There is some dispute whether Greene actually wrote this death-bed “repentance,” or whether it was passed off under his name. It may have been written by Nashe, Greene’s colleague, or perhaps by Henry Chettle. Chettle was a printer and minor dramatist who supervised the publication of Greene’s pamphlet. He was also an occasional poet and “dresser” or reviser of other men’s plays who inhabited the purlieus of sixteenth-century London literary society; if there had been a Grub Street, he would have been a part of it. Shakespeare was offended by Greene’s portrait of him, as well he might be, and he remonstrated with Chettle, who then wrote an apology, in a pamphlet published at the end of 1592, in which he stated that “I am as sory, as if the originall fault had been my fault.” Of Shakespeare he writes that “my self haue seene his demeanor no lesse ciuil than he excellent in the qualitie he professes: Beside, divers of worship haue reported his vprightnes of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his fa[ce]tious grace in writing, which approues his Art.” In describing Shakespeare’s “facetious” gift he was not employing the adjective in its modern sense; it was instead the compliment that Cicero had applied to Plautus’s sprightly and fluent wit. Shakespeare’s professed “qualitie” was that of actor, but the “divers of worship” who supported him are not known. It confirms, at least, that he was already recognised and admired by certain eminent people. He was also himself influential enough, at this date, to elicit an apology from Chettle.
We are now entering a period when Shakespeare’s plays can be securely placed if not precisely dated. And we find what we would expect to find — that he is already a superlative writer of comedies and of histories, of farce and of tragical matter. He was indeed the “Johannes factotum,” the “jack-of-all-trades,” of Greene’s description. The Shakespearian authorship of only one play is debated, Edward the Third, but the others are universally recognised as part of Shakespeare’s work. In the early 1590s we may notice in particular The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors and Richard III.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona is one of the first of Shakespeare’s comedies, composed soon after The Taming of a Shrew. Its best scenes bring on a clown, Launce, and his dog; Launce alternately berates and pleads with his dog, but the dog says nothing. It is suggestive of the early sixteenth-century interludes, which also included dogs as comic “props, ” and in that sense The Two Gentlemen of Verona has very ancient roots indeed. It is a rather febrile drama, with a very silly ending, but it breathes the spirit of comedy like the lop-sided grin of a clown. There are no records of any performance, which has led some scholars to speculate that it was material only for private performance. This seems most unlikely, however, since the broadly comic scenes are expressly designed for the groundlings of the public playhouses: “My Mother weeping: my Father wayling: my Sister crying: our Maid howling: our Catte wringing her hands, and all our house in a great perplexitie, yet did not this cruell-hearted Curre shedde one teare: he is a stone, a very pibble stone, and has no more pitty in him then a dogge”(571— 6).
It seems to have been written quickly — but then, under the circumstances of the time, all of his early plays were composed in that fashion. “A fine volly of words, gentlemen, ” as one character puts it, “& quickly shot off”(656). The same images are repeated, and the same comparisons are made. There are several inconsistencies and contradictions that show evident sign of haste or, perhaps, separate stages of composition. The Emperor suddenly becomes a Duke, and two very different characters are given the same name. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Speed, in Milan, says to Launce: “Welcome to Padua!” It has been argued that the comic passages concerning the man and the dog, easily detachable from the text, were written at a later date. It is most probable that they were added for the performance of a specific clown — Will Kempe comes immediately to mind — and thus emphasise the extent to which Shakespeare was obliged to improvise. He changed his scripts according to change of cast. One of Kempe’s famous routines was to heave his leg over his staff, and pretend to urinate like a dog. And he would have danced his famous jig at the end of the proceedings.
An early date for this play can also be conjectured from the fact that Shakespeare imitates, or borrows, passages from the fashionable playwrights of the 1580s. He takes character and dialogue from John Lyly, a romantic plot from Robert Greene, and lines from Thomas Kyd. It can be argued that he is satirising the romantic drama of the 1580s, but he is at the same time heavily indebted to it. The Two Gentlemen of Verona is part of the atmosphere of its period, and influences upon it can be traced to Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Arthur Brooke’s poem entitled The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie and the courtly literature of the period that Shakespeare seems to have devoured. There is even some evidence that he had read Marlowe’s Hero and Leander in manuscript form.
From the evidence of the play the young writer is half in love with music, of which he shows a distinct technical knowledge, and is already enamoured of the sonnet form. There are other distinct or distinctive Shakespearian aspects — or, rather, aspects that at a later date can be deemed to be Shakespearian. He places romance and farce so close together that they cannot ultimately be distinguished; the lover is followed on stage by the clown, and Launce’s affection for his dog seems stronger than that of the romantic rivals’ for their mistress. All forms of human experience are juxtaposed by Shakespeare, but his tendency is to deflate the heroic and the romantic with broad comedy. We will come to recognise that Shakespeare was a profoundly unsentimental person. In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, also, action in the world is subtly confused with play-acting; here, for the first time in Shakespeare’s drama, emerges the figure of the girl dressed as a boy that would become such a token of his art. The play also evinces immense verbal resource, with the principal characters trying out various forms of address with the sole intention of displaying the dramatist’s own skill. It shows a boundless invention and exuberance, in a language filled with puns and rhymes. No other writer of his age was so fluent and so various.
Here, as in Titus Andronicus, we also see the germs or seeds of his later work. The contrast between the court and the forest is one that he would fully exploit, as he began imaginatively to enlarge the English stage beyond the confines of unified time and space. The scene of elopement in the play here prefigures Romeo and Juliet. There are elements of Shakespeare’s imagination — preoccupations, perhaps — that did not change.
It seems almost inevitable that he turned quickly to The Comedy of Errors, another comedy in a hurry. At one point he mixes up the names of the characters from both plays, as if The Two Gentlemen of Verona was still on his mind. All of the characters in the play are in a hurry. The author was in a hurry. In her diary Virginia Woolf once confessed that “I never yet knew how amazing his stretch & speed & word coining power is, until I felt it utterly outpace & outrace my own … even the less known & worser plays are written at a speed that is quicker than anybody else’s quickest; & the words drop so fast one can’t pick them up.”2 There is a stage-direction in The Comedy of Errors, probably added by Shakespeare himself, concerning an exit: “Runne all out, as fast as may be”.