156 C. F. Tucker Brooke, 



The figure of Cade himself is a masterpiece which could never 

 have emerged from the brain of an essentially " comic " writer. 

 Instead of the buffoon and demagogue that one would expect, one 

 finds a colossus in whose character grandeur and pathos are continually 

 getting the better of boorishness — a giant peasant type near of kin 

 to Tamburlaine, who seems restrained only by the limitations of the 

 historic plot from snapping the bonds of the commonplace and 

 soaring with the Scythian shepherd into the heights of poetry and 

 heroism. That the Cade scenes could have been written by Shake- 

 speare at the early period at which they were written appears simply 

 impossible in the light of what we know of that poet's comic 

 method in such contemporary plays as Love's Labor's Lost and The 

 Tieo Gentlemen of Verona. That the scenes in question were moulded 

 at the same time as the rest of the original play, of which they form an 

 integral part, is, I think, unquestionable ; and it seems to me that in 

 spirit and character delineation they bear the strongest testimony 

 to Marlowe's authorship. 



3. Character. 



The Contention and True Tragedy contain twelve important 

 characters. Of these eight are conspicuous in the earlier play : Suf- 

 folk, Margaret, King Henry, Duke Humphrey, Cardinal Beaufort, 

 York, Warwick, and Jack Cade. Four of these, Humphrey, the 

 Cardinal, Suffolk, and Cade, die during the course of the earher 

 play ; and the remaining four are supplemented in the True Tragedy 

 by Richard, Edward, and Young Chfford, who, though all on the 

 stage in the last part of the Contention are not there psychologically 

 important. The True Tragedy introduces one new figure worthy 

 of study in Margaret's son. Prince Edward. 



If any deduction concerning the authorship of the plays is to be 

 drawn from their delineation of character, the final conclusion must 

 be based upon the treatment of these twelve figures. The character 

 of Cade has already been discussed. It seems to me unlike the work 

 of any known dramatist of the time except Marlowe. 



The other notable figures divide themselves into two or three 

 groups. Seven of them, the most memorable and the least altered 

 in Shakespeare's revision, represent the type of bold bad nobility 

 whose romantically egoistic and vindictive figures seem in Edward II 

 and The Massacre at Paris to have caught the imagination of Mar- 

 lowe to the exclusion of nearly everything else in history. Suffolk, 

 Warwick, the Cardinal, and Young Chfford form a group of over- 

 daring, remorseless, terrible, yet splendid peers comparable only 



