I have heard

That guilty creatures sitting at a play

Have by the very cunning of the scene

Been struck so to the soul that presently

They have proclaim'd their malefactions.

Early Elizabethan comedy owes something to the Roman comic playwrights, as all Elizabethan tragedy - early and late - owes something to Seneca. John Lyly was the first comic dramatist of the period to write really 'polite' comedies. He started his literary career as the author of a very popular prose work (a novel of some kind, but not a real novel in the full meaning of this word, which we will further ascribe to long pieces of literary prose of the eighteenth century through modern time) called Eupheus, written in an elaborate prose-style - flowery and full of alliteration - a style since then called Euphuistic. This elaborate prose-style was carried over into the comedies that Lyly wrote; he used verse only in his occasional lyrics. The plays are charming - Endimion (a love-affair between the moon and a mortal), Mother Bombie, Midas, and Campaspe which is about the rivalry between Alexander the Great and a painter, Apelles, for the love of the beautiful captive Campaspe. Here is a specimen of Lyly's prose-style:

... But you love, ah grief! but whom? Campaspe, ah shame! a maid forsooth unknown, unnoble, and who can tell whether immodest? Whose eyes are framed by art to enamour, and whose heart was made by nature to enchant. Ay, but she is beautiful, yea but not therefore chaste. ... Beauty is like the blackberry which seemeth red, when it is not ripe, resembling precious stones that are polished with honey, which the smoother they look, the sooner they break.

George Peele is responsible for one of the most delightful of the pre-Shakespearian comedies - The Old Wives' Tale (a title Arnold Bennett, the novelist, was to use three hundre years later). This is one of the earliest attempts at a dramatic satire on those romantic tales of enchantment and chivalry which were already so popular in England. Two brothers are searching for their sister Delia, who is in the hands of the magician Sacrapant, and they themselves are captured by him. But Eumenides, Delia's lover, who gave his last pence to pay for the funeral of the poor man called Jack, finds that Jack's ghost is grateful and, through his superior supernatural gifts, is able to defeat the enchanter. That is the plot, but much of the charm of the play lies in the interludes of song and dance, and odd characters like the giant Huanebango and mad Venelia. John Milton, later, took the theme of the two brothers and the enchanted sister for his Comus. He produced something more poetic, but hardly more dramatic.

The last pre-Shakespearian writer of comedies is Robert Greene, whose best-known play is Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Here, in the clearly defined plot and the sub-plot and in the use of the clown, we are reminded of Shakespeare's early comedies. The title refers to the magical powers of two friars, who, among other things, produce a kind of television set and create a brazen head which is to tell the secrets of the universe; love interest is provided by Edward, Prince of Wales, who is enamoured of the lovely maid of Fressingfield, sweet Margaret. The play has freshness, charm, and humour, but Greene's learning tends to intrude over-much. This is how a simple unlearned country girl is made to speak:

... Lordly sir, whose conquest is as great