The Judgment (and Women Problems) of Solomon in Greenes Vision (1592)

Abstract

Greenes Vision: Written at the Instant of His Death (1592), a work of mock authorial repentance, has often been read alongside a range of other ostensibly expiatory pieces that Robert Greene composed around the turn of the 1590s, including Grene His Farewell to Folly, Greenes Mourning Garment, and the two-volume Greenes Never Too Late. It takes the form of a pseudo-medieval dream vision in which an inscribed Greene, apprehensive about the nature of his own literary legacy and fearing ‘future infamie’, encounters the vaunted spectres of Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower. The bulk of the text features a war of words waged between these two medieval literary celebrities, and, for this reason, it has excited a greater degree of interest from scholars in our own time than Greene’s other, topically related pamphlets of penitence. Contemporary scholarship’s ongoing fascination with Greene’s nostalgic depictions of his Middle English predecessors has meant, however, that the presence of King Solomon – a third authorial ghost who materialises alongside Chaucer and Gower and intervenes in their literary dispute – has not received sustained consideration. This is a lacuna that I here seek to rectify. As I will argue, Solomon functions in Greenes Vision not only as a third-party arbitrator in an aesthetic battle waged between ‘Graue Laureats’ (C2r), but also as a biased and ironically deployed peace-maker in an unresolvable clash of language and signification that ultimately seems to be just as much about the nature of women as it does about the literary modes and values that Chaucer and Gower represent.