Page:The works of Christopher Marlowe - ed. Dyce - 1859.djvu/21

Rh positiveness: new materials for Marlowe's biography may hereafter come to light, and prove that I am mistaken.

For the same person to unite in himself the actor and the dramatist was very common, both at that time and at a later period. Marlowe may have performed on more than one stage, though we can trace him only to the Curtain; and we may gather from the terms of the ballad ("He had alsoe a player beene But brake his leg," &c.) that, the accident which there befell him having occasioned incurable lameness, he was for ever disabled as an actor.

The tragedy of Tamburlaine the Great, in Two Parts (the Second Part, it appears, having been brought upon the stage soon after the First ), may be confidently assigned to Marlowe, though the old editions have omitted the author's name. It is his earliest drama, at least the earliest of his plays which we possess. From Nash's Epistle "To the Gentlemen Students of both Universities," prefixed to Greene's Menaphon, 1587, and from Greene's Address "To the Gentlemen Readers," to his Perimedes the Blacke-Smith, 1588, Mr. Collier concludes, and, it would seem, justly, "that Marlowe was our first poet who used blank-verse in dramatic compositions performed in public theatres, that Tamburlaine was the play in which the successful experiment was made, and that it was acted anterior to 1587." On the authority of a rather obscure passage in The Black Book, 1604, Malone had conjectured that Tamburlaine was written either wholly or in part by Nash: but to that conjecture Mr. Collier,—besides adducing a line from a sonnet by Gabriel Harvey, in which Marlowe, then just deceased, is spoken of under the