Marlowe.
Did it ever happen to you to read upon a summer’s day that delightful old book—of a half century later—called The Complete Angler; and do you remember how, on a certain evening when the quiet Angler had beguiled himself with loitering under beech-trees and watching the lambs and listening to the birds, he did encounter, in an adjoining field, a handsome milkmaid, who lifted up her voice—which was like a nightingale’s—to an old-fashioned song, beginning?—
“Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, or hills, or field
Or woods, or steepy mountains yield—
And I will make thee beds of roses
And then a thousand fragrant posies
A cap of flowers and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.”
Well, that song of the milkmaid, with its setting of verdant meads and silver streams and honeysuckle hedges keeps singing itself in a great many ears to-day: And it was written by Christopher Marlowe,[102] one of the most harum-scarum young dare-devils of Elizabethan times. He was born in the same year with Shakespeare—down in Canterbury, or near by (whither we saw St. Augustine carrying Christian crosses)—was son of a shoemaker who lived thereabout, yet came somehow to be a Cambridge man, drifted thereafter to London—full of wit and words of wantonness; developing early; known for a tragedy that caught the ear of the town six years before Shakespeare had published the “Venus and Adonis.” He was an actor, too, as so many of the dramatic wits of that day were—maybe upon the same boards where Shakespeare was then certainly a mender, if not a maker of parts. Did they hobnob together? Did they compare plots? If we only knew: but we do not.
The critics of the days closely succeeding said he would have rivalled Shakespeare if he had lived: Doubtless he would have brought more learning to the rivalry; perhaps an equal wit—maybe an even greater rhythmic faculty and as dauntless and daring imaginative power; but dignity and poise of character were not in him. He died—stabbed—in a drunken brawl before he was thirty.[103] In his tragedies—if you read them—you will find the beat and flow and rhythm—to which a great many of the best succeeding English tragedies were attuned. He scored first upon British theatre-walls, with fingers made tremulous by tavern orgies, a great sampler of dramatic story, by which scores of succeeding play-writers set their copy; but into these copies many and many a one of lesser power put a grace, a tenderness, and a dignity which never belonged to the half-crazed and short-lived Marlowe. You will remember him best perhaps as the author of the pleasant little madrigal of which I cited a verselet; and if you value the delicatest of description, you will relish still more his unfinished version of the Greek story of “Hero and Leander”—a pregnant line of which—
“who ever loved that loved not at first sight”
—has the abiding honor of having been quoted by Shakespeare in his play of “As You Like It.”
I leave Marlowe—citing first a beautiful bit of descriptive verse from his “Hero and Leander:”—
“At Sestos Hero dwelt: Hero the fair,
Whom young Apollo courted for her hair,
And offered as a dower his burning throne,
Where she should sit for men to gaze upon.
The outside of her garments were of lawn,
—The lining purple silk, with gilt stars drawn.
Upon her head she wore a myrtle wreath
From thence her veil reached to the ground beneath;
Her veil was artificial flowers and leaves,
Whose workmanship both man and beast deceives;
Many would praise the sweet smell, as she past,
When ’twas the odor that her breath forth cast;
And therefor honey-bees have sought in vain
And beat from thence, have lighted there again.
About her neck hung chains of pebble stone,
Which, lighted by her neck, like diamonds shone.
She wore no gloves; for neither sun nor wind
Would burn or parch her hands, but, to her mind;
Or warm, or cool them; for they took delight
To play upon those hands, they were so white.
Some say, for her the fairest Cupid pin’d
And, looking in her face, was strooken blind.
But this is true; so like was one the other,
As he imagined Hero was his mother:
And often-times into her bosom flew,
About her naked neck his bare arms threw,
And laid his childish head upon her breast
And, with still panting rock’t, there took his rest.”
I think all will agree that this is very delicately done.