Of the six university wits, Marlowe had the most successful career as playwright and also reputation among critics and writers. However, as R. A. Logan puts it, he was the ‘least overtly self-conscious of his university education’ of them all. His Cambridge education is revealed not in any ‘self-referential remarks’ about his University affiliation, but only in the style, subject and focus of his literary expressions as in his poetry and drama.
The ‘University Wits’ was a term coined as early as in 1887 by the critic, George Saintsbury, who clubbed the University educated poet dramatists of 16th century, into a group posed against the actor playwrights of Elizabethan stage. Though some of the Wits did exhibit an amount of snobbery towards the (assumed) less educated dramatists such as Shakespeare, the possibility of a conscious grouping of these University trained poet-dramatists or their ‘contempt for unscholarly innovators’ seem to be a merely fictive conjecture and not a reality. But that as individuals, with their classical learning, they did contribute to the development of the Elizabethan theatre going crowd into a mature and appreciating audience, seems only too plausible.
About the University Wits, Saintsbury clearly states, “being all, men of genius, and having the keenest sense of poetry, they supplied the dry bones of the precedent academic model with blood and breath, with vigor and variety, which not merely informed but transformed it’. G.K. Hunter(1986) in turn, believed that the six wits chose their individuality at the cost of being isolated from the norms of society and sought to change, consequently bringing about formal literary powers that could be recognized, on stage, as a ‘liberated individuality’ as projected in the image of Tamburlaine (Marlowe’s first successful stage production).
Of the University Wits, Thomas Nashe and Marlowe besides being from Cambridge, collaborated, in ‘Dido, Queen of Carthage’, but the others such as Robert Greene, George Peele showed in their published works that they were very much aware of Marlowe, and it seems John Lyle and Thomas Lodge were also familiar with his plays. However Marlowe showed no such awareness or closeness, professionally or otherwise, to the others.
In those days, the BA students ‘studied rhetoric during their first year, concentrated on dialectic in the second and third years, and began to read philosophy in their fourth year’. Marlowe’s educational training certainly motivated him to understand and use the subtlety of language and rhetoric. Marlowe’s dramas are often dialectical in their structuring and dramatic conflict, presenting opposed views towards a character, event or issue without attempting to synthesize such views. He was also steeped in aesthetics and poetic and dramatic traditions of classical dramatists and his predecessors, which make his literary choices seem but obvious. He certainly paraded his learning in such plays as Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, and The Massacre at Paris, in the subversive literary aesthetics that display ambiguities of genre, characterization and language and unconventional attitude to gender roles and religion in his thematic content.
As a group the University Wits seem to have brought major changes in English drama and improved it immensely. G.K. Hunter finds the link between the Wits’ university culture and popular drama in ’the central issue of Elizabethan intellectual life- the theological debate about the relation of individual conscience to established hierarchies of the world’. Norman Rabkin says, ‘the…brilliant young playwrights .. transformed the confusions of their predecessors into great theatre, and in doing so they established the basis of genuine tragedy’. Finally, as George Saintsbury rightly points out ‘they shared the tastes of their public, but their education and their inborn talent enabled them to guide, purify and elevate these tastes till at last they trained an audience ready to receive and applaud the work of Shakespeare’.
Ref: ‘Christopher Marlowe’ edited by Robert A Logan
Marlowe - The Mystery 