Henry Chettle

They published a good many ballads, and some plays, including a surreptitious and botched first quarto of Romeo and Juliet, to which it is suggested Chettle added lines and stage directions.

This contained a passage criticising various playwrights, which offended at least two contemporary writers, one probably the alleged "atheist" Christopher Marlowe and the other possibly William Shakespeare.

He denied the charge in the preface to his Kind Heart's Dream, published later that year: About three months since died M. Robert Greene, leaving many papers in sundry booksellers' hands, among other his Groatsworth of Wit, in which a letter written to divers play-makers is offensively by one or two of them taken, and because on the dead they cannot be avenged, they willfully forge in their conceits a living author [...] With neither of them that take offence was I acquainted, and with one of them I care not if I never be.

Besides, divers of worship have reported his uprightness of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his facetious grace in writing that approves his art.The theory that Greene's Groatsworth is a forgery by Chettle has been both supported and challenged by scholars.

[2] He seems to have been generally in debt, judging from numerous entries in Philip Henslowe's diary of advances for various purposes, on one occasion (17 January 1599) to pay his expenses in the Marshalsea prison, on another (7 March 1603) to get his play out of pawn.