Greene's Anatomy

Robert Greene: the spiritual founder of The Onion?

We can’t retroactively diagnose what killed Greene at the age of thirty-four. The writer Gabriel Harvey wrote that it was because of “a surfeit of pickle herring and Rhenish wine”. Based on what we know of his lifestyle cirrhosis seems not unlikely, though one can’t discount the possibility of venereal disease (even if he didn’t bear the trademark physical deformations or madness of syphilis). Perhaps it was a combination of causes.

Greene didn't deny Shakespeare's authorship. He just maintained the plays were crap. Shakespeare turned Greene into a drunken, cowardly blowhard- and called him Falstaff.