Note note 35 — THE MOLDING OF THE MASK.

35 All the commentators have taken it for an indisputable fact that Green in his Groatsworth of Wit meant Shakespere when he attacked some unnamed dramatist as one whose “Tyger’s heart” was “wrapt in a player’s hide.” Dyce says that no one can hesitate to believe that Green was speaking of Shakespere. Then he demonstrates that the play wherein the above words first appeared (“The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of York”) was written by Marlowe, and so says Hallam; and even Halliwell-Phillipps asserts that the line above quoted has the true Marlowean ring. Taking that fact as proven, it is difficult to believe that the writer whom Green thus attacked as “able to bumbast out a blanke verse,” was any other than the dramatist whom Nashe, in his epistle in Greene’s Menaphone, attacked in 1587, for the “swelling bumbast of a bragging blank verse” (See note 15 herein). The trouble with all these commentators seems to be that, seeing the word “Shake-scene,” in Green’s lines, as descriptive of this bombastic writer, they are unable to understand why the syllable “Shake” should have been used unless Shakespere was meant. “Shakescene” means no more than an actor who “shook the stage,” and the complaint against him was the same as the earlier one of Nashe’s above alluded to. This earlier one appeared during the year that Shakespere, just arrived from his country home, was holding horses before the Green Curtaine theater. The commentators agree that the first attack [note 15] was directed against Marlowe. See Gervinus (p. 77), who speaks of the “general uproar of envy and ridicule raised” against Marlowe’s “drumming decasyllabons.” (Also see Bullen’s Marlowe, p. 17). I contend that the later attack was also upon Marlowe.