Authentic Works: Non-Dramatic

B.
NoN-DRAMATIc Wonrs
I
Hero and Leander
book entrtled Hero and Leander, berng
an amorous
licensed for
was
\farlorv,'
poem devised by Christopher
'A
pubhcation, September 28, 1593, by John Wolf The poem
rs clearly mature rvork; and is evidently tncomplete in the
form in whrch Marlowe left it Therefore, it is reasonable
to assume, as has commonly been done, that it ls one of l{ar67 We may
lowe's latest rvorks, left unfinrshed at his death
rnfer that the author was rmpelled to take up non-dramattc
rvriting by the fact that the Privy Council recommended the
closrng of playhouses (on account of plague) on JanuarY 28,
1593 Henslowe's entries cease in fact on February 1, and
do not begin again titl the end of the followrng December'
Thus it would seem that during the last four mcrnths of
tr{arlowe,s life he can have had no rmmedtate irrcentive to
the rvrrting of plays.
Notwithstandrng Wolf's entry, no edition of' Hero an'd
Leandcr is known to have been published earher than 1598;
nor do there seem to be any ltterary allusrons to the poem
that point to its having been generally known before that
year. The continuations of Chapman and Petowe, l\feres's
mention in Pattadi's Tamt'a, quotations by Jonson in Eaery
A[an i,fl hrs Euntor and ShakesPeare rn -ds You' Ltke it, all
belong to this year or the next. l\'Ialone rmagrned that the
poem had been printed in 1593, reasoning from the stattoners'
record and also, doubtless, from the fact that there ts a
suggestion of recent loss about Blount's rrention of the
r?Malone says (IrIS note)- ,This was, I beheve, trIarlowe's lasl work,
and it appears to me his most finished performance I mean the two 6rst
Sestrads, for vhrch alone he is answerable Many of the hnes remrnd one
of Dryden'
26
TUCKER BROOKE
deceased poet, in his dedication to Walsingharn, not very
easy to reconcile with the idea that five years had elapsed 68
It is certain, however, that Blount cannoL have addressed
lValsrngham under the trtle of Srr Thomas earher than 1597,
srnce it rvas only in consequence of Elizabeth's visit to !Valsingham in that year that he was knighted,oe That Blount's
publication of the Marlowe fragment should have synchronrzed so exactly wrth the appearance of both Chapman's
and Petowe's continuations, and that Blount's edition should
have appeared in 1598, when the Stationers' Register shows
that he had drsposed of hrs copyright in the work rn L597,zo
are circumstances largely erplainable by the close connection
between the different pubhshers concerned. Blount, Linley,
and Flasket, successive pubhshers of the poem, were rntimately associated they all drd busrness at the sign of the
Black Bear in Paul's Churchyard, to which Blount and
Flasket had succeeded on the death in 1594 of Thomas
lVoodcock, the publisher of Dodo.Tt
The division of Hero and Leander between Marlowe and
Chaprnan rs clear enough. lVlarlowe wrote what is contarned
rn Blount's edrtion of 1598. Thrs Chapman drvided into
two 'Sestiads,'addrng an argument to each, and wrote hrmself the thrrd, fourth, fifth, and srxth Sestrads. There would
be no need to speak of this, had Malone not made a false
inference at a tlme when he had not seen the origrnal quarto
edition of lUarlorve's part of the poem In one of his manu68
Oppostte the 6rst page of the dedication in his copy of the edrtron of
rvrote Thrs uas, I beheve, the Dedicatron to an editron of the
two first Cantosof thrs poerr by lUarlowe, printed as I imagine rn 1593 From
this dedrcation rt should seem that there had been an edrtron of that part
of thrs poem whrch was untten by lllarlowe, soon after his death, which
happened in 1593 See the Entry at Stationer's HaIl'
6ecf D N B.
r0 I.e
,by Ehzabcthan reckontng The record is dated }farch 2 (1597 /8),
and reads 'Paule Lynlay. Assgncd ouer vnto hym from Edward Blount,
by the consent of the \Vardens, A booke in Enghshe caUed HERO azd
160C, Malone
LEANDER,
v1d.'
tr Cf. McKerrosr, Drctionary ol Publishers and Booksellers.
THE MARLOWD CANON
27
script notes, he says: tlt appears from England''s Pantossus,
1600, p.379, that Marlowe wlote but the two first Sestiads
and about 100 lines of the third; for the description of' Cete'
rnnny, beginning at the l05th line, is there ascribed to Chaprnan The compiler of that book had probably the complete
& the unfinished work before him.' The error of ascrrbing
any lines beyond the first two cantos to Nlarlowe is evident
on bibliographical and styhstic evidence;?2 but Malone's
mistake has been repeated,Ts and it led Cunningham into a
further qurte unjustifiable ascription :
'Malone told Thomas.lVarton that, in addition to the two
first Sestiads, I\{arlorve left behind him "about a hundred
lines of the third"; which, however, m my opinron are not to
be looked lor in the place assigned to them, where all is mani'
festly Chapman's, but rn the episode of Teras, and other
portions of the fifth Sestiad, where the higher hand of
Marlowe seems to me easily discernible'7a
The Posstonale Shcpkerd to his Lolc
A manuscript note by Malone collects the essential facts
about thls poem:
'Four stanzas of this Sonnet were first printed in The
Passionate Pilgrim,1599,8 'o, where rt is ascribed to Shakespeare, in tbe following year the whole was printed in Eng'
Land.'s Eelicon, and subscribed with }larlone's name. fsaac
Walton, who has introduced it in his Complel,e Angler,
written about 1640, expressly says it was Marlowe's1 "that
smooth song (he calls it) whrch was made by Kit I\{arlowe,
now at least fifty years ago." One of the lines is found in
Marlowe's f ew o! Mal,ta; and not marked as a quotation:
Thou in those groves, bY Drs above,
Shall lne wlh me onil be lil)' loae.
2,
?r
Malone himself later gave up the rdea. See the two notes previously
quoted.
Cf Thorpe's Catalogue, no v for 1835, p 124 'The 6rst two Sestiads,
and about one hundred fuues of the thrd, were written by Marlow, and the
remainder by Chapnan.'
t'Introduction to his edltion, p. xvii.
ts
28
TUCKER BROOKE
There can be no doubt, therefore, that it was his composltion, This Sonnet was answered by Sir Walter Ralergh in
his youth. The Answer is rnserted rn Englonil,s Helicon,
1600, rn tbe Conplele Angler, and in Percy,s Reliques,
Vol. I. p.219.'
The rmplied ascription of the verses to Shakespeare in
The Passtonate Pdgrcrn may be an act of carelessness or of
dehberate fraud, but rt should be noted that they occur in
the second part of the Possionote Pilgrtn volume, which has
a separate trtle-page, Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Mus,h,
whereon there is no mention of Shakespeare's name. Besrdes
four stanzas of Marlowe's poem one stanza from the reply
ascribed to Raleigh is there given
Percy derrved hrs versrons of the poem and the reply frorn
a broadside in the Roxburgh Ballads (vol i, p 205), where
the two are printed in parallel columns. The 6rst rs headed:
'A most excellent Ditty of the Louers promises to his beloued.
To a sweet new tune called, Liuc with me ond be my Loue,'
and the second: 'The Ladies prudent answer to her Loue.
To the same tune.' The date ol the Roxburgh ballad can
be approxrrnately fixed by the rmpnnt: 'Prmted by the
Assignes of Thomas symcock.' In 1618 Symcock received a
patent for thrrty-one years grantrng him a monopoly of all
things printed on one side only. He then appointed assrgns
to work the patent Protests and litrgation followed, and on
June 30, 1629 thrs patent was ordered cancelled.Ts
There seems to be no clue to the date at which Marlowe
wrote the song of the Passionate Shepherd, except the
parody of the 6rst line in the f ew of Molta (l 1816). Whether
the remarkable passage in whrch this parody occurs was in
the play as Marlowe originally composed rt is however
doubtful.
3
Fragment: 'f wakt alongastiearn'
The fragment describrng a woodland brook, which was
printed n England's Parnosszs (1600) over the name of
?r
Cf McKerrow,
D,irtionary of PfinWs and Boobsdlus.
THE MARLOWD CANON
29
Ch. Ivlarlowe, is the only extant work of the poet to employ
an elaborate stanzaic form. The metre is the ol,taaa il,ma
(a, b, a, b, a, b, c, c):76 ltnes 5-12 and 13-20 are complete
stanzas, while 1-4 forrn the latter half of one and 2L-24 the
first half of another. It is evident, therefore, that the lines
preserved nerther begrn nor end the poem from whrch they
are taken. The versification of the piece is perfect, and at
least five of the twenty-four lines have the run-on move'
ment.77
Dyce thought it safe to conclude from a belief (now discredited) that the editor of. Ertgland's Parnassas never made
use of manuscript materral, that the lines 'were extracted
from some printed piece, of whrch not a srngle copy now
remains' Charles Crawford?8 proposed the theory that
Ivlarlowe wrote a poem rn elaboratton of Conte Lne wilh
me, of whrch the present fragment may be a part, and
that this was used in Marlowe's own plays and imitated
rn Rrchard Barnfield's Afectionate She\herd (1594) and
Cynthia (1595).
Dyce's warm praise of thrs fragment is well justified by its
felicity both of phrasing and metre. 'Most probably,' he
conjectures of the complete work, 'it was a composltron of
no great length: but the stanzas in questron present so fine a
picture of oblects seen through a poetic medium, that, in
exchange for the rest, every reader of taste rvould wrlhngly
part with a dozen of those long and tedrous productions which
are precious in the esttmatton of antiquaries alone.' Ingram,
on the contrary, expresses a wanton agnostlclsm regarding
both tbe poetic beauty of the [nes and their ascription to
Marlowe.Tg It seems to me that they must be accepted as
?o
Thts is the metre of Dantel's
Cd IVarc
and Draytorr's BQtons'
Wus. Venus ot1il Adonts has the correspondrng srx-hne stanza a b a b c c
?7 Lmes 2, 3(?),8, lA, 16,24 \\thy the anthologst chose to break off tn
tbe mrdst of a clause is hard to imagme
?s 'Richard Barnfield, Ifarlowe, and Shakespcare in Collulanca'
?e'The lines. "I walked along a stream for pureness rare," may be an
extract from a charmrng poem, but tn tbemselves the verses scarcely seem
3o
TUCKER BROOKE
work of the poet's full maturrty, parallel rn date as in tone
with Hero and, Leaniler. They are a valuable evidence of
Marlowe's versatility, for they rndrcate the possession of an
aptitude for graceful stanzarc verse after the Spenserian
fashion whrch no other extant production of his attests.
4
Ltr.can's Firsl, Book
The translation of the first book o{ Lucan's Pharsalio is
remarkable for containing a far higher percentage of elevensyllable lines than any other work of Marlowe. Bullen's
count of 109 double endings in the 694 lines is at least approximately correct, but whether this rndicates, as Sidniy Lee
believes,su that the rvork was produced late is perhaps doubtful, Freedom in the employment of eleven-syllable hnes rs
not so sure an rndex of rnaturrty with Marlowe's work as
with Shakespeare's1 and it may be that the frequency with
which the eleventh syllable appears in the Lucan is in part
due simply to the translator's earnest effort to paek into each
English verse the whole content of a Latin hexameter. The
boast that Lucan is 'translated line for line' is well justified,
and the achievement is decidedly interesting, but it is accomplished often at so great a cost to Enghsh idiom and at
such sacrifice of the translator's individuality as to make it
seem more hkely the work of Marlowe's apprentice days
than of the period of. Hero and Leand,a. There is not much
plausibrlity in Bullen's suggestion that this translation was
probably lntended as a metrical experiment, possibly for a
pro;ected eprc, Sust as the translatron of the Amores was a
prelude to Herc anil Leander (sic)-unless indeed one dates
it very early in Marlowe's career.
to call for the admiring comments they have lately received It would not
be surprising to discover that thrs fragment, fathered on Marlowe after his
decease, whrlst his name was one to con;ure by, owes lts ongln to Mrchael
Drayton ' (Msrlowe and his Associata,220) Ingram goes on to say that
the lines are much liLe the description of Queen fsabel's chamber rn 'The
Tower of Mortimer' in The Barons' Wars
60'The author drsplays sufficient nastery of tbe metre to lvarrarit its
attribution to hls later yean'
The first reference to Marlowe's Lucan is a notice tn the
Statroners' Register, September 28, 1593, when John Wolf
entered for his copy 'a book entitled Lucan's first book of the
famous crvil war betwixt Pompey and Caesar, Englished by
Chnstopher Marlow.' On the same day Wolf entered also
Marlowe's part of Hero and Leander. The title to both works
appears to have passed to Edward Blount, though no record of
the transfer exists. In 1600, the only known early edition of
Lucan was published, as printed by P. Short and offered for
sale by Walter Burre. The interesting dedicatory epistle rs
signed by Thomas Thorpesr and addressed to Blount, whose
'old nght in it' ts acknou'ledged.tt
5. Ouid's Elegies
l\{arlowe's version of the three books of Ovid's Amores
has always been printed in conjunction with the epigrams of
tnJohn Davies (who was knighted in 1603)- There is no
herent reason for associating the two works, and their different authorship is made clear on all the title-pages' Six
early editions are known, all undated, but as typographical
evidence shows, coverlng a period of forty or fifty years
(co 160f1640) Four give the complete text both of Elegies
and Epigrams, while two contain selections only. All were
surreptitious publications, containing no rndication of
publriher or printer, beyond the words 'At Middleburgh'
at the foot of each trtle-page.83 The two abridged editions
Thorpe. the famous publisher of Shakespeare's sonnets, does not aPPear
to hare pultirtted anythrng on hrs own behalf before 1604 see McKerrow,
Dtcl,tonary of Pr.blcrhers anil Boohsellcrs
tsln the 6ame year (t6@) John Flasket published a complete edrtron of
sr
Leaniler (Marlone's and Chapman's parts) wrth the curiously
erroneous trtle-page 'Hero and Leander Begunne by Chrrstopher Marloe
the first booke ol Lucan translated hne for line by the
Whereunto rr
"dd.d
of
Same AuthOr' See the drscussron of llero and Leanilw for the relations
Hero
aN
the various publrshers concerned
ss In connectron with the pubhcatron of English boots at Mrddleburgh
rn Zealand (Holland) see J D Wilson, 'Rrchard Schrlders and the English
Puritans,' Trons Btbl.$oc, 1910 Schildersprrntedalargenumberof Purrtan
tracts at lr{iddleburgh between 1580 and 1616 He appears to have been the
onll' printcr rn the place
32
rucKER BRooKE
grve the full name of the translator of the Elegies: ,C.
I\{arlow', the others content themselves with the inrtials,
'c.
1\f.'
rs rmpossible to determine when the Elegies first appeared
It
The four survrving complete texts all give, in addition to
Marlowe's rendenng of the last elegy of the first book, the
entirely different translation of the same whrch Ben Jonson
made for his Poetaster, and so cannot be earlier than the date
of that play (acted in 1601, pnnted rn 1602). The abrrdged
edrhons do not contarn this, but nerther of them can be regarded as.the editio princeps. That an edition existed in
1599 is positively proved by a well-known decree of the
Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of London (June l,
1599), commanding the destructron among other works ol
'Davyes Epigrams, wrth Marlowes Elegyes,' and specrfyrng
'That no Satyres or Epigrams be prrnted hereafter.' On
June 4, accordingly, 'Davies Eprgrams' were burned in
Stationer's Hall. The particular wrath of the authorities
appears to have been drrected against Davres' work rather
than Marlowe's, but as the two were bound together, the
latter was naturally included rn the holocaust. One copy at
least may be presumed to have escaped, to serve as progenitor of the Ivliddleburgh series of edrtions As early as 1594,
in his Unfortunate Traaeller, Nashe quotes Marlowe's versron
of two lines of the Amorcs (lI iu. 3, 4), but Nashe's connechon w*h Dido in thrs same year makes it likely that he
had at hand l\Larlowe's manuscnpt rather than a pnnted
copy.
That Marlowe intended the translation to be printed is
highly improbable. There rs every reason to beheve, on
metrical and stylistic grounds, that rt was made early in the
poet's career-doubtless at Cambridge-when his taste,
his learnrng, and his talent were all undeveloped. The
Elegies find ther natural place in hrs evolution besrde, or
rather antecedent to, the Dido and, the lost rendering of
Coluthus, whrch he rs said to have produced rn 1587