er. Their lips he touched with a live coal from
the altar of his muse, so that their words fire the heart with their
flaming zeal or sear it with their despair. In the dramas of Peele we
lamented the weakness of his characters, his inability to provide a
dominant central figure for his action; we also saw how something of the
same weakness softened his verse almost to effeminacy. Greene drew the
outline of his characters more strongly. But Marlowe alone possessed
the power, in its fullest degree, of projecting himself into his chief
character, of filling it with his own driving force, his own boundless
imagination, his own consuming passion and profound capacity for gloomy
emotion. Each of his first three plays--counting the two parts of
_Tamburlaine_ as one play--is wholly given up to the presentment of one
man; his tongue speaks on nearly every page, his purpose is the
mainspring of almost every action; by mere bulk he fills our mental view
as we read, and by the fervour, the poetry of his language, he burns the
impression of himself upon our memory. It is not by what they do that we
remember Marlowe's heroes or villains. Their deeds probably fade into
indistinctness. Few of us quite remember what were Tamburlaine's
conquests, or Faustus's wonder-workings, or Barabas's crimes. But we
know that if we would recall a mighty conqueror our recollections will
revive the image of the Scythian shepherd; if we would picture a soul
delivered over to the torments of the lost there will rush back upon us
that terrible outcry of Faustus when the fatal hour is come; if we would
imagine the feelings of one for whom wealth is the joy, the meaning, the
whole of life, we shall recite one of the speeches of Barabas.

Marlowe masters us by his poetry, and is lifted by it above his fellows,
reaching to the pedestal on which Shakespeare stands alone. It is an
astonishing thing to pass from the dramas which occupied our attention
in the previous chapter to one of Marlowe's, and then realize that his
were written first. Whereas before it was a matter of difficulty to find
passages beautiful enough to quote, it now becomes a problem to select
the best. It has been said, indeed, that he is too poetical for a
dramatist, but a very little consideration of the plays of Shakespeare
will tell us how much the greatest dramatic productions owe to poetry.
When, therefore, we say that Marlowe's greatness as a dramatist depends
on his poetry, that outsid