“An upstart crow.”

That this should be the first mention of William Shakespeare as a public person in recorded history is always a surprise. It’s 1592, and Shakespeare, the son of a glove maker, is about 28 years old; Robert Greene, a well-known poet and playwright of the time, writes a pamphlet called Greene’s Groats-worth of Wit that contains these words: “Yes, trust them not, for there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie.”

Robert Greene is one of the University Wits, a group of men who have gone to university, in Oxford and Cambridge, and then, coming to London to find jobs as tutors, have gone on to become playwrights. Christopher Marlowe is the most well known in the group; there are others: George Peele, John Lyly and the three Thomases—Kyd, Nashe and Lodge.

Shakespeare, born in the small town of Stratford-upon-Avon, hasn’t had the benefit of a proper education. In that sense, he has indeed had to fend for his own learning like a crow scavenges for food—it is, of course, an ad hoc ethic, of letting the impress of whatever comes his way annotate his learning. This autodidacticism is inevitable—he only has, as Ben Jonson, another contemporary who was quick to criticise him, said, “small Latin and less Greek.” Latin and Greek, the foundational languages of European culture. How could such a man have the audacity to write plays, and how would it be possible for the classicist Jonson and the well-educated University Wits to tolerate a person like William?

William Shakespeare was—let us admit it—a provincial. The crude attacks on him by his contemporaries were evidently by people who, apart from the obvious benefits of class and education, also had the privilege of place: Oxbridge and London. Greene’s criticism of him as an upstart and a crow, a scavenging bird, who “beautified” himself with borrowed feathers, and who used “bumbast”—bombastic language— is not unique...

All this characterisation of Shakespeare is true. He was indeed writing in a language that would have disturbed the educated and the powerful—he was adding to and remaking the English language without caring for any such ambition or even knowing that he was. It was a practical necessity, not a deliberate aesthetic choice: a hungry person will put together something—anything— to eat from whatever they find from foraging. When Greene accuses him of borrowing our feathers, he is making an accusation against the outsider William. There are other accusations: of plagiarism and of copying Marlowe, the most successful of the playwrights. That he himself is borrowing this metaphor—and expression—from Horace would seem ironic, except that Greene would have justified it as intellectual lineage.

Shakespeare is an outsider—both to London and to lineages, social and intellectual. He is an autodidact, teaching himself, often by copying, like apprentice artists do. “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different,” T. S. Eliot would say 400 years later. Both Shakespeare and his critics at that time were doing the same—it is just that the rest of them, because of the power that had accrued to them from institutional learning, could lay claim to Horace in a way that William and other provincials like him could not. “It was a terrible time in Shakespeare’s life. He hadn’t been writing plays for a long time. He’d probably been acting for longer. He had also been adapting other people’s plays, and to get attacked like this would be insulting ... Theatres were closed for the plague, so he is in a lousy line of work. He isn’t making any money. Then this guy goes after him for plagiarism and bombast.”1

None of this would have mattered, neither to Shakespeare nor to us, to literary history, had the provincial not responded to Greene’s criticism through his writing. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, with its many biographies of Greek and Roman rulers; Holinshed’s Chronicles and in it the histories of England, Ireland and Scotland, on which Shakespeare would base—never faithfully, of course— his historical plays; Boccaccio, ever-present Boccaccio: his “plots” derived primarily from these sources. Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Bible, particularly its use in The Book of Common Prayer, supplied him with classical and Christian references. All of this is only to reiterate that Shakespeare, without the benefit of university training, was groping and grabbing for anything out of which he could conjure a play, its particular vocabulary. Everything was found art, found poem...

Reading Shakespeare as a provincial—being able to identify the irony in the “Tyger’s heart” in Greene’s critique as actually being a borrowing from Shakespeare’s own play Henry VI (“O tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide”), or understanding what Shakespeare was doing to Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy in his play Hamlet, or recognising Marlowe’s words in the same play, where Marlowe himself is remembering Virgil, the poet of Aeneid—brought moments of epiphanous awareness, of recognising how provincial energy, working through deprivation and accidental fits, would gradually grow into an aesthetic. Two things need to be reported here. The Winter’s Tale, possibly the last play Shakespeare wrote, is based on Pandosto or The Triumph of Time, a piece of prose fiction that was written by Greene. By closing his creative life with an homage to his harshest critic, Shakespeare was perhaps showing what borrowing feathers could achieve. The second thing—three months after the death of Greene, in December 1592, his publisher and printer Henry Chettle issued a public apology to the “Upstart Crow” for having published the Greene’s Groats-worth of Wit.

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This is an excerpt from Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries by Sumana Roy, published in 2024. No part of this excerpt may be quoted or reproduced without prior written consent from its publisher, Aleph Book Company.

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Endnote: Joe Loewenstein, “The Upstart Crow: Shakespeare’s Feud with Robert Greene,” interview by Rebecca King Pierce, Washington University in St. Louis, June 23, 2015, https://artsci.wustl.edu/ ampersand/upstart-crow-shakespeares-feud-robert-greene

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