and orts, “the fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics” of another man’s board, ever uttered a more parrot-like note of plagiary.  The very exactitude of the repetition is a strong argument against the theory which attributes it to Shakespeare.  That he had much at starting to learn of Marlowe, and that he did learn much—­that in his earliest plays, and above all in his earliest historic plays, the influence of the elder poet, the echo of his style, the iteration of his manner, may perpetually be traced—­I have already shown that I should be the last to question; but so exact an echo, so servile an iteration as this, I believe we shall nowhere find in them.  The sonorous accumulation of emphatic epithets—­as in the magnificent first verse of this passage—­is indeed at least as much a note of the young Shakespeare’s style as of his master’s; but even were this one verse less in the manner of the elder than the younger poet—­and this we can hardly say that it is—­no single verse detached from its context can weigh a feather against the full and flawless evidence of the whole speech.  And of all this there is nothing in the Contention; the scene there opens in bald and flat nakedness of prose, striking at once into the immediate matter of stage business without the decoration of a passing epithet or a single trope.

From this sample it might seem that the main difficulty must be to detect anywhere the sign-manual of Shakespeare, even in the best passages of the revised play.  On the other hand, it has not unreasonably been maintained that even in the next scene of this same act in its original form, and in all those following which treat of Cade’s insurrection, there is evidence of such qualities as can hardly be ascribed to any hand then known but Shakespeare’s.  The forcible realism, the simple vigour and lifelike humour of these scenes, cannot, it is urged, be due to any other so early at work in the field of comedy.  A critic desirous to press this point might further insist on the likeness or identity of tone between these and all later scenes in which Shakespeare has taken on him to paint the action and passion of an insurgent populace.  With him, it might too plausibly be argued, the people once risen in revolt for any just or unjust cause is always the mob, the unwashed rabble, the swinish multitude; full as he is of wise and gracious tenderness for individual character, of swift and ardent pity for personal suffering, he has no deeper or finer feeling than scorn for “the beast with many heads” that fawn and butt at bidding as they are swayed by the vain and violent breath of any worthless herdsman.  For the drovers who guide and misguide at will the turbulent flocks of their mutinous cattle his store of bitter words is inexhaustible; it is a treasure-house of obloquy which can never be drained dry.  All this, or nearly all this, we must admit; but it brings us no nearer to any but a floating and conjectural kind of solution.