Nash, in the same preface to _Menaphon_ in which he had ridiculed Marlowe, satirises Kyd in the famous lines, "blood is a beggar," and "whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of tragical speeches." Kyd, as a non-university man, represented that rising coterie, of which Shakespeare was the master, against whom the jealous shafts of the university wits were directed. The signs of the influence of the tragedy of blood type are many. In the balanced and parallel lines of Senecan character, and found little elsewhere in Greene: "Only by me was lov'd Angelica, Only for me must live Angelica." and "'Angelica doth none but Medor love,' Angelica doth none but Medor love!"; in the allusions to Orestes, "Orestes was never so mad in his life as you were"; in the symbols of a classic Hades, Pluto and Averne; in the interspersed quotations from Latin and Italian; in the vague continental setting; in the use of a chorus; in the unheroic revenge motive; in the burlesque death, and the tearing of limb from limb; in "Orlando's sudden insanity and the ridiculously inadequate occasion of it, the headlong _dénouement_, the farcical technique, the mock heroic atmosphere, the paradoxical absence of pathos, the absurdly felicitous conclusion,--all seemingly unwitting,"[11] we have either imitated or burlesqued the characteristics of the popular revenge and blood play. That _Orlando Furioso_ was not written after 1591 is clear from a passage in _A Defence of Conny-catching_ (1592) in which Greene is charged with selling the play twice, once to the Queen's players for twenty nobles, and, when these had gone to the provinces, to the Admiral's men for as many more. As the Queen's players left the court 26th December 1591, the play must have existed before that date. A reference to the Spanish Armada provides 30th July 1588 as a posterior limit. No valid conclusions can be drawn from certain resemblances between lines in this play and lines in Peele's _Old Wives' Tale_,[12] on account of uncertainty as to the date of the latter play. There seems no reason to doubt that Gayley is right in pointing out 26th December 1588 as the date of the first performance of the play before the Queen at court.