'Now climbeth Tamora Olympus' top,
Safe out of Fortune's shot; and sits aloft,
Secure of thunder's crack or lightning flash,
Advanc'd above pale envy's threat'ning reach.
As when the golden sun salutes the morn,
And, having gilt the ocean with his beams,
Gallops the zodiac in his glistering coach,
And overlooks the highest-peering hills;
So Tamora.'
Bullen, in his edition of Marlowe's plays, was of the opinion that this passage was written by Marlowe, in view of Marlowe's having written, in the third chorus of Act III of Faustus, the line,
'Did mount himself to scale Olympus' top.'
Appleton Morgan (Bankside Shakespeare) thinks the passage Shakespeare's without question, and considers it a remarkably good imitation of Marlowe's style. Crawford, however, sees in lines 3–5 of the passage an echo of Peele's Honour of the Garter (line 410),
'Out of Oblivion's reach or Envy's shot,'
while Robertson finds in line 7 a direct echo of a line from Peele's Anglorum Feriæ,
'Gallops the zodiac in his fiery wain,'
and notes other lines from Peele's David and Bethsabe strikingly parallel in structure and abounding in verbal coincidences. Such resemblances are, indeed, very striking, but do they definitely prove more than that there was a singular community of thought and similarity of expression, and no little amount of imitation, among Elizabethan poets? And what, to give only one instance, shall be said of the lines in the Merchant of Venice (IV. i. 9, 10),
'no lawful means can carry me
Out of his envy's reach'?
