Ben Jonson (1572-1637)

Shakespeare’s great rival as a comic dramatist was Ben Jonson, who wasn’t above finding fault with Shakespeare’s tragic plays for their lack of realism while he was alive, but became one his greatest champions after the master’s death. Jonson is remembered for riotous comedies such as Volpone, Bartholomew Fair and Epicoene, or The Silent Woman. One of his favoured themes is moral hypocrisy, and he is particularly good at making audiences reflect on the frailties of human nature in between laughing uproariously at the social foibles of the time.

Jonson’s plays draw on a broad range of characters, from pickpockets and prostitutes to supposedly upstanding pillars of the community. There are demented petty bureaucrats and pompous patriarchs, scheming tricksters and pretentious, simpering aesthetes, all forced to rub shoulders on a crowded social canvas. More than any other English writer before Dickens, he enjoys the sheer bustle and chaos of the urban world, and the way it forces characters either to sink or swim, learning its nefarious ways or becoming the eternal dupe.

Having trained in early life as a bricklayer, Jonson joined Philip Henslowe’s troupe, the Admiral’s Men, as a rather ropey actor but a promising playwright. His later plays were judged to have lost the edge of wit their predecessors had, and with the death of James I (who had doted on his work) in 1625, he found much less favour at court.

John Webster (c.1580-c1625)

Very little is known about John Webster. Neither his date of birth, nor that of his death, are recorded - the latter because his death certificate probably perished, along with many other public records, in the Great Fire of 1666. Having also joined Henslowe’s company in the 1590s, Webster began to write in the early years of James’s reign.

After some early collaborations on comic dramas, he produced two great tragic masterpieces that are still regularly performed – The White Devil and The Duchess Of Malfi, the latter receiving its first performance in 1614 by Shakespeare's company, the King's Men, at the Globe.

Thomas Kyd (1558-1594)

An early contemporary of Shakespeare, Thomas Kyd was admired for tragic dramas written in the Roman classical style. His most famous work, which was endlessly revived during his lifetime, was The Spanish Tragedy, a textbook example of what became known as the "revenge tragedy" genre.

Kyd’s plays are full of melodramatic horror and grisly killings, scenes with ghosts and people driven mad with grief. So popular was The Spanish Tragedy that Shakespeare’s own early works are clearly influenced by its style, the gruesome, blood-soaked Roman tragedy of Titus Andronicus being the principal example.

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)

If Kyd brought ghoulish spectacle to the Elizabethan stage, Christopher Marlowe was the first playwright whose works display the beginnings of psychological subtlety. It is sometimes said that Shakespeare’s Hamlet is the first fully rounded, three-dimensional character to appear on the English stage, but this is to ignore Marlowe’s claim. In Tamburlaine, The Jew Of Malta, Edward II, and his undisputed masterpiece, Doctor Faustus, Marlowe proves himself not only as a writer of powerful dramatic poetry, but a true pioneer of English tragedy.

Marlowe had the advantage of the university education that Shakespeare lacked, which gained him an easier entry into the world of theatrical writing than his more celebrated contemporary was to enjoy. As well as being a religious dissident, Marlowe was also employed in secret espionage work by Elizabeth I’s government, an involvement that almost certainly explains his death at unknown hands in a Deptford boarding-house when he was only 29.

Francis Beaumont (1584-1616) and John Fletcher (1579-1625)

Although they each gained reputations for plays written in their own right (particularly Fletcher, who continued to enjoy success for some years after Beaumont’s death), these two dramatists are best known for their collaborations, which is why their names are always linked. They were both from aristocratic families, which wasn’t at all typical of the theatrical world of the time.

Shakespeare had a hand in their work too, in that he acted as a kind of editor on plays they wrote for his company, The King’s Men. After Francis Beaumont’s death, he took on the role of John Fletcher’s co-writer for such works as Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, both of which (not entirely fairly) have found their way into Shakespeare’s Complete Works.

Like Kyd, Fletcher in particular enjoyed great popularity with the London audiences. In an era when playwrights often wrote plays that were sequels or “answers” to other popular works, Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed – his riposte to Shakespeare’s The Taming Of The Shrew – drew more vocal support from its audiences than the original play had.

Thomas Middleton (c.1580-1627)

Another of the playwrights attached to Henslowe’s Admiral’s Men, Thomas Middleton was active from 1602 onwards. He also wrote in collaboration, as well as independently. His joint production with William Rowley (c.1585-1626), The Changeling, is celebrated as a fine Jacobean tragicomedy, a comparatively rare genre.

He may well be the actual author of the earlier, wildly popular Revenger’s Tragedy, a violent thriller written in the manner of Kyd, a play also often attributed to Cyril Tourneur (c.1575-1626).