4to seems to solicit the favour of the audience for a piece which had been composed by the author of Tumburlaine ; "You, that with friendly grace of smoothed brow 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 good reason to believe that Marlowe was a large 'contributor; "Then, good my lord, if you forgiue them all, King John, farewell! in token of thy faith, The Troublesome Raigne, Sig. M, ed. 1622. uldade Lord Cardinal, If thou diest assured of heauenly blisse,-- Oh, see, he dies, and makes no signe at all! First Part of the Conf. Sig. F, ed. 1594.90 "Let England liue but true within itselfe." 66 The Troublesome Raigne, Sig. M 2. Let England be true within itselfe. en * Lougies if 818 The True Tragedie, Sig. D4, ed. 1595, 976 * But, on the other hand, there are many things throughout The Troublesome Raigne so materially at variance with the futonco visa ceng of 1198 arw 930m 15ɗt souie aud ewobelf anon 878 6190) 31 om beonivnoɔ zad yalq ed to noctemCIAZS * It has not been observed, that when Shakespeare opened 1 10 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, vol. ii, 135. Now, if we were sure that the resemblance between these two lines was not accidental (and it seems highly probable the sec. scene of the first act of his Richard the Third with "Set down, set down your honourable load,” si 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. V In a note, vol. 1. 83, I have remarked that “there are grounds for believing The Taming of a Shrew to be the work of Marlowe:" but since that note was sent to press, a very careful examination of the play has convinced me that there are none at allgo brosyesind2 andw dads barredo novi tot ar 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 now 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 de pagoon As any in Athens, and as richlie wrought The stately legate of the Persian King, 13 + And this from them haue I made choise to weare." P. 21, ed. Shake. Soc. Surely, we should have wondered at this violent and farfetched 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 Tamburlaine, vol. i. 164. 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 mono> tonous 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 circum stance 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.ne རཐཱ་ཅིན, གཽ 8%%!! Another word on the subject of plays attributed to Marlowe. It has been conjectured that both Locrine and Titus Andronicus are by him: but, if every old tragedy of more than usual merit, whose author is either doubtful or unl known, 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; 131 Which rightly should possesse a poet's braine."* *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 Pattudis Tamia, &c, 1598, (see pp. xxxiv, li), 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, 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. 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 p. xlviii), may not improperly be quoted here; "For, if I thought my judgment were of years, * Thinking, as I do, that Shakespeare is unlike the other dramatists of Elizabeth and James's age, - that his method of conceiving and working out character (to say nothing of his diction) is peculiarly his own,-1 deny the truth of the following passage in Hazlitt's Lectures on the Dram. Lit. of the age of Elizabeth. "He [Shakespeare] towered above his fellows,' in shape and gesture proudly eminent,' but he was one of a race of giants, the tallest, the strongest, the most graceful and beautiful of them: but it was a common and a noble brood." p. 12, ed. 1840. |