According to the  Trollope Society, Anthony Trollope was “the most published novelist” of the 1860s and 1870s. He was a popular Victorian novelist whose forty-seven novels are still read today. Trollope first read Shakespeare around age twelve while spending a school holiday with his father at Lincoln’s Inn. This was hardly a joyous occasion. His father had been bad-tempered to start, and a series of business failures had left the family in penury. In his Autobiography, Trollope reflects:

Despite this unpromising start, Trollope later returned to Shakespeare, as well as his contemporaries, including Christopher Marlowe. According to Elizabeth Epperly, Trollope “puts Shakespeare in a class by himself,” but Marlowe’s mastery of language brought him up to a close second.²

The Folger Shakespeare Library’s online catalog reveals holdings of Trollope’s previously owned copies of Alexander Dyce’s editions of the collected works of George Peele (1828), Robert Greene (1831), James Shirley (1833), Thomas Middleton (1840), Beaumont and Fletcher (1843), William Shakespeare (1864-67), and John Ford (1869). Trollope loved drama and loved Dyce. 

Happily for us, Trollope wrote in his books. In Middleton’s Blurt, Master-Constable, one finds the novelist lamenting: “From the days of Marlowe and Shakespeare downwards the dramatists gradually fell from poetry and charm of characters … to so garbled in language and so confused in incident as to be almost unintelligible to the reader of the present day” (qtd. in Epperly 287). Middleton “was about the most offensive,” but none are spared Trollope’s biting critique.

On a recent visit to the Folger, we encountered Trollope’s copy of Alexander Dyce’s 1850 edition of Christopher Marlowe’s collected works. 

Unlike the Folger’s holdings of other works owned by Trollope, the online catalog did not include a note indicating prior ownership of these Marlowe editions. The card catalog lists two copies of Dyce’s Marlowe edition (with Trollope’s notes in copy 2) and the online catalog record has only now been corrected to reflect that. Needless to say, we were excited to happen upon Trollope’s bookplate and notes on Marlowe’s plays.

Trollope started reading Marlowe in 1867 and appears to have been hooked. He read The Jew of Malta on November 24 of that year, Edward II on December 1, and Faustus the very next day. As one can see from the following transcriptions, Trollope was clearly attracted to the power of Marlowe’s language, but he didn’t find him “relatable.”

The Jew of Malta

Trollope’s consideration at the conclusion of The Jew of Malta reads, in full, “There is neither pathos nor tenderness in this piece. And the incidents are as improbable, incongruous, and ill devised as to render the story wholly uninteresting. But there is a certain power of language which carries the reader on, and which is the shared characteristic of the Elizabethan Dramatists and the only charm of many of them” (I.349). Beyond his characteristic end-of-play comments, Trollope also adds a comment in the body text of The Jew of Malta, next to Barrabas’s speech declaring his intent to murder Lodowick (wln1069-1082); Trollope notes, “Massinger’s Sir Giles Overreach [from A New Way to Pay Old Debts] is taken from him [Barrabas]” (I.279). Trollope’s marginalia reflects his careful reading of early modern plays.

Faustus

Trollope recalls reading Doctor Faustus “30 years since” and “conceiving it then to be full of grand poetry.” Upon re-reading, however, Trollope changes his mind, noting: “I now find the fine passages to be few. & very short.” Trollope avers that Marlowe “never creates a feeling of sympathy with his Faustus no one cares whether the Devil harm him or no” (II.84). Dyce printed both the A-text and B-text of Faustus in full, along with a ballad; Trollope’s notes on Doctor Faustus appear at the end of the A-text, suggesting that is the version he (re-)read.

Edward II

Trollope opens his consideration of Edward II by hearkening to the play’s prior reputation: “It is said that this was considered, then, in a dramatic point of view, the best of Marlowe’s plays. We can hardly understand this now, so tedious is it from its length” (II.290). The novelist continues: There is much fine language in the play … but there is not a single character which can excite sympathy, whereon, the whining of the King for his man-friends, the fickleness of the Queen, and the cruelty of Mortimer is disgusting” (II.290). Perhaps it was Trollope’s disgust for Mortimer that makes him step away from Marlowe; he does not return until May 1, 1868 when he reads both parts of Tamburlaine.

Tamburlaine (Parts 1 and 2)

At the end of Tamburlaine, Part II, Trollope assesses both parts of the play: “The first & second parts of Tamburlaine are I think the finest of Marlowe’s works” (I.226). Trollope contends that “the magnificence of the language is often so great as to cast into shadow the terrible defects of sentiment” (I.226)—and, indeed, Trollope identifies many defects. Similar to his opinion on Faustus, Trollope sees “not one” “single character with whom the reader can sympathise”; though finds that “the roll of the poetry is often so fine as to convince the reader of the presence of something sublime” (I.226). Trollope holds opposing opinions, valuing “Marlowe’s mighty line” while finding that his characterization falls short.

Dido, Queen of Carthage

In June 1870, Trollope suggests that Dido, Queen of Carthage is “pretty, quaint, and graceful”, but “could hardly be called a play.” He suggests instead it is “a burlesque on Dido’s story as told by Vergil” (II.439). In the mid-nineteenth century, classical burlesques appeared on stage as plays, operas, and ballets; they were, as Laura Monros-Gaspar writes, “imbued with topical jokes and references, tragic heroes, suffering heroines and epic deeds are revisited with a vengeance and transformed to showcase the anxieties of a growing empire.”³ Trollope considers Dido as one of these Victorian classical burlesques that perhaps reflects his time as much as Marlowe’s.

Massacre at Paris

Trollope’s opening critique of Massacre at Paris is both damning and in line with his criticisms of other plays: “This is sad trash and unworthy of Marlowe of whom it may be said that although his characters are uninteresting his poetry is often grand” (II.359). Trollope sees this play as “unworthy of Marlowe” because “There is a hardly a fine line in this.” He considers Massacre at Paris in relation to other history plays because it tells “the events of some twenty years in the history of France put together in a dramatic form as was usual with the Elizabethan Dramatists,” but concludes by suggesting that Marlowe’s play has a “total absence of dramatic effect” (II.359).

Poetry

While Trollope assiduously put a checkmark next to the play titles in the first two volumes of Dyce’s drama, adding his notes at the conclusion of each play (or set of plays, as the case may be), he put only a single tick in the third volume of poetry, next to the title “A Song.” On the song itself, “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love” (“Come live with me, and be my love,” III.299-301), Trollope did not write any notes. Trollope’s interest in Marlowe lay with the plays and not the poetry.

Conclusion: Trollope the avid early modern reader

As these examples show, Trollope was an avid reader of early modern plays.⁴ Trollope weaved in references to these early modern works throughout his novels, as Geoffrey Harvey, William Coyle, Maurice Hunt and others have documented.⁵. Trollope’s handwritten comments on Marlowe demonstrate that he read the plays with an eye to language, character, and genre; he drew parallels between the early modern worldview and that of his own time.

The rapidly changing world at the turn of the seventeenth-century gave rise to plays enacting socio-cultural themes including “the redemption of the prodigal, the impoverishment of the gentry by the rising merchant class, the scrutiny of aristocratic values, the newly subversive spirit of the independent wealthy woman and the testing of the response of feminine virtue to altered social conditions.”⁶ Trollope’s novels stage these themes and enact individuals struggling to negotiate shifting constructions of world order.

Trollope’s engagement with early modern drama not only enriched his narrative techniques and thematic explorations but also positioned him as a bridge between the Renaissance and Victorian eras. Revisiting his annotations centuries later offers 21^st century readers fresh insights and innovative ways of networking literary movements over time.