had led to brawls--either between literary factions
or through offensive personal allusions to which we have lost all
clue--had swept into the box-office much money usually spent on Christmas
gambling, and had set up an inappeasable thirst for College ale. The
point for us is that (in 1597-1601) they abound in topical allusions to
the London theatres: that Shakespeare is obviously just as much a concern
to these young men of Cambridge as Mr Shaw (say) is to our young men
to-day, and an allusion to him is dropped in confidence that it will be
aptly taken. For instance, one of the characters, Gullio, will have some
love-verses recited to him 'in two or three diverse veins, in Chaucer's,
Gower's and Spenser's and Mr Shakespeare's.' Having listened to Chaucer,
he cries, 'Tush! Chaucer is a foole'; but coming to some lines of Mr
Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis," he cries, 'Ey, marry, Sir! these have
some life in them! Let this duncified world esteeme of Spenser and
Chaucer, I'le worship sweet Mr Shakespeare, and to honoure him I will lay
his "Venus and Adonis" under my pillowe.' For another allusion--'Few of
the University pen plaies well,' says the actor Kempe in Part II of the
"Returne"; 'they smell too much of that writer _Ovid_ and that writer
_Metamorphosis_, and talke too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why here's
our fellow _Shakespeare_ puts them all downe, ay and _Ben Jonson_, too.'
Here you have Cambridge assembling at Christmas-tide to laugh at
well-understood hits upon the theatrical taste of London. Here you have,
to make Cambridge laugh, three farcical quasi-Aristophanic plays all
hinging on the tribulations of scholars who depart to pursue literature
for a livelihood. For a piece of definite corroborative evidence you have
a statute of Queens' College (quoted by Mr Bass Mullinger) which directs
that 'any student refusing to take part in the acting of a comedy or
tragedy in the College and absenting himself from the performance,
contrary to the injunctions of the President, shall be expelled from the
Society'--which seems drastic. And on top of all this, you have evidence
enough and to spare of the part played in Elizabethan drama by the
'University Wits.' Why, Marlowe (of Corpus Christi) may be held to have
invented its form--blank verse; Ben Jonson (of St John's) to have carried
it on past its meridian and through its decline, into the masque. Both
Universities claim Lyly and Chapman. Marston, Peel, Massinger, h