Who and what were the so-called "University Wits" in Elizabethan literature?

The so-called "University Wits" were among the earliest
and most important writers of professional drama during the rise of professional theater
in Elizabethan England. They were young men who had had the privilege of attending one
of the two English universities then in existence: Oxford University and Cambridge
University. Most people who went to universities at this time completed extensive study
of the Bible and of rhetoric and other aspects of language. They also often studied
classical literature as well as history and philosophy. Such training gave graduates of
the universities real advantages as writers of plays. When men such as John Lyly, George
Peele, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, Thomas Nashe, and Christopher Marlowe came down to
London from Cambridge or Oxford, they had much of the intellectual background to make
them sophisticated writers of dramas. Although the idea of becoming playwrights had not
been their reason for attending universities, their university training helped them
distinguish themselves as writers when professional theaters began to develop in the
final decades of the 1500s.

The university wits are often
seen as members of the first wave of significant Elizabethan dramatists. Later writers,
such as William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, were very widely read but had spent no time
as students at universities. Some of the university wits welcomed and admired these new
writers. Thomas Nashe, for instance, had good things to say about both Jonson and
Shakespeare. However, at least one university wit (Robert Greene) seems to have felt
bothered or even threatened by the emergence of Shakespeare. Whatever their reactions to
these newcomers, the university wits -- Marlowe in particular -- had an enormous
influence on later Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.