Reading Robert Greene: Recovering Shakespeare’s Rival.

This review focuses on Darren Freebury-Jones’s book *Reading Robert Greene: Recovering Shakespeare’s Rival*, which aims to redefine the canon of Robert Greene, an Elizabethan playwright often overshadowed by his prose works, by employing close textual analysis and stylometric methods. Freebury-Jones uses linguistic and dramaturgical evidence, including stylometry based on Pervez Rizvi’s database of Early Modern plays, to attribute several marginal plays to Greene and to highlight his influence on Elizabethan commercial theater and contemporaries such as Christopher Marlowe. The book argues that Greene was a significant dramatist who contributed to the development of romance and tragedy and served as a theatrical rival to Shakespeare through their associations with competing companies. While the authorship analyses are considered rigorous and valuable for Early Modern drama studies, the reviewer notes that the exploration of Greene’s rivalry with Shakespeare is limited and that some methodological aspects, such as reliance on Rizvi’s corpus, warrant further scrutiny. [Extracted from the article]