CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE.--Among those who may be regarded as the immediate forerunners and ushers of Shakspeare, and who, although they prepared the way for his advent, have been obscured by his greater brilliance, the one most deserving of special mention is Marlowe.
Christopher Marlowe was born at Canterbury, about the year 1564. He was a wild, irregular genius, of bad morals and loose life, but of fine imagination and excellent powers of expression. He wrote only tragedies.
His _Tamburlaine the Great_ is based upon the history of that _Timour Leuk_, or _Timour the Lame_, the great Oriental conqueror of the fourteenth century:
So large of limb, his joints so strongly knit, Such breadth of shoulders as might mainly bear Old Atlas' burthen.
The descriptions are overdrawn, and the style inflated, but the subject partakes of the heroic, and was popular still, though nearly two centuries had passed since the exploits of the historic hero.
_The Rich Jew of Malta_ is of value, as presenting to us Barabas the Jew as he appeared to Christian suspicion and hatred in the fifteenth century. As he sits in his country-house with heaps of gold before him, and receives the visits of merchants who inform him of the safe arrival of his ships, it is manifest that he gave Shakspeare the first ideal of his Shylock, upon which the greater dramatist greatly improved.
_The Tragicall Life and Death of Doctor John Faustus_ certainly helped Goethe in the conception and preparation of his modern drama, and contains many passages of rare power. Charles Lamb says: "The growing horrors of Faustus are awfully marked by the hours and half-hours which expire and bring him nearer and nearer to the enactment of his dire compact. It is indeed an agony and bloody sweat."
_Edward II._ presents in the assassination scene wonderful power and pathos, and is regarded by Hazlitt as his best play.
Marlowe is the author of the pleasant madrigal, called by Izaak Walton "that smooth song":
The playwright, who had led a wild life, came to his end in a tavern brawl: he had endeavored to use his dagger upon one of the waiters, who turned it upon him, and gave him a wound in the head of which he died, in 1593.
His talents were of a higher order than those of his contemporaries; he was next to Shakspeare in power, and was called by Phillips "a second Shakspeare."