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 note to the strong advance of that
better genius who came to lead him into the loftier path of Marlowe.
There is not a single passage in _Titus Andronicus_ more Shakespearean
than the magnificent quatrain of Tamora upon the eagle and the little
birds; but the rest of the scene in which we come upon it, and the whole
scene preceding, are in blank verse of more variety and vigour than we
find in the baser parts of the play; and these if any scenes we may
surely attribute to Shakespeare. Again, the last battle of Talbot seems
to me as undeniably the master's work as the scene in the Temple Gardens
or the courtship of Margaret by Suffolk; this latter indeed, full as it
is of natural and vivid grace, may perhaps not be beyond the highest
reach of one or two among the rivals of his earliest years of work; while
as we are certain that he cannot have written the opening scene, that he
was at any stage of his career incapable of it, so may we believe as well
as hope that he is guiltless of any complicity in that detestable part of
the play which attempts to defile the memory of the virgin saviour of her
country. {33} In style it is not, I think, above the range of George
Peele at his best: and to have written even the last of those scenes can