13. +Shakespeare’s contemporaries.+-- But we are not to suppose that Shakespeare stood alone in the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century as a great poet; and that everything else was flat and low around him. This never is and never can be the case. Great genius is the possession, not of one man, but of several in a great age; and we do not find a great writer standing alone and unsupported, just as we do not find a high mountain rising from a low plain. The largest group of the highest mountains in the world, the Himalayas, rise from the highest table-land in the world; and peaks nearly as high as the highest-- Mount Everest-- are seen cleaving the blue sky in the neighbourhood of Mount Everest itself. And so we find Shakespeare surrounded by dramatists in some respects nearly as great as himself; for the same great forces welling up within the heart of England that made _him_ created also the others. +Marlowe+, the teacher of Shakespeare, +Peele+, and +Greene+, preceded him; +Ben Jonson+, +Beaumont+ and +Fletcher+, +Massinger+ and +Ford+, +Webster+, +Chapman+, and many others, were his contemporaries, lived with him, talked with him; and no doubt each of these men influenced the work of the others. But the works of these men belong chiefly to the seventeenth century. We must not, however, forget that the reign of Queen Elizabeth-- called in literature the +Elizabethan Period+-- was the greatest that England ever saw,-- greatest in poetry and in prose, greatest in thought and in action, perhaps also greatest in external events. 14. CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (+1564-1593+), the first great English dramatist, was born at Canterbury in the year 1564, two months before the birth of Shakespeare himself. He studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and took the degree of Master of Arts in 1587. After leaving the university, he came up to London and wrote for the stage. He seems to have led a wild and reckless life, and was stabbed in a tavern brawl on the 1st of June 1593. “As he may be said to have invented and made the verse of the drama, so he created the English drama.” His chief plays are +Dr Faustus+ and +Edward the Second+. His style is one of the greatest vigour and power: it is often coarse, but it is always strong. Ben Jonson spoke of “Marlowe’s mighty line”; and Lord Jeffrey says of him: “In felicity of thought and strength of expression, he is second only to Shakespeare himself.”