Towards the end of his life, in the 1590s, an anxious Robert Greene warns his fellow university-educated playwrights about an ‘upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygrs heart wrapt in a Players hide supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blank verse as the best of you’. The usual commentary on this allusion to Shakespeare tends to overlook the use of the word ‘beautified’ in this ferocious piece of criticism. In early modern England this word was used to describe the process of making something or someone beautiful by artificial means: to ‘make faire to the eie or eares’ ‘adourne’, ‘to be decked, garnished, dressed, trimmed’; John Florio defines ‘to beautify’ as ‘to paint, to make faire’ and his suggested synonyms include ‘to furnish, to adorne, to decke, to store, to perfect, to supply. Also to garnish, to trap’. Writers who dispensed recipes for cosmetics also use this term frequently, like Thomas Lupton who suggests seven whole eggs and vinegar to ‘beautifie’ the face. Greene contends that Shakespeare is a plagiarist, a phoney, and he does so using language that describes cosmetic embellishment. The type of beautifying that Greene refers to is base and false, but also, the implication is that it is transparent. One would know that it is not a natural beauty, but merely beautified. Beautification is a cosmetic process, and most early modern writers would be aware of the contemporary resonance of the word.