[From an epistle To the Gentlemen Students of Both Universities, prefixed to Robert Greene's Menaphon (1589; S. R. 23 Aug. 1589), reprinted from ed. 1610, which has some corrections possibly by Nashe, in McKerrow, iii. 311, with valuable notes (iv. 444) upon the allusions and supposed allusions. The suggestion of Collier that Menaphon was originally printed in 1587 appears to be baseless. Outside the three passages quoted, Nashe praises Watson's translation of Antigone. McKerrow's collection of material for the critical discussion of the epistle is so full that I need only compare briefly my conclusions with his. In (i) Nashe seems to me to be criticizing (a) 'tragedians', which for me are clearly 'tragic actors', while McKerrow inclines to make them 'writers of tragedy', and (b) their dramatists, who include blank-verse 'Art-masters', which I agree with McKerrow is more likely, in view of the fact that Greene above all flourished his University degree, to mean 'masters of their art' than 'masters of Arts', and translating tradesmen or serving-men with no education beyond a grammar-school. The slight suggestions that Nashe may have had Marlowe especially in mind are perhaps hardly sufficient to outweigh his statement in Have with you to Saffron Walden (1596) that he 'neuer abusd Marloe'; and Marlowe was a University man, and no tradesman or serving-man. On the other hand, there is no specific praise of Marlowe with other University poets in the epistle. The whole of (i) is a precise parallel to the following lines by Thomas Brabine, also prefixed to Menaphon:
'Come foorth you witts that vaunt the pompe of speach,
And striue to thunder from a Stage-mans throate:
View Menaphon a note beyond your reach;
Whose sight will make your drumming descant doate:
Players auaunt, you know not to delight;
Welcome sweete Shepheard; worth a Schollers sight.'
In (ii) I am rather more inclined than McKerrow to think that the 'Nouerint' and the 'Kidde in Æsop' may glance at Kyd, who was not one of the University group, and was a grammarian, a translator, and very likely already a serving-man. But the attempts to trace him elsewhere in the passage come to very little; nor is one playwright only necessarily in question, so that, although the 'handfuls of Tragicall speeches' may point to a play of Hamlet as already extant in 1589, the inference that Kyd was its author becomes extremely thin. In (iii) Nashe attacks the players as parasitic on the poets, in terms closely resembling those used later by Greene in his Groatsworth of Wit (No. xlviii). Probably Roscius is here Alleyn, and Caesar stands for the poets in general. I do not agree with Fleay, L. of S. 10, 99, that the epistle reflects a rivalry between the poets of the Queen's men and those of Pembroke's, who indeed did not yet exist, or any other company. The issue is between the University poets on the one hand and the players and illiterate poets on the other.]
P. 311. 'I am not ignorant how eloquent our gowned age is grown
of late; so that euery mechanicall mate abhorres the English he was
borne too, and plucks, with a solemne periphrasis, his vt vales from the
inkehorne: which I impute, not so much to the perfection of Arts,
as to the seruile imitation of vainglorious Tragedians, who contend
not so seriously to excell in action, as to embowell the cloudes in
a speech of comparison, thinking themselues more than initiated in
Poets immortality, if they but once get Boreas by the beard and the
heauenly Bull by the deaw-lap. But heerein I cannot so fully bequeath
