With Marlowe’s tragedies we at length come within measureable distance of Shakespeare. The gulf between the work of the two men is still very great. In Marlowe there is none of that benign humanity that clings to even the grimmest of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Marlowe’s characters are bleak in nature and massive in outline; enormous and majestical, but forbidding and almost inhuman. His style has the same qualities: glowing with a volcanic energy, capable of a mighty soaring line and phrase (“Marlowe’s mighty line,” as Ben Jonson called it), but diffuse, truculent, exaggerated, and bombastic. It is a lopsided style lacking the more amiable qualities of humor, flexibility, sweetness, and brevity. His four great plays, all written within a few years, are _Tamburlaine the Great_ (1587), _Doctor Faustus_ (1588), _The Jew of Malta_ (1589), and _Edward II_ (1593). All four, in their march of horrors and splendors, are not unlike one another. The last has a conclusion which for pity and terror ranks among the great achievements of Elizabethan tragedy. The plays, moreover, show a progressing dexterity in the handling of blank verse. Marlowe’s life was pitiably short. If he had lived there might have been another triumph to chronicle. He also collaborated with Nash in the tragedy of _Dido_ (1593), and left uncompleted a poor fragment of a play called _The Massacre at Paris_. We give a brief extract to show the “mighty line.” In the passage Tamburlaine, “the Scourge of God,” mentally reviews his past conquests. And I have marched along the river Nile To Machda where the mighty Christian priest, Called John the Great, sits in a milk-white robe, Whose triple mitre I did take by force, And made him swear obedience to my crown, From thence unto Cazates did I march, Where Amazonians met me in the field, With whom, being women, I vouchsafed a league, And with my power did march to Zanzibar, The eastern part of Afric, where I viewed The Ethiopian sea, rivers and lakes, But neither man nor child in all the land; Therefore I took my course to Manico, Where unresisted, I removed my camp, And by the coast of Byather, at last I came to Cubar, where the negroes dwell, And conquering that, made haste to Nubia. There having sacked Borno, the kingly seat, I took the king, and led him bound in chains Unto Damasco, where I stayed before. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564–1616) =1. His Life.= In considering the life of Shakespeare we have at our disposal a fair number of facts; but on these facts the industry of commentators has constructed an additional mass of great magnitude and complexity. It is therefore the duty of the historian with only a limited space at his disposal to keep his eye steadily upon the established facts and, without being superior or disdainful, to turn toward speculation or surmise, however ingenious or laborious, a face of tempered but obdurate skepticism.