CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564-1593)

Marlowe is one of the most suggestive figures of the English Renaissance, and the greatest of Shakespeare’s predecessors.  The glory of the Elizabethan drama dates from his Tamburlaine (1587), wherein the whole restless temper of the age finds expression: 

Nature, that framed us of four elements Warring within our breasts for regiment, Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:  Our souls—­whose faculties can comprehend The wondrous architecture of the world, And measure every wandering planet’s course, Still climbing after knowledge infinite, And always moving as the restless spheres—­ Will us to wear ourselves and never rest. Tamburlaine, Pt.  I, II, vii.

Life.  Marlowe was born in Canterbury, only a few months before Shakespeare.  He was the son of a poor shoemaker, but through the kindness of a patron was educated at the town grammar school and then at Cambridge.  When he came to London (c. 1584), his soul was surging with the ideals of the Renaissance, which later found expression in Faustus, the scholar longing for unlimited knowledge and for power to grasp the universe.  Unfortunately, Marlowe had also the unbridled passions which mark the early, or Pagan Renaissance, as Taine calls it, and the conceit of a young man just entering the realms of knowledge.  He became an actor and lived in a low-tavern atmosphere of excess and wretchedness.  In 1587, when but twenty-three years old, he produced Tamburlaine, which brought him instant recognition.  Thereafter, notwithstanding his wretched life, he holds steadily to a high literary purpose.  Though all his plays abound in violence, no doubt reflecting many of the violent scenes in which he lived, he develops his “mighty line” and depicts great scenes in magnificent bursts of poetry, such as the stage had never heard before.  In five years, while Shakespeare was serving his apprenticeship, Marlowe produced all his great work.  Then he was stabbed in a drunken brawl and died wretchedly, as he had lived.  The Epilogue of Faustus might be written across his tombstone: 

    Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
    And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough
    That sometime grew within this learned man.

MARLOWE’S WORKS.  In addition to the poem “Hero and Leander,” to which we have referred,[140] 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.  The first of these is Tamburlaine, the story of Timur the Tartar.  Timur begins as a shepherd chief, who first rebels and then triumphs over the Persian king.  Intoxicated by his success, Timur rushes like a tempest over the whole East.  Seated on his chariot drawn by captive kings, with a caged emperor before him, he boasts of his power which overrides all things.  Then, afflicted with disease, he raves against the gods and would overthrow them as he has overthrown earthly rulers. Tamburlaine is an epic rather than a drama; but one can understand its instant success with a people only half civilized, fond of military glory, and the instant adoption of its “mighty line” as the instrument of all dramatic expression.