Robert greene, one of the University wits.
Who Called Shakespeare An Upstart Crow?
The first reference to Shakespeare as an actor / playwright was in 1592. He was attacked in a pamphlet, written by a a well-known poet and playwright called Robert Greene. He called him an "Upstart Crow!"
Robert Greene, who some say, was Shakespeare's inspiration for the character of Falstaff, was a university educated man, from both Oxford and Cambridge. Writing prose and verse in London, gave him the lifestyle he wanted, soon to be ruffled by the appearance of some uneducated(non-university) boy from Stratford, who set the theatreworld on its ear with his devastating series of plays called HenryIV! Further plays followed, and forced men such as Christopher Marlowe to write Edward 11, just to keep up! In 1593, the year he died, Greene wrote a devastating attack on Shakespeare, calling him "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, who supposes he is able to write bombast with the best of you, and is a tiger dressed in a player's hide", a cynical reflection on Henry IV. Greene also attacked everybody else, from time to time, even Marlowe, who, in a literal sense, towered above him, and ruined the career of Thomas Kyd, writer of"The Spanish Tragedy". Kyd, another non-university man, couldn't take the criticism.