th so high an example before them were
content simply to snip away the tags and fringes, to patch the seams and
tatters, of the ragged coat of rhyme which they might have exchanged for
that royal robe of heroic verse wherewith he had clothed the ungrown
limbs of limping and lisping tragedy. But if these also may be reckoned
among his precursors, the dismissal from stage service of the dolorous
and drudging metre employed by the earliest school of theatrical
rhymesters must be taken to mark a real step in advance; and in that case
we possess at least a single example of the rhyming tragedies which had
their hour between the last plays written wholly or partially in ballad
metre and the first plays written in blank verse. The tragedy of
_Selimus, Emperor of the Turks_, published in 1594, {30} may then serve
to indicate this brief and obscure period of transition. Whole scenes of
this singular play are written in rhyming iambics, some in the measure of
_Don Juan_, some in the measure of _Venus and Adonis_. The couplets and
quatrains so much affected and so reluctantly abandoned by Shakespeare
after the first stage of his dramatic progress are in no other play that
I know of diversified by this alternate variation of _sesta_ with _ottava
rima_. This may have been an exceptional experiment due merely to the
caprice of one eccentric rhymester; but in any case we may assume it to
mark the extreme limit, the ultimate development of rhyming tragedy after
the ballad metre had been happily exploded. The play is on other grounds
worth attention as a sign of the times, though on poetical grounds it is
assuredly worth none. Part of it is written in blank verse, or at least
in rhymeless lines; so that after all it probably followed in the wake of
_Tamburlaine_, half adopting and half rejecting the innovations of that
fiery reformer, who wrought on the old English stage no less a miracle
than _Hernani_ on the French stage in the days of our fathers. That
_Selimus_ was published four years later than _Tamburlaine_, in the year
following the death of Marlowe, proves of course nothing as to the date
of its production; and even if it was written and acted in the year of
its publication, it undoubtedly in the main represents the work of a
prior era to the reformation of the stage by Marlowe. The level
regularity of its unrhymed scenes is just like that of the weaker
portions of _Titus Andronicus_ and the _First Part of King Henry the