The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume IV. Prose and Poetry: Sir Thomas North to Michael Drayton.
§ 9. Marlowe’s non-dramatic writings
The chronology of Marlowe’s non-dramatic work, other, and presumably later, than the translation of Ovid already named, has not been determined, Two poems Hero and Leander and The First Book of Lucan are entered in the Stationers’ register on 28 September, 1593, that is, nearly four months after the poet’s death. The first, which had been left unfinished, was printed in 1598, and again in the same year, with the text completed by Chapman. The earliest known edition of the second is dated 1600; in which year also appeared two short pieces, the song “Come live with me and be my love,” in England’s Helicon (in fuller form than the 1599 text in The Passionate Pilgrim), and the fragment “I walked along a stream for pureness rare,” in England’s Parnassus. The nearly simultaneous publication of these pieces appears to indicate an effort by friends to leave little or nothing of the poet’s work unprinted; and the fact supplies contemporary evidence of a kind hardly consistent with the popular view of the disrepute of Marlowe’s last years. Personal testimony from Edward Blunt (in his remarkable preface), Chapman and Nashe, supplemented by the praises which Hero and Leander won, from both Shakespeare and Jonson and from humbler artists like the Water Poet, should go far to reduce the popular hyperbole of Marlowe’s social and spiritual outlawry.