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Edward the Second was entered in the Stationers' Books on 6th July 1593. In the
Dyce Library at South Kensington there is a quarto with a MS. title-page (in a hand of
the late 17th century), dated 1593. The first page is in MS., and contains several
mistakes, but the text of the printed matter agrees throughout with the quarto of 1598;
it may therefore be assumed that the date 1593 is a mistake of the copyist for iSgS.
2
Warton states that the play “was written in the year 1590,” but he adduces no
evidence in support of his assertion. It is certainly the most elaborate of Marlowe's
works, and it has fortunately descended to us with a text free from any serious
corruptions. We can hardly assign an earlier date than 1590 for its composition.
A comparison between Edward II. and Richard II. naturally suggests itself to every
reader. Charles Lamb remarked that” the reluctant pangs of abdicating royalty in
Edward furnished hints which Shakespeare scarce improved in his Richard the
Second; and the death-scene of Marlowe's king moves pity and terror beyond any
scene, ancient or modern, with which I am acquainted.” Mr. Swinburne thinks that
there is more discrimination of character in Marlowe's play than Shakespeare's; that
the figures are more life-like, stand out more clearly as individual personalities. It
may also be urged that there is more “business “in Marlowe's play; that the action is
never allowed to flag. Ttie character of the gay, frank, fearless, shameless favourite,
Piers Gaveston, is admirably drawn. Even in the presence of death, with the wolfish
eyes of the grim nobles bent on him from every side, he loses nothing of his old
jauntiness. Marlowe has thoroughly realised this character, and portrayed it in every
detail with consummate ability. Hardly less successful is the character of Young
Spenser, the insolent compound of recklessness and craft, posing as the saviour of
society, while he stealthily pursues his own selfish projects. In his drawing of female
characters, Marlowe showed no great skill or variety. The features in some of his
portraits are either so dim as to present no likeness at all, or they are excessively
unlovely. Isabella is a vain, selfish woman, without any strength of character. She is
hurt at finding herself neglected by the king, but the wound is only surface-deep. She
acquiesces passively in her husband's death, and with equal indifference would have
sacrificed her paramour. Edward, with all his weakness, is not wholly ignoble. In all
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literature there are few finer touches than when, after recounting his fearful suffering
and privations in the dungeon, he gathers his breath for one last kingly utterance:—
”Tell Isabel, the queen, I looked not thus
When for her sake I ran at tilt in France,
And there unhorsed the Duke of Cleremont.”
What heart-breaking pathos in those lines! For a moment, as his thoughts travel back
across the years, he forgets the squalor of his dungeon and rides blithely beneath the
beaming eyes of his lady. It has been objected that the representation of the king's
physical suffering oversteps the limit of dramatic art. Euripides was censured by
ancient critics for demeaning tragedy; but to-day the judgment of readers is on the
side of Euripides, not of his critics. Besides, if Euripides erred, Sophocles erred also.
The physical suffering of Philoctetes excites far more disgust than anything that we
find in Euripides. There are those who think that the blinding of Gloster, in Lear,
surpasses in horror any scene of physical agony enacted on the English stage. But
criticism, which fears to raise its voice against Shakespeare, shows no mercy to
Shakespeare's contemporaries.
It has been usually stated that Fabyan's Chronicle was Marlowe's authority for the plot
of Edward II., but Mr. Fleay has made it abundantly clear that the poet's indebtedness
to Fabyan was very slight, and that the narratives of Stow and Holinshed, who tread
closely in the steps of Sir Thomas de la More, were largely used.
The two remaining plays, the Massacre at Paris and the Tragedy of Dido, are
preserved in a very unsatisfactory state: the former had been cruelly mutilated, and the
latter—left unfinished at the author's death— was completed by Thomas Nashe, an
unequalled master of invective, but a tragic poet of no high order. In Henslowe's
Diary (ed. J. P. Collier, p. 30), under date 30th January 1593-4, there is an
entry—“Rd. at the tragedy of the guyes [Guise] … iij8 … iiij8.” In this part of the
Diary the dates are in some confusion; and it is clear from the preceding and
following entries that the year should be 1592-3, not 1593-4. In the margin opposite
the entry Henslowe has written ”tie” to show that it was a new play. External
evidence, therefore, seems to insist that the Massacre at Paris was one of Marlowe's
latest works. Even if we suppose that the performance of the play did not immediately
follow its composition, yet we cannot regard the Massacre at Paris as a very early
work of Marlowe's; for Henry III., with whose assassination the play ends, died on
2nd August 1589. But we have clear proof that the play has come down in a corrupt
and mutilated state. There is preserved in an early MS.
1
a portion of scene xix.,
probably a fragment of an original play-house copy. A comparison of the text of the
MS. (vid. Vol. II. 277-8) with the text of the printed copy shows how cruelly the play
suffered in passing through the press. But when all allowances have been made on the
score of curtailments and corruptions, it is certain that the Massacre at Paris was the
feeblest of Marlowe's works. Only in one passage does the poet rise to the height of
his theme. I refer of course to the fine soliloquy of the Duke of Guise in the second
scene. There, and there only, we find the old splendour of diction and magnificence of
imagination, the old yearning after limitless power. The other characters are writ in
water.
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The Tragedy of Dido was published in 1594. On the title-page it is stated to have been
written by “Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nash, Gent.” Probably Marlowe left it
incomplete at his death, and Nashe finished it. The tragic power shown in Dido is
very slight For once Marlowe seems to have descended from his fiery flight above the
clouds, and to have sought repose in a trim garden-plot; instead of daring imagination,
we have quaint conceits and dainty play of fancy. My own opinion is, that the play is
in the main by Marlowe, and that Nashe's work lay chiefly in completing certain
scenes which Marlowe had sketched in the rough. To Marlowe must surely be given
such lines as these in the opening scene:—
“Vulcan shall dance to make thee laughing-sport,
And my nine daughters sing when thou art sad;
From Juno's bird I'll pluck her spotted pride,
To make thee wings wherewith to cool thy face;
And Venus' swans shall shed their silver down
To sweeten out the slumbers of thy bed,” &c.
The rhythm of these passages is precisely the same as in the passage (lii. i) where
Dido offers to Aeneas a fleet with “tackling made of rivell'd gold.” As Mr. Symonds
observes, “The blank verse, falling in couplets, seems to cry aloud for rhymes.” These
passages, and the pretty scene where the old nurse tempts away Cupid (who is
disguised as Ascanius) by a playfully exaggerated description of the delights of her
orchard and flower-garden, must have come from the same hand,—the hand that
wrote the song of the “Passionate Shepherd to his Love.” In the second act, where
Aeneas relates to Dido the story of the fall of Troy, occurs the passage, which
Shakespeare burlesqued in Hamlet
1
describing the slaughter of Priam. It is hard to
believe that in its present shape the narrative of Aeneas was written wholly by
Marlowe. In parts it is so absurdly grandiose that a very slight heightening is required
in order to get the effect of burlesque. Let us take the description of the slaughter of
Priam:—
“At which the frantic queen leaped on his face,
And in his eyelids hanging by the nails,
A little while prolonged her husband's life.
At last the soldiers pulled her by the heels,
And swung her howling in the empty air,
Which sent an echo to the wounded king:
Whereat he lifted up his bed-rid limbs,
And would have grappled with Achilles' son,
Forgetting both his want of strength and hands;
Which he disdaining, whisk'd his sword about,
And with the wound [wind] thereof the King fell down;
Then from the navel to the throat at once
He ripp'd old Priam.”
If these lines are Marlowe's they must have been written at the very beginning of his
career. Compared with this extraordinary passage the rant of Tamburlaine is tame. It
seems probable that Marlowe left the scene unfinished, and that Nashe worked it up
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into its present ridiculous shape. If the lines I have quoted are Nashe's he must surely
have been laughing in his sleeve when he wrote them. It was a good opportunity of
showing that he had learnt the trick of “bragging blank verse,” and could swagger in
“drumming decasyllabons.” Earlier in the same scene we find passages quite worthy
of Marlowe, as in the description how, when Smon unlocked the wooden horse,
“Suddenly
From out his entrails, Neoptolemus,
Setting his spear upon the ground, leapt forth,
And, after him, a thousand Grecians more
In whose stern faces shined the quenchless fire
That after burnt the pride of Asia.”
About the authorship of such lines as those there can be no possible doubt; but there
are very few passages in Dido where the “mighty line “rings so unmistakeably.
The exquisite fragment of Hero and Leander, which was entered in the Stationers'
Books on 28th September 1593, was first published in 1598, and a second edition,
1
with Chapman's continuation, appeared in the same year. From a passage of the Third
Sestiad it appears that Marlowe, perhaps with a foreboding of his untimely death, had
enjoined upon Chapman the task of completing the poem. The lines are these;—
“Then, ho, most strangely-intellectual fire
That, proper to my soul, hast power t' inspire
Her burning faculties, and with the wings
Of thy unspherèd flame visits't the springs
Of spirits immortal. 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,