before his death, and purchase a handsome
{103} property in his native Stratford. Accordingly, shortly after
1580, a number of men of real talent began to write for the stage as a
career. These were young graduates of the universities, Marlowe,
Greene, Peele, Kyd, Lyly, Lodge, and others, who came up to town and
led a Bohemian life as actors and playwrights. Most of them were wild
and dissipated, and ended in wretchedness. Peele died of a disease
brought on by his evil courses; Greene, in extreme destitution, from a
surfeit of Rhenish wine and pickled herring; and Marlowe was stabbed in
a tavern brawl.

The Euphuist Lyly produced eight plays from 1584 to 1601. They were
written for court entertainments, in prose and mostly on mythological
subjects. They have little dramatic power, but the dialogue is brisk
and vivacious, and there are several pretty songs in them. All the
characters talk Euphuism. The best of these was _Alexander and
Campaspe_, the plot of which is briefly as follows. Alexander has
fallen in love with his beautiful captive, Campaspe, and employs the
artist Apelles to paint her portrait. During the sittings, Apelles
becomes enamored of his subject and declares his passion, which is
returned. Alexander discovers their secret, but magnanimously forgives
the treason and joins the lovers' hands. The situation is a good one,
and capable of strong treatment in the hands of a real dramatist. But
Lyly slips smoothly over the crisis of the action and, in place of
passionate scenes, gives {104} us clever discourses and soliloquies,
or, at best, a light interchange of question and answer, full of
conceits, repartees, and double meanings. For example:

"_Apel_. Whom do you love best in the world?

"_Camp_. He that made me last in the world.

"_Apel_. That was a God.

"_Camp_. I had thought it had been a man," etc.

Lyly's service to the drama consisted in his introduction of an easy
and sparkling prose as the language of high comedy, and Shakspere's
indebtedness to the fashion thus set is seen in such passages as the
wit combats between Benedict and Beatrice in _Much Ado about Nothing_,
greatly superior as they are to any thing of the kind in Lyly.

The most important of the dramatists, who were Shakspere's forerunners,
or early contemporaries, was Christopher or--as he was familiarly
called--Kit Marlowe. Born in the same year with Shakspere (1564), he
died in 1593, at which date