for any workman in the field of tragic poetry lightly to take on
himself the responsibility or the authority to pronounce, what it is that
Christopher Marlowe could not have done; but, dying as he did and when he
did, it is certain that he has not left us a work so generally and so
variously admirable as _King Richard III_. As certain is it that but for
him this play could never have been written. At a later date the subject
would have been handled otherwise, had the poet chosen to handle it at
all; and in his youth he could not have treated it as he has without the
guidance and example of Marlowe. Not only are its highest qualities of
energy, of exuberance, of pure and lofty style, of sonorous and
successive harmonies, the very qualities that never fail to distinguish
those first dramatic models which were fashioned by his ardent hand; the
strenuous and single-handed grasp of character, the motion and action of
combining and contending powers, which here for the first time we find
sustained with equal and unfaltering vigour throughout the length of a
whole play, we perceive, though imperfectly, in the work of Marlowe
before we can trace them even as latent or infant forces in the work of
Shakespeare.

In the exquisite and delightful comedies of his earliest period we can
hardly discern any sign, any promise of them at all. One only of these,
the _Comedy of Errors_, has in it anything of dramatic composition and
movement; and what it has of these, I need hardly remind the most cursory
of students, is due by no means to Shakespeare. What is due to him, and
to him alone, is the honour of having embroidered on the naked old canvas
of comic action those flowers of elegiac beauty which vivify and
diversify the scene of Plautus as reproduced by the art of Shakespeare.
In the next generation so noble a poet as Rotrou, whom perhaps it might
not be inaccurate to call the French Marlowe, and who had (what Marlowe
had not) the gift of comic as well as of tragic excellence, found nothing
of this kind and little of any kind to add to the old poet's admirable
but arid sketch of farcical incident or accident. But in this light and
lovely work of the youth of Shakespeare we find for the first time that
strange and sweet admixture of farce with fancy, of lyric charm with
comic effect, which recurs so often in his later work, from the date of
_As You Like It_ to the date of the _Winter's Tale_, and which no later
poet had ventured