affected by that of Marlowe's hero Tamburlaine, a character
to which the poet had given a passionate life and an energy that made
him more than human. In other ways less easy to define, Shakespeare
must have been stimulated by Marlowe's fire. The latter's greatest
tragedies, _Tamburlaine_, _Dr. Faustus_, and _Edward II_, contain
poetry so beautiful, feeling so intense, and a promise of future
achievement so remarkable, that his early death may fairly be said to
have deprived English literature of a genius worthy of comparison with
that of Shakespeare himself.

Although Thomas Kyd (1558-1594) was far from the equal of Marlowe, he
was a playwright of real ability and one whose tragedies were unusually
popular. Influenced greatly by Seneca, he brought to its climax the
'tragedy of blood'--a type of drama in which ungovernable passions of
lust and revenge lead to atrocious crimes and end in gruesome and
appalling murders. His famous _Spanish Tragedy_ was the forerunner of
many similar plays, of which _Titus Andronicus_ was one. He probably
wrote the original play of _Hamlet_, which was elevated by Shakespeare
out of its atmosphere of blood and horror into the highest realms of
thought and poetry.

John Lyly (c. 1554-1606) was a master in an {33} entirely different
field, that of highly artificial comedy. He brought court comedy to a
hitherto unattained perfection of form and style, and in his best work,
_Endymion_, he displayed a lovely delicacy of thought and expression
which has kept his reputation secure. He is best known, however, for
his prose romance, _Euphues_, which gave its name to the style of which
it was the climax. Euphuism is a manner of writing marked by elaborate
antithesis and alliteration, and ornamented by fantastic similes drawn
from a mass of legendary lore concerning plants and animals.[3] This
style, which nowadays seems labored and inartistic, was excessively
admired by the Elizabethans. Shakespeare imitated it to some extent in
_Love's Labour's Lost_, and parodied it in Falstaff's speech to Prince
Hal, _I Henry IV_, II, iv. Several of Shakespeare's earlier comedies
show Lyly's influence for good and ill--ill, in that it made for
artificiality and strained conceits; good, in that it made for
perfection of dramatic form and refinement of expression.

+The Masque+.--Somewhat apart from the main current of dramatic
evolution is the development of the masque, which became extremely
popular