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.