om any inherited bondage of the couplet
measure. It is not easy to define exactly what Marlowe did give to blank
verse. His famous Prologue to the First Part of _Tamburlaine_ makes it
quite clear that the general public were indebted to him for the
introduction of blank verse upon their unpolished stage, it having
previously been heard only at court or at the universities. But while
this attempt on his part to displace the 'jigging veins of rhyming
mother-wits' by the mere roll and crash of his 'high astounding terms'
was a courageous step, it cannot be counted for originality in the
development of the verse itself. Two features of his verse, however, are
original and of his own creation. The first, its conversational ease and
freedom, will be found more perfectly developed in _Doctor Faustus_ and
the later tragedies. Tamburlaine and the other mighty kings, emperors
and captains have little skill in converse; when they speak they orate.
This is true of the speeches in the earlier plays. Peele's are long
monologues, and when Sackville's or Wilmot's characters discourse it is
in the fashion of a set debate. Faustus and Mephistophilis, on the other
hand, meet in real conversation, and it is in their question and answer
that the flexibility and naturalness of blank verse are shown to
advantage for the first time by Marlowe. The second feature is the
infusion of pure poetry into drama. Hitherto the opinion seems to have
held that dramatic verse must keep as close to prose as possible in
order to combine the grace of rhythm with the solid commonsense of
ordinary human speech. Nothing illustrates this more remarkably than a
comparison of Sackville's poetry in his Induction to the _Mirror for
Magistrates_ with his verse in _Gorboduc_. We have remarked before on
the tendency of all Senecan dramas to sententiousness and argument, than
which nothing could be less poetical. The poetry of _The Arraignment of
Paris_, again, is more lyrical than dramatic, harmonizing with the
general approximation of that play to the nature of a masque. Marlowe
was the first to demonstrate that imagination could riot madly in a
wealth of imagery, or soar far above the realms of logic and cold
philosophy to summon beautiful and terrible pictures out of the
cloud-land of fancy, without losing hold upon earth and the language of
mortals. He knew that the unspoken language of the impassioned heart is
charged with poetry, however the formality of utterance,