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THE 
 
 INFLUENCE OF CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
 
 ON SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 
 
 BEING THE 
 
 HARNESS PRIZE ESSAY FOR THE YEAR 1885. 
 
 BY 
 
 A. W. VERITY, B.A. 
 
 SCHOLAR OF TRINITY COLLEGE. 
 
 MACMILLAN AND BOWES. 
 1886 
 
PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A. AND SONS, 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 
 
 : : .:; • v ' 
 
TK iT ry 
 
 ?^6 
 
 NOTE. 
 
 In writing the following Essay I have consulted the 
 usual authorities, two of whom ought perhaps to be 
 particularised. Mr Bullen's Introdiictioii to his edition 
 of Marlowe contains, I imagine, every fragment of 
 fact connected with the poet's life and works that has 
 been discovered, together with some careful criticism ; 
 I have laid him very largely under contribution. In 
 the account of the rise of blank verse I have followed 
 Mr Symonds, who in his SJiaksperes Predecessors, in 
 three essays appended to his Sketches and Studies in 
 Italy, and in an article in the Cornhill Magazine 
 (Vol. XV.) has discussed the question very fully. To 
 each of these writers my obligations are almost too 
 obvious to need acknowledgement. For the rest, the 
 terms under which the prize was awarded required 
 that the successful essay should be printed ; this, of 
 course, is my sole reason for publishing what otherwise 
 would have sought some friendly fireplace. 
 
THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 
 ON SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 
 
 SCHLEGEL in his Dramatic Literature devotes a 
 paragraph of ten Hnes to Christopher Marlowe ; after 
 mentioning Lyly, he says, ' Marlowe possessed more 
 real talent and was in a better way. He handled the 
 history of Edward the Second with very little art it is 
 true, but with a certain truth and simplicity, so that in 
 many scenes he does not fail to produce a pathetic 
 effect. His verses are flowing but without energy : 
 how Ben Jonson could come to use the expression 
 ^'Marlowe's mighty line" is more than I conceive.' 
 As an expression of Schlegel's own opinion the quo- 
 tation is not very significant ; he wrote, as Mr 
 Swinburne suggests, the epitaph of his criticism in 
 the egregious statement that The Yorkshire Tragedy, 
 Thomas, Lord Cromwell, and Sir JoJui Oldcastle 
 were not only Avritten by Shakspere — of that there 
 could be no doubt in the mind Schlegelian — but 
 V. I 
 
MAP LOWE; S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 should really be classed amongst the poet's ' best and 
 maturest works.' At the time, however, when his 
 remarkable dictum on Marlowe was given to the 
 world Schlegel was regarded as a great Shaksperian 
 critic, and that he should have dismissed the author 
 of Tainbtndaine with a few lines of benevolent con- 
 tempt is, I think, not a little significant. It is typical 
 of the strange ignorance which existed even beyond 
 the beginning of this century concerning some of the 
 greatest of our Elizabethan dramatists. The method 
 of comparative criticism was practically ignored. 
 Shakspere was treated as an isolated phenomenon, 
 independent of the contemporaries above whom he 
 towered ; they were lost in his shadow and met with 
 the barest recognition, or none at all. It never struck 
 the older commentators and critics that Shakspere 
 must have been profoundly influenced — at any rate 
 at the outset of his career — by the literary activity of 
 the dramatists round him, and yet we may be pretty 
 sure that there were a thousand influences moulding 
 the genius of the poet from the day when he may 
 have seen the 'Queen's Players' at Stratford in 1587 
 to the day when he finished his share in Henry VIII. 
 and gave up writing altogether. And of these in- 
 fluences none surely could exceed the effect which 
 the works of his contemporaries must have had on 
 his style and method, and of these contemporaries 
 who greater than Christopher Marlowe.'* To appreciate 
 the development of Shakspere's genius and art we 
 
SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 
 
 must see him affected by the example now of one 
 dramatist, now of another. It is one great family, 
 and we must study their works in common, precisely 
 as an artist deals with a school of painters. There 
 are many points of contact between the different 
 members; there is likewise much diversity. Special 
 characteristics are represented by special writers, and 
 all are summed up in Shakspere, the central sun, so 
 to speak, of which the others are but partial reflec- 
 tions. 
 
 To insist on this is to insist on what has become 
 the merest truism — ' I sing the Obsolete ' — but it is a 
 doctrine on which proper stress was never laid until 
 Coleridge^ Hazlitt and Lamb made the great dis- 
 covery that other writers besides Shakspere had lived 
 in what is familiarly called the Elizabethan era. 
 During the eighteenth century, of course, it was 
 hardly probable that our old dramatists would receive 
 much attention. Shakspere himself had fallen on 
 evil days — and evil editors. The public rested secure 
 under the benevolent despotism of the rhymed 
 couplet, the critics raised their ceaseless Ave Iniperator 
 
 ^ Even Coleridge barely alludes to Marlowe in his Lectures, while 
 Scott in his essay on the drama has the following passage : ' The 
 English stage might be considered equally without rule and without 
 model when Shakspeare arose... He followed the path which a nameless 
 crowd of obscure writers had trodden before him. Nothing went before 
 Shakspeare, which in any respect was fit to fix and stamp the character 
 of a national drama.' How wide of the mark this criticism is my essay 
 will attempt to show. 
 
MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 to ' one Boileau,' and the poets — well, Keats has 
 described them for us : 
 
 ' A schism 
 Nurtured by foppery and barbarism 
 Made great Apollo blush for this his land. 
 Men were thought wise who could not understand 
 His glories ; with a puling infant force 
 They swayed about upon a rocking-horse, 
 And thought it Pegasus' — 
 
 Pope felt no scruples in emending the text of 
 Shakspere much as a German editor handles the text 
 of Sophocles. Colley Gibber and others laid sacri- 
 legious hands on some of the plays and ' adapted ' 
 them ; the public applauded, and even the great 
 Garrick was content to keep in his acting versions 
 what Lamb rightly calls the ' ribald trash ' of Tate 
 and his fellow-workers. Johnson himself in editing 
 Shakspere scarcely took the trouble to open the 
 works of Shakspere's contemporaries. But it is super- 
 fluous to multiply instances. The force of the classical 
 movement lasted a long time, and while it remained 
 it was not unlikely that the lesser dramatists, at any 
 rate, of Elizabeth's reign would continue under a 
 cloud. And this was so until towards the end of the 
 century. Then interest in forgotten works began to 
 revive. In 1773 Hawkins brought out his valuable 
 work, The OiHgin of the English Drama; in 1779 
 Steevens reprinted a volume of the old Chronicle 
 plays ; in the next year a still greater advance was 
 made with the issue of Dodsley's admirable Collec- 
 
SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 5 
 
 tion. The preface indeed to the last-mentioned 
 work is not a little instructive. The editor seems to 
 have felt that his publication of forgotten pieces 
 needed some apology, and accordingly he begins 
 with the remark — ' Our ancient dramatic writers have 
 suffered a very long and, some few excepted, a very 
 general neglect,' a state of things for which he endea- 
 vours — not very successfully — to account. Amongst 
 the ' some few ' to whom he alludes Christopher 
 Marlowe certainly can not be included. It was not 
 till 1826 that he was edited at all, and then the duty 
 fell to an editor who contested his claims to the 
 authorship of Tambtirlaine. But if, roughly speaking, 
 up till 1820 Marlowe was neglected, assuredly since 
 then his merits — and they are great — have been 
 freely recognised. At least three admirable editions^ 
 of his works have been published, besides innumer- 
 able essays dealing with various aspects of his genius. 
 Praise has been awarded him unstintingly ; indeed it 
 may be questioned whether the rhapsodies of en- 
 thusiastic admirers have not been as great an injury 
 to his name as was the neglect of earlier critics. Mr 
 Swinburne has exhausted the resources of his perfervid 
 rhetoric in doing justice — perhaps something more 
 than justice — alike to Marlowe's own merits as a 
 writer, and to the influence which he exercised on his 
 
 1 Those of Dyce, Cunningham and Bullen. To these may be added 
 editions of separate plays, amongst which The Tragical History of Dr 
 Faustiis, edited by Professor Wagner, as also by Professor Ward, and 
 Edward 11. by Mr Fleay, may be specially mentioned. 
 
MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 still greater successor; Mr Symonds has echoed these 
 praises in a lower key, and recently Mr Symonds has 
 been followed by Mr Bullen. The field in fact has 
 been gleaned ; every fragment of fact has long 
 since been garnered, and scarcely a single point of 
 contact between Shakspere and Marlowe remains 
 uninvestigated. One cannot in bringing forward the 
 humblest view confidently exclaim with Touchstone, 
 ' An ill-favoured thing, sir, but mine own.' Mr Leslie 
 Stephen complains somewhere of the hard lot which 
 condemns essayists in general to utter paradoxes or 
 platitudes — ' the difficulty of saying anything new' is 
 so overwhelming ; and the difficulty is complicated a 
 thousandfold when Shakspere is the subject. The 
 ordinary writer has at the outset two alternatives, and 
 practically only two: he may determine to be eccentric, 
 and unhesitatingly ascribe, say, the whole of Titus 
 Androniciis to Shakspere, in the fond hope of being 
 thought original, or he may content himself with 
 saying over again what has been said before, and 
 doubtless said better. The latter seems to me the 
 preferable course ; hence most of this essay (where 
 right) will have been seen before, and a comprehensive 
 application of Mr Puff's ingenious theory of coinci- 
 dences will be quite essential throughout. • 
 
 Perhaps before passing to the narrower question 
 of Marlowe's immediate connection with Shakspere 
 it may be well to touch, first, on the position of the 
 English stage when Marlowe appeared before the 
 
SHAA'SPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 
 
 cv 
 
 world as a playwright ; secondly, on the peculiar 
 character of his dramas judged on their own merits ; 
 it will then be possible to appreciate more exactly 
 the influence he exercised on his great successor. 
 
 When Christopher Marlowe left Cambridge, ' a 
 boy in years, a man in genius, and a god in ambition,' 
 and coming up to London threw in his lot with the 
 dramatists of the day, everything pointed to the 
 development of a great national stage. England had 
 passed through one of those crises that occurring 
 rarely in the history of a people must profoundly 
 affect its fortunes, for good or for evil. Such crises may 
 leave behind them a course of wreck and ruin, or 
 they may produce opposite results. They may rouse 
 and stimulate a nation to a sense of power and 
 strength hitherto undreamed of; they may kindle an 
 enthusiasm which must find vent, partly in action, 
 partly in artistic expression. It is impossible to 
 determine the laws which at such moments guide men 
 in their unconscious choice of a method of self-revela- 
 tion : we can only appeal to the past and be governed 
 by its teaching, and in the case of the drama ex- 
 perience shows us at least one thing. Great dramas 
 have arisen in different countries under different cir- 
 cumstances to which their various divergences may be 
 traced, but amid all external differences one vital 
 condition has always been observed — a great national 
 stage has never been developed in any country in a 
 period of national stagnation. The sine-qua-non of a 
 
8 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 national dramatic literature is national life and 
 activity ; energy of thought and energy of deed go 
 side by side. It is only at some turning-point in its 
 fortunes, when dangers have been triumphantly sur- 
 mounted and a new era of strength and prosperity is 
 opening out before it, that a people can produce great 
 dramatists. Men have lived, have saved themselves 
 by action, and it is to the stage that they instinctively 
 turn as capable, in a degree unattainable by any other 
 art, of giving definite artistic expression to their pas- 
 sionate energy ; for the central idea of the stage is man 
 in action, and thence comes the strength of its appeal. 
 A great crisis, then, may not necessarily call into 
 being a great national stage, but without the former 
 history seems to show that the latter is impossible, 
 and through such a crisis the England of Elizabeth 
 had assuredly passed in its struggle with Spain. 
 There was, too, activity of thought. It was part of 
 the widespread Renaissance spirit, of that strange 
 quickening of latent and well-nigh forgotten powers. 
 On every side new forces were at work. The old 
 order was changing ; the spell was broken ; Europe 
 awoke from its long, long dream, and the nations 
 again were young, and strong, and stirred with 
 passion. In all directions the new learning began to 
 spread, and it was not likely that this country would 
 remain unaffected by the general movement. Since 
 the beginning of the reign of Henry VIII. its history 
 had been one long struggle. It was not till the ac- 
 
SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 
 
 cession of Elizabeth that men enjoyed anything hke 
 poHtical security ; then they reaped the fruit of long 
 efforts. Religion was free. The great Reformation 
 movement had been successful ; the Bible could be in 
 every man's hands. It was a time of transition, when 
 the miserable despotism of Rome was a thing of the 
 past and the equally oppressive rule of Puritan dogma 
 was still undreamt of And if there was freedom in 
 religion there was likewise comparative political free- 
 dom. Men looked back on the absolutism of Henry 
 VIII., they remembered the reign of terror established 
 by Mary, and they felt themselves fortunate in being 
 under the rule of a Queen like Elizabeth. There 
 were, too, other causes favourable to the rise of the 
 stage. There were masses of local traditions that had 
 never been employed for literary purposes, thoroughly 
 national ballads like the Robin Hood cycle still un- 
 touched. It remained for some dramatist to draw on 
 the every-day working life of the country people for 
 inspiration, to introduce on the stage the atmosphere 
 of rural England, to paint such scenes as those which 
 Shakspere has given us in the fourth act of The Winter s 
 Tale. Again, there was the wealth of foreign literature, 
 especially Italian, that poured into England. Trans- 
 lations of foreign books abounded ; the playwright 
 was not put to the trouble of inventing his plots ; the 
 bookstalls of London were covered with Italian^ 
 
 ^ Thus Ascham's ScJwoliiiastcr — printed, we may remember, in 
 1579 — is full of references to the influx of Italian books into England. 
 
lO MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 novels from which to borrow. Indeed the connection 
 between England and the Continent was one more 
 proof of the activity of the time. London itself, the 
 heart and brain of the nation, was a vast cosmopolitan 
 centre ; men of all nationalities w^ere to be seen in the 
 streets. It was an age of discovery and enterprise, 
 and commerce of every kind was centred in the 
 great capital, then, it may be remembered, not too 
 unwieldy to be moved by something akin to a 
 general public opinion. There is at least one other 
 point that deserves to be noticed — men w^ere uncritical ; 
 they did not at every turn call in question the drama- 
 tist's accuracy. When the Poet Laureate in his last 
 play, Becket, rearranged his materials to heighten the 
 dramatic interest, he was very generally condemned 
 for departing from history, and naturally, for the 
 modern, the critical, spirit craves for fidelity, for truth 
 even at the expense of artistic effect. It was not so 
 with an Elizabethan audience. They asked to be 
 amused, nothing more. They did not condemn 
 Richard III., because Richard is made to woo the 
 widow of the dead prince, Edward. The episode 
 added to the stage-effect ; it gave another aspect of 
 Richard's heartlessness, and dramatically that was 
 its justification. Again, men were credulous. Romance 
 was in the air. They were ready to accept wonderful 
 legends with a half child-like complacency and joy. 
 A modern statesman once laughingly excused his 
 ignorance of a new theory that had been mentioned 
 
SHAKSPERKS EARLIER STYLE. II 
 
 in his presence, on the ground that he was 'born in 
 the pre-scientific period.' Shakspere and his fellow 
 workers were in much the same position, and perhaps 
 it is well that they were. There may be something 
 after all in Macaulay's old paradox that imagination 
 declines as civilization advances. The critical spirit 
 will have nothing to say to the popular legends, the 
 illogical superstitions which supply the mind of a 
 Walter Scott with the most sympathetic material on 
 which to work. Science dispels the thousand and 
 one myths that cluster round mountain and forest 
 and river. 
 
 Do not all charms fly 
 At the mere touch of cold philosophy? 
 There was an awful rainbow once in heaven : 
 We know her woof, her texture; she is given 
 In the dull catalogue of common things. 
 Philosophy will clip an angel's wings, 
 Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, 
 Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine — 
 Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made 
 The tender person'd Lamia melt into a shade. 
 
 Unfortunately not only the angel's wings are 
 clipped but — it is infinitely more important — the 
 dramatist's too. Thus a modern playwright would 
 be very shy of introducing into his work a device like 
 that of the magic crystal employed by Greene in 
 Friar Bacon and Friar Bnngay with the quaintest 
 possible effect, and yet it is just the scene where the 
 prince looks into the 'glass prospective,' and watches 
 the love-making of Margaret — one of Greene's best 
 
12 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 characters — and Lacy, that we care for most ; it is all 
 delightfully incongruous, with the prince's running 
 commentary on the unconscious lovers. Greene could 
 introduce such an incident because at a time when 
 magic in all its branches was believed in many of the 
 spectators would not find the crystal so ridiculous. 
 But on the modern stage the whole piece would be 
 impossible ; the advice of the Friar — 'sit still, my 
 lord, and mark the comedy' — would scarcely be 
 followed. Again, with what terrible realism does 
 Marlowe treat the Faust legend. There is not a 
 shred of symbolism in the play ; from first to last it is 
 charged with the simplicity that attaches to everyday 
 life, for the supernatural in that age of universal super- 
 stition was hardly supernatural at all. People believed 
 — probably Marlowe did himself — that the devil had 
 actually carried off the great wizard to a crude accom- 
 paniment of stage-thunder and evil angels, and ac- 
 cordingly we move throughout in the atmosphere of 
 accepted facts. There is no philosophy to vex us — 
 no hidden meaning to be read between the lines. 
 Helena and Faustus meet, and we forget all about the 
 union of the classical and the mediaeval which in the 
 history of literature the incident is taken by Goethe 
 to represent. Helena, as Vernon Lee says, is only some 
 lovely mediaeval lady, 
 
 •divinely tall 
 And most divinely fair ; ' 
 
 some Galataea-like statue into which the poet has 
 
SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 13 
 
 breathed the breath of Hfe ; what she is in the old 
 Faust-book that she remains in Marlowe's play. She 
 moves across the stage — she is passing beautiful — and 
 she means nothing. And Marlowe could handle the 
 legend with this nakedness of detail, this materialising 
 directness, because to him and to his audience the 
 whole story was not in the least degree out of the 
 way. Was it not all duly set forth in the famous 
 Historia von D. Johann FaiLsten, dent zveitbeschreyten 
 ZaiLberer nnd Schwartzkiinstlerf and if, as the shepherd 
 opines in TJie Winter s Tale, we may be sure that a 
 ballad in print is and must be true, who would hint 
 or hesitate a doubt against the Historie, newly im- 
 printed and in converiient places imperfect matter 
 amended, which the unknown 'P. F. Gent' (the OUen- 
 dorf of the age) kindly translated for the benefit of 
 his fellow-countrymen } 
 
 These, and other causes that might be mentioned, 
 pointed to the rise of a drama that should express 
 with the utmost imaginative fulness and force the 
 tendencies of the time. It was essential to the success 
 of such a movement that it should be in the v/idest 
 sense representative : to be identified with any par- 
 ticular school meant comparative failure. It could 
 not afford to court the patronage of the queen and of 
 the nobles, any more than it dared submit to the 
 pedantry of scholars. It had to deal with all aspects 
 of life; it had to appeal directly to the people at large, 
 and its style was bound to be romantic. That such a 
 
14 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 drama did eventually spring up is a matter of history; 
 that it did not exist in 1587, when^ Taviburlaine was, 
 in all probability, first acted, is, I think, equally a 
 matter of history. On the contrary, the stage was 
 then 'encumbered with a litter of rude, rhyming 
 farces and tragedies.' Fortunately of these plays we 
 have some specimens, and if we compare them with 
 the first forms of tragedy and comedy, and with the 
 still earlier religious plays, we shall see that, up to 
 1587, the development of the stage had been slow, 
 but regular. As in all countries, its origin had been 
 religious. To begin with there were the miracle- 
 plays, which lasted to (about) the middle of the 
 fifteenth century. Originally, no doubt, they formed 
 part of the services of the Church, as a simple and 
 effective means of instructing the unlettered laity. 
 They were written and acted by clergymen, and it 
 was not till some time after their introduction, which 
 dates from the end of the eleventh century, that the 
 Trade-Companies performed them annually, as at 
 Chester, at their own expense. As was to be ex- 
 pected these plays dealt entirely with sacred^ subjects, 
 with the lives of saints, or stories from the Old and 
 New Testaments. The dramatis personse, it is worth 
 remembering, were real characters. In the reign of 
 Henry VI. these Miracles were in part supplanted by 
 the Moral Plays, or it might perhaps be more correct 
 
 1 Cf. Mr Bullen's IntrodiicHon, I. pp. xvi — xviii. 
 
 " Cf. Collier, History of Dramatic Poetry, Vol. ii. 123. 
 
SHAA'SPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. IS 
 
 to say that the former developed by a natural process 
 into the latter, the transition being marked by the in- 
 troduction into the Miracles of allegorical characters. 
 'The change/ says Collier (ll. 259), 'was designed to 
 give Miracle Plays a degree of attraction they would 
 not have possessed, if year after year they had been 
 repeated to the same audiences precisely in the same 
 form.' As a matter of fact, however, the innovation 
 was fatal to the Miracles. Once the change had been 
 made these allegorical characters became more nume- 
 rous, the action of the piece was impeded, and as the 
 new figures were incompatible with the old the latter 
 gradually fell into the background, so that ' in process 
 of time what was originally intended to be a poetical 
 embellishment became a new species of theatrical ex- 
 hibition, unconnected with history.' Doubtless these 
 Moral Plays were infinitely more interesting than the 
 old pieces, which were merely sermons in disguise. 
 The fable or plot became more elaborate, the charac- 
 ters more life-like and tangible. Moreover they had 
 an extraneous interest; they served as satires on con- 
 temporary life. The Church was repeatedly the object 
 of their attacks, indeed we gather from them a clear 
 idea of the revolution of thought which changed the 
 England of Henry VI. into the England of Elizabeth. 
 Medisevalism dies out, and we see the gradual growth 
 of the Reformation doctrines, and later of the Renais- 
 sance. It was as satirical pieces covertly alluding to 
 popular prejudices and current events that these 
 
1 6 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 Moral Plays continued to be acted up to the end of 
 the 1 6th century, although their performance after 
 1570 was comparatively rare. Indeed they did not 
 retain their undisputed sway later than 1520. Then 
 came, in Heywood's Interhides^ the first step towards 
 a regular comedy. These Interludes — the name is 
 appropriately chosen — were distinct from the Mira- 
 cles and from the Moralities, bridging, as it were, the 
 interval that separated the latter from the earliest 
 form of comedy as given in Roister-Doister. Of one 
 of these pieces — printed somewhere about 1533 — 
 Collier has a short sketch in his History (ll. 385), 
 while another is more accessible to the ordinary 
 reader in Dodsley's Collection (I. 49). There is plenty 
 of shrewd humour in the latter. The dramatis per- 
 sonae, if drama it can be called, are a Palmer, who 
 begins with a long account of his various pilgrimages, 
 a Pardoner, obviously intended as a satire against 
 the Church, a Poticary and a Pedlar, the last with his 
 rough and ready wit giving us a far-off touch of 
 Autolycus, the prince of strolling vagabonds. The 
 metre varies ; the Palmer commences Avith stanzas of 
 four lines rhyming alternately, which afterwards give 
 place to rhymed couplets of irregular lengths. Warton 
 dismisses these Interludes somewhat contemptuously, 
 but in the Four P's there is no lack of crude, out-of- 
 door wit. Thus the pedlar's description of his wander- 
 ings is capital, the disquisition on the efficacy of relics 
 hardly less so, while the wager — who can tell the 
 
SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. IJ 
 
 greatest lie — with which they conclude, has something 
 of Greene's quaintncss of conception. Historically 
 the pieces are important as containing the first hint 
 of the Comedy that was initiated more definitely by 
 Roister Bolster , somewhere between 1534 and 1541. 
 Rather later than this innovation marked by the 
 appearance of Heywood's Interludes., the Morali- 
 ties underwent another modification — this time in 
 the direction of the Chronicle-History. Near the 
 middle of the sixteenth century Bale's Kynge JoJian 
 was written. Here the Morality Play merges into 
 the Chronicle History of the older type, though 
 semi-allegorical figures are still retained. Clergy, 
 Sedition, Civil Order, and other survivals move about 
 the scene, but fresh interest is given by the introduc- 
 tion of genuine historical figures, King John, Stephen 
 Langton, and others. Even here indeed the new 
 dramatis personae are devoid of lifelike reality. Car- 
 dinal Pandulphus, for instance, is little more than the 
 old Papal greed personified, which had done duty in 
 innumerable Moral Plays. Nevertheless the employ- 
 ment of ordinary historical figures was a distinct 
 advance, however incongruous the general effect 
 might be. 
 
 The mention of this play brings us almost to the be- 
 ginning of Elizabeth's reign, and so far, as we see from 
 skimming over this well-beaten ground, the develop- 
 ment of the English drama had been regular. From 
 1558 to 1587 this even course was, on the whole 
 
 V. 2 
 
1 8 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 maintained ; then an altogether new start was made. 
 The appearance of TainbiLrlaine revolutionised the 
 stage. We may compare it to Gotz von Berlichingen, 
 or better still, as, I think, Mr Swinburne does, to 
 Hernani. Victor Hugo and the Romanticists had a 
 great literary system to crush. Classicism had all 
 the prestige of the past in its favour, and only the 
 sheer force of genius could overthrow such an adver- 
 sary. In the same way Marlowe had formidable foes 
 opposed to him, for in TambiLvlaine he broke alto- 
 gether with the traditions of the stage. His work 
 was a passionate protest, and it had its effect. The 
 drama that followed his Tanibtirlaine — the romantic 
 drama of Shakspere — had little in common with what 
 had gone before. It was not so much that the waters 
 parted, as that the old stream stopped flowing, and a 
 new river sprang up to take its place. For what could 
 the preromantic stage show.'^ Nothing but a dead 
 mass of plays that scarcely deserved to be called 
 dramas at all. The pieces were, roughly speaking, of 
 two descriptions. There were plays written for per- 
 formance at Court, at the Universities, and at the 
 Inns of Courts ; this was the literary drama. Given 
 an audience familiar with the Poetics of Aristotle 
 it could be appreciated. But it had no claims to 
 be considered national, indeed it had little or no 
 connection at all with the people at large. It is 
 true that some of the plays performed in the first 
 instance at Court, notably those of Lyly — were after- 
 
SHAKSPERKS EARLIER STYLE. 1 9 
 
 wards brought out at the London theatres, but this 
 was the exception — indeed before 1776 no regular 
 theatre existed. Most of these Court pieces were 
 only suitable for cultured audiences ; of such is the 
 time-honoured Gorboduc. It is difficult to conceive 
 anything duller than this venerable tragedy. Lamb, 
 respecting its antiquity, speaks of the piece with 
 kindly euphemism as 'stiff and cumbersome — there 
 may be flesh and blood, but we cannot get at it.' 
 If the flesh and blood be there, it must be hidden 
 very far from sight ; no critic has ever reached it. 
 Excepting perhaps in the fourth act, there is abso- 
 lutely no animation in the piece from beginning to 
 end. The language is cold and sententious to a 
 degree, stuffed with political maxims conveyed in 
 speeches of insufferable length and dreariness. Thus 
 in the second act (scene 2), in the debate between 
 the King and his Courtiers, the characters are as 
 prolix as Miss Griselda Oldbuck in the Antiquary. 
 Philander takes 99 lines to state his case ; Eubulus 
 replies in 90, while the closing speech in Act v. ex- 
 tends to exactly 100 lines. Of course, the dramatists 
 were hampered by the use of a new metre which they 
 did not understand, and a dramatic theory which was 
 radically mistaken. But a popular audience does not 
 make allowances, and it would be in their eyes but a 
 poor compensation for the dreariness of the piece, for 
 its stilted sententiousness and want of action, that the 
 authors observed the proper Horatian maxim, and, 
 
 2 — 2 
 
20 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 instead of representing the death of the younger 
 brother coram popitlo, took care that it should be 
 narrated by the famiHar messenger. That it should 
 end with an anticlimax, the catastrophe coming in 
 the fourth act and the concluding scenes being eked 
 out with fresh and irrelevant matter, is a minor point. 
 Here is, perhaps, the best speech in the play — that of 
 Marcella : 
 
 O hard and cruel hap that thus assigned 
 
 Unto so worthy wight so wretched end: 
 
 But most hard cruel heart that could consent 
 
 To lend the hateful destinies that hand, 
 
 By which alas ! so heinous crime was wrought. 
 
 O queen of adamant, O marble breast, 
 
 If not the favour of his comely face, 
 
 If not his princely cheer and countenance, 
 
 His valiant active arms, his manly breast, 
 
 If not his fair and seemly personage, 
 
 His noble limbs in such proportion cast, 
 
 As would have wrapt a silly woman's thought, 
 
 If this mought not have moved thy bloody heart, 
 
 And that most cruel hand the wretched weapon 
 
 Even to let fall, and kissed him in the face, 
 
 With tears of ruth to reave such one by death, 
 
 Should nature yet consent to slay her son? 
 
 In this perhaps there is a ring of pathos and 
 passion that rises above the monotony of the verse — 
 and what fearful monotony it is — but such passages 
 are few and far between in the play, which, whatever 
 it was, certainly cannot be called romantic in style. 
 If Gorboduc lacked vitality, Damon and PytJiias, to take 
 another type of the drama popular at Court, possessed 
 even less interest. It deserves, however, to be noticed 
 
SffAKSPERE'S EARTJER STYLE. 21 
 
 if only on account of the extraordinary reputation 
 which its author, Richard Edwards, enjoyed. The 
 critics of the period seem for some unknown reason to 
 have conspired to praise him. He is mentioned by 
 Meres in Palladis Taviia as 'best for comedy,' the Hst 
 including 'mellifluous and honey-tongued' Shakspere^; 
 Puttenham in his Arte of Poetry is equally complimen- 
 tary, while another critic saluted Edwards (but this 
 was in an epitaph^) as 
 
 'flower of our realm 
 And Phoenix of our age.' 
 
 On what this reputation rested we cannot say. 
 Only one of Edwards' plays is extant ; of another, his 
 Palavion and Arcyte — which was played before the 
 queen at Oxford in September, 1566, the stage, as 
 we are told, literally giving way on the first night of 
 performance, doubtless under the extreme heaviness 
 of the piece — the name alone has survived. But if all 
 the dramatist's works were like Davion and PytJiias it 
 is perhaps well that oblivion should have claimed 
 them for her own, for assuredly Damon and his friend 
 are 'far, far from gay.' The piece according to the 
 prologue is a 'tragical-comedy,' and it would be hard 
 to say which parts of it are worst. Perhaps the 
 comedy, as represented by the dialogue between the 
 Collier (from Croydon) and the two Servants of the 
 court of Syracuse, is the most notably imbecile ; in 
 
 ^ Dodsley's Collection, i. 168. 
 2 Collier, iii. 2. 
 
22 „ MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 the tragic scenes one can at times trace an illusive 
 touch of pathos. For the rest, Damon and Pythias is 
 a dreary waste of rhymed crudities ; there is no cha- 
 racterisation, no plot; the language is utterly common- 
 place, and the piece abounds with incongruities, such 
 as the introduction of the Muses to mourn over the 
 intended murder of 'poor Pythias.' And yet the author 
 was a conspicuously popular Court poet! Gorboduc 
 was produced at the Inner Temple; the 'children of 
 the Queen's Chapel' performed i^^;//^;/ and Pythias. 
 On a far higher level than either of these pieces, but 
 belonging to the same type of literary drama, stands 
 The Arraignment of Paris, written soon after Peele 
 had left the University. As a dramatist Peele must 
 be put low down in the scale — he seems to me much 
 inferior to Greene in humour, in inventiveness, in 
 capacity for delineating character — but as a poet his 
 merits are considerable. His language is always clear 
 and harmonious, his verse — and he could handle a 
 variety of metres with remarkable ease and grace — 
 always pleasant. His blank verse, it is true, rarely 
 got beyond the limits of the couplet, and to the last 
 remained monotonous, but then it is the monotony of 
 sweetness. There is something indescribably cloying 
 in all he wrote. Every line of David and Bethsabe, 
 which Charles Lamb contemptuously dismissed as 
 ' stuff,' breathes an atmosphere of luxurious languor. 
 In his later works this became a mere mannerism, but 
 in his Arraignment of Paris ^ and unfortunately this is 
 
SHAKSrEKKS EARLIER STYLE. 23 
 
 the only one of Peek's dramas written prior to the 
 appearance of Tanibiudaine that has survived, the poet 
 is less conspicuously the ' Verborum Artifex ' that 
 delighted Nash\ TJie Arraignnient indeed, which 
 reads like a college exercise, is fairly simple in style. 
 Dramatically, like the majority of Court plays, it is 
 worthless ; as a poem, unlike them, it is by no means 
 devoid of beauty. It is pretty safe to say that the 
 average piece acted by 'the Children of the Chapel' 
 did not contain anything like the following passage. 
 It is the speech of CEnone, as she sits under the tree 
 with Paris. 
 
 And whereon then shall be my lOundelay? 
 
 For thou hast heard my store long since, dare say, 
 
 How Saturn did divide his kingdom tho' 
 
 To Jove, to Neptune, and to Dis below ; 
 
 How mighty men made foul successless war 
 
 Against the Gods and state of Jupiter. 
 
 How fair Narcissus tooting on his shade 
 
 Reproves disdain, and tells how form doth vade. 
 
 How cunning Philomela's needle tells 
 
 What force in love, what wit in sorrow, dwells: 
 
 What pains unhappy souls abide in hell, 
 
 They say, because on earth, they lived not well — 
 
 Ixion's wheel, proud Tantal's pining woe, 
 
 Prometheus' torment, and a many moe: 
 
 How Danaus' daughters ply their endless task, 
 
 What toil, the toil of Sisyphus doth ask. 
 
 ^ The phrase occurs in the oft-quoted 'Address to the Gentlemen 
 Students of both Universities,' prefixed to Greene's 'Arcadia, or 
 Menaphon' — 1587. Probably Nash is praising Peele at the expense of 
 Marlowe, whom he attacks in the same pamphlet, though afterwards 
 they worked together. 
 
24 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 This is at least pleasing, fluent verse, with a deli- 
 cate flavour of pastoral conceit; indeed, all the pastoral 
 scenes are marked by the same freshness and lightness 
 of touch. But the general effect is preposterous ; as a 
 drama The Arraignment is beneath criticism. Yet 
 there were probably dozens of plays of the same 
 description, pastorals, pageants, and what not, pro- 
 duced at Court, and difl"ering only from this piece in 
 that they lacked the one quality of genuine poetry 
 which redeems^ all Peele's work from utter oblivion. 
 In the same way there were probably dozens of 'tragi- 
 comedies' like Damon and Pythias, perhaps dozens 
 of tragedies pure and simple like Gorbodtic, that were 
 performed in private. If we add to these the comedies 
 of Lyly, which, it must be confessed, contained some 
 elements of popularity, and the purely classical plays, 
 whether adapted or translated directly from Seneca 
 and Euripides, we have the main elements of what 
 may be called the literary drama. Compared with 
 the drama that followed and eclipsed it, the romantic 
 drama of which there was scarcely a trace, when 
 Marlowe came before the world with Tambnrlaine^ 
 this literary drama was a mere mountain of dulness, 
 'gross, open, palpable.' To the nation at large it 
 
 ■■• Occasionally Peele gives us really fine lines in Marlowe's style; 
 thus in The Talc of Troy he speaks of the Gi^eek fleet leaving Aulis, 
 
 As shoots a streaming star in winter's night, 
 A thousand ships well-rigged, a glorious sight, 
 Waving ten thousand flags. 
 
SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 25 
 
 could make no appeal. The uncritical audiences 
 who thronged the playhouses on the Bankside, who 
 were to be found in the Innyard of the Bell Savage, 
 asked for something more imposing than these 
 vamped-up classical puppets moralising on stilts. 
 The schoolmaster in the Heart of Midlothian was 
 contemptuous of our 'modern Babylonian jargons:' 
 they struck him as being really poor compared with 
 the 'learned languages.' But the average Elizabethan 
 audience had no such enthusiasm for the classics. 
 They were in the position of Shakspere himself, of 
 knowing 'little Latin and less Greek,' and to such 
 everyday men and women the Poetics of Aristotle 
 mattered not at all. A dramatist might, if he liked, 
 violate all the unities in a single act, might scatter to 
 the winds what one of Dickens' characters calls the 
 'universal dovetailedness,' that should harmonise the 
 action of every play — so long as he could amuse his 
 audience, could make their pulses beat quicker, could 
 move their tears and laughter. They came — or at 
 least they did later on — to laugh at, and laugh with, 
 the 'Epicurean rascal' Sir John Falstaff, to sigh over 
 the sorrows of Romeo and Juliet, to follow the fortunes 
 of 'warlike Harry' and others whose names had be- 
 come household words. The scene might be rude, 
 but imagination compensated for its poverty ; they 
 were ready to admit the poet's appeal. 
 
 But pardon, gentles all, 
 The flat unraised spirits that have dared 
 
26 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth 
 So great an object ; Can this cockpit hold 
 The vasty fields of France? or may we cram 
 Within this wooden O the very casques 
 That did affright the air at Agincourt ? 
 O pardon, since a crooked figure may 
 Attest in little place a million, 
 And let us ciphers to this great accompt 
 On your imaginary forces work. 
 
 A popular audience, then, wanted sensation, they 
 wanted amusement. The literary drama as it then 
 existed could give them neither, and so they turned 
 elsewhere; and naturally their demand was met. 
 Comedies and farces of the crudest type ; melo- 
 dramas of ' the high, heroic fustian ' order, in which 
 there was at least flesh and blood ; Moral Plays, like 
 Lupton's All for Mouey, which the author indefinitely 
 termed 'A pitiful comedy' and 'A pleasant tragedy,' 
 the piece having no claim to either title; Chronicle 
 Plays in prose ; tragedies written in every possible 
 variety of metre, in ballad lines of 14 syllables, in 
 stanzas, in the ordinary rhymed couplet — in a word, 
 all sorts and conditions of plays overflowed the stage. 
 But everything was crude ; dramas were tossed off. 
 The public were in the first state of enthusiasm, when 
 admiration is for the time stronger than criticism. 
 They gratefully accepted what the dramatist gave 
 them, however bald, however undigested, and so the 
 divorce between literature and the stage, which forms 
 nowadays the text of periodical magazine articles, 
 was almost complete. The popular drama was not 
 
SHAKSPERKS EARLIER STYLE. 2/ 
 
 literary; the literary drama was not popular. Their 
 union was the problem, which some great dramatist 
 had to solve, and that dramatist was Christopher Mar- 
 lowe. He found the stage choked with a cumbrous 
 mass of rubbish, and his feeling towards it was that of 
 the Walrus and the Carpenter, when (in both senses of 
 the word) they expatiated on the sand of the sea- 
 shore : 
 
 "'If this were only cleared away', 
 They said, 'it tuould be grand'." 
 
 The speakers, it will be remembered in Mr Carroll's 
 little poem, gave up their ideal as unattainable ; the 
 sand remained. Marlowe was more successful. He 
 swept the stage clear of the miserable stuff that Court 
 poets and the rhymsters of the Bankside foisted upon 
 the people as plays. He did not attempt to breathe 
 new life into the dead bones of the classical drama. 
 Had he done so, critics might have pointed to the 
 English stage as one more proof of the truth of Mon- 
 taigne's pregnant aphorism, 'C'est un bel et grand ad- 
 gencement sans doubte que le grec et le latin — mais 
 on I'achepte trop cher;' on the other hand he did 
 not adopt the course suggested in Johnson's cynical 
 couplet — 
 
 The drama's laws, the drama's patrons give ; 
 
 For those who live to please, must please to live. 
 
 He determined to wean the public from ' the 
 jigging veins of rhyming mother wits ' that made the 
 popular drama debased in the extreme, and to do this 
 
28 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 he created something that differed absokitely from 
 what men had hitherto seen on the stage. What that 
 something was it is time to inquire. 
 
 In considering Marlowe's works it is well to re- 
 member one thing, that he is the most personal of 
 poets ; it is impossible to think of him apart from his 
 plays, and vice versa. Usually the attempt to read 
 between the lines, as the phrase is, and by so doing to 
 evolve some idea of an author's personality, is not 
 very successful : yet it is a task which some critics 
 find extremely congenial and entertaining. Touch- 
 stone's irritating query, ' Hast any philosophy in 
 thee } ' is always on their lips when they approach a 
 new work, the presumption in their minds being that 
 the writer must have started with a definite purpose, 
 ' a criticism of life ' in some form or other ; and this 
 central idea once discovered ought theoretically to 
 reveal in a measure the character of the author, and 
 thus the true seeker is, as it were, personally conducted 
 behind the scenes into the presence of the writer 
 himself. Everyone remembers Schumann's indignant 
 commentary on these acrostic-solvers, who of course 
 almost invariably lose themselves in a maze of con- 
 flicting theories till at last ' Metaphysic calls for aid 
 on Sense.' And so long as we deal with the Immortals 
 of literature it must always be so, for the best work is 
 always impersonal. The great poet is not one man, 
 he is, in sympathy, in humanity, a dozen. It is when 
 we come to writers of the second class that we find 
 
SHAKSPERKS EARLIER STYLE. 29 
 
 ourselves on firmer ground. There arc some poets 
 whose personaHty breathes in every line, each work 
 being a revelation of their character, an autobio- 
 graphical fragment; of such, to take the time-honoured 
 instance, is Byron. Everything he wrote was touched 
 with egotism, and it is this very intrusion of the 
 personal element that lends his best work the 
 sovereign quality of ' sincerity and strength,' which, 
 in Mr Swinburne's words, ' covers all his offences and 
 outweighs all his defects.' Marlowe belonged to this 
 class of writers ; for once it is safe to put a poet's 
 work into the critical crucible. Each of his plays can 
 be resolved into the prime conception from which the 
 dramatist started, and each in turn brings us into 
 close contact with the author himself. It is well to 
 keep this in mind in looking at his dramas. 
 
 His works may be easily grouped. Ediuaj'd II. 
 stands by itself; it represents the highest development 
 of the poet's genius, it represents too what was practi- 
 cally a new creation of Marlowe's, the genuine histori- 
 cal play. The tragedy of Dido, left unfinished at his 
 death, is rather a love poem than a drama, and may 
 be classed with the writer's exquisite Hej^o and 
 Lemider, both expressing in a high degree the purely 
 sensuous Italian love of beauty for beauty's sake which 
 was typical of the Renaissance spirit. The Massacre 
 at Paris is a mere fragment ; the text is so imperfect 
 and corrupt that for purposes of criticism the play is 
 wellnigh useless. We are left with three dramas — 
 
30 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 representing Marlowe's earlier style, the two parts of 
 Tainburlaine, the Jczu of Malta, and the Tragical 
 History of Dr Faitstus. They may be treated to- 
 gether, since each was written in conformity with a 
 dramatic theory peculiar to Marlowe. Various 
 writers have pointed out^ — what indeed is sufficiently 
 obvious — that each of these plays is a one-character 
 drama. In Tainburlaine we have the great conqueror, 
 who towers above all rivals ; in the Jezv of Malta we 
 have Barabas, the prototype of Shylock ; in Fanstiis, 
 the magician of medieval, legend. In each case the 
 interest centres round the one overshadowing person- 
 ality ; there are practically no minor characters. And 
 if each play resolves itself into a single character, so 
 each of these characters is the personification of a 
 single prevailing passion. Tamburlaine represents 
 the lust of dominion : here is the expression of his 
 creed, given in some of the finest lines the poet ever 
 wrote — 
 
 The thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown 
 That caused the eldest son of heavenly Ops 
 To thrust his doting father from his chair, 
 And place himself in the empyreal heavens, 
 Moved me to manage arms against thy state. 
 Nature that framed us of four elements, 
 Warring within our breasts for regiment, 
 Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds: 
 Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend 
 
 ^ No one more successfully than Professor Dowden, Fortnightly 
 Review, January 1870. 
 
SHAKSPEKE'S EARLIER STYLE. 3 1 
 
 The wondrous architecture of the world ^, 
 And measure every planet's wandering course, 
 Still climbing after knowledge infinite, 
 And always moving, as the restless spheres, 
 Wills us to wear ourselves, and never rest. 
 Until we reach the ripest fruit of all, 
 That perfect bliss and sole felicity. 
 The "sweet fruition of an earthly crown. 
 
 (ii. 7, ir — 29, Part I.) 
 
 In these lines we have the gist of the whole play; 
 and it is the same in the Jew of Malta. There may 
 be a second plot — the love story of Abigail and her 
 death — but primarily the interest centres in Barabas, 
 and Barabas is the thirst for gold personified. Here 
 is the outburst of his grief, when he believes that he 
 has lost all : 
 
 My gold ! My gold ! and all my wealth is gone ! 
 
 You partial heavens, have I deserved this plague? 
 
 What! will you thus oppose me, luckless stars? 
 
 To make me desperate in my poverty? 
 
 And knowing me impatient in distress, 
 
 Think me so mad as I will hang myself, 
 
 That I may vanish o'er the earth in air 
 
 And leave no memory that e'er I was? 
 
 No, I will live. (i. 2, 258—266.) 
 
 And so he schemes to recover his possessions, and 
 when, in the next act, Abigail flings down the bags 
 
 ^ 'The wondrous architecture of the world' — and yet Schlegel could 
 not understand what Ben Jonson meant by 'Marlowe's mighty line'! 
 though Marlowe might have been the 'better spirit' of whom Shak- 
 speare himself wrote : 
 
 'Was it the proud full sail of his great verse, 
 
 That did my ripe thoughts in my brain inhearse.' 
 
32 MARLOWKS INFLUENCE ON 
 
 to him, the intensity of his passionate joy is almost 
 fiendish and uncanny. 
 
 O my girl ! 
 My gold, my fortune, my felicity. 
 Strength to my soul, death to my enemy ! ■ 
 Welcome the first beginner of my bliss ! 
 O Abigail, Abigail, that I had thee here too ! 
 Then my desires were fully satisfied. 
 But I will practise thy enlargement hence: 
 O girl ! O gold ! O beauty ! O my bliss ! 
 
 Faustus typifies an incomparably nobler passion, 
 the thirst for boundless knowledge. In the prologue 
 to the Jezv of Malta Machiavel is made to say, 
 
 ' I count religion but a childish toy, 
 And hold there is no sin but ignorance.' 
 
 That is the philosophy of Faust. He is a very 
 Paracelsus in ambition. Nature shall reveal her 
 secrets to him ; he will no longer be bound with the 
 fetters imposed on other men. 
 
 In each play, then, it is this all-dominating, over- 
 powering passion that runs like a golden thread of silk 
 through the tangled intricacies of the parts, giving co- 
 herence to all, and ensuring harmony of effect. It is in 
 depicting the rise and progress of this central passion 
 that the dramatist expends all the resources of his art.^ 
 
 ^ Peele in his Honourable Order of the Garier, or rather in the pro- 
 logue 'ad Mtecenatem', naturally alludes to Marlowe, and it is to this 
 
 very capacity of the poet for depicting passion that he refers, 
 * 
 
 'Unhappy in thine end, 
 
 Marley, the Muses' darling for thy verse, 
 
 Fit to write passions for the souls below, 
 
 If any wretched souls in passion speak.' 
 
SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 33 
 
 He shows us its beginning, aflame that slowly brightens 
 and broadens until its fire fanned by the wind sweeps 
 mightily onward, devastating all and at last consum- 
 ing its originator. This peculiarity in Marlowe's 
 earlier plays is undoubtedly a source of weakness. 
 To think of one of Shakspere's greatest tragedies is 
 not to think of a single character; if Othello is 
 mentioned, our mind does not recur to Othello alone. 
 The interest is spread over the whole. Each of the 
 dramatis personam contributes his share to the general 
 effect ; they are not mere ciphers moving idly about 
 the scene, as impotent and unreal as the ghosts that 
 gibbered round Odysseus. A great drama is complex ; 
 it flashes upon you, like the facets of a diamond, with 
 a thousand different lights. But it is not so with 
 Marlowe's different plays. Each emits one steady 
 stream of scorching fire ; no more. To recall to 
 mind The Tragical History of Dr Faustus, is to re- 
 member the man who to win the world lost his own 
 soul ; on the other characters we bestow not a thought. 
 And the same is true of the other plays — of Tani- 
 bttrlaine, and the Jezv of Malta. I said above that 
 no poet was more self-revealing than Marlowe. The 
 impress of his personality is stamped on every page 
 with clear, firm lines ; for, although the passions which 
 his various characters personify, seem to us at first 
 sight to be distinct, yet if we look closer we find that 
 in reality they are one and the same. They are but 
 different aspects of the all-absorbing passion that 
 
 V. 3 
 
34 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 burns deep down in the heart of the poet — the flame 
 that feeds on his very soul And that passion is 
 desire of power. Lust of dominion — lust of wealth — 
 lust of knowledge — they all come to that. Tambur- 
 laine craves for kingship : like the Duke of Guise, he 
 will weary the world with his wars — and why ? To 
 conquer is to be powerful, and it is in the exercise of 
 power when won that he delights with a wild pagan 
 joy. 
 
 Tamburlaine. Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles? 
 Is it not passing brave to be a king, 
 And ride in triumph through Persepolis? 
 
 Tecli. O, my lord, 'tis sweet and full of pomp. 
 
 Us7un. To be a king, is half to be a god. 
 
 This is the spirit of the play. Again, Barabas 
 loves his gold as he loves his child ; it is almost flesh 
 of his flesh. But his passion is not petty ; it is no 
 sordid avarice. To Silas Marner, with no faith in man, 
 no trust in God, with the desolation of despair in his 
 heart, his money was the one tiny ray of light and 
 love that shone across the gloom of his life. ' His 
 gold as he hung over it and saw it grow, gathered his 
 power of loving together into a hard isolation like its 
 own.' But Barabas does not amass gold for gold's 
 sake. It is for the power that money brings that he 
 cares, and still more for the revenge it may give him 
 on his enemies. 
 
 Thus trowls our fortune in by land and sea, 
 And thus are we on every side enriched. 
 These are the blessings promised to the Jews 
 
SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 35 
 
 And herein was old Abraham's happiness: 
 
 What more may lieaven do for earthly man 
 
 Than thus to pour out plenty in their laps, 
 
 Ripping the bowels of the earth for them, 
 
 Making the seas their servants, and the winds 
 
 To drive their substance with successful blasts? 
 
 Who hateth me but for my happiness? 
 
 Or who is honoured now but for his wealth ? 
 
 Rather had I a Jew be hated thus, 
 
 Than pitied in a Christian poverty. (i. i, 102 — 115.) 
 
 This extract may give some idea of the feehng — 
 ' Money is power ' — that, not perhaps formulated in 
 any one passage, nevertheless breathes throughout 
 the whole play\ And if Tamburlaine and Barabas 
 
 ^ By the 'whole play' I mean of course such parts as can be safely 
 assigned to Marlowe. The true history of this drama we can never 
 know; only one thing is certain, that "the first two acts of the yew of 
 Alalia are more vigorously conceived both as to character and circum- 
 stance than any other Elizabethan play except those of Shakspeare" — 
 Hallam, Literature of Europe, II. 270. This is high praise, but not I 
 think too high. The poet displays astonishing power and grasp in the 
 first scenes; at the end of the second Act he has a noble plot in hand, 
 and then suddenly he seems to drop the threads, and all is a hopeless 
 maze of grotesque buffoonery. In the fifth Act there is a partial revival 
 of power. In Acts III. and IV. we doubtless have some of Marlowe's 
 work, but it is mixed up with the crudest clownage, the rhyme, we may 
 note, increasing considerably. A sufficient proof of the corruptness of 
 the text is, I think, furnished by the following passage. Ithamore is 
 speaking to Bellamira, — iv. 4, 95 — 105, 
 
 We will leave this paltry land, 
 And sail from hence to Greece, to lovely Greece, 
 I'll be thy Jason, thou my golden fleece. 
 Where painted carpets o'er the meads are hurled. 
 And Bacchus' vineyards overspread the world. 
 Where woods and forests go in goodly green, 
 I'll be Adonis, thou shalt be Love's queen. 
 
 3—2 
 
36 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 have their conception of power and, each in his own 
 way, strive to compass their ideal, still more is this the 
 case with Faustus. Knowledge is his end and aim ; 
 
 But on her forehead sits a fire: 
 
 She sets her forward countenance 
 
 And leaps into the future chance 
 Submitting all things to desire. 
 
 Half-grown as yet, a child and vain, 
 She cannot fight the fear of death. 
 What is she, cut from love and faith, 
 
 But some wild Pallas from the brain 
 
 Of Demons? fiery hot to burst 
 
 All barriers in her onward race 
 For power. 
 
 These lines ^ are a perfect epitome of the Faust 
 legend, as treated by Marlowe. It is at power that 
 Faustus grasps, and knowledge, he thinks, can give 
 
 The meads, the orchards and the primrose lanes, 
 Instead of sedge and reeds, bear sugar-canes: 
 Thou in these groves, by Dis above, 
 Shalt live with me and be my love. 
 
 Is it credible that the poet could have written this pitiable parody of his 
 own incomparable pastoral ? Half the poets of the period attempted to 
 imitate the inimitable 'Come live with me'. To copy it, as in the 
 eighteenth century to write an essay on the Spectator model, was the 
 Ulysses' bow which everyone tried to draw. It is scarcely probable that 
 Marlowe himself would have dragged into his play the jingling jargon 
 given above, ineffably worse than the worst of the avowed imitations of 
 his lyric. The writer, I imagine, inserted them as an easy way of 
 palming off his own 'jigging wits' as Marlowe's work. The average 
 spectator would catch the last line and be deluded into the belief that 
 the whole act was by Marlowe. The lyric is parodied in precisely the 
 same way in '•'• Liisfs Do/ninion,"'' for the same reason. 
 1 /w Memoriam, Canto cxiv. 
 
SHAKSPERES EARLIER STYLE. 37 
 
 it — but not ordinary knowledge. He has tried every 
 science — he has exhausted them all. He passes them 
 in review, and dismisses each with a sad, 'Why,Faustus, 
 hast thou not attained that end } ' And yet his 
 longing has not been satisfied : he is ' but Faustus, 
 and a man.' A man ! what bitter irony for one, who 
 has the ambition of a God. And then the thought 
 comes that magic will put the world at his feet. It 
 intoxicates him. He can resist no more. He agrees 
 to seal the compact, bids Mephistopheles return to 
 Lucifer, and there, standing on the very brink of the 
 precipice, is lost in one more vision of what the future 
 will bring. 
 
 Faushis. Go and return to mighty Lucifer, 
 
 And meet me in my study at midnight, 
 And then resolve me of thy master's mind. 
 
 Mephist. I will, Faustus. [Exit. 
 
 Faustus. Had I as many souls as there be stars, 
 I'd give them all for JNIephistophilis. 
 By him I'll be great emperor of the world 
 And make a bridge thorough the moving air, 
 To pass the ocean with a band of men : 
 I'll join the hills that bind the Afric shore 
 And make that country continent to Spain, 
 And both contributary to my crown. 
 The emperor shall not live but by my leave. 
 Nor any potentate of Germany. 
 
 ' L'amour de I'impossible' — to borrow Mr Symonds' 
 phrase — is the keynote of these three plays. It is 
 likewise the keynote of the poet's own character. One 
 can trace in all he wrote the presence impalpable, 
 indefinable, of a will for ever warring with convention. 
 
38 MARLOWE S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 He pants to be free. There is nothing petty in 
 Marlowe's poetry. He soars aloft, ' affecting thoughts 
 coequal with the clouds.' He reminds one of Shelley 
 — not the ' real Shelley ' — but the poet who speaks to 
 us in some of the noblest verse and the noblest prose 
 that our literature contains. Each was in a state of 
 perpetual revolt against the tyranny of social custom, 
 and each might be addressed in Shelley's own lines to 
 William Godwin. 
 
 Mighty eagle, thou that soarest 
 O'er the misty mountain forest, 
 
 And amid the light of morning, 
 Like a cloud of glory hiest, 
 And when night descends, defiest 
 The embattled tempest's warning. 
 
 We see the revolutionary bent of Marlowe's nature 
 in the very fact that he scornfully turned aside from 
 '\ the path trodden by previous dramatists, and boldly 
 struck out a new course. 
 
 What glory is there in a common good 
 That hangs for every peasant to achieve? 
 
 is the spoken thought of the Duke of Guise, and it is 
 no less the soliloquy of the poet. He blindly stretches 
 his hands to heaven, and clutches at something ' that 
 flies beyond his reach.' He is like the men round 
 him, who hardly knew what they could, and could not, 
 do. The world had drunk too deep of the Renais- 
 sance doctrines ^ Men were intoxicated with an un- 
 
 * Cf. Shaksperis Predecessors, p. 629. 
 
SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 39 
 
 known sensation of life, and power, and passion, 
 pulsating in their hearts. They yearned after — they 
 hardly knew what — and Marlowe was the incarnation 
 of this spirit. We know very little about his life, but 
 that little strengthens the conviction that his powers, 
 though great, were undisciplined, uncontrolled. He 
 has scarcely any sense of their limitation. His earlier 
 work is lacking in proportion ; it is bitter, extreme, ex- 
 aggerated. Tradition accuses him of Atheism. Prob- 
 ably Marlowe was no more an atheist than Shelley 
 was\ FatLstus surely is a sufficient answer to this 
 charge. The man who could paint with such terrible 
 truth the desolation of despair, the agony of repen- 
 tance, not merely fear, that sweeps over the soul of 
 Faustus, was assuredly not devoid of religious emo- 
 tion. But that Marlowe hated the Church as the 
 Church was then constituted, that he hated its dogma, 
 its tyranny, its system, seems to me beyond all doubt. 
 There are passages in his plays that breathe the 
 deepest loathing of Christianity ; passages, where the 
 bitterness of the speaker seems out of all proportion 
 to the dramatic requirements of the context. At 
 such times we seem to catch the ring of the poet's 
 own voice. 
 
 ^ Cf. Mr Bullen's Introduction, LXVii. — viii. Meres, in Palladis 
 Tainia says, 'As Jodelle, a French tragical poet, being an epicure and 
 an atheist, made a pitiful end, so our tragical poet Marlowe, for his 
 epicurism and atheism, had a tragical death.' Mr Bullen and Dyce 
 quote similar evidence. 
 
40 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 To emphasize in this way the deeply personal 
 element in Marlowe's work is not, I think, superfluous. 
 It is surely remarkable that his first three plays 
 should contain only three strongly-drawn characters, 
 and that each of these should be guided by a passion, 
 which in turn we find to have been the prevailing 
 passion of the poet's own nature. For to say this is 
 equivalent to saying that Tamburlaine, Barabas and 
 Faustus are merely different aspects of the poet him- 
 self. And yet it is so. To conceive them he had to 
 draw upon himself; he appealed to his own emotional 
 experience. They are not the offspring of a purely 
 creative imagination — they are rather projections 
 C from the poet's own inmost soul. Marlowe, in other 
 words, is not in these three plays the spectator ab 
 extra who conceives by the sheer force of imaginative 
 genius a great character, — great in its goodness, or 
 the reverse — with which he has no personal sympathy; 
 he is the character. His passions are the passions of 
 f Faustus. There is no gulf between the poet and the 
 beings whom he paints in his poetry ; he is merged in 
 them. Mr Furnivall in his valuable introduction to 
 the Leopold SJiakspere has some remarkable words on 
 this point. He says, " As to the question how far 
 we are justified in assuming that Shakspere put his 
 own feelings — himself — into his own plays, some men 
 scorn the notion ; ask you triumphantly which of 
 his characters represents him, assert that he himself is 
 in none of them, but sits apart, serene, unruffled him- 
 
SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 4^ 
 
 self by earthly passion, making his puppets move. 
 I believe on the contrary that all the deepest and 
 greatest work of an artist, playwright, orator, painter, 
 poet, is based on personal experience, on his own 
 emotions and passions, and not merely on his obser- 
 vations of things or feelings outside him, on which 
 his fancy and imagination work... He himself (Shak- 
 spere), his own nature and life are in all his plays." 
 As applied to Shakspere, this doctrine is at least 
 unusual. If ever there was a poet with a supreme 
 faculty for conceiving situations into which experience 
 had never brought him — of drawing characters as 
 unlike his own as Lear is unlike Falstaff — of being 
 swayed, as it were, in the persons of these characters 
 by passions which had no part or share in his own 
 nature — that poet, one would have thought, was 
 Shakspere. However, as far as the theory refers to 
 Shakspere it is no task of ours to examine it. Many 
 people would be inclined to dissent from the general 
 proposition, that the greatest work of a great artist is 
 based on personal experience. But so far as Marlowe 
 is concerned, the passage quoted above admirably 
 expresses the truth. In Tarnbiirlaine, the Jew of 
 Malta, and Faiistiis, Marlowe does not display the 
 highest type of imagination. He gives us three 
 
 1 An article in the Co7-nhill Magazhie, Vol. XLHi. — 'Why did 
 Shakspeare write Tragedies' — signed with the initials 'J. S.' and pre- 
 sumably written by Mr James Spedding, contains a fine criticism of Mr 
 Furnivall's point. 
 
42 . MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 characters ; each character is, more or less, the poet 
 himself, and each is finely drawn. But when he goes 
 outside himself, and has recourse to the purely- 
 imaginative faculty — whatever it be — he fails com- 
 pletely. The other dramatis personae are mere 
 shadows, simulacra modis pallentia miris. Who, as a 
 writer^ on the subject fairly remarks, ever realized 
 Cosroe, Mycetes, and the rest .'' To the last Marlowe 
 never succeeded in drawing a female character. 
 Greene was the first to give the stage women at all 
 comparable to those of Shakspere. Again, Marlowe 
 was deficient, I think, in the lower form of imagination. 
 He had little inventiveness ; he had none of Greene's 
 inexhaustible fancy. Greene was never at a loss ; he 
 was full of the playwright's resource ; he could always 
 devise some ingenious scene. But Marlowe in his 
 earlier plays shows a remarkable poverty in this 
 respect. When he attempts a striking situation, his 
 work is crude and rough-hewn. His effects, to vary 
 the metaphor, are too often achieved by simple dashes 
 of paint on the canvas. 
 
 To turn now to the first of the three works pre- 
 viously discussed. The two parts of TambtcrlaiJie, 
 like the two parts of Henry IV., form a complete 
 drama in ten acts, and may fairly be treated as a 
 single play. The faults of this play are obvious ; they 
 are in the main such as would naturally spring from 
 the peculiarities of Marlowe's dramatic method. 
 
 ^ Quarterly Revicio, October, 1885. 
 
SHAKS FERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 43 
 
 Tambnrlaine is not, properly speaking, a drama at 
 all ; it is rather a series of impressive scenes. We 
 have no plot, no complexity of action, no interde- 
 pendence and balance of parts. It does not begin 
 at any definite point, and dramatically there is no 
 very definite reason why it should end. Tamburlaine 
 at the outset intended to conquer the world ; by the 
 close of the tenth act he cannot, like Alexander, 
 complain that his conquests are exhausted. Instead 
 therefore of his death, we might have expected a 
 third part, and so on ; except indeed that of the 
 subsidiary characters^ few reach even the tenth act. 
 Whereas in a play of Shakspere's we have a dozen 
 threads that run in and out, and half tangled, half 
 unravelled, are in the end gathered up by the drama- 
 tist and united, there is in TambiLrlame but a solitary 
 streak of gold. This slender thread of interest — at 
 times drawn perilously fine — that keeps the whole 
 together, is of course Tamburlaine's lust of power. 
 His passion for conquest is the leitmotif of the piece. 
 There is no other continuous interest, because there 
 are no other characters. There are indeed fine 
 episodes, such as the death of Bajazeth (Part I. V. i.) 
 the love scenes with Zenocrate, and the death scene 
 
 ^ The list of deaths in Ta/nluirlaine is ahnost as formidable as the 
 catalogue drawn up by ]Mr Ruskin in his criticism on Bleak House, 
 e.g. Part I. ii. 7, Cosroe dies — iii. 2, Argier — v. i, Bajazeth and Zabina 
 — Soldan of Egypt. Part ii. ii. 3, Sigismund — ii. 4, Zenocrate — iii. 4, 
 Captain of the Fort — iv. 2, Calyphas — iv. 3, Olympia — v. i, Governor 
 of Babylon — v. 3, Tamburlaine. 
 
44 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 of Zenocrate, Part li. ii. 3. But it is on Tamburlaine 
 himself that the action of the whole drama turns, 
 from the first scene where we hear him exclaim, 
 'I am a lord, for so my deeds shall prove' — to the 
 last, where, tracing out ' the world of ground ' that lies 
 westward he complains that he must ' die and this 
 unconquered.' The poet was determined that the 
 central figure should arrest attention, and indisputably 
 he has succeeded in drawing a figure of extraordinary 
 effectiveness, the very embodiment of Titanic will 
 and force. In the second act Tamburlaine is described. 
 
 Of stature tall, and straightly fashioned, 
 
 Like his desire, lift upward and divine, 
 
 So large of limbs, his joints so strongly knit, 
 
 Such breadth of shoulders as might mainly bear 
 
 Old Atlas' burden ; twixt his manly pitch, 
 
 A pearl, more worth than all the world, is placed, 
 
 Wherein by curious sovereignty of art 
 
 Are fixed his piercing instruments of sight, 
 
 Whose fiery circles bear encompassed 
 
 A heaven of heavenly bodies in their spheres. 
 
 That guide his steps and actions to the throne, 
 
 Where honour sits invested royally; 
 
 Pale of complexion, wrought in him with passion, 
 
 Thirsting with sovereignty and love of arms: 
 
 His lofty brows in folds do figure death, 
 
 And in their smoothness amity and life. 
 
 About them hangs a knot of amber hair, 
 
 Wrapped in curls, as fierce Achilles' was, 
 
 On which the breath of heaven delights to play. 
 
 Making it dance with wanton majesty. 
 
 His arms and fingers long and sinewy ; 
 
 Betokening valour and excess of strength. 
 
 In every part proportioned like a man. 
 
 Should make the world subdued to Tamburlaine. 
 
SHAA'SPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 45 
 
 This might be a description of some picture by 
 Rembrandt. We seem to sec the face of the great 
 world-conqueror lit up with one of those dazzling 
 streams of light that Rembrandt could introduce into 
 his portraits with such infinite effect. The reader, 
 as distinguished from the spectator, is able to realise 
 the poet's conception of Tamburlaine in every detail, 
 and it is this conception alone that gives coherence, 
 or something like it, to a series of unconnected 
 pageants. Remove Tamburlaine and the ten acts are 
 simple chaos. That this should be so, that the play 
 should depend entirely on the presence on the stage of 
 one character, that there should be no balance of 
 parts, no relief, no evolution of thought, nothing, in 
 short, but the progress of the central figure as con- 
 queror, is surely a great dramatic flaw. Another 
 fault in Tamburlaine is the extravagance of style \ 
 shown in two ways. In the first place there are ' the 
 huffing braggart lines,' which 'Mine Ancient' in 
 Henry IV. vainly endeavours to imitate. On this 
 point indeed Pistol is the best critic, as he was one of 
 the first, and really there is nothing more to be said 
 
 ^ If the introduction to the golden age of Elizabethan literature was 
 marked by exaggeration of style, the silver age, the age of Tourneur 
 and others, is open to the same charge. Cf. Mr Edmund Gosse's remarks 
 on this point, Shakespeare to Pope, p. 29. The explanation is obvious. 
 The extravagance of those who precede the great period is the extrava- 
 gance of inexperience ; the extravagance of those who follow a Shak- 
 spere is that of imitation. The first class of writers have no models to 
 guide them : the second class have models, whose greatness they only 
 parody in their attempts to reproduce it. 
 
4^ MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 on the subject. It would be superfluous to insist on 
 the mere Midsummer madness of such speeches as 
 that of Tamburlaine in the second part (iv. 4), intro- 
 duced by the famous line, ' Holla, ye pampered jades 
 of Asia.' After all Marlowe was very young when he 
 wrote this play, and relying on the truth of a familiar 
 epigram we may say that even the youngest poets 
 must make mistakes. Such faults are exactly those 
 of an unformed style. Moreover, as Collier suggests \ 
 Marlowe had to satisfy his audience ; he could not 
 afford at the outset to soar clean over their heads. 
 He had taken away their rhyme, and as a substitute 
 gave them ' high astounding terms.' The extravagance 
 of language in Tamburlaine is balanced by extra- 
 vagance of incident. ' Schiller,' says Coleridge, * has 
 the material sublime ; to produce an effect he sets 
 you a whole town on fire, and throws infants with their 
 mothers into the flames, or locks up a father in an old 
 tower. But Shakspere drops a handkerchief, and the 
 same, or a greater effect, follows.' This is exactly 
 applicable to Marlowe. When the poet would move 
 pity, a whole troop of maidens must be put to the 
 sword ; Zenocrate dies, and the flames of Larissa can 
 alone quench the tears of Tamburlaine. 
 
 It is \}i\\s ferociic m. tone and treatment that repels 
 French critics of our Elizabethan literature. It is the 
 waste of energy, the squandering of power, that a 
 'literature of genius' according to Mr Matthew Arnold, 
 
 ^ iii. 117. 
 
SHAA'SPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 4/ 
 
 inevitably entails. Given a literary Court of Judg- 
 ment like the French Academy, such excesses would 
 be impossible ; but then such an innovation as the 
 introduction of blank verse would have been equally 
 out of the question. We must balance the good with 
 the evil. There are many faults in Taviburlaine, but 
 there are also astonishing merits. To begin with — the 
 play is full, from the first scene to the last, of the 
 noblest poetry — poetry, that is 'simple, sensuous, im- 
 passioned,' that sweeps the reader along in its resist- 
 less course. It is verse of the kind that Wordsworth 
 called 'inevitable;' every line fell into its place with- 
 out the poet knowing how it came there. Alfred de 
 Musset, according to tradition, would only write by 
 fits and starts, and then with a blaze of light about 
 him. One can imagine Marlowe working in the same 
 way, throwing off scene after scene at white heat, 
 never stopping to erase a single line. Hence, while 
 much that he wrote bears the clearest marks of the 
 author's haste and carelessness, the good — and the 
 great body of Marlowe's poetry is supremely good — 
 has the true ring of absolute spontaneity. The poetry 
 comes welling up from the depths of the poet's heart 
 — no tiny thread, whose every drop must be husbanded 
 — but a rich, full stream. And poetry such as Tavi- 
 burlaine contains was new to the stage. The melody 
 was intoxicating. Putting aside for the present the 
 question of metre, where in the contemporary drama 
 shall we turn, with any hope of finding such lines as 
 
48 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 the following — sonorous as the notes of an organ, 
 rhythmic as the ebb and flow of the sea-waves ? 
 
 Tcvnburlaine. Now walk the angels on the walls of heaven 
 As sentinels to warn the immortal souls, 
 To entertain divine Zenocrate. 
 Apollo, Cynthia, and the ceaseless lamps. 
 That gently looked upon this loathsome earth. 
 Shine downward now no more, but deck the heavens 
 To entertain divine Zenocrate. 
 The crystal springs, whose taste illuminates 
 Refined eyes with an eternal light. 
 Like tried silver, run through Paradise, 
 To entertain divine Zenocrate. 
 The Cherubins and holy Seraphins, 
 That sing and play before the King of kings. 
 Use all their voices and their instruments, 
 To entertain divine Zenocrate. 
 And in the sweet and curious harmony. 
 The God that tunes this music to our souls. 
 Holds out his hands in highest majesty, 
 To entertain divine Zenocrate. 
 Then let some holy trance convey my thoughts 
 Up to the palace of the empyreal heaven 
 That this my life may be as short to me. 
 As are the days of sweet Zenocrate. Part II. ii. 4. 
 
 This is poetry without 'the difference.' Again, 
 could Greene, or Peele, or Kydd, have written the 
 dying speech of Zenocrate in the same scene t 
 
 Zenocrate. Live still, my lord ! O let my sovereign live ! 
 And sooner let the fiery element 
 Dissolve and make your kingdom in the sky, 
 Than this base earth should shroud your majesty: 
 For would I but suspect your death by mine, 
 The comfort of my future happiness, 
 Turned to despair, would break my wretched breast, 
 And fury would confound my present rest. 
 
SHAA^SPEJ^E'S EARLIER STYLE. 49 
 
 But let me die my love ; yet let me die ; 
 With love and patience let your true love die I 
 Your grief and fury hurts my second life — 
 Yet let me kiss my lord before I die, 
 And let me die with kissing of my lord — 
 
 The English stage had never rung to the rhythm 
 of such periods. Against verse hke this there could 
 be no appeal. 
 
 ' His raptures were 
 All air and fire ', 
 
 says Drayton in the oft-quoted lines on Marlowe, 
 and these simple words exactly sum up the poetical 
 qualities which made Taniburlaine at the time of its 
 appearance unique and epoch-making. It contained 
 more genuine poetry than all previous dramas put 
 together, from the first Aliracle-Play down to the last 
 piece of rhymed fustian, that Nash, or Peele, or Kydd, 
 may have brought out, while Marlowe was busy on 
 the work which was to raise him high over their heads. 
 And if Marlowe rendered the stage a signal service 
 in showing that the drama might be, and indeed 
 thenceforth was bound to be, in the widest sense 
 poetical, he did scarcely less good in definitely fixing 
 the form or structure, which the drama should in the 
 future adopt. He brings us in Tamburlaiiie straight 
 into the presence of his characters. There are none 
 of the ingenious contrivances of which contemporary 
 plays are full, and which, as a rule, defeat their own 
 end. These devices were numerous enough ; to see 
 what they were, and how supremely ridiculous, we 
 
 V. 4 
 
50 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 need only turn to the works of Greene and Peele, 
 next to Marlowe the foremost writers of the time. In 
 Greene's James IV. we have a play within a play, 
 Bohan and Oberon keeping up a running commentary 
 on the course of the piece. The Looking for London 
 and England'^, is a perfect storehouse of crude incon- 
 gruities. Oseas periodically appears to point the 
 moral ; a good and an evil angel are introduced, the 
 latter amongst other things tempting the usurer to 
 kill himself, even ' offering the knife and rope,' as the 
 stage-directions quaintly inform us, and yet one more 
 absurdity from the same piece, a burning sword is let 
 down from heaven. ^TJie Comical History of King 
 Alphonsns begins and ends with an assemblage of the 
 Muses, and throughout Venus acts as a kind of 
 chorus ; in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay the intro- 
 duction of the supernatural is managed rather clumsily. 
 Peele is quite as great an offender in these matters as 
 Greene. The Arraignment of Paris is confessedly 
 classical in subject and style, but even in a classical 
 piece the entrance of Ate ('from the lowest hell') with 
 a prologue in her hand seems a gratuitous absurdity. 
 In Sir Clyomo7i and Clamydes^ there are personifica- 
 tions of Rumour and Providence, not indeed that 
 
 ^ Probably, however, Lodge was responsible for the greater part of 
 this terrible 'Morality'. Dyce, Greene and Peclc,^. 32. 
 
 - Is it quite clear that this piece was by Peele? Mr Dyce says 'On the 
 title-page of a copy of this play a MS. note in a very old hand attributes 
 it to Peele, and I have no doubt rightly.' The evidence, as Mr Symonds 
 says, does not seem very conclusive ; there is one small point worth 
 
SHAKSPERES EARLIER STYLE, 51 
 
 anything could possibly add to the faults of a piece of 
 which one can only say that in point of dulness it is a 
 case of Eclipse first and the rest nowhere. The Old 
 Wives Talc deserves considerate handling as having 
 not improbably suggested the idea of Milton's Comiis; 
 moreover it contains some pleasant scenes. But, like 
 James IV., it is a play within a play and the device 
 in the hands of Peele does not succeed. In David 
 and BetJisabe we have a regular chorus ; in the Battle 
 of Alcazar the action is eked out by the help of a 
 Presenter, a Dumb-show, and Hercules and Jonah. 
 Finally in Edzvard I. an earthquake takes place by 
 special request and gets rid of the Queen for an act 
 or two, though she subsequently reappears through a 
 dens ex machina-d^yjice. which the dramatist does not 
 stop to elucidate. All these artifices were mechanical 
 and utterly clumsy, but none the less playwrights 
 employed them as part of their legitimate dramatic 
 machinery. Marlowe brushed them on one side, and , 
 rightly, for such contrivances can only produce a 
 general effect of incongruity. No doubt some of the 
 devices were effective enough, if sparingly used. In 
 the Winter's Tale., for instance, the chorus is indispens- 
 
 noticing. Some dramatists — notably Greene, as Mr Richard Grant \Yhite 
 pointed out in discussing the Henry VI. Parts II. and III. question — are 
 very fond of the peculiar idiom 'for to' with an infinitive. Peele does 
 not often employ it : there are only scattered instances in his works, e.g. 
 two in the Oil IVives'' Tale, three in the Arraignment of Paris. In Sir 
 ClyoDion and Sir Clamydes — a very long piece it is true — I have noted 
 over 70 examples. 
 
 4—2 
 
52 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 able, and the same may be said of Henry V. Similarly 
 A MidsiLinuier Nighfs Dream — not to mention Hamlet 
 and the Taming of a Shrew — shows us what admirable 
 effects may be attained by putting a play inside a 
 play. But when such shifts were employed continually 
 careless and incongruous work was the result, and 
 everything that stands outside the main course of a 
 play tends to create a feeling of unreality, precisely 
 the danger against which a good dramatist guards. 
 Hence it was an immense gain that in Tanibnrlaine 
 
 \ the audience were brought at the outset into the pre- 
 sence of the dramatis personae, that the action of the 
 play developed naturally, that no chorus trotted in and 
 out at odd moments, that in a word the piece possessed 
 the primary elements of naturalness and reality. 
 
 We may say, then, that Marlowe in giving poetry 
 a place on the stage, and in laying down sound 
 principles of dramatic structure, did no small service 
 to the drama. But there is another point in Tambitr- 
 laine. The poet was trying a great experiment, and 
 it was essential to the success of this attempt that the 
 material out of which his play was constructed should 
 possess the strongest elements of popularity; he was 
 bound to interest the spectators. His choice of a 
 subject was admirable. The story of Tamburlaine is 
 .^"heroic, romantic, one that would naturally seize the 
 
 ' attention of a large audience. The very extravagance 
 of the piece — Tamburlaine's thirst for power — his 
 sacrifice of all, even of his child, to the passion of his 
 
SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 53 
 
 life, admitted of the sensational, melodramatic treat- 
 ment that satisfied the craving for strong excitement 
 natural to an English audience. He tells us in the 
 prologue what we have to expect — 
 
 'We'll lead you to the stately tent of war, 
 Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine : 
 Threatening the world with high, astounding terms, 
 And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword. 
 View but his picture in this tragic glass 
 And then applaud his fortune as you please.' 
 
 This is the poet's promise, and it is amply fulfilled. 
 After Tamburlame there could be no question of any 
 continuation of the Religious, or Classical drama. Both 
 were routed, and still more important, the 'jigging 
 veins ' and ' the conceits of clownage ' were likewise 
 swept on one side. 
 
 'Marlowe was trying a great experiment.' Like 
 Polyphemus, who thoughtfully reserved Odysseus to 
 the end of his banquet as a choice morsel, I have 
 kept this point — the introduction of blank verse — to 
 the last. Few questions in English literature are 
 more interesting than the history of blank verse. 
 The honour of having first employed this metre for 
 dramatic purposes is usually given to Sackville and 
 Norton ; I think the credit belongs entirely to Marlowe. ^ 
 
 Let us consider the circumstances under which 
 rhyme was discarded. Surrey \ in his translation of 
 
 1 Vide what Meres, plagiarising from Ascham, says in Palladis 
 Taiiiia of Surrey, who, by the way, called his own verse 'a strange 
 metre', which it certainly was. 
 
•54 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 the fourth book of the yEneid, was the first writer 
 who ended his lines with a vacant or blank syllable. 
 Probably the impulse came from Italy. Like Gas- 
 coigne, Greene, Peele and many other writers, Surrey 
 had travelled in that country, and there the transition 
 from rhymed to unrhymed verse had long been effected. 
 Trissino, the father of Italian tragedy, Rucellai, and 
 other poets had all written the so-called versi sciolti\ 
 The abandonment therefore of rhyme was due to ex- 
 ternal circumstances ; in other words, it was artificial. 
 But, although in all probability the example of Italian 
 writers^ was the immediate cause of the change, yet 
 the idea that rhyme was a barbarous survival sprang 
 in either case from the classicism fostered by the 
 Renaissance, ^schylus, Sophocles and the other 
 Greek poets had not employed rhyme, the world 
 recognised these writers as amongst the greatest, 
 therefore rhyme was bad ; the argument seemed 
 complete, totns teres atqiie rotundiis. 
 
 We have several critical treatises on the subject 
 by writers of the time, most of whom argue for the 
 abolition of rhyme in favour of what they call the 
 'Carmen iambicum,' their theory being that a metre 
 can be transplanted from one language to another 
 quite irrespectively of the inherent differences that 
 may separate those languages. That is the view 
 
 ^ Cf. Symonds, Shaksperc' s Predecessors^ p. 592. The Sophonisba of 
 Trissino — praised by Pope — was produced in 1515. 
 - Cf. Guest, History of English Rhythms^ p. 528. 
 
SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 55 
 
 advanced in Ascham's Schoolmaster. Ascham dis- 
 cusses the rhyme question in a spirit of the very 
 narrowest pedantry, appeaHng at every step to the 
 classical writers, precisely as Meres in his Palladis 
 Taniia begins each paragraph with the inevitable ' As 
 Homer,' or ' As Sophocles,' etc., ' So Chaucer,' etc. — 
 And it is the same with the other critics. Puttenham\ 
 for instance, speaks of the ' rhyming poesie of the 
 barbarians,' and in his sixth chapter (Book I.) explains 
 how it was that the idea of rhymed compositions first 
 arose, with all the disastrous results that followed 
 thereupon. Again in Webbe's Discotirse of English 
 Poetry'^ (1586), rhyme is indifferently called ' tinkerly 
 verse,' 'brutish poesie,' and 'a great decay of that good 
 order of versifying,' the moral of Webbe's criticism 
 being, that poets should follow the Greek model and 
 eschew everything but classical metres. In a later 
 work. Campion's Art of English Poesie"^, 1602, we 
 have specimens of two kinds of iambic lines — the 
 ' iambic pure,' and the ' licentiate iambic' The argu- 
 ments of these several writers were all variations on 
 the same note, the gist of their criticisms simply 
 amounting to this, that the only true authorities on 
 
 1 Haslewood, i. p. 7 — 9. 
 
 2 Ibid. n. p. 55. 
 
 ^ Haslewood, ii. As a specimen of the 'pure iambic' Campion (p. 
 168) gives the following line : 
 
 'The more secure the more the stroke we feel.' 
 This, he says, is a 'licentiate iambic' — 
 
 'Hark how these winds do murmur at thy flight.' 
 
5 6 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 questions of literary form and taste were the classical 
 writers, that there could be no departure from the 
 critical canons they observed, that a rhythm which 
 suited the peculiar character of the Greek language 
 would (in the face of facts) suit the English, that 
 therefore these classical metres should be introduced 
 and native metres discarded in their favour — or, as 
 Ascham puts it — poets should 'leave off their rude 
 barbariousness in rhyming and follow diligently the 
 excellent Greek and Latin examples in true versify- 
 ing.' These doctrines were widely spread. Critics 
 affected to look with contempt on the English 
 language and on its metres. On the one hand Philip 
 Sidney and his little Academe^ were making heroic 
 efforts to introduce unrhymed hexameters and sap- 
 phics into English literature. This was * artificial 
 versifying,' and it was doomed to failure. Such 
 metres depend on quantity, and for quantity the 
 English language can only offer the poor substitute 
 of accent. On the other hand, the purely scholastic 
 critics approached their mother tongue in the spirit of 
 Holofernes, who was 'a scholar at the least.' They 
 were bent on subjecting native rhythms to elaborate 
 rules drawn from their study of classical models. 
 They did not stop to reflect that the poetry of a 
 nation grows with the language, that the metrical 
 forms most suited to the peculiarities of the language 
 
 ^ Even Spenser was guilty of dabbling in these pseudo-classical 
 metres. Cf. Church's Spenscj' ('English Men of Letters' Series) p. 27. 
 
SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. $7 
 
 survive, while others die out, or remain unattempted 
 altogether, that, in short, metrically, whatever is is 
 best, and that ' one language', as Johnson says, 'cannot 
 communicate its rules to another'. They found the 
 normal heroic line of five feet 'the standard metre of 
 serious English poetry, in epic story, idyll, satire, 
 drama, elegy and meditative lyric' It was one of the 
 oldest metres. It had been used by various writers 
 in various combinations, by Chaucer in the couplet 
 and rime royal \ by Surrey and other poets in the 
 sonnet, by Spenser in the stanzas of the Faery Queen. 
 But in every case the lines had rhymed. Never, 
 until Surrey made the innovation, had the last foot 
 been left blank or unrhymed. But Surrey's abandon- 
 ment of rhyme seemed a decided step in advance. 
 The heroic line — minus the rhyme — was somewhat "^ 
 like the Greek iambic line, and the critics thought 
 that they could make the resemblance still stronger. 
 There were, of course, certain difficulties in the way. 
 To begin with, the heroic line is shorter by a whole 
 foot than the Greek senarius^ a fact which was con- 
 veniently ignored. Again — and this was the serious 
 stumbling-block — the Greek iambus, like all Greek 
 
 ^ i.e. the ballet stave of 8 lines. Guest, bk. iv. chap. \. Cf. 
 ShakspCTc' s Predecessors, p. 591. 
 
 - Daniel in his Defence of Rhyme notes this point. 'For what', he 
 says, 'do we have here, what strange precept of art about the forming 
 of an iambic verse in our language, which, when all is clone, reaches not 
 by a foot, but falleth out to be the plain Ancient Verse, consisting of 10 
 syllables or 5 feet, which hath been used among us time out of mind.' 
 
5 8 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 metres, is based on the quantitative structure. But 
 the English language does not admit in its prosody 
 the idea of quantity at all ; hence the impossibility of 
 applying to the English heroic line the system of 
 scansion by quantity. All rhythmic effects in English 
 verse rest on the principle of accent, so the scholastic 
 critics decided that an unaccented syllable should 
 represent a short syllable, and, contrarily, an accented, 
 a long syllable ; in this way they hoped to overcome 
 the quantitative difficulty. Now, as long as a writer, 
 following this principle, alternated an unaccented with 
 an accented syllable, he could produce pure iambic 
 lines of five feet, each foot being an iambus, and each 
 line ending, on the classical model, with a syllable 
 counted long, the tendency obviously being to isolate 
 the lines. But further than this he could not venture. 
 Once abandon this normal structure, and he was 
 certain to break his prescribed rules. The result was 
 obvious. The English iambic line was • infinitely 
 poorer than the Greek iambic line. How could it be 
 otherwise 1 The Greek dramatist was not bound to 
 have an iambus in every foot. In the first, third, and 
 fifth places other feet were admissible. He could 
 vary his lines by the introduction of tribrachs, ana- 
 paests, dactyls and spondees ; a trochee he could not 
 use. Consequently the trochee could find no place in 
 the English iambic line of these Elizabethan critics, 
 and yet there is no foot that English poetry admits 
 more readily, a signal proof of the futility of attempt- 
 
SHAA'SFEKE'S EARLIER STYLE. 59 
 
 ing- to impose upon one language the rules of another. 
 Thus the English iambic failed to reproduce any of 
 the richness and rhythm of the Greek iambic — quali- 
 ties directly traceable to the peculiarities of the Greek 
 language — and at the same time it lacked the old 
 charm which it had derived from the genuinely English 
 principle of rhyme. The critics in short had fallen 
 between two stools. As the result of these various 
 shifts and expedients they had produced a metre 
 which was limited to one foot, and proportionately 
 monotonous. To prove this, one need only quote a 
 passage from Gorbodiic. Here is an extract from 
 Videna's speech at the beginning of the fourth Act- — 
 one of the most vigorous in the play — 
 
 'Why should I live and linger forth my time, 
 In longer life to double my distress ? 
 O me most woeful wight ! whom no mishap 
 Long ere this day could have bereaved hence, 
 Mought not these hands by fortune or by fate 
 Have pierced this breast, and life with iron reft? 
 Or in this palace here where I so long 
 Have spent my days, could not that happy hour 
 Once, once have happ'd, in which those hugy frames 
 With deathly fall might have oppressed me? 
 Or should not this most hard and cruel soil, 
 So oft where I have pressed my wretched steps, 
 Some time had ruth of mine accursed life 
 To rend in twain and swallow me therein, 
 * So had my bones possessed now in peace 
 Their happy grave within the closed ground 
 And greedy worms had gnawed this pined heart 
 Without my feeling pain.' 
 
 This is indeed 'the even road of a blank verse.' The 
 
60 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 only objection to such lines is that we never leave 
 the level ground. It is the monotony of a Cambridge- 
 shire landscape. We can hardly wonder that any 
 theory which led to the production of such verse 
 should have been fiercely assailed. The rhymed 
 couplet was not suitable for use on the stage, but 
 this hybrid line with its solitary foot\ its almost 
 invariable pause at the end of the fourth syllable, 
 and the repeated monosyllabic ending^ was infinitely 
 worse. The heroic couplet could at least claim to be 
 considered poetry, but who would undertake to define 
 its successor } The latter simply represented the 
 apotheosis of pedantry. 
 
 The fetters of rhyme therefore had been broken 
 K without any good result following. Playwrights were 
 no nearer than before to a solution of the problem — 
 what was the most fitting vehicle of dramatic ex- 
 pression. The tyranny of the iambic was worse than 
 \ the tyranny of rhyme. And there could be no pro- 
 
 1 What Gascoigne said in his ^ Notes of Instmction, Concerning the 
 inaJdng of Verse or Ryme in English\ 1575, is perfectly true. 'Note 
 you that commonly nowadays in English rimes (for I dare not call them 
 verses), we use none other order but a foot of two syllables, whereof the 
 first is depressed or made short, and the second is elevate or made long, 
 and that sound or scanning continueth through the Verse... and surely I 
 can lament that we are fallen into such a plain and simple maniner of 
 ■writing that there is none other foot used but one.' Gascoigne was no 
 champion of rhyme; he merely protested against the tyranny of this 
 solitary, iambic foot. Haslewood, II. 
 
 " Thus in the above passage of 18 lines there are 14 monosyllabic 
 endings. 
 
SHAKSFERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 6 1 
 
 gress until some poet should arise, who taking the 
 old heroic line, could free it alike from the bonds of 
 the couplet and from the classical rules imposed upon 
 it. This Christopher Marlowe did. He borrowed the 
 heroic line, and in his hands the instrument was 
 touched to nobler issues than hitherto. He created a 
 verse system radically different from the verse of 
 Gorboduc. In the latter the couplet, or perhaps the 
 single line was the unit ; in blank verse proper the I 
 whole paragraph is the unit. And herein lies its 
 merit. The central idea of a speech in Shakspere is 
 progress. All thought is progressive, or at least all 
 thought passes through different stages. Now blank 
 verse above all verse is best calculated to express the 
 transitions of spoken thought, because changes passing 
 in the speaker's mind are expressed by changes in the 
 time and rhythm of his words. The basis of blank 
 verse, as of all English prosody, is accent, and accent 
 is only another form of emphasis. A speaker by 
 means of emphasis, by means of variety in the pause, 
 by means of accelerated and slackened rhythm can 
 give perfect expression to everything that directs the 
 train of his thoughts. The verse, in a word, reflects 
 every shade of his meaning. The distribution of the 
 rests, the incidence of the accent can emphasise the 
 relative importance of his sentences. The thought 
 conveyed, and the language in wdiich it is conveyed, 
 go side by side. Blank verse, to employ a simile, is 
 like the drapery that a sculptor chisels round a 
 
62 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 statue ; it clothes the thought, or, to vary the simile, 
 we may say that a paragraph of blank verse resembles 
 the human hand. The internal system of the lines in 
 themselves — the accent, the pause, and the rhythm — 
 represents the structure of bones and sinew that con- 
 stitute the framework of the hand ; the thought that 
 vivifies and penetrates every syllable of the speech is 
 parallel to the blood that reaches into every crevice 
 of the member, making the whole living, united, 
 supple. No one understood the art of merging the 
 thought in its expression better than Milton. ' In 
 the flow' — says Dr Guest^ — 'of his rhythm, in the 
 quality of his letter-sounds, in the disposition of his 
 pauses, his verse almost ever fits the subject. And 
 so insensibly does poetry blend with this, the last 
 beauty of exquisite versification, that the reader 
 sometimes doubts whether it be the thought itself, or 
 merely the happiness of its expression, which is the 
 source of a gratification so deeply felt.' Dr Guest, 
 however, goes on to blame Milton for his 'unsettled 
 accentuation,' for * running the verses one into the 
 otherV and observes, ' few readers are to be met with, 
 who can make the beginning or the ending of Milton's 
 lines perceptible to the audience.' This, he says, 
 may be a beauty, but it is beyond the legitimate 
 range of metre. ' Versification ceases to be a science, 
 
 1 i^\x&s\.'?> English Rhyth??is, -p. 530. 
 
 2 In the same way Daniel in his Defence of Ryme, objects to the 
 'boundless runninsj on of the classics.' 
 
SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 63 
 
 if its laws may be thus lightly broken.' It is of 
 course only a repetition of Johnson's well-known 
 criticism, that ' the variety of pauses, so much boasted 
 by the lovers of blank verse, changes the measures 
 of an English poet to the periods of a declaimer.' 
 Johnson meant this sentence to be a reproach. 
 As a matter of fact he sums up with admirable 
 terseness the peculiar excellence of blank verse. It 
 is essentially rhetorical, and consequently, whatever 
 its fitness or unfitness for purposes of epic narration, 
 it is indisputably the best of all metres as a means of ' 
 dramatic expression. It can approximate to the prose 
 of every-day life without losing its dignity as poetry ; 
 it can give the natural rhythm of conversation, and 
 yet remain verse. But obviously all depends on the 
 actor's, or reader's, fineness of ear. A line may be 
 deficient by a syllable, lacking, as is often the case in 
 Marlowe's verse, the initial syllable, or it may be 
 redundant, having a syllable packed in the middle, 
 or — as in Fletcher's plays — an extra emphatic syllable 
 at the end — or an ordinary ' feminine ' ending — or the 
 verse may be an apparent Alexandrine, or — in short, it 
 may represent any one of the various departures from 
 the normal blank verse line employed by dramatists ; 
 but in such cases examination will show that, though 
 the number of syllables be defective, or redundant, 
 )^et the sound, regulated by the sense of the line — is 
 in one case sufficient, in the other not really excessive. 
 To say this now is to repeat the merest common- 
 
64 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 place. But we must remember who it was that first 
 introduced these apparent irregularities, who first 
 developed the ' licenciate iambic ' — who, in a word, 
 first conceived a true idea of the metrical beauty, to 
 which blank verse might properly attain. In verse of 
 the Gorbodiic type there was nothing but lifeless 
 monotony — almost each line was isolated, certainly 
 each couplet. At the very outset therefore it was 
 clear, that such verse could never be suitable for the 
 stage. There can be no true evolution of thought in 
 single lines ; ideas are splintered into fragments. 
 This had been the great fault of the rhymed couplet ; 
 each pair of lines was complete in itself The 
 characters talked in epigrams, because what they 
 wished to say had continually to be concentrated 
 within the narrow limits of the two lines. It is the 
 flaw in Shakspere's earliest plays. The dialogue is 
 too sharp and pointed ; there is none of the diffuseness, 
 the easy expansiveness of natural conversation. And 
 similarly in longer speeches a finicking metre which 
 brings the speaker to a close at the end of every line, 
 or pair of lines, precludes a large and gradual flow of 
 ideas. What is passing in the character's mind must 
 be twisted and strained to suit the requirements of the 
 metre. Thought expressed in blank verse, such as 
 Shakspere wrote in the later plays, resembles the flow 
 of a stately stream ; thought expressed in rhymed 
 couplets is like a brook that foams and frets at each 
 rock in its course, at every turn in its twisted 
 
SHAKSPERKS EARLIER STYLE. 65 
 
 channel. As for the metre of Gorbodtic, the expres- 
 sion of thought in such hnes is almost impossible — 
 the movement of the verse is the motion of a stagnant 
 river, that barely progresses at all. After listening 
 to the play, the audience might well have said with 
 Jaques, 'Nay, then, God be wi'you, an you talk in 
 blank verse.' But Marlowe flung to the winds all 
 rules. He transformed the ' drumming decasyllabon ;' 
 he introduced the hitherto forbidden trochees and 
 other feet. His lines were sometimes deficient by a 
 syllable, sometimes redundant; they were 'unstopt.' 
 There was no longer the invariable pause after the 
 fourth syllable ; the single couplet was no longer the 
 unit. The emphasis fell naturally on the right words. 
 and the lines were combined into periods through 
 which the sense could develope in easy transitions, 
 ' variously drawn out,' to speak with Milton — ' from 
 one verse into another^' The sound was an echo 
 to the sense. The rhythm perpetually changed — 
 'lift upward and divine,' to echo the passions of 
 Tamburlaine ; swift, broken abrupt to ring the deso- 
 lation, the despair that closes over Faustus, in that 
 terrible ' last scene of all ' ; sonorous and sad to tell 
 the tragedy of Marlowe's King. And so in his first 
 play the poet could give us lines like these. 
 
 If all the pens that ever poets held 
 
 Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, 
 
 ^ This 'boundless running,' as Daniel terms it, has well been called 
 the 'overflow' : Shakespeare to Pope, p. 6. 
 
 V. 5 
 
66 MARLOWKS INFLUENCE ON 
 
 And every sweetness that inspired their hearts 
 Their minds and muses on admired themes : 
 If all the heavenly quintessence they still 
 From their immortal flowers of poesy, 
 Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive 
 The highest reaches of a human wit, 
 If these had made one poem's period, 
 And all combined in beauty's worthiness. 
 Yet should there hover in their restless head 
 One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least 
 Which into words no virtue can digest. 
 
 Mr Swinburne^ in one of his essays takes four lines 
 from Wordsworth's poem ' The Sohtary Reaper.' 
 
 Will no one tell me what she sings? 
 Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow 
 For old unhappy far off things 
 And battles long ago. 
 
 If, he says, all that Wordsworth ever wrote had 
 perished, with the exception of this half stanza, yet 
 the poet's name must have been immortal. These 
 few verses were enough to keep fresh the fame of any 
 writer. May not the same be said of the passage 
 from Marlowe quoted above } If of Marlowe's plays 
 not one had survived, if Hero and Leander had sunk 
 into the waters of oblivion under the weight of 
 Chapman's continuation of the original, if the two or 
 three lyrics (' old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good') 
 that we possess, had gone the way that the other 
 lyrical poems which he must have written were 
 doomed to go, still these 13 lines of blank verse, 
 
 ^ This was written before contending critics had crushed all the 
 poetry out of the hapless half-stanza. 
 
SHAA'S PERKS EARLIER STYLE. 67 
 
 enshrined in one of the many anthologies of the 
 time, would surely have been sufficient to prove that 
 a true poet had lived, and suffered, and sung-, and 
 been forgotten. The instrument which contented 
 Norton and Sackville, and the court audiences, could 
 give forth a solitary note. The instrument created by 
 Marlowe could ring out, at the touch of its master, 
 the full diapason of an organ. It is possible that 
 Bottom, who had ' a reasonable good ear in music,' 
 might have traced some connection between the two. 
 Ben Jonson exactly described (Schlegel notwith- 
 standing) the main characteristics of the poet's verse, 
 when he spoke of Marlowe's ' mighty line.' As a rule, 
 such epigrammatic definitions are not very satisfactory. 
 Attempts to label a writer's work with a convenient 
 reference-phrase usually mean that one aspect of his 
 character is emphasised and brought into relief at the 
 expense of the rest ; side points must perforce be left 
 out of sight. But ' mighty' perfectly expresses, so far 
 as any one epithet can express, the peculiar quality of 
 Marlowe's poetry. It is in what Mr Matthew Arnold 
 calls the ' grand style,' and of this style the last lines 
 that I quoted are an admirable specimen. It would 
 be a mistake however to suppose that the poet always 
 wrote in this vein. On the contrary, his verse displays, 
 especially in his best work, Edward the Second, con- 
 siderable variety. He handles the metre with con- 
 summate ease, and the secret of his rhythmic effects 
 lies in the skill with which the movement of the lines 
 
 5—2 
 
68 , MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 is always adapted to the subject. Here is a passage 
 that might, as Mr BuUen says, have come out of 
 Paradise Lost. 
 
 The galleys and those pilling brigandines 
 
 That yearly sail to the Venetian Gulf, 
 
 And hover in the straits for Christian wreck, 
 
 Shall lie at anchor in the isle Asant, 
 
 Until the Persian fleet and men of war, 
 
 Sailing along the oriental sea, 
 
 Have fetched about the Indian Continent 
 
 Even from Persepolis to Mexico 
 
 And thence unto the straits of Jubalter. 
 
 Taniburlaine, Part I. iii. 3, 248 — 255. 
 
 ' SaiHng along the oriental sea ' — the subtle swing 
 of the line is perfectly expressive of the easy motion 
 of a fleet. We have the same kind of effect in a 
 passage in the Jew of Malta, i. I. 41. 
 
 Why then I hope my ships 
 I sent for Egypt and the bordering isles 
 Are gotten up by Nilus winding banks : 
 Mine Argosy from Alexandria, 
 Loaden with spice and silk, now under sail. 
 Are smoothly gliding down by Candy shore 
 To Malta, through our Mediterranean Sea. 
 
 Here again the smooth rapidity of the last line 
 and a half exactly suggests the idea of a ship under 
 canvas ; on the other hand, the laboured effect of the 
 third verse is noticeable. 
 
 Earlier in the same speech occurs the following 
 remarkable paragraph : 
 
 Give me the merchants of the Indian mines 
 That trade in metal of the purest mould; 
 
SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 69 
 
 The wealthy Moor, that in the Eastern rocks 
 Without control can pick his riches up, 
 And in his house heap pearls like pebble stones, 
 Receive them free and sell them hy the weight. 
 Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts, 
 Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds, 
 Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds, 
 And seld seen costly stones. 
 
 Lines more hopelessly irregular according to the 
 principles laid down in Gorboduc it would be difficult 
 to conceive. ' Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds,' 
 the effect is as beautiful as it was original ; the 
 description seems to reflect the light flashing from 
 the facets of the gems ; we are dazzled by the com- 
 bination of words. The Tragedy of Dido contains at 
 least half a dozen remarkable lines with the true 
 Marlowesque ring. 
 
 Then he unlocked the horse ; and suddenly. 
 
 From out his entrails, Neoptolemus, 
 
 Setting his spear upon the ground, leapt forth, 
 
 And after him a thousand Grecians more 
 
 In whose stern faces shined the quenchless fire 
 
 That after burnt the pride of Asia.' ii. i, 183 — 88. 
 
 The resistless sweep of these verses, an effect 
 altogether beyond the reach of Nash, vividly repro- 
 duces the action described ; even the epithet ('quench- 
 less') is characteristic. Again in the same scene the 
 poet has a fine combination of monosyllables. 
 
 And, as he spoke, to further his intent. 
 
 The winds did drive huge billows to the shore. 
 
 And heaven was darkened with tempestuous clouds. 
 
 (139— 141). 
 
70 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 In the movement of the second hne one seems to 
 catch an echo of the rush and roar of the actual waves. 
 This play exhibits a curious phenomenon in the poet's 
 handling of the blank verse, viz. a return at times to 
 the structure of the old couplet. As a specimen, the 
 following speech will serve. 
 
 Aeneas, I'll repair thy Trojan ships, 
 
 Conditionally, that thou wilt stay with me, 
 
 And let Achates sail to Italy: 
 
 I'll give thee tackling made of rivelled gold, 
 
 Wound on the barks of odoriferous trees; 
 
 Oars of massy ivory, full of holes, 
 
 Through which the water shall delight to play ; 
 
 Thy anchors shall be hewed from crystal rocks, 
 
 Which, if thou lose, shall shine above the waves ; 
 
 The masts, whereon thy swelling sails shall hang. 
 
 Hollow pyramides of silver plate; 
 
 The sails of folded lawn, where shall be wrought 
 
 The wars of Troy — but not Troy's overthrow. 
 
 This passage, as Mr Symonds points out, is not at 
 all in Marlowe's usual, or at any rate later, style. It 
 is only blank verse in the sense that there are no 
 rhymes. As an explanation it may be worth while 
 to suggest that the play was written while Marlowe 
 was busy with the composition of his incomparable 
 Hero and Leandcr. The latter was entered at 
 Stationers' Hall 1593; the Tragedy of Dido was 
 published 1 594. As I said before, both are really 
 love-poems, and the passage just quoted is exactly 
 such a description as might have occurred in Hero and 
 Leander. Perhaps it is not unnatural to suppose that 
 
SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 71 
 
 the poet in writing the drama would occasionally glide 
 into the couplet form employed in the sister-poem. 
 
 It is in Edward 11. that Marlowe's power of 
 writing vigorous blank verse in dialogue is best seen. 
 His handling of the metre in Tainbiirlaiiic was a little 
 stiff. The lines lacked flexibility. The characters 
 resembled mediaeval warriors in complete, but some- 
 what unwieldy suits of mail. But against Edward 
 II. no such reproach can be made. He had acquired 
 a perfect mastery over his weapon ; the verse was 
 supple and pliant in his hands. To borrow Johnson's 
 famous remark about Milton, the poet could, if he 
 wished, carve the daintiest work on a cherrystone, 
 and this command of the metre is naturally most 
 conspicuous in the dialogue. The difficulty of writing 
 lines that should have all the naturalness of conversa- 
 tion without ceasing to be poetical, was of course 
 great, especially at the outset, when the resources of 
 blank verse remained comparatively undeveloped. 
 In this art of reconciling the simplicity that is es- 
 sential to really good dialogue with the dignity of 
 verse, Shakspere is unapproachable. Dekker, accord- 
 ing to Coleridge, comes next. But Shakspere and 
 the other dramatists in this, as in other respects, only 
 reaped the fruit of what Marlowe had previously 
 done. If we turn to Edward II. we find that the 
 dialogue is wonderfully strong. All through the 
 scenes where the king disputes with his courtiers the 
 verse is marked by animation and firmness. Take, 
 
72 
 
 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 for instance, a passage like the following in the first 
 act ; it is a fair specimen. 
 
 Edio. What are you moved that Gaveston sits here? 
 
 It is our pleasure, and we will have it so — 
 Lan. Your Grace doth well to place him by your side, 
 
 For nowhere else the new Earl is so safe. 
 E. Mort. What man of noble birth can brook this sight? 
 
 See what a scornful look the peasant casts. 
 Pcinb. Can kingly lions fawn on creeping ants. 
 
 War. Ignoble vassal, that, like Phaeton, 
 
 Aspir'st unto the guidance of the sun. 
 Y. Mort. Their downfall is at hand, their forces down : 
 
 We will not thus be faced and overpeered. 
 Edw. Lay hands on that traitor Mortimer ! 
 
 Mort. Lay hands on that traitor Gaveston ! 
 
 Ke}it. Is this the duty that you owe your king? 
 
 War. We know our duties, let him know his peers. 
 
 Edw. Whither will you bear him? stay, or ye shall die. 
 
 E. Mori. We are no traitors, therefore thi^eaten not. 
 Gav. No, threaten not, my lord, but pay them home : 
 
 Were I a king — 
 Y. Mort. Thou villain, wherefore talk'st thou of a king 
 
 That hardly art a gentleman by birth? 
 Edw. Were he a peasant, being my minion 
 
 I'll make the proudest of you stoop to him. i. 4, 
 
 It seemed to me necessary to dwell at some length 
 on Marlowe's introduction of blank verse — as we 
 understand blank verse — and, in doing so, to draw 
 freely on his works for quotation. After all, it was 
 in enriching the stage with a metre, which for dra- 
 matic purposes is incomparable, that Marlowe con- 
 ferred on English literature the most signal and 
 sovereign benefit. His creation of blank verse, for 
 the transfiguration that the verse of Gorboduc urider- 
 
SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 73 
 
 went in his hands was nothing short of a creation, was, 
 one might almost say, a vindication of the dignity 
 and resource of the Enghsh language and of EngHsh 
 metres. What Spenser was doing for poetry in 
 general, Marlowe did (without Spenser's affectation 
 of antiquarianism) for dramatic poetry in particular. 
 He proved that men could give up their perpetual 
 appeal to the classics, that if they wanted inspiration 
 there was plenty to be found nearer home, that 
 attempts to revive classical metres were futile, if not 
 something worse ; above all, that the language of 
 Chaucer was really a very effective instrument when 
 handled by a man of genius. 
 
 And there is one more point in Marlowe's work — 
 he created, in Edward 11. , the first genuine his- 
 torical play. Chronicle plays like TJie Famous 
 Victories of Henry the Fifth certainly could lay no 
 claim to this title — they were not dramas at all\ 
 
 ^ With regard to the early Historical Shaksperian plays, I Hcmy VI., 
 which Professor Dowden assigns to the ' Pre-Shaksperian Group,' 1590 — 
 91, i.e. only retouched by Shakspere, is clearly only a good specimen — 
 good, because of two or three fine scenes, added by Shakspere— of the 
 Chronicle Play proper. There is also the 'Marlowe-Shakspere' group. 
 Whatever theory be adopted as to the authorship of Henry VI. Parts 
 II. and III., and The Contention, and True Tragedy, these plays do not 
 I think mark any decided advance on the Chronicle history. They lack 
 the unity of purpose, the continuous dramatic interest essential to a 
 genuine drama. There is the widest possible gulf between them and 
 the true historical drama of which Edward II. was the earliest specimen, 
 the drama which Shakspere carried further in Richard II. and King 
 John, and brought to its fullest development in his trilogy of Ilenty IV. 
 Parts II. and III., and Henry V. There is one other play belonging to 
 
74 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 The writers merely strung together with the loosest 
 possible thread of interest a series of historical scenes ; 
 the action dragged over a long space of time, there 
 was no coherence of parts, and in the end it was 
 discovered that after all the piece had been leading 
 no whither. Infinitely better to my mind than the 
 
 the Marlowe- Shakspere group, viz. Richard TIL Various dates are 
 assigned to its production. Mr Fleay says 'probably 1595' {Shakespeare 
 Manual, p. 31); Professor Dowden gives 1593. In the Clarendon 
 Press edition the date 1593 or 1594 is 'conjecturally' assigned to it 
 {Introductio72, p. v). Now Edward II. was entered at Stationers' Hall 
 July 6, 1593, and may well have been produced some time earlier. 
 Warton, for instance, definitely states that it "was written in the year 
 1590"; unfortunately he does not give any evidence in support of his 
 statement. Perhaps 1591 — 92 would be a fair date to assign. In this 
 way it would have preceded Richard II I. ^ as it obviously did Richard 11. 
 It may be worth while to note that \ve could fix the date oi Edward II. 
 at least as early as 1593 (independently of the fact that Marlowe died in 
 that year) from what appears to me to be an obvious reference to the 
 play in Peele's Order of the Garter (1593)- Peele has these lines: 
 
 And Mortimer a gentle trusty lord. 
 
 More loyal than that cruel Mortimer, 
 
 That plotted Edward's death at Chillingworth, 
 
 Edward the ^Second, father to this King, 
 
 IVhose tragic cry even now i?iethinks I hear. 
 
 When graceless wretches murdered him by night. 
 
 Surely these lines refer to Marlowe's play, especially as Peele mentions 
 Marlowe in the prologue; I have not seen the point noticed. Peele, by 
 the way, puts the death of Edward at Kenilworth. May he not be 
 following Marlowe's account, and may not the editors be wrong in giving 
 Berkeley as the scene in Act v. s. 7? At the end of scene 3. 49, Edward 
 is taken to Kenilworth ; from that point to the murder scene we do not 
 hear of his leaving the Castle, cf. however, v. 2. 63. Marlowe, we may 
 remember, was careless about such historical points. Cf. Act II. in the 
 same play, scene 2. 18S — 193 and Mr Fleay's note. 
 
SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 75 
 
 ordinary chronicle-histories are Peek's Edward /., 
 and Greene's James IV.; the only two plays that 
 approximated at all to the form of drama initiated in 
 Edward II. But neither is to be compared to Mar- 
 lowe's work. James IV., as w^e have said, is a play 
 within a play, and that alone is enough to condemn 
 the piece: the historical of all forms of drama requires 
 the simplest and most realistic presentment. More- 
 over the play is really a love-story ; .it reads like the 
 dramatisation of some old Scottish ballad, where true 
 love is faithful to the last and has its reward. Doro- 
 thea and Ida are the characters that interest us ; the 
 king is a mere puppet. Some fragments, too, of the 
 old 'jigging wits' cling to the piece. As Bohan says 
 at the end of Act ill. 
 
 The rest is ruthful, yet to beguile the time, 
 Tis interlaced with merriment and rhyme. 
 
 On the same level as Greene's work stands Peele's 
 Edzuard I^ printed 1593. Mr Dyce calls it 'one of 
 the earliest of our chronicle-histories.' It seems to 
 me decidedly better in many respects than the ordi- 
 nary chronicle-play ; it represents a definite effort to 
 write a consecutive, coherent drama. But Peele's 
 attempt falls far short of ^Marlowe's achievement. 
 The dramatist displays no sense of proportion and 
 but little power of characterisation, the scene changes 
 with bewildering frequency, and the incidents are 
 often grotesque, or brutal, or both. And yet these 
 
7^ MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 two pieces, James IV. and Edward I.^ may fairly, I 
 think, be regarded as at least equal to anything 
 approximating to the historical drama that had been 
 
 ^ It is by no means quite clear that either of these dramas preceded 
 Edward IL I take them however as typical plays to show what the 
 best playwrights of the time — Marlowe excepted — could, or rather could 
 not, do. With regard to Javies IV. it must have been written at least 
 as early as 1592, as that was the year of Greene's death. It was pub- 
 lished in 1598. Edward II. was printed 1593. "It may be reasonably 
 conjectured that it was played some years before it was published." 
 Collier, iii. 198. The writer of the Article in the Quarterly Review 
 (October 1885) strongly expresses the opinion that Edward I. was 
 written before Edward II. I have noticed a curious case of plagiarism 
 in the two plays, though which dramatist was the plagiarist we cannot 
 say ; it is this : 
 
 Peele has (Dyce's Edition, p. 413) the following lines: 
 
 Unhappy king, dishonoured is thy stock — 
 Hence feigned weeds, unfeigned is my grief. 
 
 Compare this with Edward II. iv. 6, 96, 
 
 Sweet Spenser, gentle Baldock, part we must — 
 Hence feigned weeds, unfeigned are my woes. 
 
 It is obvious that one writer — which, we do not know — has plagiarised 
 from the other. A somewhat similar instance occurs in Peele's 'David 
 and Bethsabe', where w^e have the line (p. 465) 
 
 'And makes their weapons wound the senseless winds.' 
 
 This is clearly an imitation of Marlowe's 
 
 'And make your strokes to wound the senseless light', 
 
 Tamhurlaine, ill. 3, 158. 
 
 That David and Bethsabe was written after the production of Tam- 
 burlaine is obvious from the verse : in David and Bethsabe occurs the 
 well-known simile (p. 473) taken from the Faery Queen, bk i. canto 5, 2. 
 
 And yet one more instance of 'conveying'; in Anglorutn Ferice 
 
 (1595) the expression 
 
 ' the rising sun 
 
 Gallops the zodiac in his fiery wain' 
 is strongly suggestive of Titus Andronicus, 11. 1, 7. 
 
SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 77 
 
 written previous to the production of Echvard II. 
 But with that play an immense advance was made. 
 Edzuard II. exhibits Marlowe's powers as a dramatist 
 at their highest. The play is full of sober strength, 
 very different from the Titanic force that overflowed 
 in Tainburlainc. The characters stand out in the 
 boldest relief; their motives are clearly defined, and 
 the events of the drama are made to flow naturally 
 from one central cause. The whole action oi Ediuard 
 II. turns on the king's abuse — infatuated abuse — of 
 his power. Edward has no sense of the difficulties of 
 his position ; he resolutely shuts his eyes to the 
 harshness of facts. He is a king, and will suffer no 
 limitation of his prerogative — ' Am I a king, and 
 must be overruled,' is his perpetual reply to all 
 objections, and this point, emphasized at the outset, 
 is never lost sight of. A wide gulf of time has to 
 be bridged over, but the poet connects the two parts 
 of his play with marked skill. In the first two acts 
 Gaveston is the cause of dissension between the king 
 and his nobles : in the third and fourth acts, up to 
 the point where the king is defeated and deposed, 
 the Spencers take the place of Gaveston. When 
 Gaveston is first banished Edward exclaims, 
 
 And thou must hence, or I shall be deposed, 
 But I will reign to be revenged on them. 
 
 And he is as good as his word. He determines to 
 vindicate his own honour — for Edward never forgets 
 that he is a king — and to avenge the wrong done to 
 
y8 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 his friend. But fate is too strong for him. Gaveston 
 returns, only to be eventually taken and killed, and 
 again the king swears a solemn revenge. 
 
 Echvard. By Earth the common mother of us all, 
 
 By heaven, and all the moving orbs thereof, 
 By this right hand, and by my father's sword. 
 And all the honours 'longing to my crown, 
 I will have lives and heads for him, as many 
 As I have manors, castles, towns and towers. 
 
 And in this place of honour and of trust, 
 Spencer, sweet Spencer, I adopt thee here : 
 And merely of our love we do create thee 
 Earl of Gloucester, and Lord Chamberlain, 
 Despite of times, despite of enemies." 
 
 With the blind tenacity of a weak nature he clings 
 r desperately to his purpose. He refuses to dismiss the 
 Spencers at the demand of the barons ; they are 
 installed as his favourites, and thus we have the re- 
 quired balance between the two divisions of the play. 
 From this point Edward's character is worked out on 
 the same lines. When fortune declares for him, al- 
 most his first words are — 
 
 Methinks you hang the heads. 
 But we'll advance them, traitors: now 'tis time 
 To be avenged on you for all your braves, 
 And for the murder of my dearest friend. 
 
 Here again he strikes the two keynotes of the piece, 
 vindication of his honour, fidelity to his friends. But 
 once more his purpose is defeated. The barons 
 escape; Edward has to fight for his throne, and at 
 
SHAA'SPEKE'S EARLIER STYLE. 79 
 
 last is beaten, and even then his chief sorrow seems 
 to spring from the parting with his favourites. 
 
 Sweet Spencer ! gentle Baldock, part we must ! 
 
 And go I must. Life, farewell with my friends. 
 
 He loses them: he loses all hope of revenge, and 
 thus the secondary theme of the drama is exhausted, 
 and the poet returns to his original motive, the king's 
 exaggerated conception of his kingship. Throughout 
 the fifth act it is developed with surpassing power and 
 impressiveness. Professor Dowden speaks somewhat 
 contemptuously of Edward II. as being ' rather a 
 series of scenes from the chronicles of England than 
 a drama.' I cannot help dissenting from this view. 
 Edward the Second seems to me, and I am merely 
 repeating what critics (from Charles Lamb to Mr 
 Swinburne) have said, to be a play of remarkable 
 power ; finely conceived, and finely carried out. It is 
 not merely an enormous advance on everything of 
 the kind that had preceded it — the piece can bear \ 
 comparison with Shakspere. Marlowe here, if not in 
 his earlier dramas, displays a really great imaginative 
 faculty. We have no longer a play with but one 
 character ; the action is not dominated by a single 1 
 passion. True, everything primarily springs from 
 Edward's infatuated conception of his power as king. 
 It is this (and his weakness) that makes him foist his 
 favourites on the court, and that in turn leads to the 
 struggles with the jealous nobles. But all through 
 
80 MARLOWKS INFLUENCE ON 
 
 there is complexity of motive, and all through it is 
 quite clear what the different characters are striving 
 for. And of these dramatis personae at least three are 
 finely drawn, Edward himself, on whom we have 
 already touched sufficiently, Mortimer, and Gaveston. 
 The last is a ' peevish Frenchman,' fond in a way of 
 Edward, but determined to push his own interests 
 through the weakness of the king ; defiant in the 
 presence of the barons and ready ' to pay them home,' 
 he remains reckless and jaunty to the last, even when 
 he sees 
 
 That heading is one, and hanging is the other, 
 
 And death is all. ii. 5, 27—29. 
 
 It is a fine touch that, the last words which 
 Gaveston speaks in the play refer to his master : 
 
 'Treacherous Earl, shall I not see the king?' iii. i, 15. 
 
 Not less vigorous is the portrait of Mortimer, the 
 terribly stern unyielding man, who never turns aside 
 from the path of ambition, pursuing to the end his 
 ' deep-engendered schemes,' and passing at last from 
 the stage with stoical submission : 
 
 Base fortune, now I see that in thy wheel 
 There is a point, to which when men aspire, 
 , , They tumble headlong down : that point I touched. 
 
 And seeing there was no place to mount up higher. 
 Why should I grieve at my declining fall? 
 Farewell, fair queen : weep not for Mortimer, 
 That scorns the world, and, as a traveller. 
 Goes to discover countries yet unknown. 
 
 There is one decidedly weak point in the play, and 
 that is the portrait of the queen. The poet's hand 
 
 \. 
 
SHAKSPERKS EARLIER STYLE. 8 1 
 
 seems to have faltered over the work ; he had no 
 definite conception in his mind ; in any case it is not 
 to be extracted from the play. Some of the scenes 
 indeed where the queen is present are admirable. 
 The reconciliation, for instance, between her and the 
 king- (Act I. 4. 320 — 340) exhibits wonderful delicacy 
 and lightness of treatment. But at other times her 
 connection with Mortimer is at the very least equi- 
 vocal. It is to him that she appeals for help in the 
 first instance, and all through, up to Act ill. sc. 2, 
 her position is doubtful. Still, when she leaves the 
 king to sail for France, her words are, 
 
 'Unnatural wars, where subjects brave their king, 
 God end them once ! ' 
 
 and yet in the next act she is herself intriguing against 
 Edward, and for the rest of the play is definitely 
 ranged against him, until in Act V. (2. 43 — 45) she 
 hints at his death, just as in Richard I L Bolingbroke 
 ambiguously suggests the murder of Richard. 
 
 This is to my mind the only fault in the play. For 
 the rest it is emphatically a powerful drama, with fine 
 characterisation, a clear and continuous thread of 
 interest running throughout, and a climax of incom- 
 parable pathos. In the death scene of Edward the 
 poet strikes the deepest note of tragedy. Those three 
 simple lines, 
 
 Tell Isabel, the queen, I looked not thus 
 When for her sake I ran at tilt in France, 
 And there unhorsed the Duke of Clermont, 
 
 V. 6 
 
/ 
 
 82 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON- 
 
 are a fine specimen of what Mr Ruskin calls pene- 
 trative imagination. They reach to the very heart of 
 things ; they remind one of Faustus' ' o lente lente 
 currite noctis equi ' — of Othello's — 
 
 And say besides that in Aleppo once, 
 Where a mahgnant and a turban'd Turk 
 Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, 
 I took by the throat the circumcised dog 
 And smote him thus. 
 
 In such cases by one simple sentence, by the half- 
 conscious reminiscence, the poet brings into full 
 relief the tragedy of the situation, pointing the pitiless 
 contrast between the present and the past. And the 
 whole scene in Edzvard II. is on this level ; the 
 dramatist never falters. The agony is short, sharp 
 and concentrated, unspoilt by the diffuseness that 
 mars the parallel scene in Richard II. It is like the 
 death of the queen in Hemy VIII. Putting aside 
 Shakspere, where shall we find in our dramatic 
 literature anything equal in point of pure pathos to 
 Marlowe's work in the close of his tragedy 1 It is 
 like the ' wild preternatural ' grief that hangs as a 
 cloud over the terrible fourth act of the DticJiess of 
 Malfy, with its masquerade of madness and death. 
 
 I began this essay by suggesting that Marlowe's 
 merits had been rather over-estimated. Second 
 thoughts are best ; it seems to me almost impossible 
 to exaggerate the importance of what he did. When 
 Marlowe came before the world the stage was in a 
 
SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 83 
 
 State of chaos. Playwrights had abundance of crude 
 power and energy, but so far there was no channel 
 into which this dramatic activity could flow. Men, to 
 vary the metaphor, were still groping about in the 
 dark ; what they did was at the best merely tentative, 
 because no definitive form of drama existed. But 
 with Marlowe came a steady stream of light that 
 proclaimed the new order of things. And the presence 
 of this new power in literature was soon felt ; there 
 could be no resistance\ One after another he 
 showered his benefits on the stage. He created the 
 noblest vehicle of dramatic expression of which any 
 language is capable ; he created a new dramatic 
 formi ; he created in Edward II. a new type of play ; 
 he annihilated the classical drama, he annihilated the 
 vernacular drama ; and in place of them he substituted 
 something infinitely richer than men had ever dreamed 
 of, something that appealed to all classes, that teemed 
 wath life and passion, that gathered into itself all the 
 
 ^ Nash, of course, as befitted the satirist of the day (vide Mr Bullen's 
 Int7-odiiction)^ and Greene both bitterly attacked Marlowe (Dyce, Greene 
 and Peek, p. 35). They thought, in Horatio's phrase, that he ' might have 
 rhymed', damned his plays, and afterwards stole the metre of them, 
 precisely as the manager purloined poor Dennis' 'thunder'. Later on 
 we find Nash working with Marlow at Dido, or rather finishing the play 
 (in more senses than one), and Greene, very probably, collaborating 
 with him in The Contentmi and True Tragedy. As for Marlowe's plays 
 their popularity steadily increased; Tamburlaine became the typical 
 stage hero, Barabas, the typical villain. Allusions to them occur con- 
 tinually, e.g. in Peele's Farewell (p. 549 in Dyce's edition), in Alcazar, 
 I. 2, in Alphonstis (p. 242) etc.; cf. too, Heywood's prologue to the 
 JeiKj of Malta. Faiistiis even penetrated to South Germany. 
 
 6—2 
 
84 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 intellectual power and vigour of the people, something, 
 in a word, that could be — as the classical drama 
 could not, as the vernacular drama could not — the 
 supreme and final expression of all that men thought, 
 and did, and suffered. He had, in fact, solved the 
 problem with which we started. He had shown how 
 the stage could be, and should be, in the very widest 
 sense a national institution. 
 
 And now what influence did this young poet 
 exercise on his successor Shakspere ? What are their 
 relative positions in the history of the English drama 1 
 
 In the growth of every art there is a period of 
 preliminary development ; full and final perfection is 
 not reached all at once. The facts, the technical 
 possibilities, so to speak, that form the science of the art, 
 and that once revealed are the property of all, have to 
 be explored, and usually this task of discovery falls to 
 the share of inferior craftsmen. Talent does its work, 
 it accumulates the required knowledge, and then 
 genius comes and inherits the labours of its humbler 
 predecessor. And so it was with the Elizabethan 
 drama, with this difference, that the chief of Shakspere's 
 forerunners, the writer who next to Shakspere himself 
 did more than any one else for the stage, was himself 
 a man of supreme power. The drama, the very crude 
 drama of the morality writers, of Greene, of Kydd, 
 passed through the alembic of his genius, and it shone 
 with a thousand fresh lights. It was transfigured, 
 transformed, and when the work fell from Marlowe's 
 
SHAKSPERKS EARLIER STYLE. 85 
 
 hands Shakspere took up the task and carried it 
 through to a superb completion. At one time critics 
 read Shakspere and Shakspere alone, and they fell into 
 the very natural error of assigning to him honour 
 which belonged by right to his friend and rival ; for 
 Shakspere's obligations to Marlowe in at least two 
 points were enormous, and what these were it is not 
 very difficult to see. Coleridge says, ' Shakspere's 
 blank verse is an absolutely new creation ' ; a large 
 portion of this essay has been devoted to an attempt 
 to show that blank verse, as we understand it, as 
 Shakspere understood it, came into birth at the 
 bidding of Christopher Marlowe. This, then, is one of 
 our points ; Shakspere's treatment of the historical 
 drama is the other. In both matters his debt to Mar- 
 lowe was, I think, very great. To take the question 
 of blank verse. The history of Shakspere's use 
 of this metre is the history of his slow emancipation 
 from the bonds of rhyme. It is useless to speculate 
 on what he might have done had not Marlowe led the 
 way and introduced blank verse on the stage. Shak- 
 spere might have developed the verse for himself, or 
 he might have gone on in the path which dramatists 
 had long been treading and given us a rhymed 
 Hamlet. In the same way he might but for Marlowe 
 have thrown in his fortunes with the classical school ; 
 he might have observed all the unities, anticipated 
 ' exact Racine,' and won the praise of Voltaire. The 
 what-might-have-beens of literature are not a profit- 
 
S6 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 able study — 'such things are vain.' An ounce of 
 fact is worth a ton of conjecture, and it is enough to 
 know that, as a mere matter of history, Shakspere did 
 not write tragedies of the Gorboduc type, but did carry 
 on to its utmost Hmits the romantic and historical 
 drama initiated by Christopher Marlowe : likewise it is 
 enough to know that Marlowe was the recognised 
 leader of the blank verse school, while Shakspere for 
 a time at least did not abandon the old rhymed 
 couplet. Fortunately it is a matter of statistics, all 
 duly set forth in Mr Fleay's Shakespeare Mamial, 
 where (p. 135) we may see the number of rhymed 
 lines and of blank verse lines in the early comedies 
 (which ought surely to include the Tivo Gentlemen of 
 Verona), in the histories up to Henry V. and in the 
 first tragedy, Romeo and Juliet. 
 
 A cursory glance at Mr Fleay's tables demonstrates 
 one thing, that the proportion of rhyme in Shakspere's 
 earlier plays is remarkably large : Shakspere had 
 obviously not adopted the theories of his rival. At 
 the same time is it not a somewhat extreme state- 
 ment of the case to say, as Mr Fleay does, that 
 Shakspere definitely 'joined the advocates of rhyme 
 at first' ? I should have thought rather that the poet 
 was uncertain of his ground, that he was halting 
 between the two schools, that in fact he had not yet 
 ' found himself.' 
 
 The quantity of rhyme in the early plays is very 
 great, but still they are not definitely written in rhyme. 
 
SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 8/ 
 
 Blank verse exercised already a strong influence on 
 the poet, and what is really instructive to observe is 
 not so much the quantity as the quality of the scenes 
 in rhyme. Let us look for a moment at some of these 
 dramas in detail. The First Part of Henry VI. is 
 clearly not to be assigned wholly to Shakspere ; on 
 the contrary he wrote, as far as we can judge on the 
 evidence of style, "only a very small part of what has 
 come down to us as i Henry VI. His critics, however, 
 agree in attributing to him at least one scene in the 
 play, ii. 4, the plucking of the roses in the Temple 
 Gardens^ and I think that, as I\Ir Swinburne suggests, 
 Shakspere was responsible for the noble parting of 
 Talbot and his son, Act iv. 5. Now the first of these 
 scenes is in blank verse, the second in rhyme, and it 
 cannot be said that either metre definitely wins the 
 day. The poet seems to give each a fair chance, and 
 the combatants come ofi* equal. So much then for 
 the earliest specimen of Shakspere's historical drama ; 
 let us take now the comedies. Midsnninier NigJifs 
 Dream can be dismissed at once ; no argum^ent can 
 be based on the fact that it contains a strong pro- 
 portion of rhyme. The rhyme is appropriate : artistic 
 fitness justifies its use, whether or no Shakspere 
 designedly employed it to obtain certain definite 
 effects, which indeed was probably the case. Doubt- 
 
 ^ Of course, if, as Mr Fleay suggests, Shakespeare Manual, p. 31, 
 this scene was written, 'late, c. 1596', then the argument in the text 
 goes for nothing. 
 
 / 
 
88 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 less Titania, after proclaiming herself to be a ' spirit 
 of no common rate/ would in Fairyland, as in the 
 play, have proceeded to state her passion for Bottom 
 in dainty rhymed couplets. The Comedy of Errors 
 and Loves Labour Lost are more to the point. In the 
 first rhyme decidedly holds its own ; 380 lines in a 
 short play of 1770 lines represents a strong infusion 
 of the metre ultimately abandoned by Shakspere 
 altogether. And yet even in this fantastic, farcical 
 piece, the poet when he would strike a deep note of 
 pathos has recourse to blank verse ; he can give us 
 lines like these, which, but for the regularity of 
 rhythm, might come out of one of the latest plays. 
 
 Not know my voice ! O time's extremity 
 
 Hast thou so cracked, and splitted my poor tongue 
 
 In seven short years, that here my only son 
 
 Knows not my feeble key of untuned cares ? 
 
 Though now this grained face of mine be hid 
 
 In sap-consuming winter's drizzled snow, 
 
 And all the conduits of my blood froze up, 
 
 Yet hath my night of life some memory, 
 
 My wasting lamps some fading glimmer left, 
 
 My dull deaf ears a little use to hear: 
 
 All these old likenesses — I cannot err — 
 
 Tell me thou art my son Antipholus. 
 
 This passage seems to me to show that even thus 
 early Shakspere's instinct was guiding him towards 
 the right path ; it proves that at least in moments of 
 real passion he appreciated the infinite superiority of 
 blank verse as a means of expressing deep moral 
 earnestness. And the same is true of Loves Labour 
 
SHAKSPEJ^E'S EARLIER STYLE. 89 
 
 Lost. The infusion of rhyme is very strong, nearly 
 two rhymed Hnes to every one of blank verse ; but 
 incomparably the noblest passage in the play, the 
 great speech o{ Berowne in Act iii. (3. 289 — 365) is 
 throughout in blank verse, with only one pair of 
 rhymes (297, 98) ; the poet even forbears to end the 
 speech with the usual jingling couplet. It would be 
 unsafe to found any argument on Henry VI., 11.^ and 
 ///., but passing on to Romeo and Juliet, of which 
 the first draft was written, perhaps, somewhere about 
 1 59 1, we find that although rhyme, especially alter- 
 nate rhyme, still holds its ground, yet the ' quality of 
 the scenes chiefly written in blank verse is far higher 
 than that of the rhyming passages.' The quotation 
 is from Professor Dowden, and no one would readily 
 dissent from the opinion expressed in it. To think 
 of Romeo and Jnliet' is to think primarily of the two 
 scenes that are the crown of the poet's lyrical tragedy; 
 they are of course the garden scene, ii. 2, and the 
 balcony scene, iii. 5. Both are in blank verse of 
 wonderful fluency and sweetness. Looking therefore 
 at these five plays — at the three comedies, at the 
 historical play, and at his earliest tragedy, I do not 
 think we are justified in saying that Shakspere defi-, 
 nitely represented the school opposed to Marlowe. 
 It would I believe be nearer the truth to suppose that 
 he perceived here ' a divided duty,' that instinct was 
 
 1 Cf. however, Fleay, Shakespeare Alamial, 32, 33. 
 
 2 Cf. Swinburne, Study of Shakespeare, p. 35. 
 
90 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 leading him towards adoption of the metre from 
 which Marlowe, be it noted, had never swerved, 
 while tradition and conservatism kept him faithful in 
 a measure to the old system. There are two other 
 important plays on the list, Richard III. and Richard 
 11. 
 
 After reading the criticisms of various writers — 
 and still more — after reading the plays themselves, I 
 cannot doubt that Richard III. is the earlier work. 
 The two dramas raise one of the questions, where the 
 metrical test conflicts with the aesthetic. But in such 
 cases the internal evidence of style and treatment 
 cannot be neglected; some special explanation of the 
 metrical peculiarity must, if possible, be sought for, 
 and the principle can be applied here. In all respects 
 but one, Richard II. is a far finer play than Richard 
 III. The latter, however, is written in blank verse ; 
 the former contains much rhyme. But there is a 
 special reason why blank verse should preponderate 
 in RicJiard III. In that play Shakspere was writing 
 altogether on the lines of Marlowe ; his treatment of 
 the subject, apart from the metre, strongly reflects 
 the influence of his friend. In all probability they 
 had been working together at the revision of Heniy 
 VI., Parts II. and III., and it is clearly to that group, 
 dealing with the fortunes of the House of York, that 
 Richard III. belongs. Shakspere in contributing his 
 share to Parts II. and III. had been guided by Mar- 
 lowe's example, and we may fairly assume that in 
 
SHAKSFERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 9 1 
 
 rounding off the series he would keep to the method 
 employed in the first two dramas of what is really a 
 trilogy of plays. 
 
 In the same way it is not unnatural to suppose 
 that in writing Richard II. Shakspere, being removed 
 from the immediate influence of his friend who had 
 died in 1593, would at times slip back into the old 
 channel. And even in Richard II. his instinct is true 
 as ever. The superb speech of Gaunt (ii. i. 31 — G"^), 
 is not profaned by the jingle of any rhyme ; the 
 vigorous speeches of York in the same scene are 
 equally rhymeless (163 — 185 and 186 — 208) ; similarly 
 the great soliloquy of Richard in the fifth act is all 
 in blank verse, and generally throughout the play the 
 poet rarely in the best parts falls back into rhyme. 
 It is in the first scene where, like the eagle in Horace, 
 he is getting ready for a flight, that rhyme runs riot, 
 and again in the fifth act, scene 3, where it makes 
 desperate struggles to hold its ground. For the rest 
 the poet can write vigorous and varied blank verse, 
 until in King John rhyme has perceptibly decreased 
 to 150 lines in a total of 2403 ; afterwards it steadily 
 declined, as Mr Fleay's table shows, until in the 
 Tempest there are but two rhymed lines, in the 
 Winter's Tale, not one. At times, of course, Shak- 
 spere employed it even in his greatest plays, but 
 always for some special object. In OtJiello for in- 
 stance, as Professor Dowden points out, in Act iii. 2. 
 210 — 220, the bitterness of Brabantio's reply to the 
 
92 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 Duke's frigid commonplaces is immeasurably height- 
 ened by the rhymed parody of the cold comfort 
 offered to him, 'the vacant chaff well-meant for 
 grain;' and other instances might be quoted. 
 
 This blank verse question is obviously one of 
 great importance, and if I might summarise my 
 impressions I should say that the credit of having 
 created blank verse belongs not to Shakspere — 
 assuredly not to Norton and Sackville, but absolutely 
 to Christopher Marlowe — that there were when 
 Shakspere came up to London as a playwright two 
 dramatic schools, engaged in a fierce struggle over 
 the question of rhymed or unrhymed compositions — 
 that Marlowe, the author of blank verse, was the 
 recognized leader of the blank verse party, while 
 Greene perhaps was his most distinguished opponent 
 on the other side — that Shakspere did not definitely 
 join either school, but preserved for a time an am- 
 biguous attitude, poetic instinct leading him to adopt 
 blank verse as the most natural vehicle of dramatic 
 expression, while tradition, inexperience and perhaps 
 personal sympathies made him adhere to the old 
 rhymed system — that in his earlier plays we can trace 
 the struggle of these two motives, the more serious 
 and reflective parts of his work being written as a rule 
 in blank verse, the higher and less earnest in rhyme — 
 that somewhere about the time of the composition of 
 the original draft of his first tragedy Romeo and 
 Jjiliet, where the quality of the scenes in blank verse 
 
SHAA'SPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 93 
 
 is markedly superior to the general level of the scenes 
 in rhyme, he became associated with Marlowe in the 
 revision of the earlier sketches of Henry VI., Parts 
 II. and III. — that while still working under the in- 
 fluence of Marlowe's style he produced Richard III., 
 in which blank verse is for the time triumphant — that 
 after the death of Marlowe he wrote Richard 11, and 
 in the scenes which on general aesthetic grounds must 
 be placed on a lower level than the body of the work, 
 relapsed into the old groove, — that the ground lost in 
 Richard II. was quickly recovered in King John, and 
 the battle finally won in the Trilogy of Henry IV. 
 Parts II. and III. (1597), and Henry V. (1599), in 
 favour of blank verse. Whether, if Marlowe had not 
 preceded Shakspere the latter would have attained 
 to his perfect mastery over blank verse, or would only 
 partially have developed the resources of the metre, 
 or, again, would never have broken the fetters of 
 rhyme at all — these are questions which it is useless 
 to ask, because impossible to answer. We need not 
 waste time in theorising on a subject where the most 
 " exquisite reason " must of necessity be purely sub- 
 jective, and therefore valueless. There is only the 
 one bare fact, that with the force of Marlowe's ex- 
 ample to influence him, Shakspere for some time was 
 at least unwilling to give up the familiar rhyme ; from 
 this each will deduce his own conclusions. 
 
 I said that there w^as one other point in which 
 Shakspere was strongly affected by the work of his 
 
94 MARLOWKS INFLUENCE ON 
 
 predecessor. This was Marlowe's treatment of the 
 historical play. The connection between the drama 
 of Shakspere and the drama of Marlowe is best seen 
 in Richard III. and RicJiard II. No argument can 
 be based on Henry III, Part I. It is quite certain 
 that that is a composite work, in which Marlowe and, 
 probably, Peele had the principal shares, while Shak- 
 spere added one or two scenes in the subsequent 
 revision of the piece. In the same way we can put 
 Henry VI. Parts II. and III. on one side, as being 
 of disputed authorship. The first two historical 
 plays of Shakspere that we can feel any certainty 
 in discussing are Richard I 11^ and Richard II.; 
 each was WTitten on a model furnished by Mar- 
 lowe. Richard III. approximates to the peculiar 
 type of drama represented by Tambicrlaine, the 
 Jew of Malta and Faicstns ; in RicJiard II. we have 
 a continuation of the legitimate historical play 
 first seen in Edward II. In other words, these 
 two plays correspond to the radical differences of 
 dramatic construction that divide the earlier and the 
 later styles of Marlowe. RicJiard III. is a one 
 character play ; the main interest of the piece turns 
 on the central figure of Richard. We follow him 
 from scene to scene, as slowly but surely, consumed 
 
 ^ It is possible that Richard III. may, as Mr Fleay thinks, represent 
 Shakspere's revision of an older play by Peele, a suggestion made by 
 Coleridge, Lectures, p. 27. We are justified, however, in assuming that 
 the character of Richard himself is absolutely the work of Shakspere 
 alone. 
 
SHAICSFERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 95 
 
 by pent-up fiery energy, he works his way like some 
 pitiless personification of destiny to the final goal. 
 The rest of the play only hangs together so far as it 
 is all dominated by this one overshadowing power. 
 Some of the characters are finely drawn, especially 
 the queen-mother, Margaret, the prophetess of evil 
 and despair in the piece, but we instinctively feel 
 that the dramatist only created them to be the victims 
 of Richard's far-reaching, resistless ambition. If we 
 might employ a very homely metaphor, we should 
 compare them to ninepins set up for Richard to 
 knock down. But the structure of the play is far 
 superior to that of any of Marlowe's pieces, Edward 
 
 II. alone excepted. The minor characters in Tam- 
 burlaine are mere ciphers, part, as it were, of the 
 dramatic machinery ; the minor characters in Richard 
 
 III. serve as foils. Each constitutes his tiny contrast 
 to the cruel power that crushes them one and all, as 
 man mav crush the flies that lip-ht on his hand. And 
 this central figure is supremely impressive in its unre- 
 deemed, self-avowed villany. Richard is the incarna- 
 tion of cynical heartlessness ; he is morally colour- 
 blind ; he sees — not good, but possibilities of evil in 
 everything. lago is a villain, ' the most perfect evil- 
 doer, the most potent demi-devil,' but even in lago 
 the voice of conscience, or of what passes with him as 
 such, can make itself heard. He puts himself to the 
 trouble of spinning elaborate sophistries for his own 
 self-deception, and when his scruples are particularly 
 
9^ MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 persistent falls back on the idea that he has been 
 wronged, a thought which gnaws at his heart like 
 * a poisonous mineral.' He lashes himself into a fury 
 of counterfeit passion, and in what Coleridge finely 
 calls 'the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity' 
 casts about for excuses, for self-justifications which he 
 almost manages to believe in. lago in short cannot 
 look unblenching into the hell that he is preparing 
 with infinite care for others — and for himself. Richard 
 is lago without the saving clause. The first scene of 
 the play flashes the light into his black, self-centred 
 heart. ' I am determined to prove a villain ' is his 
 boast, and he is as good as his word. He has infinite 
 powers of deception, and he takes an intelligible 
 pleasure in contemplating these powers ; but he knows 
 all the same that there is just one person against 
 whom they can avail nothing, and that person is him- 
 self. Self-deception for such a man would be useless, 
 and wisely enough he never attempts it. Richard, in 
 fact, is rather like Mr Stevenson's friend Mr Hyde ; 
 he is all bad, the heir of all the ages of the House of 
 York, in the sense that he has inherited all the evils 
 of his line. Years of sin and civil war have produced 
 that ' foul indigested lump,' and yet by a freak of 
 nature, or rather by the perfect fairness of Shakspere, 
 Richard possesses the greatest intellectual powers, 
 and thus our loathing of him is heightened tenfold. 
 He is the only character in Shakspere in whom the 
 moral element is non-existent, and this conception of 
 
SHAKSPERKS EARLIER STYLE. 97 
 
 flawless, self-conscious, self-confessed villany is essen- 
 tially Marlowesque. Aaron in Titits Androniats'^ , 
 Barabas in the Jew of Malta, and Richard III. are 
 characters conceived and worked out on the same 
 principled The first two enumerate with complacent 
 cynicism their crimes in the past ; Richard, his crimes 
 past, present and to come. 
 
 I am determined to prove a villain 
 And hate the idle pleasures of these days; 
 Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous, 
 By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams, 
 I've set my brother Clarence and the King 
 In deadly hate the one against the other. 
 
 We are reminded too of Marlowe in another point. 
 There is little evolution in Richard's character ; he is 
 practically the same throughout. As a rule character- 
 development is one of Shakspere's great merits; his 
 mien and women seldom pass from the stage at the 
 end what they were when the curtain rose. They 
 change, and rightly, as the course of the drama pro- 
 ceeds : the Macbeth who drives with Banquo across 
 the heath is not the Macbeth who will never fear ' till 
 Birnam forest come to Dunsinane.' It is rare that we 
 have a character who springs Pallas-like from the 
 brain of its creator fully equipped, fully developed ; 
 and Richard is one of the few. This was quite in 
 
 ^ It is, I suppose, fairly safe to assume that Titiis Andronicus is in 
 great part the work of Marlov^e. 
 
 ^ Cf. Titus Andronicus, IV. i. 98 — 120; 124 — 144, Jeiv of Malla, II. 
 3. 177 — 202; 203 — 215, and Edwai'd II., v. 4. 30 — 8. 
 
 V. 7 
 
98 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 Marlowe's manner. Marlowe did not care very much 
 about the finer shades of character-drawing ; the 
 subtler miances that came readily enough to the 
 delicate touch of Shakspere stood outside the range 
 of his power. His heroes move upon the scene 
 splendid, impressive, and after they have fretted their 
 hour on the stage we can trace no material difference 
 in them ; as some one has expressed it, they are 
 counters stamped at the outset. Thus Marlowe might 
 have drawn Richard III.; Richard II. he could never 
 have achieved, just as even in Richard III. the terrible 
 irony that runs throughout the play, lending to the 
 simplest scenes the most weird intensity of meaning, 
 would have been equally beyond his reach. Another 
 peculiarity in Shakspere's tragedy that points pretty 
 clearly to the influence of Marlowe is the wild, passion- 
 ate, melodramatic energy that marks some of the 
 incidents, reminding us of the Titanic vigour, the 
 truculence almost of Tamburlaitie. The action of the 
 piece is too violent, the whirl of passion too over- 
 whelming. The effects, too, are crude, rock-hewn. The 
 dramatist is not careful to mould the forms with 
 minute delicacy; he trusts to the general impressive- 
 ness of the figures. In his great plays Shakspere never 
 neglects the details ; all is chiselled with consummate 
 skill ; the work leaves his hands flawless to the most 
 critical eye. But Richard III., like Marlowe's earlier 
 works, produces its effect — and what a supreme effect 
 it is ! — by the sense of superhuman power and force- 
 
SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. 99 
 
 fulness that it breathes ; we must stand at a distance, 
 where the eye can take in the full impression of the 
 bold masterly outlines. Of minor matters, the figure 
 of the Queen Mother is precisely such a character as 
 Marlowe might have drawn, had he possessed any 
 faculty at all for realizing strongly the passions of a 
 woman's heart, while the death scene of Clarence is 
 clearly a reminiscence of Edzvard II., Act v. 5. 
 Shakspere may too have had in his mind's eye the 
 murder of Guise, Massacre at Paris, Scene xxi. Cf. 
 also Henry VI., Part III. Act v. 6. 
 
 If Richard III. was modelled on Marlowe's earlier 
 styl^, Richard II. is a continuation of the later method 
 adopted in Edward II. I endeavoured in speaking 
 of the latter to show that it is the first specimen of 
 genuine historical drama our literature possesses. Up 
 to the production of Edward II., there had been 
 chronicle plays, but no proper dramatization of 
 history, pageants loosely strung together, but never 
 an animated organic whole. A true historical drama, 
 like any other play, must be wrought round some 
 definite idea — unity of purpose must inform the 
 various parts. The playwright has abundance of 
 material from which to choose, but in selecting his 
 incidents he bears in mind their applicability to the 
 development of his plot. He admits nothing super- 
 fluous. Each scene must be a link in the chain. And 
 so with the characters. Complexity of motive is / 
 essential to the action of a piece, and in each case the 
 
 7—2 
 
100 MARLOWE'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 motives of the dramatis personae must be patent and 
 adequate. The historical play, in other words, only 
 differs from the ordinary drama in that the poet 
 drawing on history takes the actual events as the 
 framework of his story, and fills in the rest with such 
 dramatic details as his imagination suggests. This 
 Marlowe had done in Edward II., and henceforth the 
 historical drama proceeded on the lines laid down in 
 that play. If Edward II. marked a decided advance 
 on the construction of Tamburlaine, Richard II. was, 
 1 think, no less superior in general conception and 
 effectiveness to Richard III We no longer have the 
 concentration of interest, the singleness of motive that 
 made the latter turn from first to last on the one 
 figure which dominated the scene ; Richard II. is more 
 / complex, penetrated altogether with a finer dramatic 
 spirit. Primarily indeed our gaze is riveted on the 
 king himself, the man of brilliant phrases who can do 
 nothing; we follow him from scene to scene, somewhat 
 pitiful, as Mr Swinburne says, but not pitiable, and by 
 the sheer force of his suffering our sympathy is wrung 
 from us. But Richard does not stand alone ; there 
 are other characters in the piece in whose motives and 
 action the dramatist strives to interest us. Whether he 
 succeeds, whether York, Aumerle and Mowbray are 
 as tangible, as life-like as the parallel dramatis per- 
 sonae in Marlowe's plays is another question ; Mr Swin- 
 burne thinks they are not. 'They are shifting,' he says 
 'fitful, vaporous, their outlines change, withdraw, dis- 
 
SHAA'SPERE'S EARLIER S^}tlj^.\ '■[: >. ' JQX 
 
 solve... they cannot "hold this visible shape" in which 
 the poet presents them even long enough to leave a 
 distinct image, a decisive impression for better or for 
 worse, on the mind's eye of the most simple and open- 
 hearted reader.' 
 
 For myself, I do not think any serious exception 
 can be taken to this criticism; Mortimer to my mind is 
 a far more solid and vivid creation than any of the 
 subsidiary characters, York perhaps alone excepted, 
 who gather about Richard. We need not, however, 
 institute any elaborate comparisons between the two 
 plays; it is enough to have noted the points of con- 
 nection between them, above all to have emphasized 
 the importance of Marlowe's work as marking an 
 immense advance in the direction of the true historical ( 
 drama. 
 
 To estimate exactly the obligations of one writer 
 to another is always a difficult, if not altogether im- 
 possible, task: the second comer enters upon the 
 inheritance, the literary capital, so to speak, that the 
 efforts of his predecessor have amassed, and we must 
 rest content with showing what this inheritance was. 
 If Marlowe had never lived, would Shakspere have 
 written as he did ? who can say.-^ As I have already 
 remarked, we can only assume that Marlowe's intro- 
 duction of blank verse on the stage rendered the use 
 of that metre much easier for Shakspere; in the same 
 way, we can only assume that Marlowe's having led 
 the way with Edward IL made it much less difficult 
 
102 MARLOM'^E'S INFLUENCE ON 
 
 for Shakspere to write Richard II., and the historical 
 plays that followed, than would have been the case 
 had the works of Greene, and Peele, and Kydd been 
 his sole guide what to avoid and what to aim at. To 
 show what Marlowe did, and what previous dramatists 
 (save the mark) had not done, is here, I think, as 
 always, the best commentary on Shakspere's debt to 
 him. That the reluctant pangs of abdicating royalty 
 in Edward II. suggested the main idea of Richard II. 
 anyone who read the two dramas could see for himself 
 without requiring to possess the critical sagacity of a 
 Charles Lamb : whether the second version is an im- 
 provement on the first is likewise a question that each 
 reader will decide on his own account. There is just 
 one scene in Richard II that Marlowe, I believe, could 
 never have conceived ; it is the scene in the Duke of 
 York's garden. There is nothing in Edward I I parallel 
 to this exquisite interlude. Shakspere gives us here an 
 instance of the happy tact that stooping to small 
 things lends such convincing individuality to his plays, 
 bringing home to us the terrible truth of what he 
 describes. We have a similar instance of this fine 
 felicity in the introduction of the old servant in the 
 last act, with the homely talk that follows. By such 
 prosaic touches the full force of what is passing 
 on the stage is borne in upon us. We stand with the 
 queen and listen to the gardener, and when at last 
 she cries out the break in the silence comes as a 
 positive relief to our tension. And the same effect is 
 
SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE. IO3 
 
 produced by the entrance of the groom just after 
 Richard's soliloquy. It helps us more than anything 
 else to realize the position of the king; the terrible 
 blending of the tragic and the commonplace is the 
 realism of life, and it is all part of Shakspere's unfail- 
 ing sensibility, of that indefinable quality which made 
 him write — to borrow Wordsworth's phrase — 'with his 
 eye on his object,' a quality of which Marlowe was 
 singularly devoid. On the other hand, if Marlowe 
 could not have hit on the garden scene, assuredly he 
 would never have been guilty of 'the jigging veins of 
 rhyming mother wits' that disfigure the intolerable 
 scene in Act v. — 'Speak it in French, king, say "par- 
 donne moi'" — in all Marlowe's work there is no line 
 like this. 
 
 And now my 'occupation's gone,' and only one 
 more question suggests itself — is a peroration essential.'* 
 Perhaps, seeing how many eloquent passages in the 
 ''Ercles vein' have been written on Marlowe, we can 
 dispense with one. It was long before his merits 
 were recognised, but time has done him justice, and 
 no history of the English drama would be complete, 
 or definitive, that did not assign to him the first place 
 in the crowd of pre-Shaksperian dramatists. For us 
 the works of Marlowe have a double interest, histori- 
 cally, because they are incomparably superior to any- 
 thing that had gone before; intrinsically, because they 
 contain a wealth of poetry the most splendid, the most 
 imperishable. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 Among the plays assigned to Shakspere there are four 
 of which it is practically certain that Marlowe was a part 
 author; they are, of course, Henry VI., i., ii. and iii., 
 and Titus Androtiicus. How far each of these dramas is 
 the work of Shakspere, and how far the crude originals 
 have survived in them, we cannot say : there is only the 
 internal evidence to guide us, and that everybody naturally 
 interprets his own way. But though on points of style differ- 
 ences of opinion may exist, pecuharities of diction, out- 
 of-the-way words, odd turns of expression, aira^ Xeyofxeva in 
 short — and of such there is no lack in these four plays — 
 cannot be explained away; consequently they should I 
 imagine, be allowed to constitute a tiny link in the chain of 
 evidence. If, for instance, from Shakspere's authentic 
 works not one undoubted use of the curious phrase ' to this 
 gear ' can be quoted, if the expression occurs repeatedly in 
 Marlowe's plays, and if, as is the case, we find the word in 
 Henry VI. and Titus Andronicus in passages where the 
 general style and atmosphere is Marlowesque, the coinci- 
 dence surely must cast its atom of weight in favour of any 
 theory that would assign the passages in question to the 
 author of Tamburlaiiie. Individually such points may be of 
 infinitesimal importance ; collectively they are not so con- 
 temptible. Every writer has his vocabulary, and having 
 once used a word he is likely to employ it again. Now in 
 
APPENDIX. 105 
 
 Titus Androniais, as Mr Fleay points out, there are 204 
 non-Shaksperian words ; in the same way in the three parts 
 of Henry VI. I have marked a good number of unusual 
 words and peculiar phrases, the more important of which it 
 seemed worth while to bring together, noting too some of the 
 more marked parallelisms in style between passages in these 
 three plays and passages in Marlowe's undoubted works. 
 
 With regard to Parts 11. and in., accepting to a certain 
 extent (for want of something better) the theory advanced 
 in the New Shakspere Society's Proceedings by Miss Lee, 
 I have referred very frequently, under the abbreviations 
 C, and TT.) to the two plays, T/ie Contention and The True 
 Tragedy. By ' non-Shaksperian ' I mean that the word is 
 not found in any of the undoubted plays, my authority in 
 each case being Schmidt's invaluable Lexicon. As bearing 
 somewhat on the authorship of Parts 11. and in. it may 
 not be amiss to note the great number of classical references 
 in the two plays ; we repeatedly light on allusions and even 
 quotations that strongly suggest the hand of the young 
 (Nash would have added ' idiote ') ' art-master ' fresh from 
 the University. Here are some chance references, many of 
 the lines having no equivalent in the parallel passages in The 
 Contention and True Tragedy. 
 
 Part II. Act i. 4, 10 — not in C ; same scene, line 65 — not in C ; 
 iii. 2, 92, and 116 — 19; iv. i, 99 and 116 — not in C, and 135 — 137 ; v. 
 I, 26 — not in C, and 100 (where the simile is taken from Propertius, 
 Elegies ii. i, 63); v. 2, 59 — not in C, and 62. 
 
 Part III. Act i. 3, 47 — not in TT -, ii. r, 51 — 53; ii. 2, 146 — 148 — 
 not in TT ', ii. 3, 53; ii. 5, 120; ii. 6, 12; iii. 2, 188 — 190 — not in TT\ 
 iv. 2, 19 — 21 — not in TT\ iv. 8, 24; v. 6, 21 — 22. 
 
 As for the random notes that follow, some of the coinci- 
 dences have been previously pointed out ; some, perhaps, not. 
 
I06 APPENDIX. 
 
 Henry VI. Part I. 
 Act Scene Line 
 
 i I I — 5 Obviously Marlowesque ; cf. //. Tai7ibiirlaine^ 
 
 V. 3, I — 7. Cf. Coleridge, Lechi?-es^ p. ^ya. 
 
 ,, ,, 149 cf. //. Tambzu'laine, iv. 4, 42. 
 
 ,, ,, 177 'stern' (=helm). Cf. II. Hejiry VI. iii. 2, 91 
 
 (where not in C): elsewhere only in Peri- 
 cles iv. I. 64 (by Shakspere?) ; Marlowe, Dido, 
 iii. I, 108; V. I, 61. 
 
 ,, 2 95 'buckle with'; cf. iv. 4, 5 ; v. 3, 28, //. Henry VI. 
 
 i. 4, 50. Non-Shaksperian, cf. Dido i. 2, 19. 
 
 ,, 4 100 'gathered head' — of troops, cf. //. Henry VI. 
 
 iv. 5, 10 ; Titiis Andronicus iv. 4, 64. Non- 
 Shaksperian ; Edzaard II. ii. 2, 121; Alas- 
 sacre at Paris xi. 27. 
 
 „ 5 12 'high-minded'. Non-Shaksperian, cf. Ediuard 
 
 II. i. I, 149. 
 cf. /. Ta7nlmrlai7ie ii. x, 9 and line 29. 
 'decipher' ( = detect): cf. Titzcs Andronicus iv. 
 
 2,8. 
 76 — 77 cf. Titns Andj'onicns ii. i, 82 — 83. Richard 
 
 III. i. 2, 228. Sonnet 41. 
 'reflex': verb non-Shaksperian, cf. /. Tamlmr- 
 
 laine \\\. i, 52 ; iv. 4, 2; v. i, 70. 
 Obviously by Marlowe. 
 
 'fruition'; non-Shaksperian, cf. /. Tamhurlaine 
 ii. 7, 29. 
 108 cf. Edzvard II. v. 4, 65 — ^6', Massacre at Paris 
 
 xi. 45. 
 
 Henry VI Part II. 
 
 24 cf. Version of Margaret's speech in C with Dido 
 
 iv. 4, n6. 
 249 cf. Massacre at Paris ii. 47 ; cf. the speech here 
 
 and in C with Guise's great soliloquy. 
 54 'run a tilt'; non-Shaksperian, cf. /. Henry VI. 
 
 iii. 2, 51; Edzuard II. v. 5, 66; not in C. 
 83 cf. Edzuard II. i. 4, 407; not in C. 
 
 86 'baseborn'; non-Shaksperian, cf. iv. 8, 49; ///. 
 
 Henry VI. ii. 2, 143, occurs repeatedly in 
 
 11 
 
 3 
 
 21 
 
 iv 
 
 I 
 
 184 
 
 V 
 
 3 
 
 76-7 
 
 >> 
 
 4 
 
 87 
 
 >> 
 
 55 
 
 121 
 
 »» 
 
 5 
 
 9 
 
APPENDIX. 107 
 
 Act Scene Line 
 
 Marlowe; in Greene, e.g. Orlando Ftirioso p. 
 
 108. 
 164 C has Greene's favourite 'for to'; altered in the 
 
 revision. 
 17 'To this gear', not in C; found once in Shak- 
 
 spere, Richa^-d III. i. 4, 148, where however 
 
 folios read 'shall we fall to worke?' cf. Titus 
 
 Andronicus iv. 3, 51, cf. Edivard II. v. 5, 36; 
 
 Dido i. I, 121; /. Tamburlaine ii. 2, i; 
 
 Greene has it, e. g. Looking glass Jar London 
 
 p. 126 (Dyce's Edition). 
 164 'Liefest liege'; non-Shaksperian, cf. Dido v. i, 
 
 256 ('liefest love'), Greene has 'liefest', e.g. 
 
 yames IV. v. 6, 14. 
 281 — 87 cf. the lines here and in C with Edward II. ii. 
 
 2, 162. 
 
 293 'farfet', not in C ; non-Shaksperian, cf. Dido iii. 
 
 3, 64; Fij'st Book of Lucan 94. 
 
 331 cf. Guise's speech, il/aj-j-arr^ a/ /'am ii. 33 — 107. 
 
 81 'Alehouse sign' — as term of reproach — only 
 
 here, and Titits Andronicus iv. 2, 98, and //. 
 
 Henry VI. v. 2, 67 ; not in C. 
 
 83 in C; cf. Edivard II. iv. 6, 34. 
 
 216 'buckler' ( = to defend), only here, and Taming 
 
 of Shrew iii. 2, 241, and ///. Henry VI. iii. 
 
 3, 99, cf. Edivard II. i. 4, 288; ii. 5, 18; in C. 
 I — 7 Clearly by Marlowe ; not in C. 
 
 48 cf. /. Tamburlaine i. 2, 198; v. i, 187. 
 
 136 'pass not for' — in C— is it Shaksperian? Greene 
 
 uses 'pass' in this sense, e.g. Friar Bacon p. 
 156, where Dyce quotes an instance from 
 Chettle's Kind- Harts Dream ; for Marlowe, cf. 
 /. Tamburlaine i. i, 109 ; Edward II. i. 4, 
 142; V. I, 77. Peele too has it, e.g. Old 
 Wives'' Tale p. 449. 
 
 191 'Sophister'; non-Shaksperian, cf. Edward II. i. 
 
 4, 255; not in C. 
 
 31 'eternized'; non-Shaksperian, occurs six times 
 
 in Marlowe, /. Tafnbtcrlaine i. 2, 72; //. 
 Tamburlaine v. i, 35; v. 2, 54. Fatistus i. 
 
I08 APPENDIX. 
 
 Act Scene Line 
 
 15; Dido i. I, 112; Ovid's Elegies x. 60. 
 Greene has it, e.g. Orlando Fiirioso pp. 89, 
 108; Friar Bacon p. 155. Several instances 
 in Mere's Palladis Tamia. 
 
 Henry VI. Part III. 
 i r I cf. Act ii. i, i; cf. Edward II. ii. 4, 21. 
 
 ,, ,, 60 cf. line in 7^7^ with Edward II. ii. 2, 198. 
 
 „ ,, 97 cf. Edward II. iii. 2, T32; in TT. 
 
 ,, ,, 196 'conditionally' ; non-Shaksperian : cf. Faustns v. 
 
 91 ; Dido iii. i, 113; in TT. 
 ,, ,, 239 cf. Edward II. ii. 2, 166. 
 
 ,, ,, 242 cf. Edward II. v, i, 41. 
 
 ,, 2 30 cf. /. Tamburlaitie ii. 5, 60 — 63. 
 
 ,, ,, 44 'what resteth' ; not, I believe, Shaksperian: often 
 
 in Marlowe, e.g. //. Tamburlaine ii. i, 11; 
 
 Edzuard II. iv. 5, 72 ; not in TT. 
 ,, 4 21 'overmatching'; non-Shaksperian, cf. /. Tam- 
 
 burlaine u. I, 39; not in TT. 
 ,, ,, 28 'quenchless'; non-Shaksperian in Plays', Ltc- 
 
 crece 1554; cf. //. Tainbtwlaine iii. 5, 27; 
 
 Dido u. I, 187; Edivard II. v. i, 44; in TT. 
 ,, ,, 72 'preachment'; non-Shaksperian, cf. ^'^zt^^r^ //. 
 
 iii. 2, 22 ; iv. 6, 112. 
 the famous line plagiarised from Greene, 
 cf. /. Tambiu'laine ii. i, 9; in TT. 
 'foreslow'; non-Shaksperian, Edward II. n. ^, 
 
 39; Ovid^s Elegies vii. 46; cf. VeeXo's, Alcazar 
 
 p. 436; not in TT. 
 cf. line in Z'T'with Massacre at Paris xviii. 2. 
 Like all Gloucester's speeches this passage is 
 
 quite in Marlowe's style. 
 ,, ,, 195 Possibly a reminiscence of the prologue to the 
 
 Jew of Malta. 
 v I 108 cf. Massacre at Paris xxiv. 62; Jezv of Malta v. 
 
 5, 30- 
 ,, 6 29 cf. Edward II. v. 5, 39; Richard III. i. 4, 165. 
 
 ,, „ 61 cf. Edzvard II. i. i, 92; so Webster has 'but 
 
 blood flies upward and bedews the heavens'. 
 
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