370 



NOTES AND QUERIES. 



[No. 53. 



either separately or conjointly by Greene, Marlowe, 

 Lodge, and Peele." 



An anonymous writer commits himself to no- 

 tliinir, and I should not have noticed the above 

 but that they illustrate my position. In the pas- 

 sage first cited, if the writer mean " as a writer for 

 the stase in print,'" it proves nothing; but if the 

 words " in print " are not intended to be so con- 

 nected, the assertion cannot be proved, and many 

 " competent critics " will tell him it is most impro- 

 bable. The assertion of the second quotation is 

 simply untrue ; Mr. Knight has not admitted what 

 is stated therein, and if I recollect right, an Edin- 

 burgh Reviewer has concurred with him in judg- 

 ment. Neither of these, I presume, will be called 

 incompetent. I cannot suppose that either as- 

 sertion would have been made but for the spirit to 

 which I have alluded ; for no cause was ever the 

 better for allegations that could not be maintained. 

 In some former papers which you did me the 

 honour to publish, I gave it incidentally as my 

 opinion that Marlowe was the author of the Taming 

 of a Shrew. I have since learned, tiirough Mr. 

 Halliwell, that Mr. Dyce is confident, from the 

 style, that he was not. Had I the opportunity, I 

 might ask IMr. Dyce "which style?" That of 

 the' passages I cited as being identical with passages 

 in Marlowe's acknowledgetl plays will not, I pre- 

 sume, be disputed ; and'of that of such scenes as 

 the one between Sander and the tailor, I am as 

 confident as IMr. Dyce : it is the style rather of 

 Shakspeare than Marlowe. In other respects, I 

 learn that the kind of evidence that is considered 

 by Mr. Dyce good to sustain the claim of Marlowe 

 to the authorship of the Contention and the True 

 Tragedy, is not admissible in support of his claim 

 to the Taming of a Shrew. I sliall take another 

 opportunity of showing that the very passages cited 

 by Mr. Dyce from the two first-named of these 

 plays will support my view of the case, at least as 

 well as his ; doing no more now than simply re- 

 cordinsi an opinion that Marlowe was a follower 

 and iniitator of Shakspeare. I do not know that 

 I am at present in a position to maintain this 

 opinion bv argument; but I can, at all events, 

 show on w'hat exceedingly slight grounds the con- 

 trary opinion has been founded. 



I have already called attention to the fiict, that 

 the impression of Marlowe's being an earlier writer 

 than Shakspeare, was founded solely u])on the 

 circumstance that his plays were printed at an 

 earlier date. That nothing could be more falla- 

 cious than this conclusion, the fact that many of 

 Shakspeare's earliest plays were not printed at all 

 until after his death is sufficient to evince. The 

 motive for withholding Shakspeare's plays from the 

 ])ress is as easily understood as that tor publishing 

 Marlowe's. Thus stood the question when Mr. 

 Collier approached the subject. Meanwhile it 

 should be borne in mind, that not a syllable of 



evidence has been advanced to show that Shak- 

 speare could not have written the First pari of the 

 Contention and the True Tragedy, if not the later 

 forms of Henry VL, Hamlet and Pericles in their 

 earliest forms, if not Timon of Athens, which I 

 think is also an early play revised. Love's Labour s 

 Lost, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Sec, all of 

 which I should place at least seven years distance 

 from plays which I think were acted about 1594 

 or 1595. I now pi-oceed to give the kernel of 

 Mr. Collier's argument, omitting nothing that is 

 really important to the question : — 



" ' Give me the man ' (says Nash) ' wliose exteniporal 

 vein, in any humour, will excel our greatest art masturs' 

 deliberate thoughts.' 



" Green, in 1588, says he had been 'had in derision * 

 by ' two gentlemen poets ' because I could not make 

 mv verses get on the statje in tragical hiiskii-.s, every 

 word filling the mouth like the faburdcn of Bow-hell, 

 daring Gcd out of heaven with that atheist tambur- 

 lane, or blaspheming with the mad priest of the sun.' 

 Farther on he laughs at the ' prophetical spirits ' of 

 those ' who set the end of scholarism in an Eiiylish 

 blunk-verse.' 



" Marlowe took his. degree of Master of Arts in the 

 very year when Nash was unable to do so, &c. 



" I thus arrive at the conclusion, that Christopher 

 Marlowe was our first poet who used blank-verse in 

 dramatic compositions performed in public theatres." — 

 Hiit. of Dramatic Poetry, vol. iii. pp. 110, 111, 112. 



This is literally all ; and, I ask, can any " conclu- 

 sion" be much more inconclusive? Yet Mr. Col- 

 lier has been so far misled by the deference paid 

 to him on the strength of his unquestionably great 

 services, and appears to have been so fully per- 

 suaded of the correctness of his deduction, that he 

 has since referred to as a jwoved fact what is really 

 nothing more than an exceedingly loose conjecture. 

 Of the two editors whose names I have men- 

 tioned, Mr. Knight's hitherto expressed opinions 

 in reference to the early stage of Shakspeare's 

 career in a great measure coincide with mine ; and 

 I have no reason to suppose that it is otherwise 

 than an open qtiestion to Mr. Halliwell. For 

 satisfivctory proof in support of my position, time 

 only, I firndy believe, is required ; but the first 

 stage in everv case is to remove the false conclu- 

 sion that has been drawn, to weaken its impression, 

 and to reduce it to its true value ; and that I have 

 endeavoured to do in the present paper. In con- 

 clusion, I take the opportunity of saying, as the 

 circumstance in some degree bears xipon the pre- 

 sent question, that the evidence in support of the 

 priority of Shakspeare's Taming of the Shrew to 

 the so-called older play which 1 withheld, together 

 with what I have collected since my last paper on 

 the subject, is I think stronger even than that 

 which I communicated. Samubl Hickson. 



October, 1850. 



