O, lente, lente currite, noctis equi! 
  The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike.... 
  O soul, be changed into little water-drops,
  And fall into the ocean, ne’er be found!

Marlowe’s genius was passionate and irregular.  He had no humor, and the comic portions of Faustus are scenes of low buffoonery.

George Peele’s masterpiece, David and Bethsabe, was also, in many respects, a fine play, though its beauties were poetic rather than dramatic, consisting not in the characterization—­which is feeble—­but in the Eastern luxuriance of the imagery.  There is one noble chorus—­

 O proud revolt of a presumptuous man,

which reminds one of passages in Milton’s Samson Agonistes, and occasionally Peele rises to such high AEschylean audacities as this: 

  At him the thunder shall discharge his bolt,
  And his fair spouse, with bright and fiery wings,
  Sit ever burning on his hateful bones.

Robert Greene was a very unequal writer.  His plays are slovenly and careless in construction, and he puts classical allusions into the mouths of milkmaids and serving boys, with the grotesque pedantry and want of keeping common among the playwrights of the early stage.  He has, notwithstanding, in his comedy parts, more natural lightness and grace than either Marlowe or Peele.  In his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, there is a fresh breath, as of the green English country, in such passages as the description of Oxford, the scene at Harleston Fair, and the picture of the dairy in the keeper’s lodge at merry Fressingfield.

In all these ante-Shaksperian dramatists there was a defect of art proper to the first comers in a new literary departure.  As compared not only with Shakspere, but with later writers, who had the inestimable advantage of his example, their work was full of imperfection, hesitation, experiment.  Marlowe was probably, in native genius, the equal at least of Fletcher or Webster, but his plays, as a whole, are certainly not equal to theirs.  They wrote in a more developed state of the art.  But the work of this early school settled the shape which the English drama was to take.  It fixed the practice and traditions of the national theater.  It decided that the drama was to deal with the whole of life, the real and the ideal, tragedy and comedy, prose and verse, in the same play, without limitations of time, place, and action.  It decided that the English play was to be an action, and not a dialogue, bringing boldly upon the mimic scene feasts, dances, processions, hangings, riots, plays within plays, drunken revels, beatings, battle, murder, and sudden death.  It established blank verse, with occasional riming couplets at the close of a scene or of a long speech, as the language of the tragedy and high comedy parts, and prose as the language of the low comedy and “business” parts.  And it introduced songs, a feature of which Shakspere made exquisite use.  Shakspere, indeed, like all great poets, invented no new form of literature, but touched old forms to finer purposes, refining every thing, discarding nothing.  Even the old chorus and dumb show he employed, though sparingly, as also the old jig, or comic song, which the clown used to give between the acts.