Each of these playwrights added or emphasized some essential element in the drama, which appeared later in the work of Shakespeare.  Thus John Lyly (1554?-1606), who is now known chiefly as having developed the pernicious literary style called euphuism,[138] is one of the most influential of the early dramatists.  His court comedies are remarkable for their witty dialogue and for being our first plays to aim definitely at unity and artistic finish.  Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (c. 1585) first gives us the drama, or rather the melodrama, of passion, copied by Marlowe and Shakespeare.  This was the most popular of the early Elizabethan plays; it was revised again and again, and Ben Jonson is said to have written one version and to have acted the chief part of Hieronimo.[139] And Robert Greene (1558?-1592) plays the chief part in the early development of romantic comedy, and gives us some excellent scenes of English country life in plays like Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.

Even a brief glance at the life and work of these first playwrights shows three noteworthy things which have a bearing on Shakespeare’s career:  (1) These men were usually actors as well as dramatists.  They knew the stage and the audience, and in writing their plays they remembered not only the actor’s part but also the audience’s love for stories and brave spectacles.  “Will it act well, and will it please our audience,” were the questions of chief concern to our early dramatists. (2) Their training began as actors; then they revised old plays, and finally became independent writers.  In this their work shows an exact parallel with that of Shakespeare. (3) They often worked together, probably as Shakespeare worked with Marlowe and Fletcher, either in revising old plays or in creating new ones.  They had a common store of material from which they derived their stories and characters, hence their frequent repetition of names; and they often produced two or more plays on the same subject.  Much of Shakespeare’s work depends, as we shall see, on previous plays; and even his Hamlet uses the material of an earlier play of the same name, probably by Kyd, which was well known to the London stage in 1589, some twelve years before Shakespeare’s great work was written.

All these things are significant, if we are to understand the Elizabethan drama and the man who brought it to perfection.  Shakespeare was not simply a great genius; he was also a great worker, and he developed in exactly the same way as did all his fellow craftsmen.  And, contrary to the prevalent opinion, the Elizabethan drama is not a Minerva-like creation, springing full grown from the head of one man; it is rather an orderly though rapid development, in which many men bore a part.  All our early dramatists are worthy of study for the part they played in the development of the drama; but we can here consider only one, the most typical of all, whose best work is often ranked with that of Shakespeare.