“It’s a common practice now-a-days, amongst a sort of shifting companions, that run through every art and thrive at none, to leave the trade of noverint whereto they were born and busy themselves with the endeavors of art, that could scarcely Latinize their neck-verse, if they should have need. Yet English Seneca, read by candle light, yields many good sentences, etc.”
—Nash (1587).
16 “From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits,
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,
We’ll lead you to the stately tent of war.”
—Prologue to Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Part First.
17 “Before him there was neither genuine blank verse nor a genuine tragedy in our language.”
—Article on Marlowe, Ency. Britannica,
vol. XV, p. 556.
“That fiery reformer who wrought on the old English stage no less a miracle than Hernani on the French stage in the days of our fathers.”
—Swinburne’s “Study of Shakespere,” p. 31.
18 “Quicke-sighted spirits,—this supposed Appolo,—
Conceit no other, but the admired Marlo;
Marlo admired, whose honney-flowing vein
No English writer can as yet attaine.”
—Henry Petowe, Second Part, “Hero and Leander,” 1598.
19 “Now (as swift as Time
Doth follow Motion) find th’ eternal clime
Of his free soul, whose living subject stood
Up to the chin in the Pierian flood,
And drunk to me half this Musean story
Inscribing it to deathless memory.”
—Chapman’s Third Sestiad to Marlowe’s Hero and Leander.
20 “Unhappy in thine end,
Marley, the Muses’ darling for thy verse,
Fit to write passions for the souls below,
If any wretched souls in passion speak.”
—George Peele “Prologue to the Honour of the Garter.”