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among them and at least some would be members of the circle known as ‘the University Wits’.
    The earliest of these were ‘the Oxford men’ and included John Lyly, poet and playwright, George Peele, actor and playwright, Robert Greene, he of the pointed hair and beard and goose-turd green doublet, and the poets Thomas Watson, Thomas Lodge and Matthew Roydon. By the time we catch up with them in the late 1580s they had been joined by the poet and dramatist Christopher Marlowe, and the young, adder-tongued Thomas Nashe, poet and pamphleteer. There might also have been other playwrights and poets present, those who for various reasons never belonged to that particular magic circle. Among the outsiders was George Chapman, for not every ‘Oxford man’ sought to join the Wits, while Thomas Kyd and William Shakespeare left school without going on to college, spending their time earning a living by more practical means, Kyd as a professional ‘scrivener’ and Shakespeare working in his father’s business. However, whatever their previous history might be, by 1590 Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marlowe, Chapman and Kyd were the leading figures in the first wave of professional dramatists, with Shakespeare coming up fast behind.
    Professor Stanley Wells has referred to those young men in the London of the day as the ‘roaring boys’, describing them as the element of the ‘anarchic and subversive’ in the life of the period. 1 There are a number of references to roaring boys or ‘roarers’ in contemporary sources, an epithet used loosely to describe those given to noisy, showy and anti-social behaviour. ‘I am Roughman’, brags the character of that name in Thomas Heywood’s
Fair Maid of the West
as he swaggers into a Cornish inn, catches sight of the pretty new barmaid and heroine of the tale and promptly clamps her to his chest, ‘the only approved gallant of these parts and a man of whom the
roarers
stand in awe’. 2 Bess’s spirited response to this is a slap on the face, followed a few days later by challenging him to a duel in the guise of a young man, a contest which she wins and to which she has invited an audience of locals who are hiding behind a convenient hedge to see the roarer get his come-uppance.
    But ‘roaring boys’ as the element of the anarchic and subversive might equally well apply to the new breed of professional writers and their work, some of whom can only be described as arrant self-publicists, who would dominate the London theatre scene for the next forty years, drawn to the playhouses by the prospect of fame, fortune and, above all, opportunity. So who were they, where had they come from and how had they reached the point at which we meet them?
    Apart from Nashe, they had all been born within the 10-year period from 1554 to 1564 and, given their widely differing circumstances, would have been unlikely ever to have known each other had it not been for the building of the playhouses. The eldest, John Lyly, ‘a deft and dapper companion’, cannot really be described as a roaring boy, for he was known for his courtesy and good behaviour. He was born in 1554 and we know very little about his origins except that he possibly went to the King’s School in Cambridge and from there to Magdalen College, Oxford. As early as 1580 he was noted as having written ‘light plays’ for children’s companies to be performed at Court. However, no one could describe George Peele, born in 1558, as being noted for good behaviour; in fact his name soon became a byword for riotous living and dissipation. His family had moved to London from Devonshire before his birth and his father was both a City Salter, a member of the Salters Guild, one of the great Livery Companies, and also Clerk to Christ’s Hospital, a post which brought with it a rather fine property in which the family lived. Peele, therefore, was born into a comfortable background and because of his father’s position and status was a ‘free scholar’