"Cattle were seen that mutter'd human speech;

Prodigious births with more and ugly joints

Than nature gives, whose sight appals the mother;
And dismal prophecies were spread abroad."

Plutarch's mention of some, but not all, of the wonders in the speech is of this casual kind: "For, touching the fires in the element, and spirits running up and down in the night." There is no reference to prodigious births. And most of the portents dilated upon in Julius Caesar could have been obtained, and probably were obtained, by Marlowe from Lucan's account of the prodigies that heralded the Civil War.

There are a number of weak and ineffective lines in this play which it is impossible to believe that Shakespeare could have written in his maturity. A quite remarkable feature of the work is its tautological weakness, in no place more evident than in the scene now being reviewed. This is almost enough to make one credit Peele with a share in the play. However, though there is little tautology in Beaumont, Marlowe was somewhat tainted with that vice. As an example of the thin way in which the poet spreads himself, lines 91 to 95 may be cited: 'Therein, ye gods, you make the weak most strong;

Therein, ye gods, you tyrants do defeat:

Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass,

Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron,

Can be retentive to the strength of spirit."

There is nothing here of the vigour of Shakespeare's middle period. The passage clearly takes one back to the time of the Contention and the True Tragedie.

For a similar instance of the use of "who" for "whoever" in the lines (119 and 120) below

'And I will set this foot of mine as far

As who goes farthest "'

-the editor of the Clarendon Press edition was compelled to refer to Philaster, ii. 4:

"Ye gods, I see that who unrighteously

Holds wealth or state from others shall be cursed."'

But he might have gone farther and fared better had he turned to Love's Pilgrimage (of which Beaumont wrote the last two acts), where, in Act v. Sc. 5, he would have found:

"Know, I dare appear, and do

To who dares threaten "'

-a passage that not only contains the idiom of the speech in Julius Caesar, but something of its spirit.

The answering speech of Cassius (lines 120 to 130) has some traces of Marlowe, notably the compound adjective, “honourabledangerous." Though Shakespeare was the greatest offender in the use of this literary monstrosity, Marlowe had been a previous, but not often, sinner. There are two instances of this perversion -“childish-valourous" and "manly-wise "-in one line of the Second Part of Tamburlaine, the play that probably immediately preceded Julius Caesar. Beaumont was not given to this vice. A phrase that suggests Marlowe is "the work we have in hand" (line 129). It is also in 2 Henry VI., i. 4, but not in the corresponding scene of the Contention. However, whether the scene in the chronicle has been touched up by Shakespeare or not, it has clearly been subjected to Marlowe's revision.

A comparison of lines 131 and 132 with a passage from the Massacre at Paris has already been made in Chapter I., p. 16. From line 140 onwards, the verse is less of an end-stopped pattern, from which it may be gathered that Beaumont, while retaining the Marlowe structure, has considerably modified its arrangement. This may, perhaps, be best seen in the last speech: "Him and his worth and our great need of him

You have right well conceited."

This should be compared with a passage in Philaster, i. 2: "Him will I send

To wait on you, and bear our hidden love."

This kind of inverted construction is not common to Marlowe, though, of his school, Dekker and the author of the first few scenes of 1 King Henry VI. freely used it.

Postscript. It may be thought that, having singled out this passage as the most significant of Beaumont in the play

"Brutus, I do observe you now of late :

I have not from your eyes that gentleness
And show of love as I was wont to have:

You bear too stubborn and too strange a hand

Over your friend that loves you ''

-I had failed to notice that a phrase in the last line was repeated in the Captain, iii. 5:

"Faith, this is somewhat

Too much, Fabritio, to your friend that loves you."

This comedy, corrupt in more ways than one, has certainly some of Beaumont's work in it, mostly in the last two acts. He seems to have corrected it, and he clearly wrote, with other scenes, the long interview between Lelia and her disguised father that closes the fourth act. But the scene that contains this echo from Julius Caesar does not appear to hold any mark of Beaumont at all, although it also has :

"And look you render me just such a reason." This is the phrase used by Brutus and the Citizens in the Forum

scene:

"And public reasons shall be rendered

Of Caesar's death."

"I will hear Cassius; and compare their reasons,
When severally we hear them rendered."'

Most likely, we have to deal here with Fletcher's memories of a recently-acted play. The evidence for Beaumont is quite strong enough without the inclusion of such scraps as these on the mere assumption that, as reviser of the Captain, he was responsible for every phrase in it that also appears in the Roman tragedy. In Act v. Sc. 4 of the comedy, in which is a fair amount of Beaumont's work, is the sentence: "You are stay'd for, sir." In Julius Caesar, Cinna twice asks the question: "Am I not stay'd for?" It is not a very rare idiom. Shakespeare uses it: so does Massinger. A phrase that occurs in both plays, "for my single self," has already been noticed. Some of the phrases mentioned

may have been put by Beaumont into the Roman tragedy. But one, at least the first to be noticed-is probably from Marlowe. In the Forum scene we have:

"I am no orator, as Brutus is;

But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man,
That love my friend."

In 2 Henry VI., v. 1, Iden calls himself

"A poor esquire of Kent that loves his king."

The last four words of this line are not in the corresponding line in the Contention, but their value is required to make up the metre. Miss Jane Lee ascribes the revision of the scene to Shakespeare and Marlowe, while she thinks the original authors were Marlowe and, possibly, Greene. On this showing, Marlowe has as good a title to the line as anybody.

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CHAPTER IV.-EXAMINATION OF THE TEXT: ACT 2.

I.

THERE is little of a definite nature in the opening of the first

scene of this act to connect it with either Marlowe or

Beaumont, though the first long speech of Brutus (lines 10 to 34) still holds some traces of the early Marlowean matter. The allusions to the adder and the serpent's egg are both indicative of the prior play. "There's the question" is a phrase that Marlowe used in the Massacre. The antiquated "remorse," i.e., "pity," is also his, and certainly the six lines (21 to 27)—

"But 'tis a common proof,

That lowliness is young ambition's ladder,
Whereto the climber-upward turns his face;
But when he once attains the upmost round,
He then unto the ladder turns his back,

Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend "'

-seem to be Marlowean in tone and diction, as may appear from a line in Edward II.:

"And highly scorning that the lowly earth."

The resemblance is not very close, it is true, but the same antithesis is used. In connection with the passage in Julius Caesar, it is worth notice that the King, in Act v. Sc. 1 of Richard II., calls Northumberland "thou ladder wherewithal The mounting Bolingbroke ascends my throne." It is possible, also, that the author-Peele, probably-of Act iv. Sc. 5, of Edward III. had the phrasing of the lines cited in mind when writing :

"Unto whose tall top when thy foot attains,

Look back upon the humble vale below."