No More Learning

Returning to London, he not only published his Ana-
tomie of Absurditie and his preface to Greene's Menaphon, both
of 1589, but entered with enthusiasm into the virulent Martin
Marprelate controversy! Nor was his interest decreased when the
quarrel became a personal one between him and Gabriel Harvey.
The long series of politico-religious and maliciously personal
pamphlets poured out by him for some seven years made him
so noteworthy that it is not surprising he should have taken
advantage of his reputation by writing for the stage. Whether
he worked with Marlowe on Dido Queene of Carthage, published
1594, or finished a manuscript left incomplete by the former, is not
clear. Nor is it safe to base judgment of his dramatic ability on
this play because of the contradiction by critics in the apportion-
ing of authorship. Of the lost Isle of Dogs, he says himself that
he wrote only the induction and the first act. When the play bred
trouble, and Nashe, as author, was lodged in the Fleet for a time,
he maintained that he was not really responsible for the contents
of the play. But any reader of his pamphlets will need no proof
that even an induction and a first act, if by Nashe, might contain
much venom. Summer's Last Will and Testament, acted at or
1 See vol. 11, chap. XVII, pp. 392 ff. As to Nashe's other pamphlets and prose
fiction, see ibid. chap. XVI, pp. 362 ff.
a


## p. 141 (#165) ############################################

Characteristics of the Group
141
near Croydon in 1592, gives little opportunity to judge Nashe's
real dramatic quality. It suggests both a morality and a play
written for a special occasion. Nashe here shows himself ingenious,
at times amusing, satirical as always. But to know Nashe at
his best in what is really individual to him, one must read his
pamphlets, or, better still, his Unfortunate Traveller, of 1594,
the first of English picaresque novels. The dramatic work of
Nashe suggests that he has stepped aside into a popular form
rather than turned to it irresistibly. He cannot, like Lyly,
adapt renascence ideas to the taste and the ideals of the most
educated public of the time; nor is he even so successful as Peele,
who, like him, stepped aside, but who succeeded well enough to be
kept steadily away from what he could do best. Nashe is far
enough from Greene, who, whatever his ideas gained from the
university and from foreign travel, could so mould and adjust
them as to be one of the most successful of popular dramatists.
As a group, then, these contemporaries illustrate well the
possible attitudes of an educated man of their time toward
the drama. Midway between Lyly and his successful practice
of the drama, which, for the most cultivated men and women of
his day, maintained and developed standards supplied to him,
at least in part, by his university, and Thomas Lodge, who put
the drama aside as beneath a cultivated man of manifold activities,
stand Nashe, Peele and Greene. Nashe, feeling the attraction of
a popular and financially alluring form, shows no special fitness
for it, is never really at home in it and gives it relatively little
attention. Peele, properly endowed for his best expression in
another field, spends his strength in the drama because, at the
time, it is the easiest source of revenue, and turns from the drama
of the cultivated to the drama of the less cultivated or the un-
cultivated. Greene, from the first, is the facile, adaptive purveyor
of wares to which he is helped by his university experience, but
to which he gives a highly popular presentation. Through Nashe
and Lodge, the drama gains nothing. Passing through the hands
of Lyly, Greene and even Peele, it comes to Shakespeare some-
thing quite different from what it was before they wrote.
University-bred one and all, these five men were proud of their
breeding. However severe from time to time might be their censures
of their intellectual mother, they were always ready to take arms
against the unwarranted assumption, as it seemed to them, of cer-
tain dramatists who lacked this university training, and to confuse
them by the sallies of their wit. One and all, they demonstrated
their right to the title bestowed upon them—'university wits. '
a


## p. 142 (#166) ############################################

CHAPTER VII
MARLOWE AND KYD
CHRONICLE HISTORIES
WHETHER, in strict chronology, we should say Kyd and Marlowe
rather than Marlowe and Kyd is but a minor problem of precedence.
Even if it be found, as some suspect to be the case, that The
Spanish Tragedie is earlier than Tamburlaine, we need not
disturb the traditional order; for Marlowe, more truly than his
contemporary, is the protagonist of the tragic drama in England,
and, in a more intimate sense, the forerunner of Shakespeare
and his fellows. After all, the main consideration is that the two
poets may be grouped together, because, in ways complementary
to each other, they show the first purpose of the higher and more
serious type of English tragedy, the first hints of the romantic
quality which is the literary token and honour of their successors,
and, if Lyly be joined with them, the training and technical circum-
stance of Shakespeare himself.
Of the life of Christopher Marlowe', son of a Canterbury shoe-
maker and a clergyman's daughter, there is little on record. To
some of his contemporaries, and, unfortunately, to later biographers,
interest in his personality has been confined to an exaggerated tale
of blasphemy and evil living; above all, to his death at the early
age of twenty-nine, in a tavern brawl at Deptford, by the hand of
a 'bawdy serving-man,' named Archer, or Fraser, or Ingram. The
recent elucidation of the facts of the poet's career at Cambridge
has happily diverted attention from the sordid ending and adjusted
the balance of the scanty biography. In this short career there
must, of necessity be little available to the antiquary; and yet we
know as much of the man Marlowe as of the man Shakespeare, or,
indeed, of any of the greater Elizabethans, Jonson excepted.
Marlowe proceeded from the King's school at Canterbury to
Bene’t (now Corpus Christi) College, Cambridge, about Christmas
1 This is the baptismal form, but the poet's father is referred to as · Marley'or
Marlyn,' and, in the Cambridge records, the name is spelt Marlin,''Marlyn,'«Marlen,'
Malyn. ' In 1588, he is described as Christopher Marley of London," and Peele
speaks of Marley, the Muses' darling. '
6
6


## p. 143 (#167) ############################################

>
>
Marlowe's Early Life and Literary Work 143
1580. He was in residence, with occasional breaks, till 1587, when
he took his master's degree, following on his bachelor's in 1583—4.
There is evidence that, soon after 1587, he had fallen into dis-
favour at the university, and was already settled in London.
He had probably been there for some time before the production
of Tamburlaine in that year or the next. The interval between
graduation and the appearance of this play is ingeniously filled in for
us by Collier. We must, however, treat the ballad of The Atheist's
Tragedie, which describes Marlowe's actor's life and riot in
London, as one of Collier's mystifications, and, together with it,
the interpolation in Henslowe's diary (fol. 19 v. ) about 'addicions'
to Dr Faustus and a 'prolog to Marloes tambelan. ' Cunningham's
suggestion that the young poet sought adventure as a soldier in the
Low Countries, as Jonson did later, may be correct; but it must
be proved on other grounds than his ‘familiarity with military
terms. ' It is useless to speculate on the causes of the Cambridge
quarrel and his alleged restlessness. Malone's view that Marlowe
had become heretical under the influence of Francis Kett, fellow
of Benet, was based on a misconception of Kett's doctrine. If
Kett resigned his fellowship in 1580", it would be hard to prove
any association between him and Marlowe. The only extant piece
which, with some show of reason, may be ascribed to this early
period is the translation of Ovid's Amores (Certaine of Ovid's
Elegies), which was printed posthumously, c. 1597. As an inter-
pretation of the text, it does not reach even the indifferent level of
Elizabethan scholarship, but it conveys the sensuous quality of
the original. Marlowe's early choice of this subject and of another
in the same vein (said by Warton to have been The Rape of Helen
by Coluthus, non-extant) has many parallels in contemporary litera-
ture; but it has greater value as a commentary on the later work
of the poet who, unlike Shakespeare, was not allowed time to
outlive his youthful passion. We might find in the eighteenth
elegy (Ad Macrum) of the second book of his Ovid a motto for
his coming endeavour, when, sitting in Venus' slothful shade,' he
>
says:
Yet tragedies and sceptres filld my lines,
But, though I apt were for such high designs,
Love laughëd at my cloak.
If, later, he forsook the shade for the stately tent of war,' it was
because his passion had been transformed, not because he had
grown old.
See Dictionary of National Biography, art. Marlowe. '
-
--
1


## p. 144 (#168) ############################################

144
Marlowe and Kyd
>
Marlowe's first original work was the two parts of Tamburlaine
the Great, played in 1587 or 1588, and printed in 1590. The
grandeur of the style, the gorgeous strutting of Alleyn in the
title rôle, the contrast of the piece with the plays which had held
the popular stage, gave Tamburlaine a long lease of popularity; so
that the Water Poet could truly say that the hero was not so
famous in his own Tartary as in England. How strongly it im-
.
pressed the public mind may be gauged by the number of attacks,
some reasonably satirical, others merely spiteful, which came from
literary rivals. From this onslaught, directed against what
appeared, to classicists (like Jonson) and to 'rhyming mother
wits,' to be an intolerable breach of all the laws of decorum,'has
sprung the tradition of 'bombast' and 'brag' which has clung to
Marlowe's literary name—a tradition which is at fault, not because
it has no measure of truth, but because it neglects much that is
not less true.
This sudden success confirmed Marlowe in his dramatic
ambition. Hard words like Nashe's about idiote art-masters. . .
who. . . think to outbrave better pens' could not deter this young
Tamburlaine of the stage. On the heels of his first triumph came
The tragicall History of Dr Faustus, probably produced in 1588,
though its entry in the Stationers' register is as late as January,
1601, and the earliest known edition is the posthumous quarto of
1604. Interest in this play-a boldiy drawn study of the pride
of intellect, as consuming as the Tartar's ambition has been
seriously warped by speculation on the crude insets of clownage.
Many readers have felt that the comic scenes are disturbing
factors in the progress of the drama, and that Marlowe's text
has suffered from playhouse editing. The presumption is sup-
ported by the evidence of the printer Jones, who tells us
apologetically, in his edition of Tamburlaine, that he 'purposely
omitted. . . some fond and frivolous gestures, digressing, and, in my
poor opinion, far unmeet for the matter. ' He saw the 'disgrace'
of mixing these things in print 'with such matter of worth. ' The
bias for decorum' may, however, be too strong, and there may
be reasons derived from consideration of the historical sentiment
of the popular drama and of Marlowe's artistic mood to make
us pause in saying that the original has been greatly, and sadly,
altered. As bibliography cannot help us, the position of these
alleged 'addicions' of tomfoolery and squibs in the Marlowe canon
becomes a purely critical matter.
The same problem, but in a more difficult form, is presented in


## p. 145 (#169) ############################################

Edward II.
The Massacre at Paris. Dido 145
the next play, The Jew of Malta. The first record of this piece is in
Henslowe's diary, February 1592, and two years later it is named
in the Stationers' register; but, as there is no evidence that it was
printed before 1633, when it received the editorial care of Thomas
Heywood, we have a ready excuse for disclaiming the poorer
passages as the result of the playhouse practice of writing-up’
for managerial ends. Yet, here again, caution is necessary, before
we say that only in the earlier acts, in which Barabas is presented
with little less than the felicity and dramatic mastery of Shake-
speare's Jew, do we have the genuine Marlowe.
Tamburlaine, Dr Faustus and The Jew of Malta constitute
the first dramatic group. In his next play The Troublesome
Raigne and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second', Marlowe
turned from romantic tragedy to history. It is the first English
‘history of the type which Shakespeare has given in Richard
II; a drama of more sustained power, and showing some of
Marlowe's best work. It is this sustained power which has won for
it, since Charles Lamb's time, the honour of comparison on equal
terms with the later masterpiece ; and, on the other hand, has
stimulated the suspicion of Marlowe's responsibility for the in-
equalities of the earlier plays. The most convincing proof of the
dramatist's genius is conveyed in the transformation of the existing
‘chronicle' habit of the popular stage into a new genre. A fifth and
a sixth play-The Massacre at Paris and The Tragedie of Dido
Queene of Carthage-complete the list of the accredited dramas.
The first known edition of the former has been dated between
1596 and the close of the century, the earliest text of the latter
belongs to the year 1594. In these, it must be admitted, the
suspicion of patchwork is reasonably strong, especially in Dido,
where Nashe is openly named on the title-page as a sharer in the
work. The literary interest of The Massacre is very small, except,
perhaps, in the second scene, where Guise's speech has the ring of
Tamburlaine :
Give me a look, that, when I bend the brows,
Pale death may walk in furrows of my face;
A hand, that with a grasp may gripe the worlde.
An ingenious suggestion has been made that, in the more extra-
vagant passages in Dido, such as the description of the death
of Priam, which Shakespeare parodied in Hamlet, Nashe was
1 Perhaps acted in 1592; and printed in 1593, before the appearance of the earliest
extant text by William Jones.
? This play may have been composed before 1593.
3 Act 11, sc. 1.
E. L. V. CH. VII,
10
2


## p. 146 (#170) ############################################

146 Marlowe and Kyd
‘laughing in his sleeve,' and showing that he had learnt the
trick of bragging blank verse' and could swagger in 'drumming
decasyllabons. It is better to take such passages at their poor
face value, and to say that they cannot well be Marlowe's, even at
his worst. Such blatant lines as fall to Dido when she addresses
the 'cursed tree' which bears away the Trojan?
And yet I blame thee not: thou art but wood.
The water, which our poets term a nymph,
Why did it suffer thee to touch her breast,
And shrunk not back, knowing my love was there?
cannot be by Marlowe; or even by Nashe, whether in prankish
or in serious mood.
In these six plays we have all the dramatic work directly
planned, and, with minor reservations, written, by Marlowe. It
would be foolish to claim that the texts are approximately pure;
but till a more exact canon of criticism than that a young genius
may not be astoundingly unequal in his handling be available, we
prefer to hold him responsible for nearly all that goes to the
making of the current texts. The terms of this vexing problem of
collaboration are changed when we come to consider Marlowe's
claims to a share in other men's work. Here, it is clear that the
plea must be that certain passages are in the manner of Marlowe,
and of Marlowe at his best. There are few, if any, tests left to us,
save the risky evidence of style
-all the more risky in the case of
a writer who is severely judged as an extravagant. Thus, Locrine
appears to Malone-and as a firm article of his critical faith-to
resemble the style of Marlowe ‘more than of any other known
dramatick author of that age. ' It would be as difficult to make
this strange claim good as it has been to show the play to be
Shakespeare's? So, too, with Edward III-or an earlier draft of
that pseudo-Shakespearean play—which Fleay described, without
evidence and against probability, as Marlowe’s gift to his successor.
Not less peremptorily may be dismissed the miserable play A Larum
for London which Collier tried to foist on the dramatist on the
strength of some forged rigmarole on his copy of that pieces ; and
Lusts Dominion; Or, The Lascivious Queen (printed in 1657), which
Collier, by way of amends, showed to contain allusions to events
posterior to Marlowe's death ; and, with these two, The Maiden's
Holiday (now lost, through Warburton's cook), a comedy asso-
1 Act iv, sc. 4.
? See post, chap. 2, where some striking resemblances between Locrine and The
Spanish Tragedie are pointed out.
3 Bullen's Marlowe, vol. I, p. lxxiv.


## p. 147 (#171) ############################################

Marlowe and Shakespeare
147
ciated with the name of Day, who was not at work in Marlowe's
lifetime.
There remains the question of Shakespearean association. Four
points of contact have been assumed ; in King John, in The
Taming of the Shrew, in Titus Andronicus, and in the three
parts of Henry VI. That Marlowe had any share in the old play
The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England cannot be
admitted ; the refutation lies in the appeal of the prologue for
welcome to a 'warlike christian and your countryman' from those
who had applauded the infidel Tamburlaine. That Marlowe is the
author of the older shrew play, The Taming of a Shrew, is not
more reasonable ; for the mosaic of quotations and reminiscences
of Tamburlaine and Dr Faustus prove, if they prove anything, that
the author could not be the writer of these plays. There is a
spirit of burlesque throughout in which the most incorrigible self-
critic would have hesitated to indulge, and which only a 'trans-
formed' Marlowe would have essayed. In the case of the much
debated Titus Andronicus and the three parts of Henry VI there is
some show of argument for Marlowe's hand. The more full-bodied
verse of Titus, the metaphorical reach and, above all, the dramatic
presentment of Aaron-which have helped to give the play a place
in the Shakespearean canon-might well be the work of the author
of Tamburlaine. But similar arguments, not less plausible, have
discovered the pen of Peele, and of Greene. More has been said
for the view that Marlowe had a share in Henry VI; but it is
difficult to come nearer an admission of his association than to
say that he probably had a hand in The Contention betwixt the
tuzo famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster (written before 1590)
which serves as the basis of the Second Part. We may guess that
he collaborated in the revision of the Third Part; but it is hard
to find any hint of his style in the First Part, of which there is
no evidence of an earlier version. On the other hand, it is clear
that the author of the First Part was familiar with Tamburlaine,
and in a way not to be explained as reminiscence!
The chronology of Marlowe's non-dramatic, work, other, and
presumably later, than the translation of Ovid already named,
has
not been determined. Two poems Hero and Leander and The
First Book of Lucan are entered in the Stationers' register on
28 September 1593, that is, nearly four months after the poet's
death. The first, which had been left unfinished, was printed
in 1598, and again in the same year, with the text completed by
1 Of. on this subject, post, chap. VIII.
10-2


## p. 148 (#172) ############################################

148
Marlowe and Kyd
6
Chapman. The earliest known edition of the second is dated
1600 ; in which year also appeared two short pieces, the song
‘Come live with me and be my love,' in England: Helicon (in
fuller form than the 1599 text in The Passionate Pilgrim), and
the fragment 'I walked along a stream for pureness rare,' in
England's Parnassus! . The nearly simultaneous publication of
these pieces appears to indicate an effort by friends to leave little
or nothing of the poet's work unprinted; and the fact supplies
contemporary evidence of a kind hardly consistent with the popular
view of the disrepute of Marlowe's last years. Personal testimony
from Edward Blunt (in his remarkable preface), Chapman and
Nashe, supplemented by the praises which Hero and Leander
won, from Shakespeare and Jonson and from humbler artists like
the Water Poet, should go far to reduce the popular hyperbole
of Marlowe's social and spiritual outlawry.
a
6
Since Marlowe's day, when rivals burlesqued his style, opinion
has been concerned chiefly with the extravagance of his art, with
his bombast and transpontine habit and, incidentally, with the
craft of his dramatic verse. The fault of this criticism is that it is
inadequate, that it enlarges on the accidental at the expense of the
essential, and obscures both Marlowe's individual merit as a poet
and his historical place in our literature. On the one hand, we
make too much of the youthfulness of his muse, of his restless
longing and 'buccaneering '; and, on the other, of his transitional
or preparatory character. He is treated as a forerunner, a prede-
cessor, a document for the prosodist; rarely, and, as it were, by
chance, is he held in our literary affection for his own sake. He
does not stand out as Shakespeare or Jonson or Fletcher does from
the rush of scholarly controversy : he is a 'link,' a 'signpost,' to
the historian of the English drama.
What is fundamental and new in Marlowe and was indeed his
true aid to his dramatic successors is his poetic quality-the gift
of the 'brave translunary things' of Drayton's eulogy. If there be
anything in the common statement that Shakespeare is indebted
to him, it is less for his great pattern of dramatic verse or even for
his transformation of the crude history play than for the example
of a free imagination, compassing great things greatly. It is harder
to think of Shakespeare's profiting by direct study of Marlowe's
1 To these has been added an unimportant Elegy on [Sir Roger] Manwood, pre-
served in MS in a copy of the 1629 edition of Hero and Leander; but the ascription
has small authority, if any.


## p. 149 (#173) ############################################

Marlowe's Literary Quality
149
6
experiments' in caesura and run-on lines than of his finding
encouragement in the wealth of metaphor and in the energy of
the new drama. In this poetic habit rather than in technical
ingenuities are we to seek in such predecessors as Marlowe and
Lyly for points of touch with Shakespeare. Let us, however, not
exaggerate the borrowing: the kinship is of the age rather than
of blood, the expression and re-expression of that artistic sense
which marks off the literature of this period from all that had gone
before. The interest of Marlowe's work is that it is the first to
show how the age had broken with tradition. If it unveil so much
to us, it may have helped even Shakespeare to feel his own power
and reach. This feeling or understanding, we may call, though too
crudely, the 'borrowing' from Marlowe.
A careful comparison of Marlowe's style, whether in verse-
translation or in tragedy, with what had preceded, will show the
insufficiency of the judgment that it is 'youthful' or 'preliminary. '
It is too full-bodied, too confirmed in its strength. It conveys the
impression, even in those passages which have been tardily excused,
of a vigour and richness of poetic experience far beyond what we
find in the artist who is merely making his way or is toying with
experiment. If Marlowe fail to achieve the highest, it is not
because he is a little less than a true poet, or because he cannot
temper the enthusiasm of adolescence, but because the self-imposed
task of transforming the 'jigging veins' of the national literature
to statelier purpose was one of the hardest which genius could
attempt. The familiar epithet 'titanic,' in which criticism has
sought to sum up the poet's unmeasured aspirations, or J. A.
Symonds's hard-worn phrase 't Amour de l'Impossible? may help
us to express something of this imaginative vigour which was used
in the transinutation of the old dross. Marlowe has the self-
possession of the strong man; he is no imitator, no pupil of a
theory, Senecan or other, which he would substitute for what he
found. The inequalities in his art are the effect of this strength,
rather than the signs of undeveloped power. To a genius richly
endowed from the first, and placed in such circumstance, literary
development of the kind familiar to us in the careers of more
receptive artists was impossible. In his plays we pass suddenly
from creditable verse to lines of astounding power, both of imagery
and form ; and we do so again and again. It is not our uncertainty
of the chronology of his plays which prevents our placing them in a
series of accomplishment, or doubt of his genius which makes us
1 Alias • The Impossible Amour' (Symonds, Shakspere's Predecessors (1884), p. 608. )
6


## p. 150 (#174) ############################################

150
Marlowe and Kyd
chary of joining in the wholesale condemnation of the interludes of
clownage and extravagance preserved in the texts. There is no
younger or more mature Marlowe as there is a younger or more
mature Shakespeare; and this is so, not because Marlowe's years
fall short of the time which brings the harvest to most men.
The characteristics of Marlowe's style which the traditional
criticism has singled out and deplored—the persistent hyperbole,
the weak construction of the plays and their one-man and no-
woman limitations, the lack of humour—are not to be confounded
with the faults which go by the same name in the work of weaker
contemporaries. Nor is it enough to say, in partial excuse of
the first, that all Elizabethans, including Shakespeare, are of
necessity hyperbolic in habit, and that Marlowe's excess is but the
vice of that all-pervading quality. So much is certain : that the
excess is not a mere makeweight or loading-on, to satisfy the
clamour of the pit, and that the dramatist does not find an artistic
pleasure in the mere use of bombast. There is always the sense of
intimacy, even in the most extravagant passages, between the word
and the situation which it expresses. The suggestion is literary ;
seldom, if ever, theatrical.
Indeed, we are on safer ground for the appreciation of Marlowe
if we approach him from the literary side. Though he served
English drama surpassingly well by giving it body and momentum,
he rarely supplies a model in the technicalities of that genre.
This is made clear, not only by the lack of variety in the choice of
character and in the setting and construction, but by the absence
of dramatic development in the portrayal of his heroes.
What
development we find is the outcome of a purely literary
process, showing eloquence rather than action, a stately epical
movement rather than the playwright's surprises of situation and
character. Even in the passage where Tamburlaine laments by
the bed of his dying Zenocrate, the poet achieves great pathos
not by the mere ‘stir' of the scene, but by that Miltonic know-
ledge of word values, by the conscious (and rarely overconscious)
delight in anaphora and line echo (“To entertain divine Zeno-
crate'), and by the climax of metaphor. We feel that by the
sheer verbal music of the recurring name, as in the scene of the
wooing', and, again, in the great speech in part 1, act v, sc. 1, the
poet attains a dramatic effect undramatically. When has the
magic of the word been used to better purpose than in the
passage in which Tamburlaine, after hearing the speeches of
1 Part I, act i, sc. 2.


## p. 151 (#175) ############################################

Marlowe and Milton. The Chronicle Play 151
Cosroe and Meander, and catching at the parting lines of the
latter,
Your majesty shall shortly have your wish,
And ride in triumph through Persepolis,
says,
‘And ride in triumph through Persepolis ! '
Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles ?
Usumcasane and Theridamas,
Is it not passing brave to be a king,
And ride in triumph through Persepolis? '1
This is the word music which rings out of such lines as
By knights of Logres, or of Lyones,
Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore,
and gives Marlowe as well as Milton his place as an 'inventor of
harmonies. '
Marlowe's high seriousness (bluntly called lack of humour) sug-
gests a further Miltonic analogy, and lends support to the view
that his cast of thought, unlike that of many of his great suc-
cessors in the drama, found readier expression in the processional
of the imagination than in episode and the conflict of character.
His contemporary, Kyd, had a stricter conception of the purpose
and method of the playwright; but Marlowe's gift of the secret
of stateliness was the true capital and endowment of the Eliza-
bethan drama.
Two illustrations may be offered of Marlowe's transforming
power : one, his treatment of the chronicle play; another, his
creation of blank verse as a dramatic instrument.
The first examples of the English chronicle play belong to the
early eighties of the sixteenth century. Historical personages
appear in the drama of the transition, but neither in their treat-
ment nor in their setting do we find anything which approaches
what we must understand by a chronicle play or ‘history. The
use of historical material by the stage represents three artistic
intentions, more or less distinct. The first is didactic or satirical,
and offers the key to some of the leading changes in the later
morality. It appears early in the treatment of Bible story ; later,
in the humanising of allegorical characters, as in the identification
of Herod with 'Cruelty'; later still, in the introduction of his-
torical characters such as cardinal Pandulfus and Stephen Langton.
The second is patriotic in motif, the expression of a strong national
consciousness stirred by the political fervours of Elizabethan
England, and stimulated on the literary side by the appearance of
1 Part I, act 11, 80. 5.
>


## p. 152 (#176) ############################################

152
Marlowe and Kyd
a multitude of prose works on historical subjects. Here, we have the
true beginnings of the dramatic ‘history' ushered in by such plays
as the old Henry V and Jack Straw; defined later by Peele and
Marlowe in their Edwards; and, by the end of Elizabeth's reign,
already exhausted, after the masterpieces of Shakespeare. The
third, the romantic, showing an interest in history because it offers
an artistic relief from contemporary conditions, hardly falls under
consideration at this point. Something of its mood appears in the
mythical tales crudely dramatised in the early Tudor period and
utilised by the Elizabethans; but it was its strangeness, the
opportunity given to fancy and emotion, which attracted the
playwrights. It is the 'unhistorical' sentiment of the romantic
revival of a later century which turned to the Middle Ages for the
a
sheer delight of treading forgotten paths and escaping from the
present.
It is a reasonable question whether there is any such genre as
the chronicle or history play, for the term, in its strictest sense,
means no more than a play, presumably a tragedy, which draws its
subject from the national annals. The ‘history play,' like the
historical novel, is, at its best, an effort to analyse, by dramatic
means, the development and effect of character. Rarely has it set
itself the task of the general interpretation to which the historian
proper is committed. Being a study of character which is in-
cidentally historical, it does not stand apart from the accepted
dramatic categories. The Elizabethan habit, familiarised in the
division of Shakespeare's plays into 'tragedies,' 'comedies' and
'histories,' has exaggerated the value of the distinction. The
true interest of the matter is that, in the popular appeal to
history during the stirring close of the sixteenth century, not a
few of the greater playwrights found their opportunity for the
delineation of character in less tragic circumstance: seldom,
perhaps only in Shakespeare, and in him not often, is the his-
torical interpretation, the 'truth' of the 'true' tragedies, of any
concern. Marlowe's merit as the beginner of the history play so-
called lies in his humanising of the puppets of the Kynge Johan
type, not in the discovery for us of the true Edward.
Edward II is not the first of the patriotic plays which sup-
planted the didactic and satirical morality (the dramatic counter-
part of A Mirror for Magistrates), or of the Senecan variants,
from Gorboduc to The Misfortunes of Arthur and Locrine.
Of the extant forerunners, the roughly drawn Famous Victories
of Henry the fifth and Jack Straw (printed in 1593) may be
6


## p. 153 (#177) ############################################

Marlowe and the Chronicle Play
153
the earliest. A third, The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of
England, in two parts (printed in 1591), supplies a link between the
older King John by Bale and the later by Shakespeare, not merely
as showing a progression in the treatment of a historical theme, but
-and this gives force to the progression—in the humanising of the
chief personages. This breaking with the dull habit of the chronicle
play becomes clearer in Peele's Edward I (even though much of
the roughness of the earlier models remains), and in The First
Part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke
and Lancaster and The True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of Yorke
(represented in later form by Parts II and III of Henry VI). We
find like evidence in The True Tragedie of Richard III (printed
in 1594) and in the troublesome'text of I Henry VI, as it appears
in the Shakespeare folio. In this historical laboratory, in which
some ask us to believe that Marlowe gained experience in the
earlier texts on which Parts I and II of Henry VI were founded,
as well as in the Shakespearean revisions, and even in the Shake-
spearean Part I, we have the making of Edward II, and, as a
further effect of the collaboration, of Richard II.
The praise of Edward II has probably been extravagant. Be-
cause it is the first historical play of the stricter type, and because
there is more characterisation and episode in it than in his earlier
plays, it is singled out as Marlowe's best dramatic effort. It is
necessary to supplement this half-truth. Such improvement as it
shows, in construction and in development of character, is less
real than may seem. Every play based on intimate history has
an advantage in these respects. The 'fine restraint' for which
Edward II has been admired is partly due to the fact that,
unlike Richard II, with which it is often compared, it chooses
a more extended period of action, and is, therefore, compelled to
congest or select the episodes. The condensation, which has in-
duced some critics to speak of the simplicity of Marlowe's treatment,
makes against the dramatic interest, and denies the dramatist, often
at the most urgent moments, the opportunity of fuller character-
isation. Even when we make allowance for the greater number
of characters of the first order and for the part of Isabella, it
is impossible to separate the play from the earlier Marlowe
category: not only because it is a re-expression of the simple
problem of the impassioned resolute man, but because it is
fundamentally literary in its mood. Such difference as exists
is the effect of the medium, and of that only. That the old
literary bias is strong hardly requires illustration. The keynote


## p. 154 (#178) ############################################

154
Marlowe and Kyd
6
is struck in Gaveston's opening speeches, especially in that
beginning
These are not men for me;
I must have wanton poets, pleasant wits,
Musicians,
in Edward's talk with his friends in flight, and in the debate on
his abdication. We are disappointed of the stricter dramatic
requirements, of (in Swinburne's words) the exact balance of
mutual effect, the final note of scenic harmony between ideal
conception and realistic execution. ' The characters do not
secure or even excite any finer sympathy or more serious in-
terest than attends on the mere evolution of successive events
or the mere display of emotions (except always in the great
scene of the deposition), rather animal than spiritual in their
expression of rage or tenderness or suffering? We may go
further and say that neither as a pure literary effort nor as a
drama does Edward II overtop, at least in its finest single
passages, what Marlowe has given us elsewhere. In the gruesome
death scene, we hold breath no harder than we do at the critical
moment of Faustus's career. In passion and word music, the play
never surpasses the earlier pieces : the shackles of the chronicle
keep it, on the one hand, from the imaginative range of Tambur-
laine or Faustus, and, on the other, from the reach of great tragedy.
Yet, as an effort to interpret history on the stage, it is the first
of any account, and hardly inferior to what is reputed best in
this genre. Independent of such merit as is individual to it as
literature is the credit of having reformed the awkward manners
of the 'true tragedies' to statelier bearing. Marlowe satisfied
the popular craving for the realities, as he had sought to satisfy
the vaguer spiritual longings of his ambitious age. In no single
case is his achievement final or artistically complete; but the
cumulative effect of his insistence on a great idea, his undiminished
force of passion and his poetic fulness are his great gift to
English tragedy.
To Marlowe's literary instinct rather than to his faculty as a
playwright the Elizabethan drama was indebted for the further
gift of blank verse. Though the development of the instrument
in his hands is the outcome of an experience which, unlike
Milton's, was exclusively dramatic, it is easy to note that the
phases of change, the discoveries of new effects, do not arise, as
might be expected, from dramatic necessity. The plasticity of
1 Age of Shakespeare, 1908, p. 6.


## p. 155 (#179) ############################################

Marlowe's Blank Verse
155
Marlowe's line, which is its most remarkable characteristic, is the
direct expression of his varying poetic mood, the ebb and flow
of metaphor, the organ and pipe music of word and phrase. The
differences are apparent when we pass from such lines as in the
great apostrophe to Helen to thesel:
From Scythia to the oriental plage
Of India, where raging Lantchidol
Beats on the regions with his boisterous blows,
To Amazonia under Capricorn;
And thence as far as Archipelago,
All Afric is in arms with Tamburlaine;
and to these, in the first scene of The Jew of Malta :
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 by the weight;
Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts,
Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds,
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds,
And seld-seen costly stones of so great price,
As one of them indifferently rated,
And of a caret of this quantity,
May serve in peril of calamity
To ransom great kings from captivity.
and to these, from Edward II 2:
The griefs of private men are soon allay'd,
But not of kings. The forest deer, being struck,
Runs to an herb that closeth up the wounds;
But when the imperial lion's flesh is gord,
He rends and tears it with his wrathful paw,
And, highly scorning that the lowly earth
Should drink his blood, mounts up to the air.
Such prosodic transitions do not show the intimate textual
relationship to be found in Shakespeare's plays. In Marlowe's
verse, each and all sort with a variety of mood which, in origin
and expression, is epical, at times lyrical, rarely dramatic.
It is scarcely possible, without giving much space to illus-
tration, to measure the differences in technical accomplishment
between Marlowe and the earlier practitioners in blank verse. It
matters not whether we take Surrey's rendering of the second and
fourth Aeneid, which has the historical interest of being the first
example of the naturalisation of the 'straunge meter,' or Gorboduc,
also historically interesting as the first document' of dramatic
blank verse in English: in these, it is as hard to foresee the
1 Part II, act I, sc. 1.
2 Act v, sc. 1.
6


## p. 156 (#180) ############################################

156
Marlowe and Kyd
finding of a new prosodic instrument as in the experiments of
Drant and his circle. Indeed, in both, there is only a violation of
English sentiment; and nothing is given by way of compensation.
In the confusion of accent and quantity the life of the verse has
gone out; the quantitative twitchings never suggest vitality;
each line is cold and stiff, laid out with its neighbours, in the
chance companionship of a poetic morgue. These conditions are
not entirely wanting in Marlowe: we see them when we institute
a close comparison with Shakespeare and Milton. Nevertheless,
his blank verse is, for the first time in English, a living thing:
often as full-veined and vigorous as anything in the later master-
pieces. This verse (if it be described in general terms) discloses
greater variety in the accentuation of the line, greater regularity
in the use of equivalence in the foot, an occasional shaking of the
caesura from its 'classical' pose, the frequent employment of
feminine endings even in exaggerated form, as
And Faustus hath bequeathed his soul to Lucifer,
or in the lines from The Jew of Malta, quoted on the previous
page; above all, the breaking away from the pause and sense close
at the end of each line. We have, in a word, the suggestion of
that fluidity and movement which we find in the Miltonic verse
paragraph. Marlowe achieves his line by the sheer rush of imagina-
tion, like a swollen river sweeping down on its dried-up channel,
filling its broad banks and moving on majestically. It is accom-
plished by neither stage eloquence nor stage passion: its voice
has the epical timbre, the 08 magna sonaturum. If there be
anything in the hackneyed opinion that the poet weighted his
lines with what has been called 'bombast' and 'rant' to make
good the lost ballast of rime, it tends to a further confirmation
of the belief that his technique was the outcome of an experience
which was literary in origin and process.
The dramatic career of Thomas Kyd covers a shorter period
than Marlowe's; and, despite the great popularity and influence
of The Spanish Tragedie, it lacks both the range and sustained
interest of the work of his junior and associate. He was the
son of one Francis Kyd, a city scrivener, and was educated at
Merchant Taylors' school, in which, from 26 October 1565, he was
a fellow pupil with Edmund Spenser. This date and an earlier
fixing his baptism on 6 November 1558 are the sole biographical
evidence available, with the exception of sundry references, at


## p. 157 (#181) ############################################

Kyd's Literary Labours
157
6
the close of his short life, in papers connected with the judicial
enquiry into Marlowe's religious opinions. For the rest, we must
rely on the interpretation of the well known passage in Nashe's
preface to Greene's Menaphon (1589) and of certain cryptic
entries in Henslowe's diary. The former, by the elaboration of
its satirical anger, acquires the value of a biographical document.
Even if we had not the punning reference to the 'Kidde in
Aesop' (a reminiscence of the ‘May' eclogue of The Shepheards
Calender) we should recognise, with due allowance for the extra-
vagance of the attack, that the series of allusions constitutes
strong circumstantial evidence as to the victim's career down to
1589. From this passage, therefore, we assume that Kyd had early
forsaken his apprenticeship to his father's 'trade of Noverint';
that, being weak in Latinity (and so charged unjustly), he had
turned to play-making and had ‘bled' Seneca through its 'English'
veins; that, in this barber-surgeon enterprise, he had interested
himself in the story of Hamlet; and that, later, he had fallen to
the task of translating from Italian and French. The reference
to the botching up of blank verse 'with ifs and ands' seems to
be explained by a line in The Spanish Tragedie? ; and the
ridiculed phrase "bloud is a beggar' may prove to have a
textual interest when fortune gives us the pre-Shakespearean
Hamlet.
The earliest known dated work ascribed to Kyd is The
Householders Philosophie, a version of Tasso's Padre di Famiglia.
This volume, by 'T. K. ,' printed in 1588, probably represents
the 'twopenny pamphlet' work from the Italian to which Nashe
refers towards the close of his depreciation. The French enter-
prise, also amiably described by the same hand, may remain to
us in Pompey the Great, his faire Corneliaes Tragedie, which
appeared under Kyd's name in 15952 as a translation of Garnier's
Cornélie, and in the record of his intention to follow with a
rendering of that author's Porcie. This intimation of Kyd's
interest in the French Senecan brings him into immediate touch
with lady Pembroke and her coterie, and gives point to Nashe's
double-sensed gibe that the translators "for recreation after their
candle-stuffe, having starched their beardes most curiously' made
'a peripateticall path into the inner parts of the Citie' and
spent 'two or three howers in turning over French Doudie. '
The translation of Cornélie and a pamphlet on The Murthering
1 Act 11, sc. 1, 79.
? An anonymous text appeared in 1594. See bibliography.
>


## p. 158 (#182) ############################################

158
Marlowe and Kyd
of John Brewen, Goldsmith (printed by his brother John Kyd in
1592) appear to be the latest efforts of Kyd's short career, which
came to an end about December 1594. In the short interval
anterior to this hackwork, between 1585 and the publication of
Nashe's attack in 1589, the public were probably in possession
of the works on which his reputation rests, his Hamlet, The
Spanish Tragedie, and The Tragedie of Solimon and Perseda.
These and the discredited First Part of Jeronimo still supply
some of the thorniest problems to Elizabethan scholarship. Here,
only a partial statement can be attempted.
We know that in 1592 The Spanish Tragedie was enjoying the
fullest popular favour. None of the earliest quartos-Allde's
undated print, Jeffes's in 1594, White's in 1599-give a clue to the
authorship. The entry of the licence for The Spanishe tragedie of
Don Horatio and Bellmipeia (Bellimperia) on 6 October 1592 is
silent ; so, too, the later editions, and the notes in Henslowe of
Ben Jonson's additions in 1601 and 1602. It is not till we come to
the casual reference by Thomas Heywood to ‘M. Kid' as the
author' that what might have proved another bibliographical crux
is fully determined. We may assume, from the hints in the in-
ductions to Cynthia's Revels and Bartholomew Fayre, that the
play was written between 1585 and 1587. Not only are there no
direct references to the great events of 1588, such as could hardly
be absent from a 'Spanish' tragedy-but the deliberate allusion
to older conflicts with England’ shows that the opportunity which
Kyd, as a popular writer, could not have missed had not yet come.
The theme of The Spanish Tragedie is the revenge of 'old
Hieronimo' for the undoing of his son Don Horatio and the
'pittiful death of the former in accomplishing his purpose.
Though contemporary satire fixed upon the play, and made it out-
Seneca Seneca in passion for blood, the essence of the drama
lies in the slow carrying-out of the revenge. In this, rather than
in the mere inversion of the rôles of father and son, is there analogy
with the Shakespearean Hamlet; as there is, also, in certain details
of construction, such as the device of the play within the play, the
presence of the ghost (with all allowance for Senecan and early
Elizabethan habit), and, generally, the coordination of three stories
in one plot. Consideration of this analogy helps us to define Kyd's
position in regard to both the English Senecan tragedy and the
Shakespearean: the more immediate matter is that Kyd's interest
1 Apology for Actors, 1612. ? E. g. The Spanish Tragedie, act 1, sc. 5.
>


## p. 159 (#183) ############################################

Kyd and the Early Hamlet 159
in this variant' of the Hamlet story supports, rather than con-
demns, the conjecture that he had already been engaged on the
tragedy of the son’s revenge. Such recasting by one hand of a
single and simple dramatic motif is credible ; and, in Kyd's case,
likely, when we recall the alleged relationship of Solimon and
Perseda with The Spanish Tragedie. There are few authors of
Kyd's repute whose work suggests more clearly a development
from within, a re-elaboration of its own limited material. For this
reason, it is hard to disbelieve that he wrote a 'first part’ to his
Spanish Tragedie, even if we be persuaded that the extant text of
the First Part of Jeronimo is not from his pen.
Kyd's authorship of a Hamlet which served as the basis for the
Shakespearean Hamlet is more than a plausible inference. As the
arguments in support of this are too lengthy for discussion in this
place, only a general statement may be made. In regard to the
date, we conclude, from the passage in Nashe, that the Saxo-
Belleforest story had been dramatised before 1589. As there is no
evidence that it had attracted attention in England before the
tour of English actors on the continent, and, as they returned
from Elsinore towards the close of 1587, we may very reasonably
fix the date of production in 1587 or 1588. The assumption that
Kyd is the author rests on these main bases: that the first quarto
of the Shakespearean Hamlet (1603) carries over some sections of
an original play, and that there are many parallelisms between the
Shakespearean play and The Spanish Tragedie, in construction, in
phrase and even in metre, and between it and Kyd's other works,
in respect of sentiment. The likenesses in construction already
hinted at make up, with the textual data, a body of circumstantial
evidence which the most cautious criticism, fully conscious of the
risks of interpreting the re-echoed expressions of the spirit of the
age as deliberate plagiarism, is not willing to throw aside. Indeed,
the cumulative force of the evidence would appear to convert the
assumption into a certainty. If, as no one will doubt, Shakespeare
worked over, and reworked over, some Hamlet which had already
secured popular favour, why should we, with Nashe and the com-
parative testimony before us, seek for another than Kyd as the
author of the lost, perhaps unprinted, play? We are left with the
regret that, having Shakespeare's revisions, we are denied the
details of the master's transformation of the original copy. The
lesson of this sequence would have told us more of Shakespeare's
‘mind and art' than we could learn írom the unravelling of all his
collaborated plays.


## p. 160 (#184) ############################################

160
Marlowe and Kyd
6
?
6
That Kyd, following his 'serial' habit of production, wrote a
'first part' for his 'tragedy' is, as we have said, possible, but not
a tittle of evidence is forthcoming: that he wrote The First Part
of Jeronimo. With the Warres of Portugall, and the life and
death of Don Andrea, which we have in the quarto edition of 1605,
is, despite the authority lent in support of the ascription to him,
wholly untenable. The problem of Kyd's association with a first
part may be resolved into two main questions. In the first place,
did he write, or could he have written, the extant text of 1605 ?
In the second place, is this piece to be identified with the play
entitled 'Done oracio’ alias “The Comedy of Jeronymo,' alias
'Spanes Comodye donne oracoe,' which appears seven times
in Henslowe's list of the performances, in 1592, of The Spanish
Tragedie? ? A rapid reading of the First Part will show that,
far from there being 'adequate internal evidence for assigning
the play to Kyd, there is proof that it must be by another hand.
To maintain the ascription to Kyd, we should have to adduce
very solid testimony, external as well as internal, that Kyd was
capable of burlesque, was a veritable (sporting Kyd,' and was
Puck enough to make havoc of his art and popular triumph. For,
from beginning to end, the piece is nothing but a tissue of
rhetorical mockery, a satire of 'tragical speeches' and of inter-
meddling ghosts ; often, on closer inspection, a direct quizzing of
The Spanish Tragedie itself. By no access of literary devilry
could the author of old Jeronimo transform that hero to the
speaker of such intentional fustian as
Now I remember too (0 sweet rememberance)
This day my years strike fiftie, and in Rome
They call the fifty year the year of Jubily,
The merry yeare, the peacefull yeare, the jocond yeare,
A yeare of joy, of pleasure, and delight.
This shall be my yeare of Jubily, for 'tis my fifty.
Age ushers honor; 'tis no shame; confesse,
Beard, thou art fifty full, not a baire lesse 2.
And it would be hard to believe that Kyd had joined in the raillery
of Nashe and the pamphleteers,
0, for honor,
Your countries reputation, your lives freedome,
Indeed your all that may be termed reveng,
Now let your blouds be liberall as the sea 3;
or could write the ludicrous dialogue between the ghost of Andrea
and Revenge at the close. The inevitable conclusion is that this
1 Called Jeronymo in Henslowe. ? Act 1, sc. 1. . 3 Act III, so. 1.


## p. 161 (#185) ############################################

Solimon and Perseda
161
First Part cannot have been written by the author of The Spanish
Tragedie; and further (and almost as certainly), that this burlesque
by another hand is not the piece which was interpolated by lord
Strange's men in their repertory of 1592. The opportunity for the
burlesque came more naturally in the early years of the new century,
when The Spanish Tragedie had been refurbished by Ben Jonson,
and attention had been called to it by his characteristic criticism
of the old play. Internal evidence, notably the allusions to the
Roman jubilee of 1600 and the acting of the play by the children
of the chapel, supports the general conclusion against Kyd's
authorship. It should, however, be noted that the argument that
the First Part does not answer Henslowe's label of 'comodey’ is
irrelevant, if we make allowance for the vague nomenclature of
the time and consider that the play makes no pretence to more
than the seriousness' of burlesque. Further, the shortness of the
text may be responsible for the view that the play was a 'fore-
piece,' presumably to The Spanish Tragedie. The Henslowe play
(never acted on the same night as the serious Jeronimo) might as
well be called an afterpiece ; but it is hard, in any circumstances,
to conjure up an audience of the early nineties, or even of 1605,
taking kindly to the two Jeronimos at one sitting.
Though no solid reason has been advanced against the ascription
of Solimon and Perseda to Kyd, it is only on the slenderest
grounds that it has been claimed for him. The story on which it
is based appears in Henry Wotton's Courtlie Controversie of
Cupids Cautels (1578), which also supplies the original of the
pseudo-Shakespearean Faire Em; the play is entered in the
Stationers' register on 22 November 1592, and is extant in an
undated quarto and two quartos of 1599. Its association with Kyd
has been assumed from the fact that he uses the same plot in the
interpolated play which Jeronimo and Bellimperia present in The
Spanish Tragedie. If we assume that one author is responsible
for both renderings, the question remains as to which play was the
earlier. ' Decision on this point is more difficult because of the
long popularity of Wotton's translation, and of Jacques Yver's
original, Le Printemps d'Iver—as shown in the successive refer-
ences, from Greene's Mamillia (1583), to Shakespeare's King John
and Henry IV. Shakespeare's pointed allusions to Basilisco—the
captain Bobadil of Solimon and Perseda-imply an immediate and
current popularity of the play; and for this reason we incline to
dispute Sarrazin's conclusion that it was an early effort, and ante-
cedent to The Spanish Tragedie. It appears, on the whole,
11
E. L. V.
CH, VII.


## p. 162 (#186) ############################################

162
Marlowe and Kyd
reasonable to fix the date of composition between the appearance
of The Spanish Tragedie and the entry in the Stationers' register
in 1592, and to consider it, if it be given to Kyd, as a fuller
handling of the sketch for Jeronimo and Bellimperia. Certain
similarities in motif, construction and phrasel are tempting aids to
the finding of a single author for both plays. On the other hand,
the closer we find the likeness, the harder is it to reckon with the
difficulty of believing that an author would thus repeat himself.
If, as Kyd's most recent editor maintains, Solimon lacks the show
of genius of The Spanish Tragedie, and if, as is also admitted,
there is a close family likeness (on which, indeed, the argument of
one parentage is based), we are in danger of being forced, contrary
to this critic's view and our own (as already stated), to the con-
clusion that the inferior play must be the earlier. The problem
is further complicated by the presence of a strange element of
comedy in Solimon. This, and, especially, the transcript of the
miles gloriosus type in the braggart Basilisco, introduces us, if
not to a new author, to a new phase of Kyd's art. And so we
float, rudderless and anchorless, on the sea of speculation? .
The difficulty of determining the authentic work of Kyd makes
any general estimate of his quality and historical place more or
less tentative; yet the least uncertain of these uncertainties and
the acknowledged work in translation give us some critical foothold.
Kyd, in the words of his Hieronimo, proclaims his artistic
fellowship with the author of Tamburlaine :
Give me a stately written tragedie;
Tragedia cothurnata fitting Kings,
Containing matter, and not common thing83.
Even if we allow, on the most liberal interpretation of the claims
set up by his editors, that he shows a subtler sense of humour than
is to be found in Marlowe, we are never distracted from the sombre
purpose of his art. A closer student of Seneca than was his brother
dramatist, he transfers, with direct touch, the 'tragical' rhetoric,
the ghostly personages, the revel in stage massacre; yet never in
the intimate fashion of the Tenne Tragedies or of his own version
* E. g. the words 'tralucent' (translucent) 'breast' in Solimon, act 11, sc.