(in 1597-1601) they abound in topical allusions to the London theatres:  that Shakespeare is obviously just as much a concern to these young men of Cambridge as Mr Shaw (say) is to our young men to-day, and an allusion to him is dropped in confidence that it will be aptly taken.  For instance, one of the characters, Gullio, will have some love-verses recited to him ’in two or three diverse veins, in Chaucer’s, Gower’s and Spenser’s and Mr Shakespeare’s.’  Having listened to Chaucer, he cries, ‘Tush!  Chaucer is a foole’; but coming to some lines of Mr Shakespeare’s “Venus and Adonis,” he cries, ’Ey, marry, Sir! these have some life in them!  Let this duncified world esteeme of Spenser and Chaucer, I’le worship sweet Mr Shakespeare, and to honoure him I will lay his “Venus and Adonis” under my pillowe.’  For another allusion—­’Few of the University pen plaies well,’ says the actor Kempe in Part II of the “Returne”; ’they smell too much of that writer Ovid and that writer Metamorphosis, and talke too much of Proserpina and Jupiter.  Why here’s our fellow Shakespeare puts them all downe, ay and Ben Jonson, too.’  Here you have Cambridge assembling at Christmas-tide to laugh at well-understood hits upon the theatrical taste of London.  Here you have, to make Cambridge laugh, three farcical quasi-Aristophanic plays all hinging on the tribulations of scholars who depart to pursue literature for a livelihood.  For a piece of definite corroborative evidence you have a statute of Queens’ College (quoted by Mr Bass Mullinger) which directs that ’any student refusing to take part in the acting of a comedy or tragedy in the College and absenting himself from the performance, contrary to the injunctions of the President, shall be expelled from the Society’—­which seems drastic.  And on top of all this, you have evidence enough and to spare of the part played in Elizabethan drama by the ‘University Wits.’  Why, Marlowe (of Corpus Christi) may be held to have invented its form—­blank verse; Ben Jonson (of St John’s) to have carried it on past its meridian and through its decline, into the masque.  Both Universities claim Lyly and Chapman.  Marston, Peel, Massinger, hailed from Oxford.  But Greene and Nashe were of Cambridge—­of St John’s both, and Day of Caius.  They sought to London, and there (for tragic truth underlay that Christmas comedy of “The Pilgrimage of Parnassus”) many of them came to bitter ends:  but before reaching their sordid personal ruin—­and let the deaths of Marlowe and Greene be remembered—­they built the Elizabethan drama, as some of them lived to add its last ornaments.  We know what, meanwhile, Spenser had done.  I think it scarcely needs further proof that Cambridge, towards the end of the sixteenth century, was fermenting with a desire to read, criticise, yes and write, English literature, albeit officially the University recognised no such thing.