ut magnanimously forgives the treason and joins the
lovers' hands. The situation is a good one, and capable of strong
treatment in the hands of a real dramatist. But Lyly slips smoothly over
the crisis of the action and, in place of passionate scenes, gives us
clever discourses and soliloquies, or, at best, a light interchange of
question and answer, full of conceits, repartees, and double meanings.
For example:

"_Apel_. Whom do you love best in the world?"

"_Camp_. He that made me last in the world."

"_Apel_. That was God."

"_Camp_. I had thought it had been a man," etc.

Lyly's service to the drama consisted in his introduction of an easy and
sparkling prose as the language of high comedy, and Shakspere's
indebtedness to the fashion thus set is seen in such passages as the wit
combats between Benedict and Beatrice in _Much Ado about Nothing_,
greatly superior as they are to any thing of the kind in Lyly.

The most important of the dramatists who were Shakspere's forerunners,
or early contemporaries, was Christopher or--as he was familiarly
called--Kit Marlowe. Born in the same year with Shakspere (1564), he
died in 1593, at which date 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 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