Shakespeare has here left the powerful and admirable text untouched, except for the deletion of a single superfluous and weakening verse, "I had no father, I am like no father," which is followed by the profoundest and most remarkable lines in the play:—
"I have no brother, I am like no brother;
And this word love, which greybeards call divine,
Be resident in men like one another,
And not in me: I am myself alone."
[1] New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1875-76, pp. 219-303.
[2] "Tantæne animis cœlestibus iræ!—Medice, te ipsum!—Gelidus timor occupat artus—La fin couronne les œuvres—Di faciant! laudis summa sit ista tuæ."
[VIII]
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE AND HIS LIFE-WORK—TITUS ANDRONICUS
The man who was to be Shakespeare's first master in the drama—a master whose genius he did not at the outset fully understand—was born two months before him. Christopher (Kit) Marlowe, the son of a shoemaker at Canterbury, was a foundation scholar at the King's School of his native town; matriculated at Cambridge in 1580; took the degree of B.A. in 1583, and of M.A. at the age of twenty-three, after he had left the University; appeared in London (so we gather from an old ballad) as an actor at the Curtain Theatre; had the misfortune to break his leg upon the stage; was no doubt on that account compelled to give up acting; and seems to have written his first dramatic work, Tamburlaine the Great, at latest in 1587. His development was much quicker than Shakespeare's, he attained to comparative maturity much earlier, and his culture was more systematic. Not for nothing had he gone through the classical curriculum; the influence of Seneca, the poet and rhetorician through whom English tragedy comes into relation with the antique, is clearly recognisable in him, no less than in his predecessors, the authors of Gorboduc and Tancred and Gismunda (the former composed by two, the latter by five poets in collaboration); only that the construction of these plays, with their monologues and their chorus, is directly imitated from Seneca, while the more independent Marlowe is influenced only in his diction and choice of material.