Shakespeare first comes into being in the records of Elizabethan theater history as a player-poet, thanks to the now famous words of Robert Greene: “there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you.'” Greene's attack is revealing insofar as it asserts chat the conjunction of the two activities – writing and playing – is startling. The style and the content of the Queen's Men repertory were foundational to Shakespeare's dramatic imagination. We can account for this by speculating, as we did earlier, that Shakespeare joined the Queen's Men as a player and, as McMillin and MacLean suggest, perhaps apprentice playwright. Greene wrote plays performed by the Queen's Men, e.g., Setimus and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and might have been especially miffed by the writcrly pretences of one of his former “puppets.” Apart from making him a threat to the likes of Greene, Shakespeare's unusual status as player-poet made him especially apt to appreciate the dedication of the Queen's Men to an audience-oriented style. And, further, to understand that while the skillful manipulation of actors' bodies was crucial to provid-ing a good show, the skillful manipulation of language was a complement to physical performance that could exponentially expand the pleasures and the power of the theater.

Through its parody of lines from die play we now call 2 Henry VI, die Greene quotation connects Shakespeare's early notoriety specifically with the writing and playing of history. The success of his early history plays is a major component of Shakespeare's rise to prominence.