It was not until after the plague of 1586, and the return of the companies from the provinces, that the university playwrights rose to a commanding place in the life of the time. And then, though their plays were still performed at court, it was to the people that the dramatists made their appeal. Marlowe, and Greene, and Peele and Lodge now constituted the group of the university wits. The support that the court had before either withheld, or but fitfully given, was now vouchsafed liberally at the Theatre and the Curtain. The university dramatists knew well what was demanded of them. Dismissing the topics treated by Lyly, and by Peele in his early play, _The Arraignment of Paris_ (1584), and discarding by degrees the allegorical and didactic as found in the popular drama of the preceding time, they began to dramatise the spirit of contemporary life in the form of stories built from legend and romance, and instinct with the leonine spirit of awakening England. Marlowe's _Tamburlaine_ is as true to Elizabethan England as is Dekker's more realistic _Shoemaker's Holiday_; and Peele's _Old Wives' Tale_ and Greene's _Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_ are both native in England's soil. In the years between 1584 and 1593 the number of companies greatly increased. Fleay mentions nine companies as performing at court between these dates. Besides the Queen's players, who comprised, perhaps, two or more companies, there were companies of my Lord Admiral, Pembroke, Sussex and other lords. Normally the playwrights wrote only for the company to which they were attached. It is believed that at one time Lodge, Peele, Marlowe and Greene were together as playwrights for the Queen's men playing at the Theatre. Later the first three went over to the support of the Admiral's men, and thereafter often changed their allegiance, but Greene probably wrote only for the Queen's players until his death. Soon other dramatists aligned themselves with the movements of the new drama, and out of the jealous rivalry aroused by the entrance into the field of dramatic authorship of such non-university playwrights as Kyd and Shakespeare there developed the maze of controversy and vituperation that has made the Elizabethan age famous as an era of personal pamphleteering.