e top of
question and are most tyrannically clapped for it." Ben Jonson's
touching lyrical epitaph on a boy actor, Salathiel Pavy, who had for
"three fill'd zodiacs" been "the stage's jewel," shows how highly the
Elizabethans sometimes regarded boy actors. The regular theaters found
the companies of boys such strong rivals that, in 1609, Shakespeare
and other theatrical managers used modern business methods to suppress
competition and agreed to pay the master of the boys of St. Paul's
enough to cause him to withdraw them permanently from competing with
the other theaters.

PRE-SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMATISTS

The "University Wits" and Thomas Kyd.--Five authors, John Lyly,
George Peele, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, and Thomas Nashe, all
graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, were sufficiently versatile to be
called "university wits." Amid various other activities, all of them
were impelled by the spirit of the age to write plays. These
intellectual aristocrats hurled the keen shafts of their wit at those
dramatists, who, without a university education, were arrogant enough
to think that they could write plays. Because Shakespeare had never
attended a university, Greene called him "an upstart Crow beautified
with our feathers."

On New Year's, 1584, John Lyly, the author of _Euphues_, presented
in the first Blackfriars Theater[16] his prose comedy, entitled
_Campaspe_. This play relates the love story of Alexander the Great's
fair Theban captive, Campaspe. The twenty-eight characters necessary
to produce this play were obtained from the boys of the Chapel Royal
and St. Paul's Cathedral. Two months later Lyly's _Sapho and Phao_ was
given in the same theater with a cast of seventeen boys. It should be
remembered that these plays, so important in the evolution of the
drama, were acted by boys under royal patronage. _Campaspe_ is little
more than a series of episodes, divided into acts and scenes, but,
unlike _Gorboduc, Campaspe_ has many of the characteristics of an
interesting modern play.

Lyly wrote eight comedies, all but one in prose. In the history of the
drama, he is important for (1) finished style, (2) good dialogue, (3)
considerable invention in the way he secured interest, by using
classical matter in combination with contemporary life, (4) subtle
comedy, and (5) influence on Shakespeare. It is doubtful whether
Shakespeare could have produced such good early comedies, if he had
not received suggestions from Lyly's work