Page 8 - FEN1(2)C01 LITERATURES IN ENGLISH PAPER I: From Chaucer to the Present

The age also produced non-dramatic poets; the centre of this
group is Spenser, whose Shepherd Calendar and Fairy Queen
marked the appearance of the first national poet since
Chaucer’s death in 1400; then comes Chapman who is noted
for his completion of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, and for his
translation of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Sidney, besides his
poetry Astrophel and Stella, wrote his prose romance Arcadia
and the Defense of the Possie, one of the earliest classical
critical essay.

The Elizabethan Age is the golden age of English drama. It was
now that plays came to be divided into five acts and scenes.
Strictly speaking the drama has two divisions: comedy and
tragedy, but in this age, a mixed mode of drama was
developed called Tragicomedy, a type of drama which
intermingled with the both standard of tragedy and comedy.

The second period of the Elizabethan Drama was dominated
by "University Wits" {John Lyle, Thomas Kyd, George Peele,
Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe, and
Thomas Nash} for they all were university educated men as
well as dramatists. All of them began as actors, revised old
plays and then became independent writers.