The two following lines—

are the same as those in King John—

and again the Moor’s exclamation,

is the same as Cleopatra’s—

Eleazar’s sarcasm,

shews the utmost virulence of smothered spleen; and his concluding strain of malignant exultation has been but tamely imitated by Young’s Zanga.

It may be worth while to observe, for the sake of the curious, that many of Marlowe’s most sounding lines consist of monosyllables, or nearly so. The repetition of Eleazar’s taunt to the Cardinal, retorting his own words upon him, ‘Spaniard or Moor, the saucy slave shall die’—may perhaps have suggested Falconbridge’s spirited reiteration of the phrase—‘And hang a calve’s skin on his recreant limbs.’

I do not think the rich Jew of Malta so characteristic a specimen of this writer’s powers. It has not the same fierce glow of passion or expression. It is extreme in act, and outrageous in plot and catastrophe; but it has not the same vigorous filling up. The author seems to have relied on the horror inspired by the subject, and the national disgust excited against the principal character, to rouse the feelings of the audience: for the rest, it is a tissue of gratuitous, unprovoked, and incredible atrocities, which are committed, one upon the back of the other, by the parties concerned, without motive, passion, or object. There are, notwithstanding, some striking passages in it, as Barabbas’s description of the bravo, Philia Borzo^[18]; the relation of his own unaccountable villainies to Ithamore; his rejoicing over his recovered jewels ‘as the morning lark sings over her young;’ and the backwardness he declares in himself to forgive the Christian injuries that are offered him,^[19] which may have given the idea of one of Shylock’s speeches, where he ironically disclaims any enmity to the merchants on the same account. It is perhaps hardly fair to compare the Jew of Malta with the Merchant of Venice; for it is evident, that Shakespear’s genius shews to as much advantage in knowledge of character, in variety and stage-effect, as it does in point of general humanity.

Edward II. is, according to the modern standard of composition, Marlowe’s best play. It is written with few offences against the common rules, and in a succession of smooth and flowing lines. The poet however succeeds less in the voluptuous and effeminate descriptions which he here attempts, than in the more dreadful and violent bursts of passion. Edward II. is drawn with historic truth, but without much dramatic effect. The management of the plot is feeble and desultory; little interest is excited in the various turns of fate; the characters are too worthless, have too little energy, and their punishment is, in general, too well deserved, to excite our commiseration; so that this play will bear, on the whole, but a distant comparison with Shakespear’s Richard II. in conduct, power, or effect. But the death of Edward II. in Marlow’s tragedy, is certainly superior to that of Shakespear’s King; and in heart-breaking distress, and the sense of human weakness, claiming pity from utter helplessness and conscious misery, is not surpassed by any writer whatever.

There are some excellent passages scattered up and down. The description of the King and Gaveston looking out of the palace window, and laughing at the courtiers as they pass, and that of the different spirit shewn by the lion and the forest deer, when wounded, are among the best. The Song ‘Come, live with me and be my love,’ to which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote an answer, is Marlowe’s.

Heywood I shall mention next, as a direct contrast to Marlowe in everything but the smoothness of his verse. As Marlowe’s imagination glows like a furnace, Heywood’s is a gentle, lambent flame that purifies without consuming. His manner is simplicity itself. There is nothing supernatural, nothing startling, or terrific. He makes use of the commonest circumstances of every-day life, and of the easiest tempers, to shew the workings, or rather the inefficacy of the passions, the vis inertiæ of tragedy. His incidents strike from their very familiarity, and the distresses he paints invite our sympathy, from the calmness and resignation with which they are borne. The pathos might be deemed purer from its having no mixture of turbulence or vindictiveness in it; and in proportion as the sufferers are made to deserve a better fate. In the midst of the most untoward reverses and cutting injuries, good-nature and good sense keep their accustomed sway. He describes men’s errors with tenderness, and their duties only with zeal, and the heightenings of a poetic fancy. His style is equally natural, simple, and unconstrained. The dialogue (bating the verse), is such as might be uttered in ordinary conversation. It is beautiful prose put into heroic measure. It is not so much that he uses the common English idiom for everything (for that I think the most poetical and impassioned of our elder dramatists do equally), but the simplicity of the characters, and the equable flow of the sentiments do not require or suffer it to be warped from the tone of level speaking, by figurative expressions, or hyperbolical allusions. A few scattered exceptions occur now and then, where the hectic flush of passion forces them from the lips, and they are not the worse for being rare. Thus, in the play called A Woman killed with Kindness, Wendoll, when reproached by Mrs. Frankford with his obligations to her husband, interrupts her hastily, by saying

And further on, Frankford, when doubting his wife’s fidelity, says, with less feeling indeed, but with much elegance of fancy,

So also, when returning to his house at midnight to make the fatal discovery, he exclaims,

It is the reality of things present to their imaginations, that makes these writers so fine, so bold, and yet so true in what they describe. Nature lies open to them like a book, and was not to them ‘invisible, or dimly seen’ through a veil of words and filmy abstractions. Such poetical ornaments are however to be met with at considerable intervals in this play, and do not disturb the calm serenity and domestic simplicity of the author’s style. The conclusion of Wendoll’s declaration of love to Mrs. Frankford may serve as an illustration of its general merits, both as to thought and diction.

The affecting remonstrance of Frankford to his wife, and her repentant agony at parting with him, are already before the public, in Mr. Lamb’s Specimens. The winding up of this play is rather awkwardly managed, and the moral is, according to established usage, equivocal. It required only Frankford’s reconciliation to his wife, as well as his forgiveness of her, for the highest breach of matrimonial duty, to have made a Woman Killed with Kindness a complete anticipation of the Stranger. Heywood, however, was in that respect but half a Kotzebue!—The view here given of country manners is truly edifying. As in the higher walk of tragedy we see the manners and moral sentiments of kings and nobles of former times, here we have the feuds and amiable qualities of country ‘squires and their relatives; and such as were the rulers, such were their subjects. The frequent quarrels and ferocious habits of private life are well exposed in the fatal rencounter between Sir Francis Acton and Sir Charles Mountford about a hawking match, in the ruin and rancorous persecution of the latter in consequence, and in the hard, unfeeling, cold-blooded treatment he receives in his distress from his own relations, and from a fellow of the name of Shafton. After reading the sketch of this last character, who is introduced as a mere ordinary personage, the representative of a class, without any preface or apology, no one can doubt the credibility of that of Sir Giles Over-reach, who is professedly held up (I should think almost unjustly) as a prodigy of grasping and hardened selfishness. The influence of philosophy and prevalence of abstract reasoning, if it has done nothing for our poetry, has done, I should hope, something for our manners. The callous declaration of one of these unconscionable churls,

might have been taken as a motto for the good old times in general, and with a very few reservations, if Heywood has not grossly libelled them.—Heywood’s plots have little of artifice or regularity of design to recommend them. He writes on carelessly, as it happens, and trusts to Nature, and a certain happy tranquillity of spirit, for gaining the favour of the audience. He is said, besides attending to his duties as an actor, to have composed regularly a sheet a day. This may account in some measure for the unembarrassed facility of his style. His own account makes the number of his writings for the stage, or those in which he had a main hand, upwards of 200. In fact, I do not wonder at any quantity that an author is said to have written; for the more a man writes, the more he can write.

The same remarks will apply, with certain modifications, to other remaining works of this writer, the Royal King and Loyal Subject, a Challenge for Beauty, and the English Traveller. The barb of misfortune is sheathed in the mildness of the writer’s temperament, and the story jogs on very comfortably, without effort or resistance, to the euthanasia of the catastrophe. In two of these, the person principally aggrieved survives, and feels himself none the worse for it. The most splendid passage in Heywood’s comedies is the account of Shipwreck by Drink, in the English Traveller, which was the foundation of Cowley’s Latin Poem, Naufragium Joculare.

The names of Middleton and Rowley, with which I shall conclude this Lecture, generally appear together as two writers who frequently combined their talents in the production of joint-pieces. Middleton (judging from their separate works) was ‘the more potent spirit’ of the two; but they were neither of them equal to some others. Rowley appears to have excelled in describing a certain amiable quietness of disposition and disinterested tone of morality, carried almost to a paradoxical excess, as in his Fair Quarrel, and in the comedy of A Woman never Vexed, which is written, in many parts, with a pleasing simplicity and naiveté equal to the novelty of the conception. Middleton’s style was not marked by any peculiar quality of his own, but was made up, in equal proportions, of the faults and excellences common to his contemporaries. In his Women Beware Women, there is a rich marrowy vein of internal sentiment, with fine occasional insight into human nature, and cool cutting irony of expression. He is lamentably deficient in the plot and denouement of the story. It is like the rough draught of a tragedy, with a number of fine things thrown in, and the best made use of first; but it tends to no fixed goal, and the interest decreases, instead of increasing, as we read on, for want of previous arrangement and an eye to the whole. We have fine studies of heads, a piece of richly-coloured drapery, ‘a foot, an hand, an eye from Nature drawn, that’s worth a history’; but the groups are ill disposed, nor are the figures proportioned to each other or the size of the canvas. The author’s power is in the subject, not over it; or he is in possession of excellent materials, which he husbands very ill. This character, though it applies more particularly to Middleton, might be applied generally to the age. Shakespear alone seemed to stand over his work, and to do what he pleased with it. He saw to the end of what he was about, and with the same faculty of lending himself to the impulses of Nature and the impression of the moment, never forgot that he himself had a task to perform, nor the place which each figure ought to occupy in his general design.—The characters of Livia, of Bianca, of Leantio and his Mother, in the play of which I am speaking, are all admirably drawn. The art and malice of Livia shew equal want of principle and acquaintance with the world; and the scene in which she holds the mother in suspense, while she betrays the daughter into the power of the profligate Duke, is a master-piece of dramatic skill. The proneness of Bianca to tread the primrose path of pleasure, after she has made the first false step, and her sudden transition from unblemished virtue to the most abandoned vice, in which she is notably seconded by her mother-in-law’s ready submission to the temptations of wealth and power, form a true and striking picture. The first intimation of the intrigue that follows, is given in a way that is not a little remarkable for simplicity and acuteness. Bianca says,

To which the more experienced mother answers,

It turns out however, that he had been looking at them, and not ‘at the public good.’ The moral of this tragedy is rendered more impressive from the manly, independent character of Leantio in the first instance, and the manner in which he dwells, in a sort of doting abstraction, on his own comforts, in being possessed of a beautiful and faithful wife. As he approaches his own house, and already treads on the brink of perdition, he exclaims with an exuberance of satisfaction not to be restrained—

This dream is dissipated by the entrance of Bianca and his Mother.

The Witch of Middleton is his most remarkable performance; both on its own account, and from the use that Shakespear has made of some of the characters and speeches in his Macbeth. Though the employment which Middleton has given to Hecate and the rest, in thwarting the purposes and perplexing the business of familiar and domestic life, is not so grand or appalling as the more stupendous agency which Shakespear has assigned them, yet it is not easy to deny the merit of the first invention to Middleton, who has embodied the existing superstitions of the time, respecting that anomalous class of beings, with a high spirit of poetry, of the most grotesque and fanciful kind. The songs and incantations made use of are very nearly the same. The other parts of this play are not so good; and the solution of the principal difficulty, by Antonio’s falling down a trap-door, most lame and impotent. As a specimen of the similarity of the preternatural machinery, I shall here give one entire scene.

Fire. They are all going a birding to-night. They talk of fowls i’ th’ air, that fly by day, I’m sure they’ll be a company of foul sluts there to-night. If we have not mortality affeared, I’ll be hang’d, for they are able to putrify it, to infect a whole region. She spies me now.

Fire. A little sweeter than some of you; or a dunghill were too good for me.

Fire. Nineteen, and all brave plump ones; besides six lizards, and three serpentine eggs.

Fire. I have some mar-martin, and man-dragon.

Fire. Here’s pannax, too. I thank thee; my pan akes, I am sure, with kneeling down to cut ’em.

Fire. Every blade of ’em, or I’m a moon-calf, mother.

Fire. Aloft, quoth you! I would you would break your neck once, that I might have all quickly (Aside).—Hark, hark, mother! They are above the steeple already, flying over your head with a noise of musicians.

Fire. Well, mother, I thank you for your kindness. You must be gamboling i’ th’ air, and leave me here like a fool and a mortal.

The Incantation scene at the cauldron, is also the original of that in Macbeth, and is in like manner introduced by the Duchess’s visiting the Witches’ Habitation.

Fire. I know as well as can be when my mother’s mad, and our great cat angry; for one spits French then, and th’ other spits Latin.

Fire. They fare but too well when they come hither. They ate up as much t’ other night as would have made me a good conscionable pudding.

Fire. All at hand, forsooth.

Fire. Here’s bear-breech and lizard’s brain, forsooth.

Fire. Whereabouts, sweet mother?

Fire. You shall have acopus, forsooth.

Fire. A tune! ’Tis to the tune of damnation then. I warrant you that song hath a villainous burthen.