Christopher Marlowe

In

Edward the Second the interest rises and the execution improves as visibly and as greatly with the course of the advanc ing story as they decline in The Jew of Malta. The scene of the king's deposition at Kenilworth is almost as much finer in tragic effect and poetic quality as it is shorter and less elaborate than the corresponding scene in Shakespeare's King Richard II.

Of The Massacre at Paris (acted in 1593, printed I600?) it is impossible to judge fairly from the garbled fragment of its genuine text which is all that has come down to us. To Mr. Collier, among numberless other obligations, we owe the discovery of a noble passage excised in the piratical edition which gives us the only version extant of this unlucky play.

In the tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage (completed by Thomas Nashe, produced and printed 1594), a servile fidelity to the text of Virgil's narrative has naturally resulted in the failure which might have been expected from an attempt at once to transcribe what is essentially inimitable and to reproduce it under the hopelessly alien conditions of dramatic adaptation.

The Poems

—One of the most faultless lyrics and one of the loveliest fragments in the whole range of description and fanciful poetry would have secured a place for Marlowe among the memorable men of his epoch, even if his plays had perished with himself. His Passionate Shepherd remains ever since unrivalled in its way—a way of pure fancy and radiant melody without break or lapse. The untitled fragment, on the other hand, has been very closely rivalled, perhaps very happily imitated, but only by the greatest lyric poet of England—by Shelley alone. Marlowe's poem of Hero and Leander (entered at Stationers' Hall in September 1593; completed and brought out by George Chapman, who divided Marlowe's work into two sestiads and added f our of his own, 1598), closing with the sunrise which closes the night of the lovers' union, stands alone in its age, and far ahead of the work of any possible competitor between the death of Spenser and the dawn of Milton.

The place and the value of Christopher Marlowe as a leader among English poets it would be almost impossible for historical criticism to over-estimate. To none of them all, perhaps, have so many of the greatest among them been so deeply and so directly indebted. Nor was ever any great writer's influence

upon his fellows more utterly and unmixedly an influence for good. He first, and he alone, guided Shakespeare into the right way of work; his music, in which there is no echo of any man's before him, found its own echo in the more prolonged but hardly more exalted harmony of Milton's. He is the greatest discoverer, the most daring and inspired pioneer, in all our poetic literature. Bef ore him there was neither genuine blank verse nor a genuine tragedy in our language. After his arrival the way was prepared, the paths were made straight, for Shakespeare. (A. C. S.) Marlowe's fame, so finely appreciated by Shakespeare and Drayton, was obscured from the fall of the theatres until the generation of Lamb and Hazlitt. Collected editions are by A. Dyce (1858, 1865, 1876) ; A. H. Bullen (3 vols., 1884-85) ; "Best Plays" in the Mermaid series by Havelock Ellis with an Introduction by J. A. Symonds (1887-89). The best modern text is that edited by C. F. Tucker Brooke (Oxf. Univ. Press, 191o). See J. G. Lewis, Marlowe, Outlines of his Life and Works (1891) ; J. H. Ingram, Christopher Marlowe and his Associates (1904) ; H. Jung, Das Verhdltnis Marlowes zu Shakespeare (1904). For further information the reader should consult the histories of the stage by Collier, Ward, Fleay, Schelling and E. K. Chambers, and the studies of Shakespeare's predecessors by Symonds, Mezieres, Boas, Manley, Churton Collins, Feuillerat and J. M. Robertson. See also Verity's Essay on Marlowe's Influence (1886) ; Mod. Lang. Rev. iv. 167 (M. at Cambridge) ; Swinburne, Study of Shakespeare (188o) ; C. F. T. Brooke, The Marlowe Canon (Baltimore 1922), and Marlowe's Versifi cation and Style (5922) ; E. Seaton, Marlowe's Map (1924) ; and the separate editions of Dr. Faustus, Edward II., etc. The main sources of Marlowe were as follows: for Tamburlaine, Pedro Mexia's Life of Timur in his Silva (Madrid, 1543), Anglicized by Fortescue in his Foreste (1571) and Petrus Perondinus, Vita Magni Tamerlanis (1551) ; for Faustus: a contemporary English version of the or Historia von D. Johann Fausten (Frankfort, 1587), and for Edward II., the Chronicles of Fabyan (1516), Holinshed (1577) and Stow (158o).