In him the two streams begin to unite which have their sources in the Biblical dramas of the Middle Ages and the later allegorical folk-plays on the one hand, and, on the other hand, in the Latin plays of antiquity. But he entirely lacks the comic vein which we find in the first English imitations of Plautus and Terence—in Ralph Roister Doister and in Gammer Gurtoris Needle, acted, respectively, in the middle of the century and in the middle of the sixties, by Eton schoolboys and Cambridge students.
Kit Marlowe is the creator of English tragedy. He it was who established on the public stage the use of the unrhymed iambic pentameter as the medium of English drama. He did not invent English blank verse—the Earl of Surrey (who died in 1547) had used it in his translation of the Æneid, and it had been employed in the old play of Gorboduc and others which had been performed at court. But Marlowe was the first to address the great public in this measure, and he did so, as appears from the prologue to Tamburlaine, in express contempt for "the jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits" and "such conceits as clownage keeps in pay," seeking deliberately for tragic emphasis and "high astounding terms" in which to express the rage of Tamburlaine.
Before his day, rhymed couplets of long-drawn fourteen-syllable verse had been common in drama, and the monotony of these rhymes naturally hampered the dramatic life of the plays. Shakespeare does not seem at first to have appreciated Marlowe's reform, or quite to have understood the importance of this rejection of rhyme in dramatic writing. Little by little he came fully to realise it. In one of his first plays, Love's Labour's Lost, there are nearly twice as many rhymed as unrhymed verses, more than a thousand in all; in his latest works rhyme has disappeared. There are only two rhymes in The Tempest, and in A Winters Tale none at all.
Similarly, in his first plays (like Victor Hugo in his first Odes), Shakespeare feels himself bound to make the sense end with the end of the verse; as time goes on, he gradually learns an ever freer movement. In Love's Labour's Lost there are eighteen end-stopped verses (in which the meaning ends with the line) for every one in which the sense runs on; in Cymbeline and A Winter's Tale they are only about two to one. This gradual development affords one method of determining the date of production of otherwise undated plays.
Marlowe seems to have led a wild life in London, and to have been entirely lacking in the commonplace virtues. He is said to have indulged in a perpetual round of dissipations, to have been dressed to-day in silk, to-morrow in rags, and to have lived in audacious defiance of society and the Church. Certain it is that he was killed in a brawl when only twenty-nine years old. He is said to have found a rival in company with his mistress, and to have drawn his dagger to stab him; but the other, a certain Francis Archer, wrested the dagger from his grasp, and thrust it through his eye into his brain. It is further related of him that he was an ardent and aggressive atheist, who called Moses a juggler and said that Christ deserved death more than Barabbas. These reports are probable enough. On the other hand, the assertion that he wrote books against the Trinity and uttered blasphemies with his latest breath, is evidently inspired by Puritan hatred for the theatre and everything concerned with it. The sole authority for these fables is Beard's Theatre of God's Judgments (1597), the work of a clergyman, a fanatical Puritan, which appeared six years after Marlowe's death.
There is no doubt that Marlowe led an extremely irregular life, but the legend of his debaucheries must be much exaggerated, if only from the fact that, though he was cut off before his thirtieth year, he has yet left behind him so large and puissant a body of work. The legend that he passed his last hours in blaspheming God is rendered doubly improbable by Chapman's express statement that it was in compliance with Marlowe's dying request that he continued his friend's paraphrase of Hero and Leander. The passionate, defiant youth, surcharged with genius, was fair game for the bigots and Pharisees, who found it only too easy to besmirch his memory.
It is evident that Marlowe's gorgeous and violent style, especially as it bursts forth in his earlier plays, made a profound impression upon the youthful Shakespeare. After Marlowe's death, Shakespeare made a kindly and mournful allusion to him in As You Like It (iii. 5), where Phebe quotes a line from his Hero and Leander:—
"Dead shepherd! now I find thy saw of might:
'Who ever lov'd, that lov'd not at first sight?'"
Marlowe's influence is unmistakable not only in the style and versification but in the sanguinary action of Titus Andronicus; clearly the oldest of the tragedies attributed to Shakespeare.
The evidence for the Shakespearian authorship of this drama of horrors, though mainly external, is weighty and, it would seem, decisive. Meres, in 1598, names it among the poet's works, and his friends included it in the First Folio. We know from a gibe in Ben Jonson's Induction to his Bartholomew Fair that it was exceedingly popular. It is one of the plays most frequently alluded to in contemporary writings, being mentioned twice as often as Twelfth Night, and four or five times as often as Measure for Measure or Timon. It depicts savage deeds, executed with the suddenness with which people of the sixteenth century were wont to obey their impulses, cruelties as heartless and systematic as those which characterised the age of Machiavelli. In short, it abounds in such callous atrocities as could not fail to make a deep impression on iron nerves and hardened natures.