First published in 1591, Greene's Farewell to Follie is divided into three discourses interpolated with the tales of Peratio and Cosimo. The work is dedicated to Robert Carey and is also prefaced by an ironic address "To the Gentlmen Students of both Universities health." Follies and quackeries, rather than vices, were Greene's characteristic subjects, and with Thomas Nashe he was largely responsible for introducing a trenchant realism into English prose in the last decade of the 16th century.