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,