The saddler appeals to biographers who attribute the writer's later low-life sympathies to a humble birth; the innkeeper, a more prosperous man possibly related to landowners, interests scholars who note the social ambitions of Greene's early works.Both the Norwich cordwainer-turned-innkeeper and the Norwich saddler left wills, proved in 1591 and 1596 respectively, but neither will mentioned a son named Robert.

Greene is thought to have attended the Norwich Grammar School, although this cannot be confirmed as enrolment documents for the relevant years are lost.

[13] In The Repentance, Greene claimed to have married a gentleman's daughter, whom he abandoned after having had a child by her and spent her dowry, after which she went to Lincolnshire, and he to London.

[17][18] Harvey attributed Greene's demise to "a surfeit of pickle herring and Rhenish wine",[19] and claimed he had been buried in "the New Churchyard near Bedlam" on 4 September.

[1] He wrote prolifically: From 1583 to 1592, he published more than twenty-five works in prose, becoming one of the first authors in England to support himself with his pen in an age when professional authorship was virtually unknown.

One song from Menaphon, Weep not my wanton, smile upon my knee, (a mother's lullaby to her baby son), enjoyed immense success and is now probably his best-known work.

[21] In his later "coney-catching" pamphlets, Greene fashioned himself into a well-known public figure, telling colourful inside stories of rakes and rascals duping young gentlemen and solid citizens out of their hard-earned money.

These stories, told from the perspective of a repentant former rascal, have been considered autobiographical, and have been thought to incorporate many facts of Greene's own life thinly veiled as fiction: his early riotous living, his marriage and desertion of his wife and child for the sister of a notorious character of the London underworld, his dealings with players, and his success in the production of plays for them.

[1] His plays earned himself the title as one of the "University Wits", including John Lyly, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, and Christopher Marlowe.

He equivocates and hesitates over the defence of the values of a conservative culture, virginity, true devotion, strict moral probity.In addition to his prose works, Greene also wrote several plays, none of them published in his lifetime,[1] including The Scottish History of James IV, Alphonsus, and his greatest popular success, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, as well as Orlando Furioso, based on Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso.

In addition to the plays published under his name after his death, Greene has been proposed as the author of several other dramas, including a second part to Friar Bacon which may survive as John of Bordeaux, The Troublesome Reign of King John, George a Greene, Fair Em, A Knack to Know a Knave, Locrine, Selimus, and Edward III, and even Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and Henry VI plays.

[24][25][26] Greene is most familiar to Shakespeare scholars for his pamphlet Greene's Groats-Worth of Wit, which alludes to a line, "O tiger's heart wrapped in a woman's hide", found in Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 3 (c. 1591–92): ... for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.Greene evidently complains of an actor who believes he can write as well as university-educated playwrights, alludes to the actor with a quotation that appears in both the True Tragedy quarto and Shakespeare's Folio version of Henry VI, Part 3, and uses the term "Shake-scene", a unique term never used before or after Greene's screed, to refer to the actor.

Some scholars have hypothesised that all or part of Groatsworth was written shortly after Greene's death by Henry Chettle or another one of his fellow writers, hoping to capitalise on a lurid tale of death-bed repentance.