Note 87 — CALAMITIES OF AUTHORS: (continued 3)

Sir Egerton Brydges in his reprint of “Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit,” has given the only passage from “The Quip for an Upstart Courtier,” which at all alludes to Harvey’s father. He says with great justice, “there seems nothing in it sufficiently offensive to account for the violence of Harvey’s anger.” The Rev. A. Dyce, so well known from his varied researches in our dramatic literature, is of opinion that the offensive passage has been removed from the editions which have come down to us. Without some such key it is impossible to comprehend Harvey’s implacable hatred, or the words of himself and friends when they describe Greene as an “impudent railer in an odious and desperate mood,” or his satire as “spiteful and villanous abuse.” The occasion of the quarrel was an attack by Richard Harvey, who had the folly to “mis-term all our poets and writers about London, piperly make-plays and make-bates,” as Nash informs us; “hence Greene being chief agent to the company, for he writ more than four other, took occasion to canvass him a little,—about some seven or eight lines, which hath plucked on an invective of so many leaves.”—Ed.