_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.