The Atithorship of " King Henry VI." ill 



Thus, we get the following sequence of plays : Massacre at Paris — • 

 Contention — True Tragedy — Edward II. Once this order is accepted, 

 the theory that the Contention and True Tragedy were written by an 

 imitator of Marlowe and not by Marlowe himself becomes indefen- 

 sible, since upholders of that theory would be obliged to assume that 

 the plagiarist first succeeded in introducing into the plays we are con- 

 sidering marvellous imitations of the spirit and language of Marlowe's 

 earlier dramas, such as Tamhurlaine, The Jew of Malta, and The 

 Massacre at Paris ; next that he himself composed other original 

 passages conspicuously suggestive of Marlowe's hand ; and then that 

 jMarlowe borrowed copiously from these passages in his later play 

 of Edward II. By this theory, one would have to assume such a 

 poetic identity between the two authors, each writing in the same 

 style, and each stealing from the other in the same manner, that 

 the two would constitute a kind of literary syndicate, To any one 

 who considers ]\Iarlowe's striking individuality and his aloofness 

 from all his dramatic contemporaries, no conception can well seem 

 more extravagant. 



5. Metrical evidence. 



The imperfect state in which the Contention and True Tragedy 

 are preserved in the eariiest editions of 1594/5 makes it impossible 

 to apply metrical tests to the solution of the problem of authorship 

 with even the doubtful authority which such tests possess in the 

 case of the works of Shakespeare. Yet, after allowing for the in- 

 conclusiveness of this evidence, the results obtained by tabulating 

 the various metrical criteria seem pretty strongly to suggest homo- 

 geneity of authorship between the Contention and True Tragedy 

 and the Marlovian plays of about the same date, while they point 

 yet more decisively to the fact that the Contention and True Tragedy 

 cannot have been written by the author of the new passages inserted 

 in the revised 2 and J Henry VI. 



Blank verse, as written by Marlowe, is a definitely decasyllabic 

 measure, in which the individual line is still unmistakeably the poetic 

 unit. Marlowe, therefore, avoids run-on hues, in which the division 

 of one verse from the next is obscured in the unity of sentence or 

 paragraph ; and double-ending lines, in which the normal ten-syllable 

 measure is varied by the addition of a more or less strongly stressed 

 eleventh syllable. These latter features, which give the impression 

 of colloquial ease, grew steadily more conspicuous, as dramatic verse 

 came in the later Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights to be re- 

 garded less as a medium for impassioned lyric declamation and more 



