He passes from _Ferrex and Porrex_[141] and _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ directly to Shakspere, and quite omits Marlowe and the other immediate predecessors.

He was not ignorant of their existence, for against a statement of Dryden's that Shakspere was the first to use blank verse we find in Scott's edition the note,--"This is a mistake.
Marlowe and several other dramatic authors used blank verse before the days of Shakespeare";[142] and one of his youthful notebooks contains this comment on _Faustus_: "A very remarkable thing.

Grand subject--end grand."[143] In 1831 Scott intended to write an article for the _Quarterly Review_ on Peele, Greene, and Webster, and in asking Alexander Dyce to have Webster's works sent to him he said, "Marlowe and others I have,--and some acquaintance with the subject, though not much."[144] Webster he considered "one of the best of our ancient dramatists." The proposed article was never written, because of Scott's final illness.
In spite of his statement that "the English stage might be considered equally without rule and without model when Shakspeare arose," Scott did not seem inclined to leave the great man altogether unaccounted for, as some critics have preferred to do, for he says, "The effect of the genius of an individual upon the taste of a nation is mighty; but that genius in its turn is formed according to the opinions prevalent at the period when it comes into existence." These opinions, however, Scott assigns very vaguely to the influence of "a nameless crowd of obscure writers," and thinks it fortunate that Shakspere was unacquainted with classical rules.

The critic had evidently made no attempt to define the influence of particular writers upon Shakspere.

His criticism is at some points purely conventional, as for instance when he calls the poet "that powerful magician, whose art could fascinate us even by means of deformity itself "; but on the whole Scott seems to write about Shakspere in a very reasonable and discriminating way.
He has a good deal to say of Ben Jonson, in other places as well as in this Essay on the Drama.[145] He was evidently well acquainted with that poet, and admired him without liking him.