“Yet, for he was a scholar once admired,
For wondrous knowledge in our German Schools;
We’ll give his mangled limbs due burial;
And all the students, clothed in mourning black
Shall wait upon his heavy funeral.”

Some one character is a centre of over-mastering pride and ambition in every play.  In the Jew of Malta it is the hero Barabbas.  In Edward II. it is Piers Gaveston.  In Edward II. indeed, two elements are mixed—­the element of Machiavelli and Tamburlaine in Gaveston, and the purely tragic element which evolves from within itself the style in which it shall be treated, in the King.  “The reluctant pangs of abdicating Royalty,” wrote Charles Lamb in a famous passage, “furnished hints which Shakespeare scarcely improved in his Richard II; and the death scene of Marlowe’s King moves pity and terror beyond any scene, ancient or modern, with which I am acquainted.”  Perhaps the play gives the hint of what Marlowe might have become had not the dagger of a groom in a tavern cut short at thirty his burning career.

Even in that time of romance and daring speculation he went further than his fellows.  He was said to have been tainted with atheism, to have denied God and the Trinity; had he lived he might have had trouble with the Star Chamber.  The free-voyaging intellect of the age found this one way of outlet, but if literary evidences are to be trusted sixteenth and seventeenth century atheism was a very crude business.  The Atheist’s Tragedy of Tourneur (a dramatist who need not otherwise detain us) gives some measure of its intelligence and depth.  Says the villain to the heroine,

“No?  Then invoke
Your great supposed Protector.  I will do’t.”

to which she: 

“Supposed Protector!  Are you an atheist, then
 I know my fears and prayers are spent in vain.”

Marlowe’s very faults and extravagances, and they are many, are only the obverse of his greatness.  Magnitude and splendour of language when the thought is too shrunken to fill it out, becomes mere inflation.  He was a butt of the parodists of the day.  And Shakespeare, though he honoured him “on this side idolatry,” did his share of ridicule.  Ancient Pistol is fed and stuffed with relic and rags of Marlowesque affectation—­

“Holla! ye pampered jades of Asia,
 Can ye not draw but twenty miles a day.”

is a quotation taken straight from Tamburlaine.

(3)

A study of Shakespeare, who refuses to be crushed within the limits of a general essay is no part of the plan of this book.  We must take up the story of the drama with the reign of James and with the contemporaries of his later period, though of course, a treatment which is conditioned by the order of development is not strictly chronological, and some of the plays we shall have to refer to belong to the close of the sixteenth century.  We are apt to forget that