On this day in 1592 Robert Greene's A Groats-Worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance, in which appears the first printed reference to Shakespeare, was entered in the Stationers' Register. Greene was one of the most popular English authors of his day, and a notorious profligate. He had died three weeks earlier from a lifetime, he confessed, of "riot" and "incontinence," though the immediate cause was apparently "a surfett of pickle herringe and rennish wine." Included in Greene's groat (i.e. a fourpenny coin) of wit was his advice to his fellow dramatists to watch out for the twenty-eight-year-old Shakespeare, an actor and playwright of dubious scruples ... FULL STORY »
