The pamphlets of the Elizabethan age were almost as often in verse as in prose, the superior attraction of verse for early and uncultivated audiences not having died out. Indeed, far later than the period covered by this volume, things continued to be written in verse which were merely pamphlets, and gave us both matter of eternity, such as _Absalom and Achitophel_ or _Religio Laici_, and hard-bound doggerel like Defoe's _True-Born Englishman_ and _Jure Divino_. The Elizabethan verse pamphlet, which was largely written by Thomas Churchyard, Nicholas Breton, John Davies, Samuel Rowlands, and others, is a curiosity, but as a rule very little more; and I do not propose to give any examples of it here. Nor, the space at my command being all too limited, have I thought it necessary to draw in this present volume on the miscellaneous pamphlets of the times. The examples will be taken from what may be called the great single pamphleteers or pamphlet collections--that is to say, Lodge, Greene, Nash, Harvey, 'Martin Marprelate' and the anti-Martinists, Breton, and Dekker. Some particulars of each of the selected authors or groups may appropriately be given in this introduction.
No minor Elizabethan author is better known than Robert Greene, partly from the fact that he touches Shakespeare, and partly from the other fact that his short and ill-spent life was that of the typical Bohemian, and so interests those who like gossip about men of letters. He was born in 1560 at Norwich, was educated at Clare Hall, Cambridge (being also subsequently incorporated at Oxford), travelled on the Continent, married, treated his wife very badly, may have been both a clerk in orders and a student of medicine, lived recklessly in London as a dramatist and pamphleteer, and died at the age of thirty-two either _propter_ or merely _post_ undue consumption of pickled herrings and Rhenish wine. His plays, though full of the ante-Shakespearian crudity and unskilled workmanship, have many graceful touches; the songs which he scattered about both his plays and his poems are frequently charming; his pamphlets, which, short as his life was, are very numerous, perhaps rank, on the whole, above those of any other Elizabethan writer for combined bulk, variety, and merit. They were produced in the space of about ten years (1583-92). Those certainly known to be his, or probably attributed to him, are nearly thirty in number, and almost defy classification. Some of them approach that strange type of novel consisting of a minimum of story, a maximum of moralising, and, if I may say so, a _plusquam_-maximum of conceited style, the example of which had been set in Lyly's _Euphues_. Not a few are personal reminiscences--how far deliberately imbued with an exaggerated profession of repentance in order to hit readers with both barrels it is very hard to say. A distinct and very interesting set deals with the ways of the Elizabethan 'conny-catcher,' the 'Captain Rook' (though usually of lower grade) of the time. Others are pure book-making, as we should call it now, about subjects which for political or other reasons happened to be in the public eye at the moment. Greene is certainly one of the most typical of his fellowship.