Identifier: cambridgeitshist00grayuoft (find matches)
Title: Cambridge and its history : with sixteen illustrations in colour by Maxwell Armfield, and sixteen other illustrations
Year: 1912 (1910s)
Authors: Gray, Arthur, 1852-1940
Subjects: University of Cambridge Universities and colleges -- England History
Publisher: London : Methuen
Contributing Library: OISE - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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at Christmas-time. But con-cerning plays at Corpus in Marlowes day historyis silent, and the record of Marlowes student life isa blank. About the year of Marlowes death (1593) Corpusadmitted another famous playwright, John Fletcher.But with Fletcher we pass beyond the circle of thecreators of English Drama. We turn to the questionwhy it was that the Drama in its beginnings was linkedwith the Universities, and more particularly withCambridge. In the year 1598 Francis Meres (of Pembroke,Cambridge) published his well-known Palladis Tamia,which surveyed the position of poetry in England tothe date of publication. In it he gives a list of twenty-eight writers of tragedies and comedies. Of thosewhom he mentions nothing is recorded of one, andthe place of education of some others is doubtful.Ten were bred at Cambridge, six at Oxford, and oneother, Sackville, seems to have been at both Uni-versities. In this book Meres shows an acquaintance withcontemporary literature which is remarkable in a
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SPENSER AND THE DRAMA 169 man who ended his days in a country living. Hiscriticism is slight enough ; but he knows the books,and he knows a good deal of the writers—not onlytheir printed work, but the unfathered plays whichexisted only in actors copies and sonnets amongprivate friends. His summary is full enough to in-clude the most recent publications as well as Chaucerand Lydgate : in the same sentence it links academicLegge with cockney Dekker. That in his compre-hensive list so large a proportion should be universitymen is certainly noteworthy. But we must makeallowance for the fact that Meres was himself auniversity man, and academic writers are pressedinto his muster whose names were unknown to theaudiences of the Curtain or the Rose. What morepertains to the connection of the Universities with therise of the Drama is that play-acting of some sort wasa very early feature of University life, and that, whenthe medieval church-plays passed away at the Refor-mation, stage performa

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