It is not strange, perhaps, that it was university men who served to free the drama to the better purposes of art. Themselves trained in the classics, and in the essentials of Italian culture, they were able to bring to bear on drama the force of the influence of Seneca, the pastoral, and the masque, and thereby greatly to increase the range of inspiration and the instruments of effective expression open to the playwrights. The fact is, however, worthy of remark that it is to the university playwrights that we have to credit the transference of the patronage of the drama out of the hands of the court into the hands of the people. Lyly had been the first great university dramatist. His plays, of which _Campaspe_ and _Sapho and Phao_ must have been composed before 1581, were written for court production. But Lyly's own melancholy story shows clearly enough that if dramatists were to flourish at all they needed means of support supplementary to the uncertain pension of a noble. It was for the sake of this further support that the playwrights and the actors proceeded to perform their court plays before the people, first in the inn-yards of the Cross Keys, the Bull and the Bell Savage, and finally in the Theatre and the Curtain, erected in 1576 and 1577 in Finsbury Fields. As an indication of the movement to transfer the support of the drama from the court to the public it is recorded that in 1575 "Her Majesty's poor players" were petitioning the Lord Mayor, through the Privy Council, for permission to play within the city, assigning as reasons the fact that they needed rehearsal properly to prepare for their court appearances, and that they needed to earn their livings. The answer of the city authorities, that plays should be presented by way of recreation by men with other means of subsistence, was manifestly an avoidance of the implications of the situation at hand.
It was not until after the plague of 1586, and the return of the companies from the provinces, that the university playwrights rose to a commanding place in the life of the time. And then, though their plays were still performed at court, it was to the people that the dramatists made their appeal. Marlowe, and Greene, and Peele and Lodge now constituted the group of the university wits. The support that the court had before either withheld, or but fitfully given, was now vouchsafed liberally at the Theatre and the Curtain. The university dramatists knew well what was demanded of them. Dismissing the topics treated by Lyly, and by Peele in his early play, _The Arraignment of Paris_ (1584), and discarding by degrees the allegorical and didactic as found in the popular drama of the preceding time, they began to dramatise the spirit of contemporary life in the form of stories built from legend and romance, and instinct with the leonine spirit of awakening England. Marlowe's _Tamburlaine_ is as true to Elizabethan England as is Dekker's more realistic _Shoemaker's Holiday_; and Peele's _Old Wives' Tale_ and Greene's _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_ are both native in England's soil. In the years between 1584 and 1593 the number of companies greatly increased. Fleay mentions nine companies as performing at court between these dates. Besides the Queen's players, who comprised, perhaps, two or more companies, there were companies of my Lord Admiral, Pembroke, Sussex and other lords. Normally the playwrights wrote only for the company to which they were attached. It is believed that at one time Lodge, Peele, Marlowe and Greene were together as playwrights for the Queen's men playing at the Theatre. Later the first three went over to the support of the Admiral's men, and thereafter often changed their allegiance, but Greene probably wrote only for the Queen's players until his death. Soon other dramatists aligned themselves with the movements of the new drama, and out of the jealous rivalry aroused by the entrance into the field of dramatic authorship of such non-university playwrights as Kyd and Shakespeare there developed the maze of controversy and vituperation that has made the Elizabethan age famous as an era of personal pamphleteering.