as an epoch-making play because it brought to the
popular drama true poetry and genuine passion; but it and its successors
also established a new type of tragedy. Marlowe made no effort to retain
the structure or themes of classical tragedy; on the contrary, he made
his plays loosely connected series of scenes dealing with the life and
death of the hero, crowded with persons and with startling action. In
this he was conforming to the method of the dramatic narratives that
pleased the theaters. But each play centers its dramatic interest on a
mighty protagonist battling with his overweening desires and their
inevitable disappointment. With the spectacle and sensation, the rant
and absurdity, there is also dramatic structure and tragic significance
in the revelation of these protagonists, their volitional struggles, and
their direful catastrophes. These plays set the key for all Elizabethan
tragedy, including Shakespeare's _Lear_, _Othello_, and _Macbeth_. They
were immediately followed by dozens of imitators. All blank verse echoed
Marlowe's mighty line, and tragedy was filled with ranting conquerors
like Tamburlaine, monstrous villains like Barabbas, and murders like
that of Edward II. Shakespeare was his pupil in the _2_ and _3 Henry
VI_, mastered his methods in _Richard III_, and still wrote in
emulation, though no longer in imitation, in _Richard II_ and _The
Merchant of Venice_.

[Page Heading: Marlowe and Kyd]

Within a few months of _Tamburlaine_, appeared a play of almost equal
influence on subsequent drama, Kyd's _Spanish Tragedy_. Kyd was a
student of Seneca, a translator of Garnier's _Cornelia_, a Senecan
imitation; and he adapted some elements of classical tragedy to the
English stage. The ten plays ascribed to Seneca were the accepted models
of tragedy in the Renaissance. Their presentation of the more horrible
stories of Greek tragedy, their rhetorical and aphoristic style, their
moralizing and their psychology, were all greatly admired. They were
believed by the Elizabethans to have been acted, and their murders and
violence seemed to warrant such action on the modern stage; though the
Elizabethans found less adaptable their use of the chorus, the
restriction of the number of persons speaking, their long monologues,
and the limitation of the action to the last phase of a story. Kyd
modeled his rhetoric on Seneca and retained a vestige of the chorus,
long soliloquies, and some other traits of Senecan struc