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 o