Others met the problem in an attitude of frank despair.
Not all great tragic writers can easily or gracefully wield the pen of comedy, and Marlowe in _Dr.Faustus_ took the course of leaving the low comedy which the audience loved and a high salaried actor demanded, to an inferior collaborator.
Alongside this drama of street platforms and inn-yards and public theatres, there grew another which, blending with it, produced the Elizabethan drama which we know.

The public theatres were not the only places at which plays were produced.

At the University, at the Inns of Court (which then more than now, were besides centres of study rather exclusive and expensive clubs), and at the Court they were an important part of almost every festival.

At these places were produced academic compositions, either allegorical like the masques, copies of which we find in Shakespeare and by Ben Jonson, or comedies modelled on Plautus or Terence, or tragedies modelled on Seneca.

The last were incomparably the most important.