Michael Prescott on All The Mysteries That Remain

First off, I was wrong in saying Marlowe’s fellow writers explicitly praised Tamburlaine as highly original. I had this impression because the play was immediately imitated by lesser talents, notably Greene, and because the play was often cited or name-checked in contemporary or slightly later writings. All of this is consistent with the play being seen as original (generally, the work that sets the trend is the one that’s imitated and remembered), but it’s not proof that other writers saw Marlowe's *style* as something new. There are possible indications of this (in 1597 Joseph Hall wrote, "One higher pitched doth set his soaring thought On crowned kings that Fortune hath brought low, etc.," in reference to Tamburlaine, suggesting that the play and its sequel were still seen as the basic "type" of the high-flown drama about royal tragedy, and many writers commented on the play's soaring rhetoric —Marlowe's "mighty line" — which suggests that such bombast wasn’t typical, at least), but nothing definitive. Your point about end-stopped lines in Romeo and Juliet, and how some lines were reworded, is interesting and does point to a comparatively early origin. Some of the pro-North arguments strike me as doubtful, though. The Jasper Heywood quote is intriguing, but it can be read as distinguishing between playwrights (first two sentences) and prose writers (third sentence), as though one were to say, "There are many talented writers of tragic plays … and then there are other talented writers, as well, such as the translator of The Dial." I don’t think we’re at the point where we can confidently assign the Ur-Hamlet to North; it’s usually given to Kyd, I think, although this is speculation. I’m in the minority in believing that Groatsworth was a sustained attack on Ned Alleyn, whom Greene had worked for and probably owed money to. I do think Greene wrote the pamphlet; he was just mean-spirited enough to spend his dying days churning out malicious gossip. Alleyn was publicly associated with the "tiger's heart" line, inasmuch as he had produced and starred in the play (and probably delivered the line onstage), and he had tried his hand at play-writing (apparently he thought he was able to bombast out a blank verse as well as anybody). He was referred to as "the cobbler's crow" (by Nashe, I think) — the cobbler being Marlowe, son of a shoemaker, and crow being a slang term for a strutting, cawing actor. This, I think, is the meaning of "upstart crow." ("Beautified by our feathers" need not mean the crow is a plagiarist, only that he owes his famous roles to the writers who created them.) The Roberto in Greene's story, who meets a strolling player-producer, is Robert Greene himself, and the wealthy player was Alleyn who, as the premiere actor of that time, London's "Roscius," would have been immediately recognized by the reader. As for "Shake-Scene," I think it’s a hit at Alleyn's thunderous line delivery, which would shake the stage. The name Shakespeare would have been unknown to Greene's readers (it did not appear in print until the following year), and Greene wrote to be understood, even if he preserved a degree of plausible deniability. There’s no indication that William Shaksper had become famous in theatrical circles, or wealthy, at that time, so I very much doubt Greene would’ve parodied him as a well-dressed impresario — even if Will had gallivanted about town in fine clothes (for which there’s no evidence), Greene's readership wouldn’t have gotten the reference, since Alleyn was the far more obvious choice. Your points about Prince Harry/Hal are intriguing. You go a long way toward establishing an early date for the trilogy.