positiveness: new materials for Marlowe's biography may hereafter come to light, and prove that I am mistaken.
For the same person to unite in himself the actor and the dramatist was very common, both at that time and at a later period. Marlowe may have performed on more than one stage, though we can trace him only to the Curtain; and we may gather from the terms of the ballad ("He had alsoe a player beene . . . . But brake his leg," &c.) that, the accident which there befell him having occasioned incurable lameness, he was for ever disabled as an actor.
The tragedy of Tamburlaine the Great, in Two Parts (the Second Part, it appears, having been brought upon the stage soon after the First[1]), may be confidently assigned to Marlowe, though the old editions have omitted the author's name. It is his earliest drama, at least the earliest of his plays which we possess. From Nash's Epistle "To the Gentlemen Students of both Universities,"[2] prefixed to Greene's Menaphon, 1587, and from Greene's Address "To the Gentlemen Readers,"[3] to his Perimedes the Blacke-Smith, 1588, Mr. Collier concludes, and, it would seem, justly, "that Marlowe was our first poet who used blank-verse in dramatic compositions performed in public theatres, that Tamburlaine was the play in which the successful experiment was made, and that it was acted anterior to 1587."[4] On the authority of a rather obscure passage in The Black Book, 1604, Malone had conjectured that Tamburlaine was written either wholly or in part by Nash:[5] but to that conjecture Mr. Collier,—besides adducing a line from a sonnet by Gabriel Harvey, in which Marlowe, then just deceased, is spoken of under the
- ↑ See Prologue to the Sec. Part.
- ↑ In which Nash ridicules the then recent introduction of blank-verse on the public stage, and seems to allude to Marlowe in contemptuous terms.
- ↑ In which Greene expressly mentions Marlowe's tragedy; "daring God out of heauen with that atheist Tamburlan, or blaspheming with the mad preest of the sonne."—Mr. Collier thinks that Marlowe also wrote the play in which "the Priest of the Sun" was a leading character.
- ↑ Hist. of Engl. Dram. Poet. iii. 112.—Compare too the Prologue to the First Part of Tamburlaine;
"From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,
We'll lead you to the stately tent of war," &c.—Mr. Collier informs us, that, before the appearance of Tamburlaine, writers for the regular theatres had confined themselves to the use of prose or rhyme; and that all the English tragedies in blank verse which preceded Tamburlaine were performed either at court or before private societies.—Warton incidentally observes that Tamburlaine was "represented before the year 1588." Hist. of Engl. Poet. iv. 11, ed. 4to.
- ↑ Shakespeare (by Boswell), iii. 357.—The passage in The Black Book is,—"the spindle-shank spiders . . . . . . went stalking over his [Nash's] head as if they had been conning of Tamburlaine" (see Middleton's Works, v. 526, ed. Dyce); and it means, I have no doubt, that the spiders stalked with the tragic gait of an actor practising the part of Tamburlaine: compare the 2d line of the quotation from Hall in p. xvii.
