of his
jealous scholastic rivals, as well as the accruing material advantages
involved, that impelled Shakespeare in 1596 to apply, through his
father, to the College of Heralds for official confirmation of a grant
of arms alleged to have been made to his forebears.

Shakespeare's earliest scholastic detractor was Robert Greene, who
evidently set much store by his acquired gentility, as he usually signed
his publications as "By Robert Greene, Master of Arts in Cambridge," and
who, withal, was a most licentious and unprincipled libertine, going,
through his ill-regulated course of life, dishonoured and unwept to a
pauper's grave at the age of thirty-two. After the death of Greene, when
his memory was assailed by Gabriel Harvey and others whom he had
offended, his friend Nashe, who attempted to defend him, finding it
difficult to do so, makes up for the lameness of his defence by the
bitterness of his attack on Harvey. Nashe, in fact, resents being
regarded as an intimate of Greene's, yet his, and Greene's, spiteful and
ill-bred reflections upon Shakespeare's social quality, education, and
personal appearance, between 1589 and 1592, were received
sympathetically by the remainder of the "gentlemen poets,"--as they
styled themselves in contradistinction to the stage poets,--and used
thereafter for years as a keynote to their own jealous abuse of him.

John Florio, in his _First Fruites_, published in 1591, and after he had
entered the service of the Earl of Southampton, though not yet assailing
Shakespeare personally, as did these other scholars, appears as a critic
of his historical dramatic work.

In 1593 George Peele, in his _Honour of the Garter_, re-echoes the slurs
against Shakespeare voiced by Greene in the previous year. In the same
year George Chapman, who thereafterwards proved to be Shakespeare's
arch-enemy among the "gentlemen scholars," caricatures him and his
affairs in a new play, which he revised, in conjunction with John
Marston, six years later, under the title of _Histriomastix, or The
Player Whipt_. Neither the authorship, date of production, nor satirical
intention of the early form of the play has previously been known.

In 1594 Chapman again attacks Shakespeare in _The Hymns to the Shadow of
Night_, as well as in the prose dedication written to his colleague,
Matthew Roydon. In the same year Roydon enters the lists against
Shakespeare by publishing a satirical and scandalous poem reflecting
upon,