“Apel.  Whom do you love best in the world?”

  “Camp.  He that made me last in the world.”

  “Apel.  That was God.”

  “Camp.  I had thought it had been a man,” etc.

Lyly’s service to the drama consisted in his introduction of an easy and sparkling prose as the language of high comedy, and Shakspere’s indebtedness to the fashion thus set is seen in such passages as the wit combats between Benedict and Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing, greatly superior as they are to any thing of the kind in Lyly.

The most important of the dramatists who were Shakspere’s forerunners, or early contemporaries, was Christopher or—­as he was familiarly called—­Kit Marlowe.  Born in the same year with Shakspere (1564), he died in 1593, at which date his great successor is thought to have written no original plays, except the Comedy of Errors and Love’s Labour’s Lost.  Marlowe first popularized blank verse as the language of tragedy in his Tamburlaine, written before 1587, and in subsequent plays he brought it to a degree of strength and flexibility which left little for Shakspere to do but to take it as he found it. Tamburlaine was a crude, violent piece, full of exaggeration and bombast, but with passages here and there of splendid declamation, justifying Ben Jonson’s phrase, “Marlowe’s mighty line.”  Jonson, however, ridiculed, in his Discoveries, the “scenical strutting and furious vociferation” of Marlowe’s hero; and Shakspere put a quotation from Tamburlaine into the mouth of his ranting Pistol.  Marlowe’s Edward II. was the most regularly constructed and evenly written of his plays.  It was the best historical drama on the stage before Shakspere, and not undeserving of the comparison which it has provoked with the latter’s Richard II. But the most interesting of Marlowe’s plays, to a modern reader, is the Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.  The subject is the same as in Goethe’s Faust, and Goethe, who knew the English play, spoke of it as greatly planned.  The opening of Marlowe’s Faustus is very similar to Goethe’s.  His hero, wearied with unprofitable studies, and filled with a mighty lust for knowledge and the enjoyment of life, sells his soul to the Devil in return for a few years of supernatural power.  The tragic irony of the story might seem to lie in the frivolous use which Faustus makes of his dearly bought power, wasting it in practical jokes and feats of legerdermain; but of this Marlowe was probably unconscious.  The love story of Margaret, which is the central point of Goethe’s drama, is entirely wanting in Marlowe’s, and so is the subtle conception of Goethe’s Mephistophiles.  Marlowe’s handling of the supernatural is materialistic and downright, as befitted an age which believed in witchcraft.  The greatest part of the English Faustus is the last scene, in which the agony and terror of suspense with which the magician awaits the stroke of the clock that signals his doom are powerfully drawn.