And set black streamers in the firmament (_Tamburlaine_) becomes See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament! (_Doctor Faustus_) The verse accomplishments of _Tamburlaine_ are notably two: Marlowe gets into blank verse the melody of Spenser, and he gets a new driving power by reinforcing the sentence period against the line period. The rapid long sentence, running line into line, as in the famous soliloquies “Nature compounded of four elements” and “What is beauty, saith my sufferings, then?” marks the certain escape of blank verse from the rhymed couplet, and from the elegiac or rather pastoral note of Surrey, to which Tennyson returned. If you contrast these two soliloquies with the verse of Marlowe’s greatest contemporary, Kyd—by no means a despicable versifier—you see the importance of the innovation: The one took sanctuary, and, being sent for out, Was murdered in Southwark as he passed To Greenwich, where the Lord Protector lay. Black Will was burned in Flushing on a stage; Green was hanged at Osbridge in Kent.... which is not really inferior to: So these four abode Within one house together; and as years Went forward, Mary took another mate; But Dora lived unmarried till her death. (Tennyson, _Dora_) In _Faustus_ Marlowe went farther: he broke up the line, to a gain in intensity, in the last soliloquy; and he developed a new and important conversational tone in the dialogues of Faustus with the devil. _Edward II._ has never lacked consideration: it is more desirable, in brief space, to remark upon two plays, one of which has been misunderstood and the other underrated. These are the _Jew of Malta_ and _Dido Queen of Carthage_. Of the first of these, it has always been said that the end, even the last two acts, are unworthy of the first three. If one takes the _Jew of Malta_ not as a tragedy, or as a “tragedy of blood,” but as a farce, the concluding act becomes intelligible; and if we attend with a careful ear to the versification, we find that Marlowe develops a tone to suit this farce, and even perhaps that this tone is his most powerful and mature tone. I say farce, but with the enfeebled humour of our times the word is a misnomer; it is the farce of the old English humour, the terribly serious, even savage comic humour, the humour which spent its last breath on the decadent genius of Dickens. It has nothing in common with J. M. Barrie, Captain Bairnsfather, or _Punch_. It is the humour of that very serious (but very different) play, _Volpone_. First, be thou void of these affections, Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear; Be moved at nothing, see thou pity none ... As for myself, I walk abroad o’ nights, And kill sick people groaning under walls: Sometimes I go about and poison wells ... and the last words of Barabas complete this prodigious caricature: