The Elizabethan audience, as we have seen, loved action, and in these Senecan tragedies the action took place "off." But they had a strong and abiding influence on the popular stage; they gave it its ghosts, its supernatural warnings, its conception of nemesis and revenge, they gave it its love of introspection and the long passages in which introspection, description or reflection, either in soliloquy or dialogue, holds up the action; contradictorily enough they gave it something at least of its melodrama.
Perhaps they helped to enforce the lesson of the miracle plays that a dramatist's proper business was elaboration rather than invention.

None of the Elizabethan dramatists except Ben Jonson habitually constructed their own plots.

Their method was to take something ready at their hands and overlay it with realism or poetry or romance.

The stories of their plays, like that of Hamlet's Mousetrap, were "extant and writ in choice Italian," and very often their methods of preparation were very like his.
Something of the way in which the spirit of adventure of the time affected and finished the drama we have already seen.

It is time now to turn to the dramatists themselves.
(2) Of Marlowe, Kyd, Greene, and Peele, the "University Wits" who fused the academic and the popular drama, and by giving the latter a sense of literature and learning to mould it to finer issues, gave us Shakespeare, only Marlowe can be treated here.