following passages from different parts of the Roman tragedy, placed in juxtaposition with the words of the Guise.

Arrogance and contempt of fear form a preponderating share of the make-up of all Marlowe's heroes, and the speech of the Guise

"Let mean conceits and baser men fear death;
Tut, they are peasants; I am Duke of Guise;

-may well show the author of:

and

'But I fear him not:

"

Yet if my name were liable to fear,'' (J. C., i. 1)

"I rather tell thee what is to be feared

Than what I fear, for always I am Caesar." (Ib., i. 1)

"Caesar should be a beast without a heart,

If he should stay at home for fear." (Ib., ii. 2)

Another idea fostered by Marlowe was that the faces of strong and highly-placed characters should carry a something more than human look of majesty, manifest enough to strike fear into the hearts of common mortals. This is exemplified in Tamburlaine, in the last line of the cited speech of the Guise in the Massacre: And princes with their looks engender fear,"

and in the words of Caesar (ii. 2):

"We are two lions littered in one day,

And I the elder and more terrible:

And Caesar shall go forth."

"Caesar shall forth: the things that threatened me

Ne'er looked but on my back; when they shall see
The face of Caesar, they are vanishèd."

The speech of the First Murderer in the Massacre

"Stand close; he is coming; I know him by his voice" -furnishes a parallel with the following piece of dialogue in Julius Caesar, i. 3:

"Casca. Stand close awhile, for here comes one in haste.

Cas. 'Tis Cinna; I do know him by his gait."

In the Massacre, the Guise himself had previously (p. 231) made a similar remark to the two contained in the lines above: "Cousin, 'tis he; I know him by his look."

Another coincidence of expression deserves attention here, if for no other reason than that it displays the occasional importance of little, and apparently quite insignificant, words. After the murder (iii. 1), Brutus resolves to

"Show the reason of our Caesar's death."

"Our " is the strange word in this passage. I cannot call to mind any attempt by any commentator to explain the use of this possessive, almost affectionate, pronoun. It was not the custom for Shakespeare's murderers to speak in such terms of their victims. But here, probably, the poet intended to show that, after the death of Caesar, Brutus was sole lord of Rome, or at least the liquidator of the slain Caesar's conspiracy. The position of Brutus is similar to that of the King in the Massacre, who, standing over the body of his victim, uses the same-under the circumstances, unaccountable-pronoun as Brutus did:

"As all the world shall know our Guise is dead" (p. 242). This subtle coincidence of expression, while by itself no proof of community of authorship, is an accretion to other evidence suggesting that the poet of the Massacre had a hand in Julius Caesar. Finally, the scene of the Guise's murder ends with the line (evidently a quotation):

"Thus Caesar did go forth, and thus he died."

This passage, with its recurrent "forth," probably figured in the pre-Shakespearean play, under the fortuitously-preserved preShakespearean title, The Life and Death of Julius Caesar.

Besides the external evidence already brought forward, two other considerations concur in assigning for Marlowe's play the years 1588-89. Between Julius Caesar and the Second Part of Tamburlaine are a number of links of the kind that denote a vocabulary common to two plays of one period. We are reminded of the words of Cassius in Act v. Sc. 3

'This day I breathed first ''

-by this line in 2 Tamburlaine, iv. 1:

"O Samarcanda, where I breathed first."

This extremely uncommon expression is nowhere employed by Shakespeare. In the Roman tragedy we have (iv. 1)

"The three-fold world divided,"

and in 2 Tamburlaine, iv. 3, the line:

66

"To note me emperor of the three-fold world."

'Three-fold world" also appears in Locrine, by Peele (?): it is certainly a little belated in a 1600 Julius Caesar. Finally a line from the Second Part of Tamburlaine (iii. 5)—

-helped to furnish the closing rhyme of the Roman tragedy: "To part the glories of this happy day."

Is it likely that Shakespeare would have inserted a ten year-old tag from Marlowe in the most conspicuous line of his play?

These links certainly tend to support the theory that there is still something of Marlowe left in Julius Caesar. There are, of course, others which will receive notice in due time, but only those bearing on the question of date are here mentioned. If we are to believe Warton, another play of this period is Edward II., which, says that authority, was "written in the year 1590." It contains an incident similar to one in Julius Caesar, iii. 1, where the conspirators are keenly watching the facial by-play of Caesar as he listens to Popilius Lena, of whose business with Caesar the anxious knot of men are, of course, ignorant. The lines below are from two speeches of Brutus:

"Look, how he makes to Caesar: mark him."

Popilius Lena speaks not of our purposes;

For, look, he smiles, and Caesar doth not change."'

In Edward II. (p. 190, Dyce's edition), the Queen pleads with the rebel peers for permission to recall Gaveston. Young Mortimer goes aside with her, and the rest endeavour to forecast the result of Mortimer's counter-pleading:

"Pem. Fear not; the queen's words cannot alter him.
War. No? Do but mark how earnestly she pleads.
Lan. And see how coldly his looks make denial.

War. She smiles: now, for my life, his mind is changed."'

Would Shakespeare, so late as 1600, have copied this passage of Marlowe's, reproducing the last line with almost Massinger-like fidelity?

From the foregoing, it would seem that Caesar was written shortly after the Second Part of Tamburlaine, which, it is generally held, followed the First Part after a very short interval. This latter was in existence by 1587, and the Second Part probably by 1588. This would give 1589 for Julius Caesar. This date is also indicated by a political event of the time, the assassination of the Duke of Guise, which did not take place before the closing month of 1588. Why Marlowe was unable to treat openly till 1592 of this, by him, detested personage is a question that, perhaps, admits of no satisfactory answer. It would appear, however, that the Elizabethan dramatists had to be very careful indeed to avoid ruffling the feelings of the French Court. But, while Marlowe might have lost his ears had he written the Massacre in 1589, there was nothing to deter him from writing a play there and then upon the Guise and calling it Julius Caesar, which is what he appears to have done.

It is sufficiently clear that, when writing the Massacre at Paris, Marlowe had Caesar in mind when dealing with the happenings to the Guise; but it may not be quite so obvious that Caesar posed for the Guise-as, later, Richard II. did for Elizabeth-which subterfuge gave Marlowe the opportunity of saying what he pleased without running any risk. For, unless one can show points of difference, as well as features of resemblance, the argument falls to the ground. And it is just here that the attempt to prove that the Guise and Caesar are identical-or, rather, that Marlowe, in creating Caesar, had an eye upon a recently-living model-is made extremely difficult by the likeness between the lives and fortunes of the two men. The character of one will fit the other. Up to a certain point their careers were similar, and in their several deaths they were not divided. Both had repeated

warnings of their coming doom, which were ignored for the same reason-contempt of fear. Before Caesar was despatched, we are told that he walked to and fro, avoiding the strokes aimed at him. So did the Guise, who must also have had quite as many wounds as Caesar. When Caesar saw that resistance was useless, he "pulled his gown over his head," falling eventually against the base of Pompey's statue, "which ran all of a goare bloud." At the finish of Guise's ineffectual struggle, "il jeta le pan de son manteau sur son visage," and finally rested at the foot of the king's bed, which was spattered with his blood. Caesar had previously spared the life of Brutus, and De Gast, one of the murderers of the Guise, owed his life to his victim. It is much to be suspected that the Guisian apologist who wrote the tract from which these "facts" relating to the murder are taken was purposely exaggerating in an attempt to suggest a parallel between Caesar and the Guise. If so, Marlowe was spared the trouble of inventing the connection.

It would, perhaps, be worth while to search contemporary records to find how far the characteristics and peculiarities of the Guise resemble those traits of Caesar in the play that are not taken from Plutarch. Was the Guise deaf in one ear? Were his public utterances of a bombastic cast? Was he in the habit of speaking of himself in the third person? (This peculiarity of Caesar's, however, I believe to be due to Beaumont.) So far, I have found but one departure from Plutarch showing that the author of the murder scene in Julius Caesar may have had the recent assassination of the Guise in mind when writing it. In the two accounts in the Lives no mention is made of the time when the crime was committed. In the play it is distinctly given (ii. 1):

"Bru. By the eighth hour; is that the uttermost?
Cas. Be that the uttermost, and fail not then."

And again (ii. 2):

"Caesar. What is't o'clock?

Bru. Caesar, 'tis strucken eight."