Who was Christopher Marlowe?

Christopher Marlowe, his life and character

Christopher Marlowe was the greatest of Shakespeare’s predecessors. He may be regarded as the true founder of English drama. He was born in 1564, two months before Shakespeare, in the town of Canterbury. He was the son of a poor shoe-maker. Through the kindness of a patron, he was educated at the town grammar school and then at the University of Cambridge. He graduated at the age of nineteen; and then went to London where he became an actor, living in a low-tavern atmosphere of excess and wretchedness. In 1587, at the age of twenty-three, he produced his first play, Tamburlaine, which brought him instant recognition. Thereafter, although he led a wretched life, he remained loyal to a high literary purpose. In five years, while Shakespeare was serving apprenticeship, Marlowe produced all his great work. Then he was stabbed in a drunken fight and died wretchedly as he had lived. He was only twenty-nine when he died. The epilogue of Faustus could very well be inscribed on his tombstone:

Francis Kett, the mystic, who was burned in 1589 for heresy, was a fellow and tutor at his college at Cambridge. It is surmised that Kett had some share in developing Marlowe’s opinions in religious matters. Marlowe also knew Thomas Kyd, who was a man of unorthodox opinions. Marlowe too, was associated with what was denounced as Sir Walter Raleigh’s school of atheism, and held opinions which were then regarded as highly objectionable and obnoxious. In October, 1588, Marlowe gave bail for his appearance for some unknown offence. Serious charges were brought against him in 1593. As a result of certain confessions made by Thomas Kyd under the influence of torture, the Privy Council started an investigation of the charges of atheism and blasphemy against Marlowe. But Marlowe’s career was abruptly cut short.

Various accounts of Marlowe’s death have been given by various writers. However, according to the most reliable version, based on the evidence of documents in the Public Record Office, Marlowe was killed by a companion of his, one Ingram Frizzier, at an inn on the 30th May, 1593. Frizzier and Marlowe, together with two friends named Robert Poley and Nicholas Skiers, had gone to the inn to drink and dine. A quarrel arose about paying the bill. Marlowe, in a sudden fit of temper, attacked Frizzier from behind. In the ensuring struggle Frizzier stabbed Marlowe who died instantly. Frizzier was subsequently pardoned on the ground that he had killed Marlowe in self-defence. A full account of the documentary evidence which supports this version of Marlowe’s death is given in Dr. Hoston’s book, The Death of Christopher Marlowe, which appeared in 1925. Dr. Huston points out that Ingram Frizzier was a “gentleman” and did not, even after killing Marlowe, forfeit the good graces of his employers, the Walsinghams, who were friends of Marlowe.

Marlowe’s classical acquirements were of kinds which were then extremely common, being based for the most part on a close acquaintance with Roman mythology, as revealed in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. His spirited translation of Ovid’s Armors (printed in 1596) commenced at Cambridge. His translation of The First Book of Lucan also printed after his death in 1600, belongs to these last years.

There is something in the meteor-like suddenness of his appearance in the skies of poetry, and in the swift flaming of his genius through its course, that seems to make inevitable his violent end. He sums up for us the Renaissance passion for life, sleepless in its search and daring in its grasp after the infinite in power, in knowledge, and in pleasure.”

Marlowe, during his life-time, had the reputation of being an “atheist and epicure”, and a mocker of religion. His contemporaries, Thomas Kyd and Richard Baines, brought against him many charges of blasphemy, heresy, and atheism. He was accused, for instance, of saying: “That the first beginning of religion was only to keep men in awe and that Moses was a juggler, and Aaron a cozener, the one for his miracles to Pharaoh to prove there was a God, and the other for taking the earrings of the children of Israel to make a golden calf.” Other reported sayings are of an even more serious nature; and it seems Marlowe delivered a lecture in defence of atheism and perhaps started on an atheistically treatise. There is no need to shut our eyes to these charges. We may admit them as true, but at the same time we should not evaluate Christianity. His skeptical and rebellious temperament was not simply his personal tendency; it made him one of the great representative figures of his time, capable of the fullest experience of the intellectual and moral troubles of his generation.

Marlowe was the greatest of a group of young writers generally called the “University Wits”. Before his untimely death at the age of twenty –nine, he had founded English romantic tragedy, had written one of the greatest poetical dramas in the English language, and had converted the stiff mechanical blank verse of Gorboduc into a vital form, which Shakespeare in his turn could make fit for the speeches of his greatest characters. But Marlowe was far more than a pioneer. He shines across the centuries in the blaze of his genius. No one but Milton could bend the bow of the grand style as he bent it. His poem, Hero and Leander, proves him a son also of the gentler Muse of sweet sensuousness. His dramas show only moderate constructive ability or power of characterization, but they carry the reader away by the sheer force and beauty of their language, and by the great visions which they call up in the mind. Tamburlaine, his earliest and crudest character, comes upon the stage driving a team of kings before his chariot; Barabbas rules the world by the power of gold; Faustus sells his soul to become a magician. Each is inspired by a lust for power, and the tragedy always pursues the same course—triumph followed by a mighty fall. From the technical point of view, Marlowe’s best work in Edward II*, but it cannot be compared in psychological interest or poetic grandeur with Doctor Faustus. For this great symbolic tragedy deals with a theme which was part not only of the author’s inner experience, but of the very stuff which nourished the Renaissance spirit. The pride of intellect by which both the Faustus of Marlowe and the Lucifer of Milton fell, was the subtlest and most dangerous temptation of the age. After wandering for centuries through the mists of ignorance, man found himself once more before the tree of knowledge. There, within his reach, burned like a thousand lamps the coveted fruit of his desire; but there, too, coiled about the roots, lay the old serpent, still unconquered, still thirsting for his soul’s blood.

The Works of Marlowe

1. Tamburlaine the Great (in two parts of which the first appeared in 1587 and the second in 1588) is the story of Timur, the Tartar who began his life as shepherd chief and ultimately became a great conqueror. Tamburlaine the Great may be called a pure “hero-play”.

2. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1588)*, is also a hero-play (though written along more subtle lines). It is a dramatized story of the life and death of a medieval scholar who sells his soul to the devil, in return for a life of power and pleasure.

3. The Jew of Malta (1589), is a study of lust for wealth, which centers around Barabas, a terrible old money-lender, who is strongly suggestive of Shakespeare’s Shylock.

4. Edward II (1592), is unquestionably Marlowe’s masterpiece, so far as play-making goes, though it contains fewer quotable passages of pure poetry than any of the others. It is a tragic study of a king’s weakness and misery. This play is a worthy predecessor of Shakespeare’s historical dramas.

Other plays in which Marlowe is said to have had a share are: The Massacre at Paris (1593); and Dido, Queen of Carthage (1593). Both these were written in collaboration with Thomas Nashe. His hand has been traced in a few other plays as well.

Besides these plays, Marlowe also wrote a poem called Hero and Leander (1592), in which, apart from the drama, the Renaissance movement is seen perhaps at its highest point in English poetry. The tide of Italian eroticism and sensuousness is also seen here at its height. (This poem was completed by George Chapman).

Marlowe also wrote one of the finest lyrics in the English language: The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, a poem of pure fancy and radiant melody.

Marlowe as a Dramatist
Marlowe’s first tragedy, Tamburlaine the Great, a play in two parts (each of five Acts) introduced a pliant, rhetorical, passionate, and resonant form of blank verse which was described by Jonson as Marlowe’s mighty line”, and which gave a permanent stamp and lasting impetus to English romantic drama. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus contains some of the finest poetry in the English language. The Jew of Malta shows a remarkable advance over Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus, in the knitting together of cause and effect, although this play degenerates into melodrama of the bloodiest kind. Edward II best exhibits its author’s skill as a playwright and was the first Elizabethan historical drama. Each of these plays represents what may be called the one-man type of tragedy. Each revolves around one central personality who is consumed by the lust for power. Marlowe’s dramatic construction is faulty, and he created no heroine. His two principal heroes (Tamburlaine and Faustus) are men of humble origin and exemplars of the superman: Tamburlaine typifies the will to conquer by physical force, and the play proved tremendously popular in its days because the English people were feeling stirred by the defeat of the Spanish Armada; Faustus symbolizes the lust for knowledge. Marlowe may truly be regarded as the greatest of Shakespeare’s predecessors in the field of drama.

The growth of Marlowe’s dramatic genius may be traced by considering each of his plays separately. Nothing is more characteristic of Marlowe than his choice of his first hero. His imagination was fired by the story of the life of this great adventurer, who from a mere shepherd became the most powerful man in the whole world. Tamburlaine seemed to Marlowe a superman, to whom the petty rules of morality did not apply. In Marlowe’s play we see Tamburlaine slaughtering wholesale—women and children as well as men—laughing at the blood he sheds, imprisoning a defeated emperor in a cage, having his chariot drawn by kings, burning a town in honor of the funeral of his wife, Zenocrate. Marlowe represents his hero as the scorner of men and gods. Marlowe transfigures him by exalting his barbarities. Tamburlaine is, at the same time, capable of extraordinary love. He lays the earth at the feet of his Zenocrate and, when death snatches her away from him, he threatens heaven with his fury. Marlowe wrote two dramas (that is, Parts I and II) pertaining to this one hero who is almost always on the stage and by himself in nearly the whole of each play. The same theme and the same tone of passionate emphasis are repeated endlessly. Nothing could be less dramatic or more monotonous. But the play contains scenes which haunted men’s memories. The audiences listened to this play from end to end, thus showing that the fire in the author’s heart had caught them too. There is plenty of declamation and rhetoric in the play but Marlowe makes his blank verse thunder and echo like a drum that never ceases. The verse for which men had been waiting now sounded on the stage for the first time.

In his subsequent plays, Marlowe continued to be mainly oratorical and lyrical as he had been in Tamburlaine the Great. He was, however, leading a life of intense dissipation which hardly allowed him time to produce a complete work like Tamburlaine. “He became the improviser who flings a couple of powerful scenes into a botched play.” Such was the composition of Doctor Faustus. This play deals with a necromancer who pledges his soul to the devil in return for supreme knowledge and supreme power, and who is thus able for twenty-four years to satisfy his appetites. Although the play contains a number of crude and farcical scenes, it is believed that these were not the work of Marlowe himself. When Faustus obtains a vision of Helen of Greece, Marlowe, imagining her supreme beauty, is inspired to write lines of incomparable lyricism. “The last scenes of Doctor Faustus are among the most pathetic and most grandiose in Renaissance drama. They are unsurpassable, even by Shakespeare. Marlowe, incapable of a complete masterpiece, yet had genius to reach, here and there, the sublime beauty which has no degrees. When Goethe took the same legend for the basis of one* of the chief accomplishments of modern poetry, he could not eclipse the poignant greatness of his forerunner’s scenes.”

The Jew of Malta, though a melodrama, yet contains passages of lyrical power. The Jew, Barabas, having been unjustly deprived of his property by Christians, avenges himself on them by an extraordinary series of crimes. Compelled to use cunning in order to achieve his purpose, he becomes Machiavelli incarnate. His crimes must have made the hair of audiences stand on end (although there is another character, yet more terrible, in the play). Before the Jew becomes a criminal maniac, he has both dignity and greatness. Enormously rich, he is first seen with heaps of gold before him, and as he speaks he seems to be a poet intoxicated by the vastness of his own wealth and the immense power which it brings. As he mentions the countries from where his treasures have come, his exaltation has a mystical greatness. It would seem that, for a time at least, the poet identifies himself with the Jew who may even have retained, to some extent the author’s sympathy till the very end.

Before he died at the age of twenty-nine, Marlowe was able to produce Edward II which is the best of the tragedies on English national history written before the work of Shakespeare. This play has qualities which are properly dramatic and are not to be found in any of Marlowe’s other plays. The lyrical declamation, so plentiful in Tamburlaine and even in other plays, is now under control. The tirades are shorter, and the dialogue is better distributed in speeches. The blank verse is less strained and more pliable; it is nearer to the tones of the human voice. The characterization is more varied. The subject of this play is the tragedy of a king who is dominated by two favorites (first Gaveston, and then Mortimer). Mortimer reaches an understanding with Queen Isabella who becomes his mistress. The betrayed king is thrown into prison and then put to death by the order of the two accomplices (Mortimer and Isabella), who are in their turn executed by the son of their victim. King Edward II stands for sentimental weakness. In Mortimer, with his uncontrolled ambition, Marlowe returned to one of his favourite types, and it is Mortimer who links this play with Marlowe’s earlier dramas. Except the death of Faustus, nothing in Marlowe’s plays is more touching and pathetic than the scene of the murder of King Edward II by two ruffians. The end of the bad king is so miserable that he becomes an item of pity.

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