—Edward Dowden.
4 “If Marlowe had lived to finish his ‘Hero and Leander’ he might perhaps have contested the palm with Shakespere in his ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘Rape of Lucrece.’”
—Malone.
5 “In his first stage Shakespere had dropped his plummet no deeper into the sea of the spirit of man than Marlowe had sounded before him, and in the channel of simple emotion no poet could cast surer line with steadier hand than he.”
—Swinburne’s “A Study of Shakespere,” p. 77.
“It [Richard III] is doubtless a better piece of work than Marlowe ever did; I dare not say than Marlowe ever could have done. It is not for any man to measure * * * what it is that Christopher Marlowe could not have done; but dying as he did and when he did, etc.”
—“A Study of Shakespere,” Swinburne 43.
6 “For my own part, I feel a strong persuasion, that with added years and well directed efforts, he would have made a much nearer approach to Shakespere than has yet been made by any of his countrymen.”
—Dyce’s Marlowe, p. 55.
7 Raise cavalieros higher than the clouds,
And with the cannon break the frame of heaven;
Batter the shining palace of the sun,
And shiver all the starry firmament.
—Second Part Tamburlaine II, 4.