University wits and Dramatists of Elizabethan Age

'University Wits' is a group of English dramatists, who wrote in the 16th century and were educated at the universities Oxford or Cambridge. They significantly influenced the development of Elizabethan literature. The group includes – John Lyly, George Peele, Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Lodge, Thomas Nashe and Thomas Kyd (he was also a part although he had studied at the Merchant Taylor's School, an excellent place in itself).

According to Edward Albert, the plays of University Wits had certain common features– there was a fascination towards heroic themes, style and treatment was also heroic and the themes were tragic in nature.

Brief description of the dramatists of the group, called 'University Wits'

John Lyly (1554-1606)

John Lyly was born in Kent in 1554. His father, Peter Lyly was the Registrar of Canterbury and his grandfather William Lyly was a well-known grammarian. He received his education at Magdalen College, Oxford, from where he graduated in 1573 and completed MA in 1575.

In 1583, Lyly married Beatrice Browne, a Yorkshire heiress. The same year he came in control of the first Blackfriars Theatre. He also served as an MP three times, the first of which was for Hindon in Wiltshire, in 1589.

Literary Career and Works

Lyly is best known for his prose romance, Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit (1578) and its sequel Euphues and His England (1580).

The name Euphues literally means a person well-endowed with wit. In Lyly's work, Euphues is a young gentleman of Athens, who is graced by nature with great personal beauty and by fortune with a large patrimony. But he uses his brilliant wit to enjoy the pleasures of wickedness rather than the honours of virtue. Euphues exemplifies the demoralised state of Italian society.

Major Works

• Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit (1578)
• Euphues and His England (1580)
• Campaspe (1584)
• Sappho and Phao (1584)
• Mother Bombie (1589)
• Midas (1589)
• Love's Metamorphosis (1589)
• Endymion (1591)
• Gallathea (1592)
• Woman on the Moon (1597)

George Peele (1558-1596)

George Peele was born in London in 1558. His father, James Peele, was a clerk and teacher of book-keeping, writing and arithmetic, who wrote textbooks on accountancy. In 1565, Peele became a free scholar at Christ's Hospital, of which his father was clerk.

Christ’s Hospital was a charitable institution administered by the Corporation of London, where Peele was taught writing and arithmetic. In 1571, Peele went to Oxford. He was a student first at Broadgates Hall (now Pembroke College) and later at Christ Church, whence he graduated in 1577 and completed MA in 1579.

Literary Career and Works

In 1585, he was employed to write the Device of the Pageant born before Woolston Dixie and in 1591, he devised the pageant in honour of another Lord Mayor, Sir William Webbe. Peele’s The Arraignment of Paris (1584) was a courtly mythological pastoral play, which paid tribute to Queen Elizabeth. His The Battle of Alcazar (1594) was a semi-historical play, while The Old Wives’ Tale (1595) was a romantic satire on the current dramatic taste.

Major Works

• The Arraignment of Paris (1584)
• The Famous Chronicle of King Edward, the First (1593)
• The Battle of Alcazar (1594)
• The Old Wives’ Tale (1595)
• The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe (1599)

Robert Greene (1558-1592)

English dramatist Robert Greene is considered to be the founder of Romantic Comedy. Greene was born in Norwich in 1558. He studied at St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1575 and graduated in 1578.

Literary Career and Works

Greene’s literary career began with the romance Mamillia in 1583. His Honourable History of Friar Bungay and Friar Bacon, a play written in 1591 and published in 1594 is considered to be one of the first romantic comedies. This play deals with Bacon’s proof of his magical powers before King Henry III. His short romances, written in the manner of Lyly’s Euphues, include Pandosto: The Triumph of Wit (1588), from which Shakespeare drew the plot for A Winter’s Tale.

Greene also wrote pamphlets related to urban low life such as A Notable Discovery of Coosnage (1592). He also wrote an autobiographical pamphlet- A Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance (1592). Greene died in 1592 in the house of a poor shoemaker.

Major Works

• Mamillia (1583)
• Euphues: His Censure to Philautus (1587)
• Pandosto: The Triumph of Wit (1588)
• The History of Orlando Furioso (1590)
• A Looking Glass for London and England (with Thomas Lodge) (1590)
• The Scottish History of James the Fourth (1590)
• The Comical History of Alphonsus, King of Aragon (1590)
• A Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance (1592)
• Philomela (1592)
• A Quip for an Upstart Courtier (1592)
• Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (1594)

Thomas Lodge (1557-1625)

Thomas Lodge was probably born in London in 1557. His father, Sir Thomas Lodge, served as Lord Mayor of London for the 1562-63 term and his mother, Lady Anne Lodge, was the stepdaughter of William Laxton, who had been Lord Mayor of London from 1544 to 1545. However, their high social position soon weakened as a result of his father’s bankruptcy.

Lodge made his first appearance at the University of Oxford about the year 1573, and was afterwards a scholar under the learned Mr Edward Hobye of Trinity College. In 1578, he joined Lincoln’s Inn, London for a study of law. However, he left it midway, went against the wishes of his family and took up literature.

Literary Career and Works

He first came to attention in literary circles for his Defence of Plays in 1580. This pamphlet was written in reply to Stephen Gosson’s attack on stage plays. Lodge’s best known play is his prose romance Rosalynde, which provided the plot for Shakespeare’s As You Like It. His other plays include An Alarum Against Usurers (1584), Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589), The Wounds of Civil War (1594) and A Margarite of America (1596). Lodge also collaborated with Robert Greene on the play A Looking Glass for London and England. While Lodge gained some success for his literary endeavours, he gradually became convinced about its lack of monetary potential.

To escape poverty, he took several long sea voyages and also worked on medicines to make his living. In 1597, he became a Roman Catholic and he graduated in medicine from the University of Avignon in 1598. He received another MD degree from Oxford in 1602 and thereafter practised medicine in London and in Brussels. Lodge died in 1626.

Major Works

• An Alarum Against Usurers (1584)
• Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589)
• Rosalynde: Euphues Golden Legacie (1590)
• The Wounds of Civil War (1594)
• A Looking Glass for London and England (1594, with Robert Greene)
• A Margarite of America (1596)
• A Treatise of the Plague (1603)

Thomas Nashe (1567-1601)

Thomas Nashe was born in November 1567 at Lowestoft, a fishing port in Eastern England. He was the third son of a clergyman called William Nashe. His father later became a minister. Nashe studied at St John’s College, Cambridge and gained his bachelor’s degree in 1586. After his father’s death, Nashe could not continue his education and left Cambridge for London. There, he involved himself in the Martin Marprelate controversy, a religious and literary argument which arose as a result of Archbishop Whitgift’s strict censorship policies.

Literary Career and Works

Martin Marprelate was the pseudonym, under which appeared several Puritan pamphlets (1588-89) satirising the authoritarianism of the Church of England under Archbishop John Whitgift. Nashe is believed to have written several satiric pamphlets, of which An Almond for a Parrot (1590) can be attributed to him with conviction.

Nashe’s most significant work is his picaresque tale The Unfortunate Traveller or The Life of Jack Wilton (1594). It is an account of the wild overseas adventures of a youngster called Jack Wilton. This work is considered to be the precursor of the picaresque novel and is also sometimes known as the first English historical novel. His other works are Pierce Penniless: His Supplication to the Devil (1592), The Terrors of the Night (1594) and Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1600).

Nashe was involved in a bitter pamphlet war with Gabriel Harvey, whom he also abuses in Pierce Penniless. Harvey further attacked Nashe’s Pierce Penniless in Pierce’s Supererogation (1593), which Nashe in turn countered with Have with You to Saffron-Walden (1596). This ‘war’ controversy finally ended in June 1599, when Archbishop Whitgift and Bishop Bancroft decreed that “all Nashe’s books and Doctor Harvey’s books be taken away wheresoever they may be found and that none of their books be ever printed thereafter.” Nashe died at the age of 34, in 1601.

Major Works

• The Anatomy of Absurdity (1589)
• Preface to Greene’s Menaphon (1589)
• An Almond for a Parrot (1590)
• Pierce Penniless (1592)
• Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem (1593)
• Terrors of the Night (1594)
• The Unfortunate Traveller (1594)
• Have with You to Saffron-Walden (1596)
• Isle of Dogs (1597)
• Summer’s Last Will and Testament (play performed 1592, published 1600)

Thomas Kyd (1557-1594)

Thomas Kyd was born in 1558 probably in London. He was educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School in London. It is believed that Kyd did not proceed to the universities; he apparently followed, soon after leaving school, his father’s business as a scrivener.

Literary Career and Works

Kyd probably began his career as a popular playwright about 1583 and produced his most significant work, The Spanish Tragedy or Hieronimo is Mad Again, sometime around 1589-92. It was based on the tragedies written by the Roman playwright Seneca, whose plays focused on murder and revenge. Kyd’s play established on the Elizabethan stage the revenge tragedy, a genre which included William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Other works by Kyd are his translations of Torquato Tasso’s Padre di Famiglia, published as The Householder’s Philosophy (1588) and translation of Robert Garnier’s Cornelia (1594). In 1590, Kyd seems to have given up writing for the stage and entered the service of an unnamed lord, who employed a troop of players.

Kyd was probably the private secretary of this nobleman. Kyd’s lord patronised a company of players for which Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) also most likely wrote. This brought Kyd and Marlowe into close acquaintance. In early May 1593, Kyd was arrested by the Queen’s Privy Council for possession of heretical and blasphemous papers.

His papers were found shuffled with some of Marlowe’s, who was imprisoned a week later. Kyd was imprisoned and interrogated thoroughly about the origins of his papers. Kyd confessed that he had received the papers from Marlowe. Though he was later released, his patron refused to take him back into service. He therefore died of poverty in 1594.

Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy

Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy was written between 1582 and 1589.

It was the first example of a revenge tragedy, a type of play that was to become extremely popular on the Elizabethan stage during the last decade of the 16th century.

It was modeled on Seneca’s revenge tragedies.

The central motif of the play is the revenge of Hieronimo, Marshal of Spain for the murder of his son Horatio.

Horatio, in love with the beautiful Belimperia, was murdered by the Prince of Portugal and by Belimperia’s brother Lorenzo, who wanted her to marry the Prince.

Kyd’s play introduced a new kind of character in drama: an obsessive, brooding and mistrustful plotter.

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)

The most talented of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe was born in Canterbury around 26th February, 1564. He was the second child and eldest son of John Marlowe, a Canterbury shoemaker. Marlowe received a scholarship from Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury to study music, religion, Latin and literature and entered King’s School, Canterbury. Later, he joined Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, from late 1580 until 1587. During his later Cambridge years, Marlowe translated Ovid’s Amores (The Loves) and the first book of Lucan’s Pharsalia from Latin.

Literary Career and Works

After his education, Marlowe went to London where he started writing for the stage. His first play, Dido, Queen of Carthage, was also written while he was still a student at Cambridge, but it was not published until 1594. His second play, Tamburlaine the Great, about a Scythian shepherd and his thirst for power was published in 1590.

Marlowe’s famous ‘mighty lines’ first came into focus in this play and also established blank verse as the staple medium for later Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic writing. His other famous plays are Dr Faustus (1604), about a scholar, who in his quest for infinite knowledge and power, sells his soul to the Devil and The Jew of Malta (1633), which is a dramatic presentation of a Machiavellian man-Barabas.

Apart from his dramatic works, Marlowe also succeeded in non-dramatic verse. His Hero and Leander is a mythological poem consisting of 818 lines. This unfinished poem was completed after his death by George Chapman.

Marlowe died of a stab wound in a possible government safe house in Deptford on 30th May, 1593. He was buried on the 1st of June in the churchyard of St Nicholas at Deptford.

Major Works

• Tamburlaine (1590)
• The Massacre at Paris (1593)
• Dido, Queen of Carthage (1594)
• Edward II (1594)
• Doctor Faustus (1604)
• The Jew of Malta (1633)
• Poetry
• Translation of Book One of Lucan’s Pharsalia (date unknown)
• Translation of Ovid’s Elegies (1580s)
• The Passionate Shepherd to His Love (pre-1593)
• Hero and Leander (1593, unfinished; completed by George Chapman, 1598)

Dramatists 

Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon was born in London on 22nd January, 1561. His father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, was the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Queen Elizabeth I. His mother, Lady Anne Cooke Bacon, was his father’s second wife and daughter to Sir Anthony Cooke, a humanist, who was Edward VI’s tutor.

Political and Literary Career

Bacon composed his first political memorandum A Letter of Advice to Queen Elizabeth, which earned him instant attention.

Bacon’s political career flourished under the reign of King James I. He was knighted in 1603 and further went on to receive a number of appointments, including Solicitor General, Attorney General, Lord Chancellor and his father’s old position, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. He also became a member of the Privy Council and received two titles, Baron Verulam and Viscount St Albans.

His political career came to an abrupt end in 1621, when he was impeached for taking bribes. Bacon pleaded guilty and spent four days in prison at the Tower of London. Because of this, he lost his position at the court. He devoted the remaining years of his life to writing and produced some of his most significant works such as The History of the Reign of King Henry VII (1622), six essays on natural history called The History of Winds (1622) and De Augmentis Scientiarum (1623). Francis Bacon died at Highgate, in the Earl of Arundel’s house on 9th April, 1626, due to complications arising from bronchitis.

Major Works

• Essays: Religious Meditations (1597)
• The Elements of the Common Law of England (1597)
• A Declaration of the Practises and Treasons attempted and committed by Robert, late Earl of Essex and his complices (1601)
• Sir Francis Bacon his Apology, in certain Imputations Concerning the Late Earl of Essex (1604)
• Certain considerations touching the Better Pacification and Edification of the Church of England (1604)
• The Proficience and Advancement of Learning (1605)
• De Sapientia Veterum Liber (1609)
• The Charge of Sir Francis Bacon, Knight, the King’s Attorney-General, Touching Duels (1614)
• The Wisdom of the Ancients (1619)
• Novum Organum (1620)
• The History of the Reign of King Henry VII (1622)
• The History of Winds (1622)
• Apophthegms, New and Old (1625)
• The New Atlantis (1626)
• 
  

Important Quotes of Bacon

• "If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties."
• 'Knowledge is power'.
• "Fame is like a river that beareth up things light and swollen and drowns things weighty and solid."
• "Reading make a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man."
• "Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humour to console him for what he is."
• "Wives are young men's mistresses, companions for middle age and old men's nurses."