Excerpt from The Plays Poems of Robert Greene, Vol. 1 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 I 592 there were at least eight Robert Greenes within the city of N or 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. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.