The Elizabethan "University Wits"
Marlowe, Kyd, Green, Lyle: Important English Renaissance Playwrights
Apr 16, 2008
Clever and Educated "University Wits"
Just who were these barely known contemporaries of Shakespeare? Some of them managed even to surpass Shakespeare during the height of their fame. Let's take a look at some of the chief wits who transformed popular drama.
Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)
Probably the most famous University Wit, Marlowe was best known for his famous blank verse. Until Marlowe perfected this technique, most plays were written in rhyme, which greatly slowed down the free flowing dialogue of a play. Marlowe burst onto the scene with Tamburlaine, a play that was about the more or less true story of Timur the Lame, a historical monarch of Asia. He died in Deptford, England, of a knife wound to the eye, at Eleanor Bull's rooming house. The brawl was over "le recknynge," or bill of receipt, of his food and drink. Some literary scholars believe that he didn't actually die; that his death was faked – it was a hoax and a ruse, and that Christopher Marlowe was really William Shakespeare.
Thomas Kyd (1558-1594)
Kyd wrote the most popular play of the 1500s – The Spanish Tragedy. Along with Marlowe, he was the first English playwright to gain a wide following in the popular playhouses. He also roomed with Marlowe at one point in time, and would get in trouble with government authorities because of his alleged cover-ups of Marlowe's whereabouts. Kyd was then tortured by these government authorities, the Star Chamber inquisitors, for supposedly co-authoring libelous literature with Marlowe. The infamous libels, signed by one "Tamburlaine," (also the name of Marlowe's famous play), relate disparagingly to Dutch immigrants in England. Kyd died a year later, broken-hearted and penniless.
Robert Green (1560-1592)
Robert Green was best known for his criticism of Shakespeare, supposedly calling him an "upstart crow," and his famous pamphlets about the culture of the London underworld. Green sported a Mohawk hairdo and liked to dress outrageously. Green's autobiographical pamphlets disclose that he hung around with "wags as lewd as myself, with whom I consumed the flower of my youth, who drew me to travel to Italy." His best known play, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungar was written at about the same time as Marlowe's more famous play, Doctor Faustus. Both plays deal with the subjects of magic and the occult.
John Lyle (c. 1554-1606)
John Lyle was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, and went to London around 1576, where he gained fame with the publication of two prose romances, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, and Euphues and His England. After this splash of fame, Lyle devoted himself to almost entirely to writing comedies. He then gained control of the Blackfriar's Theatre, and his earliest plays, Campaspe and Sapho and Phao were produced there. The key to Lily's success, first as a novelist, and then as a playwright, was his prose style. He wrote in rhythmic, balanced clauses, and with this device he was exceedingly skillful at integrating the sound and sense of his prose. Lily's popularity in English drama waned with the rise of Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe.
The University Wits were poets and playwrights with a philosophical bent, and they live on in distant memory. Sadly, Renaissance scholars are usually the only people who have heard of them. And although Shakespeare may have usurped them in fame, the University Wits were the first playwrights to lay the foundations of English Drama.
Sources:
- Rigg, David. The World of Christopher Marlowe. New York: Henry Holt, 2004.
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