opening of Elizabeth's
reign, the son of a Canterbury shoemaker, but educated at Cambridge,
Marlowe burst on the world in the year which preceded the triumph over
the Armada with a play which at once wrought a revolution in the English
stage. Bombastic and extravagant as it was, and extravagance reached its
height in a scene where captive kings, the "pampered jades of Asia,"
drew their conqueror's car across the stage, "Tamburlaine" not only
indicated the revolt of the new drama against the timid inanities of
Euphuism, but gave an earnest of that imaginative daring, the secret of
which Marlowe was to bequeath to the playwrights who followed him. He
perished at thirty in a shameful brawl, but in his brief career he had
struck the grander notes of the coming drama. His Jew of Malta was the
herald of Shylock. He opened in "Edward the Second" the series of
historical plays which gave us "Caesar" and "Richard the Third." His
"Faustus" is riotous, grotesque, and full of a mad thirst for pleasure,
but it was the first dramatic attempt to touch the problem of the
relations of man to the unseen world. Extravagant, unequal, stooping
even to the ridiculous in his cumbrous and vulgar buffoonery, there is a
force in Marlowe, a conscious grandeur of tone, a range of passion,
which sets him above all his contemporaries save one. In the higher
qualities of imagination, as in the majesty and sweetness of his "mighty
line," he is inferior to Shakspere alone.

[Sidenote: Shakspere.]

A few daring jests, a brawl, and a fatal stab, make up the life of
Marlowe; but even details such as these are wanting to the life of
William Shakspere. Of hardly any great poet indeed do we know so little.
For the story of his youth we have only one or two trifling legends, and
these almost certainly false. Not a single letter or characteristic
saying, not one of the jests "spoken at the Mermaid," hardly a single
anecdote, remain to illustrate his busy life in London. His look and
figure in later age have been preserved by the bust over his tomb at
Stratford, and a hundred years after his death he was still remembered
in his native town; but the minute diligence of the enquirers of the
Georgian time was able to glean hardly a single detail, even of the most
trivial order, which could throw light upon the years of retirement
before his death. It is owing perhaps to the harmony and unity of his
temper that no salient peculiarity seems to have left its trace o