We are apt to forget that alongside Shakespeare and at his heels other dramatists were supplying material for the theatre.

The influence of Marlowe and particularly of Kyd, whose _Spanish Tragedy_ with its crude mechanism of ghosts and madness and revenge caught the popular taste, worked itself out in a score of journeymen dramatists, mere hack writers, who turned their hand to plays as the hacks of to-day turn their hand to novels, and with no more literary merit than that caught as an echo from better men than themselves.

One of the worst of these--he is also one of the most typical--was John Marston, a purveyor of tragic gloom and sardonic satire, and an impostor in both, whose tragedy _Antonio and Mellida_ was published in the same year as Shakespeare's _Hamlet_.

Both plays owed their style and plot to the same tradition--the tradition created by Kyd's _Spanish Tragedy_--in which ghostly promptings to revenge, terrible crime, and a feigned madman waiting his opportunity are the elements of tragedy.

Nothing could be more fruitful in an understanding of the relations of Shakespeare to his age than a comparison of the two.