The most important collection was Painter’s ‘Palace of Pleasure,’ in 1566. The University Wits were a group of late 16th century English playwrights who were educated at the universities (Oxford or Cambridge) and who became playwrights and popular secular writers. Christopher Marlowe (baptised 26 February 1564; died 30 May 1593) was an English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. Greene calls Shakespeare an “upstart crow” in his pamphlet Greene’s Groats – Worth of Wit.
As the foremost Elizabethan tragedian, next to William Shakespeare, Marlowe is known for his blank verse, his overreaching protagonists, and his mysterious death. A warrant was issued for Marlowe’s arrest on 18 May 1593. No reason for it was given, though it was thought to be connected to allegations of blasphemy—a manuscript believed to have been written by Marlowe was said to contain “vile heretical conceipts”. Robert Greene (11 July 1558 – 3 September 1592) was an English author best known for a posthumous pamphlet attributed to him, Greene’s Groats-Worth of Wit, widely believed to contain a polemic attack on William Shakespeare.
Thomas Nashe was an English Elizabethan pamphleteer, playwright, poet and satirist. Thomas Lodge was an English dramatist and writer of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.
Having been to sea with Captain Clarke in his expedition to Terceira and the Canaries, Lodge in 1591 made a voyage with Thomas Cavendish to Brazil and the Straits of Magellan, returning home by 1593. When the penitent Stephen Gosson had (in 1579) published his Schoole of Abuse, Lodge responded with Defence of Poetry, Music and Stage Plays (1579 or 1580), which shows a certain restraint, though both forceful and learning. In conjunction with Robert Greene, he probably produced in a popular vein the odd but far from feeble play, A Looking Glass for London and England (published 1594).
He had already written “The Wounds of Civil War” (produced perhaps as early as 1587, and published in 1594, and put on as a play reading at the Globe Theatre on 7 February 1606), a good second-rate piece in the half-chronicle fashion of its age. He composed his prose tale of Rosalynde, Euphues Golden Legacie, which, printed in 1590, afterwards furnished the story of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Lodge is the “Young Juvenal” of Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit is no longer a generally accepted hypothesis.
He also regards him as at least part-author of, The True Chronicle of King Leir and his three Daughters (1594); and The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England. On the other hand, His pastoral comedy The Arraignment of Paris was presented by the Children of the Chapel Royal before Queen Elizabeth perhaps as early as 1581, and was printed anonymously in 1584.
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