For what care I who calls me well or ill
14 lines✦
hough not much addicted to cryptograms, I feel the suggestion asplausible which sees in the otherwise unknown word "o’er-greene”an allusion to the name of his tormentor, somewhat as in “out-Herod,” the meaning of the clause then being* If you wipe outGreene’s insult to what is ill in me, my occupation . . In these excruciated poems no resort is had to the veneration for playing thatwill be expressed by Hamlet; instead, a proud nature seems stung to awrithing assent to what is true in Greene’s charge. This is Shake-speare helpless, in private with one friend. In public he resented theattack so effectively that, within three months Chettle— whomShakespeare and Marlowe (he says*) accused of writing the thinghimself— had apologized in the Epistle to a book of his own. Not to Chetde does not name the men, but their identities, which are unmistakable,have not been doubted.
✦