Starting from the accepted premise that Marlowe influenced the young Shakespeare, a selection of strongly contextual words characteristic of Tamburlaine are shown to be reflected in Shakespeare's early history plays. Principal components analysis confirms this. A very similar configuration, however, results when the selected Marlowe-preferred words are non-contextual common words. This feature can not be explained by influence in its conventional sense, particularly when the Shakespeare plays closest to Marlowe are those that share with Marlowe a dearth of selected Shakespeare-preferred common words.