ere was one of the greatest dramatists of the world who was
obliged by fashion to use a previously perfected form of verse. The state
of Moliere was undoubtedly the more gracious; but the splendour of
Marlowe's uncut diamonds of poetry is the more wonderful.

The characteristics of this strange and interesting school may be summed up
briefly, but are of the highest importance in literary history. Unlike
their nearest analogues, the French romantics of the 1830 type, they were
all of academic education, and had even a decided contempt (despite their
Bohemian way of life) for unscholarly innovators. They manifested (except
in Marlowe's fortuitous and purely genial discovery of the secret of blank
verse) a certain contempt for form, and never, at least in drama, succeeded
in mastering it. But being all, more or less, men of genius, and having the
keenest sense of poetry, they supplied the dry bones of the precedent
dramatic model with blood and breath, with vigour and variety, which not
merely informed but transformed it. _David and Bethsabe_, _Doctor Faustus_,
_Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay_, are chaotic enough, but they are of the
chaos that precedes cosmic development. The almost insane bombast that
marks the whole school has (as has been noticed) the character of the
shrieks and gesticulations of healthy childhood, and the insensibility to
the really comic which also marks them is of a similar kind. Every one
knows how natural it is to childhood to appreciate bad jokes, how seldom a
child sees a good one. Marlowe and his crew, too (the comparison has no
doubt often been used before), were of the brood of Otus and Ephialtes, who
grew so rapidly and in so disorderly a fashion that it was necessary for
the gods to make an end of them. The universe probably lost little, and it
certainly gained something.

Side by side with this learned, extravagant, gifted, ill-regulated school,
there was slowly growing up a very different one, which was to inherit all
the gifts of the University Wits, and to add to them the gifts of measure
and proportion. The early work of the actor school of English dramatists is
a difficult subject to treat in any fashion, and a particularly difficult
subject to treat shortly. Chronology, an important aid, helps us not very
much, though such help as she does give has been as a rule neglected by
historians, so that plays before 1590 (which may be taken roughly as the
dividing date), and plays after it hav