containing a richness of fancy, and a musical fluency of expression, to which Marston’s undoubted plays afford no parallel. The italicised lines are certainly not in Marston’s vein:—
“Like to the lion when he hears the sound
Of Dian’s bowstring in some shady wood,
I should have couched my lowly limb on earth
And held my silence a proud sacrifice.”
“Others, compared to her, show like faint stars
To the full moon of wonder in her face.”
Again: the play contains an unusually large number of imitations of Shakespearean passages. In fact I know no play of this early date in which Shakespeare is so persistently imitated or plagiarised. Again and again we find images and expressions borrowed more or less closely from Hamlet. Shakespeare’s historical plays, too, were laid under contribution. In the very first scene we have these lines:—
“Slave, I will fight with thee at any odds;
Or name an instrument fit for destruction,
That e’er was made to make away a man,
I’ll meet thee on the ridges of the Alps,
Or some inhospitable wilderness.”
A very cool piece of plagiarism from Richard II. (i. 1):—
“Which to maintain I would allow him odds
And meet him, were I tied to run a-foot
Even to the frozen ridges of the Alps
Or any other ground inhabitable.”
In the lines,
“The ghosts of misers that imprison’d gold
Within the harmless bowels of the earth,”
the italicised words were unquestionably suggested by a passage of Hotspur’s famous speech in Henry IV., i. 2,—
“That villainous salt-petre should be digg’d
Out of the bowels of the harmless earth.“