Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe :: English Literature

Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher MarloweMarloe was stabd with a dagger, and dyed swearingA MORE friendly critic, Mr. A. C. Swinburne, observes of this poetthat the father of side tragedy and the creator of slope blankverse was therefore also the teacher and the guide of Shakespeare. Inthis sentence there are two tawdry assumptions and two misleadingconclusions. Kyd has as good a title to the first honour as MarloweSurrey has a better title to the second and Shakespeare was nontaught or guided by whizz of his predecessors or contemporaries alone.The less questionable judgment is, that Marlowe exercised a stronginfluence over later drama, though not himself as great a dramatist asKyd that he introduced several new tones into blank verse, andcommenced the dissociative process which drew it further and fartheraway from the rhythms of rhymed verse and that when Shakespeareborrowed from him, which was pretty often at the beginning,Shakespeare either made something inferior or so mething different. 1The comparative study of English versification at various periods is alarge tract of unwritten history. To make a study of blank versealone, would be to elicit some queer conclusions. It would show, Ibelieve, that blank verse within Shakespeares lifetime was morehighly developed, that it became the vehicle of more varied and moreintense art-emotions than it has ever conveyed since and that afterthe erecting of the Chinese Wall of Milton, blank verse has sufferednot only arrest but retrogression. That the blank verse of Tennyson,for example, a consummate master of this form in certain applications,is cruder (not rougher or less perfect in technique) than that ofhalf a dozen contemporaries of Shakespeare cruder, because lesscapable of expressing complicated, subtle, and surprising emotions. 2Every source who has written any blank verse worth saving has producedparticular tones which his verse and no others is capable ofrendering and we should keep this in mind wh en we let the cat out of the bag aboutinfluences and indebtedness. Shakespeare is universal (if youlike) because he has more of these tones than anyone else but theyare all out of the one man one man cannot be more than one man theremight have been six Shakespeares at once without conflictingfrontiers and to say that Shakespeare expressed nearly all humanemotions, implying that he left(p) very little for anyone else, is aradical misunderstanding of art and the artist-a misunderstandingwhich, even when explicitly rejected, may lead to our neglecting theeffort of attention necessary to gain the specific properties ofthe verse of Shakespeares contemporaries.