are centered in his person; and from a short-lived dream of supreme felicity and drunken power, he sinks into an abyss of darkness and perdition. This is the alternative to which he submits; the bond which he signs with his blood! As the outline of the character is grand and daring, the execution is abrupt and fearful. The thoughts are vast and irregular, and the style halts and staggers under them 'with uneasy steps,' 'such footing found the sole of unblest feet.' There is a little fustian and incongruity of metaphor now and then, which is not very injurious to the subject." Hallamt says of Faustus that "it is full of poetical beauties, but an intermixture of buffoonery weakens the effect, and leaves it, on the whole, rather a sketch by a great genius than a finished performance. There is an awful melancholy about Marlowe's Mephistophiles, perhaps more impressive than the malignant mirth of that fiend in the renowned work of Goethe. But the fair form of Margaret is wanting, and Marlowe has hardly earned the credit of having breathed a few casual inspirations into a greater mind than his own." When the illustrious possessor of this greater mind was himself spoken to on the subject, we are told that he "burst out with an exclamation of praise: How greatly it is all planned! He had thought of translating it. He was fully aware that Shakspeare did not stand alone." Charles Lamb is the very last man to be selected to weigh the merits of a Georgian German and an Elizabethan EnglishOne might as well have asked Sir Egerton Brydges for a judicial opinion on the claims to the Barony of Chandos of Sudeley. But the very prejudices of such a man are delightful, and it is difficult not to sympathize with him when he says§ "What has Margaret to do with Faust? Marlowe makes Faust possess Helen of Greece!" He is not the only person who has doubted whether the conquest of a simple village maiden would have arrested the daring ambition that had just made so tremendous a sacrifice. With regard to the buffoonery of which Hallam so justly complains, I have no hesitation in saying that it must be attributed to any hand rather than Marlowe's The edition of 1604 has been separately reprinted, with the view of showing that this debasing matter was of gradual introduction, the dose being made stronger and stronger to satisfy the taste of the groundlings, a proceeding which can hardly be complained of in a generation which appears to relish few things so much as the beastly grimaces, hurdy-gurdy tunes, and stupid threadbare jokes of pack after pack of buffoons smeared all over with filthy lampblack. If by any chance the original MS. of the Tragical History of Dr. Faustus is ever recovered, it is almost safe to predicate that Marlowe's share would be found to consist solely and entirely of those grand, daring, and affecting scenes which will last as long as the English language. man. own. Hazlitt's Lectures on Elizabethan Literature, ed. 1869, p. 43. + Introduction to the Literature of Europe, ii. 271. Henry Crabb Robinson's Diary, ii. 434, under date 1829. Hayward had sent him his § "1833. April 19. I reached the Lambs' at tea-time. Faust. He thinks it well done, but he thinks nothing of the original. How inferior to Marlowe's play! One scene of that is worth the whole! What has Margaret to do with Faust? Marlowe, after the original story, makes Faust possess Helen of Greece."-H. C. Robinson's Diary, iii. 24. Mr. Collier considers that The Jew of Malta was written in 1589 or 1590, and on such a point the opinion of no other man is of equal weight. It seems the work of a writer grown confident-not to say careless-by use and success, as may well have been the case of the young author of Tamburlaine and Faustus; and had he carried out the three last acts, as he was well capable of doing, with the same ability as the two first, he would not only have drawn a Jew fit to be matched against Shylock, but have written a play not much inferior to the Merchant of Venice. But while the first part conveys the most life-like and poetical idea conceivable of what the great Levantine merchant of the Middle Ages must have appeared to an untravelled subject of the Tudors, the whole of the latter part is more grotesquely untrue to nature than the worst portions of Tamburlaine. Looking at the first two acts, Hallam† justly says, that the drama is "more vigorously conceived, both as to character and circumstances, than any other Elizabethan play, except those of Shakspeare;" and, regarding the three last acts only, Lamb,‡ with equal justice (there being no modern German rival to warp his judgment), describes the principal character as "a mere monster, brought in with a large painted nose to please the rabble. He kills in sport, poisons whole nunneries, invents infernal machines. He is just such an exhibition as, a century or two earlier, might have been played before the Londoners by the royal command, when a general pillage and massacre of the Hebrews had been previously resolved on in the Cabinet." There are, however, a few passages of uncommon merit, and among these may be distinguished the living picture of the Alsatian bully, sent by Bellamira to extort money from Barabas. "He sent a shaggy tottered staring slave, That when he speaks draws out his grisly beard And cross-biting-such a sort of rogue As is the husband to a hundred whores !"-p. 110a. Qualified, however, as must always be the praise assigned to the Jew of Malta, the critics combine in a chorus of approbation when they come to speak of Edward the Second, which is recognised by common consent as, after Shakspeare's, the finest specimen of the English historical drama; while, as regards its only superiors, it possesses the important advantage of being anterior to them all in the date of its production. The conclusion, in particular, has called forth the admiration of the highest judges. Hazlitt§ pronounces it to be "certainly superior" to the parallel scene in Richard II., and "in heart-breaking distress, and the sense of human weakness claiming pity from utter helplessness and conscious misery, is not surpassed by any *History of Dramatic Poetry, iii. 135. Lamb's Specimens, i. 29. writer whatever." This is high praise, but it is more than confirmed by the verdict of Lamb, who says "the death-scene of Marlowe's King moves pity and terror beyond any scene, ancient or modern, with which I am acquainted." But, if I may presume to speak after such authorities, the pity and terror fail to exalt the character of Edward in the reader's mind, while the last scene of Faustus fills the soul with love and admiration as for a departed hero. The Massacre of Paris is not only a fragment, but the little that remains to us has come down in a most corrupt state.† Mr. Dyce, however, considers that, "after every allowance has been made on these accounts, it must be regarded as the very worst of Marlowe's dramas." The nobles of the French court appear to me, however, to have more marked individuality of character than those in Edward II., where the Barons resemble each other as closely as if they had been painted by Kneller, in his later days, when the grasping old Westphalian was thinking of his dividends rather than his fame.‡ In the tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage, which, in Mr. Collier's opinion, was written in 1590, although not printed till 1594, Marlowe was assisted, or perhaps rather his work was completed, by his old opponent Thomas Nash. However this may be, the production must be regarded on the whole as a very pleasing poem, every now and then swelling into real beauty, and at the worst times not sinking lower than other poets at the time were apt to do. Occasionally we come upon such a line as, "Gentle Achates reach the tinder-box," which, if I were a proper biographer, I should at once assign to Nash, while just afterwards we stumble upon passages of such genuine vigour and beauty as nobody but the writer of a life of the lesser genius would give to any one but Marlowe. Take for instances the lines in which Æneas describes the opening of the Wooden Horse : "Then he unlocked the horse, and suddenly, From out his entrails, Neoptolemus, Setting his spear upon the ground, leapt forth, And after him a thousand Grecians more, In whose stern faces shined the quenchless fire That after burnt the pride of Asia ;" and the charming verses in which Dido indulges her fancy in equipping the ships of her lover: "I'll give thee tackling made of rivelled gold, Wound on the barks of odoriferous trees, Oärs of massy ivory, full of holes, * Lamb's Dramatic Specimens, p. 26. In the note at p. 336 on the words "Enter a soldier." I have made no mention of the play of Lust's Dominion; or, The Lacivious Queen, which was first printed as Marlowe's in 1657, but was proved by Mr. Collier, in 1826, to be the joint work of Thomas Dekker, William Houghton, and John Day. Hazlitt, who was not aware of the above fact, criticized it as a play of Marlowe's, and assigned it a high place among his dramas. The verdict of Mr. Collier has been emphatically endorsed by Mr. Dyce. Through which the water shall delight to play; The sails of folded lawn, where shall be wrought Take what ye will, but leave Æneas here." I now come to the poem of Hero and Leander, or The Sestiad, as I suppose Marlowe must have intended to call it (from the town of Sestos, in which the scene is laid); a name which Chapman retained, or perhaps invented, when he completed the poem and divided it into books. In Marlowe's time it was supposed that the Musæus who wrote the Greek poem on which the Sestiads were founded, was in very deed the ancient Athenian bard whom modern criticism has dismissed from his position as the flesh and blood predecessor of Hesiod and Homer, and fixed in nubibus along with Orpheus and other "semi-mythological personages." It is fortunate that the respect which Marlowe must have felt for what was then regarded as the most ancient of human compositions did not lead him into a repetition of the fatal blunder of a line for line translation. In fact he may almost be said to have lost sight of his original altogether, and to have given full swing to his rich and thick-coming fancies. Malone told Thomas Warton that, in addition to the two first Sestiads, Marlowe left behind him "about a hundred lines of the third;" which, however, in my opinion are not to be looked for in the place assigned to them, where all is manifestly Chapman's, but in the episode of Teras, and other portions of the fifth Sestiad, where the higher hand of Marlowe seems to me easily discernible. Chapman was a true and excellent poet, in some respects Marlowe's superior, but altogether different from him in lines of thought and modes of expression, and labouring besides under the immense disadvantage of singing as it were in falsetto, by endeavouring to work in the style and spirit of another man's performance. The age was not the age of mocking-birds, but of genuine songsters of the grove, who each piped the wood notes that were native to him, and which persist in making themselves heard sweet and clear in the midst of any attempt at imitating another. The popularity of this poem was unbounded. Contemporary literature is full of allusions to it: Shakspeare and Ben Jonson have introduced quotations from it into their works; and Taylor the Water Poet tells us that his brother "scullers" sweetened their toil by chanting its couplets as they rowed along the Thames. But before this time arrived, the short and troubled career of this greatly gifted man had come to a dark and melancholy close. During the six years which elapsed between his quitting Cambridge and his death, we know literally nothing of him, except that he must have composed the works above enumerated; that he had the evil reputation of being a free liver and a free-er thinker; and that he had tried his fortune upon the stage. The curtain is for a moment lifted. but it is only to show him in the agonies of a violent death. In the last week of May, 1593, he was carousing at Deptford, in-to say the least-very doubtful company; and taking offence at some real or supposed insult to himself or his female companion, he unsheathed his dagger to avenge it, and in the scuffle which ensued received a mortal wound in the head from his own weapon. It is a convenient custom in fatal brawls like these to cast the blame on the dead man and the stranger who can make no answer himself, and is without friends to represent the matter in a fairer light. In the present case, too, the narratives which have come down to us were written long after the event, and by men whose purpose it was to represent him in the blackest light as the object of the direct vengeance of the Almighty. I shall not, therefore, detain the reader by pointing out the improbabilities and discrepancies in their stories, which are given at the foot of the page,* and only wish I could convince myself that, in the following passage of the Hero and Leander, Chapman intended us to understand that the dying bed of the poet was watched over by some "associate" or "friend beloved," who listened to and treasured up his "late desires." "Then, now, most strangely intellectual fire That, proper to my soul, hast power to inspire "Not inferior to any of the former in atheisme and impietie, and equal to al in maner of punishment, was one of our own nation, of fresh and late memorie, called Marlin, by profession a scholler, brought up from his youth in the Universitie of Cambridge, but by practice a playmaker and a poet of scurrilitie, who by giving too large a swing to his owne wit, and suffering his lust to have the full reines, fell (not without just desert) to that outrage and extremitie, that hee denied God and his sonne Christ, and not onely in word blasphemed the Trinitie, but also (as is credibly reported) wrote bookes against it, affirming our Saviour to be but a deceiver, and Moses to be but a conjurer and seducer of the people, and the holy Bible to bee but vaine and idle stories, and all religion but a device of policie. But see what a hooke the Lord put into the nostrils of this barking dogge! So it fell out, that as he purposed to stab one, whom he ought a grudge unto, with his dagger, the other party perceiving so avoyded the stroke, that, withal catching hold of his wrest, hee stabbed his owne dagger into his owne head, in such sort that, notwithstanding all the meanes of surgerie that could bee wrought, hee shortly after died thereof: the manner of his death being so terrible (for hee even cursed and blasphemed to his last gaspe, and together with his breath an oath flew out of his mouth) that it was not only a manifest signe of God's judgement, but also an horrible and fearfulle terror to all that beheld him. But herein did the justice of God most notably appeare, in that hee compelled his owne hand which had written those blasphemies, to bee the instrument to punish him, and that in his braine which had devised the same."-Beard's Theatre of God's Judgements. 1597. In the first edition of his book, Beard states that Marlowe was killed "in the streets of London," which is importar.t, as showing on what vague information he wrote. As the poet Lycophron was shot to death by a certain rival of his, so Christopher Marlow was stabd to death by a bawdy servingman, a rival of his in his lewd love."-More's Palladio Tamia. 1598. "Not inferior to these was one Christopher Marlow, by profession a playmaker, who as it was reported, about fourteen years ago wrote a book against the Trinitie. But see the effects of God's justice! It so hapned that at Detford, a little village about three miles distant from London, as he meant to stab with his poniard one name Ingram, that had invited him thither to a feast, and was then playing at tables, hee quickly perceiving it, so avoyded the thrust, that with all drawing out his dagger for his defence, hee stabd this Marlowe into the eye, in such sort, his braynes comming out, at the daggers point, hee shortly after dyed. Thus did God, the true executioner of divine justice, work the end of impious atheists.”—Sir William Vaughan's Golden Grove, Moralized in three books. 1600. Let any one who is inclined to place implicit reliance on evidence of this description take up the works of Peter Pindar, Esq., 5 vols. 8vo, 1812, and turn to the note at p. 493 of vol. iii., and read what is there specifically asserted as to the career of the living William Gifford. |