r," can hardly be now a matter of debate among
competent judges. The crucial difficulty of criticism in this matter is
to determine, if indeed we should not rather say to conjecture, the
authorship of the humorous scenes in prose, showing as they generally do
a power of comparatively high and pure comic realism to which nothing in
the acknowledged works of any pre-Shakespearean dramatist is even
remotely comparable. Yet, especially in the original text of these
scenes as they stand unpurified by the ultimate revision of Shakespeare,
there are tones and touches which recall rather the clownish horseplay
and homely ribaldry of his predecessors than anything in the lighter
interludes of his very earliest plays. We find the same sort of thing
which we find in their writings, only better done than they usually do
it, rather than such work as Shakespeare's a little worse done than
usual. And even in the final text of the tragic or metrical scenes the
highest note struck is always, with one magnificent and unquestionable
exception, rather in the key of Marlowe at his best than of Shakespeare
while yet in great measure his disciple.

It is another commonplace of criticism to affirm that Marlowe had not a
touch of comic genius, not a gleam of wit in him or a twinkle of humor:
but it is an indisputable fact that he had. In "The Massacre at Paris,"
the soliloquy of the soldier lying in wait for the minion of Henri III.
has the same very rough but very real humor as a passage in the
"Contention" which was cancelled by the reviser. The same hand is
unmistakable in both these broad and boyish outbreaks of unseemly but
undeniable fun: and if we might wish it rather less indecorous, we must
admit that the tradition which denies all sense of humor and all
instinct of wit to the first great poet of England is no less unworthy
of serious notice or elaborate refutation than the charges and calumnies
of an informer who was duly hanged the year after Marlowe's death. For
if the same note of humor is struck in an undoubted play of Marlowe's
and in a play of disputed authorship, it is evident that the rest of the
scene in the latter play must also be Marlowe's. And in that
unquestionable case the superb and savage humor of the terribly comic
scenes which represent with such rough magnificence of realism the riot
of Jack Cade and his ruffians through the ravaged streets of London must
be recognizable as no other man's than his. It is a pity we h