This is even more in Shakespeare’s early manner than the other, and it is not ungrateful to our feeling of his immeasurable supremacy to think that even he had been helped in his schooling. There is a truly royal pathos in “They give me bread and water”; and “Tell Isabel the queen,” instead of “Isabel my queen,” is the most vividly dramatic touch that I remember anywhere in Marlowe. And that vision of the brilliant tournament, not more natural than it is artistic, how does it not deepen by contrast the gloom of all that went before! But you will observe that the verse is rather epic than dramatic. I mean by this that its every pause and every movement are regularly cadenced. There is a kingly composure in it, perhaps, but were the passage not so finely pathetic as it is, or the diction less naturally simple, it would seem stiff. Nothing is more peculiarly characteristic of the mature Shakespeare than the way in which his verses curve and wind themselves with the fluctuating emotion or passion of the speaker and echo his mood. Let me illustrate this by a speech of Imogen when Pisanio gives her a letter from her husband bidding her meet him at Milford-Haven. The words seem to waver to and fro, or huddle together before the hurrying thought, like sheep when the collie chases them. “O, for a horse with wings!--Hear’st thou, Pisanio? He is at Milford-Haven: read, and tell me How far ’t is thither. If one of mean affairs May plod it in a week, why may not I Glide thither in a day?--Then, true Pisanio-- Who long’st like me to see thy lord; who long’st O, let me ’bate--but not like me--yet long’st-- But in a fainter kind:--O, not like me; For mine’s beyond beyond: say, and speak thick,-- Love’s counsellor should fill the bores of hearing, To the smothering of the sense,--how far it is To this same blessed Milford: and, by the way, Tell me how Wales was made so happy as To inherit such a haven: but, first of all, How we may steal from hence.” The whole speech is breathless with haste, and is in keeping not only with the feeling of the moment, but with what we already know of the impulsive character of Imogen. Marlowe did not, for he could not, teach Shakespeare this secret, nor has anybody else ever learned it. There are, properly speaking, no characters in the plays of Marlowe--but personages and interlocutors. We do not get to know them, but only to know what they do and say. The nearest approach to a character is Barabas, in “The Jew of Malta,” and he is but the incarnation of the popular hatred of the Jew. There is really nothing human in him. He seems a bugaboo rather than a man. Here is his own account of himself:--