Italian comedy, or rude farces like "Ralph Roister Doister," or
tragedies such as "Gorbudoc" where, poetic as occasional passages may
be, there is little promise of dramatic developement. But in the year
which preceded the coming of the Armada the whole aspect of the stage
suddenly changes, and the new dramatists range themselves around two
men of very different genius, Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe.

[Sidenote: Greene.]

Of Greene, as the creator of our lighter English prose, we have already
spoken. But his work as a poet was of yet greater importance, for his
perception of character and the relations of social life, the
playfulness of his fancy, and the liveliness of his style, exerted an
influence on his contemporaries which was equalled by that of none but
Marlowe and Peele. In spite of the rudeness of his plots and the unequal
character of his work, Greene must be regarded as the creator of our
modern comedy. No figure better paints the group of young playwrights.
He left Cambridge to travel through Italy and Spain, and to bring back
the debauchery of the one and the scepticism of the other. In the words
of remorse he wrote before his death he paints himself as a drunkard and
a roysterer, winning money only by ceaseless pamphlets and plays to
waste it on wine and women, and drinking the cup of life to the dregs.
Hell and the after-world were the butts of his ceaseless mockery. If he
had not feared the judges of the Queen's Courts more than he feared God,
he said in bitter jest, he should often have turned cutpurse. He
married, and loved his wife, but she was soon deserted; and the wretched
profligate found himself again plunged into excesses which he loathed,
though he could not live without them. But wild as was the life of
Greene, his pen was pure. He is steadily on virtue's side in the love
pamphlets and novelettes he poured out in endless succession, and whose
plots were dramatized by the school which gathered round him.

[Sidenote: Marlowe.]

The life of Marlowe was as riotous, his scepticism even more daring,
than the life and scepticism of Greene. His early death alone saved him
in all probability from a prosecution for atheism. He was charged with
calling Moses a juggler, and with boasting that, if he undertook to
write a new religion, it should be a better religion than the
Christianity he saw around him. But he stood far ahead of his fellows as
a creator of English tragedy. Born in 1564 at the