Greene's Tu Quoque

Greene's Tu Quoque, also known as The City Gallant, is a Jacobean era stage play, a comedy written by John Cooke.

By that date in the summer of 1612, Cooke's play had already lost its original title; the Court records refer to the work as Tu Coque.

In the Restoration period, Sir William Davenant produced his own adaptation of Cooke's play in 1667; Samuel Pepys saw it on 12 September of that year.

Francis Kirkman's 1662 volume The Wits uses a frontispiece that alludes to the play: a picture of a clown peeking out from behind a curtain is captioned "Tu quoque".

In this first edition, the work was called Greene's Tu Quoque, or The City Gallant; and it was under its ad hoc title that the play maintained its fame.

Greene's Tu Quoque gives a rich picture of everyday life in its era; it "uses tennis rackets, tobacco pipes, cards, dice and candles to establish a life of debauchery in visual terms...and a begging-basket with scraps of food to symbolize the natural result...."[3] The play's stark picture of debtors' prison is noteworthy.

His 1612 last will and testament mentions his wife Susan, daughter Honor, brothers John and Jeffrey Greene and sister Elizabeth Barrett.

The will also mentions two sons-in-law and three daughters-in-law, though in Greene's day these terms referred to stepchildren – his wife Susan's five children with her first husband, Robert Browne.