Notes and Queries, Number 53, November 2, 1850 | Page 2

be so connected, the assertion cannot be proved, and many "competent
critics" will tell him it is most improbable. The assertion of the second
quotation is simply untrue; Mr. Knight has not admitted what is stated
therein, and if I recollect right, an Edinburgh Reviewer has concurred
with him in judgment. Neither of these, I presume, will be called
incompetent. I cannot suppose that either assertion 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, through Mr. Halliwell, that
Mr. Dyce is confident, from the style, that he was not. Had I the
opportunity, I might ask Mr. Dyce "which style?" That of the passages
I cited as being identical with passages in Marlowe's acknowledged
plays will not, I presume, be disputed; and of that of such scenes as the
one between Sander and the tailor, I am as confident as Mr. 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 shall 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 recording an opinion that Marlowe was a follower and
imitator of Shakspeare. I do not know that I am at present in a position
to maintain this opinion by argument; but I can, at all events, show on
what exceedingly slight grounds the contrary opinion has been
founded.
I have already called attention to the fact, that the impression of
Marlowe's being an earlier writer than Shakspeare, was founded solely
upon the circumstance that his plays were printed at an earlier date.
That nothing could be more fallacious 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 press is as easily understood as that for 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 Shakspeare could not have
written the First part of the Contention and the _True Tragedy_, if not
the later forms of _Henry VI._, 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_, &c.,
all of which I should place at least seven years distance from plays
which I think were acted about 1594 or 1595. I now proceed to give the
kernel of Mr. Collier's argument, omitting nothing that is really
important to the question:--
"'Give me the man' (says Nash) 'whose extemporal vein, in any humour,
will excel our greatest _art masters_' deliberate thoughts.'
"Green, in 1588, says he had been 'had in derision' by 'two gentlemen
poets' because I could not make my verses get on the stage in tragical
buskins, every word filling the mouth like the faburden of Bow-bell,
daring God out of heaven with that atheist tamburlane, 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 _English
blank-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."--_Hist. of Dramatic Poetry_, vol. iii. pp. 110, 111,
112.
This is literally all; and, I ask, can any "conclusion" be much more
inconclusive? Yet Mr. Collier 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 persuaded of the correctness of his
deduction, that he has since referred to as a proved fact what is really
nothing more than an exceedingly loose conjecture.
Of the two editors whose names I have mentioned, 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