A Study of Shakespeare | Page 9

extant, and which cannot be classed with such as these.
The poets or rhymesters who supplied them had already seen good to
clip the cumbrous and bedraggled skirts of those dreary verses, run all
to seed and weed, which jingled their thin bells at the tedious end of
fourteen weary syllables; and for this curtailment of the shambling and
sprawling lines which had hitherto done duty as tragic metre some
credit may be due to these obscure purveyors of forgotten ware for the
second epoch of our stage: if indeed, as I presume, we may suppose
that this reform, such as it was, had begun before the time of Marlowe;
otherwise, no doubt, little credit would be due to men who with so high
an example before them were content simply to snip away the tags and
fringes, to patch the seams and tatters, of the ragged coat of rhyme
which they might have exchanged for that royal robe of heroic verse
wherewith he had clothed the ungrown limbs of limping and lisping
tragedy. But if these also may be reckoned among his precursors, the
dismissal from stage service of the dolorous and drudging metre

employed by the earliest school of theatrical rhymesters must be taken
to mark a real step in advance; and in that case we possess at least a
single example of the rhyming tragedies which had their hour between
the last plays written wholly or partially in ballad metre and the first
plays written in blank verse. The tragedy of _Selimus, Emperor of the
Turks_, published in 1594, {30} may then serve to indicate this brief
and obscure period of transition. Whole scenes of this singular play are
written in rhyming iambics, some in the measure of Don Juan, some in
the measure of Venus and Adonis. The couplets and quatrains so much
affected and so reluctantly abandoned by Shakespeare after the first
stage of his dramatic progress are in no other play that I know of
diversified by this alternate variation of sesta with ottava rima. This
may have been an exceptional experiment due merely to the caprice of
one eccentric rhymester; but in any case we may assume it to mark the
extreme limit, the ultimate development of rhyming tragedy after the
ballad metre had been happily exploded. The play is on other grounds
worth attention as a sign of the times, though on poetical grounds it is
assuredly worth none. Part of it is written in blank verse, or at least in
rhymeless lines; so that after all it probably followed in the wake of
Tamburlaine, half adopting and half rejecting the innovations of that
fiery reformer, who wrought on the old English stage no less a miracle
than Hernani on the French stage in the days of our fathers. That
Selimus was published four years later than Tamburlaine, in the year
following the death of Marlowe, proves of course nothing as to the date
of its production; and even if it was written and acted in the year of its
publication, it undoubtedly in the main represents the work of a prior
era to the reformation of the stage by Marlowe. The level regularity of
its unrhymed scenes is just like that of the weaker portions of Titus
Andronicus and the _First Part of King Henry the Sixth_--the opening
scene, for example, of either play. With Andronicus it has also in
common the quality of exceptional monstrosity, a delight in the parade
of mutilation as well as of massacre. It seems to me possible that the
same hand may have been at work on all three plays; for that Marlowe's
is traceable in those parts of the two retouched by Shakespeare which
bear no traces of his touch is a theory to the full as absurd as that which
would impute to Shakespeare the charge of their entire composition.

The revolution effected by Marlowe naturally raised the same cry
against its author as the revolution effected by Hugo. That Shakespeare
should not at once have enlisted under his banner is less inexplicable
than it may seem. He was naturally addicted to rhyme, though if we put
aside the Sonnets we must admit that in rhyme he never did anything
worth Marlowe's _Hero and Leander_: he did not, like Marlowe, see at
once that it must be reserved for less active forms of poetry than the
tragic drama; and he was personally, it seems, in opposition to
Marlowe and his school of academic playwrights--the band of bards in
which Oxford and Cambridge were respectively and so respectably
represented by Peele and Greene. But in his very first plays, comic or
tragic or historic, we can see the collision and conflict of the two
influences; his evil angel, rhyme, yielding step by step and note by