PEELE, GREENE, AND KYD. Of the most important early contemporaries of
Shakspere we have already mentioned two as noteworthy in other fields of
literature. George Peele's masque-like 'Arraignment of Paris' helps to show
him as more a lyric poet than a dramatist. Robert Greene's plays,
especially 'Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,' reveal, like his novels, some
real, though not very elaborate, power of characterization. They are
especially important in developing the theme of romantic love with real
fineness of feeling and thus helping to prepare the way for Shakspere in a
very important particular. In marked contrast to these men is Thomas Kyd,
who about the year 1590 attained a meteoric reputation with crude
'tragedies of blood,' specialized descendants of Senecan tragedy, one of
which may have been the early play on Hamlet which Shakspere used as the
groundwork for his masterpiece.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE, 1564-1593. Peele and Greene were University men who
wrote partly for Court or academic audiences, partly for the popular stage.
The distinction between the two sorts of drama was still further broken
down in the work of Christopher Marlowe, a poet of real genius, decidedly
the chief dramatist among Shakspere's early contemporaries, and the one
from whom Shakspere learned the most.

Marlowe was born in 1564 (the same year as Shakspere), the son of a
shoemaker at Canterbury. Taking his master's degree after seven years at
Cambridge, in 1587, he followed the other 'university wits' to London.
There, probably the same year and the next, he astonished the public with
the two parts of 'Tamburlaine the Great,' a dramatization of the stupendous
career of the bloodthirsty Mongol fourteenth-century conqueror. These
plays, in spite of faults now conspicuous enough, are splendidly
imaginative and poetic, and were by far the most powerful that had yet been