As one of them, indifferently rated,
* * * * *
May serve in peril of calamity
To ransom great kings from captivity.
This is the ware wherein consists my wealth:
* * * * *
Infinite riches in a little room.”
This is the very poetry of avarice.
Let us now look a little more closely at Marlowe as a dramatist. Here also he has an importance less for what he accomplished than for what he suggested to others. Not only do I think that Shakespeare’s verse caught some hints from his, but there are certain descriptive passages and similes of the greater poet which, whenever I read them, instantly bring Marlowe to my mind. This is an impression I might find it hard to convey to another, or even to make definite to myself; but it is an old one, and constantly repeats itself, so that I put some confidence in it. Marlowe’s “Edward II.” certainly served Shakespeare as a model for his earlier historical plays. Of course he surpassed his model, but Marlowe might have said of him as Oderisi, with pathetic modesty, said to Dante of his rival and surpasser, Franco of Bologna, “The praise is now all his, yet mine in part.” But it is always thus. The path-finder is forgotten when the track is once blazed out. It was in Shakespeare’s “Richard II.” that Lamb detected the influence of Marlowe, saying that “the reluctant pangs of abdicating royalty in Edward furnished hints which Shakespeare has scarce improved upon in Richard.” In the parallel scenes of both plays the sentiment is rather elegiac than dramatic, but there is a deeper pathos, I think, in Richard, and his grief rises at times to a passion which is wholly wanting in Edward. Let me read Marlowe’s abdication scene. The irresolute nature of the king is finely indicated. The Bishop of Winchester has come to demand the crown; Edward takes it off, and says:—
“Here, take my crown; the life of Edward too: