INTRODUCING “UNIVERSITY WITS”

In this chapter we shall discuss about the University Wits and their role in the development of the
English drama.

1.1 INTRODUCTION:

The first theatres in England were private – at the court, in the universities, in the Inns of Court and
in the mansion of the noblemen. “We find them, writes F. S. Boas, “as early as in the reign of Henry
VII, attaching permanent companies of actors in their households. Thus a professional class of
performers was gradually developed. In the earlier years of Elizabeth the principal companies
belonged to Lord Leicester, Warwick, Clinton, and Charles Howard. Warwick’s men were later
succeeded by Lord Hudson’s, Clinton’s by those of the Earl of Essex, and Lord Charles Howard’s by
those of the Lord Derby. In addition to these men-actors, there were troupes of boy-performers,
composed of the choirs of the Chapel Royal and St. Paul’s, or of the scholars of Westminster and
Merchant Taylors’. When not playing at court or at the houses of their patrons, these companies, as
a rule, made use of inn yards, such as ‘The Bell’ in Gracechurch Street, ‘The Bull’, mentioned by
Gosson, in Bishopgate, and ‘The Bell Savage’ on Ludgate Hill. Leicester’s influence with the Queen
enabled him in 1574 to procure for his ‘servants’ a royal patent empowering them to perform within
the city of London, and throughout the realm of England, provided that their plays were licensed by
the Master of the Revels. But the company was to meet with strenuous opposition to the exercise of
these privileges. The Corporation of London was the determined enemy of the stage, on the double
ground of the immorality of so many of the performances, and of the peril of contagion in time of
plague. Accordingly, in the year 1576, it issued an order no theatrical performances should be given
in public within the city bounds. This order led to a prolonged contest between the Corporation and
the Privy Council, which had a highly important result. The players, relying on the favour of the
Court, yet not daring openly to defy the authority of the Mayor, established themselves in
permanent buildings just beyond the boundaries of the city. Here they were outside the jurisdiction
of the Corporation, and yet close enough to the town to permit of both the public and the Court
gallants being present at their performances. In this way regular theatres sprang into existence, and
took the place of the inns and the temporary erections which had hitherto sufficed for dramatic
shows: the stage passed from nomadic to the settled condition.” [Shakspere and His Predecessors]

1.2. DISCUSSION

A band of young men from the universities who are called ‘University Wits’ – Peele, Greene,
Kyd, Marlowe, Nash and a few lesser known men in England set the pattern for such plays
and paved the way for great Shakespeare to unleash his creative genius. The term
"University Wits" was not used in their lifetime, but was coined by George Saintsbury, a
19th-century journalist and author. Saintsbury argues that the "rising sap" of dramatic
creativity in the 1580s showed itself in two separate "branches of the national tree":

In the first place, we have the group of university wits, the strenuous if not always wise
band of professed men of letters, at the head of whom are Lyly, Marlowe, Greene, Peele,
Lodge, Nash, and probably (for his connection with the universities is not certainly known)
Kyd. In the second, we have the irregular band of outsiders, players and others, who felt
themselves forced into literary and principally dramatic composition, who boast
Shakespeare as their chief, and who can claim as seconds to him not merely the imperfect
talents of Chettle, Munday, and others whom we may mention in this chapter, but many of
the perfected ornaments of a later time.

George Saintsbury

Saintsbury argues that the Wits drew on the ploddingly academic verse-drama of Thomas
Sackville, and the crude but lively popular entertainments of "miscellaneous farce-and-
interlude-writers", to create the first truly powerful dramas in English. 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 [2]:

 There was a fondness for heroic themes, such as the lives of great figures like
Mohammed and Tamburlaine.
 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.
  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.
 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 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." [3]

While Marlowe is the most famous dramatist among them, Robert Greene and Thomas
Nash were better known for their controversial, risqué and argumentative pamphlets,
creating an early form of journalism. Greene has been called the "first notorious
professional writer".

In the English drama of this period, the native and the foreign elements mingle so finely that
it is very difficult to separate them. The audience did not care to distinguish between the
two strains of influences and accepted materials and fashions of folk traditions as well as
new themes inspired by the classics. In many plays we find allegorical characters and
situations side by side with spectacular violence, a mixture of comedy and tragedy
forbidden by classical rules, rhetoric and bombast with simplicity and foolery. This drama
was called ‘romantic’ for it was something new in Europe and adhered to no rules. John Lyly,
one of Shakespeare’s predecessors in comedy, wrote drama in prose but dramatists found
out plays in blank verse paid better dividends and so did not use prose until Ben Jonson
wrote his realistic comedies.

2.1 INDIVIDUAL PLAYWRIGHTS

A. John Lyly (1554-1660) was a school teacher who taught Latin and wrote plays for private
teachers and aristocratic audience. He turned to drama after his success with Euphues,
following his courtly artificial prose to the stage to bring into being a new kind of court
comedy. He was the author of at least eight comedies – all, except The Woman in the Moon,
in a modified form of his euphuistic style. In them he gave the first skilful dramatic dialogue
of the age. His delicately balanced and stylized prose was an up gradation over the doggerel
“fourteeners” of his predecessors. Though he turned to Greek legends for the plots of his
plays, he cast them in a completely original way where he blends mythology and human
sentiment. His subjects are allegorical but through them he treated topical issues. In A most
excellent Comedy of Alexander and Campaspe, and Diogenes (1581) he introduces the
theme of rivalry between Alexander the Great and the painter Apelles for the Theban
captive Campaspe besides holding up to his queen the ideal of Alexander who sacrificed
love to kingly duty. In Saphao and Phao (1584), mythology is more pronounced: Saphao the
chaste princess has the better of Venus. Cynthia of Endymion (1586) receives love but never
returns it just like Elizabeth. Midas (1592) is a satire on greed as typified in Philip II of Spain.
Gallathea (1587), Loves’s Metamorphoses, and The Woman in the Moon are pastoral plays.
The first is laid in Lincolnshire, the second in Arcadia, and the third in Utopia, but in fact the
scene is the same in all three – a pastoral dreamland against which allegorical and
mythological action concerning nymphs, swains, soldiers, monsters, goddesses, and a
variety of human lovers and supernatural characters is played out. Gallathea shows two girls
disguised as boys falling in love with each other. In Lyly the broad farce and horse-play has
no place, his humour and wit are refined. He was also the first dramatist to introduce fairies
to the English stage. Lyly’s plays are full of lovely songs and though they were not popular
they exerted a considerable influence on later dramatists. The phrase that comes to mind
with reference to Lyly’s plays is “faded charm.” They are unparallel; the subplots are not
always effectively knitted up with the main story; but there exists a delicate imagination, a
sense of form and wholeness, and a new idea of comedy, all of which held flourishing
promise for later Elizabethan drama.

B. George Peele (c.1558-1597):

Born in the gutters of London Peele was educated at London and led a Bohemian life. He
narrowly escaped imprisonment for swindles. A better poet than dramatist he chastened
the blank verse and created a genre in each of his five plays that have survived. The
Arraignment of Paris (1581) is a pastoral comedy relating the story of the golden apple. Here
Peele takes the familiar story of the judgement of Paris, treating the love of Paris and
Oenone and Paris’s consequent inconstancy with a smooth lyrical grace. The love of Colin
for his hardhearted Thestylis comprises a subplot, with rustic characters (whose names are
derived from Spenser’s Shepherds’s Calendar) introduced to endow with a more realistic
level of action. Paris is summoned before the Council of the Gods, at the instance of Pallas
and Juno, to be accused partiality in his judgement. He defends himself in vigorous blank
verse and, finally Diana awards the disputed golden apple to

a gracious nymph
That honours Dian for her chastity
And likes the labours well of Phoebe’s groves;
The place Elizium hight, and of the place
Her name that governs there Eliza is.
And Peele awards the fruit to the nymph Zabeta (Queen Elizabeth). It is written in a variety
of verse forms, including “fourteeners” and includes some fine singing lyrics, notably the
duet sung by Paris and Oenone, “Fair and fair, and twice so fair,” which is sadly echoed later
in Oenone’s lament for her desertion of Paris. As the play is essentially a masque, there is
little dramatic movement in it. Edward I (1591) is a crude chronicle play. Part of its materials
was supplied by Holinshed but the main story is based on a popular ballad. The Battle of
Alcazar is too loosely connected to produce a satisfactory drama. The blank verse in David
and Bethsabe excels in sweetness and flexibility everything written before. It dramatizes the
biblical story of David’s love for Bathsheba and Absalom’s mutiny in elaborately rhetorical
and slow-pacing blank-verse. Charming song integrated with the action makes Peele’s The
Old Wives Tale (1590) the liveliest of his plays. It is a play of wicked enchantment and real
love which begins as a narrative recounted by Magde, wife of Clunch the blacksmith, to
three gay fellows who have lost their way in the wood and whom she is entertaining at her
chalet; but soon after she initiates the story the characters emerge to act it out, so that the
oral narration becomes the play itself. The introductory scene is in forceful colloquial prose;
the main part of the play is partly in a more mannered prose and partly in blank verse.
Though the whole possesses a quaint charm, the several ingredients of which it is made up
are not well-connected to produce the impression of a finished product. However, it made
romantic comedy immediately popular. As said earlier, Peele was a skilled poet, who
experimented with drama and tried bring appealing charm in this genre. In spite of having a
little theatrical sagacity or gift for dramatic construction, he was talented and prolific
enough and his dynamic lyricism instilled novelty into Elizabethan dramaturgy.

C. Robert Greene (c.1560-1592), a prolific and a bohemian genius, and better recognized for
his graphic autobiographical narrative than for his plays, turned to the drama to eek out his
livelihood. Greene himself informs in A Groatsworth of Wit how he came to compose for the
stage. “Once, sitting by a hedge lamenting his misfortune and poor prospects, he was
overheard by a player who told him he required the services of a scholar to write plays: ‘for
which you will be well paid if you take the pains.’ To which proposal he agreed, thinking it
best ‘in respect of his present necessity to try his wit.’ The result was a group of plays
characterized by a crafts was a group of plays characterized by a craftsman-like plotting, a
skilful mixture of realistic native background and an atmosphere of romance, and an ability
to portray a heroine who is both charming as a personality, attractive as a woman, and
convincing as a human being.” So long women played but a minor part in dramatic plots.
Greene made them as important as men in his plays. Moreover, he placed the comic and
the tragic side by side. The best of his plays, The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar
Bungay (1589) is partly in prose. It has two parallel plots blend together. The main plot
resembles that of Faustus but Roger Bacon saves his soul wooing and winning Margaret, a
country girl. The story revolves around Bacon’s evidence of his magical ability (which he
ultimately renounces) before King Henry III and the Emperor of Germany and merges with
this not only some colloquial humour but also an amatory idyll between Margaret, the fair
maid of Fressingfield, and Lacy, Earl of Lincoln. The two plots are orderly built-in to produce
an atmosphere of wholeness. The action shifts between Margaret’s Suffolk, Friar Bacon’s
cell in Oxford, and the court, and, despite the lack of scenery-arrangements there exists a
limpid motion of progress; the dialogue, mostly workmanlike blank verse but sporadically in
lively prose, carries the story along enthusiastically, in spite of some flashes of superfluous
classical embellishment in the love speeches. The Scottish History of James the Fourth is not
at all a history/chronicle play although the title might induce to think so. It is a serious
comedy derived from a story by the Italian Giraldi Cinthio. The play begins with a slightly
atypical piece of machinery: it is performed before Oberon, King of Fairies, by Bohan, a Scot,
to prove his sceptical attitude that the world is not a suitable place for a wise man to live in.
The main plot is concerned with King James’s love for Ida, daughter of the Countess of
Arran, and the evil (including countenancing an attempt of the life of his queen) into which
this guides him. But Ida’s firm rejection of her regal suitor and Queen Dorothea’s loyalty to
her erring husband (she is driven from court disguised as a page and wounded by a hired
assassin) bring the story finally to a happy ending. Dorothea combines the fortitude of
Griselda with something of the self-reliance as well as the steadiness of Shakespeare’s Viola
and Imogen, and the play, though slow-stirring, has some fascinating and some tenderly
poignant moments. Greene’s other plays are of less-interest (though George a Green or the
Pinner of Wakefield, which may well be his but cannot be definitely credited to him, exhibits
lots of his best merits), Orlando Furioso (1588, based on Ariosto) and Alphouses, King of
Arragon (1587), demonstrate the influence not very happily of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. Like
Kyd and Marlowe, Genre wrote for the public stage and looked for and popular success
“romantic comedy” - a genre of which Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and As You Like It
represent the highest development.

D. Thomas Lodge (c. 1557-1625) is much less significant as a contributor to the

development of English drama. His most outstanding work is his euphuistic prose romance,
Rosalynde, the chief source of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. He wrote a sizeable amount of
diverse prose and some accomplished sonnets, and collaborated with Greene in A Looking
Glass for London and England, a moral play concerning a vicious despot called to
repentance. His one certainly identified entirely original play is The Wounds of Civil War,
“lively set forth in true tragedy of Marius and Scilla.” This dealing of the civil war between
Marius and Sulla is interesting as an early dramatic treatment of Roman history, but on the
whole it is a confused presentation, despite some Marlovian touches.

E. Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) had a share in some plays by more than one author
(collaboration being a not unusual exercise at this time), but the only complete existing play
of his is Summer’s Last Will and Testament, an symbolic play about the seasons which unites
satire with courtly compliment; it has accompanying songs and some sparkling moments, in
spite of a general limitation in both plot and character description. His most remarkable
work is a picaresque tale called The Unfortunate Traveller.

F. If Greene brought into being what has been called “romantic comedy,” Thomas Kyd
(1558-94) was an even greater popular success as the founder of what might be called
“romantic tragedy.” Combining the elements of love, conspiracy, murder, and revenge, Kyd
developed a way of adapting some of the appealing features of Senecan tragedy to roaring
melodrama. The Spanish Tragedie (1584) is the first, and in its melodramatic way the most
powerful, of the series of revenge plays that captured the Elizabethan and Jacobean
imagination. The story is full of horror; it has murder, suicide, madness, intrigue, villains, the
avenging ghost and blood-freezing climaxes. The plot of the Spanish Tragedie is intricate and
bears resemblances to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Horatio is the son of Hieronimo, the Marshal
of Spain. He and Lorenzo capture in battle Balthazar, the son of the Viceroy of Portugal.
Balthazar makes love to Belimperia, Lorenzo’s sister and is encouraged by Lorenzo. They
discover that Belimperia loves Horatio and kills him. Hieronimo discovers the murderers of
his son and is mad for revenge. He arranges a performance with himself, Belimperia,
Lorenzo and Balthazar in the cast. In course of this play within the play Lorenzo and
Balthazar are killed, while Hieronimo and Belimperia take their own life. A sketchy summary
of the plot, of course, can impart a little idea of the power of the play. Violence is all-
pervasive; passion and intrigue worked themselves out in every variety of horror and
malicious scheming. The blank verse fuses exclamatory rhetoric with morbid
sententiousness. After the witty love play in the dialogue between Bell-imperia and Horatio
in the arbor:

Bel. If I be Venus, thou must needs be Mars;

And where Mars reigneth there must needs be wars.
Hor. Then thus begin our wars: put forth thy hand,
That it may combat with my ruder hand,
Bel. Set forth thy foot to try the push of mine.
Hor. But first my looks shall combat against thine.
Bel. Then guard thyself: I dart this kiss at thee.....
we get the sudden intrusion of the assassins, the dispatching of Horatio, Belimperia’s
uproar, Lorenzo’s callous, “Come, stop her mouth; away with her,” and then the sudden
entrance of the excited Hieronimo:
What outcries pluck me from my naked bed,
 And chill my throbbing heart with trembling fear,
Which never danger yet could daunt before?
Who calls Hieronimo? Speak, here I am.
I did not slumber; therefore ’twas no dream,
And here within this garden did she cry,
And in this garden must I rescue her.-
But stay, what murd’rous spectacle is this?
A man hang’d up and all the murderers gone!
And in my bower, to lay the guilt on me!
This place was for pleasure, not for death.
(He cuts him down.)
In spite of the long rhetorical eruptions, the speed of the action is terrific, event following
on event with the grimmest kind of irony. The characterization in the play is unsophisticated
to the point of non-existence; only passions carry them forward making them dissemble and
hate and go and frantic as well as love and murder. The Spanish Tragedy was really “good
theatre”; it was one of the great successes of the Elizabethan stage. It is believed that Kyd
composed a Hamlet (which has not survived), on which Shakespeare based his Hamlet; but
even without this supposed lost play of Kyd’s we can discern his manner of sensational
melodrama lies behind the boundlessly subtler and profounder Shakespearean tragedy.

G. Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593): One of the most dashing personalities of his age,
Marlowe revolutionised play-writing within the short span of five years. Kyd had improved
the technique of English drama but Marlowe was its creative force. The pattern of the
romantic tragedy he wrote was followed by his contemporaries including Shakespeare. As a
playwright he had serious limitations, though it is feasible to map out a growing sense of the
theatre through his plays. Only in Edward II does he show any sense of plot structure, while
his characterization is of the simplest, and lacks the warm humanity of Shakespeare’s. His
dramas except Edward II depict the rise and fall of one character who dominates the action.
They exhibit no intricacy or subtleness of development and are the quintessence of a single
idea; they achieve success regardless of cost and go down fighting. Like their creator, they
defy both man and God in this life and are madly after power. Really, to realize Marlovian
characters, we must put aside traditional ideas of the dramatist personae and view them as
the representation of a poetic vision, the typically Renaissance quest power – l’amour de
l’impossible – combined with the quest for beauty. Tamburlaine, the hero of Tamburlaine
the Great I and II (1588), seeks it in ruthless conquests: “sweet fruition of an earthly crown”;
Barabas of The Jew of Malta (1591), in wealth: “infinite riches in little room”, Faustus of
Doctor Faustus (1592) in super-human knowledge. In Edward II Marlowe attempted a
chronicle play and enhanced its dignity by bringing out the sublimity of human suffering. It is
the best of the plays from the stand-point of plot construction and is a tragedy of situation
while the others are tragedies of character. Each play is propelled by a vision which gives it
the artistic and poetic unity. It is as a poet Marlowe excels; his greatest contribution to the
English drama is his blank verse thundering or vibrating in the jeers of the Scythian king at
his captive princes, in Barabas’s out-pouring of scorn and hate, in Faustus’s impassioned
apostrophe to Helen, in Edward II’s abdicating speech. He was the first to show how
sonorous the medium could be made. But his verse is not suited to dialogue for it is too high
sounding for the exchange of intimate emotions. As Marlowe was deficient in humour his
comic scenes are of an inferior kind. One of the two other plays believed to be Marlowe’s
The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage (1593) is unworthy of his genius. Parts of this play
were written by Thomas Nashe. The Massacre at Paris is a piece that Marlowe could not
complete for he was killed in a drunken brawl at a tavern at the age of twenty-eight.

2.2 EVALUATION
Questions:
Long answer type:
Who are the University Wits? Why are they called so? Discuss their achievements in
the field of English drama.
Write a note on the contribution of either Marlowe or Kyd towards the development
of English tragedies.
Middle answer type:
Discuss the contribution of Greene towards the development of English comedies.
Write a note on the condition of Elizabethan theatre before the University Wits.
Short answer type:
Briefly introduce: a) The Spanish Tragedy, b) Doctor Faustus.
Briefly write on the salient features of the plays written by the University Wits.

[All textual lines quoted above are from A Critical History of English Literature Vol. I: From the
beginnings to Milton by David Daiches, Supernova Publishers, 2010 (Revised Edition).]