UNIVERSITY WITS

INTRODUCTION

England has a rich literature with a long history. The Elizabethan

Period is said to be the golden age of English history, with a quite diversified
public life, a rise in the fine arts, and numerous advancements in many
technological and scientific fields. University wits are a notable group of
pioneer English dramatists who wrote during the last 15 years of the 16th
century and who transformed the native interlude and chronicle play with
their plays of quality and diversity. Their experiments with burlesque, banquet
literature, parody and satire resulted in a volatile yet creative dialogue
between civility and license, and between pleasure and the violence of
scurrilous words. The university wits inaugurated a mode of literary fellowship
that shaped the history and literature of sociability in the seventeenth century.
 BACKGROUND

The first generation of professional playwrights in England has

become known collectively as the university wits. University Wits were mostly
playwrights, poets and pamphleteers and they were also considered as the
earliest professional writers in London. The term ‘university wits’ was coined by
George Saintsbury and was applied to a group of men of letters who flourished
in Elizabethan age under the influence of the Renaissance. The group was
more or less constituted of some young university scholars, highly cultivated
literary men who took writing as their profession. They are called university
wits because they are associated with the University of Cambridge or Oxford.
The constellation of the university wits consists of a minor star like Thomas
Kyd, John Lyly, George Peele, Robert Greene, Thomas Nash, and Thomas
Lodge, all of whom revolved around the central sun Christopher Marlowe.
They process a special significance and they exerted a direct influence upon
Shakespeare. They were romantic in their attitude and represent the spirit of
the Renaissance.
Pat Rogers commented on the University Wits by saying that, “They did
not bring to the public stage the academic canons of play constructions - far
from it”. Adolphus William Ward has a chapter on "The Plays of the University
Wits", in which he argues that a "pride in university training which amounted
to arrogance" was combined with "really valuable ideas and literary
methods"(The Cambridge History of English Literature,1932). David Horne, the
author of the only biography of George Peele, puts it: “All were learned and
classical in their tastes and interested in courtly literature”.
A very important factor is that the University Wits were extremely
admired when Shakespeare began his career in the 1580s. Their popularity was
such that they all were considered significant figures of London in the political
scene as well as in the entertainment scenario of England. They were
producing successful plays and had a lot of connection with the court which
made them quite vital figures and they also had university education which
made them quite distinct from many of the other playwrights of that period.
They were also literary elite and gentry of literature of those times. They all
had moved from different parts of England to the city of London to pursue
literary arts, theatre and writing. Their writing included a kind of
pamphleteering, which was a prototype of journalism then.
The University Wits were willing to move towards a free and flexible
kind of drama. It is said about them that they breathed a new life into a
classical model. They brought new coherence in structure , real wit, and poetic
power to the language. Their nickname identifies their social pretensions, but
their drama was primarily middle class, patriotic, and romantic. Their preferred
subjects were historical or pseudo-historical, mixed with clowning, music, and
love interest.
 UNIVERSITY WITS
1) John Lyly (1554-1606):- John Lyly was considered as the leader of the
University Wits. He is the most talented and extremely prevalent than the all
the other university wits but at the same time, recent critics have also realized
that he was the most neglected, underappreciated and misunderstood
Elizabethan playwright. He was the first to master the prose style of English
Drama and his works were patterned artifices, combining Italian pastoralism
with intrigue derived from Plautus and Terence. His plays were synthesized
with antagonistic elements and he was the one who made use of clever
repartees. He used puns, conceits and all kinds of verbal fireworks and he in
that sense had influenced and anticipated Shakespeare as far as the history of
drama is concerned.
Some of his works include Alexander, Endymion, and
Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit. C. S. Lewis has called Lyly's "Euphues: The
Anatomy of Wit" as a "fatal success," "a diversion of the author from his true
path, which by its unfortunate celebrity confuses our impression of his genius."
In fact, the proverb "All is fair in love and war" has been attributed to
Lyly's Euphues.

2) George Peele(1556-96):- Peele was an Oxford scholar and he followed

Lyly in writing romantic comedies. He had a clear vision of drama as an art, and
his feeling for word-music is remarkable. As a precursor of Shakespeare,
Peele’s importance cannot be denied; he helped to give greater smoothness
and flexibility to the use of the blank-verse line , and to combine elements
appealing to popular taste with qualities of courtly refinement.
Some of famous works are:-
1) Old Wife’s Tale
2) The Arraignment of Pans
3) The Love of David and Fair Bethsabe
3) Robert Greene(1558-92):- He was known as the “First Celebrity Writer” and
was the most notorious professional writer of the 16th Century. He was
educated at both Oxford and Cambridge and is also a pamphleteer as well as
playwright. He lived a Bohemian lifestyle both in fashion and writing style.
Greene and Lyly taught Shakespeare the rudiments of romantic comedy, which
he honed to perfection. Psychologically, Greene’s plays displayed a new
realism in understanding human motivation and he also contributed to the
development of a complicated plot.
Three of his best comedies include:-
1) Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay
2) Orlando Furioso
3) The Scottish History of James IV

4) Thomas Nashe (1567-1601):- He was a satirist, pamphleteer, poet, and

playwright. Nashe was educated at the University of Cambridge, and about
1588 he went to London, where he became associated with Robert Greene and
other professional writers. His first published work was a stern review of
contemporary literature prefaced to Greene’s Menophon (1589). Nashe’s
prose writings manifest a racy, colloquial diction, grotesque, characterizations,
fantasy and a dislike of foreigners and puritans. They are often brilliantly
inventive linguistically, but there is a general lack of coherence. Nashe was the
first of the English prose eccentrics, an extraordinary inventor of verbal
hybrids. He was said to have collaborated with Marlowe not only in dramatic
affairs but also he led a very controversial political life. He was imprisoned for a
short period after the production of his satire Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem.
There is still a lot of debate over whether he actually had written it or not.
However he was prosecuted for the satirical play along with Ben Jonson,
another play writer who said to have collaborated with him.
His works include:-
1) The Unfortunate Traveller
2) The Terrors of the Night
3) Lenten Stuff or the Praise of Red Herring.

5)Thomas Lodge(1558-1625):- Lodge was a pamphleteer, poet, playwright,

and author of prose romances and was very influential in terms of his
upbringing. He is from London and went to Oxford to study law. He was also
credited for his voluminous and energetic pamphleteer and is the one who
responded quite boldly to Stephen Gosson’s condemnation of stage plays.
His major works include:-
1) A Defence of Poetry, Music and Stage Plays
2) A Looking Glass for London and England
3) The Wounds of Civil War

6)Thomas Kyd(1558-94) :-Although Kyd was a noted playwright and a close

friend of Marlowe, Kyd does not belong to the University wits because he was
educated at the Merchant Taylor’s school and practiced as a scrivener. Kyd’s
most famous work “The Spanish Tragedy” was the earliest known English
revenge tragedy ( both by date and by influence ) and is taken as one the
principal starting points of the great age of the Elizabethan drama. The Spanish
Tragedy marks the beginning of a movement in English drama because it
questions and explores so many existing, involatile assumptions. The ‘tragedy
of blood’ began a whole new genre, and The Spanish Tragedy is one of its
finest examples. Kyd established a pattern for revenge tragedies, and many of
the other devices he used-ghosts, a play-within-the-play, scenes of violent
murder, a mad hero and the final blood bath are all found in later revenge
tragedies such as Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Thomas Kyd has written numerous works. Some of them
include:-

1) The Spanish Tragedy

2) Cornelia
3) Don Horatio.

7) Christopher Marlowe(1564-93):- The humanist exploration of the

Renaissance period moves significantly in the work of Marlowe, the first
commanding genius to emerge among the numerous writers of the period.
Marlowe’s unorthodox lifestyle and views help to conjure an image of him as a
blasphemous rebel against all authorities, social and spiritual. Blank verse was
used by Surrey, by Sackville and Norton in Gorboduc , by Peele and Kyd but
Marlowe raised it to a level where it become the most expressive and the
grandest of English metres.
Marlowe was obsessed with the careers and aspirations of
ambitious and over-reaching heroes who sought to defy social, political and
religious morality. Marlowe’s scholarship is mirrored in his tragedies and
therefore, we can see his knowledge of Geography, astronomy, philosophy and
classical literature in all of his plays. Some of his major works include:-
1) Tamburlaine
2) The Jew of Malta
3) Doctor Faustus
4) The Massacre at Paris .
 CONTRIBUTIONS
The term Elizabethan Drama refers to the literature and plays created during
the reign (from 1558 to 1603) of Elizabeth I of England, and during the period
following her death. Literary forms were encouraged during her rule , and the
role of the theatre in England was greatly expanded. It was during this time
that the University Wits wrote their famous works. The University wits were
educated men who were first-class entertainers and they set the course for
the latest Elizabethan drama.
John Lyly was the first master of the prose style
in English drama. He brought on the English stage the element of high comedy,
full of lively wit and fantastic charm. His wit consists of puns, quibbles and a
rapid exchange of repartee. Lyly strangely amalgamates humour and romantic
imagination and in this way paves the way for Shakespeare who does likewise
in many of his comedies. The prose that Lyly used in his comedies is sometimes
mannered after the style of his Euphues; it is full of puns, far-fetched conceits,
and verbal pyrotechnics which Shakespeare incorporated in his early comedies
such as Love’s Labour Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Lyly’s subjects
are taken mostly from mythology and legends, foreign as well as natives. He
introduces pastoral scenes to allegorize his plays. Their characters are
personifications of Nature of Concord and Discord and he mingled the tragedy
and comedy, pathos and humour in his plays. Lyly freely blended the different
segments of existence and different worlds.
He added to English drama the feminine qualities of
literature delicacy, grace, charm, and subtlety. To quote Wyatt and Collins:-
“Lyly’s greatest service to the drama consists in his writing plays in prose. Lyly’s
sparkling dialogue gave Shakespeare an excellent model to follow and the
greater dramatist is probably indebted to him for his first teaching in court
style and for hints as to the light touch so proper for the handling of classical
legend and fairy lore”.
George Peele helped to give a greater smoothness and flexibility to the use
of the blank-verse line and to combine elements appealing to popular taste
with qualities of courtly refinement. Peele’s style can be violent to the point of
absurdity, but he has his moments of real poetry; he can handle his blank verse
with ease and variety that was common at the time. He is fluent, humorous
and has a fair amount of pathos. In short, he represents a great advance upon
the earliest drama and is perhaps one of the most attractive among the
playwrights of the time. “Certainly”, observes Compton-Rickett, “he shares
with Marlowe the honor of informing blank verse with musical ability that, in
the later hand of Shakespeare, was to be one of its most important
characteristics.”
Robert Greene contributed greatly to the development of
romantic comedy. In his plays the realism and idealism meet freely.* In
characterization, he makes a notable movement whereby in place of the stock
characters of the mystery and miracle plays he introduces individual
characters. He brings the suppleness and grace into his comedies. Though his
style is not of outstanding merit, his humour is somewhat genial. As regards to
characterization, Nicoll gives Greene the credit of being “the first to draw the
Rosalinds and Celias of Elizabethan times.” Dorothea, the heroine of his
comedy James IV which has romantic love for its theme, is the best known of
all the female characters in Elizabethan drama excluding Shakespeare’s works.
Further, as regards Greene’s handling of blank verse which he used as the
medium of his comedies, it may be observed that he gave it more flexibility
than the imitators of the classical models allowed it.
Thomas Nashe prose writings manifest a racy, colloquial
diction, grotesque, characterisations, fantasy and a dislike of foreigners and
puritans. They are brilliantly inventive linguistically but lack in coherence. The
freedom and zest of his comic writing owe something to earlier Renaissance
writers – the Italian poet and comedian Pietro Aretino, and the great French
satirist Francis Rabelais.
Thomas Kyd contribution to English tragedy is twofold. First,
he gave a new kind of tragic hero who was neither a royal personage nor a
superman but an ordinary person. Secondly, he introduced the element of
introspection in the hero. Along with the external conflict in the play, we are
conscious of a kind of introspective self-analysis within Heironimo himself. In
this; respect Kyd was paving the way for Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Shakespeare is
much indebted for the matching of the plot of his famous Hamlet to this
tragedy of Kyd. Kyd’s dramatic style, though ranting, has occasional flashes of
rare beauty which foreshadow the great tragical lines of Shakespeare. Kyd’s
blank verse was ridiculed for its pomposity and exaggeration even by his
contemporaries-who had an ear for high-sounding words. Like Seneca’s tragic
style, Kyd’s also has the element of rhetoric in it. Kyd’s extravagance is
sometimes annoying but we must remember Compton-Rickett’s words that
“even extravagance is better than lifelessness.”
Nicoll’s called Christopher Marlowe as “the most talented
of pre-Shakespeareans.” Marlowe’s contribution to English tragedy is very vital
and manifold. He himself seems to be aware of having scored an advance over
the previous drama. Marlowe promises that his play is going to be different
from the conventional plays in both its language and subject. Marlowe exalted
and varied the subject-matter of tragedy. For the Senecan motive of revenge
he substituted the more interesting theme of ambition and revived the
Aristotelean conception of the tragic hero in so far as he introduced a certain
flaw or flaws in his character.
One of Marlowe’s chief merits is his reformation of the chronicle
plays of his time. They were formless and poor in characterisation. Marlowe
humanised the puppets of these plays and introduced motives in them. Also he
gave shape and internal development to his plots. He handled the crude
historical material judiciously and artistically, selecting some, rejecting some,
and modifying some, so as to suit his dramatic purpose. Out of the
formlessness of old chronicle Marlowe produced a play which is a genuine
tragedy and the model for Shakespeare’s RichardII. Lastly, is Marlowe’s
establishment of blank verse as an effective and pliant medium of tragic
utterance. His blank verse is immensely superior to the blank verse of
Gorboduc, the first tragedy which employed this measure. He found it wooden,
mechanical, and lifeless and breathed into it a scarifying intensity ‘of passion
which electrified it into something living^and throbbing with energy. He
substituted the end-stopped lines of Gorboduc with run-on lines forming verse
paragraphs. He made blank verse a great dramatic medium acknowledged by
all his successors as the metre indispensable for any serious drama. With
Marlowe, indeed, begins a new era in the history of-English drama.
 Bibliography
1) 0’Callaghan,Michelle.The English Wits( Literature And Sociability in Early
Modern England).
2) Long, William J . A History of English Literature.
3) Chowdhury and Goswami, Aditi and Rita. A History of English Literature(
Traversing the Centuries) .
4)Raj, Prof. Merin Simi . The University Wits: A Prelude to Shakespeare .
5) Dutta, Sibaprasad .The University Wits.
6) Naaem .The University Wits.
7)www.literatureexpress.com
8)www.wikepedia.com
9)Arghya Jana Literature guide.blogspot.com
10)www.wikipedia.com
y Shakespeare. They had shape and mould the Elizabethan age and had
contributed a lot to English Literature. In fact, they have really lift up to their
name.