are now termed the spurious plays, had been appearing for an interval
of twenty-five years, with the announcement on their title pages
of being “newly arranged by,” or “written by” William Shakespere.
The claims announced on these title pages appear never to have been
disputed by Shakespere. “A Yorkshire Tragedy,” “The London Prodigal,”
and “The First Part of the Life of Sir John Oldcastle” were so
published as his work. Then followed the collection of dramas in the
edition of 1623. Jonson may, or may not, have known the real facts of
the authorship. If he knew that some persons, other than Shakespere,
were the authors, he went only a step further than he did in his
address in “Sejanus,” where he fails to mention the name of the “happy
genius” who wrote that tragedy with him; but his own molding of the
play has not destroyed the trace of Marlowe’s elemental wit therein.
We would rather attribute to Jonson ignorance of the authorship of
the plays, and in this ignorance assigning them to the Manager of the
Globe, than to place him on the level of the Archbishop who ordered
Marlowe’s translation of the “Amores” burnt, or of Richard Bame,
who wrote the accusation of blasphemy, or of those unknown and more
powerful persons, either of Church or State, who labored to blot out of
memory the daring and impious Marlowe.
The copy of the second folio edition (1632), containing emendations
of the original text, as given to the world by Mr. Collier, if
genuine, contains evidence of my theory of Ben Jonson’s editing the
earliest edition of the plays. This copy contained interlineations
and corrections of text which could have been made only by an editor
with the manuscript before him, or by a student deeply versed. The
handwriting displayed in these emendations is a facsimile of Ben
Jonson’s.
--The Author.
For comparison, a portion of a facsimile page of emendations in
Collier’s volume, and some of the writing of Jonson, are here printed:
[Illustration:
Enter Charles, Alanson, Burgundie, Bastard,
and Pucell
_Char._ Had Yorke and Somerset brought rescue in,
We should have found a bloody day of this.
_Bast._ How the yong welpe of _Talbots_ raging wood,
Did flesh his punie-sword in Frenchmens blood.
_Puc._ Once I encountred him, and thus I said:
Thou Maiden youth, be vanquisht by a Maide.
But with a proud Majesticall high scorne
He answer’d thus: Yong _Talbot_ was not borne
To be the pillage of a Giglot Wench,
He left me proudly, as unworthy fight.
_Bur._ Doubtlesse he would have made a noble Knight:
See where he lyes inherced in armes
Of the most bloody Nursser of his harmes.
Hos ego versiculos feci.
Ben: Jonson.]
26 “This view was embraced by Frederic Schlegel in his history of
Literature. He perceived in Shakespere a nature deeply sensitive and
austerely tragic, a disposition isolated, reserved and solitary.”
--Gervinus, 480.
27 Editions appeared during these years of Edward II, The Massacre of
Paris, and Dido, all bearing the name of Marlowe on their title pages.
--Bullen’s Marlowe.
28 Titus Andronicus was published in 1594; Romeo and Juliet, 1597;
Richard II, 1597; Richard III, 1597. No name of author was on their
title pages.
--Fleay’s Life and Character of Shakespere.
Halliwell-Phillipps Outlines chap. “Life
Time Editions.”
29 The first published drama bearing Shakespere’s name was Love’s Labor
Lost, 1598. “Newly corrected and augmented by W. Shakespere,” were the
words on the title page.
--Fleay’s Life and Character of Shakespere.--Outlines,
chapter “Life Time Editions.”
30 “Like Sir Walter Raleigh, and a few less memorable men of the
same generation, he was attacked in his own time, not merely as a
free-thinker, but as a propagandist or apostle of atheism; nor was the
irregularity of his life thought worthier of animadversion than the
uncertainty of his livelihood.”
--Article “Marlowe,” Encyclopedia Britannica.
31 This accusation is among the Harleian MSS., 6853, fol. 320, and is
entitled “A note containing the opinion of one Christopher Marlye,
concerning his damnable opinions and judgment of relygion and scorne of
God’s worde.” On it is also a memorandum that within three days after
its delivery, Marlowe “came to a soden and fearfull end of his life.”
It is endorsed “Copy of Marlowes blasphenyes as sent to her Highness.”
A great portion of it is too abominable to be printed.
--Dyce’s Marlowe.
--Bullen’s Marlowe.
32 There are only five known signatures of Wm. Shakespere, and no other
written words or manuscript known to be by his hand. The scrawls are
scarcely decipherable and strongly at variance with the statement made
by Heminge and Condell in the First Folio Edition of the Plays: “His
mind and hand went together, and what he thought he wrote with that
easiness, that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.”
33 “His face was like a rotten russet apple when it is bruised,” and he
was described by himself as remarkable for
“His mountain belly and his rocky face.”
He was “wont to wear a coat with slits under the armpits.”
--Knight’s London, vol. I, 367.
34 This Act of 1593 “enacted the penalty of imprisonment against any
person above the age of 16 who should forbear for the space of one
month to repair to some church, etc. Those who refused to submit to
these conditions were to abjure the realm, and if they should return
without the queen’s license, to suffer death as felons.”
--Hallam’s Constitutional History, vol. I, 215. 35 Elizabeth, c. 1.
35 All the commentators have taken it for an indisputable fact that
Green in his Groatsworth of Wit meant Shakespere when he attacked
some unnamed dramatist as one whose “Tyger’s heart” was “wrapt in a
player’s hide.” Dyce says that no one can hesitate to believe that
Green was speaking of Shakespere. Then he demonstrates that the
play wherein the above words first appeared (“The True Tragedie of
Richard Duke of York”) was written by Marlowe, and so says Hallam;
and even Halliwell-Phillipps asserts that the line above quoted has
the true Marlowean ring. Taking that fact as proven, it is difficult
to believe that the writer whom Green thus attacked as “able to
bumbast out a blanke verse,” was any other than the dramatist whom
Nashe, in his epistle in Greene’s Menaphone, attacked in 1587, for the
“swelling bumbast of a bragging blank verse” (See note 15 herein).
The trouble with all these commentators seems to be that, seeing the
word “Shake-scene,” in Green’s lines, as descriptive of this bombastic
writer, they are unable to understand why the syllable “Shake” should
have been used unless Shakespere was meant. “Shakescene” means no more
than an actor who “shook the stage,” and the complaint against him was
the same as the earlier one of Nashe’s above alluded to. This earlier
one appeared during the year that Shakespere, just arrived from his
country home, was holding horses before the Green Curtaine theater. The
commentators agree that the first attack (note 15) was directed against
Marlowe. See Gervinus (p. 77), who speaks of the “general uproar of
envy and ridicule raised” against Marlowe’s “drumming decasyllabons.”
(Also see Bullen’s Marlowe, p. 17). I contend that the later attack was
also upon Marlowe.
--The Author.
36 Stratford on Avon was in the time of Shakespere’s youth “a bookless
neighborhood.”
--Halliwell-Phillipps Outlines, p. 88.
See also Id. p. 1 and 2.
37 “I consider myself bound to believe, till some positive proof be
produced to the contrary, that Dido was completed for the stage by Nash
after the decease of Marlowe.”
--Dyce’s Marlowe, p. 36.
“But Chapman had also been busy with a continuation of Marlowe’s
‘half-told tale.’”
--Dyce’s Marlowe, p. 42.
38. “It is a comfort to know that the ruffian who drew up the charges,
a certain ‘Rychard Bame’, was hanged at Tyburn on 6th December, 1594.
Doubtless Bame was backed by some person or persons of power and
position. It was a deliberate attempt on the part of some fanatics to
induce the public authorities to institute a prosecution for blasphemy
against the poet.”
--Bullen’s Marlowe, p. 69.
39 The passage which, upon being read by the condemned, would entitle
him to liberation. See Benefit of Clergy.
40 In Watts v. Brains, 2 Croke, 778, the jury returned a verdict of
not guilty, but were sent back and brought in a verdict of guilty. The
defendant was hanged and the jury fined.
41. For evidence of similarity in rhythm, diction and thought read the
parallel passages at the heads of each chapter of this book.
42 “Black is the beauty of the brightest day;
The golden ball of Heaven’s eternal fire,
That danced with glory on the silver waves,
Now wants the fuel that inflamed his beams;
And all for faintness and for foul disgrace,
He blinds his temples with a frowning cloud,
Ready to darken earth with endless night.”
--II Tamburlaine, II, 5.
“The gaudy, babbling and remorseful day
Is crept into the bosom of the sea,
And now long howling wolves arouse the jades
That drag the tragic melancholy night;
Who with their drowsy slow and flagging wings
Clip dead men’s graves, and from their misty jaws
Breathe foul contagious darkness in the air.”
--Second Part Henry VI.
Aut Christopherus Marlowe, aut diabolus, “A study of Shakespere,”
by Swinburne, p. 52.
43 “Mr. Fleay believes him [the writer of the plays] to have been a
partner of Shakespere, whose name so far is undiscoverable.”
--Morgan’s “Shakespere In Fact and In Criticism,” p. 18.
44 “There were tiers of galleries or scaffolds; beneath these, the
boxes or rooms intended for persons of the higher class, and which at
the private theaters were secured with locks, the keys being given to
the individuals who engaged them.”
--Dyce’s Shakespere, p. 41.
45 “The top of his performance was the ghost in Hamlet.”
--Rowe’s Life of Shakespere.
46. “I wonder that the commentators should have overlooked so obvious
an origin of this passage as Lucan’s description (Pharsalia lib. 1) of
the prodigies which preceded the death of Cæsar.”
--Note in Furness’ Variorum, vol. 3, p. 17 (Hunter II, 214).
47 Marlowe’s translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia was first published in
1600. “Lucan’s First Booke Translated Line for Line by Chr. Marlow, at
London, 1600.”
--Bullen’s Marlowe, vol. 3, p. 250.
48 “I hold then, that the object which Shakespere had in view in
introducing this speech into Hamlet was to expose the weakness of his
opponent Nash as a playwright.”
--Fleay, Macmillan’s Magazine, Dec., 1874.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] “Study of Shakespere,” by Swinburne, p. 52.
[2] Thomas Beard’s, the Puritan, Account of Marlowe’s Death in Bullen’s
Marlowe, p. 63.
[3] The performance commenced at 3 o’clock.--Dyce’s Shakespere, vol. 1,
p. 45.
[4] A nest of alleys near the bottom of St. Martin’s Lane, so called by
Jonson.--Knight’s London, vol. 1, p. 369.
[5] Stow’s Survey, Ed. 1633, p. 470.
[6] Dyce’s Shakespere, vol. 1, p. 40.
[7] Taine’s History of English Literature, Book II, chap. 2.
[8] Induction to Cynthia’s Revels. Ben Jonson.
[9] Dyce’s Shakespere, vol. 1, p. 40.
[10] See note 15.
[11] See note 15.
[12] Swinburne’s Study of Shakespere, p. 24.
[13] “He trod the stage with applause.”--Langbaine.
[14] See notes 18 to 24.
[15] Hallam and Lamb.
[16] See note 35.
[17] Dyce’s Marlowe, Bullen’s Marlowe.
[18] “Doubtless Bame was backed by some person or persons of power and
position.”--Bullen’s Marlowe, Introduction, lxix.
[19] “The Atheist’s Tragedie,” vol. iii.--Bullen’s Marlowe.
[20] Jew of Malta, Act. I.
[21] Halliwell-Phillipp’s Outlines, 105.
[22] Bullen’s Marlowe, Introduction, 58.
[23] 14 Eliz. c. 5 (1572).
[24] Id.
[25] “The earliest legitimate theater south of the Thames; opened early
in 1592”--Halliwell-Phillipp’s Outlines, p. 79.
[26] So held in the case of the Dean of Asaph as the law; but the
doctrine was vigorously attacked by Erskine in his great speech on the
“Rights on Juries.” See British Eloquence by Goodrich, pp. 655-683.
[27] Chamber’s Enc. Eng. Lit., vol 1, 176.
[28]
And hell itself breathes out contagion to this world.
--Hamlet, ii, 2.
[29]
“Now could I drink hot blood.”
--Hamlet iii, 2.
“That you may drink your fill and quaff in blood.”
--Edward II., iii, 2.
* * * * * *
Transcriber’s note:
Obvious printer errors corrected silently.
Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation are as in the original.