The University Wits

Notes Prepared by Dr Siddhartha Singh

Associate Professor, Department of English, Sri JNPG College Lucknow

The University Wits is a phrase used to name a group of late 16th-

century English playwrights and pamphleteers who were educated at the universities
(Oxford or Cambridge) and who became popular secular writers. The term coined by George
Saintsbury, a 19th-century journalist and author who argues that the "rising sap" of dramatic
creativity in the 1580s showed itself in two separate "branches of the national tree". Prominent
members of this wise band of professed men of letters were Christopher Marlowe, Robert
Greene, and Thomas Nashe from Cambridge, and John Lyly, Thomas Lodge, and George
Peele from Oxford. Thomas Kyd is also sometimes included in the group, though he is not
believed to have studied at university.
This diverse and talented loose association of London writers and dramatists set the stage
for the theatrical Renaissance of Elizabethan England. They are identified as among the earliest
professional writers in English, and prepared the way for the writings of William Shakespeare,
who was born just two months after Christopher Marlowe. They represent an interesting cultural
development in their attempt to put the fruits of their enthusiasm for literature and ideas. They
worked as prose writers and poets as well as for the theatre. The blend of university culture and
gentlemanly sophistication which some of them brought to bear on the popular theatre is
significant, while Greene and Nashe may be credited with the achievement of marrying
university culture and popular tradition.
The University Wits, "with Marlowe at their head, made the blank verse line for dramatic
purposes, dismissed, cultivated as they were, the cultivation of classical models, and gave
English tragedy its Magna Charta of freedom and submission to the restrictions of actual life
only". However, they failed "to achieve perfect life-likeness". It was left to "the actor-
playwrights who, rising from very humble beginnings, but possessing in their fellow
Shakespeare a champion unparalleled in ancient and modern times, borrowed the improvements
of the university wits, added their own stage knowledge, and with Shakespeare's aid achieved the
master drama of the world."
Edward Albert in his History of English Literature (1979) argues that the plays of the
University Wits had several features in common:
(a) There was a fondness for heroic themes, such as the lives of great figures like Mohammed
and Tamburlaine.
(b) Heroic themes needed heroic treatment: great fullness and variety; splendid descriptions, long
swelling speeches, the handling of violent incidents and emotions. These qualities, excellent
when held in restraint, only too often led to loudness and disorder.
(c) The style was also ‘heroic’. The chief aim was to achieve strong and sounding lines,
magnificent epithets, and powerful declamation. This again led to abuse and to mere bombast,
mouthing, and in the worst cases to nonsense. In the best examples, such as in Marlowe, the
result is quite impressive. In this connexion it is to be noted that the best medium for such
expression was blank verse, which was sufficiently elastic to bear the strong pressure of these
expansive methods.
(d) The themes were usually tragic in nature, for the dramatists were as a rule too much in
earnest to give heed to what was considered to be the lower species of comedy. The general lack
of real humour in the early drama is one of its most prominent features. Humour, when it is

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brought in at all, is coarse and immature. Almost the only representative of the writers of real
comedies is Lyly.
G. K. Hunter argues that the new "Humanistic education" of the age allowed them to create a
"complex commercial drama, drawing on the nationalisation of religious sentiment" in such a
way that it spoke to an audience "caught in the contradictions and liberations history had
imposed".
Marlow (1564 –1593)
Marlowe was the foremost Elizabethan tragedian of his day. He greatly influenced William
Shakespeare, who was born in the same year as Marlowe and who rose to become the pre-
eminent Elizabethan playwright after Marlowe's mysterious early death. Marlowe's plays are
known for the use of blank verse and their overreaching protagonists.
Of the dramas attributed to Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage is believed to have been his first.
It was performed by the Children of the Chapel, a company of boy actors, between 1587 and
1593. The play was first published in 1594; the title page attributes the play to Marlowe
and Thomas Nashe.
Marlowe's first play performed on the regular stage in London, in 1587, was Tamburlaine the
Great, about the conqueror Timur (Tamerlane), who rises from shepherd to warlord. It is among
the first English plays in blank verse and with Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, generally is
considered the beginning of the mature phase of the Elizabethan theatre.[8] Tamburlaine was a
success and was followed with Tamburlaine the Great, Part II.
The two parts of Tamburlaine were published in 1590; all Marlowe's other works were published
posthumously. The sequence of the writing of his other four plays is unknown; all deal with
controversial themes.
 The Jew of Malta (first published as The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta),
about the Jew Barabas' barbarous revenge against the city authorities, has a prologue
delivered by a character representing Machiavelli. It was probably written in 1589 or 1590
and was first performed in 1592. It was a success and remained popular for the next fifty
years. The play was entered in the Stationers' Register on 17 May 1594 but the earliest
surviving printed edition is from 1633.
 Edward the Second is an English history play about the deposition of King Edward II by
his barons and the Queen, who resent the undue influence the king's favourites have in court
and state affairs. The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 6 July 1593, five
weeks after Marlowe's death. The full title of the earliest extant edition, of 1594, is The
troublesome reigne and lamentable death of Edward the second, King of England, with the
tragicall fall of proud Mortimer.
 The Massacre at Paris is a short and luridly written work, the only surviving text of
which was probably a reconstruction from memory of the original performance text,
portraying the events of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572, which English
Protestants invoked as the blackest example of Catholic treachery.It features the silent
"English Agent", whom tradition has identified with Marlowe and his connexions to the
secret service. The Massacre at Paris is considered his most dangerous play, as agitators in
London seized on its theme to advocate the murders of refugees from the low countries and it
warns Elizabeth I of this possibility in its last scene. The full title was The Massacre at
Paris: With the Death of the Duke of Guise.
 Doctor Faustus (or The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus), based
on the German Faustbuch, was the first dramatised version of the Faust legend of a scholar's

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 dealing with the devil. Versions of "The Devil's Pact" can be traced back to the 4th century,
Marlowe deviates significantly by having his hero unable to "burn his books" or repent to a
merciful God to have his contract annulled at the end of the play. Marlowe's protagonist is
instead carried off by demons and in the 1616 quarto his mangled corpse is found by several
scholars. Doctor Faustus is a textual problem for scholars as two versions of the play exist:
the 1604 quarto, also known as the A text and the 1616 quarto or B text. Both were published
after Marlowe's death. Scholars have disagreed which text is more representative of
Marlowe's original and some editions are based on a combination of the two. The scholarly
consensus of the late 20th century holds the A text is more representative because it contains
irregular character names and idiosyncratic spelling, which are believed to reflect a text
based on the author's handwritten manuscript or "foul papers". The B text, in comparison,
was highly edited, censored because of shifting theater laws regarding religious words
onstage and contains several additional scenes which scholars believe to be the additions of
other playwrights, particularly Samuel Rowley and William Bird (alias Borne).

Marlowe's plays were enormously successful, thanks in part, no doubt, to the imposing stage
presence of Edward Alleyn. Alleyn was unusually tall for the time and the haughty roles of
Tamburlaine, Faustus and Barabas were probably written for him. Marlowe's plays were the
foundation of the repertoire of Alleyn's company, the Admiral's Men, throughout the 1590s.
Marlowe also wrote the poem Hero and Leander (published in 1598 and with a continuation
by George Chapman the same year), the popular lyric The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,
translations of Ovid's Amores and the first book of Lucan's Pharsalia. In 1599, his translation
of Ovid was banned and copies publicly burned as part of Archbishop Whitgift's crackdown on
offensive material. Marlowe has been credited in the New Oxford Shakespeare series as co-
author of the three Henry VI plays, though some scholars doubt any actual collaboration.

Robert Greene (1558–1592)
Greene is best known for a posthumous pamphlet attributed to him, Greene's Groats-Worth of
Witte, bought with a million of Repentance, widely believed to contain an attack on William
Shakespeare. Robert Greene was a popular Elizabethan dramatist and pamphleteer known for his
negative critiques of his colleagues. He is said to have been born in Norwich. He
attended Cambridge, receiving a BA in 1580, and an M.A. in 1583 before moving to London,
where he arguably became the first professional author in England. Greene was prolific and
published in many genres including romances, plays and autobiography
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. Greene's literary career began with the
publication of a long romance, Mamillia, entered in the Stationers' Register on 3 October 1580.
Greene's romances were written in a highly wrought style which reached its highest level
in Pandosto (1588) and Menaphon (1589). In addition to his prose works, Greene also wrote
several plays, none of them published in his lifetime 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, which later inspired Edmund
Spenser.
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

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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.

Thomas Nashe (1567 – 1601) [also Nash]

Nashe is known for his novel The Unfortunate Traveller, his pamphlets including Pierce
Penniless, and his numerous defences of the Church of England.  In October 1592 he wrote an
entertainment called Summer's Last Will and Testament, a "show" with some resemblance to
a masque. In brief, the plot describes the death of Summer, who, feeling himself to be dying,
reviews the performance of his former servants and eventually passes the crown on to Autumn.
The play was published in 1600. Nashe is widely remembered for three short poems, all drawn
from this play and frequently reprinted in anthologies of Elizabethan verse: “Adieu, farewell,
earth’s bliss,” “Fair summer droops” and “Autumn hath all the summer’s fruitful treasure.”
Nashe may also have contributed to Henry VI, Part 1, the play later published under
Shakespeare's name as the first part of the Henry VI trilogy.  Nashe subsequently promoted the
play in his pamphlet Pierce Penniless.[6] In 1593 Nashe published Christ's Tears Over Jerusalem,
a pamphlet dedicated to Lady Elizabeth Carey. Despite the work's apparently devotional nature it
contained satirical material which gave offence to the London civic authorities and Nashe was
briefly imprisoned in Newgate Prison. At some time in the early 1590s Nashe produced an erotic
poem, The Choice of Valentines that begins with a sonnet to "Lord S". It has been suggested
that The Choice of Valentines was written possibly for the private circle of Ferdinando Stanley,
5th Earl of Derby (then known as Lord Strange)
In 1594, Nashe wrote a book titled The Terrors of the Night; Or A Discourse of
Apparitions, which sceptically considers dreams, nightmares, and apparitions, which Nashe
considers born of superstition, melancholy or imagination. Correspondence can be seen between
the rationalism expressed in Act 5 of Shakespeare’s play Midsummer Night’s Dream and the
ideas expressed in The Terrors of the Night.

John Lyly (1553 or 1554 –1606)

Lyly the brightest star among them is best known during his lifetime for his mannered literary
style, originating in his first books Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), a didactic romance,
and Euphues and His England (1580). The name Euphues is derived from Greek meaning
"graceful, witty." Lyly adopted the name from Roger Ascham's The Scholemaster, which
describes Euphues as a type of student who is "apte by goodnes of witte, and appliable by
readines of will, to learning, hauving all other qualities of the mind and partes of the bodie, that
must an other day serue learning, not trobled, mangled, and halfed, but sounde, whole, full &
hable to do their office" (194). Lyly's mannered style is characterized by parallel arrangements
and periphrases.
In 1632 Blount published Six Court Comedies, the first printed collection of Lyly's plays. They
appear in the text in the following order; the parenthetical date indicates the year they appeared
separately in quarto form:
 Endymion (1591)
 Campaspe (1584)
 Sapho and Phao (1584)
 Gallathea (1592)
 Midas (1592)

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 Mother Bombie (1594)
Lyly's other plays include Love's Metamorphosis (though printed in 1601, possibly Lyly's
earliest play — the surviving version is likely a revision of the original), and The Woman in the
Moon, first printed in 1597. Of these, all but the last are in prose. A Warning for Faire
Women (1599) and The Maid's Metamorphosis (1600) have been attributed to Lyly, but on
altogether insufficient grounds.
His importance as a dramatist has been very differently estimated. Lyly's dialogue is still a
long way removed from the dialogue of Shakespeare. But at the same time it is a great advance
in rapidity and resource upon anything which had gone before it; it represents an important step
in English dramatic art. His nimbleness, and the wit which struggles with his pedantry, found
their full development in the dialogue of Twelfth Night and Much Ado about Nothing, just as
"Marlowe's mighty line" led up to and was eclipsed by the majesty and music of Shakespearean
passion.
Lyly must also be considered and remembered as a primary influence on the plays
of William Shakespeare, and in particular the romantic comedies. Love's Metamorphosis is a
large influence on Love's Labour's Lost, and Gallathea is a major source for A Midsummer
Night's Dream. In 2007, Primavera Productions in London staged a reading of Gallathea,
directed by Tom Littler, consciously linking it to Shakespeare's plays. They also claim an
influence on Twelfth Night and As You Like It.

Thomas Lodge (1558 – 1625)

Lodge's known dramatic work is small in quantity. In conjunction with Robert Greene he,
probably in 1590, produced in a popular vein the odd but far from feeble play, A Looking Glass
for London and England (published 1594). He had already written The Wounds of Civil
War (produced perhaps as early as 1587, and published in 1594), a good second-rate piece in the
half-chronicle fashion of its age.
His second historical romance, the Life and Death of William Longbeard (1593), was
more successful than the first. Lodge also brought back with him from the new world A
Margarite of America (published 1596), a romance of the same description interspersed with
many lyrics. Already in 1589 Lodge had given to the world a volume of poems bearing the title
of the chief among them, Scillaes Metamorphosis, Enterlaced with the Unfortunate Love of
Glaucus, more briefly known as Glaucus and Scilla. To this tale Shakespeare was possibly
indebted for the idea of Venus and Adonis. In a lost work, the Sailor's Kalendar, he must in one
way or another have recounted his sea adventures.[1]
George Peele (1556 –1596)
Peele is most noted for his supposed but not universally accepted collaboration
with William Shakespeare on the play Titus Andronicus. Many anonymous Elizabethan plays
have been attributed to him, but his reputation rests mainly on Edward I, The Old Wives'
Tale, The Battle of Alcazar, The Arraignment of Paris, and David and Bethsabe. The
Troublesome Reign of John, King of England, the immediate source for Shakespeare's King
John, has been published under his name.
His pastoral comedy The Arraignment of Paris was presented by the Children of the
Chapel Royal before Queen Elizabeth. His play Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First was
printed in 1593. This chronicle history is an advance on the old chronicle plays, and marks a step
towards the Shakespearean historical drama. Peele may have written or contributed to the bloody
tragedy Titus Andronicus, which was published as the work of Shakespeare. This theory is in

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part due to Peele's predilection for gore, as evidenced in The Battle of Alcazar (acted 1588–1589,
printed 1594), published anonymously, which is attributed with much probability to him. The
Old Wives' Tale (printed 1595) was followed by The Love of King David and fair
Bethsabe (written ca. 1588, printed 1599), which is notable as an example of Elizabethan
drama drawn entirely from Scriptural sources
There are several plays attributed to him though the scholarly consensus has judged these
attributions to be insufficiently supported by evidence. Indeed, individual scholars have
repeatedly resorted to Peele in their attempts to grapple with Elizabethan plays of uncertain
authorship. Plays that have been assigned to (or blamed on) Peele include Locrine, The
Troublesome Reign of King John, and Parts 1 and 2 of Shakespeare's Henry VI trilogy, in
addition to Titus Andronicus. Edward III was attributed to Peele by Tucker Brooke in 1908.
While the attribution of the entire play to Peele is no longer accepted, Sir Brian
Vickers demonstrated using metrical and other analysis that Peele wrote the first act and the first
two scenes in Act II of Titus Andronicus, with Shakespeare responsible for the rest

Thomas Kyd (1558-1594)

The author of The Spanish Tragedy, and one of the most important figures in the development
of Elizabethan drama, Kyd is famous for initiating the tradition of revenge tragedy in English
literature. The Spanish Tragedie was probably written in the mid to late 1580s. The earliest
surviving edition was printed in 1592; the full title being, The Spanish Tragedie, Containing the
lamentable end of Don Horatio, and Bel-imperia: with the pittifull death of olde Hieronimo.
However, the play was usually known simply as "Hieronimo", after the protagonist. It was
arguably the most popular play of the "Age of Shakespeare" and set new standards in effective
plot construction and character development. Other works by Kyd are his translations
of Torquato Tasso's Padre di Famiglia, published as The Householder's Philosophy (1588);
and Robert Garnier's Cornelia (1594). Plays attributed in whole or in part to Kyd
include Soliman and Perseda, King Leir, Arden of Favershamand Edward III. A play related
to The Spanish Tragedy called The First Part of Hieronimo (surviving in a quarto of 1605) may
be a bad quartoor memorial reconstruction of a play by Kyd, or it may be an inferior writer's
burlesque of The Spanish Tragedy inspired by that play's popularity. Kyd is more generally
accepted to have been the author of a Hamlet, the precursor of the Shakespearean play (see: Ur-
Hamlet).