"Marlowe, as Dr. Farmer observes to me, has the

Mark the proof.

very same phraseology in 'King Edward II :'

'Scorning that the lowly earth

Should drink his blood, mounts up to the air.'

"And in the same play I have lately noticed another line in which we find the very epithet here applied to the pious Lancastrian king:

'Frown'st thou thereat, aspiring Lancaster ? "

We should be content to leave such childish nonsense to its own fate, had the opinion of Marlowe's authorship not been adopted by men of a very different calibre.

The theory that Marlowe wrote one or both Parts of The Contention' must begin by assuming that his mind was so thoroughly disciplined at the period when he produced Tamburlaine,' and 'Faustus,' and 'The Jew of Malta,' that he was able to lay aside every element, whether of thought or expression, by which those plays are characterised; adopt essentially different principles for the dramatic conduct of a story; copy his characters from living and breathing models of actual man; come down from his pomp and extravagance of language, not to reject poetry, but to ally poetry with familiar and natural thoughts; and delineate crime, not with the glaring and fantastic pencil that makes demons spout forth fire and blood in the midst of thick darkness, but with a severe portraiture of men who walk in broad daylight upon the common earth, rendering the ordinary passions of their fellows-pride, and envy, and ambition, and revenge-most fearful, from their alliance with stupendous intellect and unconquerable energy. This was what Marlowe must have done before he could have conducted a single sustained scene of either Part of The Contention ;'-before he could have depicted the fierce hatreds of Beaufort and Gloster, the never-subdued ambition of Margaret and York, the patient suffering amidst taunting friends and reviling enemies of Henry, and, above all, the courage, the activity, the tenacity, the self-possession, the intellectual supremacy, and the passionless ferocity, of Richard. In the Tamburlaine,' and 'Jew,' and 'Faustus,' events move on with no natural progression. In every scene there must be something to excite. We have no repose; for, if striking situations are not presented, we have the same exaggerations of thought, and the same extravagance of language. What is intended to be familiar at once plunges into the opposite extravagance of ribaldry; and even the messengers and servants are made out of something different from life. We

6

have looked through Marlowe's plays (we except Edward II.” for reasons which will presently appear) for a plain piece of narrative, such as might contrast with the easy method with which Shakspere in general tells a story, and of which 'The Contention' furnishes abundant examples; but we have looked in vain. We select a passage, however, from the Second Part of Tamburlaine,' in which Callapine and his allies take a survey of their military position and resources; and we compare it with the scene in 'The Second Part of the Contention' in which Warwick meets Edward and Richard after the battle of Wakefield. There can be no doubt that these passages were written within two or three years of each other:—

FROM THE SECOND PART OF TAMBURLAINE. "Enter CALLAPINE, ORCANES, ALMEDA, and the Kings of Jerusalem, Trebizond, and Syria, with their Trains.-To them enter a Messenger.

Mess. Renowned emperor, mighty Calla-
pine,

God's great lieutenant over half the world!
Here at Aleppo, with a host of men,
Lies Tamburlaine, this king of Persia,
(In numbers more than are the quiv'ring
leaves

Of Ida's forest, where your highness' hounds,
With open cry, pursue the wounded stag,)
Who means to girt Natolia's walls with siege,
Fire the town, and overrun the land.

Call. My royal army is as great as his,
That, from the bounds of Phrygia to the sea
Which washeth Cyprus with his brinish

waves,

Covers the hills, the valleys, and the plains.
Viceroys and peers of Turkey, play the men!
Whet all your swords, to mangle Tambur-
laine,

His sons,

his captains, and his followers;
By Mahomet! not one of them shall live:
The field wherein this battle shall be fought
For ever term the Persians' sepulchre,
In memory of this our victory!

Orc. Now, he that calls himself the scourge
of Jove,

The emp'ror of the world, and earthly god,
Shall end the warlike progress he intends,
And travel headlong to the lake of hell,
Where legions of devils, (knowing he must
die

Here, in Natolia, by your highness' hands,)
All brandishing their brands of quenchless

fire,

Stretching their monstrous paws, grin with

their teeth,

And guard the gates to entertain his soul.

Call. Tell us, viceroys, the number of your

men,

And what our army royal is esteem'd.

Jer. From Palestina and Jerusalem,

Of Hebrews threescore thousand fighting men Are come since last we showed to your majesty.

Orc. So from Arabia desert, and the bounds
Of that sweet land, whose brave metropolis
Re-edified the fair Semiramis,

Came forty thousand warlike foot and horse,
Since last we number'd to your majesty.

Treb. From Trebizond, in Asia the Less,
Naturaliz'd Turks and stout Bithynians
Came to my band, full fifty thousand more
(That fighting know not what retreat doth

mean,

Nor e'er return but with the victory)
Since last we number'd to your majesty.

Syr. Of Syrians from Halla is repair'd,
And neighbour cities of your highness' land,
Ten thousand horse, and thirty thousand
foot,

Since last we number'd to your majesty ;
So that the royal army is esteem'd

Six hundred thousand valiant fighting men.
Call. Then welcome, Tamburlaine, unto
thy death.

Come, puissant viceroys, let us to the field,
(The Persians' sepulchre,) and sacrifice
Mountains of breathless men to Mahomet,
Who now, with Jove, opens the firmament
To see the slaughter of our enemies."

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Our soldiers', like the night-owl's lazy flight,
Or like an idle thresher with a flail,

Fell gently down, as if they smote their
friends.

I cheer'd them up with justice of the cause,
With promise of high pay, and great rewards:
But all in vain, they had no hearts to fight,
Nor we in them no hope to win the day;
So that we fled; the king unto the queen,
Lord George your brother, Norfolk, and my-
self,

In haste, post haste, are come to join with you;
For in the marches here we heard you were
Making another head to fight again.

Edw. Thanks, gentle Warwick.
How far hence is the duke with his power?
And when came George from Burgundy to
England?

War. Some five miles off the duke is with

his power.

But as for your brother, he was lately sent
From your kind aunt, duchess of Burgundy,
With aid of soldiers'gainst this needful war."

can be therein found

Our readers have now the two Parts of The Contention' before them; and we would ask if a single passage conceived in Marlowe's "Ercles' vein "? On the other hand, innumerable other passages may be found in Marlowe's Edward II.' in which his peculiar characteristics continue to prevail, associated indeed with many evidences of a really higher style of dramatic poetry. This is decisive, we think, against Marlowe being the author of The Contention.' But it proves something more ;— it is evidence that he had become acquainted with another model, and that model we hold to be The Contention' itself. Here it stands, with a fixed date; in itself a model, we believe, if no other works of Shakspere can be proved to have existed in, or close upon, the first half of the decad commencing in 1585. To show the contrary it would be necessary to maintain that Marlowe's Edward II.' preceded The Contention;' but upon this point no one has ever raised a doubt. All the English authorities have left The Contention' amidst the dust and rubbish of that drama, which Marlowe first, and Shakspere afterwards, according to their theory, came to inform with life and poetry. They have always proclaimed these dramas as old plays-rude plays-things which Shakspere remodelled. We hold that they were the things upon which Marlowe built his later style, whether as regards the dramatic conduct

of an action, the development of character, or the structure of the verse ;—and we hold that they were Shakspere's.

But it is necessary that we should show that in Marlowe's Edward II.' the author, possessing that power of adaptation, to a certain extent, which always belongs to genius, was still pursued by his original faults of exaggeration of thought and inflation of language. We think this may be effected by selecting a few passages up and down the drama :

scattered

"Queen. O miserable and distressed queen!

Would, when I left sweet France, and was embark`d,
That charming Circe, walking on the waves,

Had chang'd my shape; or at the marriage-day
The cup of Hymen had been full of poison;

Or with those arms, that twin'd about my neck,
I had been stifled, and not liv'd to see
The king my lord thus to abandon me!
Like frantic Juno will I fill the earth

With ghastly murmur of my sighs and cries."

"Edw. My heart is as an anvil unto sorrow,
Which beats upon it like the Cyclops' hammers,
And with the noise turns up my giddy brain,
And makes me frantic for my Gaveston.
Ah! had some bloodless fury rose from hell,
And with my kingly sceptre struck me dead,
When I was forc'd to leave my Gaveston!"

"Edw. By earth, the common mother of us all!
By heaven, and all the moving orbs thereof!
By this right hand! and by my father's sword!
And all the honours 'longing to my crown!
I will have heads and lives for him, as many
As I have manors, castles, towns, and towers.
Treacherous Warwick! traitorous Mortimer!
If I be England's king, in lakes of gore

Your headless trunks, your bodies will I trail,
That you may drink your fill, and quaff in blood,
And stain my royal standard with the same,
That so my bloody colours may suggest
Remembrance of revenge immortally
On your accursed traitorous progeny,
You villains that have slain my Gaveston.
And in this place of honour and of trust,
Spencer, sweet Spencer, I adopt thee here;
And merely of our love we do create thee
Earl of Gloster, and lord chamberlain,
Despite of times, despite of enemies."

"Edw. A litter hast thou? lay me in a hearse,

And to the gates of hell convey me hence;

Let Pluto's bells ring out my fatal knell,

And hags howl for my death at Charon's shore.

For friends hath Edward none but these; and these

Must die under a tyrant's sword."

"Spencer, junior. O, is he gone? is noble Edward gone? Parted from hence, never to see us more?

Rend, sphere of heav'n! and, fire, forsake thy orb!

Earth, melt to air! Gone is my sovereign!

Gone, gone, alas! never to make return."

The slight specimens which we have thus taken, almost at random, from the Edward II.' will suggest to our readers a general idea of the structure of Marlowe's verse in that play, which is held to be, "if not the last, the most perfect, of his dramatic productions ;" and of which Mr. Collier further says, "Here the author's versification is exhibited in its greatest excellence, and successful experiments are made in nearly all those improvements for which Shakespeare has generally had exclusive credit." Mr. Collier, in his "History of Dramatic Poetry,' from which this passage is extracted, has given a criticism upon each of Marlowe's productions, "with a view to trace the gradual improvement of his style and versification, and to show that he often introduced into his mighty line (as Ben Jonson calls it) not less vigour and majesty than Shakespeare, with such varieties of pause, inflection, and modulation, as left our greatest dramatist little more to do than to follow his example." He adds, "This position supposes, as I have already endeavoured to establish, that Shakespeare had not written any of his original plays prior to 1593 (when Marlowe was killed), although, anterior to that year, he might have employed himself in altering and improving for representation some of the works of older dramatists." We have invariably been opposed to this position; and not only opposed to Mr. Collier's theory that Shakspere did not commence as an original author till 1593, (so utterly at variance with the same gentleman's invaluable discovery that Shakspere held a distinguished status in his profession in 1589,) but also to the more common belief that the date of his first original efforts must be assigned to 1591. We have not disguised that we ourselves have a theory connected with our own opinion :—“ We have somewhat pertinaciously clung to the belief that Shakspere, by commencing his career as a dramatic writer some four or five years earlier than is generally maintained, may claim, in common with his less illustrious early contemporaries, the praise of being one of the founders of our dramatic literature, instead of being the mere follower and