Robert Greene's place in the literary scene of the 1580s and 1590s is unique: he was the first person in England to attempt to make a living purely from his writing. Although he thought of himself as a playwright, by far the larger part of his literary output consisted of prose. In a working life of little more than ten years, he experimented with almost every fashionable mode of his day, creating a considerable reputation for himself though never achieving any sort of social or financial security. His popularity and success derived initially from euphuistic novellas and romances that were highly imitative and derivative, but he was soon able to introduce new kinds of writing to the following he had created for himself. The cony-catching pamphlets of his last years, though dependent on earlier models of rogue literature, were perceived as innovative in the 1590s, and influenced his...