ABSTRACT
Robert Greene’s death had more than just symbolic importance for narrative fiction in early modern England. A key part of Harvey's attack on Greene consists in emphasizing his deathbed poverty. The two-part maneuver is familiar to readers of Greene: he offers the alluring but troubling matter (love stories, or, in this case, incitements for Nashe to attack Harvey in print), then hides it under the cover of moral restraint, but of course the cat has left the bag. Barnebe Riche’s Greene embodies the uncomfortable position of early modern prose fiction, which can rest in neither a humanist’s heaven nor an outlaw’s hell. The man Harvey called a “ringleader” of popular print became for Riche an eternally marginal and disruptive spirit. The obsessive struggle in the 1590s to give meaning to Greene's name and legacy helps define changes in the cultural status of middlebrow prose fiction during the English Renaissance.
