Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe :: English Literature

Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher MarloweMarloe was stabd with a dagger, and dyed swearingA MORE friendly critic, Mr. A. C. Swinburne, observes of this poetthat the father of side of meat tragedy and the creator of English unclouded meter was therefore also the teacher and the guide of Shakespeare. Inthis sentence there are two mislead assumptions and two misleadingconclusions. child has as good a title to the first prize as MarloweSurrey has a better title to the second and Shakespeare was nottaught or guided by one of his predecessors or multiplication alone.The less indistinct judgment is, that Marlowe exercised a stronginfluence over later drama, though not himself as great a dramatist asKyd that he introduced several new tones into blank meter, andcommenced the dissociative process which force it farther and fartheraway from the rhythms of rhymed verse and that when Shakespeareborrowed from him, which was pretty practic completelyy at the beginning,Shakespeare ei ther made something inferior or something different. 1The comparative study of English versification at various periods is alarge booklet of unscripted history. To make a study of blank versealone, would be to elicit some curious conclusions. It would show, Ibelieve, that blank verse indoors Shakespeares lifetime was more(prenominal)(prenominal)highly developed, that it became the vehicle of more varied and moreintense art-emotions than it has ever conveyed since and that afterthe erection of the Chinese Wall of Milton, blank verse has sufferednot only arrest but retrogression. That the blank verse of Tennyson,for example, a consummate master of this form in certain applications,is cruder (not rougher or less perfect in technique) than that ofhalf a dozen contemporaries of Shakespeare cruder, because lesscapable of expressing complicated, subtle, and surprising emotions. 2Every writer who has written any blank verse worth saving has producedparticular tones which his verse and no others is capable ofrendering and we should keep this in mind when we prate aboutinfluences and indebtedness. Shakespeare is universal (if youlike) because he has more of these tones than anyone else but theyare all out of the one man one man cannot be more than one man theremight have been six Shakespeares at once without conflictingfrontiers and to say that Shakespeare expressed nearly all kindemotions, implying that he left very little for anyone else, is aradical construe of art and the artist-a misunderstandingwhich, even when explicitly rejected, may lead to our neglecting the parkway of attention necessary to discover the specific properties ofthe verse of Shakespeares contemporaries.