TJic Reputation of CJivistoplicr Marlozvc. 357 



itselfe ; I therefore leaue vnto your learned censures, both the one 

 and the other.' Chettle. whose huml)ler path had not crossed 

 Marlowe's, and who feels bourgeois horror at the heretical notions 

 ascribed to him, yet reverences his learning and recognizes that he 

 is hardly one to be slightingly spoken of. The ceremonious epithet 

 'Gentleman' seems seldom to have been forgotten when he was 

 named ; and his contemporaries appear never to have remembered 

 that he was a cobbler's son.** 



His known acquaintances were men of worth and station, if 

 of advanced ideas. Kyd credits him with no worse associates 

 than Harriot, Warner, Royden, 'and some stationers in Paules 

 Churchyard.' His familiarity wnth Raleigh is well established; 

 his intimacy with Sir Thomas W'alsingham even better. The 

 words which Blount, one of the 'stationers in Paul's Churchyard,' 

 uses of Marlowe in dedicating Hero and Lcander (1598) to 

 Walsingham manifest that 'the parts of reckoning and worth' 

 which Marlowe's friends had found in him were still unashamedly 

 avowed five years after his death. 



li we discount Kyd's words, there is nothing to indicate on the 

 part of the poets and publishers who were Marlowe's associates 

 a sense that either his life or his death required apology. Concern- 

 ing the manner of his death, his acquaintances maintain a reticence 

 which is baffling to the biographer, but which is hardly compatible 

 with the idea that there was in it anything outrageously sordid or 

 spectacular." For Shakespeare Marlowe is 'Dead Shepherd,' for 



" There seems no justification for Fleay's suggestion that Greene is 

 thinking of Marlowe when he says in Menaphon: 'Whosoever descanted of 

 that love told you a Canterbury tale ; some prophetical fuUmouth, that, as 

 he were a Cobler's eldest son, would by the last tell where another's shoe 

 wrings.' (Fleay, Shakspcre, p. 99.) 



'° Commenting on the popularity of the contemporary murder play about 

 the year 1600, Hartley Coleridge (Introduction to Massinger and Ford in 

 The Old Dramatists ed., p. xii, note) remarked: 'The death of Marlow 

 might seem a tempting subject to a dramatist of the Domestic school; but 

 I have not seen or read of any previous to the short and recent attempt of 

 Mr. Home.' Dyce replies : 'Surely, it is no wonder that the dramatists of 

 those days did not endeavour to give additional publicity to the melancholy 

 and disgraceful fate of one who had been the most eminent among them.' 

 It may well be doubted whether all the dramatists would have been governed 

 by such a scruple if the actual facts had possessed a great melodramatic 

 appeal. 



