This paper will explore changing scholarly approaches towards the authorial identity of Robert Greene.  The principal purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the figure of “Greene the author” is not a fixed entity; it is a construct of critical response.  Greene’s authorial identity is the product of a series of narratives, some generated by Greene himself as part of his strategy of self-presentation, and others imposed upon him after his death.   When we attempt to reconstruct the figure of Robert Greene, all we find are a series of guises: the debauchee, the insecure hack, the embittered critic, the literary drudge and the envious rival of Shakespeare. More often than not, the only occasion on which critics come into contact with Greene is by way of his association with Shakespeare.  If Greene is remembered at all, it is as a long forgotten Elizabethan hack writer, who once wrote a pamphlet in which he called Shakespeare an ‘upstart crow’ in a fit of professional spite.  This insult, which was most likely the work of Henry Chettle, has come to function as an allegory of authorial identity.  In Derridean terms, Greene is supplementary to Shakespeare; he is a prop – a supplement – to Shakespeare’s identity and simultaneously a threat to that identity. This paper will trace changing responses to the authorial identity of Robert Greene, from early modern depictions (Gabriel Harvey, Cuthbert Burbie and John Dickenson) to modern fictional accounts (Virginia Woolf and Anthony Burgess), and from early criticism (A.B. Grosart, J. Churton Collins and John Clark Jordan) to recent literary-historical reassessments (Kirk Melnikoff and Edward Gieskes)

—Dr Jenny Sager, Jesus College, University of Oxford