or by any number of single passages.  The first and last evidence of real and demonstrable weight is the evidence of character.  A good deal might be said on the score of style in favour of its attribution to a poet of the first order, writing at a time when there were but two such poets writing for the stage; but even this is here a point of merely secondary importance.  It need only be noted in passing that if the problem be reduced to a question between the authorship of Shakespeare and the authorship of Marlowe there is no need and no room for further argument.  The whole style of treatment from end to end is about as like the method of Marlowe as the method of Balzac is like the method of Dumas.  There could be no alternative in that case; so that the actual alternative before us is simple enough:  Either this play is the young Shakespeare’s first tragic masterpiece, or there was a writer unknown to us then alive and at work for the stage who excelled him as a tragic dramatist not less—­to say the very least—­than he was excelled by Marlowe as a narrative and tragic poet.

If we accept, as I have been told that Goethe accepted (a point which I regret my inability to verify), the former of these alternatives—­or if at least we assume it for argument’s sake in passing—­we may easily strengthen our position by adducing as further evidence in its favour the author’s thoroughly Shakespearean fidelity to the details of the prose narrative on which his tragedy is founded.  But, it may be objected, we find the same fidelity to a similar text in the case of A Warning for Fair Women.  And here again starts up the primal and radical difference between the two works:  it starts up and will not be overlooked.  Equal fidelity to the narrative text we do undoubtedly find in either case; the same fidelity we assuredly do not find.  The one is a typical example of prosaic realism, the other of poetic reality.  Light from darkness or truth from falsehood is not more infallibly discernible.  The fidelity in the one case is exactly, as I have already indicated, the fidelity of a reporter to his notes.  The fidelity in the other case is exactly the fidelity of Shakespeare in his Roman plays to the text of Plutarch.  It is a fidelity which admits—­I had almost written, which requires—­the fullest play of the highest imagination.  No more than the most realistic of reporters will it omit or falsify any necessary or even admissible detail; but the indefinable quality which it adds to the lowest as to the highest of these is (as Lamb says of passion) “the all in all in poetry.”  Turning again for illustration to one of the highest names in imaginative literature—­a name sometimes most improperly and absurdly inscribed on the register of the realistic school, {137} we may say that the difference on this point is not the difference between Balzac and Dumas, but the distinction between Balzac and M. Zola.  Let us take by way of example the character next in importance to that