“Yet all these were, when no man did them know,
 Yet have from wiser ages hidden been;
 And later times things more unknown shall show.”

It is in the drama that this spirit of adventure caught from the voyagers gets its full play.  “Without the voyagers,” says Professor Walter Raleigh,[1] “Marlowe is inconceivable.”  His imagination in every one of his plays is preoccupied with the lust of adventure, and the wealth and power adventure brings.  Tamburlaine, Eastern conqueror though he is, is at heart an Englishman of the school of Hawkins and Drake.  Indeed the comparison must have occurred to his own age, for a historian of the day, the antiquary Stow, declares Drake to have been “as famous in Europe and America as Tamburlaine was in Asia and Africa.”  The high-sounding names and quests which seem to us to give the play an air of unreality and romance were to the Elizabethans real and actual; things as strange and foreign were to be heard any day amongst the motley crowd in the Bankside outside the theatre door.  Tamburlaine’s last speech, when he calls for a map and points the way to unrealised conquests, is the very epitome of the age of discovery.

“Lo, here my sons, are all the golden mines,
 Inestimable wares and precious stones,
 More worth than Asia and all the world beside;
 And from the Antarctic Pole eastward behold
 As much more land, which never was descried. 
 Wherein are rocks of pearl that shine as bright
 As all the lamps that beautify the sky.”

[Footnote 1:  To whose terminal essay in “Hakluyt’s Voyages” (Maclehose) I am indebted for much of the matter in this section.]

It is the same in his other plays.  Dr. Faustus assigns to his serviceable spirits tasks that might have been studied from the books of Hakluyt

“I’ll have them fly to India for gold,
 Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
 And search all corners of the new round world
 For pleasant fruits and princely delicates.”

When there is no actual expression of the spirit of adventure, the air of the sea which it carried with it still blows.  Shakespeare, save for his scenes in The Tempest and in Pericles, which seize in all its dramatic poignancy the terror of storm and shipwreck, has nothing dealing directly with the sea or with travel; but it comes out, none the less, in figure and metaphor, and plays like the Merchant of Venice and Othello testify to his accessibility to its spirit.  Milton, a scholar whose mind was occupied by other and more ultimate matters, is full of allusions to it.  Satan’s journey through Chaos in Paradise Lost is the occasion for a whole series of metaphors drawn from seafaring.  In Samson Agonistes Dalila comes in,

“Like a stately ship ... 
With all her bravery on and tackle trim
Sails frilled and streamers waving
Courted by all the winds that hold them play.”