The most important of the dramatists who were Shakspere's forerunners, or early contemporaries, was Christopher or--as he was familiarly called--Kit Marlowe. Born in the same year with Shakspere (1564), he died in 1593, at which date his great successor is thought to have written no original plays, except the _Comedy of Errors_ and _Love's Labour's Lost_. Marlowe first popularized blank verse as the language of tragedy in his _Tamburlaine_, written before 1587, and in subsequent plays he brought it to a degree of strength and flexibility which left little for Shakspere to do but to take it as he found it. _Tamburlaine_ was a crude, violent piece, full of exaggeration and bombast, but with passages here and there of splendid declamation, justifying Ben Jonson's phrase, "Marlowe's mighty line." Jonson, however, ridiculed, in his _Discoveries_, the "scenical strutting and furious vociferation" of Marlowe's hero; and Shakspere put a quotation from _Tamburlaine_ into the mouth of his ranting Pistol. Marlowe's _Edward II_. was the most regularly constructed and evenly written of his plays. It was the best historical drama on the stage before Shakspere, and not undeserving of the comparison which it has provoked with the latter's _Richard II._ But the most interesting of Marlowe's plays, to a modern reader, is the _Tragical History of Doctor Faustus_. The subject is the same as in Goethe's _Faust_, and Goethe, who knew the English play, spoke of it as greatly planned. The opening of Marlowe's _Faustus_ is very similar to Goethe's. His hero, wearied with unprofitable studies, and filled with a mighty lust for knowledge and the enjoyment of life, sells his soul to the Devil in return for a few years of supernatural power. The tragic irony of the story might seem to lie in the frivolous use which Faustus makes of his dearly bought power, wasting it in practical jokes and feats of legerdermain; but of this Marlowe was probably unconscious. The love story of Margaret, which is the central point of Goethe's drama, is entirely wanting in Marlowe's, and so is the subtle conception of Goethe's Mephistophiles. Marlowe's handling of the supernatural is materialistic and downright, as befitted an age which believed in witchcraft. The greatest part of the English _Faustus_ is the last scene, in which the agony and terror of suspense with which the magician awaits the stroke of the clock that signals his doom are powerfully drawn. O, _lente, lente currite, noctis equi_! The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike.... O soul, be changed into little water-drops, And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found! Marlowe's genius was passionate and irregular. He had no humor, and the comic portions of _Faustus_ are scenes of low buffoonery.