It is a human bit of dramatic analysis, and reduces inconsistent femininity to a common denominator.
In her third volume, Marlowe, a drama, founded upon the life of the lovable but erratic poet and playwright, Miss Peabody essayed an ambitious undertaking, but one which, as literature, carries its full justification. As drama, one must qualify. In characterization, aside from Marlowe himself, who comes before one vividly, there is a lack of sharp definition. Nashe, Lodge, Peele, and Green, Marlowe’s fellow playwrights and friends, might, from the evidence of the dialogue, be the same character under different names, so alike are they in speech and temperament. Next to Marlowe himself, Bame, who through jealousy becomes his enemy, and brings on the final tragedy, is the most individually drawn. Of the women characters, the drama presents practically but one,—Alison, the little country maid who loves Marlowe secretly, and becomes in a way his good angel,—as “Her Ladyship” of the Court, object of his adoration, is introduced but twice in the play, and that veiled, so that only for a moment at the last may one see the beauty that—under guise of Helen—inspired Marlowe’s lines:
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burned the topless towers of Ilium!
While the two brief comings of “Her Ladyship” impart an artistic touch of mystery, it is to be doubted if in a play so intangible a heroine could become a vital factor, and if she were not, the woman element of the drama must be sustained wholly by Alison, the little “Quietude,” who, until the one beautiful scene with Marlowe after her marriage, remains an artless undeveloped child, with too little color, too weak a human pulse-beat, to compel interest and sympathy. She is delicately drawn, in her unsophisticated sweetness and purity, and the inner strength of her nature is finely shown at the last, but up to this period of revelation one does not feel her; she lacks the touch of life essential to a character in drama.
In plot the work presents somewhat the same limitation. It is, until the two final scenes, after Marlowe’s downfall, literature without action: nothing happens in the earlier part of the play to create an element of suspense forelooking to the developments at the close. Marlowe’s triumphs are detailed to one another by his friends, but they are not shown in some great scene where he might receive the acclamations of the people and so contrast sharply
with his downfall at the end: story suffices for action. The sentiment of the play presents also no intricacies: Alison, although loving Marlowe, is not for a moment a factor of love in his life, since he neither suspects her attachment nor reciprocates it, and hence the jealousy of her suitors has no effect either upon him or upon the supposed audience. “Her Ladyship” is not pitted against Alison, since the latter knows that Marlowe’s heart is given to his veiled divinity; hence there are no complexities arising from the love-element. For the purpose of acting, therefore, the play seems to me to lack movement, suspense, variety of characterization, and, except in the drawing of Marlowe, definiteness of type. It has, however, a strong and vivid scene at the close, leading up to and including Marlowe’s tragic death, and a scene of rare beauty and of intense dramatic reality, of which I shall speak later, in the visit of Marlowe to Alison after his downfall.
On the side of literature, the drama contains work of admirable strength and quality, work that in its beauty of phrase and subtlety of penetration is not unworthy to be put into the mouth of Marlowe of the “mighty line.” Miss Peabody never falls into the Shakespearizing
strain which many writing of that epoch assume; her dialogue is vivid, direct, and full of original imagery, as when Marlowe speaks of Alison as having for him—
Snowflake pity,