The white of Pelops' shoulder: I could tell ye, How smooth his breast was, and how white his belly; And whose immortal fingers did imprint That heavenly path with many a curious dint Shakespeare could not have been younger than Marlowe when he wrote his Venus and Adonis, which has ever since been coupled with Marlowe's poem.1 Venus and Adonis is oppressive with its unexpanded power; its workmanship is perhaps more searching and thorough, though so much less felicitous than that of Hero and Leander; but we turn away with delight from its massive monotonous energy, its close and sensual atmosphere, to the free and open air, the colour and light, the swift and various music of Marlowe's poem. Shelley has scarcely surpassed the sweet gravity which the verse of "our elder Shelley" here reaches :— "It lies not in our power to love or hate, For will in us is over-ruled by fate. When two are stripped, long e'er the course begin, And one especially do we affect Of two gold ingots, like in each respect : The reason no man knows, let it suffice, Where both deliberate, the love is slight : Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?" The peculiar beauty of these lines seems to have 1 They had a wide popular reputation, resting on their supposed licentiousness, as, at a later day, Mademoiselle de Maupin. "I have conveyed away all her wanton pamphlets," says Harebrain in Middleton's A Mad World, my Masters, "as Hero and Leander, Venus and Adonis, O two luscious marrow-bone pies for a young married wife." dwelt in Shakespeare's memory. It is little surprising that men were not easily tired of Hero and Leander. Taylor the water-poet tells us how his fellow scullers used to sing it as they plied their occupation on the Thames. It was these "sweetaccording rimes" of Marlowe's, which, as his enthusiastic young admirer, Petowe, wrote, 66 moved such delight, That men would shun their sleep in still dark night In the spring of 1593 the plague raged in London. The actors went into the provinces ; many authors sought refuge in the country. In May we know that Marlowe was at the little village of Deptford, not many miles from London. There was turbulent blood there, and wine; there were courtesans and daggers. Here Marlowe was slain, killed by a serving-man, a rival in a quarrel over bought kisses-"a bawdy serving-man." They buried him in an unknown spot, beneath the grey towers of St. Nicholas, and they wrote in the parish-book: "Christopher Marlow, slain by ffrancis Archer, the I of June 1593." HAVELOCK ELLIS. 1 So the brief account of Francis Meres (Palladis Tamia, 1598). There are other more suspected narratives, varying considerably from each other, and with a marked bias in favour of moral edification. HE play of Tamburlaine, which had been acted in, or before, 1588, was published in 1590. There were subsequent editions in 1592, 1593, 1597, 1605-6. Its popularity was very great. According to Thomas Heywood, the famous actor Alleyn, in this play and in The Jew of Malta, and in Henslowe's Diary we read of Tamburlaine's crimsonvelvet breeches and copper-laced coat. From an address to the reader prefixed by the printer to the edition of 1592, it appears that the play originally contained comic scenes. "I have purposely omitted and left out," he tells us, "certain fond and frivolous gestures, digressing, and, in my poor opinion, far unmeet for the matter, which I thought might seem more tedious unto the wise than any way else to be regarded, though haply they have been of some vain-conceited fondlings greatly gaped at, what time they were shewed upon the stage in their graced deformities: nevertheless now to be mixtured in print with such matter of worth, it would prove a great disgrace to so honourable and stately a history. The sources whence the play of Tamburlaine was derived have been already pointed out.1 1 See ante, p. xxxiii. THE PROLOGUE. FROM jigging veins of rhyming mother wits, Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine And then applaud his fortune as you please. |