topher Marlowe. Born two months earlier than Shakespeare, the son of a shoemaker of Canterbury, Marlowe was educated at the King's School, in the city of his birth, and later at Benet College, Cambridge, where he matriculated as a pensioner shortly after the completion of his seventeenth year. Who defrayed the expenses of his collegiate life, and to which of the learned professions it was apparently directed, we have no means of knowing. All we know is that he went up to London, as Greene did about two years before him, as Shakespeare did about a year after him, and as many English poets have done since, carrying with them the works that were to make them immortal-to the great world of London, where he began to write plays, and at once distinguished himself by his first play, Tamburlaine the Great. The success of Tamburlaine, which was great, was partly due to the genius of Marlowe, and partly to the measure of Surrey, which, fingered feebly by Grimoald, stiffly by Sackville, and monotonously by Gascoigne, became in his hands the instrument of might, and majesty, and magnificence. It silenced for the moment the tinkling couplets to which the earlier dramatists had accustomed the ears of their audiences, and which are referred to in the prologue : "From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits, And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, What first strikes a modern reader of Tamburlaine is the extravagance of its conception, and the turgidity and bombast of its expression: what next strikes him, if he has a keen sense of the poetical, is the occasional beauty and grandeur of single lines and phrases. A living English poet, whose genius belongs to the same order as Marlowe's, admits the stormy monotony of Titanic truculence which blusters like a simoom through the noisy course of its ten fierce acts, but declares that there are two grave reasons why it must always be remembered with distinction and mentioned with honor. "It is the first poem ever written in English blank verse, as distinguished from mere rhymeless decasyllabics; and it contains one of the noblest passages, perhaps indeed the noblest in the literature of the world, ever written by one of the greatest masters of poetry in loving praise of the glorious delights and sublime submission to the everlasting limits of his art. In its highest and most distinctive qualities, in unfaltering and infallible command of the right note of music and the proper tone of color for the finest touches of poetic execution, no poet of the most elaborate modern school, working at ease upon every consummate resource of luxuriant learning and leisurely refinement, has ever excelled the best and most representative work of a man who had literally no models before him, and probably or evidently was often if not always compelled to write against time for his living." The glowing poetical admiration of Swinburne is not shared by the cooler and more critical Dyce. "With very little discrimination of character," he writes, "with much extravagance of incident, with no pathos where pathos was to be expected, and with a profusion of inflated language, Tamburlaine is nevertheless a very impressive drama, and undoubtedly superior to all the English tragedies which preceded it-superior to them in the effectiveness with which the events are brought out, in the poetic feeling which animates the whole, and in the nerve and variety of the versification. Marlowe was yet to show that he could impart truthfulness to his scenes; but not a few passages might be gleaned from Tamburlaine as grand in thought, as splendid in imagery, and as happy in expression as any which his later works contain." The second part of Tamburlaine was followed by The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, a remarkable work in which the judgment of the poet was as conspicuous as his power. Successful at once, it continued so popular after the death of Marlowe that additions were made to it by his fellow dramatists, Dekker and Rowley, and once it was published in the ill-printed quartos which were then in vogue, it went through four editions in less than thirty years. A sure foundation upon which the fame of Marlowe has rested for nearly three hundred years, it was warmly admired by Goethe, who said it was all greatly planned, and thought at one time of translating it, and even by Hallam, who was more impressed by the awful melancholy about its Mephistopheles than by the malignant mirth of which Goethe's fiend is the symbol. "To such a genius," said Lamb, "the History of Faustus must have been delectable food: to wander in the fields where curiosity is forbidden to go, to approach the dark gulf near enough to look in, to be busied in speculations which are the rottenest part of the core of the fruit that fell from the Tree of Knowledge." The dates at which Marlowe's plays were written have not been fully determined, but placing the first part of Tamburlaine in 1585 (as Fleay does), and the fragment of Dido, which Nash finished, in the year of his death, his whole poetic life was comprised in eight years. During this time he wrote, in addition to the plays named, The Jew of Malta, The Massacre of Paris, and Edward II., of which Lamb thought so highly. "The reluctant pangs of abdicating Royalty in Edward furnished hints which Shakespeare scarce improved in his Richard the Second; and the deathscene of Marlowe's king moves pity and terror beyond any scene ancient or modern with which I am acquainted." The poets of Marlowe's day, Marlowe among them, lived from hand to mouth, and, like all who so lived, were reckless and improvident. The growing importance of the Drama, which had begun to put forth its first vigorous growths, created a demand for new plays which they were ready to supply. When Marlowe entered upon his triumphant career with the first part of Tamburlaine he excited the enmity of Nash and Greene, but it was not long before they patched up a truce, and banded themselves against a young poet player, who had lately appeared in London, and whose revisions of and additions to their plays were thought to be better than the originals. Nineteenth century criticism has busied itself in curiously considering the authorship of the old plays to which the genius of Shakespeare imparted vitality, and has assigned por tions of it to Marlowe, Greene, and Peele. The hand of Marlowe is thought to be visible in the Taming of the Shrew and Titus Andronicus, and Swinburne declares that it is as nearly certain as anything can be which depends upon cumulative and collateral evidence that the better part of what is best in the serious scenes of King Henry VI. is mainly the work of Marlowe. The lives of Greene and Marlowe were so disorderly and their endings so tragical, it is no wonder that they were seized upon by Puritan writers to point a moral. Greene abandoned his wife, and lived with the sister of a highwayman, went from bad to worse in his circumstances, and finally died in destitution in the house of a poor shoemaker at Dowgate, by whose wife he was kindly cared for in his last illness, and who crowned his dead body with bays. He died on the 3d of September, 1592, and the next day was buried in the New Churchyard near Bedlam. The end of Marlowe was still more awful, for in less than a year after Greene-on the 1st of June, 1593-he was done to death in a tavern brawl at Deptford by one Francis Archer, whom he had attempted to stab while they were playing at backgammon, and who avoiding the blow caught him by the wrist and stabbed him in the eye with his own dagger. "Cut was the branch that might have grown full straight; And burned was Apollo's laurel-bough That sometime grew within this learned man." Beginning with Marlowe's Tamburlaine, which was written about 1585, and ending with Shirley's Honoria and Mammon, which was written about 1659, the reign |