At the outset of the play extempore, Falstaff describes his characterization of Hal's father with a reference to Thomas Preston's by then decades-old play Cambises. “King Cambyses’ vein” describes a whole dramatic tradition that Shakespeare and his contemporaries increasingly represent as passé and unfashionable. These references have helped shape narratives about the development of early modern drama that see the cruder, gorier, and less competent works of the 1560s and 1570s develop into the great theater of the 1590s and after. The idea that there was an upward movement from crude to sophisticated, from “plodding” fourteeners to the mighty line, is fundamental to most of these narratives. The apotheosis of this movement is typically found in Shakespeare and, to a lesser extent, in the work of contemporaries like Marlowe or Jonson. Developmental narratives like these distort ways that later playwrights respond to Tudor drama, which as Howard B. Norland notes in Drama in Early Tudor Britain, 1485–1558, extended “to all corners of the commonwealth and to every level of society” (xvii).

This chapter begins with a discussion of Thomas Preston's Cambises, King of Persia. First printed in 1569 and likely in performance well before that, the play is generically hybrid, drawing on both a native allegorical tradition and on Senecan drama, which was then associated with the universities. It was also, as Falstaff's comment indicates, well remembered into the 1590s and after. I use this discussion both to characterize the field and to call attention to continuities between early Tudor drama and later plays. Preston's play, like those of later playwrights, drew on classical and neoclassical drama. The chapter's next section looks at connections between university tragedy and Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. Kyd's play represents a crucially important intervention in the generic system and the discursive repertoire of English drama. It is one of the first blank verse plays to appear on the public stage and, in structure as much as in content, it is also one of the more innovative plays of the period.