Robert Greene was a very unequal writer. His plays are slovenly and
careless in construction, and he puts classical allusions into the
mouths of milkmaids and serving boys, with the grotesque pedantry and
want of keeping common among the playwrights of the early stage. He has,
notwithstanding, in his comedy parts, more natural lightness and grace
than either Marlowe or Peele. In his _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_,
there is a fresh breath, as of the green English country, in such
passages as the description of Oxford, the scene at Harleston Fair, and
the picture of the dairy in the keeper's lodge at merry Fressingfield.
In all these ante-Shaksperian dramatists there was a defect of art
proper to the first comers in a new literary departure. As compared not
only with Shakspere, but with later writers, who had the inestimable
advantage of his example, their work was full of imperfection,
hesitation, experiment. Marlowe was probably, in native genius, the
equal at least of Fletcher or Webster, but his plays, as a whole, are
certainly not equal to theirs. They wrote in a more developed state of
the art. But the work of this early school settled the shape which the
English drama was to take. It fixed the practice and traditions of the
national theater.
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