PREFACE.
Nature doth strive with Fortune and his stars
To make him famous.
—I Tamburlaine, ii, 1.
Nature and Fortune joined to make him great.
—King John, iii, 1.
A number of years ago I read the plays of Christopher Marlowe; and as evidence of the impression they made upon me, there is still among my recent notes gathered for this romance, the extracts I then wrote down from his Tamburlaine and Faustus. There was something in them to excite more than the passing interest of a boy; and for a long time I mourned over the accepted account of the untimely, and disgraceful ending of that unfortunate poet—“our elder Shelley,” as Swinburne has termed him. Later the Bacon-Shakespere controversy attracted my attention; and while I became skeptical concerning the authorship by William Shakespere of the dramas that bear his name, I could not attribute them to the pen of Francis Bacon.
There are many reasons for my disbelief, in the solution of the mystery as presented by the Baconians, but it has not arisen from my failure to study the proofs and argument. One reason, however, must be mentioned. A man, so solicitous of his fame as to leave it in his will “to foreign nations and the next ages,” would not, if he had written the plays, have departed this life without some mention of them. Whoever wrote them was not blind to their merits; and of his knowledge of their enduring quality we have the author’s own opinion in the lines:
“Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.”
Shakespere also left a will, as mean and petty in its details of “gilt boles,” “wearing apparrell” and money to “buy them ringes,” as though conceived by a tiller of the soil whose eyes had never been raised above his plow-handles. It had been carefully prepared three months before his death, and subscribed while his “mind was yet unclouded;” but, as in the case of Bacon, we listen vainly for one word from the testator concerning the grandest productions of all time. Ye who have sweat in striking “the second heat upon the Muse’s anvil,” think of the utter indifference of both these men concerning the “living lines” of Hamlet and of Richard!
With the fame of Shakespere thus rudely shaken, and that of Bacon firmly set upon the enduring monument of law and philosophy which he alone had raised for himself, I began groping for a solution of these mysterious questions. Who wrote the plays? Why was their authorship concealed?
As to the first inquiry, my belief that Christopher Marlowe could have written the plays, had his life been sufficiently prolonged, was supported by the opinions of Phillips, Collier, Dowden, Malone, Swinburne and Dyce [[notes 1-6.]]
This belief was founded upon the striking similarity of the strongest portions of his acknowledged works to passages of the Shakespere plays; the tendency of each to degenerate into pomposity and bombast in passages of tragic pathos [[note 7]]; the similar treatment of characters, and the like spirit that pervades them. (The Shakespere plays, free as they are from any trace of a hand during the period when it was moved by an immature mind, seem like a continuation of the works of the earlier master, and evolved when the author was at the meridian of his power.)