In 1589 Robert Greene, a successful if profligate writer of romances and plays, published a tale called Menaphon: Camilla's Alarum to Slumbering Euphues, along with a document that contains the first recorded allusion to a tragedy with which Shakespeare was to be associated—though it wasn't his yet. The allusion is made by Thomas Nashe, in his preface addressed to “The Gentlemen Students of both Universities,” where Nashe, then twenty-two years old, takes the occasion to broadly criticize the state of English letters. His critique is notable not only for the jaunty self-assertion that characterizes much of his later writing, but also for the vocabulary he uses and the themes he chooses to pursue. He opens with an attack on “inkhorne” men—the common term for writers who abandon their native English fields of russet yeas and honest kersey noes for the exotic shores of Latinate diction and rhetorical amplification. According to Nashe, they’ve acquired this style not by arduous study but through the “servile imitation of vain-glorious tragoedians”—that is, by picking it up from actors on the stage, especially those who “contend not so seriouslie to excell in action as to embowell the clowdes in a speach of comparison” (308). There's a double critique here: of a newly “lettered” popular theater that is beginning to imitate, in high astounding terms, the high literary—and of a new generation of writers who are going not to the sources for their learning but to popular theatrical imitations.

The social implications of this critique become evident as Nashe pursues his theme, for the languages of market and class now enter the discourse: