Chapter VIII: Part 8

The Tyburn road started amid thick clustering buildings, but soon shaking itself free from these, it ran on, wide and firm, by bordering dwellings, tippling houses and inns, into the open country, where it straggled and seemed aimless in its purpose. But this seeming was only to quiet the thousands of wretches who were carried over its surface on their last ride. For them there were three miles of hard travel, and at the end of each intermediate mile, hope could kindle in their breasts that the ride might be only the beginning of a journey into exile. In summer they saw broad fields of grain; felt the cool shade of forests; heard the songs of birds; or, in the dead season of the year, reaped from the vision of white hills a temporary respite from brooding melancholy.

The crowd that followed the cart bearing Bame was boisterous to a degree suggestive of immediate violence. They had, with blanched faces, seen the death meted out to two of their members; and while this scene had for a time appalled and silenced them, as they drew away from the close buildings in the outer ward of the city, their ill will against the guard and its prisoner became manifest through their murmurs and demeanor. They did not blame the guard so much as they did the prisoner. The guard had done its duty, undoubtedly; it was a mere instrument, but Bame had been the cause. The result lay at his door. The driver must press forward speedily, and the hangman must be unusually expeditious if the crowd was to be pacified.

Bame realized the situation, and contrary to the usual desire of Tyburn passengers, prayed for a speedy ride. There was the inn of the White Ox on ahead. Would it ever be reached? The wheels of the cart sunk so deep in the mud that it seemed as though at every yard they would stop turning. The guard flourished its weapons at the restless mob behind it, and still the procession moved. Here was the White Ox at last, and there at the front edge of its wide porch stood the man who had actually counted seven hundred and four condemned felons ride by the White Ox during that year. He thought that he had marked them on the inner edge of the white railing against which he was leaning, but he had missed at least two score driven by on several early hours while he was sleeping off the effect of some late-at-night potations. He had reason to count, for he was the tapster, and here the executioner always stopped for a drink. It was not to steady his nerves, for apparently he had none. The tapster had it ready when the cart stopped.

The man in the cassock and black hat rode close to the edge of the railing and took the glass from the tapster’s hand. As he raised it to his lips, he bowed in mock cheer to the sad-faced man in the tumbril as though to say, “This is to your good health.” However, he said nothing, except to the driver whom he admonished to drive more rapidly.

About three miles from the west wall of London, on what is now Oxford street, close at the foot of a small declivity, there stood at the time of our narrative a solitary building of two stories. Near this structure was a cluster of elm trees, and from them the place had received the title of “The Elms.” The building had been designed for an inn, but the locality was in such ill favor that very few occasions arose for its landlord to welcome the coming, and speed the parting guest. One side of the steep mossed roof sloped toward the muddy road; the other side touched the top of a lofty board fence. This fence surrounded the “triple tree of Tyburn,” as the gallows was called. The obnoxious structure whereon felonies were expiated was invisible to all travelers except those coming down the hill from where the bourne of Tye found its source; but the enclosing fence was such a subject of notice and inquiry, that strangers, as well as neighboring farmers, were glad to pass quickly by it. The tenant of the Elms, however, did not depend for livelihood upon the profits of the inn bar, its table or its beds. The key to the great gates of the fence hung within the tap-room, and there was revenue to the landlord for being its custodian. In the enclosure were raised seats and on “state” occasions these were in demand at fair prices, all of which were collected and retained by the keeper. This keeper was a woman, nicknamed Mother Peter.

As usual, Mother Peter had the gates open long before the procession arrived; and so, without a pause, into the enclosure passed the stern, compact and mounted body, representative of order, and after it the loose and disorderly mob. The latter filled the space between the widely separated gate posts as it poured in, a body of ill-clad flesh, of all ages and of both sexes, with brutal and repulsive faces, and audible from jeers, curses and loud laughter.

The enclosure was one of three acres with a flat open space in the center around whose edges rose tiers of seats sloping upward and backward to the fence’s top. In the center was a triangular platform, raised twenty feet above the ground, and having at each of its three corners an upright post each with a beam extending horizontally from its top. Broad steps led up to this platform, and on it was a bench and a table. On the table was an earthen jug and beside it an earthen bowl. In the table was a Bible. From the three horizontal arms, black ropes suspended, and every breeze swayed them.

The tumbril had stopped at the foot of the broad steps. Its footboard was let down and Bame descended from it. He stood there with a guard on each side, and the crowd drawn backward to standing places on the encircling seats. A feeling of weakness pervaded him as he glanced upward at the posts and their suspended ropes so ominous of evil to himself. He partially recovered his control while the guard and executioner were attending to their horses, and then, with them, he ascended the steps to the platform.

From the raised platform Bame could see across the top of the gates of the enclosure toward London. He looked absently in that direction, and at first saw nothing because of the tumult in his mind. Suddenly the scene swept into his field of consciousness, and under a dark canopy of smoke and cloud, he saw the distant city. No sunlight lay upon the myriad of walls that formed the picture. No gilded dome, nor window in visible towers, flashed to him a welcome or a warning. In the gloom, it seemed a city of death or sleep, and he felt it to be a vision, impalpable and evanescent. The broken steeple of St. Paul, the crumbling Roman wall, the fronts of familiar buildings, brought a rush of tender memories and a flood of tears. He could not brush this evidence of weakness aside, for his hands were bound; and so with outer vision blurred, the inner, or spiritual, became the real. The fields of morning appeared, and he passed through them as with the rapid wings of an angel, catching their scents and a sweetness of life like that known only to the barefooted boy when the grass is green and the day perfect and no duties confront him. Then the fire of the period of ambition filled him, and he saw his home, the deserted bench at which he once labored, the patient face of his wife and then the figure of Marlowe as he appeared to him under the blazing lights of the chantry. Ah! was it he? Yes. “And are not the charges false?” rises the question from a thousand voices.

He recognizes them all, and he attempts to say, “Yes, and let it be so recorded!” but he finds himself without voice. There is a darkness that is never to be lifted about him. He has a faint comprehension of the reason, but it grows into no verity. Verities are beyond him, so is the world with all its falseness. There is a close cloth over his face which stifles him. He feels bungling fingers about his neck, then the scraping of a rough substance in the same place. He imagines he cries:

“Unloose! Air, air! My God, save me!”

But in fact he had said nothing, and with these unuttered words upon his burning lips, he feels a terrific jar that seems an explosion in his own brain. All the world is aflame. Was there ever such an illumination? But, O God! what thrust was that through the center of life itself? This is pain in its purity. But, wait, hold but a moment, O ye fires! It groweth dark and darker. An absolute blackness is gathering with a swiftness incomprehensible; and a roar, as mighty and continuous as the ocean at steep headlands, fills his ears, increases and then dies utterly.

Bame was hanging under the Tyburn gallows.

FINIS CORONAT OPUS.

_No bounds, but heaven, shall bound his empery,_
_Whose azured gates, enchased with his name,_
_Shall make the Morning haste her grey uprise_
_To feed her eyes with his engraven fame._

--_Dido, i._

_Methinks ’tis pride enough to be his son._
_See how the morning opes her golden gates,_
_And takes her farewell of the glorious sun._

--_Third Part of Henry VI, ii, 1._

In 1597 the Privy Council commanded that the playhouses in Finbury Fields be leveled to their foundations, but the command had not been executed. It is one thing to decree, it is another to enforce. The indignant spirit of reform that prevailed upon the administrative body appeared to have exhausted its power with the procurance of the mandate, for even on the Sabbath, the annunciatory trumpets before the Curtain and Theater continued to proclaim the daily stage performance.

The last trumpet for the day had blown before the Curtain on a winter afternoon in 1598, and a packed audience already filled its pit and galleries, when a solitary foot traveler, leaving the Shore-ditch highway, entered the narrow lane leading toward the fields. The air was cold and frosty, and that may have caused the traveler to keep the cape of his cloak raised high around his face. At any rate, on such a day, there was nothing in the fact that the low-drawn hat and high-raised cape left visible only a pair of eyes, to raise suspicion that the man desired to avoid identification.

A heavy snow had fallen during the previous night, but a wide, firmly-beaten path led over it across the fields. As he noted this condition of the way, he calculated that several thousand people had preceded him. Was it to hear Alleyn at the Theater, or Burbage at the Curtain? He thought that it was to hear Burbage, and possibly his knowledge of what that great actor was to perform forced this conclusion. The play of Hamlet had already been performed at White Hall before the Queen, but this was to be its first presentation before the public. The praise bestowed upon it by the titled few who had assembled in the banqueting house at the palace had reached the public ear, and its effect was here demonstrated. It was the prospect of seeing this play that led this man across the fields which he had not entered for several years.

If he had been at all interested in his surroundings, he would have noticed that in the short space of time which had elapsed since the last day he had passed through the break in the field wall, many changes had taken place. The ruins of the old church of Holywell (demolished in the reign of Henry VIII) had been removed, or appropriated for the walls of dwellings arising above the ancient foundations. Much solid ground had been made where the sedge had sprung from shallow marsh water, and houses here and there dotted the white expanse. An assembly house for the worship of Brownists stood within the brick boundary wall of the fields. Although a low structure, it covered a large area and appeared a menace against the playhouses. These theaters, of height equivalent to three stories, were resplendent with lively-colored fronts and painted windows. A single red flag fluttered above the top of each. There had been no changes in their exteriors since the observer last saw them. Hundreds of horses, many richly caparisoned, and others bearing rude saddles only, stood in groups before both houses, while shivering boys and men held them. Only a few of the dismounted riders were standing at the entrances of the theaters.

The late comer passed around one of these groups, and at the entrance of the Curtain presented a letter to the doorkeeper, who, without betraying his inability to read, passed it into a square window, within which was a room with cheerful fire and a man who broke open the letter and read it, saying:

“It is the man for whom a box has been reserved.”

“Who is he?” asked the other.

“The note sayeth not.”

“Strange that a whole box should have been reserved for one person on such a day,” growled the doorkeeper.

“Well, those were Shakespere’s orders, and as he holds much of the stock of the company, his request must be respected. The note is signed by him. Admit him to box 4.”

The man passed in and followed a boy up a winding flight of stairs to the lower gallery. It was a small compartment at one end of, and overlooking, the stage. The boy unlocked it [note 44]. Although the round pit, into which one could look from this box, was open to the clear sky, the floor of the upper gallery projected so far over this box that the light was dim within it; and heavy curtains at its front, although drawn apart, augmented its constant dimness. The boy started to light a lamp in a wall bracket, but the man stopped him and directed him as he left to lock the frail door. There was room for ten people in the box, and as the boy turned the key upon his temporary prisoner, and wormed his way through the packed gallery, he wondered how one could be so selfish as to appropriate an entire box for one’s sole use.

Finding himself alone, the man threw off his hat and cloak; but immediately the chill of the winter day penetrated his doublet and he replaced the discarded garments. The interval in which his head, countenance and shoulders were uncovered was scarcely a minute; but it was quite long enough to reveal that his beard and hair were false, and the doublet so arranged as to misrepresent the form beneath it. Having seated himself so as to be out of the view of the audience, he peered through the space between the wall and the edge of one of the curtains. A pleased expression showed on his face as he noticed the immensity of the audience.

There was no standing room in the pit, which was so clamorous for the play to begin that the orchestra, in its box within the center wall above the stage, could scarcely be heard above the tumult. The front row of standing spectators was crowded so close to the stage that their chins rested upon it; and the press was so great that several of the more active groundlings had crawled up and lay upon the rushes at the feet of the favored portion of the audience which occupied every chair upon the ends of the stage. There were black hangings upon all the posts and the lofty canopy above the boards was of like color, indicating that the play to be presented was a tragedy. A sign bearing the word “Denmark” hung close to the canopy, and was an announcement of the place where the scenes of the drama were laid. Neither curtain nor foot-lights graced the stage, but the rude painting of a castle partially concealed the barn-like wall. A raised platform at the back showed that there was to be a play within a play.

The music of the orchestra died away, and the groundlings and scaffolders held breath. Francisco had taken his post, and Bernardo entered. It seemed that the first question, “Who’s there?” was uttered by the man in Box 4, for at that moment the door to the box was burst open with a crash, and several persons pushed in. The gross-looking man, whose broad shoulders had been used to force an entrance, was in the lead. He whispered so that the quiet man against the railing heard him, “Beg your pardon, but it was either this forcible intrusion, or the sweat of the mob for us and these ladies, and no sight of the play. You can’t blame us.”

The man to whom the words were addressed disdained to turn his head, but sunk it lower within his ruff and kept his eyes on the stage, but it is not likely that he saw it any more than he did the intruders. He kept his peace, but his face was white from rage or fright. He had recognized the speaker as Ben Jonson, and the voice of one of the other two men with him had sounded so familiar that even before the ghost stalked across the stage, he knew that one of his companions was Nash. Feminine voices proclaimed that at least two of the fair sex were of the party. Their whispers conveyed no further intelligence to him. He again became absorbed in the play, while the intruders took possession of the chairs behind him. They thought him a dull boor; he either should have shown enough spirit to resent their rude entrance with fierce words or a drawn sword; or, with resignation to the inevitable, have murmured a welcome at least to the ladies. Thus ran their thoughts; but he had forgotten the disturbance and his situation. Even at the close of the act, the ecstasy of his mind continued as his eyes swept over the audience, and from pleased countenances gleaned the opinion of a favorable reception of the play. Why did this please him?

The conversation behind him caught his ears. It was between Jonson and Nash and ran on uninterrupted for an interval. It held his attention.

“Who plays the ghost?”

“Shakespere” [note 45].

“’Tis said he wrote the play.”

“I question it.”

“Why so?”

“He knoweth little Latin.”

“We have heard no Latin.”

“True; but the speech of Horatio is descriptive of the events preceding Cæsar’s death as set forth in Lucan’s Pharsalia” [note 46].

“Doth no translation of the Pharsalia exist?” [note 47]

“Yes, but only in manuscript.”

“Perchance he hath had access to the manuscript.”

“There is but one copy, and that is in my possession.”

“Translated by thyself?”

“No.”

“By whom?”

“Marlowe.”

“And the description of the tenantless graves, the sheeted dead gibbering in the streets of Rome and the stars with trains of fire is like Marlowe’s translation?”

“The one is drawn from the other; for in Marlowe’s translation ‘Sylla’s ghost was seen to walk singing sad oracles:’ ‘Souls quiet and appeased sighed from their graves;’ ‘and ghosts encountered men;’ and ‘sundry fiery meteors blazed in Heaven.’”

“’Tis strange.”

“Most strange!”

“And how do you account for such a coincidence?”

“Wait; the play goes on.”

The second scene of Act I was in progress, and at its close Nash, who appeared to be the better posted, said:

“Didst ever hear Marlowe’s play of Edward II?”

“Yes, years ago at this theater.”

“Dost thou remember the character of Spencer?”

“I do,” answered Jonson.

“Where he says:

‘’Tis not a black coat and a little band,
A velvet caped cloak faced before with serge?’”

“And what of that?” interrupted the other.

“What! why have you not just heard Hamlet say:

‘’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black’?”

“Examine at thy leisure the entire passages.”

“’Tis plagiarism!” ejaculated Jonson, ever ready to decry the works of another.

“Or--” began Nash.

“Hamlet was written by Marlowe,” interrupted Jonson.

“True,” answered Nash, nodding his head excitedly, “And much additional evidence exists confirmatory of your hastily given statement; but this time is all too short to compare the precepts of Polonius with Spencer’s ‘to stab when occasion serves,’ or with the meditations of Barabbas; or to note how Marlowe’s metaphysical musings concerning ‘This frail and transitory flesh,’ ‘the aspiring mind,’ ‘the incorporeal spirit,’ ‘the buzzing fear’ of what comes after death, have been joined and compacted in this play of Hamlet. Note in your study how smoothly the polished lines of Marlowe’s acknowledged works can be run in between the lines of this play without the slightest jar or impairment; note how many of the speeches wind up with the last two lines rhyming; note the tendency in all toward bombast where excess of passion is expressed.”

This conversation, while it pleased and amused the listener, awakened in him a fear of no trifling character. He would have made his exit from the box, but he dared not arise and pass before the eyes of those behind him. They might recognize him, and such recognition was to be avoided. Act III was in progress, and Burbage, as Hamlet, held the audience spell-bound. Ophelia, played by the boy, Thomas Deak, of the children of the Chapel, had awakened the sympathy of every auditor; and in praise and honor of the creative genius of the drama an inexhaustible cup was filling for the lips of all his lovers through the coming centuries.

No sooner had the act closed than the conversation was resumed between the two dramatists who had carried on the former discussion:

“‘The undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns,’” whispered Nash, “is much like the expression of Mortimer, who, upon contemplation of death, says, in Edward II:

‘Weep not for Mortimer,
That scorns the world, and, as a traveler,
Goes to discover countries yet unknown.’”

“An apt parallelism,” remarked Jonson, and then slyly added, “But what think you of the lines put in the mouths of the players?”

“In Scene II of Act II, of this Hamlet?” inquired Nash.

“Yes, Æneas’ tale to Dido.”

“I know not what to think of them.”

“Did not Marlowe begin the drama of Dido?”

“He did.”

“And you completed it, did you not?” questioned Jonson.

“I did,” answered Nash [note 37].

“Now, is not this speech of the players in ridicule of thy work?”

“Possibly,” answered Nash, somewhat nettled by the question. “I had no love for the subject and pushed the work without inspiration; but no one but Marlowe, methinks, would have taken offense at my weak closing of his strong and poetic opening.”

“And the story of Troy was a fond one of his.”

“True, the famous Helen is the subject of conjuration in Faustus and is spoken of in Tamburlaine.”

“And is not the same fondness displayed in Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, King Henry IV, King Henry VI, Troilus and Cressida, and the Tempest?”

“It is.”

“Well, then if thy supposition is correct that Marlowe instead of Shakespere wrote this play of Hamlet, why is not my theory correct that he is holding up thy extravagant lines in Dido to ridicule?” [note 48]

“But, how can that be possible?” retorted Nash, “while I may be inclined to believe that Marlowe wrote this play, it could not have been since I completed his unfinished drama of Dido; for did he not die in 1593?”

“Is there not good reason to dispute that death?”

“By what?”

“The internal evidence of this play.”

“And by what else?”

“The contradictory reports of his death.”

“And to what conclusion does all this tend?”

“That Marlowe still lives, an outcast, a fugitive from justice.”

“But why an outcast; why a fugitive?”

“What else would cause him to keep concealed?”

“Thou hast not answered the question.”

“Did he not offend the church? Were not direct charges made against him? Was not the Queen apprised? Was not this but three days before his disappearance? You know the charge?”

“Aye, blasphemy.”

“And see what the play reveals, bitter remembrances, personal griefs and doubts, misanthropy in strongest sort. ‘The suits of woe,’ the ‘weary, stale, flat and unprofitable uses of this world,’ ‘contagious blastments,’ the losing of ‘all mirth,’ ‘we fools of nature,’ ‘the sleep of death,’ ‘the blister on the forehead of the once innocent love,’ These are but the outpourings of one sick of the vanities of life, hopeless of fame, bereft of all joys, and unsolaced by religion.”

“Bah! one in love can write of murder and madness.”

“True, as it may fit the story that he writes; but this is a drama in which the light and dark could well mingle to the interest of the auditors; but no, ’tis heavy with the fruit of gloomy philosophical meditations provoked in a sensitive mind from brooding over some crime more dark than that of blasphemy.”

“So! and possibly what?” asked Nash.

“The slaying of a human being,” answered Jonson.

“Murder by Marlowe?” ejaculated Nash.

A feminine cry arose in the box. It was stifled instantly, but it stopped the conversation. The man at the front of the box shuddered, and covered his face with his hands. He had almost turned his head at this outcry, but he restrained himself for the moment. This inclination to turn had been induced solely by the effect upon his ears, but following it came a force to turn him that was irresistible. The cry had shaken a chord that had been vibrated before, it seemed by the same voice in similar outcry. It did not immediately flash upon him where or under what circumstances he had heard it. No words had risen from the lips of this woman, as yet to him unseen, to give character to the cry she had just uttered, or to explain its occasion. But the one chord that it vibrated within him trembled until the surrounding network of memory became animated, and the tavern duel scene at the point where Anne had thrown herself at the feet of her combative husband arose in the mind of the man at the box’s edge. The woman behind him was Anne! His head turned involuntarily with the thought. He saw her; and she, with gaze centered upon his face, recognized him as Marlowe despite the change he had effected in his natural appearance. He also saw the eyes of Nash and Jonson fastened upon him, and in self preservation he resumed the position which he had been faithfully maintaining until this late moment.

The outcry had been induced by two causes, one was the climax reached in the conversation of the two men which had been running on disjointedly during the progress of the play, and the other was the wounding of Laertes by Hamlet in the duel scene. They had occurred simultaneously. She had caught the name of Marlowe in the conversation near her and knew that the talk was of him; the contest with foils between the two actors on the stage had absorbed her so that again she seemed the helpless spectator of a duel to death. It was the old scene over again in all its vivid reality. Laertes, of kindlier aspect than Burbage, as Hamlet, had awakened her sympathies, and she saw him as an embodied Marlowe. Then came the struggle, the exchange of rapiers and the thrust through the doublet of Laertes that staggered him. At the same time she heard the final words of Nash, and the cry had passed her lips.

It is a wonder that a second cry had not escaped her when, closely following this exhibition, the man in front had fastened his eyes upon her, and she recognized the person whom for five years she had sought, until, with heart fairly eaten out with the changeless subject of her thoughts and the dejection of an apparently fruitless quest, she had numbered him among the voiceless unreturning. But the vision of his face seemed but the natural concomitant of what had just transpired. Why should the Fates drag any other visage within the field either of reality or illusion? If God worketh for a purpose, what else could all the events transpiring within the Curtain on that day lead up to, except the meeting of the lovers?

Controlled by an irresistible impulse, Anne left her chair, and coming forward to where Marlowe was seated, fell on her knees beside him. The closing peal of ordnance had sounded, and amid the prolonged applause of the great house, the play had ended. The enthusiasm continued, despite the recognition of it by the leading actors, who bowed again and again from the stage’s front. It was more than this acknowledgment of its demonstrative praise that the audience wanted. Only a portion of the applause was for the actors, the rest was for the genius who had raised the tremendous tragedy.

“Where is the author?”

“Let him come forth!”

Such were the cries that arose. But no one answered the appeal. From his place behind one wing of the stage, Shakespere looked out upon the tumult, and then his eyes wandered to the box wherein sat the unknown creator of the drama. Was the latter not impelled toward public recognition of the multitude’s applause?

He, Marlowe, was possessed with temporary elation over the enthusiasm of the audience, and with the further knowledge that the one whom he loved was now beside him. In his ecstasy, it seemed that he mingled with the gods. The darkness in which he dwelt, and the mighty world, voiceless as to himself and his merit, were as naught. The same spirit that had filled and fired him in the production of the eternal drama, again possessed him, and for once, but not again, he felt the crown of laurel about his brows.

APPENDIX.

1 “A second Shakespere, not only because he rose like him from an actor to be a maker of plays, * * * but also because * * * he seems to have a resemblance to that clear unsophisticated wit that is natural to that incomparable poet.”

--Phillips in Theatrum Poetarum, p. 24, Ed. 1680.

2 “Collier considers that Marlowe would in this case (i. e. had he lived) have become a formidable rival to Shakespere.”

--Gervinus’ Shakespere Commentaries, p. 78.

3 “But the department of tragedy was dominated by a writer of superb genius, Christopher Marlowe. Shakespere, whose powers ripened slowly, may at the time when he wrote the ‘Comedy of Errors’ and ‘Love’s Labor Lost,’ have well hesitated to dispute with Marlowe his special province. Imitators and disciples had crowded around the master.”

--Edward Dowden.

4 “If Marlowe had lived to finish his ‘Hero and Leander’ he might perhaps have contested the palm with Shakespere in his ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘Rape of Lucrece.’”

--Malone.

5 “In his first stage Shakespere had dropped his plummet no deeper into the sea of the spirit of man than Marlowe had sounded before him, and in the channel of simple emotion no poet could cast surer line with steadier hand than he.”

--Swinburne’s “A Study of Shakespere,” p. 77.

“It [Richard III] is doubtless a better piece of work than Marlowe ever did; I dare not say than Marlowe ever could have done. It is not for any man to measure * * * what it is that Christopher Marlowe could not have done; but dying as he did and when he did, etc.”

--“A Study of Shakespere,” Swinburne 43.

6 “For my own part, I feel a strong persuasion, that with added years and well directed efforts, he would have made a much nearer approach to Shakespere than has yet been made by any of his countrymen.”

--Dyce’s Marlowe, p. 55.

7 Raise cavalieros higher than the clouds,
And with the cannon break the frame of heaven;
Batter the shining palace of the sun,
And shiver all the starry firmament.

--Second Part Tamburlaine II, 4.

“Now pile your dust upon the quick and dead,
Till of this flat a mountain you have made,
To o’ertop old Pelion, or the skyish head
Of blue Olympus.”

--Hamlet III, 3.

“Streams of blood
As vast and deep as Euphrates or Nile.”

--Tamburlaine V, 2.

“Not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain.”

--Hamlet IV, 4.

8 “Weep Powles, thy Tamburlaine voutsafes to dye.
* * * * * * * * *
He and the plague contended for the game.
* * * * * * * * *

The graund disease disdained his Toade Conceit
And smiling at his Tamburlaine contempt
Sternly struck home the peremptory stroke.”

--Harvey’s New Letter, September, 1593.

9 “It so fell out that in London streets, as he (Marlowe) proposed to stab one, whom he owed a grudge unto, with his dagger, * * * he stabbed his owne dagger into his owne head, etc.”

--Thomas Beard’s “Theater of God’s Judgments,”
Edition First, 1597.

10 “As the poet Lycophron was shot to death by a certain rivall of his, so Christopher Marlow was stabbed to death by a bawdy servingman, a rivall of his in his lewde love.”

--Meres “Palladis Tamia,” etc., 1598.

11 “Not inferior to these was one Christopher Marlow, by profession a playmaker, who, as it is reported, about 14 years ago wrote a book against the Trinitie. It so happened that at Deptford, a little village about 3 miles from London, as he meant to stab with his ponyard one named Ingram, etc.”

--Vaughan’s Golden Grove, etc., 1600.

12 “As for the Worthies on his hoste’s wall,
He knows three worthy drunkards pass them all;
The first of them in many a tavern tried,
At last subdued by Aquavitæ died.”

--Sam’l Rowland (published 1600).

13 “He (Ben Jonson) killed Mr. Marlow, ye poet, on Bunhill, coming from the Green Curtain play house.”

--Aubrey’s “Lives of Eminent Men,” citing Sr. Ed. Sherburne, p. 415.

14 “Christopher Marlow, slaine by Francis Frazer; sep. 1 of June, 1593.” This entry from the burial register of the church of St. Nicholas, Deptford, was kindly furnished me by the present pastor, Rev. William Chandler. The surname “Frazer” had been given to the world by Dyce and others as “Archer” and is so printed in the Encyclopedia Britannica, but such is a misreading.

--The Author.

15 “Idiote art masters that intrude themselves to our ears as the alcumists of eloquence; who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) think to outbrave better pens with the swelling bumbast of a bragging blank verse.”

--Nash’s Introduction to Greene’s Menaphon, 1587 (Grosart’s
Nashe I, XX).

“And he that cannot write true English without the help of clerks of parish churches, will needs make himself the father of interludes. O, ’tis a jolly matter when a man hath a familiar style, and can endite a whole year, and not be beholden to art.”

--Greene’s Farewell to Folly (1587).

“It’s a common practice now-a-days, amongst a sort of shifting companions, that run through every art and thrive at none, to leave the trade of noverint whereto they were born and busy themselves with the endeavors of art, that could scarcely Latinize their neck-verse, if they should have need. Yet English Seneca, read by candle light, yields many good sentences, etc.”

--Nash (1587).

16 “From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits,
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,
We’ll lead you to the stately tent of war.”

--Prologue to Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Part First.

17 “Before him there was neither genuine blank verse nor a genuine tragedy in our language.”

--Article on Marlowe, Ency. Britannica, vol. XV, p. 556.

“That fiery reformer who wrought on the old English stage no less a miracle than Hernani on the French stage in the days of our fathers.”

--Swinburne’s “Study of Shakespere,” p. 31.

18 “Quicke-sighted spirits,--this supposed Appolo,--
Conceit no other, but the admired Marlo;
Marlo admired, whose honney-flowing vein
No English writer can as yet attaine.”

--Henry Petowe, Second Part, “Hero and Leander,” 1598.

19 “Now (as swift as Time
Doth follow Motion) find th’ eternal clime
Of his free soul, whose living subject stood
Up to the chin in the Pierian flood,
And drunk to me half this Musean story
Inscribing it to deathless memory.”

--Chapman’s Third Sestiad to Marlowe’s Hero and Leander.

20 “Unhappy in thine end,
Marley, the Muses’ darling for thy verse,
Fit to write passions for the souls below,
If any wretched souls in passion speak.”

--George Peele “Prologue to the Honour of the Garter.”

21 “The impression of the man that hath been dear unto us, living an after life in our memory, etc.”

--Blunt’s Dedication of Hero and Leander, 1598.

22 “Is it a dream? or is the Highest minde
That ever haunted Pauls, or haunted winde
Bereft of that same sky-surmounting breath,
That breath that taught the Timpany to swell?”

--“Sonet Gorgon,” Gabriel Harvey, 1593.

23 “Dead Musæus’ gracious song.”

--Henry Chettle.

24 “Next Marlow, bathed in the Thespian springs,
Had in him those brave translunary things
That the first poets had; his raptures were
All air and fire which made his verses clear.”

--Michael Drayton’s Epistle, etc.

25 Ben Jonson’s commendatory verses prefixed to the Folio Edition of 1623, cannot be included among the contemporary notices. They were not written until seven years after Shakespere’s death. Ben Jonson failed to write aught about Shakespere while the latter lived. His sneers at the early “Shakespere plays,” as shown in the Prologue to “Every Man In His Humor” and his sonnet “On Poet-Ape,” are too well known to need quotation; and, being a “contemner and scorner of others,” one must look to self interest as being the motive for the production of those commendatory lines to his “beloved, the author, Master William Shakespere.” Was not this self interest a financial one in the Shakespere plays? Shakespere died in 1616. The first folio edition appeared in 1623. The address, therein, attributed by Malone and many other commentators, to Jonson, recited that the plays are now offered to “view cured and perfect of their limbs,” and “we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.” If these statements were true of manuscripts, unmentioned in the will of Shakespere, and “collected” by Heminge and Condell from the playhouses, it must be that some master mind arranged, revised and recopied them during the seven years between Shakespere’s death and this publication. From the date of the death of Shakespere (1616) to 1625, “Jonson did not write one line for the stage!” It was this revision that kept him silent, and as editor of the folio edition he sought for reimbursement for his labors in its sale. “But whatever you do, buy,” reads the address in that edition; and the commendatory verses are praise enough to excite purchases.

Quarto editions of what are now termed the genuine, and also of what are now termed the spurious plays, had been appearing for an interval of twenty-five years, with the announcement on their title pages of being “newly arranged by,” or “written by” William Shakespere. The claims announced on these title pages appear never to have been disputed by Shakespere. “A Yorkshire Tragedy,” “The London Prodigal,” and “The First Part of the Life of Sir John Oldcastle” were so published as his work. Then followed the collection of dramas in the edition of 1623. Jonson may, or may not, have known the real facts of the authorship. If he knew that some persons, other than Shakespere, were the authors, he went only a step further than he did in his address in “Sejanus,” where he fails to mention the name of the “happy genius” who wrote that tragedy with him; but his own molding of the play has not destroyed the trace of Marlowe’s elemental wit therein. We would rather attribute to Jonson ignorance of the authorship of the plays, and in this ignorance assigning them to the Manager of the Globe, than to place him on the level of the Archbishop who ordered Marlowe’s translation of the “Amores” burnt, or of Richard Bame, who wrote the accusation of blasphemy, or of those unknown and more powerful persons, either of Church or State, who labored to blot out of memory the daring and impious Marlowe.

The copy of the second folio edition (1632), containing emendations of the original text, as given to the world by Mr. Collier, if genuine, contains evidence of my theory of Ben Jonson’s editing the earliest edition of the plays. This copy contained interlineations and corrections of text which could have been made only by an editor with the manuscript before him, or by a student deeply versed. The handwriting displayed in these emendations is a facsimile of Ben Jonson’s.

--The Author.

For comparison, a portion of a facsimile page of emendations in Collier’s volume, and some of the writing of Jonson, are here printed:

Enter Charles, Alanson, Burgundie, Bastard,
and Pucell

_Char._ Had Yorke and Somerset brought rescue in,
We should have found a bloody day of this.

_Bast._ How the yong welpe of _Talbots_ raging wood,
Did flesh his punie-sword in Frenchmens blood.

_Puc._ Once I encountred him, and thus I said:
Thou Maiden youth, be vanquisht by a Maide.
But with a proud Majesticall high scorne
He answer’d thus: Yong _Talbot_ was not borne
To be the pillage of a Giglot Wench,
He left me proudly, as unworthy fight.

_Bur._ Doubtlesse he would have made a noble Knight:
See where he lyes inherced in armes
Of the most bloody Nursser of his harmes.

Hos ego versiculos feci.
Ben: Jonson.]

26 “This view was embraced by Frederic Schlegel in his history of Literature. He perceived in Shakespere a nature deeply sensitive and austerely tragic, a disposition isolated, reserved and solitary.”

--Gervinus, 480.

27 Editions appeared during these years of Edward II, The Massacre of Paris, and Dido, all bearing the name of Marlowe on their title pages.

--Bullen’s Marlowe.

28 Titus Andronicus was published in 1594; Romeo and Juliet, 1597; Richard II, 1597; Richard III, 1597. No name of author was on their title pages.

--Fleay’s Life and Character of Shakespere.
Halliwell-Phillipps Outlines chap. “Life
Time Editions.”

29 The first published drama bearing Shakespere’s name was Love’s Labor Lost, 1598. “Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere,” were the words on the title page.

--Fleay’s Life and Character of Shakespere.--Outlines,
chapter “Life Time Editions.”

30 “Like Sir Walter Raleigh, and a few less memorable men of the same generation, he was attacked in his own time, not merely as a free-thinker, but as a propagandist or apostle of atheism; nor was the irregularity of his life thought worthier of animadversion than the uncertainty of his livelihood.”

--Article “Marlowe,” Encyclopedia Britannica.

31 This accusation is among the Harleian MSS., 6853, fol. 320, and is entitled “A note containing the opinion of one Christopher Marlye, concerning his damnable opinions and judgment of relygion and scorne of God’s worde.” On it is also a memorandum that within three days after its delivery, Marlowe “came to a soden and fearfull end of his life.” It is endorsed “Copy of Marlowes blasphenyes as sent to her Highness.” A great portion of it is too abominable to be printed.

--Dyce’s Marlowe.
--Bullen’s Marlowe.

32 There are only five known signatures of Wm. Shakespere, and no other written words or manuscript known to be by his hand. The scrawls are scarcely decipherable and strongly at variance with the statement made by Heminge and Condell in the First Folio Edition of the Plays: “His mind and hand went together, and what he thought he wrote with that easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.”

33 “His face was like a rotten russet apple when it is bruised,” and he was described by himself as remarkable for

“His mountain belly and his rocky face.”

He was “wont to wear a coat with slits under the armpits.”

--Knight’s London, vol. I, 367.

34 This Act of 1593 “enacted the penalty of imprisonment against any person above the age of 16 who should forbear for the space of one month to repair to some church, etc. Those who refused to submit to these conditions were to abjure the realm, and if they should return without the queen’s license, to suffer death as felons.”

--Hallam’s Constitutional History, vol. I, 215. 35 Elizabeth, c. 1.

35 All the commentators have taken it for an indisputable fact that Green in his Groatsworth of Wit meant Shakespere when he attacked some unnamed dramatist as one whose “Tyger’s heart” was “wrapt in a player’s hide.” Dyce says that no one can hesitate to believe that Green was speaking of Shakespere. Then he demonstrates that the play wherein the above words first appeared (“The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of York”) was written by Marlowe, and so says Hallam; and even Halliwell-Phillipps asserts that the line above quoted has the true Marlowean ring. Taking that fact as proven, it is difficult to believe that the writer whom Green thus attacked as “able to bumbast out a blanke verse,” was any other than the dramatist whom Nashe, in his epistle in Greene’s Menaphone, attacked in 1587, for the “swelling bumbast of a bragging blank verse” (See note 15 herein). The trouble with all these commentators seems to be that, seeing the word “Shake-scene,” in Green’s lines, as descriptive of this bombastic writer, they are unable to understand why the syllable “Shake” should have been used unless Shakespere was meant. “Shakescene” means no more than an actor who “shook the stage,” and the complaint against him was the same as the earlier one of Nashe’s above alluded to. This earlier one appeared during the year that Shakespere, just arrived from his country home, was holding horses before the Green Curtaine theater. The commentators agree that the first attack (note 15) was directed against Marlowe. See Gervinus (p. 77), who speaks of the “general uproar of envy and ridicule raised” against Marlowe’s “drumming decasyllabons.” (Also see Bullen’s Marlowe, p. 17). I contend that the later attack was also upon Marlowe.

--The Author.

36 Stratford on Avon was in the time of Shakespere’s youth “a bookless neighborhood.”

--Halliwell-Phillipps Outlines, p. 88.
See also Id. p. 1 and 2.

37 “I consider myself bound to believe, till some positive proof be produced to the contrary, that Dido was completed for the stage by Nash after the decease of Marlowe.”

--Dyce’s Marlowe, p. 36.

“But Chapman had also been busy with a continuation of Marlowe’s ‘half-told tale.’”

--Dyce’s Marlowe, p. 42.

38. “It is a comfort to know that the ruffian who drew up the charges, a certain ‘Rychard Bame’, was hanged at Tyburn on 6th December, 1594. Doubtless Bame was backed by some person or persons of power and position. It was a deliberate attempt on the part of some fanatics to induce the public authorities to institute a prosecution for blasphemy against the poet.”

--Bullen’s Marlowe, p. 69.

39 The passage which, upon being read by the condemned, would entitle him to liberation. See Benefit of Clergy.

40 In Watts v. Brains, 2 Croke, 778, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty, but were sent back and brought in a verdict of guilty. The defendant was hanged and the jury fined.

41. For evidence of similarity in rhythm, diction and thought read the parallel passages at the heads of each chapter of this book.

42 “Black is the beauty of the brightest day;
The golden ball of Heaven’s eternal fire,
That danced with glory on the silver waves,
Now wants the fuel that inflamed his beams;
And all for faintness and for foul disgrace,
He blinds his temples with a frowning cloud,
Ready to darken earth with endless night.”

--II Tamburlaine, II, 5.

“The gaudy, babbling and remorseful day
Is crept into the bosom of the sea,
And now long howling wolves arouse the jades
That drag the tragic melancholy night;
Who with their drowsy slow and flagging wings
Clip dead men’s graves, and from their misty jaws
Breathe foul contagious darkness in the air.”

--Second Part Henry VI.

Aut Christopherus Marlowe, aut diabolus, “A study of Shakespere,”
by Swinburne, p. 52.

43 “Mr. Fleay believes him [the writer of the plays] to have been a partner of Shakespere, whose name so far is undiscoverable.”

--Morgan’s “Shakespere In Fact and In Criticism,” p. 18.

44 “There were tiers of galleries or scaffolds; beneath these, the boxes or rooms intended for persons of the higher class, and which at the private theaters were secured with locks, the keys being given to the individuals who engaged them.”

--Dyce’s Shakespere, p. 41.

45 “The top of his performance was the ghost in Hamlet.”

--Rowe’s Life of Shakespere.

46. “I wonder that the commentators should have overlooked so obvious an origin of this passage as Lucan’s description (Pharsalia lib. 1) of the prodigies which preceded the death of Cæsar.”

--Note in Furness’ Variorum, vol. 3, p. 17 (Hunter II, 214).

47 Marlowe’s translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia was first published in 1600. “Lucan’s First Booke Translated Line for Line by Chr. Marlow, at London, 1600.”

--Bullen’s Marlowe, vol. 3, p. 250.

48 “I hold then, that the object which Shakespere had in view in introducing this speech into Hamlet was to expose the weakness of his opponent Nash as a playwright.”

--Fleay, Macmillan’s Magazine, Dec., 1874.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Study of Shakespere,” by Swinburne, p. 52.

[2] Thomas Beard’s, the Puritan, Account of Marlowe’s Death in Bullen’s Marlowe, p. 63.

[3] The performance commenced at 3 o’clock.--Dyce’s Shakespere, vol. 1, p. 45.

[4] A nest of alleys near the bottom of St. Martin’s Lane, so called by Jonson.--Knight’s London, vol. 1, p. 369.

[5] Stow’s Survey, Ed. 1633, p. 470.

[6] Dyce’s Shakespere, vol. 1, p. 40.

[7] Taine’s History of English Literature, Book II, chap. 2.

[8] Induction to Cynthia’s Revels. Ben Jonson.

[9] Dyce’s Shakespere, vol. 1, p. 40.

[10] See note 15.

[11] See note 15.

[12] Swinburne’s Study of Shakespere, p. 24.

[13] “He trod the stage with applause.”--Langbaine.

[14] See notes 18 to 24.

[15] Hallam and Lamb.

[16] See note 35.

[17] Dyce’s Marlowe, Bullen’s Marlowe.

[18] “Doubtless Bame was backed by some person or persons of power and position.”--Bullen’s Marlowe, Introduction, lxix.

[19] “The Atheist’s Tragedie,” vol. iii.--Bullen’s Marlowe.

[20] Jew of Malta, Act. I.

[21] Halliwell-Phillipp’s Outlines, 105.

[22] Bullen’s Marlowe, Introduction, 58.

[23] 14 Eliz. c. 5 (1572).

[24] Id.

[25] “The earliest legitimate theater south of the Thames; opened early in 1592”--Halliwell-Phillipp’s Outlines, p. 79.

[26] So held in the case of the Dean of Asaph as the law; but the doctrine was vigorously attacked by Erskine in his great speech on the “Rights on Juries.” See British Eloquence by Goodrich, pp. 655-683.

[27] Chamber’s Enc. Eng. Lit., vol 1, 176.

[28]

And hell itself breathes out contagion to this world.

--Hamlet, ii, 2.

[29]

“Now could I drink hot blood.”

--Hamlet iii, 2.

“That you may drink your fill and quaff in blood.”

--Edward II., iii, 2.

* * * * * *

Transcriber’s note:

Obvious printer errors corrected silently.

Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation are as in the original.