Its is useful for students those who are doing Masters in English Literature or attempting or practicing to appear a common entrance exam on it.

1. University wits
“we must think of them mainly as a group and must be satisfied with the general assertion
that each contributed something to the evolution of the drama in to the forms in which
Shakespeare was to take it up.”
William Henry Hudson
(outline of English History)

2. • Playwrights, poets, pamphleteers –
• Earliest professional, secular writers in London- prepared the
way for Shakespeare
• Extremely popular playwrights when Shakespeare began his
career in the 1580s
• Educated at universities of oxford and Cambridge(Ox-
bridge scholars)
• Literary Elite, Gentry, Ridiculed others
• “ A pride in the university training which amounted to
arrogance” and combined with “really valuable ideas and
literary methods”
Who were they?

3. • John Lyly
• George Peele
• Thomas Lodge
• Robert Greene
• Thomas Nashe
• Christopher Marlowe
• Thomas kyd
University wits
Oxford
Cambridge
Saintsbury

4. • The leader of University wits?
• Most talented, Exytremely popular
• “Most neglected, unappreciated and misunderstood
Elizabethan Playwright”
• Seven comedies – Alexander, campaspe, Endymion,
Gallathea, sapho and phao, midas, The man in the moon
(written for performance at court)
• “Undeniably Shakespeare's first master” (Hudson)
John Lyly

5. • Explored London life and society, nationalist, sentiments
• Handled Blank Verse with more Ease and variety.
• The Arraignment of Praise – flatters the queen of
England
• old wives Tales- Satire
• Influenced Shakespeare's the winter’s tale
George Peele

6. • No portrait available
• Educated at Cambridge and oxford
• But preferred theatre over academics
• Known as the first notorious writer
• Collaborated with Thomas lodge- a looking glass
for London and England
• He taught disguise (change of character) to the
Shakespeare clowns, fools.
Robert Greene

7. • Educated at Cambridge went to London in 1586
• A born journalist and active in
pamphleteering
• The unfortunate traveler – forerunner of the present
novel form
• Summer last will and testament (1592)- his only
surviving play
Thomas Nashe

8. • Son of a lord Mayor of London
• Voluminous and Energetic Pamphleteering
• Respond to Stephen Gosson's condemnation of stage
plays – (school of Abuse 1579)
• Collaborated with Shakespeare in Henry Vi
• The wounds of civil war is only surviving play (a
chronicle play)
Thomas Lodge

9. “kyd’s characters are trapped because
everything has been mapped out for them”
“Marlowe’s characters are trapped because
they can not discover a map”
(From Pat Roger’s critical analysis)
Kyd and Marlowe

10. • No university education
• Most of his work has been lost
• The Spanish tragedy- the most popular (at least 10 editions
before 1634)
• The great exemplar of Elizabethan and Jacobian Revenge
Tradition
• Excellent stage craft- kept the audience glued to their seat
• “If you blinked you missed a murder” (Pramod Nayar)
• Ur hamlet, a Danish tragedy- an immediate ancestor of
Shakespeare's Hamlet.
• Involve in subversive political activities
• Died at age of 36
Thomas kyd

11. • Born at canterbury, educated at oxford
• Bohemian life, worked as spy, travelled much
• Writing career- 5 years
• Writing companions – Nashe and Greene
• Friends with walter Raleigh
• The first sustained analysis of the effect of power-
Tamburlaine, Jew of Malta, Edward II, Doctor
Faustus
• Tamburlaine the great- a new kind of tragedy
• Edward II- Dramatic tension between duty and desire
• Doctor Faustus- a mans quest for knowledge and demonic powe
Christopher Marlowe

12. The End