The playwrights were usually young men who had been at one of the Universities, and had picked up all that they could learn of the newest French and Italian literature, ideas, and manners. They were very scornful of play writers who, like Kyd, Shakespeare, and even Ben Jonson, far more learned than any of them, had not been at Oxford or Cambridge. The pamphlets of the University men tell us much of the little we know about their rivals, often their betters, who had not studied at Oxford or Cambridge.
John Lyly.
From the University wits whose plays preluded to Shakespeare, John Lyly (?1554-1606) of Magdalen, Oxford, stands a little apart. He wrote dramas to be acted before the maiden Queen by the boy singers of the Chapel Royal and of St. Paul's. Unlike some of his brethren, he remembered the reverence due to boys and virgins, and his pieces are remarkable for delicacy of tone, while the refined and romantic sentiment, the pure and hopeless passion of his "Endymion," for example, and the style of the prose in his dialogue, are all in the manner of his "Euphues". When he aimed at broad mirth, he was not broad enough or facetious enough to be amusing. His characters usually, as in "Endymion" and "The Woman in the Moon," are the gods, goddesses, heroes, and heroines of classical mythology, but their manners are those of the Court of Elizabeth, though more refined.
Allegory on events of the day is suspected of lurking in the plays: Cynthia, for example, has always some complimentary reference to Elizabeth. "Mother Bombie" is not a successful essay in low comedy: "Campaspe," a love story of the Court of Alexander the Great (where Plato finds himself, somehow), is quite a pretty approach, as is "Galatea," towards the romantic comedy; but in Shakespeare's early "Love's Labour's Lost" we see that, at the first attempt, he far surpassed his predecessor. Puns, alliteration, and anecdotes of unnatural history are nearly as prevalent in the plays as in the "Euphues" of Lyly. Several of his songs are pretty; some of his scenes of love-making when the lady, though coy, is willing to be won, are graceful, and the prose of the dialogue, conceits apart, is lucid and in good taste. His blank verse in "The Woman in the Moon," is not specially characteristic.
Peele.
George Peele would have a far better claim than Kyd to the title of "sporting" if there were even a little truth in the tract about him called "Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele, Gentleman"; while to the title of "gentleman" he would have no moral pretensions. The jests are rough and far from honest practical jokes, but the author had some knowledge of Peele's position as a director of pageants and masques. There is no smoke without fire, and the contemporary stories of the "Bohemian" life of pranks and poverty led by young poor University wits connected with the stage, may be exaggerated but can scarcely be baseless. George Peele is thought to have been of Devonshire: he was born about 1558, was a member, in 1574, of Broadgates Hall, now Dr. Johnson's college of Pembroke in Oxford, took his Bachelor's degree about 1577, his Master's in 1579.
His "Tale of Troy," in rhymed heroic couplets (published 1589), he probably wrote at Oxford. It is a pocket epic, and summary of the Trojan war—based partly on the "Iliad," partly on the later Ionian legends, as of Palamedes, and the love of Achilles for Polyxena, daughter of Priam. By 1581 Peele was in London. In 1584 his "Arraignment of Paris" was published; it was acted in that year before Elizabeth by the "children" of the Chapel Royal. It is strange sport for ladies, and Mrs. Quickly might have said, "You do ill to teach the child such words". The piece in which Paris is arraigned for giving the apple to Venus, is a pastoral written in a variety of rhymed metres, with some speeches in creditable blank verse: there is a pretty song,
Fair, and fair, and twice as fair,
And fair as any may be.
At the close Diana presents the famous apple, with the assent of Venus, Juno, and Pallas, to Queen Elizabeth. Peele also arranged pageants for the Lord Mayor, and wrote (1593) a "Chronicle History of Edward I," a play based on an absurd ballad about the profligacy and fabulous cruelty of Eleanor, the worthy Queen of "Longshanks". Friar David ap Tuck provides a comic part, in prose. John Baliol, King of Scotland, brags and submits in blank verse: the best of the blank verse is assigned to the wicked Eleanor: the lines are not usually "stopped" in the stiff old style.
In 1593 Peele also wrote his "Honour of the Garter," a poetic vision of "lovely knights" of old days. The Prologue contains a lament for Marlowe,