pretty scene is made out of what is said in the original regarding the substitution by Venus of Cupid for Ascanius: Dido takes him to her arms, and Cupid wounds her with a dart he had concealed for the purpose: she almost instantly begins to loathe her suitor Iarbas, and to doat upon Æneas. This scene, and one or two that follow it, I have little hesitation in assigning to Marlow. Soon after she is secretly wounded, Dido exclaims 'Oh, dull-conceited Dido, that till now But now, for quittance of this oversight, And thou, Æneas, Dido's treasury, 'In whose fair bosom I will lock more wealth Shortly afterwards she tells Æneas, (who has besought her to repair his ships,) in a similar strain of poetical luxuriance— I'll give thee tackling made of rivel'd gold Wound on the barks of odoriferous trees, 'Oars of massy ivory, full of holes Through which the water shall delight to play: Thy anchors shall be hewed from crystal rocks, VOL. III. Q 2 'The sails of folded lawn, where shall be wrought The wars of Troy-but not Troy's overthrow.' In these beautiful passages the rhythm is essentially different from that of Nash, and lines are even left imperfect for the sake of variety: Nash would, perhaps, have written Hollow pyramides of silver plate'— by which the mere metre might have been improved, but the general beauty of the quotation lessened by the constant recurrence of the same cadence. Dido afterwards sends for the tackling of the refitted ships of Æneas, in order that he may not escape unawares, and in an exquisite strain of poetry reproaches them, as if they had life and sense, and wished ungratefully to contribute to her misery Is this the wood that grew in Carthage plains, 'Thou wouldst have leapt from out the sailor's hands, 'And told me that Eneas meant to go: 'And yet I blame thee not-thou art but wood.' In the same spirit she elsewhere bursts out— 'O, that I had a charm to keep the winds Within the closure of a golden ball; Or that the Tyrrhene sea were in mine arms, That he might suffer shipwreck on my breast, 'As oft as he attempts to hoist up sail.' When afterwards Eneas cannot be prevailed upon to remain, she exclaims- 6 Thy mother was no goddess, perjur'd man, 'Nor Dardanus the author of thy stock; 'But thou art sprung from Scythian Caucasus, 'And Tigers of Hyrcania gave thee suck. 'Ah, foolish Dido, to forbear thus long!.... Why star'st thou in my face? If thou wilt stay, 'Leap in mine arms; mine arms are open wide: 'If not, turn from me, and I'll turn from thee; For though thou hast the power to say farewell, 'I have not power to stay thee.' Although there is a marked superiority in the versification of some parts of the play over others, we may conclude with sufficient certainty, that it was produced before Marlow had himself acquired that degree of excellence in the formation of blank-verse which he had attained when he produced his Edward II. In the piece itself, however, there is nothing by which we can at all fix the date at which it was written. It seems likely that Nash and Marlow became acquainted not very long after the former had come to London, and had assisted his friend Greene by writing the Epistle before his Menaphon, 1587: it is easy to suppose that although Nash there laughs a little at the expense of Marlow, who had then, perhaps, only brought out his Tamburlaine, yet that he soon became sensible of his extraordinary and original powers. 230 ON HENRY CHETTLE, ANTHONY MUNDAY, AND ROBERT WILSON. BETWEEN February, 1597, and March, 1603, as we find by Henslowe's Diary, Henry Chettle was concerned, more or less, in the production of eight-andthirty plays on a great variety of subjects, only four of which have been printed and have descended to us. By a letter from him to Thomas Nash, published by the latter in his Have with you to Saffron Walden, 1596, and signed Your old Compositor,' it seems that Chettle had been originally a printer, and having thus become acquainted with dramatic authors, he at length made a similar attempt himself, and succeeded. There is good reason to believe that he had written for the stage prior to 1592, when he published Greene's posthumous Groatsworth of Wit, and on this account it will be necessary, with as much brevity as possible, to examine such of his pieces as are still in existence. I shall first speak of a tragedy on which he appears to have been alone engaged, and I shall afterwards notice some of his earlier coadjutors, who, we may also conclude, had produced plays anterior to the time of Shakespeare. The tragedy of Hoffman, or a Revenge for a Father, is a revolting mass of blood and murder, in which it seems to have been the author's object to concentrate all the horrors he could multiply. It was not printed until it came out anonymously in 1631; but, by an entry among Henslowe's papers, it appears that it was in existence in December, 1602, and that Henry Chettle was the author of it *. The scene is laid on the shores of the Baltic, near to which the Duke of Prussia keeps his court, and is visited by the Dukes of Saxony and Austria. The foundation of the tragedy rests upon the execution of Admiral Hoffman, father of the hero, as a pirate, (after he had long served the Duke of Lunenburg,) by placing a red-hot crown of iron upon his head, then paring the flesh from his bones, and finally exposing his skeleton upon a gallows. This skeleton young Hoffman, the son and the hero of the tragedy, steals by night, and retiring to a lone cavern near a wood on the coast, hangs it up as a memento of revenge. Prince Otho of Lunenburg is his first victim he is shipwrecked, and Hoffman, assisted by a faithless servant of the prince, named Lorrique, murders him by placing a red-hot iron crown on his head, and then suspends his body by the side of old Hoffman's skeleton, Hoffman then disguises himself like the prince, and, followed by Lorrique, whom he induces *The tragedy of Hoffman could not be older than 1598, for in the beginning of Act ii. Prince Jerome mentions The Mirror of Knighthood, which, having been translated from the Spanish by Margaret Tyler, was printed in that year. |