University Wits

v  Comment on the plays written immediately before Shakespeare. Or Write an essay on the contributions of the University Wits towards the making of Elizabethan drama.

ü  The days of Moralities and Interludes were nearly over; and drama was taking shape out of the elements of comedy, tragedy, farce, morality, tragic-comedy – all rolled into one play. In the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the awakened ‘humanistic’ learning of the age produced its first learned masters who deftly mirrored the variegated dramatic ferventness of man in their plays. They were staging the theatre for one maestro, William Shakespeare; and they were adding fermentable emotions and passionate language to the classical form hitherto practised in English. They were ‘University Wits’, as George Saintsbury grouped them, and the prominent playwrights were, namely, Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, and Thomas Nashe from Cambridge, and John Lyly, Thomas Lodge, George Peele from Oxford. Thomas Kyd is also included in the group, though he is not believed to have studied at a university.

§  CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE: As a dramatist Marlowe surpassed all other University Wits and in use of metre he “is almost as great as Shakespeare”. His notable plays are Tamburlaine, Dr. Faustus, Edward II, The Tragedy of Dido, the Queen of Carthage, The Massacre of Paris etc. Marlowe chose magnanimous heroic subjects that appealed to human imagination and romanticism. He, for the first time, made blank verse, which Ben Jonson calls “Marlowe’s Mighty line”, a powerful vehicle for the expression of varied emotions. Shakespeare worked on the possibilities that Marlowe created, for instance, with Dr. Faustus he ushered in what was to become psychological tragedy, and with Edward II the historical play.

§  JOHN LYLY: Among the named University Wits only John Lyly wrote real comedies. Of his eight comedies A Most Excellent Comedy of Alexander and Campaspe, Gallathea, Endymion, Sapho and Phao, The Woman in the Moon are noteworthy.  He established prose as a medium of expression for comedy. He gave to British comedy a witty phraseology. Lyly successfully depicted comic characters both as types and individuals. The device of mistaken identity, that a girl is dressed as a boy, is traced back to Lyly. The introduction of songs which symbolised the mood and movement of a particular comedy owes its popularity to Lyly.

§  GEORGE PEELE: The Arrangement of Paris, The Battle of Alcazar, The Famous Chronicle of King Edward, the First, The love of King David and Fair Bethsaobe are Peele’s remarkable plays. His range is versatile. He has left behind a pastoral, a romantic tragedy, a chronicle history and a romantic satire. He juxtaposes reality and romance in his plays. As a humorist he influenced Shakespeare. In The Old Wives’ Tale, Lyly, for the first time, introduced the note of satire in comedy.

§  ROBERT GREENE: Greene’s plays include The Comical History of Alphonsus, King of Aragon, The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, The Scottish History of James the IV. He was the first master of the art of plot construction in British drama. In his plays Greene has three distinct worlds mingled together – the world of magic, the world of aristocratic life, and the world of the country. There is a peculiar romantic humour and rare combination of realism and idealism in his plays. Hi is the first to draw romantic heroines.

§  THOMAS KYD: Kyd’s only play The Spanish Tragedy (1585), a Senecan tragedy, is a landmark in English drama. Forceful dialogues, passion, fear, pathos are deftly blended to attain the revenge motif in this tragedy. Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi were influenced by this play.

§  THOMAS LODGE: 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. He had already written The Wounds of Civil War, a good second-rate piece in the half-chronicle fashion of its age.

§  THOMAS NASHE: In 1597 Nashe co-wrote the play The Isle of Dogs with Ben Jonson. The work caused a major controversy for its "seditious" content. The play was suppressed and never published. Summer's Last Will and Testament is Nashe's sole extant drama, it broke new ground in the development of English Renaissance drama: "No earlier English comedy has anything like the intellectual content or the social relevance that it has."

Although these dramatists are not exclusive in the making of the Elizabethan Drama, there is no denying that they paved the way for others, including Shakespeare, to reach the pinnacle of dramatic expression.