Faustus, the second play, is one of the best of Marlowe’s works.[141] The story is that of a scholar who longs for infinite knowledge, and who turns from Theology, Philosophy, Medicine, and Law, the four sciences of the time, to the study of magic, much as a child might turn from jewels to tinsel and colored paper.  In order to learn magic he sells himself to the devil, on condition that he shall have twenty-four years of absolute power and knowledge.  The play is the story of those twenty-four years.  Like Tamburlaine, it is lacking in dramatic construction,[142] but has an unusual number of passages of rare poetic beauty.  Milton’s Satan suggests strongly that the author of Paradise Lost had access to Faustus and used it, as he may also have used Tamburlaine, for the magnificent panorama displayed by Satan in Paradise Regained.  For instance, more than fifty years before Milton’s hero says, “Which way I turn is hell, myself am hell,” Marlowe had written: 

Faust.  How comes it then that thou art out of hell?
Mephisto.  Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
* * * * *
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place; for where we are is hell,
And where hell is there must we ever be.

Marlowe’s third play is The Jew of Malta, a study of the lust for wealth, which centers about Barabas, a terrible old money lender, strongly suggestive of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.  The first part of the play is well constructed, showing a decided advance, but the last part is an accumulation of melodramatic horrors.  Barabas is checked in his murderous career by falling into a boiling caldron which he had prepared for another, and dies blaspheming, his only regret being that he has not done more evil in his life.

Marlowe’s last play is Edward II, a tragic study of a king’s weakness and misery.  In point of style and dramatic construction, it is by far the best of Marlowe’s plays, and is a worthy predecessor of Shakespeare’s historical drama.

Marlowe is the only dramatist of the time who is ever compared with Shakespeare.[143] When we remember that he died at twenty-nine, probably before Shakespeare had produced a single great play, we must wonder what he might have done had he outlived his wretched youth and become a man.  Here and there his work is remarkable for its splendid imagination, for the stateliness of its verse, and for its rare bits of poetic beauty; but in dramatic instinct, in wide knowledge of human life, in humor, in delineation of woman’s character, in the delicate fancy which presents an Ariel as perfectly as a Macbeth,—­in a word, in all that makes a dramatic genius, Shakespeare stands alone.  Marlowe simply prepared the way for the master who was to follow.

VARIETY OF THE EARLY DRAMA.  The thirty years between our first regular English plays and Shakespeare’s first comedy[144] witnessed a development of the drama which astonishes us both by its rapidity and variety.  We shall better appreciate Shakespeare’s work if we glance for a moment at the plays that preceded him, and note how he covers the whole field and writes almost every form and variety of the drama known to his age.