As certain is it that but for
him this play could never have been written. At a later date the subject
would have been handled otherwise, had the poet chosen to handle it at
all; and in his youth he could not have treated it as he has without the
guidance and example of Marlowe. Not only are its highest qualities of
energy, of exuberance, of pure and lofty style, of sonorous and
successive harmonies, the very qualities that never fail to distinguish
those first dramatic models which were fashioned by his ardent hand; the
strenuous and single-handed grasp of character, the motion and action of
combining and contending powers, which here for the first time we find
sustained with equal and unfaltering vigour throughout the length of a
whole play, we perceive, though imperfectly, in the work of Marlowe
before we can trace them even as latent or infant forces in the work of
Shakespeare.
In the exquisite and delightful comedies of his earliest period we can
hardly discern any sign, any promise of them at all. One only of these,
the _Comedy of Errors_, has in it anything of dramatic composition and
movement; and what it has of these, I need hardly remind the most cursory
of students, is due by no means to Shakespeare.
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