Who Described Shakespeare as an ‘Upstart Crow’?

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

In 1592, the brightest new star of the London theatre scene was on the receiving end of a rather harsh review:

Yes trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.

There is no doubting the object of this diatribe. As if the punning ‘Shake-scene’ wasn’t a big enough clue, the reference to a ‘Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde’ serves as reinforcement: one of Shakespeare’s earliest successes on the Elizabethan stage, 3 Henry VI, contains a reference to a ‘tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide’ (the woman in question being Queen Margaret, i.e. Margaret of Anjou), so the author of the ‘upstart Crow’ broadside was alluding to Shakespeare’s own words – and his status as a ‘player’ or actor, who has decided to branch out into writing for the stage as well – in order to denigrate him.

And ‘Johannes fac totum’, by the way, is a Latinate way of saying ‘Jack of all trades’, literally meaning, if you like, ‘John [who] can make everything’.

So, it’s clear that Shakespeare is the topic of the author’s character assassination. But who wrote this powerfully worded tirade?

Perhaps the commonest answer is ‘Robert Greene’, because Greene’s name was attached to the tract in which these embittered words appeared. Greene’s Groats-worth of Wit, or Greenes, Groats-worth of Witte, bought with a million of Repentance as the original title-page had it, was published in 1592. The pamphlet was entered in the Stationers’ Register ‘upon the peril of Henry Chettle’ on 20 September of that year, shortly after Greene’s death on 3 September.

Greene (1558-92) is probably best-known for two things: writing the play Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, which I have discussed here, and writing the savage attack on Shakespeare as the ‘upstart Crow’ of the London stage which I quote above. But what if he didn’t write the latter after all?

As I discuss in my book The Secret Library, in 1589 a young writer named Thomas Nashe, fresh from the University of Cambridge and newly arrived in London, launched a blistering attack on upstart writers who ‘think to out-brave better pens with the swelling bombast of a bragging blank verse’, adding: ‘if you entreat him [an unnamed playwright] fair in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches.’

The reference to Hamlet might take us to Shakespeare, though 1589 is a little early to be linking Shakespeare with Hamlet, which would not be written and performed until 1600/01. Instead, it’s possible that the object of Nashe’s attack was Thomas Kyd, who, like Shakespeare, wrote for the stage but had the temerity not to have received an Oxbridge education first.

The style of the ‘upstart Crow’ passage from Greene’s Groats-worth was analysed in the 1960s, with Warren B. Austin using pioneering computer software to ascertain the author of the piece. He concluded it was the dramatist and publisher Henry Chettle (c. 1564 – c. 1606), rather than Greene himself. Austin’s findings have since been challenged by Richard Westley, in 2006. And according to Andrew Doyle (a Twitter ‘friend’ of Interesting Lit in the days when I tweeted, or indeed, when they were still called ‘tweets’), Doyle’s DPhil supervisor at Oxford, Katherine Duncan-Jones, believed that Nashe, rather than Chettle, was the author.

On the face of it, this is a compelling argument. The prose style is in keeping with Nashe’s bombastic style, and it was not uncommon at the time for writers to publish potentially controversial statements under a dead person’s name, so the real author would be shielded from criticism or consequences. It’s true that Nashe himself denied he was the author, writing in the 1592 edition of his book Pierce Penniless that the Groats-worth was a ‘scald, trivial lying pamphlet’, but this could have been an elaborate double-bluff: after all, if he was the author, he chose to hide his authorship and use Greene’s name instead. So why would he suddenly own up?

It is worth noting that Chettle also denied writing Groats-worth, stating that the manuscript used for the printing of the book was in his handwriting because he had transcribed it from Greene’s original manuscript. So both leading candidates for the authorship – if we discount Greene himself, who wasn’t around to argue – denied that they had written it. It’s possible Chettle intervened in Greene’s manuscript and covertly interposed some of his own views about his rival dramatists of the day, or it’s possible that Nashe wrote it. We can’t say for sure, but I’d say that, of the three candidates for the authorship of the ‘upstart Crow’ passage, Greene himself is the least persuasive.