Background
A literary opportunist of limited genius, he won popularity with his romances, pamphlets, and dramas. His life was ill-ordered and miserable: he deserted his wife, and his loose habits and increasing poverty culminated, as his friend Thomas Nashe records in Foure Letters Confuted, in a "fatall banquet of Rhenish wine and pickled hearing."
Career
After 1590 he turned to realism in such works as the "conny-catching" pamphlets of 1591 and 1592, which exposed London tricksters, and the personal Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance (1592) and Repentance (1592), both written in part on his death-bed. Skillful narrative and charming heroines hardly compensate for the unmotivated shallowness of the romances; nevertheless they did contribute to the development of romantic fiction, as did his realistic works to that of picaresque fiction. Greene's poems are varied and sweet but conventionally shallow.
His imitation of Marlowe's heroic style in Alphonsus and Orlando is bombastic and unsuccessful. The magical scenes of his best-known play, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, are likewise an obvious attempt to match Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. In Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and James IV Greene established the romantic comedy with outdoor setting, idealized heroines sometimes disguised as boys, and a sympathetic love story. These plays have much in common with Shakespeare's romantic comedies.