Summing up Greene's contribution to the drama of his age we should say that it lies in the essential comedy of his outlook on life, his inherent _vis comica_; in his loving insight into human nature in its familiar aspects; in his distrust of exaggeration and his tendency to turn this to burlesque; and in his beautiful philosophy of the eternal verities. Out of the drama of Greene there developed the new romantic comedy of Shakespeare and the realism of joy of domestic drama. After _George-a-Greene_ there came the Huntingdon plays of Munday and Chettle, in which the woodland knight, Robin Hood, appears again. After _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_ there came _Fair Em, A Knack to Know a Knave, John-a-Kent and John-a-Cumber,_ and Dekker's _Shoemaker's Holiday_. Heywood and Samuel Rowley and Munday and Dekker and the author of _The Merry Devil of Edmonton_ share with Shakespeare indisputable strains of his individual note.
Professor Herford calls attention to the conflict, in Greene's life, between "the fresh, unworn sense of beauty and poetry," and "the bitter, disillusioned cynicism of premature old age." That conflict was a necessary one. It was present also in the discrepancy between the lyric note of Marlowe's yearning fancy and the hard reserve laid upon his later pen by bitter suffering. Both of these were true Elizabethans. They were true to their times in the vastness of their conceptions and in the narrowness of their lives, in their poetic triumphs no less than in their personal defeats. The marvellous thing is that in the midst of riotous life they should have learned repose in art, that though writing in a tavern their muse should have remained chaste. Marlowe remained to the end the poet of "air and fire." From Greene we get in the drama the first clear note of the English woodland joy that had echoed fitfully in English non-dramatic verse from the days of Chaucer and the unknown author of _Alysoun_.
_A Groatsworth of Wit_ has been so often cited as a record in the history of English drama that its value as a human document has been forgotten. Of Greene's attack therein on Shakespeare there is no need to say anything here. To those who have any concern with Greene himself it is interesting chiefly for its revelation of the awful melancholy of his last days and his pathetic sense of the wrongs suffered by the little school of dramatists of which he was a member. The sense of pity produced by reading this book is intensified by a study of Greene's last days as suggested in his own succeeding book, _The Repentance of Robert Greene_, and in the pamphlets of Harvey and Nash. Greene died on the 3rd of September 1592, of a malady following a surfeit of Rhenish wine and pickled herring. Before his death he received commendations from his wife, and his last written words were addressed to her in a request to pay the debt incurred by his sickness. We are told that after his death the keeper of his garret crowned his head with bays. Fourteen years later, when, with the exception of Lodge, the last of the university wits had passed away, and Shakespeare, whom they had all feared, had taken his abiding place, Dekker in his tract, _A Knight's Coiffuring_, shows Marlowe, Greene and Peele, together once more in Elysium, under the "shades of a large vine, laughing to see Nash, that was but newly come to their college, still haunted with the sharp and satirical spirit that had followed him here upon earth."