this poem; upon whom knowing that in his lifetime you bestowed many kind favours, entertaining the parts of reckoning and worth which you found in him with good countenance and liberal affection, I cannot but see so far into the will of him dead, that whatsoever issue of his brain should chance to come abroad, that the first breath it should take might be the gentle air of your liking; for since his self had been accustomed thereunto, it would prove more agreeable and thriving to his right children that any other fostercountenance whatsoever.-BLUNT, EDWARD, 1598, Dedication of Hero and Leander to Sir Thomas Walsingham.

Liue still in heauen thy soule, thy fame on earth!

Thou dead, of Marlos Hero findes a dearth. Weepe, aged Tellus! all on earth complaine! Thy chiefe-borne faire hath lost her faire againe :

Her faire in this is lost, that Marlo's want Inforceth Hero's faire be wonderous scant. Oh, had that king of poets breathed longer, Then had faire beautie's fort been much more stronger!

His goulden pen had clos'd her so about, No bastard æglet's quill, the world throughout,

Had been of force to marre what he had made;

For why they were not expert in that trade. What mortall soule with Marlo might contend, That could 'gainst reason force him stoope or bënd?

Whose siluer-charming toung mou'd such delight,

That men would shun their sleepe in still darke night

To meditate vpon his goulden lynes,

His rare conceyts, and sweet-according rimes.
-PETOWE, HENRY, 1598, The Second Part
of the Loves of Hero and Leander, To the
Quick-Sighted Reader.

Then, now, most strangely intellectual fire
That, proper to my soul, hast power to inspire
Her burning faculties, and with the wings
Of thy unspherèd flame, visits't the springs
Of spirits immortal Now, as swift as Time
Doth follow motion, find th' eternal clime
Of his free soul, whose living subject stood
Up to the chin in the Pierian flood,
And drunk to me half this Musæan story,
Inscribing it to deathless memory:
Confer with it, and make my pledge as deep
That neither's draught be consecrate to sleep:
Tell it how much his late desires I tender
(If yet it know not), and to light surrender
My soul's dark offspring.

-CHAPMAN, GEORGE, 1600, Hero and Leander, bk. iii.

A kind of second Shakesphear (whose contemporary he was) not only because like him he rose from an actor to be a maker of plays, though inferior both in fame, and merit; but also because in his begun poem of "Hero and Leander," he seems to have a resemblance of that clean and unsophisticated Wit, which is natural to that incomparable poet.-PHILLIPS, EDWARD, 1675, Theatrum Poetarum Anglicanorum, ed. Brydges, p. 113.

The fragment of "Hero and Leander" is incomparably the finest product of Marlowe's genius: it is one of the chief treasures of the language. The poet is fairly intoxicated with the beauty of his subject: he has thought about the two lovers, and dreamed about them, and filled his imagination with their charms; he writes with ecstasy as if obeying an impulse that he can resist no longer, and in every other line expressions escape him that have all the warmth of involuntary bursts of admiration. He dashes into the subject with passionate eagerness, outlining the situation with a few impatient strokes. MINTO, WILLIAM, 1874-85, Characteristics of English Poets, p. 239.

66

Written in the so-called heroic verse, it bears no resemblance to any other poem in that metre composed before, nor, perhaps, is there any written since which decidedly recalls it, unless it be "Endymion." Pagan it is in a sense, with the Paganism of the Renascence: the more pagan the better, considering the subject. Nothing of the deeper thought of the time, no "looking before and after, no worship of a Gloriana or hostility to an Acrasia, interferes with its frank acceptance of sensuous beauty and joy.-BRADLEY, ANDREW CECIL, 1880, English Poets, ed. Ward, vol. 1, p. 415. No poem in our language is more classical, in the sense at least in which Politian and Sanazzaro would have understood the term, and assuredly no poem in our language is more sensuously lovely, than "Hero and Leander." It reminds us in some respects of the best episodes in the "Metamorphoses," and it reminds us still more frequently of Keats's narratives, not, indeed, of "Isabella" or of "The Eve of Saint Agnes," but indirectly of "Endymion," and directly of "Lamia." COLLINS, JOHN CHURTON, 1895, Essays and Studies, p. 161.

GENERAL

Marley, the Muses' darling

Fit to write passions for the souls below, If any wretched souls in passion speak.

a vigorous, and-not to lay too much. stress upon the term-a great mind; but his heart was waste and rude, and it is from the heart that every truly great

Marlow's mighty line.-JONSON, BEN, 1623, To the Memory of my Beloved Master William Shakespeare, and what he hath left us.

Neat Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs,

Had in him those brave translunary things That the first poets had; his raptures were All air, and fire, which made his verses clear; For that fine madness still he did retain, Which rightly should possess a poet's brain. -DRAYTON, MICHAEL, C1627, Of Poets and Poesie.

That smooth song* which was made by Kit Marlow, now at least fifty years ago: and . . . an answer to it which was made by Sir Walter Raleigh in his younger days. They were old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good.-WALTON, ISAAC, 1653, The Complete Angler.

His tragedies manifest traces of a just dramatic conception; but they abound with. tedious and uninteresting scenes, or with such extravagancies as proceeded from a want of judgment, and those barbarous ideas of the times, over which it was the peculiar gift of Shakespeare's genius alone to triumphand to predominate.- WARTON,

THOMAS, 1778-81, History of English

Poetry, sec. lix.

Had he lived longer to profit by the example of Shakspeare, it is not straining conjecture to suppose, that the strong misguided energy of Marlowe would have been kindled and refined to excellence by the rivalship. CAMPBELL, THOMAS, 1819, Specimens of the British Poets.

Christopher Marlow, whose name will live as long as tender sentiment, clothed in language the most felicitous, shall be understood and felt, is known rather as a dramatist than a professed poet.-DIBDIN, THOMAS FROGNALL, 1824, The Library Companion, p. 699, note.

Marlowe was in all essential points the direct opposite of Greene; while the latter delighted in a cheerful grace, and agreeableness of style, Marlowe aimed solely and exclusively at the forcible, extraordinary, and sublime. He possessed, in fact *The Passionate Shepard."

his hand, the forcible becomes the forced, the uncommon the unnatural, while the great and sublime sinks into the grotesque. and monstrous. . . . To such a height does he frequently accumulate terrific and monstrous events, deeds of violence, enormities and crimes, that no corresponding catastrophe nor adequate punishment, can be devised for them; and the close of the piece consequently appears as a low and narrow outlet through which the mass of the action seeks in vain to force its way. Accordingly, the last moments of his heroes, however they may distress and agitate, never exalt or elevate the feelings. His notion of tragedy comprehends in it nothing of solace and atonement. Nevertheless, his mental vigour alone has enabled him to do that which was wholly beyond the power of Greene; his poetical matter is well connected and condensed; his dramas have for their basis a vital concrete idea, a fully defined view of life and the world, out of which the whole composition appears to have grown naturally, and organically to have perfected itself. ULRICI, HERMANN, 1839, Shakspeare's Dramatic Art, p. 45.

principle of his mind was self-will, and this is the bond which binds together his strangely huddled faculties. Of all English poets, he most reminds us of Byron; ruder, it may be, but at the same time more colossal in his proportions. He is a glorious old heathen, "large in heart and brain," a fiery and fickle Goth, on whose rough and savage energies a classical culture has been piled, tossed among the taverns, and theatres, and swelling spirits of London, to gratify the demands of his senses in some other way than by acts of brilliant pillage. In his lustiness, his absence of all weak emotions, his fierce delight in the mere feeling of self, in the heedlessness with which he heaps together rubbish and diamonds, and in the frequent starts and strange far-flights of his imagination," he is the model of irregular genius. His mind, in its imperiousness, disregarded by instinct the natural relations of things, forced objects.

He is intense, but narrow. The central

into the form of his individual passions, and lifted his vices into a kind of Satanic dignity, by exaggerating them into shapes. colossal. His imagination, hot, swift, impatient of control, pervaded by the fiery essence of his blood, and giving wings to the most reckless desires, riots in the maddest visions of strength and pride. Of all writers, he seems to feel the heartiest joy in the mere exercise of power, regardless of all the restraints which make power beneficent.-WHIPPLE, EDWIN P., 1846, North American Review, Essays and Reviews, vol. II, p. 19.

Eschylus of the English stage, like his great Athenian prototype, seems to have impressed his contemporaries with a most exalted respect for his sublime and irregular genius. SHAW, THOMAS B., 1847, Outlines of English Literature, p. 104.

The essential character of his mind was that of a lofty extravagance, shaping itself into words that may be likened to the trumpet in music, and the scarlet in painting perpetual trumpet, perpetual scarlet. Through five thousand

lines have we the same pompous monotony, the same splendid exaggeration, the same want of truthful simplicity. But the man was in earnest. His poetical power had nothing in it of affectation and pretence. -KNIGHT, CHARLES, 1849, Studies of Shakspere, p. 32.

Marlowe had a rare imagination, a delicacy of sense that made him the teacher of Shakespeare and Milton in versification, and was, perhaps, as purely a poet as any that England has produced; but his mind. had no balance-wheel.-LOWELL, JAMES RUSSELL, 1858-64-90, Library of Old Authors, Prose Works, Riverside ed., vol. I, p. 277.

Although we cannot say much for the dramatic art of Marlowe, he has far surpassed every one that went before him in dramatic poetry. The passages that might worthily be quoted from Marlowe's writings for the sake of their poetry are innumerable, notwithstanding that there are many others which occupy a border land between poetry and bombast, and are such that it is to us impossible to say to which class they rather belong. . . . His verse is, for dramatic purposes, far inferior to Shakspere's.-MACDONALD, GEORGE, 1864-83, The Imagination and other Essays, pp. 100, 101.

For thou, if ever godlike foot there trod These fields of ours, wert surely like a god. Who knows what splendour of strange dreams was shed

With sacred shadow and glimmer of gold and red

From hallowed windows, over stone and sod, On thine unbowed, bright, insubmissive head? The shadow stayed not, but the splendour

stays,

Our brother, till the last of English days.
No day nor night on English earth shall be
Forever, spring nor summer, Junes nor Mays,
But somewhat as a sound or gleam of thee
Shall come on us like morning from the sea.

SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES, 1866, In the Bay, Poems and Ballads, ss. xviii, xix.

Marlowe was an ill-regulated, dissolute, outrageously vehement and audacious. spirit, but grand and sombre, with the genuine poetic frenzy; pagan moreover, and rebellious in manners and creed. . . . Marlowe is to Shakspeare what Perugino was to Raphael.-TAINE, H. A., 1871, History of English Literature, tr. Van Laun, vol. 1, bk. ii, ch. ii, pp. 237, 244.

His was a wild, volcanic nature, storming through life with the licence of genius. The glowing imagination of this poet delighted in portraying the terrific struggle between the most violent passions, but he was never able to keep within the bounds of beauty; the conciliatory and elevating element is wanting in his tragedies; his delineation of character generally degenerates into monstrosity, and his energetic diction into an inflated and bombastic style. The boldness of his genius led him to choose subjects of historical significance or such as allowed in revelling in demoniacal emotions.SCHERR, J., 1874, A History of English Literature, p. 59.

Marlowe has been styled, and not unjustly styled, the father of English dramatic poetry. When we reflect on the conditions of the stage before he produced "Tamburlaine," and consider the state in which he left it after the appearance of "Edward II.," we shall be able to estimate his true right to this title. . . Out of confusion he brought order, following the clew of his own genius through a labyrinth of dim unmastered possibilities. Like all great craftsmen, he worked by selection and exclusion on the whole mass of material ready to his hand; and his

instinct in this double process is the proof of his originality. SYMONDS, JOHN ADDINGTON, 1884, Shakspere's Predecessors in the English Drama, pp. 585, 586.

Mr. J. A. Symonds has defined the leading motive of Marlowe's work as L'Amour de l'Impossible-"the love or lust of unattainable things." Never was a poet fired with a more intense aspiration for ideal beauty and ideal power. As some adventurous Greek of old might have sailed away, with warning voices in his ears, past the pillars of Hercules in quest of fabled islands beyond the sun, so Marlowe started on his lonely course, careless of tradition and restraint, resolved to seek and find some world far from ours"

where the secret springs of Knowledge should be opened and he should touch the lips of Beauty.-BULLEN, A. H., 1884, ed. Works of Christopher Marlowe, Introduction, vol. 1, p. lxxii.

achieved so much distinction by his first work. Other poets, the most eminent, served their apprenticeship in the divine art from the beginning, Marlowe was a master. That his success was resented, as we are told it was, by Greene and Nash, was natural; for, not to insist upon the jealousy and envy with which the poetic temperament has always been credited, and of which they had, no doubt, their full share, it touched them in that vital part, the pocket. They had the market to themselves before this young interloper from Cambridge set up a stall of his own, and had his wares preferred to theirs. It was monstrous, sirs, monstrous. STODDARD, RICHARD HENRY, 1884, ed. Selections from the Poetical Works of A. C. Swinburne, Introduction, p. v.

He is the undoubted author of some of the masterpieces of English verse; the hardly to be doubted author of others not much inferior. Except the very greatest names Shakespere, Milton, Spenser, Dryden, Shelley-no author can be named who has produced, when the proper historical estimate is applied to him, such work as is to be found in "Tamburlaine," "Doctor Faustus," "The Jew of Malta,"

'Edward the Second," in one department; "Hero and Leander" and the "Passionate Shepherd" in another. I have but very little doubt that the powerful, if formless, play of "Lust's Dominion" is Marlowe's, though it may have been rewritten, and the translations of Lucan and Ovid and the minor work which is, more or less probably attributed to him, swell his tale. Prose he did not write, perhaps could not have written. . . . Shakespere himself has not surpassed, which is equivalent to saying that no other writer has equalled, the famous and wonderful passages in "Tamburlaine" and "Faustus," which are familiar to every student of English literature as examples of the ne plus ultra of the poetic powers, not of the language but of language. The tragic imagination in its wildest flights has never summoned up images of pity and terror more imposing, more moving, than those excited by "The Jew of Malta." The riot of passion and of delight in the beauty of colour and form which characterises his version of "Hero and Leander" has never been approached by any writer.

It is impossible to call Marlowe a great dramatist, and the attempts that have been made to make him out to be such remind one of the attempts that have been made to call Molière a great poet. Marlowe was one of the greatest poets of the world whose work was cast by accident and caprice into an imperfect mould of drama; Molière was one of the greatest dramatists of the world who was obliged by fashion to use a previously perfected form of verse. The state of Molière was undoubtedly the more gracious; but the splendour of Marlowe's uncut diamonds of poetry is the more wonderful.-SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1887, History of Elizabethan Literature, pp. 76, 77, 78.

He had the freshness and splendour of Heosphoros, the bearer of light, the kindler of morning; as the dawn-star of our drama, he ascended the heavens, in the auroral flush of youth, to announce the approaching majesty of Shakespeare. But his early death, and the unexampled character of the genius who superseded him, have for centuries obscured the name of Marlowe, which scintillated half-extinguished in the blaze of "Hamlet" and "Othello." His reputation has, however, increased during the last generation with

He

It may be said that Marlowe did more in the way of indicating the dramatic capabilities of blank verse, by freeing it from some of the fetters in which it had been bound, than of realizing those capabilities on the higher planes of expression to which Shakespeare carried them. certainly did not do all that John Addington Symonds credits him with, in his "Shakespeare's Predecessors in the English Drama." There is not, generally, in his plays, that sanity of mind and heart, that well-balanced and well-toned thought and genuine passion, to have brought out the higher capabilities of the verse. CORSON, HIRAM, 1892, A Primer of English Verse, p. 189.

As the real founder, though not precisely the initiator, both of English tragedy and English blank verse as being thus in a certain sense the father of our poetry more truly than even Chaucer, for Chaucer's direct influence upon Shakespeare and Milton is not great, while Marlowe's unquestionably is the immense importance of his position can scarcely be overstated. And it is not merely a relative or historical importance either. Judged upon their absolute merits as poetry, such passages as those in which Faustus addresses the apparition of Helen, disclose by their magnificence of hyperbole a power of style. belonging to the great poets alone. imagination is of wide sweep, with an adventurous, intrepid, and untamable wing. Violent, sinister, rebellious, unblest, he has something of the grandeur of a fallen angel about him, and in the dayspring of our drama he is Lucifer, son of the morning. WATSON, WILLIAM, 1893, Excursions in Criticism, p. 5.

His

With wine and blood and wit and deviltry, He sped the heroic flame of English verse: Bethink ye, rhymers, what your claim may be,

Who in smug suburbs put the Muse to nurse? -RHYS, ERNEST, 1894, A London Rose and other Rhymes, p. 91.

In reading Marlowe one is brought face to face, not only with tragic situations, but with the elemental tragedy, the tragedy which has its rise in the conflict between the infinite desires of the soul and the rigid restrictions of its activity. The master of "the mighty line" never learned that lesson of self-mastery which Shakespeare studied so faithfully; he was always wasting his immense force on the impossible, and matching his powerful genius against those immutable conditions imposed upon men, not to dwarf but to develop them.-MABIE, HAMILTON WRIGHT, 1894, My Study Fire, Second Series, p. 138.

To no single man does our drama owe more than to this ill-starred genius. It was he who determined the form which tragedy and history were permanently to assume. It was he who first clothed both in that noble and splendid garb which was ever afterwards to distinguish them. It was he who gave the death-blow to the old rhymed plays on the one hand, and to the frigid and cumbersome unrhymed classical plays on the other.

He cast in clay what Shakspeare recast in marble. It is more than probable that without the tragedies of Marlowe we should never have had, in the form at least in which they now stand, the tragedies of Shakspeare. Of the History in the proper sense of the title, Marlowe was the creator. In his "Edward I." Peele had, it is true, made some advance on the old Chronicles. But the difference between Peele's "Edward I." and Marlowe's "Edward II." is the difference between a work of art and mere botchwork. COLLINS, JOHN CHURTON, 1895, Essays and Studies, pp. 149, 150.

Christopher Marlowe is one of the most fascinating figures in our own, or indeed in any, literature. In the temple of poetic. fame the highest places are sacred to genius that has mounted securely to its meridian splendour, to Homer, Dante, Shakspere. But seats only lower than these, and hallowed with perhaps richer offerings of human sympathy and love, are granted to genius dead ere its time, cut down in the freshness of its morning radiance. It is here that Marlowe is to be sought, side by side with Collins and Shelley and Keats. What the world has lost by the untimely close of his career