THE REPUTATION OF CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 



I. TO THE CLOSING OF THE THEATRES (1642) 



The first literary reference to Marlowe, as to Shakespeare, 

 appears to be due to the envy of Robert Greene. Some four and 

 a half years before he penned the famous reference to Shakescene 

 in his Groatszvorth of Wit, Greene introduced the following cryptic 

 passage into the epistle 'to the gentlemen readers' of his Pcrimedes 

 the Blacksmith, licensed March 29, 1588, and published the same 

 year : 



I keepe my old course, to palter vp some thing in Prose, vsing mine old 

 poesie still, Omne tulit pimctuin, although latelye two Gentlemen Poets made 

 two mad men of Rome beate it out of their paper bucklers : and had it in 

 derision, for that I could not make my verses iet vpon the stage in tragicall 

 buskins, euerie worde filling the mouth like the faburden of Bo-Bell, daring 

 God out of heauen with that Atheist Taiuhurlan, or blaspheming with the 

 mad preest of the sonne : but let me rather openly pocket vp the Asse at 

 Diogenes hand : then wantonlye set out such impious instances of intollerable 

 poetrie, such mad and scoffing poets, that haue propheticall spirits as bred 

 of Merlins race, if there be anye in England that set the end of scollarisme 

 in an English blanck verse, I thinke either it is the humor of a nouice that 

 tickles them with selfe-loue, or so much frequenting the hot house . . / 



Though much of this has now lost its meaning, two things are 

 clear: that the splendor of the blank verse in Tmnhurlaine had 

 already taken the town and left at least one of Marlowe's competi- 

 tors sick at heart; and that his bold speculative attitude toward 

 religion was being branded as 'atheism' by the bigoted orthodoxy of 

 the age. Although Marlowe's name is not precisely mentioned — 

 just as Shakespeare's is not in the Groatszvorth passage — the pun 

 implied in 'Merlin's (Marlin's") race' seems as obvious as that 



^ References for the passages cited in the following pages are generally 

 to the standard modern editions. Where these do not employ the original 

 spelling and punctuation — as in Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Jonson, 

 Hazlitt's Dodsley — the quotations ordinarily follow modern usage. 



Many of the allusions to Marlowe liave been noted by earlier students. 

 Particular acknowledgment is due to the manuscript memoranda of Malone 

 and James Broughton, Dyce's Account of Marlowe and his Writings (1850), 

 E. Koeppel's Marloive im Spiegel des Drauias (Anglistische Forschungen 20, 

 1906), and Alexander Tille's Faustsplitter (1900). 



^ Marlin is the name by which the poet is known in most of the Cambridge 

 records. 



