How we may steal from hence.”
The whole speech is breathless with haste, and is in keeping not only with the feeling of the moment, but with what we already know of the impulsive character of Imogen. Marlowe did not, for he could not, teach Shakespeare this secret, nor has anybody else ever learned it.
There are, properly speaking, no characters in the plays of Marlowe—but personages and interlocutors. We do not get to know them, but only to know what they do and say. The nearest approach to a character is Barabas, in “The Jew of Malta,” and he is but the incarnation of the popular hatred of the Jew. There is really nothing human in him. He seems a bugaboo rather than a man. Here is his own account of himself:—
“As for myself, I walk abroad o’ nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls;
Sometimes I go about and poison wells;
And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves,
I am content to lose some of my crowns,
That I may, walking in my gallery,
See ’em go pinioned by my door along;