his great successor is thought to have
written no original plays, except the _Comedy of Errors_ and _Love's
Labour's Lost_. Marlowe first popularized blank verse as the language
of tragedy in his _Tamburlaine_, written before 1587, and in subsequent
plays he brought it to a degree of strength and flexibility which left
little for Shakspere to do but to take it as he found it.
_Tamburlaine_ was a crude, violent piece, full of exaggeration and
bombast, but with passages here and there of splendid {105}
declamation, justifying Ben Jonson's phrase, "Marlowe's mighty line."
Jonson, however, ridiculed, in his _Discoveries_, the "scenical
strutting and furious vociferation" of Marlowe's hero; and Shakspere
put a quotation from Tamburlaine into the mouth of his ranting Pistol.
Marlowe's _Edward II._ was the most regularly constructed and evenly
written of his plays. It was the best historical drama on the stage
before Shakspere, and not undeserving of the comparison which it has
provoked with the latter's _Richard II_. But the most interesting of
Marlowe's plays, to a modern reader, is the _Tragical History of Doctor
Faustus_. The subject is the same as in Goethe's _Faust_, and Goethe,
who knew the English play, spoke of it as greatly planned. The opening
of Marlowe's _Faustus_ is very similar to Goethe's. His hero, wearied
with unprofitable studies, and filled with a mighty lust for knowledge
and the enjoyment of life, sells his soul to the Devil in return for a
few years of supernatural power. The tragic irony of the story might
seem to lie in the frivolous use which Faustus makes of his dearly
bought power, wasting it in practical jokes and feats of legerdemain;
but of this Marlowe was probably unconscious. The love story of
Margaret, which is the central point of Goethe's drama, is entirely
wanting in Marlowe's, and so is the subtle conception of Goethe's
Mephistophiles. Marlowe's handling of the supernatural is
materialistic and downright, as befitted an age which believed in
witchcraft. The {106} greatest part of the English _Faustus_ is the
last scene, in which the agony and terror of suspense with which the
magician awaits the stroke of the clock that signals his doom are
powerfully drawn.

"_O lente, lente currile, noctis equi!_
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike.
O soul, be changed into little water-drops,
And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found!"

Marlowe's genius was passion