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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: MAR-MEC |
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MARLOWE, CHRISTOPHER (1564-1593) , English dramatist, the father of English tragedy, and instaurator of dramatic blank verse, the eldest son of a shoemaker at Canterbury, was born in that city on the 6th of February 1564. He was christened at St George's Church, Canterbury, on the 26th of February, 1563/4, some two months before Shakespeare's baptism at Stratford-on-Avon. His father, John Marlowe, is said to have beenthe grandson of John Morley or Marlowe, a substantial tanner of Canterbury. The father, who survived by a dozen years or so his illustrious son, married on the 22nd of May 1561 Catherine, daughter of Christopher Arthur, at one time rector of St Peter's, Canterbury, who had been ejected by Queen Mary as a married minister. The dramatist received the rudiments of his education at the King's School, Canterbury, which he entered at Michaelmas 1578, and where he had as his fellow-pupils Richard Boyle, afterwards known as the great earl
Cambridge as one of Archbishop Parker's scholars from the King's School, and matriculated at Benet (Corpus Christi) College, on the 17th of March 1571, taking his B.A. degree in 1584, and that of M.A. three or four years later.Francis Kett, the mystic, burnt in 1589 for heresy, was a fellow and tutor of his college, and may have had some share in developing Marlowe's opinions in religious matters. Marlowe's classical acquirements were of a kind which was then extremely common, being based for the most part upon a minute acquaintance with Roman mythology, as revealed in Ovid's Meta-morphoses. His spirited translation of Ovid's Amores (printed 1596), which was at any rate commenced at Cambridge , does not seem to point to any very intimate acquaintance with the gram-mar and syntax of the Latin tongue. Before 1587 he seems to have quitted Cambridge for London, where he attached himself to the Lord Admiral's Company of Players, under the leadership of the famed actor Edward Alleyn, and almost at once began writing for the stage. Of Marlowe's career in London, apart from his four great theatrical successes, we know hardly anything; but he evidently knew Thomas Kyd, who shared his unorthodox opinions. Nash criticized his verse, Greene
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circumstances of Marlowe's death. The ,probability is he was killed in a brawl, and his atheism must be interpreted not according to' the ex park accusation of one Richard Baines, a professional informer (among the Privy Council records), but as a species of rationalistic antinomianism, dialectic in character, and closely related to the deflection from conventional orthodoxy for which Kett was burnt at Norwich in 1589. A few months before the end of his life there is reason to believe that he transferred his services from the Lord Admiral's to Lord Strange's Company, and may have thus been brought into communication with Shakespeare, who ih such plays as Richard II. and Richard III. owed not a little to the influence of his romantic predecessor. Marlowe's career as a dramatist lies between the years 1587 and 1593, and the four great plays to which reference has been made were Tamburlaine the Great, an heroic epic in dramatic form divided into two parts of five acts each (1587, printed in 1590); Dr Faustus (1588, entered at Stationers' Hall
" From jigging veins of riming mother wits And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay We'll lead you to the stately tent of war, Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine Threatening the world with high astounding terms And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword." It leapt with a bound to a place beside Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, and few plays have been more imitated by rivals ( Greene
The majestic and exquisite excellence of various lines and passages in Marlowe's first play must be admitted to relieve, if it cannot be allowed to redeem, the stormy monotony of Titanic truculence which blusters like a simoom through the noisy course of its ten fierce acts. With many and heavy faults, there is some thing of genuine greatness in Tamburlaine'the Great; and for two grave reasons it must always be remembered with distinction and mentioned with honour. It is the first poem ever written in English blank verse, as distinguished from mere rhymeless decasyllabics; and it contains one of the noblest passages, perhaps indeed the noblest, in the literature of the world, ever written by one of the greatest masters of, poetry in loving praise of the glorious delights and sublime submission to the everlasting limits of his art. In its highest and most distinctive qualities, in unfaltering and infallible command of the right note of music and the proper tone of colour for the finest touches of poetic execution, no poet of the most elaborate modern school, working at ease upon every consummate resource of luxurious learning and leisurely refinement, has ever excelled the best and most representative work of a man who had literally no models before him and probably or evidently was often if not always compelled to write against time for his living. The just and generous judgment passed by Goethe on the Faustus of his English predecessor in tragic treatment of the same subject is somewhat more than sufficient to counterbalance the slighting or the sneering references to that magnificent poem which might have been expected from the ignorance of Byron or the incompetence of Hallam. And the particular note of merit observed, the special point of the praise conferred, by the great German poet should be no less sufficient to dispose of the vulgar misconception yet lingering among sciolists and pre-tenders to criticism, which regards a writer than whom no man was ever born with a finer or a stronger instinct for perfection of excellence in execution as a mere noble savage of letters, a rough self-taught sketcher or scribbler of crude and rude genius, whose unhewn blocks of verse had in them some veins of rare enough metal to be quarried and polished by Shakespeare. What most impressed the author of Faust in the work of Marlowe was a quality the want of which in the author of Manfred is proof enough to consign his best work to the second or third class atmost. How greatly it is all planned!" the first requisite of all great work, and one of which the highest genius possible to a greatly gifted barbarian could by no possibility understand the nature or conceive the existence. That Goethe " had thought of translating it " is perhaps hardly less precious a tribute to its greatness than the fact that it has been actually and admirably translated by the matchless translator of Shakespearethe son of Victor Hugo; whose labour of love may thus be said to have made another point in common, and forged as it were another link of union, between Shakespeare and the young master of Shakespeare's youth. Of all great poems in dramatic form it is perhaps the most remarkable for absolute singleness of aim and simplicity of construction; yet is it wholly free from all possible imputation of monotony or aridity. Tamburlaine is monotonous in the general roll and flow of its stately and sonorous verse through a noisy wilderness of perpetual bluster and slaughter; but the unity of tone and purpose in Doctor
It is now a commonplace of criticism to observe and regret the decline of power and interest
In Edward the Second the interest
Doctor
conception and realistic execution is not yet struck with perfect accuracy of touch and security of hand; but on this point also Marlowe has here come nearer by many degrees to Shakespeare than any of his other predecessors have ever come near to Marlowe. Of The Massacre at Paris (acted in 1593, printed 'Coo?) it is impossible to judge fairly from the garbled fragment of its genuine text which is all that has come down to us. To Mr Collier, among numberless other obligations, we owe the discovery of a noble passage excised in the piratical edition which gives us the only version extant of this unlucky play, and which, it must be allowed, contains nothing of quite equal value. This is obviously an occasional and polemical work, and being as it is overcharged with the anti-Catholic passion of the time has a typical quality which gives it some empirical significance and interest. That antipapal ardour is indeed the only note of unity in a rough and ragged chronicle which shambles and stumbles onward from the death of Queen Jeanne of Navarre to the murder of the last Valois. It is possible to conjecture, what it would be fruitless to affirm, that it gave a hint in the next century to Nathaniel Lee for his far superior and really admirable tragedy on the same subject, issued ninety-seven years after the death of Marlowe. In the tragedy of Dido Queen of Carthage (completed by Thomas Nash, produced and printed 1594), a servile fidelity to the text of Virgil's narrative has naturally resulted in the failure which might have been expected from an attempt at once to transcribe what is essentially inimitable and to reproduce it under the hopelessly alien conditions of dramatic adaptation. The one really noble passage in a generally feeble and incomposite piece of work is, however, uninspired by the unattainable model to which the dramatists have been only too obsequious in their subservience. It is as nearly certain as anything can be which depends chiefly upon cumulative and collateral evidence that the better part of what is best in the serious scenes of King Henry VI. is mainly the work of Marlowe. That he is at any rate the principal author of the second and third plays passing under that name among the works of Shakespeare, but first and imperfectly printed as The Contention between the two Famous Houses of York
A Taming of a Shrew, the play on which Shakespeare's comedy was founded, has been attributed, without good reason, to Marlowe. The passages in the play borrowed from Marlowe's works provide an argument against, rather than for his author-ship; while the humorous character of the play is not in keeping with his other work. He may have had a share in The Trouble-some Raigne of King John (1591), and Fleay conjectured that the plays Edward III. and Richard III. usually included in editions of Shakespeare are at least based on plays by Marlowe. Lust's Dominion, printed in 1657, was incorrectly ascribed to him, and a play no longer extant, The True History of George Scanderbage, was assumed by Fleay on the authority of an obscure passage of Gabriel Harvey to be his work. The Maiden's Holiday, assigned to Day and Marlowe, was destroyed by Warburton'scook. Day was considerably Marlowe's junior, and collaboration between the two is not probable. Had every copy of Marlowe's boyish version or perversion of Ovid's Elegies (P. Ovidii Nasonis Amorum compressed into three books) deservedly perished in the flames to which it was judicially condemned by the sentence of a brace of prelates, it is possible that an occasional bookworm, it is certain that no poetical student, would have deplored its destruction, if its demerits could in that case have been imagined. His translation of the first book of Lucan alternately rises above the original and falls short of it,often inferior to the Latin in point and weight of expressive rhetoric, now and then brightened by a clearer note of poetry and lifted into a higher mood of verse. Its terseness, vigour and purity of style would in any case have been praiseworthy, but are nothing less than admirable, if not wonderful, when we consider how close the translator has on the whole (in spite of occasional slips into inaccuracy) kept himself to the most rigid limit of literal representation, phrase by phrase and often line by line. The really startling force and felicity of occasional verses are worthier of remark than the inevitable stiffness and heaviness of others, when the technical difficulty of such a task is duly taken into account. One of the most faultless lyrics and one of the loveliest fragments in the whole range of descriptive and fanciful poetry would have secured a place for Marlowe among the memorable men of his epoch, even if his plays had perished with himself. His Passionate Shepherd remains ever since unrivalled in its waya way of pure fancy and radiant melody without break or lapse. The untitled fragment, on the other hand, has been very closely rivalled, perhaps very happily imitated, but only by the greatest lyric poet of Englandby Shelley alone. Marlowe's poem of Hero and Leander (entered at Stationers' Hall
The place and the value of Christopher Marlowe as a leader among English poets it would be almost impossible for historical criticism to over-estimate. To none of them all, perhaps, have so many of the greatest among them been so deeply and so directly indebted. Nor was ever any great writer's influence upon his fellows more utterly and unmixedly an influence for good. He first, and he alone, guided Shakespeare into the right way of work; his music, in which there is no echo of any man's before him, found its own echo in the more prolonged but hardly more exalted harmony of Milton's. He is the greatest discoverer, the most daring and inspired pioneer
Marlowe's fame, so finely appreciated by Shakespeare and Drayton, vas in obscuration from the fall of the theatres until the generation of Lamb and Hazlitt. A collected edition was brought out by Pickering in 1826. This was greatly improved upon by A. Dyce (1858, 1865, 1876). A one-volume edition was prepared by Colonel Francis Cunningham in 1871. The standard edition of Mr A. H. Bullen in 3 vols. appeared in 18841885 and is now under revision. The " Best Plays " were edited for the Mermaid series by Havelock
Study of Shakespeare (188o) ; Elze, Notes, and Hazlitt Dramatic Lit. of the Age of Elizabeth; Fortnightly Review, xiii., lxxi., and Sept.Oct., 1905; Jusserand, Hist. of English Lit.; the Cambridge Hist. of English Lit. ; Seccombe and Allen, Age of Shakespeare (vol. ii. 3rd ed., 1909), and the separate editions of Dr Faustus, Edward II., &c. The main sources of Marlowe were as follows: for Tamburlaine, Pedro Alexia's Life of Timur in his Silva (Madrid, 1543), anglicized by Fortescue in his Foreste (1571) and Petrus Perondinus Vita Magni Tamerlanis (1551); for Faustus: a contemporary English version of the Faust- buch or Historia von D. Johann Fausten (Frankfort, 1587), and for Edward II., the Chronicles of Fabyan (1516), Holinshed (1577) and Stow (1580). (T. SE.)End of Article: MARLOWE, CHRISTOPHER (1564-1593) If you wish, you can link directly to this article.
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