"Edward II" has been much praised in modern times, and even preferred to the "Richard II" of Shakespeare. Neither King was a good subject for tragedy, though both endured the extremes of misfortune. But in Richard there were noble elements, debased by a long struggle with some of his uncles, and undermined by a period of absolute power. In Edward II we know nothing estimable, save a moment of princely valour when he was all but taken at Bannockburn. His doting devotion to Piers Gaveston, who is well sketched by Marlowe, his intolerable insults to his Queen, place him quite beyond sympathy, till his awful last hours and appalling end. The instantaneous change of the Queen from a loving, forgiving, and intolerably wronged woman to a monster of cruel hypocrisy cannot be called artistic; and though the play, compared with Marlowe's other dramas, is "regular," and opens the path to what we may call the legitimate drama, without the monstrosities of "The Jew of Malta," it does not contain such surprising excellencies as occur in "Tamburlaine" and "Faustus". The noblest passage, the speech of the fallen King to Leicester, could scarcely come from the Edward of the earlier acts. The "Massacre of Paris" (the Bartholomew massacre of 1572) is of no importance among Marlowe's works. If we could agree with his too fond biographer that Marlowe wrote the passages of "Henry VI," in which Jeanne d'Arc is worthy of herself, and that Shakespeare contributed the scandalous scenes of her debasement, we might regard Marlowe as a wonder of clear-sighted appreciation. But nothing in their works confirms this conjecture. What share, if any, Marlowe had in "Henry VI" and "Titus Andronicus," and precisely what Shakespeare did for both of these dramas is unknown. Marlowe's beautiful lyric, "Come live with me and be my Love," is for ever fragrant, and his "Hero and Leander" (stiffly finished by Chapman, it is said at Marlowe's own dying request) is at least the equal of, and may even be preferred by many readers to, the first fruits of Shakespeare's invention, "Venus and Adonis". Shakespeare's "dead shepherd" did not die unlamented by his brother poets: he had patrons in Raleigh and Sir Thomas Walsingham, and it is not necessary to criticize here certain horrible libels on his life and conversation.[3] Kyd.