to be a maker of plays;" but the authority of Phillipswho was very frequently inaccurate-carries little weight. Collier, who did so much to enlighten students, and so much to perplex them, produced from his capacious portfolio a MS. ballad about Marlowe, entitled the Atheist's Tragedie, from which it would appear that the poet had been an actor at the Curtain and in the performance of his professional duties had had the misfortune to break his leg :

"A poet was he of repute,

And wrote full many a playe;
Now strutting in a silken sute,
Now begging by the way.

He had also a player been

Upon the Curtaine-stage;

But brake his leg in one lewd scene
When in his early age."
"" 1

This is doubtless very ingenious, but I have little hesitation in pronouncing the ballad to be a forgery, though Dyce-who had been victimised on other occasions—and later editors accept it as genuine. The words "When in his early age" can only mean that the poet was a boy-actor at the Curtain; but we know that he could not possibly have been connected with the stage before 1583. I have not seen the MS., and so am unable to deliver any opinion as to the style of the hand-writing; but when we remember how many documents, proved afterwards to be forgeries, Collier put

1 The ballad is given in full at the end of the third volume.

forward as genuine, we shall be quite justified in rejecting the Atheist's Tragedie. It is a work of no great difficulty to imitate with success a doggerel ballad.

Critics are agreed that the first, in order of time, of Marlowe's extant dramatic productions is the tragedy of Tamburlaine the Great, in two parts. From internal evidence there can be no doubt that Tamburlaine was written wholly by Marlowe ; but on the title-page of the early editions there is no author's name, and we have no decisive piece of external evidence to fix the authorship on Marlowe. In Henslowe's Diary there is an entry which, if it had been genuine, would have been conclusive :

"Pd unto Thomas Dickers, the 20 of Desembr 1597, for adycyous to Fostus twentie shellinges, and fyve shellenges for a prolog to Marloes Tamberlen, so in all I saye/payde twentye fyve shellinges." (Henslowe's Diary, ed. J. P. Collier, p. 71.)

Unfortunately this entry, which was received without suspicion by Dyce and other editors, is a forgery. Mr. G. F. Warner, who published in 1881 his careful and elaborate catalogue of the Manuscripts and Muniments of Dulwich College, pronounces that "the whole entry is evidently a forgery, written in clumsy imitation of Henslowe's hand. The forger, however, has shown some skill in his treatment of a narrow blot or smudge which intersects the upper part of the in the second 'shellinges;' for in order that the writing may appear to be under and not over the old blot, he has at first carried up the I (as if writing u) only as far as the lower edge

of the blot, and then started again from the upper edge to make the loops" (p. 159). The only piece of external evidence which appears to connect Marlowe with Tamburlaine is to be found in a sonnet1 of Gabriel Harvey's, printed at the end of his New Letter of Notable Contents, 1593. From a passage in the Black Book, 1604 (a tract attributed on no sure ground to Thomas Middleton the dramatist), Malone inferred that Tamburlaine was written in whole or part by Nashe. The passage to which Malone referred occurs in the account of an imaginary visit paid to Nashe in his squalid garret. "The testern, or the shadow over the bed," we are informed, "was made of four ells of cobwebs, and a number of small spinner's ropes hung down for curtains the spindle-shank spiders, which show like great letchers with little legs, went stalking over his head as if they had been conning of Tamburlaine." (Dyce's Middleton, v. 526.) It is difficult to see how any conclusion about the authorship of Tamburlaine can be drawn from this passage. The writer's meaning is that the spiders walked with the pompous gait of an actor rehearsing the part of Tamburlaine. But, putting aside the evidence (in itself conclusive) of style, there is an excellent reason for dismissing Nashe's claims. To Robert Greene's Menaphon, of which the first extant edition is dated 1589 (though some critics supposed that the book was originally published in 1587), Nashe con

1 This sonnet, with the accompanying postscript and gloss, will be examined later in the introduction.

tributed an epistle "To the Gentlemen Students of Both Universities," in which he holds up to ridicule the "idiote art-masters that intrude themselves to our eares as the alcumists of eloquence; who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) think to outbrave better pens with the swelling bumbast of a bragging blank verse. Indeed it may be the ingrafted overflow of some kilcow conceipt that overcloieth their imagination with a more than drunken resolution, beeing not extemporall in the invention of anie other meanes to vent their manhood, commits the digestion of their cholerick incumbrances to the spacious volubilitie of a drumming decasillabon." (Grosart's Nashe, i. xx.) This passage was surely intended as a counterblast to the Prologue of Tamburlaine. The allusion to "idiote art-masters" points distinctly to Marlowe, who took his Master's degree in 1587; and it was Marlowe who had stamped "bragging blank verse" as his own. Afterwards Nashe was on friendly terms with Marlowe; but in 1589 (or 1587 ?) he was doing his best to aid Greene in discrediting the author of Tamburlaine. In an address "To the Gentlemen Readers," prefixed to his Perimedes the Black Smith, 1588, Greene denounces the introduction of blank verse, which he compares to the "fa-burden of Bo-bell." He speaks with scorn of those poets "who set the end of scollarisme in an English blank verse ;" and expressly mentions Tamburlaine,—“ daring God out of heaven with that atheist Tamburlan, or blaspheming with the mad preest of the sonne." It is therefore plain that Tamburlaine, which was entered in the Stationers' books

on 14th August 1590, and published in the same year, had been presented on the stage in or before 1588 (probably in 1587); and it is equally plain that Nashe 1 had no share in the composition of a play which he so unsparingly ridiculed in the epistle prefixed to Menaphon.

It is difficult to over-estimate the importance of Tamburlaine in the history of the English drama. To appreciate how immensely Marlowe outdistanced at one bound all his predecessors, the reader must summon courage to make himself acquainted with such productions as Gorboduc, The Misfortunes of Arthur, and Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes. He will then perceive how real is Marlowe's claim to be regarded as the father of the English drama. That the play is stuffed with bombast, that exaggeration is carried sometimes to the verge of burlesque, no sensible critic will venture to deny. But the characters, with all their stiffness, have life and movement. The Scythian conqueror, "threatening the world in high astounding terms," is an impressive figure. There is nothing mean or trivial

1 Several allusions to Tamburlaine might be culled from Nashe's works. The following curious passage is from Christ's Teares over Jerusalem, 1592 :-"When neither the White-flag or the Red which Tamburlaine advaunced at the siedge of any Citty, would be accepted of, the Blacke-flag was sette up, which signified there was no mercy to be looked for; and that the miserie marching towardes them was so great, that their enemy himselfe (which was to execute it) mournd for it. Christ having offered the Jewes the White-flage of forgivenesse and remission, and the Red-flag of shedding his Blood for them, when these two might not take effect, nor work any yeelding remorse in them, the Black-flagge of confusion and desolation was to succeede for the obiect of their obduration." (Works, ed. Grosart, iv. 27.)