IN writing the following Essay I have consulted the usual authorities, two of whom ought perhaps to be particularised. Mr Bullen's Introduction to his edition of Marlowe contains, I imagine, every fragment of fact connected with the poet's life and works that has been discovered, together with some careful criticism; I have laid him very largely under contribution. In the account of the rise of blank verse I have followed Mr Symonds, who in his Shakspere's Predecessors, in three essays appended to his Sketches and Studies in Italy, and in an article in the Cornhill Magazine (Vol. xv.) has discussed the question very fully. To each of these writers my obligations are almost too obvious to need acknowledgement. For the rest, the terms under which the prize was awarded required that the successful essay should be printed; this, of course, is my sole reason for publishing what otherwise would have sought some friendly fireplace.

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THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

ON SHAKSPERE'S EARLIER STYLE.

SCHLEGEL in his Dramatic Literature devotes a paragraph of ten lines to Christopher Marlowe; after mentioning Lyly, he says, 'Marlowe possessed more real talent and was in a better way. He handled the history of Edward the Second with very little art it is true, but with a certain truth and simplicity, so that in many scenes he does not fail to produce a pathetic effect. His verses are flowing but without energy: how Ben Jonson could come to use the expression "Marlowe's mighty line" is more than I conceive.' As an expression of Schlegel's own opinion the quotation is not very significant; he wrote, as Mr. Swinburne suggests, the epitaph of his criticism in the egregious statement that The Yorkshire Tragedy, Thomas, Lord Cromwell, and Sir John Oldcastle were not only written by Shakspere-of that there could be no doubt in the mind Schlegelian-but

2

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ MARLOWE'S, Influence on

should really be classed amongst the poet's 'best and maturest works.' At the time, however, when his remarkable dictum on Marlowe was given to the world Schlegel was regarded as a great Shaksperian critic, and that he should have dismissed the author of Tamburlaine with a few lines of benevolent contempt is, I think, not a little significant. It is typical of the strange ignorance which existed even beyond the beginning of this century concerning some of the greatest of our Elizabethan dramatists. The method of comparative criticism was practically ignored. Shakspere was treated as an isolated phenomenon, independent of the contemporaries above whom he towered; they were lost in his shadow and met with the barest recognition, or none at all. It never struck the older commentators and critics that Shakspere must have been profoundly influenced-at any rate at the outset of his career-by the literary activity of the dramatists round him, and yet we may be pretty sure that there were a thousand influences moulding the genius of the poet from the day when he may have seen the 'Queen's Players' at Stratford in 1587 to the day when he finished his share in Henry VIII. and gave up writing altogether. And of these influences none surely could exceed the effect which the works of his contemporaries must have had on his style and method, and of these contemporaries who greater than Christopher Marlowe? To appreciate the development of Shakspere's genius and art we

must see him affected by the example now of one dramatist, now of another. It is one great family, and we must study their works in common, precisely as an artist deals with a school of painters. There are many points of contact between the different members; there is likewise much diversity. Special characteristics are represented by special writers, and all are summed up in Shakspere, the central sun, so to speak, of which the others are but partial reflections.

To insist on this is to insist on what has become the merest truism-'I sing the Obsolete '-but it is a doctrine on which proper stress was never laid until Coleridge', Hazlitt and Lamb made the great discovery that other writers besides Shakspere had lived in what is familiarly called the Elizabethan era. During the eighteenth century, of course, it was hardly probable that our old dramatists would receive much attention. Shakspere himself had fallen on evil days and evil editors. The public rested secure under the benevolent despotism of the rhymed couplet, the critics raised their ceaseless Ave Imperator

1 Even Coleridge barely alludes to Marlowe in his Lectures, while Scott in his essay on the drama has the following passage: 'The English stage might be considered equally without rule and without model when Shakspeare arose...He followed the path which a nameless crowd of obscure writers had trodden before him. Nothing went before Shakspeare, which in any respect was fit to fix and stamp the character of a national drama.' How wide of the mark this criticism is my essay

will attempt to show.