"Next, Marlowe, bathéd in the Thespian springs, Had in him those brave translunary things That the first poets had: his raptures were All air and fire, which made his verses clear; For that fine madness still he did retain Which rightly should possess a poet's brain."
Before leaving the subject, I must notice a remark by Charles Lamb,--the dear, delightful Charley. "The reluctant pangs," says he, "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." Both the scenes in question have indeed great merit, but this praise seems to me far beyond the mark. Surely, there is more of genuine, pity-moving pathos in the single speech of York,--"As in a theatre the eyes of men," etc.,--than in all Marlowe's writings put together. And as to the moving of terror, there is, to my mind, nothing in _Edward the Second_ that comes up to _Faustus_; and there are a dozen scenes in _Macbeth_, any one of which has more of the terrific than the whole body of _Faustus_. And in the death-scene of Edward, it can hardly be denied that the senses are somewhat overcrammed with images of physical suffering, so as to give the effect rather of the horrible than the terrible.
Others, again, have thought that Marlowe, if he had lived, would have made some good approach to Shakespeare in tragic power. A few years more would no doubt have lifted him to very noble things, that is, provided his powers could have been kept from the eatings and cripplings of debauchery; still, any approach to that great Divinity of the Drama was out of the question for him. For, judging from his life and works, the moral part of genius was constitutionally defective in him; and, with this so defective, the intellectual part cannot be truly itself; and his work must needs be comparatively weak in those points of our being which it touches, because it does not touch them all: for the whole must be moved at once, else there can be no great moving of any part. No, no! there was not, there could not have been in Marlowe, great as he was, a tithe of Shakespeare, for tragedy, nor any thing else. To go no further, he was, as we have seen, destitute of humour; the powers of comedy evidently had no place in him; and these powers are indispensable to the production of high tragedy: a position affirmed as long ago as the days of Plato; sound in the reason of the thing; and, above all, made good in the instance of Shakespeare; who was _Shakespeare_, mainly because he had _all_ the powers of the human mind in harmonious order and action, and _used_ them all, explicitly or implicitly, in every play he wrote.