© Gunnar Tómasson

9 April 2016

Background

(S. Schoenbaum – See below)

I. Archtypal Robert Greene’s Repentant Death

(Shakespeare Myth)

117898

17013 = GREENES, GROATS-WORTH of witte,

16389 = bought with a million of Repentance.

29168 = Describing the follie of youth, the falshood of make-shifte flatterers,

28707 = the miserie of the negligent, and mischiefes of deceiuing Courtezans.

26621 = Written before his death and published at his dyeing request.

117898

II. Who’s there? Archetypal Stratfordian

(Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon)

129308

19949 = STAY PASSENGER, WHY GOEST THOV BY SO FAST

22679 = READ IF THOV CANST WHOM ENVIOVS DEATH HATH PLAST

24267 = WITH IN THIS MONVMENT SHAKSPEARE: WITH WHOME,

20503 = QVICK NATVRE DIDE: WHOSE NAME, DOTH DECK YS TOMBE,

20150 = FAR MORE, THEN COST: SIEH ALL YT HE HATH WRITT

21760 = LEAVES LIVING ART, BUT PAGE, TO SERVE HIS WITT.

129308

III. Unsigned – Third/First Person – Author’s Preface

(Groats-worth of Witte)

565688

10518 = To the Gentlemen Readers.

4116 = Gentlemen.

18255 = The Swan sings melodiously before death,

19700 = that in all his life vseth but a iarring sound.

16111 = Greene though able inough to write,

25601 = yet deeplyer searched with sickenes than euer ereofre,

22486 = sendes you his Swanne like songe, for that he feares

23071 = he shal ne[ ]er againe carroll to you ereof loue layes,

22265 = neuer againe discouer to you youths pleasures.

20892 = How euer yet sickenesse, riot, Incontinence,

24328 = haue at once shown their extremitie, yet if I recouer,

26490 = you shall all see, more fresh sprigs, then euer sprang from me,

27138 = directing you how to liue, yet not diswading ye from loue.

28447 = This is the last I haue writ, and I feare me the last I shall writ[ ].

26182 = And how euer I haue beene censured for some of my former ereo,

28160 = yet Gentlemen I protest, they were as I had ereof information.

28316 = But passing them, I commend this to your fauourable censures,

14886 = and like an Embrion without shape,

19605 = I feare me will be thrust into the world.

17922 = If I liue to ende it, it shall be otherwise:

23670 = if not, yet will I commend it to your courtesies,

25931 = that you may as well be acquainted with my repentant death,

18477 = as you haue lamented my careles course of life.

23613 = But as Nemo ante obitum felix, so Acta Exitus probat:

19808 = Beseeching therefore to be deemed ereof as I deserue,

29700 = I leaue the worke to your likinges, and leaue you to your delightes.

565688

IV. Third/First Person Seventh-Day Poet

(Shakespeare Myth)

35242

9322 = William Shakespeare

25920 = Platonic Great Year

35242

V. Greene’s Upstart-Crow Swan Song

(Groats-worth of Witte)

138084

10282 = Yes trust them not:

29160 = for there is an vp-start Crow, beautified with our feathers,

23774 = that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde,

25415 = supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse

7638 = as the best of you:

16349 = and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum,

25466 = is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.

138084

I + II + III + IV + V = 117898 + 129308 + 565688 + 35242 + 138084 = 986220

***

Calculator for converting letters to cipher values is at:

http://www.light-of-truth.com/ciphersaga.htm

Background

(S. Schoenbaum)

The first allusion on record to Stratfordian Will Shakspere as actor and playwright, scholars agree, was in a book published in 1592 containing what purport to be actor and playwright Robert Greene’s deathbed musings on the trials and tribulations of his wretched and sinful life.

Schoenbaum describes the circumstances as follows:

…Robert Greene, experinced not only in letters but also in the hard school of Elizabethan low-life.

He belonged to the brotherhood of University Wits: that small company of Bohemian intellectuals born in the provinces shortly after mid-century, and educated at Cambridge or Oxford. Footloose, they turned their backs on their origins, and gravitated to the capital, where they supplied the stationers with pamphlets and the players with plays. In London they led lives that were nasty, brutish, brilliant, and short. With Greene we cannot always separate fact from fiction in the fantasias he composed on autobiographical themes, or the legend made of him by his contemporaries. The pattern of his career – necessarily pieced together from the testimony of biased witnesses – assumes the lineaments of archetype.

He came of sound middle-class stock, the son of a Norwich saddler who educated him locally, no doubt at the Free Grammar School which, under the supervision of the mayor and aldermen, enrolled ‘fourscore and four scholars’. In 1580 Greene graduated B.A. from St. John’s College, Cambridge. Foreign travel provided postgraduate education; in Italy and Spain he reports seeing and practising ‘such villainy as is abominable to declare’. Back in England, a restless libertine drowned in pride, he wandered one day into St. Andrew’s Church in Norwich, where the preacher, John More – known as the Apostle of Norwich – laid before his imagination the terrors of God’s Judgement. Greene repented. ‘Lord have mercy upon me’, he said, to himself, ‘and send me grace to amend and become a new man.’ Thus reformed, he took his M.A. in 1583 from Clare Hall, Cambridge, and two years later married the virtuous and patient Dorothea. But the new man slipped back into the old: he got Dorothea with child, and, having squandered her marriage money, shipped her off to Lincolnshire to shift for herself as best she could, then took up again with his dissolute London companions. In his own phrase, he fell again with the dog to his old vomit.

[…] For a month Greene lingered in squalor, deserted by friends but attended by troops of lice. Mrs. Isam gave him the penny-pot of malmsey he pitifully begged, while Gabriel Harvey exulted in the downfall of the wicked:

A rakehell, a makeshift, a scribbling fool:

                                A famous bayard in city, and school.

                                Now sick as a dog, and ever brainsick:

                                Where such a raving and desperate Dick?

Between prayers Greene scribbled his last confessions, and near the end wrote piteously to his cast-off Dorothea, asking her to forgive him and pay the ten pounds he owed his host. When he died, Mrs. Isam crowned him with a garland of bays, in accordance with his last wish. Before the year was out the bookstalls of St. Paul’s Churchyard displayed The Repentance of Robert Greene, Master of Arts and Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, bought with a million of Repentance. Describing the folly of youth, the falsehood of makeshift flatterers, the misery of the negligent, and mischiefs of deceiving Courtesans. Written before his death and published at his dying request.

Thus lived and died Robert Greene, the saddler’s son who would not willingly let the world forget that he was a Master of Arts. His progress furnishes a direct antithesis to that of the glover’s son from Stratford who never went beyond grammar school. But Greene’s career holds more than an exemplary interest. In the Groatsworth of Wit he makes the first unmistakable reference we have to Shakespeare in London.

[…] the Groatsworth of Wit contains – no question – a desperate shaft directed at Shakespeare. The author hurls it later, after having abandoned any pretence at fiction; he speaks as Greene, offering while life still beats, the bitter wisdom of experience. He sets down a set of religious wholesome rules for good conduct, and then, in a letter, addresses some special advice to three of his ‘fellow scholars about this city’: […] There follows the celebrated denunciation of the ‘upstart crow’:

Base minded men all three of you, if by my miserie you be not warnd: for unto none of you (like mee) sought those burres to cleaue: those Puppets (I meane) that spake from our mouths, those Anticks garnisht in our colours. Is it not strange, that I, to whom they all haue beene beholding: is it not like that you, to whome they all haue beene beholding, shall (were yee in that case as I am now) bee both at once of them forsaken: Yes trust them not: for there is an vp-start Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.  (William Shakespeare, A Compact Documentary Life, Oxford University Press paperback, 1978, pp. 147-151 – extract from Greenes Groatsworth is here in the original spelling.)

Note

As noted by S. Schoenbaum – “With Greene we cannot always separate fact from fiction in the fantasias he composed on autobiographical themes, or the legend made of him by his contemporaries. The pattern of his career – necessarily pieced together from the testimony of biased witnesses – assumes the lineaments of archetype.” –

In a follow-up posting, the Cipher Value of the above account of the Archetype, 986220, together with that of a letter by Iceland’s – now resigned – Prime Minister, 1556328, is shown to equal the Cipher Value of the Dedication (1611) of the King James Bible, 986220 + 1556328 = 2542548.