33-) English Literature
Christopher Marlow
Shakespeare
authorship theory
An
argument has arisen about the notion that Marlowe faked his death and then
continued to write under the assumed name of William Shakespeare. Academic
consensus rejects alternative candidates for authorship of Shakespeare's plays
and sonnets, including Marlowe.
Plays
In
his 1592 letter to Lord Burghley, the Governor of Flushing described his
prisoners and said that Marlowe was “by his profession a scholar.” Marlowe’s earliest
writings are certainly those one would expect from a learned man—at the
beginning of his career. Marlowe began writing verse by translating the Roman
poets Ovid and Lucan. He could well have encountered Lucan while he was at
grammar school; and at school too he would have read some of Ovid’s verse—but
not the Amores, which he chose to translate.
The
Latin poems are written in the elegiac meter: a hexameter line followed by a
pentameter. They show Ovid at his most sophisticated, writing of love in many
different aspects with complete confidence in his linguistic brilliance.
Marlowe’s translations of these elegies are not uniformly successful; but they
nevertheless form an impressive achievement. For the Latin elegiac couplet,
Marlowe substituted the rhymed pentameter couplet—which John Donne later
followed, imitating Marlowe with his own elegies. Instead of the polished
artifice with which Ovid manipulated his inflective language, Marlowe wrote
with the directness of the spoken voice, using the range and variety of speech
tones to approach the “masculine perswasive force” for which Donne is so highly
esteemed. The couplet and the speaking voice often combine to give a dramatic
immediacy and wit to lines such as these from elegy 18 of book two, where the poet
makes his excuses for writing of love when he should be contemplating epic
matters:
Often
at length, my wench depart, I bid,
Shee
in my lap sits still as earst she did.
I
sayd it irkes me: halfe to weping framed,
Aye
me she cries, to love, why art a shamed?
Then
wreathes about my necke her winding armes,
And
thousand kisses gives, that worke my harmes:
I
yeeld, and back my wit from battells bring,
Domesticke
acts, and mine owne warres to sing.
Here
the closing of the couplet enacts the speaker’s resignation as well as bringing
to a close the first section of the poem.
There
are 48 poems in the collection All Ovids Elegies, and many are less satisfying
than this one. Sometimes Marlowe seems to be bored with his work and snatching
at the most obvious English word without reflecting on its aptness (“admonisht”
for admonitus); at other times the exigencies of rhyme force the English
language new strange shapes to take (“forbod” to rhyme with “god”); and often
the attractive circumlocutions of the Latin are rendered with a pedantry which
assumes an ignorant readership (the worst example is the translation of Ovid’s
pretty reference to the birth of Bacchus in III. iii “non pater in Baccho
matris haberet opus” becomes “The fathers thigh should unborne Bacchus lacke”).
More often, however, we see the praiseworthy attempts of a young poet to master
the foreign language and his native tongue—and on occasion we see the genesis
of a notion which is developed later in his career.
The
translating of book one of Lucan’s epic poem the Pharsalia was in many ways
less demanding than the translating of the Amores: the poem’s narrative line
and the medium (blank verse) were better guides to Marlowe—and when his
comprehension of the Latin was inadequate, he had a copiously annotated
commentary to help him. Neither this translation nor that of the Amores can be
dated with any accuracy, but it seems likely that such academic—and
apprentice—work would be undertaken at a time of (comparative) leisure such as
the Cambridge years. For the nation, these were times of political tension,
with events such as the unmasking of the Babington Conspiracy, the execution of
Mary, Queen of Scots, and the threat of the Spanish Armada. In literature the
national unease manifested itself in works such as Lodge’s play The Wounds of
Civil War and Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy. In this context book one of
Pharsalia takes on a new dimension: it is not merely an academic and personal
exercise but a warning of grim topicality against the horrors and dangers of
civil butchery. Lucan’s Centurion promises to wage war against his city at
Caesar’s command, even if he should “Intombe my sword within my brothers
bowels; / Or fathers throate ... [.]” The lines may be compared with the stage
direction which, for Shakespeare, indicated the greatest of civil (and natural)
disorders: “Enter a Sonne that hath kill’d his Father ... and a Father that
hath kill’d his Sone” (Henry VI, part three, II.v).”
In
the preface to his translations of Ovid’s Epistles (1680) John Dryden
distinguished three kinds of translation, of which the first was “that of
Metaphrase, or turning an Author word by word, and line by line, from one
language into another.” Marlowe’s translations of Ovid and Lucan are of this
kind—which is good reason to suppose that they are early works, where Marlowe
might be reluctant to allow himself too much freedom because he lacked the
confidence to use it. Dryden’s second method offers greater scope: “Paraphrase,
or Translation with Latitude,” which is a useful term to describe Marlowe’s
handling of Virgil’s Aeneid for what was probably his first play, Dido Queen of
Carthage.
Dryden
explained “Paraphrase” by saying that in this kind of translation “the Author
is kept in view by the Translator, so as never to be lost, but his Words are
not so strictly followed as his Sense, and that too is admitted to be
amplified, but not altered.” Marlowe took the plot of his play from book six of
Virgil’s poem, but he moved easily around the epic, taking details from books
one and two for his dramatic purposes. His translation changes the Latin into
English, transforms epic narrative into stage action, and takes the part for
the whole—the story of Dido occupies only one twelfth of the Aeneid, so that
the episode can be viewed sub specie aeternitatis.
Another
difference—which is of great importance for the appreciation of the play—is
that whereas Virgil’s characters are superhuman, of proper epic proportions,
Marlowe’s are slightly less than human in size: they were meant to be acted by
children. The title page of the first quarto edition advertises that the play
was “Played by the Children of her Majesties Chappell.” The plays written for
these highly professional children obeyed conventions different from those
obtaining in plays written for adult performers: Dido is more appropriately
compared—in respect of its technique—with the plays of Peele than with Antony
and Cleopatra (whose subject matter is comparable).
Marlowe
took from Virgil the account of Dido’s passion for Aeneas, the Trojan hero
ship-wrecked on the Carthaginian coast after the destruction of Troy, and he
added a subplot of the unrequited love of Anna, Dido’s sister, for one of
Dido’s suitors, whose name—Iarbus—is mentioned only infrequently in the Aeneid.
Virgil’s hero is a man of destiny, ordained by the gods to sail to Italy and
there establish the Roman race, the true descendants of the Trojans. The
interlude with Dido is only a part of the divine plan, and Aeneas must not
allow himself to be detained in Carthage, even though his departure is a tragic
catastrophe for the Queen. Virgil’s gods are always in control of the action.
Marlowe
introduces the gods at the beginning of his play, daringly presenting them as a
bunch of rather shabby immortals subject to very human emotions: Venus is
anxious for the welfare of her shipwrecked son, Aeneas; Juno is jealous of
Venus and irritated by her husband’s infidelities; and Jupiter is besotted with
a homosexual passion for Ganymede. This is a grotesquely “domestic” comedy,
which might seem to endanger the tragic stature of the play’s heroine and the
epic status of its hero, since both Dido and Aeneas are at the mercy of such
deities. The character of Aeneas has provoked varying reactions in critics of
the play (one sees him as “an Elizabethan adventurer”; another adopts the
medieval view in which he is the betrayer of Troy; and for yet another he is
the unheroic “man-in-the-street” who has no desire for great actions). Dido,
however, is unambiguously sympathetic. At first a majestic queen, she becomes
almost inarticulate as she struggles with a passion that she does not
understand; her grief at Aeneas’s departure brings back her eloquence, and
then, preparing for death, she achieves the isolated dignity of a tragic
heroine. The inarticulateness was described by Virgil (incipit effari, mediaque
in voce resistit), and Marlowe adds the immediacy of speech when in III.iv Dido
is overcome with love:
AENEAS.
What ailes my Queene, is she falne sicke of late?
DIDO.
Not sicke my love, but sicke:—I must conceal
The
torment, that it bootes me not reveale,
And
yet Ile speake, and yet Ile hold my peace,
Doe
shame her worst, I will disclose my griefe:—
Aeneas,
thou art he, what did I say?
Something
it was that now I have forgot.
At
the end of the play Marlowe does not translate the Latin, and this has been
called by Harry Levin “an evasion that smells of the university.” Rather, it
shows Marlowe’s respect, both for his author and for his audience. The lines
that he takes from Virgil are beautiful—and well known: he could not hope to
equal them. When the stage Aeneas is adamant to Dido’s entreaties, he utters
the words of the epic hero (which include one of the best-known half lines in
all poetry): “Desine meque tuis incendere teque querelis,/ Italiam non sponte
sequor.” (“Cease to inflame both me and yourself with your lamentations. It is
not of my own free will that I seek Italy.”) And Dido’s last words, as she
curses Aeneas before her self-immolation, are the words of Virgil—but the
dramatic moment is intensified by the interpolation of an English line:
Littora
littoribus contraria, fluctibus undas
Imprecor:
arma armis: pugnent ipsíque nepotes:
Live
false Aeneas, truest Dido dyes,
Sic
sic juvat ire sub umbras.
(“I
pray that coasts may be opposed to coasts, waves to waves, and arms to arms;
may they and their descendants ever fight. ... Thus, thus I rejoice to enter
into the shades.”)
Implicit
tribute is paid in these lines not only to the verse of Virgil and the
understanding of the audiences but also to the skills of the child actors, who
were chosen from the (already highly selected) boys of the royal choirs and
given special coaching for their theatrical roles. Writers in the 16th century
such as Peele and Lyly (and in the seventeenth century, Jonson and Middleton)
were proud to write for such companies, recognizing that special demands were
made on them to exploit the assets and minimize the limitations of the child
actors.
Immaturity
was the most obvious limiting factor: verisimilitude was not to be looked for,
and the presentation of “character” (in the modern sense of the word) was
clearly impossible. Instead the productions compensated by offering spectacle,
where the emphasis was always on artifice and where imitation was always ready
to draw attention to itself qua imitation—expecting applause for the excellence
of its craftsmanship in equalling (and, if possible, surpassing) nature. For
example, an Oxford boys’ production of an entertainment in 1583 was reported
with wonder, for there was “a goodllie sight of hunters with full crie of a
kennel of hounds ... The tempest wherein it hailed small confects, rained rose
water, and snew an artificial kind of snew, all strange, marvellous, and
abundant” (in John Nichols, The Progresses, and Public Processions, of Queen
Elizabeth, 1788–1807). The dramatists’ choice of subject matter also emphasized
the artificiality of the performances: boys with unbroken voices took the parts
of the great figures from classical mythology—“Hercules and his load too,” as Rosencrantz
tells Hamlet.
The
great strength of the children was their elocution, taught as part of the
discipline of rhetoric in every Elizabethan grammar school. It included not
only the training of the voice but practice in the appropriate accompanying gestures
and facial expressions. And the child actors were, of course, far more
accomplished than the average schoolboy. Marlowe’s play calls for such
talent—especially in Aeneas’s account of the Fall of Troy, where more than 60
lines are punctuated only occasionally by comments from the other character,
orchestrating pity and terror in fine narrative verse.
The
play was published in 1594, and the title page claims Thomas Nashe as part
author—but there is no trace of his hand in the composition. Perhaps Nashe
secured, or even transcribed, the manuscript for publishers eager to take
advantage of the notoriety of Marlowe’s death and unable to obtain possession
of the other plays since these were all the valued property of adult theatrical
companies.
The
earliest of these plays had, however, already been published: the two parts of
Tamburlaine the Great, subtitled Two Tragicall Discourses, appeared in print in
1590, two or three years after the plays were performed by the Admiral’s Men.
The first of these “Discourses” appears to be complete in itself, leaving the
eponymous hero triumphantly alive at the end of act five, where he announces
that now “Tamburlaine takes truce with al the world.” The second “Discourse”
opens with a prologue which testifies to the popularity of the first,
explaining its own raison d’être:
The
generall welcomes Tamburlain receiv’d,
When
he arrived last upon our stage,
Hath
made our Poet en his second part [.]
At
the end of this play’s act five, “earth hath spent the pride of all her fruit”:
Tamburlaine is dead.
In
outline, the action of Tamburlaine is simple. The hero of part one, a Scythian
shepherd of boundless aspiration, encounters no serious opposition in his rise
to power and majesty. By force, either of rhetoric or of arms, he overcomes all
resistance—winning allies, conquering kings and kingdoms, and captivating the
beautiful Zenocrate. The play ends with amatory as well as martial triumph,
anticipating the “celebrated rites of mariage.” In part two the opposition
grows and is not merely human in origin: Tamburlaine is disappointed in his
sons; Zenocrate falls sick and dies; lastly Tamburlaine himself is forced to
confess that “sicknesse proove[s] me now to be man.”
The
play’s style suits the character. In verses prefixed to the first folio edition
of Shakespeare’s plays (1623), Ben Jonson referred to “Marlowe’s mighty line,”
and it is in part one of Tamburlaine that this line is evolved, especially when
in II.vii the hero enunciates his credo:
Nature
that fram’d us of foure Elements,
Warring
within our breasts for regiment,
Doth
teach us all to have aspyring minds:
Our
soules, whose faculties can comprehend
The
wondrous Architecture of the world:
And
measure every wandring plannets course:
Still
climing after knowledge infinite,
And
alwaies mooving as the restles Spheares,
Wils
us to weare our selves and never rest,
Untill
we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That
perfect blisse and sole felicitie,
The
sweet fruition of an earthly crowne.
The
verse sweeps to its climax at the end of the paragraph, verbally enacting the
speaker’s breathless impetuousness and captivating audiences just as
Tamburlaine’s person vanquishes all resistance.
But
the play does not ask for uncritical applause, either for the character or for
the “high astounding tearms” of his utterances. Marlowe is well aware that both
ambition and hyperbole are potentially ludicrous, and in the first scene he
encourages laughter, thereby establishing criteria for the appreciation of his
protagonist.
The
very first lines of the play, spoken by Mycetes, King of Persia, make the
proper association between personality and linguistic command:
Brother
Cosroe, I find my selfe agreev’d
Yet
insufficient to expresse the same:
For
it requires a great and thundring speech [.]
Marlowe
demonstrates the comic range of such “thundring speech” as soon as Mycetes
attempts to speak as befits his dignity. His comedy includes the grimly
incongruous—in the description of “milk-white steeds”
All
loden with the heads of killed men.
And
from their knees, even to their hoofes below,
Besmer’d
with blood, that makes a dainty show.
There
is even one of the crude “conceits [which] clownage keeps in pay” which are
scorned in the prologue:
MYCETES.
Well here I sweare by this my royal seate—
COSROE.
You may doe well to kisse it then.
MYCETES.
Embost with silke as best beseemes my state [.]
The
folly and weakness of Mycetes justify Cosroe in his determination to overthrow
his brother and wear the crown himself; and this act of usurpation serves to
justify Tamburlaine in his subsequent decision.
Tamburlaine
first appears in the company of Zenocrate, to whom he offers comfort and
protection. Although he is dressed as a shepherd, his behavior is more like
that of a knight in some medieval romance. Before our eyes, he seems to
increase in stature as he sheds his humble garments (“weedes that I disdaine to
weare”) and exchanges them for “adjuncts more beseeming”—a “compleat armour”
and a “curtle-axe.” So accoutred, he is compared by his companions to a lion
(the emblem of kingship), and he himself refers to “Empires”; but the first
impassioned speech is made to Zenocrate—and Tamburlaine is thereby associated
with beauty, jewels, love, and richness, rather than bloodthirsty conquests.
The advance of the Persian horsemen also places Tamburlaine in a favorable
position for winning the sympathy of the audience—he asks the Soldier to
confirm the enemy numbers: “A thousand horsemen? We five hundred foote?”
Undeterred he outlines a stratagem and declares his willingness to combat against
far greater odds—“Weele fight five hundred men at armes to one”—and to face the
foe himself—“My selfe will bide the danger of the brunt.”
By
the end of act two, Tamburlaine is secure in his position of “super-man,”
because he has been seen to deserve it and to be morally as well as physically
superior to those he has defeated. He reaches a pinnacle of success in act
three, when he fights against the Turkish Emperor Bajazeth.
The
Turk’s proud boasts overtop Tamburlaine’s own claims, and Bajazeth is accompanied
by apparently powerful allies—so that once again Tamburlaine’s army seems to be
heavily outnumbered. Furthermore, Tamburlaine is now presented as a defender of
the faith, opposed to the infidel Turks and promising to inlarge
Those
Christian Captives, which you keep as slaves,
Burdening
their bodies with your heavie chaines,
And
feeding them with thin and slender fare,
That
naked rowe about the Terrene sea.
The
battle is splendidly managed. Fought offstage, its progress is commented on by
Zabina and Zenocrate, who also wage a verbal battle which parallels the
conflict of the warriors. But although Tamburlaine once again deserves victory,
his treatment of the conquered Bajazeth gives rise to audience suspicion that
he is beginning to overreach himself.
For
the rest of part one, and throughout most of part two, Marlowe balances scenes
of great brutality, performed with a ritual solemnity, against speeches of
amazing beauty in praise of Zenocrate and in lament for her death. Themes of
ambition, love, power, and justice are introduced in part one and developed
further in part two, so that the two parts form a symphonic unity.
Increasingly
in part one and throughout the whole of part two, Tamburlaine images himself as
“the Scourge and Wrath of God,” the instrument of some divine retribution; this
must be accepted by the audience—who must also recognize (as an Elizabethan
audience certainly would acknowledge) that the scourge itself must be scourged
and destroyed. Even Tamburlaine seems sporadically aware of this fact—as when,
at the death of Zenocrate, he inveighs in II.iv against the
Proud
furie and intollorable fit,
That
dares torment the body of my Love,
And
scourge the Scourge of the immortall God [.]
Thus
admiration (for the valor) and horror (at the cruelty) are tempered with
respectful anticipation of the inevitable catastrophe.
The
style of Tamburlaine was immediately infectious: but imitation soon turned to
parody and then to scorn. In Timber Ben Jonson warns his “true Artificer” that
the language of his play should not “fly from all humanity, with the
Tamerlanes, and Tamer-Chams of the late Age, which had nothing in them but the
scenicall strutting, and furious vociferation, warrant them to the ignorant
gapers.” The actor responsible for the “scenicall strutting” was Edward Alleyn,
the star performer of the Admiral’s Men, for whom Marlowe wrote this play. For
Alleyn, also, he created the role of Barabas in his next play, The Jew of
Malta.”
Internal
evidence (mainly stylistic) suggests that The Jew of Malta was written circa
1589; it was frequently performed by The Admiral’s Men in the years immediately
following Marlowe’s death, and the recorded “box-office receipts” testify to
its popularity. There was no printed text until 1633 when a quarto edition was
published carrying new prologues and epilogues written by Thomas Heywood; it
seems likely that Heywood was also responsible for a complete revision of the
play—but the full extent of his revising cannot be ascertained. In both of his
new prologues Heywood alludes to the play’s antiquity: addressing the “Gracious
and Great” in the “Prologue spoken at Court,” he explains that The Jew of Malta
was “writ many years agone,” and he adds that it was “in that Age, thought
second unto none.”
The
play has always been “second unto none” in the sense that nothing else in
English drama is quite like it: it has no place in any recognizable dramatic
tradition. The theme of radix malorum cupiditas is not unknown in English
drama. Shakespeare’s Shylock is a distant relation of Marlowe’s Barabas, and
Jonson’s Volpone shares his interest: but these similarities only emphasize the
differences between The Jew of Malta on the one hand, and The Merchant of
Venice or Volpone on the other.
Marlowe’s
play has no obvious source. The action is set on the tiny Mediterranean island
of Malta, which at the end of the 16th century was a Spanish possession
occupied by the Knights of St. John Hospitaller after their expulsion from
Rhodes in 1522. Marlowe’s Knights (and audience) are reminded of this fact in
II.ii:
Remember
that to Europ’s shame,
The
Christian Ile of Rhodes, from whence you came,
Was
lately lost, and you were stated here
To
be at deadly enmity with Turkes.
The
Knights of the play, however, have a truce with the Turks, to whom they owe a
tribute. In order to pay this tribute Ferneze, the Governor of Malta,
determines to levy tax on the island’s Jews, who must either pay one-half of
their estates, or else be converted to Christianity. The wealthiest Jew,
Barabas, rejects both alternatives. To punish him, Ferneze confiscates his
entire property; the rest of the play shows Barabas’s efforts to reinstate
himself—he in fact becomes Governor of Malta—and to take revenge on those who
have injured him. There follows a rapid succession of murders: Ferneze’s son,
who is in love with the Jew’s daughter, fights a duel—in which both he and his
rival are killed; Abigail, the object of their affections, is poisoned—and an
entire convent of nuns dies with her; two suspicious friars quarrel—one is strangled
and the other hanged; Ithamore, a villainous Turkish slave who has been
Barabas’s instrument, is poisoned before he can betray his master—a prostitute
and her pimp die with him; a monastery housing the Turkish forces is blown up
while their leader is preparing to banquet with Barabas—but the leader (the son
of the Turkish emperor) is saved when Ferneze operates the mechanism which
should have precipitated him into a cauldron of boiling water. It is Barabas
who is boiled to death, caught in his own trap; and he dies with a fine,
melodramatic defiance: “Dye life, flye soule, tongue curse thy fill and dye.”
The
speed with which these crimes are dispatched encourages in the spectator the
detachment appropriate to comedy, precluding any sympathy with the victims. And
only Abigail is presented as an attractive character—“The hopelesse daughter of
a haplesse Jew.” Her death is pathetic: in III.vi she expires in the arms of
the friar who converted her, with the laudable sentiment
ah
gentle Fryar,
Convert
my father that he may be sav’d,
And
witnesse that I dye a Christian.
But
pathos is immediately dissolved in laughter with the friar’s response: “I
[Aye], and a Virgin too, that grieves me most.” None of the other murder
victims emerges as more than a comic stereotype—the romantic lover, the
avaricious friar (an anti-Catholic caricature), a slave whose curriculm vitae
includes “setting Christian villages on fire, Chaining of Eunuches, binding
gallyslaves,” and a prostitute lamenting the decline of trade in Malta (“my
gaine growes cold ... now against my will I must be chast”).
In
contrast to all these Barabas is presented as a richly unique character. A
“bottle-nos’d knave,” he opens the play as a mercantile adventurer, discovered
“in his Counting-house, with heapes of gold before him.” Absorbed in his
enterprises, he is a businessman who keeps his accounts straight. In I.i he
says,
So
that of thus much that returne was made:
And
of the third part of the Persian ships,
There
was the venture summ’d and satisfied.
But
he soon shows frustration and envy:
Fye;
what a trouble tis to count this trash.
Well
fare the Arabians who so richly pay
The
things they traffique for with wedge of gold [.]
Ambition
turns him into a dreamer—a visionary lost in the admiration of
Bags
of fiery Opals, Saphires, Amatists,
Jacints,
hard Topas, grasse-greene Emeraulds,
Beauteous
Rubyes, sparkling Diamonds,
And
seildsene costly stones ... [.]
The
speech builds to a crescendo, rising to one of Marlowe’s best-known lines when
Barabas longs to “inclose / Infinite riches in a little roome.” There are
further revelations to come, but already we (as audience or readers) have begun
to understand Barabas; we are more inward with him than any of the other
dramatis personae. This sense of intimacy is developed in the ensuing action
through the use of asides which allow us to feel superior to the other
characters—to the Jews, for instance, when later in I.i Barabas seems to be
promising his support:
2.
JEW. But there’s a meeting in the Senate-house,
And
all the Jewes in Malta must be there.
BARABAS.
Umh; All the Jewes in Malta must be there?
I
[Aye], like enough, why then let every man
Provide
him, and be there for fashion-sake.
If
any thing shall there concerne our state
Assure
your selves I’le looke—
unto
my selfe. Aside.
Barabas
is also a sympathetic character in that, at the beginning of the play, he is a
man more sinned against than sinning: the victim of prejudice, his fault lies
in his Jewishness—and the Knights of Malta are prepared to use religion as a
cloak for theft when they take the Jews’ property to pay the Turks. Barabas
discloses their hypocrisy—“Preach me not out of my possessions.”
In
this confrontation of Jew and Roman Catholic, Marlowe is presenting two objects
of fear, hatred, and suspicion to the Elizabethan Protestants who formed the
play’s contemporary audience. As Christians, the Elizabethans believed the Jews
to be the race that betrayed and crucified their God; but as Englishmen they
recognized in Roman Catholicism a threat to their church and their monarch.
From the very beginning of the play there is a complexity of emotional response
which is by no means reconciled at the end of act five.
By
overreaching himself in his villainy Barabas, like Tamburlaine in the earlier
play, has alienated the audience; his ignominious death in the
cauldron—standard Elizabethan punishment for the poisoner—is seen to be most
appropriate. At the same time, it is impossible to share in the unctuous piety
of Ferneze’s closing couplet: “let due praise be given / Neither to Fate nor
Fortune, but to Heaven.” It is, perhaps, the last joke of this early “black
comedy.”
Marlowe
seems to be well acquainted with the history of Malta—whence Jews were expelled
in 1422 unless they cared to purchase Christian baptism at the price of 45
percent of their individual estates. In the 1580s the island seems to have had
a particular interest for the English. There were suspicions—still imperfectly
understood—of conspiracies and espionage which might have been known to Marlowe,
whose interest in politics and current events did not cease with his Cambridge
career.
This
interest is clearly evidenced by The Massacre at Paris, a play linked
stylistically with The Jew of Malta by its grim humor. The date of The Massacre
at Paris is unknown: it was performed in 1593, and must have been written after
the death, in August 1589, of Henry III of France. The first scenes of the play
present the bloody violence of the French riots in 1572, when more than 30,000
French Protestants were murdered at the hands of Roman Catholics led by the
Duke of Guise (drawing support from Catherine de Medici). The play ends after
Guise has been murdered (December 1588) at the instigation of Henry III, and
when Henry himself is dying, passing the French crown to Henry of Navarre
(Henry IV of France). Among the accusations made against Guise is the
rhetorical reminder
Did
he not draw a sorte of English priestes
From
Doway to the Seminary at Remes,
To
hatch forth treason gainst their naturall Queene?
Did
he not cause the King of Spaines huge fleete,
To
threaten England ... ?
Marlowe
could, of course, have gained this information from the printed sources that he
was using; but it must not be forgotten that he may well have been at Rheims in
the service of Walsingham and the Privy Council. Just before his death Henry
III addresses the “Agent for England,” instructing him to “send thy mistres
word, What this detested Jacobin [the Duke of Guise] hath done”; swearing to
“ruinate that wicked Church of Rome,” he vows his loyalty to the Protestant
cause, “And to the Queene of England specially, / Whom God hath blest for
hating Papestry.” The “Agent for England” at the time of Henry III of France
was Walsingham himself.
Unfortunately,
The Massacre at Paris survives only in a pitifully mangled form, and the
undated octavo edition cannot offer adequate material for an assessment of
Marlowe’s work. There are the traces of a fine theatricality in the very first
scene, where the religious tensions are shown at the wedding of the Protestant
Navarre to the Catholic Margaret—a union which Catherine de Medici threatens to
“desolve with bloud and crueltie.” The character of Guise is presented with
typical Marlovian ambivalence: unquestionably a brutal, ruthless murderer, he
nevertheless is possessed of aspiration and a high disdain which in themselves
are praiseworthy:
That
like I best that flyes beyond my reach.
Set
me to scale the high Peramides,
And
thereon set the Diadem of Fraunce,
Ile
either rend it with my nayles to naught,
Or
mount the top with my aspiring winges,
Although
my downfall be the deepest hell.
And
although Henry III’s deeds are sanctioned by his Protestant sympathies, the
character is not given uncritical approval: his hypocrisy is blatant, and we
are clearly shown the weakness to which Queen Catherine draws attention: “His
minde you see runnes on his minions.” In this last respect, the character seems
to adumbrate the protagonist of Edward II.
The
eponymous hero of this play on the subject of English history is the only one
of Marlowe’s protagonists who is totally lacking in the charismatic energy with
which the rest are driven, and which is voiced in the “high astounding tearmes”
of Tamburlaine. This was not a part designed for Edward Alleyn.
According
to the title page of the first (1594) edition, Edward II was “sundrie times
publiquely acted in the honourable citie of London, by the right honourable the
Earle of Pembrooke his servants.” Pembroke’s Men seem to have been a scratch
troupe of actors who toured the provinces in time of plague; in September 1593
they were penniless and forced to disband, pawning their costumes and selling
their playbooks. Marlowe might have written his play especially for this
company: it demands few elaborate costumes and asks for no multilevel staging,
and in such respects it would suit a touring company. But it offers no roles
comparable with those of Tamburlaine, Barabas, or Dr. Faustus—the parts played
by Alleyn for the Admiral’s Men.
Most
of the events of Edward II were taken from Holinshed’s Chronicles of England
(1597). The five acts of Marlowe’s play span 23 years of English history, from
the accession of Edward II in 1307 until the events of 1330 when Mortimer’s
treachery was discovered. Edward was a weak king, besotted by love for his
“minion,” Piers Gaveston. Neglecting—and even abusing—both his queen and the
realm, he was imprisoned and cruelly murdered.
The
play also shows the rise to power and “the tragicall fall of proud Mortimer.”
At first Mortimer is an impetuous patriot, resenting the honors that the King
bestows on Gaveston because the country is thereby impoverished. But ambition
leads him to rebel. He becomes the Queen’s lover; forces Edward to resign the
crown to his son; and takes upon himself the position of Protector to the young
King. For a short time he can gloat over his power, saying in V.iv:
Now
all is sure, the Queene and Mortimer
Shall
rule the realme, the king, and none rule us,
Mine
enemies will I plague, my friends advance,
And
what I list commaund, who dare controwle?
Major
sum quam cui possit fortuna nocere.
(“I am great beyond Fortune’s harm.”)
He
has arranged the murder of Edward, who dies in agony; but the crime is
discovered, and the new King condemns Mortimer to a traitor’s death.
Sympathies
in this play are never fixed, and the characters are unusually complex. From a
passionate patriot Mortimer becomes a Machiavellian usurper and a sadistic
regicide. Isabella, the Queen, is at first (in II.iv) a cruelly wronged wife,
“Whose pining heart, her inward sighes have blasted, / And body with continuall
moorning wasted.” Love and obedience are eventually destroyed, and she finds
comfort in Mortimer’s gentle courtesy. Soon she is quite dominated by her
lover: in IV.vi we are told by the Earl of Kent (always a useful guide to the
direction our sympathies should take) that “Mortimer And Isabell doe kisse
while they conspire,” and in V.ii the Queen herself acknowledges her new love:
Sweet
Mortimer, the life of Isabell,
Be
thou perswaded, that I love thee well,
And
therefore so the prince my sonne be safe,
Whome
I esteeme as deare as these mine eyes,
Conclude
against his father what thou wilt,
And
I my selfe will willinglie subscribe.
Isabella’s
rival for her husband’s attentions is the young Frenchman, Piers Gaveston. He
too is a character who develops—or at least changes—during the course of the
play’s action. He opens the play with a soliloquy, outlining schemes he has
devised to “draw the pliant king which way I please”; although he speaks of
Edward with affection, it is certain that self-interest is a powerful
motivating force. As the play progresses, however, it becomes equally certain
that his self-interest gives way to an unselfish love that overcomes the
bitterness of captivity and the imminence of an ignoble death—in II.iv, for
example, Gaveston looks forward to a final meeting with his lover: “Sweete
soveraigne, yet I come To see thee ere I die.”
Toward
Edward II Marlowe’s attitude (and consequently our attitude) seems to be
ambivalent. Edward is a danger to the country’s stability in his free
dispensation of offices and wealth to a commoner. Wailing over Gaveston’s
departure, or on tiptoe with excitement at his return, the King is ludicrous.
And the husband who flaunts a lover before his wife, making her acceptance of
Gaveston the condition for the continuance of their marriage, is utterly
despicable. Against such charges Marlowe sets the solitary redeeming fact that
Edward loves Gaveston:
MORTIMER.
Why should you love him, whome
the
world hates so?
EDWARD.
Because he loves me more then all
the
world.
Edward
is a man of extremes, swerving violently from the blackest depression to
carefree exuberance with no intervening stage of reasonable moderation. In his
death he is the object of intense pity—and admiration.
Edward’s
death is a parody of the homosexual act. The details were supplied by history,
and Marlowe accumulated them from various chronicle sources. The King is
arrested at the Abbey of Neath, where he has tried to find sanctuary among
friends and sympathizers; in IV.vii Marlowe, the poet of striving and
aspiration, becomes the poet of weariness and despondency:
good
father on thy lap
Lay
I this head, laden with mickle care,
O
might I never open these eyes againe,
Never
againe lift up this drooping head,
O
never more lift up this dying hart!
It
is the last comfort he will find. After his capture he is bundled “from place
to place by night,” shaved in puddle water, and finally imprisoned in a
stinking cell—“the sincke / Wherein the filthe of all the castell falles” and
where “One plaies continually upon a Drum.” Edward recounts his pitiful story
to Lightborn, a character of Marlowe’s own imagination, who is in fact the
murderer. Lightborn is subhuman, a machine for murder. He is the only character
in the play who has no emotional response to Edward, and his heartless
efficiency seems to intensify the King’s muddled, suffering humanity. For one
moment Edward becomes a king again as in V.v, with an almost habitual grace, he
bestows his last jewel—“Know that I am a king.”
Not
until he lost his throne did Edward rise to kingship, and the sad eloquence of
his final speeches is in contrast to the empty rhetoric that precedes them. The
“mighty line” is subdued in this play, whose characteristic modes are irony and
deflation: when in IV.iv Isabella begins a peroration to justify the rebellion
against Edward, she is abruptly silenced by Mortimer:
QUEENE.
.............................................
Misgoverned
kings are cause of all this wrack,
And
Edward thou art one among them all,
Whose
loosnes hath betrayed thy land to spoyle,
And
made the channels overflow with blood,
Of
thine own people patron shouldst hou be
But
thou—
MORTIMER.
Nay madam, if you be a warriar,
Ye
must not grow so passionate in speeches [.]
Only
Mortimer is allowed to hold up the play’s action with a heroic parting speech,
but the words of stoical courage are preceded and followed by references to
Mortimer as “traitor” and “murderer” which effectively reduce the speech’s
impact.
Frustration
and weakness are Marlowe’s themes in Edward II. There is no superman hero—and
the soaring splendor of Tamburlaine’s verse would be inappropriate here. In his
next play, Dr. Faustus, Marlowe sets the mighty lines of the hero’s aspirations
in a critical balance against the cool tones of experience, achieving thereby a
tragedy which is still—in the 20th century—able to startle and terrify with its
thoughtful intensity.
At
the beginning of the play Faustus, having excelled in all branches of human
knowledge, finds his intellectual ambitions still unsatisfied: although as a
physician, for instance, he has achieved renown in the treatment of “thousand
desperate maladies,” he longs for greater power:
Couldst
thou make men to live eternally,
Or
being dead, raise them to life againe,
Then
this profession were to be esteem’d.
At
last he turns to Divinity, but upon opening the Bible he is confronted with an
apparently insoluble dilemma when he juxtaposes two sentences: “The reward of
sin is death”; and “If we say that we have no sinne we deceive our selves, and
there is no truth in us.” From these two premises he proceeds to the
syllogism’s logical conclusion:
Why
then belike
We
must sinne, and so consequently die,
I
[Aye], we must die, an everlasting death.
Throwing
his books aside, he opts for the study of magic, resolving be this means “to
get a Deity.”
In
I.iii, with his first invocation, he conjures up the devil, Mephostophilis, and
makes a bargain with him: in exchange for 24 years of power and knowledge, when
Mephostophilis will be his servant, Faustus will hazard his immortal soul.
Mephostophilis, a surprisingly honest devil, tries to dissuade the eager
conjurer by painting a bleak picture of the torments of the damned
Think’st
thou that I who saw the face of God,
And
tasted the eternall Joyes of heaven,
Am
not tormented with ten thousand hels,
In
being depriv’d of everlasting blisse?
O
Faustus leave these frivolous demandes,
Which
strike a terror to my fainting soule.
Faustus
is undeterred, refusing to believe “that after this life there is any paine.”
At the devil’s request he writes a formal legal document in his own blood,
which is “A Deed of Gift, of body and of soule.”
For
the next 24 years he pursues knowledge and pleasure, but finds only
disappointment. All the time he is accompanied by two Angels, Good and Evil;
the former urges him to turn to God in repentance and hope for mercy, while the
Evil Angel persuades him that he cannot repent, that he can never be forgiven,
and that “devils will teare [him] in peeces” if he attempts to break the
promise he has made to the devil. In the last act of the play he twice conjures
up the spirit of Helen of Troy—the first time for the benefit of his scholar
friends, who have requested to see “the admirablest Lady that ever lived.” The
second conjuration is for his own delight and comfort; he asks for Helen as his
“paramour,”
Whose
sweet embraces may extinguish cleare,
Those
thoughts that do disswade me from my vow,
And
keepe mine oath I made to Lucifer.
The
second appearance of Helen calls forth from Faustus the most famous lines that
Marlowe ever wrote:
Was
this the face that Launcht a thousand ships,
And
burnt the toplesse Towers of Ilium?
Sweet
Hellen make me immortall with a kisse:
Her
lips sucke forth my soule, see where it flies.
Such
hyperbole is by no means uncommon in the love poetry of the 16th century, but
here there is a cruel irony. In Helen’s embraces Faustus “from [his] soule
exclud[es] the grace of heaven” (V.i) and indeed assures himself of
immortality—“in hell for ever” (V.ii).”
The
final soliloquy enacts his last hour on earth and reverses the movement of the
first soliloquy. The proud scholar, who had fretted at the restrictions imposed
by the human condition and longed for the immortality of a god, now seeks to
escape from an eternity of damnation. To be physically absorbed by the
elements, to be “a creature wanting soule,” “some brutish beast,” even—at the
last—to be “chang’d into little water drops”: this is the final ambition of the
man who had once tried “to get a Deity.” Time is the dominant in this speech.
The measured regularity of the opening gives way to a frantic tugging in two
directions as Faustus is torn between Christ and the devil: “O I’le leape up to
my God: who puls me downe?” The pace and passion increase as the clock strikes
relentlessly, and the second half-hour passes more quickly than the first. We
are agonizingly aware of the last minutes of Faustus’s life, trickling away
like sand through the hourglass with what seems like ever-increasing speed. But
as each grain falls, bringing Faustus closer to his terrible end, we become
more and more conscious of the deserts of vast eternity and damnation that open
up beyond death.
The
critic Leo Kirschaum said in 1943 that “there is no more obvious Christian
document in all Elizabethan drama than Doctor Faustus” (Review of English
Studies). But its ideology is not simple. The form is, in some respects, that
of the old morality plays—with two significant differences. Firstly, the
central figure is not the generic Everyman: Dr. Faustus is an individual, with
a history (born in Germany, “within a Towne cal’d Rhode,” to parents “base of
stocke”) and an impressive curriculum vitae. And, in the second place, the fate
of this individual is not that of the type character, whose fall into sin is
condemned and then—before the end of the play—redeemed.
It
is important to remember that Marlowe spent some time as a student of theology;
and a close reading of Dr. Faustus reveals the dramatist’s recollections of his
study. Dr. Faustus sins willfully: he has full knowledge of the consequences of
his deed (even though he does not believe in the reality of the threatened
hell), and in II.i he takes complete responsibility:
MEPHOSTOPHILIS.
Speake Faustus, do you deliver this
as
your Deed?
FAUSTUS.
I [Aye], take it, and the devill give thee
good
of it.
Throughout
the play there is a conflict in Faustus’s mind, encouraged and expressed by the
two Angels, as in these lines from II.ii:
GOOD
ANGEL. Faustus repent, yet God will pitty thee.
BAD
ANGEL. Thou art a spirit, God cannot pity thee.
Orthodox
theology taught that the devils—in this context “spirit” is a synonym—were by
their very nature incapable of repentance and therefore of receiving divine
forgiveness; and Faustus acknowledges this doctrine when he hears the two
promptings and responds:
FAUSTUS.
Who buzzeth in mine eares I am a spirit?
Be
I a devill yet God may pitty me,
Yea,
God will pitty me if I repent.
BAD
ANGEL. I [Aye], but Faustus never shall repent.
FAUSTUS.
My heart is hardned, I cannot repent [.]
He
confesses to despair—a “deepe despaire” which even prompts him to suicide, but
which is overcome by “sweete pleasure.”
The
triviality in the central scenes of the play has often drawn attention away
from its profound seriousness. Acts three and four, where Faustus explores his
magic powers, show scenes of slapstick farce and simple conjuring. Some
suggestions for these scenes could have come from the prose narrative which was
the main source of Marlowe’s plot—Das Faust-Buch (1587) translated into English
by 1592 as The Historie of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John
Faustus. This prose work was a mixture of jestbook and moral fable, which
offered also a guidebook to Europe and a tour of hell. But the storyteller’s
license was not available to the playwright, and the middle part of the
dramatic Dr. Faustus is a disappointment.
But
it is unlikely that Marlowe himself was responsible for this flaw. Perhaps the
manuscript of the play, unfinished when Marlowe died in 1593, came into the
hands of the impresario Philip Henslowe, who found other writers to complete
the piece for performance in 1594. Eight years later Henslowe recorded in his
diary a payment to two hack dramatists, Samuel Rowley and William Birde, for their
“adicyones” to Dr. Faustus. The play in its earlier form was not published
until 1604 (the A Text); the later edition, published in 1616 (the B Text),
incorporates the 1602 “adicyones.” These complications of writing and printing
make Dr. Faustus one of the major bibliographical problems of English
literature.
Before
his death, Marlowe had returned to the writing of nondramatic verse and was
again working on a form of translation—the kind that Dryden describes as
“imitation.” In Dryden’s sense, “imitation” does not seek to translate the
words, or even the sense, of an author but “to set him as a pattern and to
write as [the translator] supposes that author would have done, had he lived in
our age and in our country.” The “pattern” for Marlowe was Musaeus, a Greek
poet of the fourth or fifth century A.D., whose narrative poem Hero and Leander
earned him the title of “grammatikos”—which distinguished him as a scholarly
writer, learned in the poetry, rhetoric, and philosophy of his own time and
expert in the interpretation of the great authors of the past. Marlowe’s poem
is a worthy imitation; and to the necessary qualities of a “grammatikos” the
English writer adds one more: wit.
The
Greek poem briefly describes the first encounters of the two lovers and then
narrates Leander’s final attempt to swim the Hellespont on a winter’s night;
the youth was drowned, and his Hero died by his side. Marlowe’s poem, however,
is a comedy, lavishing care on the meeting of Hero, “Venus Nun,” with the
stranger from Abydos. The two lovers are described in great detail. Hero is a
masterpiece of art—her footwear, for example, is a technological tour de force:
Buskins
of shels all silvered, used she,
And
brancht with blushing corall to the knee;
Where
sparrowes pearcht, of hollow pearle and gold,
Such
as the world would woonder to behold:
Those
with sweet water oft her handmaid fils,
Which
as shee went would cherupe through the bils.
The
verse admires the elaborate luxury, while at the same time revealing its
absurdity. In complete contrast to the description of Hero is Marlowe’s
portrait of Leander, which lingers erotically over the boy’s naked body:
Even
as delicious meat is to the tast,
So
was his necke in touching, and surpast
The
white of Pelops shoulder. I could tell ye,
How
smooth his brest was, and how white his bellie,
And
whose immortal fingers did imprint,
That
heavenly path, with many a curious dint,
That
runs along his backe ... [.]
The
admixture of comedy (especially through the rhymes) prevents the sensual and
mythological richness from becoming self-indulgent.
Using
persuasions taken from Ovid’s Amores, Leander starts his seduction of Hero; he
is at first a “bold sharpe Sophister,” but quickly shows himself to be a
“novice ... rude in love, and raw.” Hero responds by protecting herself,
initially, with her status as priestess, but instinctive attraction soon leads
to unconscious encouragement as “unawares (Come thither) from her slipt.” She
shows her true innocence when she opens the door to Leander, who has just swum across
the Hellespont, and “seeing a naked man, she scriecht for feare, / Such sights
as this, to tender maids are rare.” Marlowe’s poem moves toward a climax as the
poet slowly describes the encounter of the two lovers, which leads to the
consummation of their love. The passage is splendidly orchestrated. It begins
with the human comedy of Leander’s appeal to Hero’s pity (“This head was beat
with manie a churlish billow, / And therefore let it rest upon thy pillow”); a
second movement is the sympathetic presentation of Hero’s conflicting emotions
as she halfheartedly tries to ward off Leander’s assaulting hands; then, after
a brief and “metaphysical” comparison of Hero’s breasts to “a globe,” we reach
the moment of Leander’s triumph, when he achieves the status of a superman and,
“like Theban Hercules,” accomplishes his mission.
Hero
and Leander reveals qualities in its author that the plays seem to suppress or
deny: tenderness, sympathy, and generous humor which can laugh without cruelty.
The poem is not without flaws, of course; but the achievement is great in
itself and suggests enormous potential for the future, which can only be
lamented in the words of the epilogue to Dr. Faustus:
Cut
is the branch that might have growne full straight,
And
burned is Apollo’s Lawrell bough,
That
sometime grew within this learned man [.]
But
Marlowe’s actual achievement (rather than his unfulfilled potential) is best
summed up in the words of a contemporary; Shakespeare’s reference to Marlowe’s
death (in As You Like It) serves as an epitaph on the writer’s work—it was “A
great reckoning in a little room.
Six
dramas have been attributed to the authorship of Christopher Marlowe either
alone or in collaboration with other writers, with varying degrees of evidence.
The writing sequence or chronology of these plays is mostly unknown and is
offered here with any dates and evidence known. Among the little available
information we have, Dido is believed to be the first Marlowe play performed,
while it was Tamburlaine that was first to be performed on a regular commercial
stage in London in 1587. Believed by many scholars to be Marlowe's greatest
success, Tamburlaine was the first English play written in blank verse and,
with Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, is generally considered the beginning of
the mature phase of the Elizabethan theatre.[86]
The
play Lust's Dominion was attributed to Marlowe upon its initial
publication in 1657, though scholars and critics have almost unanimously
rejected the attribution. He may also have written or co-written Arden of
Faversham. Ferdinando Stanley, 5th Earl of Derby, aka "Ferdinando, Lord
Straunge," was patron of some of Marlowe's early plays as performed by
Lord Strange's Men. Ferdinando Stanley, 5th Earl of Derby, aka
"Ferdinando, Lord Straunge," was patron of some of Marlowe's early
plays as performed by Lord Strange's Men.
Poetry
and translations
Publication
and responses to the poetry and translations credited to Marlowe primarily
occurred posthumously, including:
Amores,
first book of Latin elegiac couplets by Ovid with translation by Marlowe (c.
1580s); copies publicly burned as offensive in 1599.
The
Passionate Shepherd to His Love, by Marlowe. (c. 1587–1588); a popular lyric of
the time.
Hero
and Leander, by Marlowe (c. 1593, unfinished; completed by George Chapman,
1598; printed 1598).
Pharsalia,
Book One, by Lucan with translation by Marlowe. (c. 1593; printed 1600)
Collaborations
Modern
scholars still look for evidence of collaborations between Marlowe and other
writers. In 2016, one publisher was the first to endorse the scholarly claim of
a collaboration between Marlowe and the playwright William Shakespeare:
Henry
VI by William Shakespeare is now credited as a collaboration with Marlowe in
the New Oxford Shakespeare series, published in 2016. Marlowe appears as
co-author of the three Henry VI plays, though some scholars doubt any actual
collaboration.
Charles
Howard, 1st Earl of Nottingham, Lord High Admiral, shown here c. 1601 in a
procession for Elizabeth I of England, was patron of the Admiral's Men during
Marlowe's lifetime.
Contemporary
reception
Marlowe's plays were enormously successful, possibly because of the imposing stage presence of his lead actor, Edward Alleyn. Alleyn was unusually tall for the time and the haughty roles of Tamburlaine, Faustus and Barabas were probably written for him. Marlowe's plays were the foundation of the repertoire of Alleyn's company, the Admiral's Men, throughout the 1590s. One of Marlowe's poetry translations did not fare as well. In 1599, Marlowe's translation of Ovid was banned and copies were publicly burned as part of Archbishop Whitgift's crackdown on offensive material.
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