The Penitent Greene

By Author: Peter King
Total Articles: 73
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The penitent Greene, discussed in the chapters by Reynolds and Turner and by Mentz, comes to the fore in two sharply contrasting contributions by Lori Humphrey Newcomb and Robert W. Maslen. Maslen articulates the view of Greene's repentance as strategic, calculated, 'showing off the creative energy of his work under the guise of rejecting it as useless'. Newcomb's objection that dying young is not much of an authorial strategy rather slides over the fact acknowledged elsewhere in the essay that MBT Chapa the pamphlet she's most interested in is a posthumous publication with (at least) significant editorial shaping, but her project of reclaiming the repentance pamphlets as genuinely significant contributions to the history of devotional literature stands on its own merits.

Aiming to sideline questions of sincerity and authenticity, she sees Greene (or 'Greene') as expressing a heterodox scepticism about the efficacy of the spoken word of the sermon, preferring reading to hearing, treatise to sermon; this rich seam is well exploited here. One side-effect ...
... of the determination to take The Repentance of Robert Greene seriously is, ironically, that Newcomb must ultimately find it insufficiently serious theologically iffy and rather slight in itself where for readers like Maslen and Mentz the self-authorizing narratives of these pamphlets need no apology. Nonetheless, the historical and theological precision with which Newcomb situates Greene's work makes this an important and thought-provoking contribution. Like Tumelson's, Newcomb's Greene is an unwitting and idiosyncratic prophet of a literature to come, here inexpensive, commercial works of spiritual autobiography and popular devotion. Maslen's rich, long and multi-stranded 'Robert Greene and the Uses of Time' resists easy summary, partly because of the sheer multifariousness of MBT Lami those uses. Seeing a cluster of works of 1589 as a 'cumulative autobiography' with various characters standing as partial ciphers for the author, Maslen explores (inter alia) quick wits versus solid intellects, changing literary fashion, Greene's filling of interstices in earlier Elizabethan fiction, plagiary, class, gender, theatre time and pamphlet time, the deferral of repentance. If the chapter seems a little over-stuffed with material, all of its parts are richly rewarding and ripe for further development.

Katharine Wilson's more tightly-focused 'Transplanting Lillies' shares a number of preoccupations with Maslen, notably in the view of Greene as a more socially radical author than his literary models on class and gender; his exemplary heroines must make what are simultaneously moral and literary choices, and can be left dangerously exposed by literary experience. She presents the Greene of Pandosto, Menaphon and Friar Bacon as in the process of re-branding himself as a Sidneian practitioner of pastoral rather than a Lylyan romancer, yet one who continues to exploit Lyly, albeit for increasingly ironic ends, rather than breaking entirely with the earlier fashion. As in some other parts of the book, explicit dialogue and cross-reference between these two chapters would help bring out both common ground and disputed territory; the former, though, is helpfully laid out in the editors' meaty introduction, which is particularly concerned to situate Greene as professional writer. They also supply handy appendices with chronological lists of apocrypha and authentic works by date of presumed composition and by edition. There is also a discursive guide to recent scholarship and criticism which adds to the usefulness of this valuable collection.