naturally suggests itself to every reader. Charles Lamb remarked that "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." Mr. Swinburne thinks that there is more discrimination of character in Marlowe's play than Shakespeare's; that the figures are more life-like, stand out more clearly as individual personalities. It may also be urged that there is more "business" in Marlowe's play; that the action is never allowed to flag. The character of the gay, frank, fearless, shameless favourite, Piers Gaveston, is admirably drawn. Even in the presence of death, with the wolfish eyes of the grim nobles bent on him from every side, he loses nothing of his old jauntiness. Marlowe has thoroughly realised this character, and portrayed it in every detail with consummate ability. Hardly less successful is the character of Young Spenser, the insolent compound of recklessness and craft, posing as the saviour of society, while he stealthily pursues his own selfish projects. In his drawing of female characters, Marlowe showed no great skill or variety. The features in some of his portraits are either so dim as to present no likeness at all, or they are excessively unlovely. Isabella is a vain, selfish woman, without any strength of character. She is hurt at finding herself neglected by the king, but the wound is only surface-deep. She acquiesces passively in her husband's death, and with equal indifference

1

would have sacrificed her paramour.

his weakness, is not wholly ignoble.

Edward, with all

In all literature there are few finer touches than when, after recounting his fearful suffering and privations in the dungeon, he gathers his breath for one last kingly utterance :—

“Tell Isabel, the queen, I looked not thus
When for her sake I ran at tilt in France,
And there unhorsed the Duke of Cleremont."

For a

What heart-breaking pathos in those lines! moment, as his thoughts travel back across the years, he forgets the squalor of his dungeon and rides blithely beneath the beaming eyes of his lady. It has been objected that the representation of the king's physical suffering oversteps the limit of dramatic art. Euripides was censured by ancient critics for demeaning tragedy; but to-day the judgment of readers is on the side of Euripides, not of his critics. Besides, if Euripides erred, Sophocles erred also. The physical suffering of Philoctetes excites far more disgust than anything that we find in Euripides. There are those who think that the blinding of Gloster, in Lear, surpasses in horror any scene of physical agony enacted on the English stage. But criticism, which fears to raise its voice against Shakespeare, shows no mercy to Shakespeare's contemporaries.

It has been usually stated that Fabyan's Chronicle was Marlowe's authority for the plot of Edward II., but Mr. Fleay has made it abundantly clear that the poet's indebtedness to Fabyan was very slight, and that the

narratives of Stow and Holinshed, who tread closely in the steps of Sir Thomas de la More, were largely used.

...

The two remaining plays, the Massacre at Paris and the Tragedy of Dido, are preserved in a very unsatisfactory state the former had been cruelly mutilated, and the latter-left unfinished at the author's deathwas completed by Thomas Nashe, an unequalled master of invective, but a tragic poet of no high order. In Henslowe's Diary (ed. J. P. Collier, p. 30), under date 30th January 1593-4, there is an entry-"Rd. at the tragedy of the guyes [Guise] . . . iij3 . . . iiij3.” In this part of the Diary the dates are in some confusion; and it is clear from the preceding and following entries that the year should be 1592-3, not 1593-4. In the margin opposite the entry Henslowe has written "ne" to show that it was a new play. External evidence, therefore, seems to insist that the Massacre at Paris was one of Marlowe's latest works. Even if we suppose that the performance of the play did not immediately follow its composition, yet we cannot regard the Massacre at Paris as a very early work of Marlowe's; for Henry III., with whose assassination the play ends, died on 2nd August 1589. But we have clear proof that the play has come down in a corrupt and mutilated state. There is preserved in an early MS.1 a portion of scene xix., probably a fragment of an original play-house copy. A comparison of the text of the MS. (vid. Vol. II. 277-8)

1 First printed in Collier's History of Engl. Dram. Lit. iii, 134 (ed. 1).

with the text of the printed copy shows how cruelly the play suffered in passing through the press. But when all allowances have been made on the score of curtailments and corruptions, it is certain that the Massacre at Paris was the feeblest of Marlowe's works. Only in one passage does the poet rise to the height of his theme. I refer of course to the fine soliloquy of the Duke of Guise in the second scene. There, and there only, we find the old splendour of diction and magnificence of imagination, the old yearning after limitless power. The other characters are writ in water.

The Tragedy of Dido was published in 1594. On the title-page it is stated to have been written by "Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nash, Gent." Probably Marlowe left it incomplete at his death, and Nashe finished it. The tragic power shown in Dido is very slight. For once Marlowe seems to have descended from his fiery flight above the clouds, and to have sought repose in a trim garden-plot ; instead of daring imagination, we have quaint conceits and dainty play of fancy. My own opinion is, that the play is in the main by Marlowe, and that Nashe's work lay chiefly in completing certain scenes which Marlowe had sketched in the rough. To Marlowe must surely be given such lines as these in the opening scene:—

"Vulcan shall dance to make thee laughing-sport,
And my nine daughters sing when thou art sad;
From Juno's bird I'll pluck her spotted pride,
To make thee wings wherewith to cool thy face;
And Venus' swans shall shed their silver down
To sweeten out the slumbers of thy bed," &c.

The rhythm of these passages is precisely the same as in the passage (iii. 1) where Dido offers to Aeneas a fleet with "tackling made of rivell'd gold." As Mr. Symonds observes, "The blank verse, falling in couplets, seems to cry aloud for rhymes." These passages, and the pretty scene where the old nurse tempts away Cupid (who is disguised as Ascanius) by a playfully exaggerated description of the delights of her orchard and flowergarden, must have come from the same hand,—the hand that wrote the song of the "Passionate Shepherd to his Love." In the second act, where Aeneas relates to Dido the story of the fall of Troy, occurs the passage, which Shakespeare burlesqued in Hamlet,1 describing the slaughter of Priam. It is hard to believe that in its present shape the narrative of Aeneas was written wholly by Marlowe. In parts it is so absurdly grandiose that a very slight heightening is required in order to get the effect of burlesque. Let us take the description of the slaughter of Priam :

"At which the frantic queen leaped on his face,
And in his eyelids hanging by the nails,
A little while prolonged her husband's life.
At last the soldiers pulled her by the heels,
And swung her howling in the empty air,
Which sent an echo to the wounded king:
Whereat he lifted up his bed-rid limbs,

And would have grappled with Achilles' son,
Forgetting both his want of strength and hands;

1 A few years ago a theory was gravely propounded that the player's speech in Hamlet was written originally by Shakespeare to complete Marlowe's play." This titanic absurdity-"gross as a mountain, open, palpable"-was received with much applause in certain quarters.