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

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."

From Halleck's New English Literature by Halleck, Reuben Post

Christopher Marlowe, the greatest of all the University Wits, has been reserved to the last because in his work we rise nearest to the excellence of Shakespearian drama.

From The Growth of English Drama by Wynne, Arnold

With Nash alone, of the University Wits proper, was Lyly connected, and this only problematically.

From A History of Elizabethan Literature by Saintsbury, George

The University Wits and scholar poets, who had "climbed to the height of Seneca his style," deserve no little thanks for the making of our Shakespeare.

From Platform Monologues by Tucker, T. G. (Thomas George)