Robert Greene represents the Elizabethan age at its best and its worst. What was best in it he helped to consummate. Of the worst he was the victim as well as the exemplar. Greene's life comprises and almost defines the greatest era of expansion known in English drama. Shakespeare's debt to his predecessors is great not only on account of direct literary influences. The best things his forerunners had done for him were to free the drama from the regulations of a didactic art, to provide the dramatist a cultivated audience at home in the great popular play-houses of the metropolis, and somewhat to relieve the stage from the awful stigma that had rested on the callings of the actor and the playwright. When Greene was at preparatory school and at Cambridge didactic purpose still dominated popular plays. In _The Conflict of Conscience_ (1560), _King Darius_ (1565), _The Life and Repentance of Mary Magdalene_ (1566), and _Jacob and Esau_ (1568) moral drama was late represented. Even in tragedy, and serious drama on secular subjects, the didactic element persisted in Preston's _Cambises_ (1569), and in Edward's _Damon and Pithias_ (1571). Only in Gascoigne did pure art speak for itself. He indeed "broke the ice" for the greater poets who followed him, but he was a translator, and not an original dramatist. The most promising writer before 1586 was Robert Wilson. Critics have seen in his _The Three Ladies of London_ (1584) the mingling of the old morality and the new art, yet Wilson shows his subserviency to the demands of his time by making this "a perfect pattern for all estates to look into," and by presenting the allegory of three abstractions--Lucre, Love and Conscience. Six years later his continuation of this play was frankly called a "Moral." Greene himself shows the same motive in _A Looking-Glass for London and England_ and in _James IV._; and the late appearance of such plays as _A Warning for Fair Women_ (1599), and _A Larum for London_ (1602) testifies to the vitality of the didactic element in drama long after the exponents of a new art had arisen.