CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE: The Great Predecessor of Shakespeare LECTURE 13 BY ASHER ASHKAR GOHAR 3 CREDIT HRS. INTRODUCTION Even a brief glance at the life and work of the first true playwrights shows three noteworthy things which have a bearing on Shakespeare's career: 1. These men were usually actors as well as dramatists. They knew the stage and the audience, and in writing their plays they remembered not only the actor's part but also the audience's love for stories and brave spectacles. "Will it act well, and will it please our audience," were the questions of chief concern to our early dramatists. 2. Their training began as actors; then they revised old plays, and finally became independent writers. In this their work shows an exact parallel with that of Shakespeare. 3. They often worked together, probably as Shakespeare worked with Marlowe and Fletcher, either in revising old plays or in creating new ones. They had a common store of material from which they derived their stories and characters, hence their frequent repetition of names; and they often produced two or more plays on the same subject. Much of Shakespeare's work depends, as we shall see, on previous plays; and even his Hamlet uses the material of an earlier play of the same name, probably by Kyd, which was well known to the London stage in 1589, some twelve years before Shakespeare's great work was written. Elizabethan drama is rather an orderly though rapid development, in which many men bore a part. All the early dramatists are, therefore, worthy of study for the part they played in the development of the drama; but we can here consider only one, the most typical of all, whose best work is often ranked with that of Shakespeare. CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564 – 1593) HIS LIFE: Christopher Marlowe (1564 – 1593), was an Elizabethan poet and Shakespeare’s most important predecessor in English drama, who is noted especially for his establishment of dramatic blank verse. Marlowe was the second child and eldest son of John Marlowe, a Canterbury shoemaker. Nothing is known of his first schooling, but on January 14, 1579, he entered the King’s School, Canterbury, as a scholar. A year later he went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Obtaining his bachelor of arts degree in 1584, he continued in residence at Cambridge — which may imply that he was intending to take Anglican orders. In 1587, however, the university hesitated about granting him the master’s degree; its doubts (arising from his frequent absences from the university) were apparently set at rest when the Privy Council sent a letter declaring that he had been employed “on matters touching the benefit of his country”—apparently in Elizabeth I’s secret service. CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564 – 1593) After 1587 Marlowe was in London, writing for the theatres, occasionally getting into trouble with the authorities because of his violent and disreputable behaviour, and probably also engaging himself from time to time in government service. Marlowe won a dangerous reputation for “atheism,” but this could, in Elizabeth I’s time, indicate merely unorthodox religious opinions. There is further evidence of his unorthodoxy, notably in the denunciation of him written by the spy Richard Baines and in the letter of Thomas Kyd to the lord keeper in 1593 after Marlowe’s death. Kyd alleged that certain papers “denying the deity of Jesus Christ” that were found in his room belonged to Marlowe, who had shared the room two years before. Both Baines and Kyd suggested on Marlowe’s part atheism in the stricter sense and a persistent delight in blasphemy. Whatever the case may be, on May 18, 1593, the Privy Council issued an order for Marlowe’s arrest; two days later the poet was ordered to give daily attendance on their lordships “until he shall be licensed to the contrary.” On May 30, 1593, however, Marlowe was killed by Ingram Frizer, in the dubious company of Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley, at a lodging house in Deptford, where they had spent most of the day and where, it was alleged, a fight broke out between them over the bill. CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564 – 1593) HIS WORK: Outshining all his contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe alone realized the tragic potential inherent in the popular style with its bombast and extravagance. His heroes are men of towering ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and occasionally monotonous) elevation, their “high astounding terms” embodying the challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of the societies they disrupt. Marlowe is famous for four dramas, now known as the Marlowesque or one-man type of tragedy, each revolving about one central personality who is consumed by the lust of power. In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II (c. 1591; published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings. The Jew of Malta (c. 1589; published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and trickery give him unrestrained power. The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Dr. Faustus (c. 1593; published 1604) depicts the overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant regard for God. The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and religious sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address themselves to the anxieties of an age being transformed by new forces in politics, commerce, and science. CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564 – 1593) In a playwriting career that spanned little more than six years, Marlowe’s achievements were diverse and splendid. Perhaps before leaving Cambridge he had already written Tamburlaine the Great (in two parts, both performed by the end of 1587; published 1590). Almost certainly during his later Cambridge years, Marlowe had translated Ovid’s Amores (The Loves) and the first book of Lucan’s Pharsalia from the Latin. About this time he also wrote the play Dido, Queen of Carthage (published in 1594 as the joint work of Marlowe and Thomas Nashe). With the production of Tamburlaine he received recognition and acclaim, and playwriting became his major concern in the few years that lay ahead. Both parts of Tamburlaine were published anonymously in 1590, and the publisher omitted certain passages that he found incongruous with the play’s serious concern with history; even so, the extant Tamburlaine text can be regarded as substantially Marlowe’s. No other of his plays or poems or translations was published during his life. His unfinished but splendid poem Hero and Leander — which is almost certainly the finest nondramatic Elizabethan poem apart from those produced by Edmund Spenser—appeared in 1598. CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564 – 1593) There is argument among scholars concerning the order in which the plays subsequent to Tamburlaine were written. It is not uncommonly held that Faustus quickly followed Tamburlaine and that then Marlowe turned to a more neutral, more “social” kind of writing in Edward II and The Massacre at Paris. His last play may have been The Jew of Malta, in which he signally broke new ground. It is known that Tamburlaine, Faustus, and The Jew of Malta were performed by the Admiral’s Men, a company whose outstanding actor was Edward Alleyn, who most certainly played the characters of “Tamburlaine”, “Faustus”, and “Barabas the Jew”. Before Marlowe, blank verse had not been the accepted verse form for drama. Many earlier plays had used rhymed verse; there are a few examples, such as Gorboduc, which had used blank verse, but the poetry in Gorboduc was stiff and formal. Marlowe was the first to free the drama from the stiff traditions and prove that blank verse was an effective and expressive vehicle for Elizabethan drama. Marlowe’s characteristic “mighty line” (as Ben Jonson called it) established blank verse as the staple medium for later Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic writing. Earlier blank verse had been metrically precise and regular which, in long passages, could become rhythmically boring. Marlowe alternated the regular stresses and created a more varied, sincere, and beautiful verse. Shakespeare was later to follow Marlowe's example and use the natural rhythm of blank verse. CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564 – 1593) Throughout the drama, the student should be aware of the highly ornamental language that Marlowe uses. His speeches are rich in allusions to classical myths. The style, however, has a musical quality about it which appeals to the ear even when the listener does not know the exact nature of the allusions. The combination of the above qualities influenced the trend of blank verse in Elizabethan drama and earned for Marlowe's verse the term "Marlowe's Mighty Line.“ Doctor Faustus (or in full: The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus), is tragedy in five acts by Christopher Marlowe, and is considered as one of the best of Marlowe's works. It was published in 1604 but first performed a decade or so earlier. Marlowe’s play followed by only a few years the first translation into English of the medieval legend of “Faust” on which the play is based. In Doctor Faustus Marlowe retells the story of Faust, the doctor-turned-necromancer, who makes a pact with the devil in order to obtain knowledge and power. Both main characters i.e. Doctor Faustus and Mephistopheles (the devil’s intermediary in the play) are subtly and powerfully portrayed. Marlowe examines Faustus’s grandiose intellectual ambitions, revealing them as futile, self-destructive, and absurd. Marlowe is the only dramatist of the time who is ever compared with Shakespeare. When we remember that he died at twenty-nine, probably before Shakespeare had produced a single great play, we must wonder what he might have done had he outlived his wretched youth and become a man.