" For it is now, I should hope, unnecessary to insist that the
able and conscientious editor to whom his fame and his readers owe so
great a debt was over-hasty in assuming and asserting that he was a poet
"to whom, we have reason to believe, nature had denied even a moderate
talent for the humorous." The serious or would-be poetical scenes of the
play are as unmistakably the work of an imitator as are most of the
better passages in "Titus Andronicus" and "King Edward III." Greene or
Peele may be responsible for the bad poetry, but there is no reason to
suppose that the great poet whose mannerisms he imitated with so stupid
a servility was incapable of the good fun.
Had every copy of Marlowe's boyish version or perversion of Ovid's
_Elegies_ deservedly perished in the flames to which it was judicially
condemned by the sentence of a brace of prelates, it is possible that an
occasional bookworm, it is certain that no poetical student, would have
deplored its destruction, if its demerits--hardly relieved, as his first
competent editor has happily remarked, by the occasional incidence of a
fine and felicitous couplet--could in that case have been imagined.
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