University Wits

American  

noun

(used with a plural verb)

1. a name given to an Elizabethan group of university-trained playwrights and pamphleteers, among them Robert Greene, John Lyly, Thomas Nash, and George Peele.

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Example Sentences

With Keats, no doubt, poetry and the hope of success in it were passions more glowing than we have reason to attribute to his contemporaries at the same time of life.3 The letters remind us also that, compared with them, he was at a disadvantage in intellectual training and acquisitions, like the young Shakespeare among the University wits.

From Project Gutenberg

The nascent drama of genius can be found in the “University wits,” who flourished Drama. between 1580 and 1595, and the chief of whom are Lyly, Kyd, Peele, Greene and Marlowe.

From Project Gutenberg

It is bright and amusing, in the style common to the “sons” of Ben Jonson, the university wits who wrote more for the closet than the public stage.

From Project Gutenberg

He was an active opponent of the first University Commission, in reference to which he wrote the most brilliant satire of the kind proper to University wits which this century has produced—the Aristophanic parody entitled Phrontisterion.

From Project Gutenberg

Contemporary with these, however, there was growing up a quite different school of English prose which showed itself on one side in the estilo culto of Lyly and the university wits of his time; on the other, in the extremely vernacular and sometimes extremely vulgar manner of the pamphleteers, who were very often the same persons.

From Project Gutenberg