V. Christopher Marlowe. matist before The greatest English dramatist before Shakespeare was indubitably Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593). The son of a shoemaker, he was born at Canter- Marlowe, the bury in 1564, the year also of Shakespeare's greatest drabirth, and was educated at the King's School Shakespeare. in that town. He proceeded later to Cambridge, where he made the acquaintance of his contemporaries, Greene and Nash. Throughout his life Marlowe was on friendly terms with the chief men of letters of his day, and with other distinguished persons. But like Greene and Nash, he lived a wild lawless life, and died a violent death, in a tavern brawl at Deptford. He is buried there in the church of St. Nicholas. In 1892 a memorial was erected to him in his native city of Canterbury. He Scarcely thirty when he died, Marlowe had composed five tragedies which rank only just below the great productions that Shakespeare was about to give the world. All Marlowe's plays were performed in his lifetime. In them we have the first really fine use of blank verse. possessed true poetic passion, but lacked Shakespeare's wide knowledge and keen perception of men's characters, and thus, except perhaps in Edward II., Marlowe's portrayal of character does not reach the excellence of his great successor. Marlowe's heroes each represent a ruling passion, which, carried to excess, brings its own punishment. Tamburlaine desires universal power, Faustus universal knowledge, Barabbas universal wealth. Marlowe's first play was Tamburlaine, composed in 1587. The hero was a real personage, a Scythian shepherd, who, in the fourteenth century, "Tamburconquered nearly the whole of Asia. In the laine." prologue Marlowe declares his intention of avoiding rime: From jigging veins of riming mother-wits, And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, Threatening the world with high astounding terms, There is no real plot. In a series of scenes Marlowe depicts the hero's conquests and his manner of dealing with those he had overcome. The drama is in two parts, both very long. Although extravagant in tone to our ideas, it pleased the Elizabethans. Even the scene (2 Tamb., iv. 3), in which Tamburlaine is drawn in his chariot by the kings he has conquered, "the pampered jades of Asia", who, Tamburlaine complains, "can draw but twenty miles a day", would seem to have been scarcely absurd in their eyes. But notwithstanding such drawbacks, the play is full of life and animation, and contains poetry of the highest kind, of which the following fine lines on beauty may serve as a specimen:— If all the pens that ever poet held Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, And all combin'd in beauty's worthiness, Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, And it would be difficult to surpass the tenderness and charm of the passages which portray Tamburlaine's love for Zenocrate, the daughter of the Sultan of Egypt, whom the mighty conqueror had subdued. Dr. Faustus belongs to the year 1588, and deals with a legend that never loses its popularity. As Tamburlaine desires universal empire, Faustus desires universal knowledge, and in hope of obtaining it, sells his soul to Mephistopheles, the spirit of evil, the "Dr. Faustus." devil. A bargain is made between them that for a certain period of time Faustus shall have all his desires; but at the end of the prescribed time he must die, and his soul will then become the property of Mephistopheles, who will immure it for ever in hell. For dramatic force and horror, the last scene probably stands alone in our drama. Faustus is to die at midnight, and he sits alone in his study, awaiting the fearful summons. Faustus (the clock strikes eleven). Oh Faustus, Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, (The clock strikes the half-hour.) Ah, half the hour is past! 'T will all be past anon! He continues to soliloquize, and as midnight sounds Mephistopheles and his dread attendant spirits enter and bear off Faustus to eternal punishment. A chorus then speaks lines that might well be applied to Marlowe's early death Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, That sometime grew within this learned man. They were Marlowe did not write the comic scenes. interpolated by another hand, probably to please the taste of the "groundlings", i.e. the less educated part of the audience, who usually stood on the ground in the centre of the theatre, the part occupied in a modern playhouse by the pit.1 The Jew of Malta was written in 1589 or 1590, and illustrates the passions of greed and hatred. The first 1 When Goethe, the great German poet, and the author of the finest modern play on the same subject, was asked about Marlowe's play, he burst into exclamations of praise, saying how greatly it was all planned, and that he had thought of translating it. two acts are the best, the remaining portion of the play "Jew of is scarcely at the level Marlowe's work usually Malta." reaches. When the play opens Barabbas, the wealthy Jew, is in his counting-house, with heaps of gold before him. He soliloquizes over his wealth in picturesque lines: Give me the merchants of the Indian mines, And in his house heap pearls like pebble-stones, And seld-seen1 costly stones of so great price, May serve, in peril of calamity, To ransom great kings from captivity. This is the ware wherein consists my wealth; Shakespeare, in drawing the character of a Jew in the Shylock of the Merchant of Venice, may possibly have taken hints from Marlowe's Barabbas. But Marlowe was without that sympathy for an oppressed race that lends so fine a touch of pathos to Shakespeare's conception, and his Jew does not come near the creation of his great successor in the English drama. Edward II. is by far the best constructed of Marlowe's dramas, and may fairly be considered his masterpiece. It followed the Jew of Malta, and was probably As we have pointed out before, dramas dealing with the history of the country, "Edward II." written in 1590. 1 seldom-seen. dramas that were even no more than mere transcripts of the chronicle history, found great favour with the Elizabethans. In Edward II., however, we have our first great history play, the first of that grand series of plays embodying the greater part of our national history from Edward II. to Henry VIII. Marlowe, like Shakespeare after him, drew his facts mainly from Stow and Holinshed, and in the play under consideration, the dramatist illustrates with much force the misery entailed by weakness of character, especially in a king, and depicts the pathos of his ruin and the agony of his miserable end. The play abounds in action and movement, and the characters are well drawn. We have the weak king, fond of luxury and ease, without patriotism or dignity, yet loving his favourite Gaveston, and not wholly without affection for the wife who has used him so badly. Even in his squalid dungeon he can say: Tell Isabel, the queen, I look'd not thus, Gaveston draws the king's character for us in the following passage:— I must have wanton poets, pleasant wits, Therefore I'll have Italian masks by night, 1 Old-fashioned, quaint dance. ( M 205) 2 Coronets. N |