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The Ex-Classics Web Site About Us The Ex-Classics project was founded in 2000 to fill an unmet need.  When reading the blurb etc. to a book by Charles Dickens or Charlotte Bronte, say, we would often come across sentences like "Favourite reading included . . ."  If  it's good enough for them, it's good enough for us. So off we go to the library or bookshop, to be met first with blank stares and then with the information that the book has been out of print for decades. Our first two books were Gil Blas and Hudibras, which are prime examples of this.  This web site is dedicated to rescuing these works from obscurity and making them available online, both for reading directly, and for downloading. Book of the Month -- December 2021  A Groatsworth of Wit by  Robert Greene Robert Greene (1558 – 1592) was an English dramatist, poet, pamphleteer, rake and debauchee. He appears as a minor character in both of Anthony Burgess' Elizabethan novels Nothing Like The Sun (about Shakespeare) and A Dead Man In Deptford (about Marlowe) A graduate of Clare Hall, Cambridge, he eloped with a wealthy woman whom he abandoned after having spent all her money. He then went to London, where he lived by writing, associated with "whores, cony-catchers and lewd fellows" and spent money faster than he got it on drunkenness and debauchery. In his short life he wrote six plays, many poems, and numerous pamphlets, mostly love stories and accounts of criminals and swindlers. His "Groatsworth of Wit", published posthumously, is a disguised autobiography, but is best known for the first reference in print to William Shakespeare as a playwright: ". . . there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tiger's heart wrapped in a Player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country." What do you think? Any comments about this site or its contents? E-mail me (Click here) We have an occasional newsletter - please say if you want to be added to the mailing list. We never give out your details to spammers, or anyone else, for that matter. No-Copyright notice This site and its contents are public domain and free to the world. Anything in it may be copied and distributed free of charge or obligation. [There are one or two exceptions to this, which are clearly marked where they occur.] We expect this policy to be passed on - anyone who copies our texts or web pages and tries to claim copyright for themselves is stealing - not from us, but from you, and from everyone. An example of what we mean.

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