Poetical works of Robert Greene; and Christopher Marlowe

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 186? Excerpt: ...is loosely called the Elizabethan drama. The whole period it occupied was about half a century; and, considering how much was accomplished within that time, every step of the progress, and each individual's share in it, becomes of importance. Yet there is hardly any portion of our literary annals in which greater confusion prevails; and Peele and Massinger, Kyd and Webster, Greene and Ben Jonson, who were really distant from each other, are commonly mixed up together, as if, instead of forming an interlinked series, they were all writing simultaneously. It might be a question of minor biographical interest, whether Marlowe was a little before Shakspeare, or Shakspeare a little before First printed in 1590. t Theatrum Poetarum. Marlowe; but it is a question of a very different order of interest, whether the weighty versification of Tamburlaine preceded or followed the delicate melody of the Midsummer Night's Dream. Dates are here essential to enable us to trace the course of our dramatic poetry from its source to that point where the stream is at its full. Marlowe is close to the spring; to him is ascribed, on apparently valid grounds, the first use of blank verse in dramatic composition; and we must, therefore, treat him as a poet who struck out a path for himself, and not as a follower of Shakspeare. Indeed, it may be said that Marlowe had closed his account not only with the stage, but with all human affairs, before Shakspeare was known as an original dramatist. At all events, it is certain that the first notice we have of Shakspeare was published only a few months before the death of Marlowe, and that it does not recognise him even as a maker of plays of his own, but as an adapter of the plays of others, including some of Marlowe's amongst them. Philips ...