If the scientific pre-eminence of Cambridge is unquestioned, her poetical pre-eminence is no less absolute. Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Milton, Dryden, Gray, Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson called her mother. In the long list of English poets every poet of first rank (excluding Shakespeare and Keats who were at no university) was at Cambridge, except Shelley who was expelled from Oxford.
The dramatist movement from Marlowe to Shirley is one of the most important in our literature. Here for the first time in English history a group of Englishmen set themselves, on leaving the university, to earn an independence by literature—and the opportunity offered them was writing for the players. The dramatists were, with but few exceptions of which the greatest is Shakespeare himself, university men; and of these all who were epoch-marking hail from Cambridge. The list is headed by the first English tragic poet, Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s great predecessor; and Ben Jonson the greatest of his younger contemporaries was also a Cambridge man. Lyly who created the art tradition of English comedy, went to Cambridge from Oxford and there graduated M.A. Lodge after leaving Oxford went to Avignon, took his M.D. degree there, and on returning to England went to Cambridge. Shirley, the last of the dramatists, went from Oxford to Cambridge.[385]
The sonneteers had preceded the dramatists, and the first writer of an English sonnet was another Cambridge man, Sir Thomas Wyatt.[386] Surrey whose university, if he went to one, was certainly Cambridge, wrote the first blank verse. The first English essayist was Bacon, and he takes his place in literature by another tide, because he was the first to adapt our language as the vehicle for a scientific literature. Of the five men who in the great days of the flowering of English poesy wrote about the art of verse Spenser, Webbe, Harvey, Sidney, and Puttenham, the first three, whose contribution is also the most important, were Cambridge men.
All literary initiative, indeed, between the xiv and xviii centuries appears to have come from the one university; the epoch-making representatives of our literature, that is, were Cambridge men: Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe and Ben Jonson (in defect of
