These translations are mainly of
interest as having furnished plots to the English dramatists. Lodge's
_Rosalind_ and Robert Greene's _Pandosto_, the sources respectively of
Shakspere's _As You Like It_ and _Winter's Tale_, are short pastoral
romances, not without prettiness in their artificial way. The satirical
pamphlets of Thomas Nash and his fellows, against "Martin Marprelate,"
an anonymous writer, or company of writers, who attacked the bishops,
are not wanting in wit, but are so cumbered with fantastic
whimsicalities, and so bound up with personal quarrels, that oblivion
has covered them. The most noteworthy of them were Nash's _Piers
Penniless's Supplication to the Devil_, Lyly's _Pap with a Hatchet_, and
Greene's _Groat's Worth of Wit_. Of books which were not so much
literature as the material of literature, mention may be made of the
_Chronicle of England_, published by Ralph Holinshed in 1580. This was
Shakspere's English history, and its strong Lancastrian bias influenced
Shakspere in his representation of Richard III. and other characters in
his historical plays. In his Roman tragedies Shakspere followed closely
Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives, made in 1579 from
the French version of Jacques Amyot.
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