ABSTRACT
The open letter to the three dramatists in Robert Greene’s Groats-worth of Witte, which refers to William Shakespere in relation to 3 Henry VI, is analyzed in detail to discover what is being claimed. An early interpretation saw James Halliwell-Phillipps declare that it had been “composed under the influence of a profound jealousy of Shakespeare”. In rare collocation profiling, a systematic and exhaustive assessment of the rarity of each phrase and collocation in the play is carried out against contemporary texts in the early english books online database. Robert Greene’s complaint is about a particular actor who recites lines from better pens, that is, scholars such as himself, and makes a considerable profit while Greene sinks inexorably into poverty. When Greene wanted to claim that someone was acting above their station he used Aesop’s Crow. Greene was not the first to express the resentment of the university-educated playwrights at the actors’ social rise and professional success.
