1561),
soon added farces from English country life and dramatized some of
Chaucer's stories. Finally, the regular playwrights, Kyd, Nash, Lyly,
Peele, Greene, and Marlowe, brought the English drama to the point where
Shakespeare began to experiment upon it.

Each of these playwrights added or emphasized some essential element in the
drama, which appeared later in the work of Shakespeare. Thus John Lyly
(1554?-1606), who is now known chiefly as having developed the pernicious
literary style called euphuism,[138] is one of the most influential of the
early dramatists. His court comedies are remarkable for their witty
dialogue and for being our first plays to aim definitely at unity and
artistic finish. Thomas Kyd's _Spanish Tragedy_ (_c._ 1585) first gives us
the drama, or rather the melodrama, of passion, copied by Marlowe and
Shakespeare. This was the most popular of the early Elizabethan plays; it
was revised again and again, and Ben Jonson is said to have written one
version and to have acted the chief part of Hieronimo.[139] And Robert
Greene (1558?-1592) plays the chief part in the early development of
romantic comedy, and gives us some excellent scenes of English country life
in plays like _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_.

Even a brief glance at the life and work of these first playwrights shows
three noteworthy things which have a bearing on Shakespeare's career: (1)
These men were usually actors as well as dramatists. They knew the stage
and the audience, and in writing their plays they remembered not only the
actor's part but also the audience's love for stories and brave spectacles.
"Will it act well, and will it please our audience," were the questions of
chief concern to our early dramatists. (2) Their training began as actors;
then they revised old plays, and finally became independent writers. In
this their work shows an exact parallel with that of Shakespeare. (3) They
often worked together, probably as Shakespeare worked with Marlowe and
Fletcher, either in revising old plays or in creating new ones. They had a
common store of material from which they derived their stories and
characters, hence their frequent repetition of names; and they often
produced two or more plays on the same subject. Much of Shakespeare's work
depends, as we shall see, on previous plays; and even his _Hamlet_ uses the
material of an earlier play of the same name, probably by Kyd, which was
well known to the London stage in 1589, s