As a poet Marlowe stands immediately below Spenser and Shakespeare, but between them and every other contemporary. He fails to rank with them because he wanted their range, and also because there was something in him not only unbridled, but incapable of submitting to order and measure. For a moment, and from time to time, he shoots up to the utmost height of poetry, but only in a beam of light, which lasts for a very brief space and then sinks out of view. In these happy passages of inspiration he showed what could be done with English blank verse. It had been written before him, since it was first used by Surrey in his translation of the _Æneid_, but Marlowe was its real creator as an instrument of English poetry. This was his great achievement. His fragment of _Hero and Leander_, though a beautiful poem of the mythological and rather lascivious order popular at the time, and full of a most passionate love of beauty, nowhere attains to the height of the constantly quoted “purple patches” from the first part of _Tamburlaine_, from _Dr Faustus_, or from _The Jew of Malta_. In themselves they are unsurpassable, yet his plays cannot by any possible stretch of charity be called good. What we remember of them is always the passage of poetry, expressing in the most magnificent language some extreme passion of ambition, greed, fear, or grasping arrogance, or some sheer revel of delight in the splendour of jewels and the possibilities of wealth. There are few scenes, in the proper sense of the word, and there is much monotonous repetition. The second part of _Tamburlaine_ is the same thing over and over. The first two acts of _The Jew of Malta_ promise well, and then the play falls off into incoherence and absurdity. Marlowe, though an incomparably greater man, seems to have been as blind as Greene or Peele ever were to what is meant by consistency. His Barabas, for instance, who is represented as a wicked able man, is suddenly found putting his neck in the power of a new-bought slave in a fashion hardly conceivable in the case of a mere fool. _Dr Faustus_ holds together no better than Barabas. There is something more astonishing still. A poet may be able to express passion in splendid verse, and yet be able neither to construct a story nor create a character, but we do not expect to find him dropping into what, as mere language, is childishly inept. Now that is what Marlowe did. The difference is not that between Wordsworth at his best and his worst. It is the difference between Dryden and the bellman’s verses--between poetry and rank fustian, or commonplace. His short life, and the conditions in which it was passed, made it inevitable that the bulk of Marlowe’s work should be but little. _Tamburlaine_, _Faustus_, _The Jew of Malta_, _Edward II._, and _The Massacre of Paris_ sum up the list of the plays which we can be sure were wholly his. _The Tragedy of Dido_ was written in collaboration with Nash.