JULIETS RUNAWAY, ONCE MORE
The two collaborated, and the younger borrowed some of Marlowe's phrases for his after-plays, and burlesqued others. Romeo and Juliet was sketched out in his spring-time of echoes and impressibility with respect to feeling and style.
The experience of many a writer has been that in youth—however original his conceptions may be—he will more readily fall into the cadences and syntax of the predecessor whom he knows by heart, than commit any plagiarism with or without intent. The strongest, the most subtle, proofs of influence lie in imitation of cæsura, rhythm, structure, tone. To all this I once alluded more fully, in comparison of Tennyson with the Syracusan idyllists.
Turn, as I say, to the last scene of Faustus, and to the frantic soliloquy of the magician, who realizes that he has "but one bare hour to live" and then "must be damned perpetually." Consider his opening adjuration:
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,[1]
That time may cease, and midnight never come;
Fair Nature's eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul!
O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!
Then read from the soliloquy of Juliet, Romeo and Juliet, iii. 2:
- ↑ The italics in these passages, the Latin verse excepted, are of course my own.
