erasure by which its effect is so singularly heightened with the inborn
skill of so divine an instinct is just such an alteration as would be
equally likely to occur to the original writer on glancing over his
printed text or to a poet of kindred power, who, while busied in
retouching and filling out the sketch of his predecessor, might be struck
by the opening for so great an improvement at so small a cost of
suppression. My own conjecture would incline to the belief that we have
here a perfect example of the manner in which Shakespeare may be
presumed, when such a task was set before him, to have dealt with the
text of Marlowe. That at the outset of his career he was so employed, as
well as on the texts of lesser poets, we have on all hands as good
evidence of every kind as can be desired; proof on one side from the text
of the revised plays, which are as certainly in part the work of his hand
as they are in part the work of another; and proof on the opposite side
from the open and clamorous charge of his rivals, whose imputations can
be made to bear no reasonable meaning but this by the most violent
ingenuity of perversion, and who presumably were not persons of such
frank imbecility, such innocent and infantine malevolence, as to forge
against their most dangerous enemy the pointless and edgeless weapon of a
charge which, if ungrounded, must have been easier to refute than to
devise. 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