The very exactitude of the repetition is a strong
argument against the theory which attributes it to Shakespeare. That he
had much at starting to learn of Marlowe, and that he did learn much--that
in his earliest plays, and above all in his earliest historic plays, the
influence of the elder poet, the echo of his style, the iteration of his
manner, may perpetually be traced--I have already shown that I should be
the last to question; but so exact an echo, so servile an iteration as
this, I believe we shall nowhere find in them. The sonorous accumulation
of emphatic epithets--as in the magnificent first verse of this
passage--is indeed at least as much a note of the young Shakespeare's
style as of his master's; but even were this one verse less in the manner
of the elder than the younger poet--and this we can hardly say that it
is--no single verse detached from its context can weigh a feather against
the full and flawless evidence of the whole speech. And of all this
there is nothing in the _Contention_; the scene there opens in bald and
flat nakedness of prose, striking at once into the immediate matter of
stage business without the decoration of a passing epithet or a single
trope.
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