It is another commonplace of criticism to affirm that Marlowe had not a touch of comic genius, not a gleam of wit in him or a twinkle of humor:  but it is an indisputable fact that he had.  In “The Massacre at Paris,” the soliloquy of the soldier lying in wait for the minion of Henri iii. has the same very rough but very real humor as a passage in the “Contention” which was cancelled by the reviser.  The same hand is unmistakable in both these broad and boyish outbreaks of unseemly but undeniable fun:  and if we might wish it rather less indecorous, we must admit that the tradition which denies all sense of humor and all instinct of wit to the first great poet of England is no less unworthy of serious notice or elaborate refutation than the charges and calumnies of an informer who was duly hanged the year after Marlowe’s death.  For if the same note of humor is struck in an undoubted play of Marlowe’s and in a play of disputed authorship, it is evident that the rest of the scene in the latter play must also be Marlowe’s.  And in that unquestionable case the superb and savage humor of the terribly comic scenes which represent with such rough magnificence of realism the riot of Jack Cade and his ruffians through the ravaged streets of London must be recognizable as no other man’s than his.  It is a pity we have not before us for comparison the comic scenes or burlesque interludes of “Tamburlaine” which the printer or publisher, as he had the impudence to avow in his prefatory note, purposely omitted and left out.

The author of A Study of Shakespeare was therefore wrong, and utterly wrong, when in a book issued some quarter of a century ago he followed the lead of Mr. Dyce in assuming that because the author of “Doctor Faustus” and “The Jew of Malta” “was as certainly”—­and certainly it is difficult to deny that whether as a mere transcriber or as an original dealer in pleasantry he sometimes was—­“one of the least and worst among jesters as he was one of the best and greatest among poets,” he could not have had a hand in the admirable comic scenes of “The Taming of the Shrew.”  For it is now, I should hope, unnecessary to insist that the able and conscientious editor to whom his fame and his readers owe so great a debt was over-hasty in assuming and asserting that he was a poet “to whom, we have reason to believe, nature had denied even a moderate talent for the humorous.”  The serious or would-be poetical scenes of the play are as unmistakably the work of an imitator as are most of the better passages in “Titus Andronicus” and “King Edward iii.”  Greene or Peele may be responsible for the bad poetry, but there is no reason to suppose that the great poet whose mannerisms he imitated with so stupid a servility was incapable of the good fun.