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Robert Wilson must have been passé as an actor in 1589, if indeed he was then living, while Strange's company was composed of younger and rising men, all recently selected for their histrionic abilities from several companies, amongst which, it appears evident, the Queen's company was not then included, though it is likely that in 1591 some Queen's men joined Strange's company. That Robert Wilson was not the Roscius referred to by Greene and Nashe in 1589 and 1590 a further examination of the evidence will fully verify.

The person indicated as Roscius by Nashe in his Address to Greene's Menaphon in 1589, and in Greene's Never Too Late in 1590, was the leading actor of a new company that was then gaining great reputation, which, however, was largely due—according to Nashe—to the pre-eminent excellence of this Roscius' acting. The pride and conceit of this actor had risen to such a pitch, Nashe informs us in his Anatomy of Absurdity (1589), that he had the "temerity to encounter with those on whose shoulders all arts do lean." This last is a plain reference to George Peele, whom he had recently described in his Menaphon "Address" as "The Atlas of Poetry." In the following year Greene refers to the same encounter in the first part of his Never Too Late. Pretending to describe theatrical conditions in Rome, he again attacks the London players and brings in Roscius—who without doubt was Edward Alleyn—as contending with Tully, who is Peele. "Among whom," he writes, "in the days of Tully, one Roscius grew to be of such exquisite perfection in his faculty that he offered to contend with the orators of that time in gesture as they did in eloquence, boasting that he would express a passion in as many sundry actions as Tully could discourse it in a variety of phrases. Yet so proud he grew by the daily applause of the people that he looked for honour or reverence to be done him in the streets, which conceit when Tully entered into with a piercing insight, he quipped it in this manner:

"It chanced that Roscius and he met at dinner both guests unto Archias, the poet, when the proud comedian dared to make comparison with Tully. Why Roscius art thou proud with Æsop's crow, being prankt with the glory of others' feathers? Of thyself thou canst say nothing and if the cobbler hath taught thee to say Ave Cæsar disdain not thy tutor because thou pratest in a King's chamber. What sentence thou utterest on the stage flows from the censure of our wits, and what sentence or conceit the people applaud for excellence, that comes from the secrets of our knowledge. I grant your acting, though it be a kind of mechanical labour, yet well done, 'tis worthy of praise, but you worthless if for so small a toy you wax proud."

Here again Tully is Peele, and Greene is merely describing more fully the alleged encounter between Alleyn and Peele, mentioned by Nashe the year before in The Anatomy of Absurdity.

Though it has never been noticed before, in this connection, we possess in Edward Alleyn's own papers preserved at Dulwich College a remarkable confirmation of this emulation, which, however, Greene and Nashe distort to the prejudice of Alleyn, who, as shall be shown, was innocent in the affair. The whole thing arose from admirers of Alleyn's among the theatre-frequenting gentry offering wagers to friends who championed Peele in order to provide after-dinner entertainment for themselves, by putting the poet and the player on their mettle in "expressing a passion"—the one in action and the other in phrases. Alleyn refused the contest "for fear of hurting Peele's credit," but gossip of the proposed wager got abroad and was distorted by the scholars, who affected to be insulted by the idea of one of their ilk contending with a player. Failing to bring about this match, Alleyn's backers, not to be beaten, and in order, willy-nilly, to make a wager on their champion, evidently tried to get Alleyn to display his powers before friends who professed to admire Bentley and Knell—actors of a slightly earlier date, who were now