Reflections on “University Wits”

 The famous  “University Wits” are Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593),  Thomas Kyd (1558-1594),  Robert Green (1560-1592),   and John Lyly (c. 1554-1606). They include  Christopher Marlowe,  Robert Greene, and Thomas Nashe (all graduates of Cambridge), as well as Thomas Lodge, George Peele  and John Lyly  (from  Oxford). The greatest  dramatist among them was  Marlowe, whose handling of blank verse  created a great influence on Shakespeare.

         Marlowe has been called  the father of  English tragedy, and the guide of Shakespeare.  Marlowe’s  “mighty line”   influenced  Shakespeare  to a great extent.  T. S. Eliot  rightly says that Shakespeare often borrowed from  Marlowe’s extraordinary  blank verse.  For example, we may see these lines from  Doctor Faustus: “Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.” “O thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.” His greatest lines from Doctor Faustus are the following: 

Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!
Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!

Marlowe’s  most famous  plays are TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT I-II  ( 1590), EDWARD II (1594), DOCTOR FAUSTUS (1604), THE JEW OF MALTA (1633).

               The other outstanding plays by the “University Wits” are The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd, Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and John Lyly’s The Man in the Moon.