Assuming then that in common with other young poets of his day
he was thus engaged during the first years of his connection with the
stage, we should naturally have expected to find him handling the text of
Marlowe with more of reverence and less of freedom than that of meaner
men: ready, as in the _Contention_, to clear away with no timid hand
their weaker and more inefficient work, to cancel and supplant it by
worthier matter of his own; but when occupied in recasting the verse of
Marlowe, not less ready to confine his labour to such slight and skilful
strokes of art as that which has led us into this byway of speculation;
to the correction of a false note, the addition of a finer touch, the
perfection of a meaning half expressed or a tone of half-uttered music;
to the invigoration of sense and metre by substitution of the right word
for the wrong, of a fuller phrase for one feebler; to the excision of
such archaic and superfluous repetitions as are signs of a cruder stage
of workmanship, relics of a ruder period of style, survivals of the
earliest form or habit of dramatic poetry.
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