The University Wits
The University Wits were a group of English playwrights from the late 16th century who
attended Oxford or Cambridge Universities and had no inclination to enter the Church or find
sponsors for their literary endeavors went on to become prominent secular writers and
playwrights.They revitalised classical models and exposed a new audience to the problems and conflicts that the stage could dramatise. Their work contributed to the shift from self-conscious literary awareness to a wider-based popular appeal.
The literary historian George Saintsbury coined the name “University Wits” in the 19th century to describe a group of English playwrights from the late 16th century who attended the universities of Cambridge and Oxford and wrote plays for the commercial theatres in London. This loose alliance of gifted and varied London writers and dramatists laid the groundwork for Elizabethan England’s theatrical Renaissance. They were regarded as the pinnacle of the literary world at the time and frequently made fun of other playwrights without college degrees, such as Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd. Shakespeare is referred to by Greene in his booklet Greene’s Groats – Worth of Wit as an “upstart crow.”
By turning to playwriting as a means of expression, they elevated Elizabethan popular drama to a more literary and, in certain cases, dramatic status. Not all of them went into public theatre; by creating plays for the Chapel’s children to perform at Court or Blackfriars, they might always hope to catch the eye of the royal family or gain a distinguished sponsor.
Their plays shared a number of characteristics.
(a) Heroic subjects, such the lives of notable people like Mohammed and Tamburlaine, were
popular.
(b) Heroic topics required heroic treatment, such as magnificent descriptions, lengthy, luscious speeches, the handling of violent incidents and emotions, and enormous depth and variety. These traits, while great when controlled, all too frequently resulted in noise and chaos.
(c) The fashion was similarly “heroic.” The main goal was to produce tremendous declamation, magnificent epithets, and strong, resonant sentences. Once more, this resulted in mistreatment, empty platitudes, mouthing, and, in the worst situations, absurdity. The outcome is very striking in the best instances, such in Marlowe. In this regard, it should be mentioned that blank verse worked best as a medium for this kind of expression since it was sufficiently elastic to withstand the intense pressure of these expansive techniques.
(d) The topics were typically sad because, on the whole, the dramatists were too serious to pay attention to what they saw as the lesser forms of comedy. The early drama’s overall lack of genuine humour.
(e) The topics were typically sad because, on the whole, the dramatists were too serious to pay attention to what they saw as the lesser forms of comedy. One of the most obvious
characteristics of the early play is the widespread lack of genuine humor. When humor is expressed at all, it is crude and immature. Lyly, who gave us the first examples of romantic comedy in plays like Campaspe (1584), Endymion (1592), and The Woman in the Moone, is almost the only representative of the writers of true comedies.
Dramatists known as University Wits :
Christopher Marlowe
Robert Greene
Thomas Nashe
Thomas Lodge
George Peele
John Lyly
Thomas Kyd
The University Wits, who were intelligent, driven, and cunning individuals who were frequently careless bohemians in their private lives but were invariably men of letters in the profession, laid the groundwork for later Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre and, more specifically, for Shakespeare.
Christopher Marlowe
Under the leadership of Christopher Marlowe (1564–93), it made a remarkable progress in
achieving these two objectives. Among the University Wits, Marlowe had the most striking
personality and was the most accomplished dramatist. He gained widespread recognition for Tamburlaine the Great, a play in two parts that was likely originally performed in the winter of 1587–88 when the author was still in his early twenties. English theatre saw a new era of life with this colourful tale of the Scythian shepherd who conquered, told in wonderfully expressive blank verse full of vivid imagery of violence and force.
Dr. Faustus” is a tragic play by Christopher Marlowe, narrating the story of Dr. Faustus, a dissatisfied scholar who pacts with the devil for magical powers. The play explores themes of knowledge, power, and the consequences of dealing with dark forces.
Faustus enjoys life’s pleasures and does a number of magical deeds with his newly acquired powers. But as the years go by, he starts to realize more and more that his agreement with the devil is about to expire. Scholars and angels of good will tell Faustus not to behave recklessly, but he refuses to change.
As the last moments draw near, Faustus is overcome with regret and dread of being condemned. In the end, Faustus suffers a terrible fate as the devils arrive to take his soul. A moral lesson on the repercussions of giving in to worldly pleasures and the significance of repentance is presented in the play’s conclusion.
Robert Greene
The prolific and adaptable bohemian Robert Greene (c. 1558–1522) is more well-known for his vivid autobiographical writing than for his plays, though he also turned to theatre as a means of support. Shakespeare was attacked by Robert Greene, who described him as “an upstart crow beautified with Our feathers” in a pamphlet he wrote on his deathbed. This suggests that there was a player with the audacity to try writing plays in addition to acting them out; the reference is presumably to the second and third acts of Henry VI. Shakespeare was in a great position to
assess popular taste since he was a player.
Thomas Lodge
Thomas Lodge, who lived from approximately 1557 to 1625, made significantly less of an
impact on the evolution of the play. His euphuistic prose romance Rosalynde, which served as the inspiration for Shakespeare’s As You Like It, is his most intriguing creation. He co-authored A Looking Glass for London and England, a moral drama about a virulent tyrant driven to repentance, with Greene. He also wrote a good deal of other work, including some excellent sonnets. The Wounds of Civil War, “lively set forth in the true tragedy of Marius and Scilla,” is his only known and undoubtedly original drama.
Lodge’s prose romances are characterized by a formal, rhetorical style that draws inspiration
from Lyly. However, Lodge’s narrative prose, when it works well, has a flow and control that are more pleasing to the ear than many euphuistic examples; the artificiality is present but subdued to the narrative, which flows with conspicuous ease.
He joined Lincoln’s Inn in 1578, and like the other Inns of Court, there was a common love of writing and a harvest of loans. Lodge picked up books against his family’s desires. Following the publication of Stephen Gosson’s contrite Schoole of Abuse in 1579, Lodge answered with Defence of Poetry, Music, and Stage Plays (1579 or 1580), demonstrating a certain amount of moderation while yet being powerful and intelligent. Despite being outlawed, the pamphlet seems to have been distributed covertly. Gosson addressed it in his Playes Confuted in Five Actions, and Lodge responded with his Alarum against Usurers (1585), a tract catered to the periods that might have followed.
Thomas Nashe
In the history of narrative, Thomas Nashe is a significant figure. In fact, The Unfortunate
Traveller (1594), which the author himself referred to as “being a clean, different vein from other my former courses of writing,” is recognized by some as having “invented” modern narrative. These earlier writing classes were critiques of popular writing trends of the day, such Pierce Penniless (1592) and The Anatomie of Absurditie (1589), which addressed the religious controversy of the day in a satirical low-life complaint to the Devil. It’s one of the few English-language writings that honours eating and drinking in the manner of the French author Rabelais.
Particularly in his later work, like Pierce Penniless, his Supplication to the Devil, an extraordinary combination of character portraits of types, anecdotes, abuse, preaching, fiction, and sheer high spirits, Nashe’s characteristic mixture of roaring colloquialism and fancy rhetoric is more successful than might be imagined. In Polimanteia, William Covell observed that Cambridge “has been unkind to the one to wean him before his time.” Nashe stated that if he had wanted to, he could have grown up to be a fellow.
Like Ben Jonson, Nashe was not averse to causing controversy and was sentenced to prison for defying authority. He worked with Greene, Jonson, and Marlowe, yet the most of his dramatic composition has not survived.
George Peele
Similar to many of Lyly’s plays, George Peele (c. 1551–1596) started his career as a dramatist with a courtly legendary pastoral play. The children of the Chapel performed The Arraignment of Paris for the Queen in the early 1580s. Peele uses a fluid, poetic grace to handle the well-known tale of Paris’s judgement, including the love between Paris and Oenone as well as Paris’s eventual disloyalty. A subplot centred on Colin’s love for his heartless Thestylis is presented, and to give a more realistic degree of action, rustic characters with names taken from Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar are inserted.
Peele was a charming and talented poet who dabbled in theatrical to advance his profession.
Despite lacking a strong theatrical sense and a knack for dramatic organisation, he was
versatile and easy to work with, and his free-flowing lyricism gave Elizabethan play a fresh perspective.
John Lyly
Shakespeare’s “middle” plays owe a lot to Lyly for their wit and elegance in prose. Lyly drew
inspiration for his storylines from Greek mythology, but he did more than just depict well-known ancient myths; he created entirely new uses for famous characters and ideas. One of the best plays penned by Lyly is Campaspe and its theme is the rivalry in love between Alexander the Great and the painter Apelles for the Theban captive Campaspe, and it is handled with a mixture of mythology and sentiment.
Born about 1554 and dying in 1606, Lyly went to drama following his success with Euphues,
bringing his manufactured, courtly prose to the stage and creating a new genre of court comedy. The majority of his plays were composed for the St. Paul’s children, and were intended to be presented to the Queen at court.
Some endearing lyrics may be found in the mythical and pastoral plays. These lyrics aren’t
necessarily by Lyly, though, as they were originally included in a posthumous version of his “court comedies” in 1632. Regarding Lyly’s plays, the term that springs to mind is “faded
charm.” Although they are uneven, the subplots are not always successfully connected to the
main storyline, and the euphuistic prose is frequently tiresome, there is a deft imagination, a sense of form, and a novel understanding of comedy at work here, all of which held great
promise for later Elizabethan drama.
Thomas Kyd
While Greene established “romantic comedy,” Thomas Kyd (1558–94) had even greater public success as the creator of “romantic tragedy.” Kyd managed to transform some of the key components of Senecan tragedy into a riotous drama by combining the themes of love, intrigue, murder, and retaliation.
It is believed that Shakespeare based his Hamlet on a Hamlet that Kyd penned but has not survived. Even in the absence of this presumed lost play, Kyd’s style of spectacular melodrama is still evident.
“The Spanish Tragedy” is a 16th-century revenge tragedy by Thomas Kyd, centred around the murder of Hieronimo’s son, Horatio. The play begins with Prince Don Andrea’s death, and Bel-imperia seeks revenge. Hieronimo, unaware of the truth, discovers a conspiracy involving Lorenzo and Balthazar. He devises a gruesome revenge plan, revealing the conspirators’ guilt through a play-within-a-play. The play explores themes of justice, revenge, and political corruption, and is considered one of the most influential works of Elizabethan drama.
