Shakespeare’s Early Reputation as a Writer Shakespeare’s Early Reputation as a Writer Author Kate McPherson Copy Editor Leah Hamby Senior Encoder Leah Hamby Encoding and Metadata LEMDO Team Copyright Holder (Content) Kate McPherson Copyright Holder (XML and interface) University of Victoria Early Modern England Encyclopedia EMEE

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.

 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Mitacs Globalink Research Internship Utah Valley University

Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a

 University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform

Unless otherwise noted, intellectual copyright in EMEE Anthology pages is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions

Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines

This document uses Canadian English spelling

 Document Types All documents in LEMDO are either born-digital documents or primary documents. Within those two general categories, LEMDO offers additional ways to categorize a file. Born-digital Born-digital documents are anything other than primary texts Critical Critical material, such as a general introduction or a textual introduction. Responsibilities Responsibilities Author A person, family, or organization responsible for creating a work that is primarily textual in content, regardless of media type (e.g., printed text, spoken word, electronic text, tactile text) or genre (e.g., poems, novels, screenplays, blogs). Use also for persons, etc., creating a new work by paraphrasing, rewriting, or adapting works by another creator such that the modification has substantially changed the nature and content of the original or changed the medium of expression. LEMDO uses the term author in two contexts: (1) to indicate the author of a primary work or document (such as Hamlet), and (2) to indicate the author of a secondary text (such as the Critical Introduction to <title level="m">Hamlet, by David Bevington). Copy Editor LEMDO uses the term owner for the person who checks facts, quotations, and citations; may make formatting changes; may convert from one citation style to another; may suggest wording changes; and enforces conformity with the project style guide. Markup Editor A person or organization performing the coding of SGML, HTML, or XML markup of metadata, text, etc. Gloss needed. Copyright Holder A person or organization to whom copy and legal rights have been granted or transferred for the intellectual content of a work. The copyright holder, although not necessarily the creator of the work, usually has the exclusive right to benefit financially from the sale and use of the work to which the associated copyright protection applies. Normally the editor is the copyright holder for an LEMDO edition. EMEE Keywords Culture Learn about the customs, beliefs, and daily lives of people in early modern England. Literature and the Arts Greene, Robert (1558–1592) Published file. Updated metadata Made corrections in the figDesc and desc. proofed fixed minor formatting and spacing added one figure and biblio updated author respStmt. Created file. Michael Best Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

 Leah Hamby Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

 Navarra Houldin Navarra Houldin

Training and Documentation Lead 2025–present. LEMDO project manager 2022–2025. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

 Janelle Jenstad Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

 Kate McPherson Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

 LEMDO Team The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors. University of Victoria https://www.uvic.ca/
Title page of the book Greenes Groats-VVorth of Witte from 1592. The modernized title reads: Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, Bought with a Million of Repentance. The printer’s ornament is a mammalian creature’s face with fronds or feathers flaring out behind it. The title page of Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit (1592), which attacks a new playwright identified by scholars as Shakespeare. Courtesy of Folger Shakespeare Library. CC BY-SA 4.0.
Shakespeare Becomes a Playwright

Sometime during the period between 1585 and 1592, William Shakespeare began a career in the theatre. During his youth, records indicate that the Earl of Leicester’s Men played in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1573, while the Earl of Warwick’s and the Earl of Worcester’s Men visited in 1575. Shakespeare potentially joined one of the five theatrical companies that toured through his hometown, but no concrete evidence indicates this. Some speculation exists that the Queen’s Men were in Stratford in 1587 and may have been shorthanded due to the June 1587 death of one of their actors, William Knell. They might have hired young Shakespeare to help fill in the cast. This theory might explain how William Shakespeare left Stratford for London.

An Upstart Crow

Shakespeare as a writer first appears in print in a pamphlet published under the name Robert Greene as A Groats-worth of Witte, Bought with a Million of Repentance, published in 1592, shortly after Greene’s death. Although published under Greene’s name, scholars believe it was more likely written after Greene’s death by either Henry Chettle, Greene’s publisher, or the playwright Thomas Nashe, or both. Chettle and Nashe both published denials of their involvement. The Greene pamphlet advises fellow playwright-scholars to quit writing for the stage because the actors were ungrateful; specifically, it attacks a young actor-playwright who had apparently just arrived on the scene. Greene complains that: There is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.

In modern spelling: There is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out inflate a blank verse as the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum jack-of-all-trades is in his own conceit belief the only Shake-scene in a country.Greene F1v

Greene clearly refers to Shakespeare, as his pun on Shake-scene indicates. Also, Greene parodies a line from one of Shakespeare’s first plays, Henry VI, Part 3: O tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide! (1.4.137). The upstart crow insult refers to one of Aesop’s fables in which a crow thinks himself beautiful when adorned with peacock feathers. Greene may be accusing Shakespeare of plagiarism to his own benefit.

Motivations for Greene’s Attack

Because Shakespeare was an actor and a playwright, Greene (or whoever wrote the attack) likely objected to a mere player thinking he could write real verse. University-educated poets and playwrights of the time may have believed that an unlearned writer such as Shakespeare lacked the qualifications to write verse drama. Envy of Shakespeare’s financial success may also have motivated the attack. Shakespeare had probably achieved some financial success by 1592 (the final year when his father’s financial problems are documented). Scholars gather good information from Greene’s pamphlet, whatever the author’s intentions. It confirms that Shakespeare had a reputation as a writer by 1592, enough that he was seen as a threat by other writers.

Key Print Sources Greenblatt, Stephen. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. W.W. Norton, 2004. Potter, Lois. The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
Key Online Sources Best, Michael. London: Character Assassination. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions, 4 Jan. 2011, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/life/youth/london.html. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026. Best, Michael. The Upstart Crow.Shakespeare’s Life and Times.Internet Shakespeare Editions, 4 Jan. 2011, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/life/youth/groatsworth2.html. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026. Best, Michael. Why Did Greene Disparage Shakespeare?.Shakespeare’s Life and Times.Internet Shakespeare Editions, 4 Jan. 2011, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/life/youth/greene.html. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026. Dickson, Andrew. Shakespeare’s Life. The British Library. 15 Mar. 2016. https://www.britishlibrary.cn/en/articles/shakespeares-life/. Wolfe, Heather. Greenes, Groats-Worth of Witte: First Printed Allusion to Shakespeare as a Playwright. Shakespeare Documented. 5 Jun. 2020. https://doi.org/10.37078/86.
Image Sources Greene, Robert. Greenes, Groats-Worth of Witte. London: Henry Chettle, 1592. MS. Shakespeare Documented. https://doi.org/10.37078/86.