THE materials for a life of Greene are apparently very ample;
but these materials are illusory and perplexing, and the task of a
biographer who is scrupulous is an unusually difficult one. He has to
distinguish between truth and fiction where they have been mingled
in what is professedly autobiography; between what is apocryphal
and what is authentic in tradition; between what rests on mere
inference or conjecture on the part of memorialists and com-
mentators, and what is certain. These difficulties are increased by
the fact that as the poet's names, Christian and surname alike, are
exceedingly common among his contemporaries; the inquirer soon
finds himself involved in such a labyrinth of Robert Greenes that
identification becomes difficult in the extreme. Between 1530 and
1592 there were at least eight Robert Greenes within the city of Nor-
wich, and at least six others within the county of Norfolk; and it
is highly probable that further inspection of the Norwich Registers
and Archives would discover more. On the Registers of the
Stationers' Company in London there are within those dates four
Robert Greenes; and I have met with the name more than once
in Church Registers in London. In 1594 one Robert Greene a
saddler, possibly an emigrant from the Greenes who pursued this
occupation in Norwich, was living in the Savoy ¹ How this con-
fusion of names has misled Greene's biographers we shall presently
see.

The first who wove the scattered notices of Greene into a for-
real biography was Dyce, in his edition of Greene's Plays and
Poems which appeared in 1831. This he revised and expanded
in a second edition published in 1861. In the same year appeared
Cooper's notice of him in his Athenae Cantabrigienses, but Cooper
added nothing to Dyce. Thirteen years afterwards, in 1874,
appeared W. Bernhardi Robert Greenes Leben und Schriften, einehistorisch-kritische Skizze

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