of the Contention and of The True Tragedie; and the following instances of their occasional close resemblance to his Edward the Second are confirmative of that supposition, however little such parallelisms might be thought to weigh, if they formed the only grounds for it: "I tell thee, Poull, when thou didst runne at tilt And stolst away our ladaies' hearts in France," &c. First Part of the Cont. Sig. B 3, ed. 1594. "Tell Isabel the queen, I look'd not thus, When for her sake I ran at tilt in France," &c. Edward the Sec., p. 220, first col. "Madame, I bring you newes from Ireland; First Part of the Cont. Sig. E., "The wild Oneil, with swarms of Irish kerns, Edward the Sec., p. 197, first col. "Sterne Fawconbridge commands the narrow seas." The True Tragedie, Sig. A 6, ed. 1595. "The haughty Dane commands the narrow seas.” Edward the Sec., p. 197, first col. "Thus yeelds the cedar to the axes edge, Whose armes gaue shelter to the princlie eagle." The True Tragedie, Sig. E 2. "A lofty cedar-tree, fair flourishing, On whose top-branches kingly eagles perch.” Edward the Sec., p. 195, first col. in The True Tragedy' and some lines in one of Greene's acknowledged dramas, 'Alphonsus, King In 'Alphonsus' the hero kills Flaminius, his enemy, and thus addresses the 'Go, pack thee hence,' &c. of Arragon'. dying man ; And if he ask thee who did send thee down, Alphonsus say, who now must wear thy crown.' In The True Tragedy' Richard, while stabbing Henry VI. a second time, exclaims, 'If any spark of life remain in thee, Down, down to hell; and say I sent thee thither."" Collier's Shakespeare, v. 225-7. Mr. Hallam remarks; "It seems probable that the old plays of the Contention of Lancaster and York, and the True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York, which Shakespeare remodelled in the Second and Third Parts of Henry VI., were in great part by Marlowe, though Greene seems to put in for some share in their composition ;" and in a note he adds; "The bitterness he [Greene] displays must lead us to suspect that he had been one himself of those who were thus preyed upon. But the greater part of the plays in question is in the judgment, I conceive, of all competent critics, far above the powers either of Greene or Peele, and exhibits a much greater share of the spirited versification, called by Jonson the 'mighty line,' of Christopher Marlowe." Introd. to the Lit. of Europe, ii. 171, ed. 1843. d What, will the aspiring bloud of Lancaster Sinke into the ground? I had thought it would have mounted." "Frown'st thou thereat, aspiring Lancaster ?" Edward the Sec., p. 184, sec. col. "[And], highly scorning that the lowly earth Should drink his blood, mounts up to the air." Besides The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedie,* some other play or plays, of which Greene was either the sole or joint author, and in which Marlowe had no concern whatever, may perhaps be comprehended in the expression, "our feathers :" but an inquiry into that point would be irrelevant here. Two old plays are yet to be mentioned, which have been ascribed to Marlowe, and which Shakespeare remodelled,-The Troublesome Raigne of King John in Two Parts, and The Taming of a Shrew. Be it observed, however, that to neither of these plays, even supposing them to have been really written by Marlowe, could we refer the above-cited allusion of Greene in 1592; for at that date Shakespeare, unless his commentators are greatly mistaken, had not produced his King John and his Taming of the Shrew. In support of Marlowe's claim to The Troublesome Raigne, it has been urged :— First, that the Prologue to the earliest 4to seems to solicit the favour of the audience for a piece which had been composed by the author of Tamburlaine; "You, that with friendly grace of smoothed brow Haue entertain'd the Scythian Tamburlaine, And giuen applause vnto an infidel, Vouchsafe to welcome with like curtesie A warlike Christian and your countryman." Secondly, that the play has two passages coincident with lines in The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedie,-to both which dramas, as already observed, there is every reason to believe that Marlowe was a very large contributor; * I may notice, that while Shakespeare was remodelling The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedie, he had sometimes in his recollection plays which we know for certain to be by Marlowe ; "She bears a duke's revenues on her back." Sec. Part of Henry VI., act 1. sc. 3. "He wears a lord's revenue on his back." Edward the Sec., p. 193, first col. "These arms of mine shall be thy winding-sheet; Third Part of Henry VI., act II. sc. 5. "What sight is this! my Lodovico slain ! The Jew of Malta, p. 161, first col. But, on the other hand, there are many things throughout The Troublesome Raigne* so materially at variance with the style of Marlowe, that, while I admit the probability of his co-operation in the play, I cannot assent to the critical dictum ✦ which would attribute the whole of it to him. As to The Taming of a Shrew, which was both entered in the Stationers' Books and printed in 1594,-it abounds in passages that either strongly resemble or directly correspond with passages in the undoubted plays of Marlowe. These were first pointed out by an ingenious American critic, and, together with his arguments to prove that the comedy was written by Marlowe, may be seen in the second volume of Mr. Knight's Library edition of Shakespeare. I shall, as briefly as possible, declare my reasons for believing that Marlowe was not the author of The Taming of a Shrew. -Among the less striking parallelisms just mentioned is the following one; "And hewd thee smaller then the Libian sandes." The Taming of a Shrew, p. 42, ed. Shake. Soc. "Or hew'd this flesh and bones as small as sand." Faustus (from the quarto of 1616), p. 126, first col. It has not been observed, that when Shakespeare opened the sec. scene of the first act of his Richard the Third with "Set down, set down your honourable load," he remembered a line with which a scene in the Second Part of The Troublesome Raigne begins,"Set downe, set downe the loade not worth your paine." Sig. K 4, ed. 1622. Malone once supposed it to have been written by Peele or Greene; latterly (Shakespeare, by Boswell, ii. 313) he assigned it to Marlowe. Now, if we were sure that the resemblance between these two lines was not accidental (and it seems highly probable that the former was suggested by the latter), we might at once conclude that the author of The Taming of a Shrew and Marlowe were distinct persons; for the line cited from Faustus belongs to a scene which is not found in the earliest quarto, and which is evidently the composition of a poet whose style was not a little dissimilar to that of Marlowe. But, leaving this particular out of the question, I find enough besides in The Taming of a Shrew to convince me that it was the work of some one who had closely studied Marlowe's writings, and who frequently could not resist the temptation to adopt the very words of his favourite dramatist. It is quite possible that he was not always conscious of his more trifling plagiarisms from Marlowe,-recollections of whose phraseology may have mingled imperceptibly with the current of his thoughts: but the case was certainly otherwise when he transferred to his own comedy whole passages of Tamburlaine or Faustus. In some instances the borrowed matter seems to be rather out of place in the speech which I subjoin it is very awkwardly introduced. When the bridegroom Ferando enters" baselie attired, and a red cap on his head," Polidor entreats him to change his apparel before going to church, and offers him the use of his own wardrobe: upon which, Ferando replies, "Tush, Polidor, I haue as many sutes And this from them haue I made choise to weare." P. 21, ed. Shake. Soc. Surely, we should have wondered at this violent and far-fetched comparison of Ferando's "sutes" to a particular massy robe, if we had not known that the writer was, as usual, levying a contribution on Marlowe ;— "And I sat down, cloth'd with a massy robe The Sec. Part of Tamburlaine, p. 56, first col. Throughout the play there is little vigour of thought or expression; the style, when elevated, is laboriously ornate rather than poetical; the many high-flown descriptions of female beauty (which are admired by the American critic) have only an artificial glow; and the versification is monotonous in the extreme. Yet The Taming of a Shrew is by no means a contemptible drama, possessing, as it certainly does, some portion of genuine comic humour; a circumstance which alone would tend to prove that it was not the production of Marlowe, to whom, we have good reason to believe, nature had denied even a moderate talent for the humorous.-I may add, that, as The Taming of a Shrew is printed anonymously, its author probably had no intention that his name should transpire, and therefore resorted to plagiarism with the greater boldness. Another word on the subject of plays attributed to Marlowe. It has been conjectured that both Locrine and Titus Adronicus are by him: but, if every old tragedy of more than usual merit, whose author is either doubtful or unknown, must be fathered upon Marlowe, the catalogue of his dramas will presently be swollen to a size not easily reconcilable with the shortness of his life. I have now brought to a close this very imperfect essay concerning one whom Drayton has characterised in the following fervid lines; "Neat [Next] Marlow, bathed in the Thespian springs, Had in him those braue translunary things That the first poets had; his raptures were All ayre and fire, which made his verses cleere ; For that fine madnes still he did retaine, Which rightly should possesse a poet's braine."* Though immeasurably superior to the other dramatists of his time, he is, like them, a very unequal writer; it is in detached passages and single scenes, rather than in any of his pieces taken as a whole, that he displays the vast richness and vigour of his genius. But we can hardly doubt that if death had not so suddenly arrested his career, he would have produced tragedies of more uniform excellence; nor is it too much to suppose that he would also have given still grander manifestations of dramatic power;—indeed, for my own part, I feel a strong persuasion, that, with added years and well-directed efforts, he would have made a much nearer approach in tragedy to Shakespeare than has yet been made by any of his countrymen. * To Henry Reynolds, of Poets and Poesie,-The Battaile of Agincourt, &c. 1627, ed. fol.-Besides the notices of Marlowe which have been already cited from Meres's Palladis Tamia, &c, 1598 (see pp. xxxi, xlii), the following passages occur in that work. "As the Greeke tongue is made famous and eloquent by Homer, Hesiod, Euripides, &c.; and the Latine tongue by Virgill, Ouid, Horace, &c. so the English tongue is mightily enriched, and gorgeouslie inuested in rare ornaments and resplendent abiliments by Sir Philip Sidney, Spencer, Daniel, Drayton, Warner, Shakespeare, Marlow, and Chapman." fol. 280. "As these tragicke poets flourished in Greece, Eschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, &c. ; and these among the Latines, Accius, M. Attilius, Pomponius Secundus, and Seneca; so these are our best for tragedie, the Lorde Buckhurst, Doctor Leg of Cambridge, Doctor Edes of Oxforde, Maister Edward Ferris, the authour of the Mirrour for Magistrates, Marlow, Peele, Watson, Kid, Shakespeare, Drayton, Chapman, Decker, and Beniamin Johnson." fol. 283.-The passage in Jonson's verses To the memory of Shakespeare, which has been before alluded to (see note†, p. xli), may not improperly be quoted here; "For, if I thought my judgment were of years, I should commit thee surely with thy peers, |
