"But whiles I have a sword, a hand, a heart, I will not yield to any such upstart. You know my mind: come, uncle, let's away." The First Act ends here, and the Second Act carries the tale on, with like smoothness in the succession of events as of a single action, from the return of Gaveston in July, 1309. The Act opens with the younger Spenser and Baldock, servants of Gloucester newly dead, prepared to serve Gaveston upon his coming; with Gloucester's daughter, who is King Edward's niece, expectant of her promised husband; and King Edward at Tynemouth eager for the landing of his minion. Edward II. puts aside the danger of attack by France on Normandy as a trifle, asks the lords their devices for the shows that shall greet Gaveston, and sees their hate of Gaveston. The king defies them. Gaveston enters, to be fondled by the king. Scorned by the barons, he returns their scorn. Lancaster offering to stab Gaveston, the king cries, "Treason! treason! Where's the traitor?" Pembroke takes Gaveston by the throat and says, "Here, here!" While men come forward at the king's command to carry the favourite away in safety, Gaveston is wounded by young Mortimer. The scene ends in civil war afoot. Old Mortimer is taken by the Scots. Young Mortimer and Lancaster, in alternation of reproach, speak their minds to the king boldly, and quote to him the disgrace of England in the jig made by the Scots on Bannockburn, that battle of June, 1314, being ante-dated a few years that it may be cited as a climax to the tale of ruin. Left in impotent wrath, Edward is urged by his brother Kent, who has thus far steadily befriended him, to banish Gaveston. For Gaveston he casts away his brother's friendship, and Kent joins the barons. Edward defames and thrusts away the queen, but takes Spenser and Baldock into his service. Gaveston, escaped to Scarborough, is followed, taken prisoner, and condemned to death. King Edward sends the Earl of Arundel to beg that he may see Gaveston before he dies. The barons refuse till Pembroke offers to conduct him to the king and give him back. He is trusted to Pembroke's hands, but in the Third Act the Earl of Warwick seizes Gaveston. The elder Spenser brings four hundred men-at-arms to Edward, and young Spenser urges on the weak king counsels of defiance to the barons. Queen Isabel brings news to the king of the loss of Normandy, and is despatched to France with her son, Prince Edward. Arundel brings tidings of the death of Gaveston, seized by Warwick and beheaded (June 19, 1312). Edward vows vengeance, and adopts "Spenser, sweet Spenser " in Gaveston's place. A herald from the barons in arms demands the removal of this new favourite as the price of peace. Edward embraces Spenser, and then follows the great fight at Boroughbridge that sums up the results of omitted incidents in the Barons' War, and brings the date of action in the play to the sixteenth of March, 1322. The king is victorious, Warwick and Lancaster are sent to execution, and young Mortimer to the Tower. Queen Isabel with her son in France is seeking help for the deposition of Edward II., and Levune is sent with gold to bribe the lords of France and thwart her policy. At the beginning of the Fourth Act Edward's brother, the Earl of Kent, with the young Mortimer, escaped from the Tower, departs for France. They find Queen Isabella mourning for the failure of her efforts. There is no hope but in the sword : "The king will ne'er forsake his flatterers." In London Edward exults. He receives letters from Levune reporting that Queen Isabella, failing with the King of France, has gone with Sir John of Hainault, Edmund of Kent, and Mortimer to Flanders, "and as constant report goeth, they intend to give King Edward battle in England, sooner than he can look for them." Edward is ready for the fight, grieved only that his little boy is thus misled. The queen's force is at Orwell, with young Mortimer. It is victorious near Bristol. King Edward flies. His brother Edmund's heart turns back to him. The King's son is made Lord Warden of the realm. Edward, Spenser, and Baldock are taken from shelter in the abbey of Neath. King Edward must to Killingworth; his favourites, to prison and to death. The Fifth Act opens at Killingworth with the conflicting passions of Edward at his forced resignation of the crown. The discrowned king is then removed to Berkeley; the crown is taken away from Killingworth to Mortimer and Isabel; and the young prince, made king, is taken from the kindly care of his uncle Edmund, Earl of Kent, that Isabel and Mortimer may rule through him. The discrowned king, carried across country by rude attendants, is washed with puddle water, and has his beard shaven that he may not be known. His brother Edmund finds and pities him, and is taken prisoner that he may be carried to the court, which is where Mortimer and Isabel abide. Edward II.'s murder is planned by Mortimer, now at the height of his power. Edmund of Kent, brought before young Mortimer, is sent to execution, notwithstanding the pleading of his nephew, the fourteenyear-old King Edward III. Then follows the cruel murder of Edward II., after imprisonment for ten days in a dungeon that was the sink to which all filth of the castle ran. This brings the action to September, 1327. The vengeance of Edward III. is then represented as immediately following the flight and confession of one of the murderers, and the head of Mortimer is brought to the royal mourner, who has it placed upon the hearse of the dead king. In history, it was not until October, 1330, that Mortimer was seized at Nottingham Castle by Edward III. Parliament met on the twenty-sixth of November, Mortimer was impeached for misleading Queen Isabel and for the murder of the late king, for execution of the Earl of Kent, and for embezzlement of public money, and was hanged at Tyburn on the twenty-ninth of the same month. The action of the play required also that the execution of the Earl of Kent should come before the murder of the king. The kindly character of Edmund, Earl of Kent, who is alienated for a time only by his brother's infatuation for Gaveston, is all of Marlowe's shaping. The play is natural and consistent throughout in variety of circumstance. The levity of the French favourite is tempered by a real affection for King Edward. A few more touches were required to complete the indication of the character of Queen Isabel. It is clear that Marlowe meant to show the alienation of a wife's love when its fidelity was slighted, and the growth of an honest liking for young Mortimer to closer intimacy through their alliance against Gaveston, by whom the king's love was engrossed. But there is some want of gradation in that part of the character-painting. Throughout there is an artistic treatment of this tale of twenty years which gives to it the oneness of a day. There is throughout also a sense of nature in the light and shade of character that lifts Marlowe's "Edward II." high above all earlier plays of its kind. There is advance even in the diction and in the handling of the verse. All trace is gone of the extravagance of "Tamburlaine." The blank verse has gained in ease, has more variety of power, and many a passage of pure English in this play is so modulated that it is in tune with the best music of a later generation that had built on the foundations Marlowe laid. "Edward II." comes to us as Marlowe wrote it, free from those interpolations which clouded the design in "Faustus ;" and it may be said that Marlowe gave by it his second impulse to the forward movement of the English drama. "Tamburlaine" led the way to a vigorous use of blank verse. Throughout "Edward II.”—in blank verse, in shaping of the lines, the plot, the characters-art was based on nature, and Shakespeare, watching with an artist's eye the work of the dramatists about him, received from this play of Marlowe's his most fruitful lesson. Marlowe would have gone forward had he lived-far forward, had he cared to make the best use of his powers. But his age was only twenty-nine years, three months, and some days, when he was killed in the drunken brawl at Deptford. Then there lived none but Shakespeare who could carry on his work, and, starting from the vantage-ground that Marlowe reached, advance the player's imagery to the floor of heaven. Other There are two works in which Marlowe had part, both of the finest touch, "The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage," written with Thomas Nash; and the poem of " Hero and Leander," finished by George Chapman. There are many lost plays of the early dramatists. Some of them are wholly lost, and some are extant without clear evidence to show who were their authors. Opinion is not evidence. Various and mutable, it is worth little regard, and is usually of least value when most confident, because confidence in doubtful things means want of judgment. But in the two parts of "Tamburlaine," in "Faustus," "The Jew of Malta," "The Massacre of Paris," and "Edward II.," we have six plays, and in "Dido" part of a seventh, to represent for Marlowe six years' work about the theatre. If his rate of production was like Shakespeare's, of about two plays in a year, he might possibly have written five more pieces than are here accounted for. Some think that Shakespeare wrought on Marlowe's work in "Titus Andronicus." It is suggested, also, that Marlowe was author, or chief author, of the plays upon which Shakespeare worked in the final shaping of the Three Parts of "King Henry VI." I share that opinion, but it is opinion only. Of all the dramatists who supplied the London stage during Shakespeare's prentice years, Marlowe alone had that in him which could have found fellowship with the yet undiscovered genius of Shakespeare. The two young men were within a few weeks of like age, and there may very possibly have been friendship between them that made Shakespeare, the player, at first half colleague with the poet in laying down the lines of each of these three plays. It may be, also, that in the last of them he took more part as a writer, and he may then have completed his collaboration by revision of them all. If the two poets worked also together -as I think they did-upon the play of " Edward III.," hereafter to be considered, Marlowe's time will be sufficiently accounted for. There are no other known plays that we feel strongly impelled to ascribe to him; but the number is great of the lost plays eaten up by time or dispersed in the smoke of the fire of London. "The "The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage," was first printed, in the year after Marlowe's death, as "played by the Children of her Maiesties Chappell. Written by Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nash, Gent." It was a dainty setting of Virgil's story in the first four books of the " Æneid," and was first presented to the queen and court. Not printed until 1594, it may have been acted in earliest, as the joint work of Nash and Marlowe. joint work, not a piece that Marlowe left at his death unfinished for Nash to complete. There is no sign of a completion different in style from the beginning. Except 1591, at It was a |