assuredly the due of Christopher Marlowe, whose violent end prematurely closed a poetic career of dazzling brilliancy. His earliest play, _Tamburlaine the Great_, in which the use of blank verse was introduced upon the English public stage, while full of the "high astounding terms" of an extravagant and often bombastic diction, is already marked by the passion which was the poet's most characteristic feature, and which was to find expression so luxuriantly beautiful in his _Doctor Faustus,_ and so surpassingly violent in his _Jew of Malta_. His masterpiece, _Edward II._, is a tragedy of singular pathos and of a dramatic power unapproached by any of his contemporaries. George Peele was a far more versatile writer even as a dramatist; but, though his plays contain passages of exquisite beauty, not one of them is worthy to be ranked by the side of Marlowe's _Edward II._, compared with which, if indeed not absolutely, Peele's _Chronicle of Edward I._ still stands on the level of the species to which its title and character alike assign it. His finest play is undoubtedly _David and Bethsabe_, which resembles _Edward I._ in construction, but far surpasses it in beauty of language and versification, besides treating its subject with greatly superior dignity. If the difference between Peele and Shakespeare is still, in many respects besides that of genius, an immeasurable one, we seem to come into something like a Shakespearian atmosphere in more than one passage of the plays of the unfortunate Robert Greene--unfortunate perhaps in nothing more enduringly than in the proof which he left behind him of his supercilious jealousy of Shakespeare. Greene's genius, most conspicuous in plays treating English life and scenes, could, notwithstanding his academic self-sufficiency, at times free itself from the pedantry apt to beset the flight of Peele's and at times even of Marlowe's muse; and his most delightful work[176] seems to breathe something of the air, sweet and fresh like no other, which blows over an English countryside. Thomas Lodge, whose dramatic, and much less of course his literary activity, is measured by the only play that we know to have been wholly his;[177] Thomas Nashe, the redoubtable pamphleteer and the father of the English picaresque novel;[178] Henry Chettle, who worked the chords of both pity[179] and terror[180] with equal vigour, and Anthony Munday, better remembered for his city pageants than for his plays, are among the other more important writers of the early Elizabethan drama, though not all of them can strictly speaking be called predecessors of Shakespeare. It is not possible here to enumerate the more interesting of the anonymous plays which belong to this "pre-Shakespearian" period of the Elizabethan drama; but many of them are by intrinsic merit as well as for special causes deserving of the attention of the student. Common characteristics of the early Elizabethans.