it is, we know that in the
winter which saw the close of the sixteenth century he was engaged with
the author of "The Parliament of Bees" and the author of "Englishmen for
My Money" in the production of a play called "The Spanish Moor's
Tragedy." More than half a century afterward a tragedy in which a
Spanish Moor is the principal and indeed the only considerable agent was
published, and attributed--of all poets in the world--to Christopher
Marlowe, by a knavish and ignorant bookseller of the period. That
"Lust's Dominion; or, the Lascivious Queen," was partly founded on a
pamphlet published after Marlowe's death was not a consideration
sufficient to offer any impediment to this imposture. That the hand
which in the year of this play's appearance on the stage gave "Old
Fortunatus" to the world of readers was the hand to which we owe the
finer scenes or passages of "Lust's Dominion," the whole of the opening
scene bears such apparent witness as requires no evidence to support and
would require very conclusive evidence to confute it. The sweet
spontaneous luxury of the lines in which the queen strives to seduce her
paramour out of sullenness has the very ring of Dekker's melody: the
rough and reckless rattle of the abrupt rhymes intended to express a
sudden vehemence of change and energy; the constant repetition or
reiteration of interjections and ejaculations which are evidently
supposed to give an air of passionate realism and tragic nature to the
jingling and jerky dialogue; many little mannerisms too trivial to
specify and too obvious to mistake; the occasional spirit and beauty,
the frequent crudity and harshness, of the impetuous and uncertain
style; the faults no less than the merits, the merits as plainly as the
faults, attest the presence of his fitful and wilful genius with all the
defects of its qualities and all the weakness of its strength. The
chaotic extravagance of collapse which serves by way of catastrophe to
bring the action headlong to a close is not more puerile in the violence
of its debility than the conclusions of other plays by Dekker;
conclusions which might plausibly appear, to a malcontent or rather to
a lenient reader, the improvisations of inebriety. There is but one
character which stands out in anything of life-like relief; for the
queen and her paramour are but the usual diabolic puppets of the
contemporary tragic stage: but there is something of life-blood in the
part of the honest and ho