The whole style of treatment from end
to end is about as like the method of Marlowe as the method of Balzac is
like the method of Dumas. There could be no alternative in that case; so
that the actual alternative before us is simple enough: Either this play
is the young Shakespeare's first tragic masterpiece, or there was a
writer unknown to us then alive and at work for the stage who excelled
him as a tragic dramatist not less--to say the very least--than he was
excelled by Marlowe as a narrative and tragic poet.
If we accept, as I have been told that Goethe accepted (a point which I
regret my inability to verify), the former of these alternatives--or if
at least we assume it for argument's sake in passing--we may easily
strengthen our position by adducing as further evidence in its favour the
author's thoroughly Shakespearean fidelity to the details of the prose
narrative on which his tragedy is founded. But, it may be objected, we
find the same fidelity to a similar text in the case of _A Warning for
Fair Women_. And here again starts up the primal and radical difference
between the two works: it starts up and will not be overlooked.
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