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at Christ’s Hospital before going on to Broadgates Hall, Oxford (now Pembroke College), taking his BA in 1577 and his MA in 1578. He was already becoming known for his verse and early attempts at drama while still at university.
    Of Robert Greene we know a great deal more since he wrote copiously of his own life and times. He was born in Norwich about 1560 into what must have been a good family for, although he does not tell us what his father’s trade or profession was, he writes that his parents ‘were respected for their gravity and honest life’. 3 He went first to the grammar school in the city and from there to St John’s College, Cambridge, where he studied for his BA degree, before going on to Oxford to graduate as MA. He was extremely proud of having attended both universities. On leaving Oxford he set off on a tour of Europe which took him to Italy, Poland, Denmark and Spain, risky though this last sounds, given the running enmity between the two countries. However, on returning to England some time in 1580 he found it impossible to settle down, took lodgings in London and set about seriously devoting himself to wine, women and poetry. ‘At my return I ruffled out in my silks in the habit of a malcontent and seemed so discontent that no place would please me to abide in nor no vocation cause me to stay myself in.’ A couple of years later, having run through all his money, he returned to Norwich, spent some time in Cambridge, then courted and married ‘a gentleman’s daughter from Lincolnshire’, a pretty fair-haired young woman by the name of Dorothy, and made an attempt at settling down with her in Norwich. Within a year or so she had borne him a daughter and gone home to mother and he was back in London. ‘I deserted her’, he told his friends, ‘because she tried to reform me.’ It might be said here that however badly Peele and Greene might have behaved separately, when they came together as they frequently did, they were worse than the sum of their parts.
    The youngest of the Wits, born in 1567, was Thomas Nashe, born in Lowestoft in Suffolk. He was the son of a parson, William Nashe, who at that time was in straitened circumstances (presumably Lowestoft was a poor parish), and his second wife, Margaret. When he was six the family moved to the rectory at West Harling, which appears to have brought with it a better stipend. It is possible that he was educated at home by his father, but whether at home or at a local school, when he went up to St John’s College, Cambridge, money was still tight, so much so that he was of necessity a ‘sizar’ student. Sizar students were those too poor to pay fees or who had no scholarship and undertook menial tasks as servants to pay their way, in Nashe’s case cleaning and serving in the college itself. A graphic and bitter account of what being such a student entailed is given by the Elizabethan doctor and astrologer, Simon Forman, in his own biography. 4 The only way he and a friend could go up to Oxford was as servants to two wealthy young layabouts. They were forced to fit their studying around running errands, keeping their masters in food and drink, waiting on them hand and foot and assisting them in their assignations with young women. The two young men in question later took Holy Orders, one becoming a bishop, while Forman, with insufficient time to study, had to drop out. Nashe, however, stuck with it. It might be that it was in Cambridge that he first met Greene, who was spending time there between returning from his travels and his marriage. He would almost certainly have known Christopher Marlowe, who was three years ahead of him. In 1588, having taken his degree, Nashe too made his way to London.
    So to two of those outside the circle of the Wits. George Chapman was born in Hitchen, Hertfordshire, about 1560. He was the son of Thomas and Joan Chapman and grandson to ‘George Nodes, Sergeant to the Buckhounds to Henry VIII’. He too had been up