Christopher_Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe Born in the same year as Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) was his greatest rival. In spite of his talent and the clearness of his ultimate vision, Marlowe’s plays were not as successful as Shakespeare’s at the time they were publishing their work. As Ellis-Fermor noted, in reality, Marlowe speaks of things no less profound and no less universal than Shakespeare. Wherever men are preoccupied with the 'why'' rather than the 'how'' in whatever periods of history thought turns back to question the nature of man's being and the part he plays in the universe, there the thought of Marlowe will be found to be at the heart of man's most vital experience.[1] Born in the family of a shoemaker, in 1579, Christopher Marlowe went to King's School, Canterbury, on a scholarship, from which we judge that the arts of reading and writing and elementary Latin must then have been familiar to him. Like most young Elizabethan boys, he had probably attended an 'elementarie' school - these were kept in many cases by the parish clerk-where the rudiments were given to children whose parents were not of a position to have private tutors.[2] At that time, King's School enjoyed a brilliant reputation, and it was a centre of theatrical interests. The school contained a large library filled with a number of volumes which have been claimed as sources for Marlowe's plays. In December 1580, Marlowe moved to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he studied for the next six years. He received a scholarship founded by Mathew Parker, master of the college from 1544 to 1553 and later archbishop of Canterbury. The scholarship was for six years and was granted to those who were supposed to join the clergy after graduation. Marlowe's academic career was uneventful, except for mysterious and increasingly long absences after his second year. It is now assumed that Marlowe was absent from college for weeks, even months at a time due to the fact that he was involved in government service either as a secret agent or as a confidential messenger. His education from the age of seventeen to that of twenty-three, when he took his Bachelor degree in divinity, and left Cambridge for London, must have been narrow, over-disciplined and over-specialised, as the Elizabethan universities provided an education with a strong theological bias.[3] However, at Cambridge, Marlowe became familiar with classical texts. This is why his works abound in classical allusions and his sentences are constructed with so close an observance of the rules of rhetoric.[4] Instead of joining the clergy after graduation, he became a free-thinker and he joined Sir Walter Ralegh’s School of Atheism, thus making the Privy Council accuse him of atheism. In 1587 Marlowe became an actor and dramatist for the Lord Admiral's Company and in 1593 he was stabbed in a barroom brawl by a drinking companion. A coroner's jury certified that the assailant acted in self-defense, yet Marlowe’s biographers think that the murder may have resulted from Marlowe's activities as a government agent. Among Christopher Marlowe’s early interests we may mention his translations, for instance Lucan’s Pharsalia and Ovid’s Amores. His first play was The Tragedie of Dido Queene of Carthage (1593' published 1594); it aroused criticism by Shakespeare, who parodied the description of Priam’s death in his Hamlet. Dido is the embodiment of passion, dignity and courage, making us think of a sort of Elizabethan feminine titan – if Dido actually was Marlowe’s earliest play, the heroine may be said to inaugurate the gallery of titans.[5] The tragedy has not been seen by critics as one of Marlowe’s literary achievements until recently, when several studies of the politics of gender, nationality, and race have focused on its relation to the development of English imperialism. Queen Dido is a female ruler from North Africa who is brought down by her love for a male voyager intent on founding an imperial dynasty. William Godshalk has suggested that Queen Elizabeth's abortive marriage negotiations with the Duke of Anjou in the years 1579-81 seem to have been on the playwright's mind, though their exact relation to the details of the play has never been worked out.[6] As founder of an empire that rivaled that of ancient Rome, Dido was a convenient analogue for Elizabeth in her challenge to the sixteenth-century Roman imperium controlled by the Pope and his powerful allies in France and Spain. Interest in the myth at the English court appears as early as 1564, when Edward Halliwin ell staged a Latin play entitled Dido (now lost) before the Queen at Cambridge.[7] In Marlowe’s play, Dido shows off her private portrait gallery to Aeneas and his men - the gallery displays images of her many former suitors, of whom the Queen boasts complacently, All these and others which I never sawe,/ Have been most urgent suiters for my love,/ Some came in person, others sent their Legats:/ Yet none obtained me (3.1.150-53). Dido’s suitors include rival kings of Aeneas from Greece, Troy, Persia, and other lands, yet Aeneas, a traveller who lacks experience, unlike his men, does not recognise any of them. Unlike Virgil's Dido who had only one suitor, Iarbus, Marlowe's evidently has a large and distinguished following, including prominent men from opposing sides in every major regional conflict in recent memory.[8] Donald Stump considers that in transforming Dido into a collector of love trophies, Marlowe almost certainly had Elizabeth in mind. One point that he stresses is her general strategy of entertaining numerous foreign suitors in order to maintain the delicate balance of power between rival states in Europe.[9] Within this general framework of topical allusions to the Anjou affair, Marlowe’s play becomes more interesting for the philologist who has acquired some knowledge in British culture and civilisation.[10] Tamburlaine the Great (first acted in 1587 or 1588, published in 1590) represented Marlowe’s first literary achievement, and his contemporaries and audience hailed the play enthusiastically. Part I is full of bloodshed, treachery, and ambition of a kind which was as unequivocally condemned by sixteenth-century as by twentieth-century moral orthodoxy[11]. In The Prologue to the first part we are immediately informed of Tamburlaine's racial origin: he is a Scythian. In Elizabethan ideology, the term Scythian demarcated an absolute otherness, a being so sharply inferior to civilised Western man that his very membership of the same species was open to doubt.[12] The Scythian Shepherd, Tamburlaine, moved by an ambition far beyond the circumstances of his humble birth, had made himself leader of a gang of brigands that prey successfully on the rich merchant trains that cross Persia. In one of their raids, the brigands capture the party escorting Zenocrate, daughter of the Sultan of Egypt, to her nuptials with the King of Arabia. Tamburlaine promptly falls in love with her. Meanwhile, Mycetes, the not too bright King of Persia, has heard that Tamburlaine might have designs on the throne of Persia. He therefore sends one of his lords, Theridamas, with a thousand horsemen to take Tamburlaine prisoner. Theridamas and his cavalry join Tamburlaine's ranks. Hearing this, Mycetes' brother, Cosroe, decides that the help of such a powerful man as Tamburlaine might make his own chances of seizing his brother's crown. Tamburlaine and his followers do so, yet they also turn on Cosroe and dispatch him, taking Persia for themselves. Tamburlaine’s insatiable ambition impels him next to try his fortunes against the all-powerful Bajazeth, emperor of Turkey. In spite of Zenocrate's pleas, Tamburlaine also marches against her native Egypt, which her father, the Sultan, and her former betrothed of Arabia, prepare to defend. The Arabian is killed, but, true to his promise, Tamburlaine spares the Sultan and makes him one of his tributary kings. With such a valiant start toward conquering the known world, Tamburlaine feels that his crown is now worth Zenocrate's acceptance and the play closes with the wedding rites. Part II of Tamburlaine was evidently written at a later date due to the immense popularity of Part I; the second part deals with Tamburlaine's subsequent victories and inglorious death from illness. Taking Alexandru Olaru’s theories[13] as reference points, Leon Leviţchi analyses Tamburlaine’s paranoid consciousness in his article Christopher Marlowe, the Scourge and the Book. Thus, among the specific signs of a paranoid constitution are the pathological overrating of the self, haughtiness or vanity…; the falseness of judgment which worsens as a result of a passion for logic, which supports the paranoid’s opinions with increased obstinacy…; disdain, voluntary isolation, active revolt etc. The form of the paranoid’s reactions is determined by the main delirious theme: claiming, megalomaniac, mystical, erotic, reforming, etc.[14] According to Roy W. Battenhouse, Marlowe uses the “scourge” declaration both earlier and later in the story and with such frequency as to make it the running theme of the drama. A dozen times in the play the protagonist calls our attention to his title.[15] Trying to search through several of the occurrences of the epithet scourge of God[16], we may see the way in which Tamburlaine deepens his paranoid delirium. Tamburlaine is called the scourge of God from the very beginning (line six in Act I): … you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine Threatening the world with high astounding terms, And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword. (I, I, 1, 6) Later on, when Tamburlaine humiliates awfully the kings of Trebizon and Soria by compelling them to draw his chariot while he “scourgeth them” with a whip, he thinks he has reached an acme of his triumph.[17] This time it is no longer another character who calls Tamburlaine the scourge of God but Tamburlaine himself who does it, overrating himself: Thus I am right the scourge of highest Jove; And see the figure of my dignity, By which I hold my name of majesty! (II, IV, 3, 24-26) By the end of the first part of the play, Tamburlaine still considers himself a messenger of God, the God of wrath which punishes people, as can be seen in The Old Testament: There is a God, full of revenging wrath, From whom the thunder and the lighting breaks, Whose scourge I am, and him will I obey. (V, 1, 191-193) The main delirious theme is still what Olaru calls claiming, but it evolves immediately to megalomania, as several lines further Tamburlaine no longer considers himself the representative of God on earth but God himself, as he claims to be immortal: Sickness or death can never conquer me. (V, 1, 230) The climax of his paranoid delirium takes the form of the reforming theme, when Tamburlaine, a God on Earth, threatens to kill the God in Heaven: Come, let us march against the powers of heaven, And set black streamers in the firnament, To sign the slaughter of the gods. (V, 3, 48-50) At this point, in his mind, Tamburlaine replaces the God in Heaven, as he claims to represent life itself: Come, let us charge our spears, and pierce his breast Whose shoulders bear the axis of the world, That, if I perish, heaven and earth may fade. (V, 3, 58-60) Line 60 in Act V, scene 3 represents for Leviţchi the total eclipse of the moral sense (total lack of concern for anyone else besides him) and the total eclipse of consciousnes(the belief that with his disappearance universal life may or will disappear too).[18] At this point, God needs to send him a sign that He still exists, and thus Zenocrate dies in the second Act, part II. This is the first time that Tamburlaine’s sleeping consciousness awakens and he realises that, just like Zenocrate he can perish. The death of Zenocrate unbalances Tamburlaine’s already disordered mind. The evidence of what he sees is too hard for him to come to terms with it: What, is she dead' Techelles, draw thy sword, And wound the earth, that it may cleave in twain, And we descend into th’eternal vaults, To hale the Fatal Sisters by the hair, And throw them in the triple moat of hell For taking hence my fair Zenocrate. (II, III, 3, 96-101) When he himself is threatened by annihilation, he utters a number of questions prompted by his refusal to accept reality.[19] His fear of death grows as he goes on asking one question after another: The one who claimed to be God himself understands that God is still present in heaven and torments his body. What daring god torments my body thus And seeks to conjure mighty Tamburlaine' (II, V, 3, 42-43) The fact that he is still not convinced of God’s existence relies in his speaking about himself in the third person. Later on, the one who claimed once that he could not be conquered by sickness, and by death, realises that he is only human, and just like any human being, he can get sick: Tell me what think you of my sickness now' (II, V, 3, 81) Yet, as a conqueror of the world, he would still accomplish his plans before he dies, as he asks twice the same question: And shall I die, and this unconquered' (II, V, 3, 149 and 157) As Leon Leviţchi observed, it is yet too late for Tamburlaine to become a philosopher, or at least a common thinking man.[20] His work may be accomplished by his two warrior-sons as symmetrically, six lines before the play ends, his will has already been expressed. For Tamburlaine, the Scourge of God must die. He therefore became again a human being, keeping his initial status, that of the representative of God on earth. The one who thought that he was God himself becomes again only the scourge of God. The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1592') was considered Marlowe’s masterpiece; it concentrates on the world-old opposition between good and evil, between the forces of “light” and the forces of “darkness” that the symbolic contract of man with the devil had its roots and, on the soil of medieval Christianity, made the legend of Faustus possible.[21] On the surface, Doctor Faustus is a powerful and extremely effective dramatic entertainment made for the Elizabethan stage, with many of the popular traditional elements which earlier English drama had evolved: an exciting story, the constant use of stage-effects, anti-Pope satire, farcical episodes and, equally attractive to the contemporary audience, that high-sounding, evocative theatre poetry which Marlowe had already used so impressively in the two Tamburlaine plays.[22] All Marlowe’s plays are concerned with power of various kinds, and Dr. Faustus, like all the main characters of Marlowe’s, looks for power by means of the magic aid of Lucifer. Tamburlaine intended to get power with his sword in a murderous career. He killed the virgins of Damascus, he killed his own son as he had no desire to fight. He used his scourge to conquer the world. Dr. Faustus looks for another type of power, he looks for infinite knowledge, and he can do this by means of his books: O, what a world of profit and delight, Of power, of honour, of omnipotence, Is promis’d to the studious artisan. All things that move between the quiet poles Shall be at my command: emperors and kings Are but obey’d in their several provinces, Nor can they raise the wond or rend the clouds; But his dominion that exceeds in this Stretches as far as doth the mind of man. (I, 52-60) Faustus speaks with a fine exaltation akin to Tamburlaine’s, but his ringing aspirations are merely a desire for wealth, privilege and power; when, just after this speech, Valdes and Cornelius encourage Faustus to use magic, the results they offer him are also power and wealth. All that he seeks throughout most of the rest of the play until the last phase (that is, about three-quarters of the whole) is the knowledge and its special power that magic seems to promise.[23] On the one hand, statistically speaking, the occurrences of the thematic key-word book in Dr. Faustus exceed the occurrences of the thematic key-word scourge in Tamburlaine the Great. On the other, Marlowe uses not only book but various synonyms: art, Scripture, study, etc. Although “book” does not appear at the beginning of the tragedy, it is an easy substitute for “learning” in a line uttered by Chorus: “/he is/ glutted now with learning’s golden gifts.” (Prologue, 20) – “the golden gifts of books”, or, without pushing the paraphrase too far, “the golden gifts of good books”, the books that allow men to advance along the path leading to a scientific knowledge of the world.[24] In his attempt to overreach his condition, Dr. Faustus compares two texts from The Bible, Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, VI, 23 which says: the reward of sin is death, and The First Epistle General of John that says if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and there’s no truth in us. The two sentences, taken out of their respective contexts, contradict each other, and by logical deduction Dr. Faustus understands that, irrespective of the course of his actions, he will go to hell. Thus, it is worth trying to play with eternity by the help of Mephistopheles who offers him the book wherein he might behold all spells and incantations. (V, 166-167) Disagreements in matters of religion were nothing new to the English of the 1580s, for the effects of the Reformation were still felt by people; Christians were not only divided into Catholics and Protestants but also into varieties of Catholicism and Protestantism. Catholics were divided into two main trends: some considered themselves primarily English subjects and placed loyalty to the monarchy above obedience to the pope, others believed that true Catholicism could not be practiced without accepting the pope's role. Protestants, too, could be more or less Calvinists. As a result of this division, many Christians felt bewildered, alienated from their God. For some, the loss of the spiritual comfort afforded by the Catholic belief in Purgatory, or in the effectiveness of prayers for the deceased, or in the practice of Confession was made even more painful by the desecration of churches and by the elimination of ritual elements from the service[25]. This was the religious crisis that Marlowe himself experienced when he created Dr. Faustus. And these are exactly the controversies that Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus engages in. Yet, when comparing the two texts from the Bible, Dr. Faustus commits two essential sins: pride and despair. Pride makes Dr. Faustus, reject the authority of God and look for that knowledge which would allow him to perform miracles and to raise people from death. Despair functions as a kind of inverted pride—the assumption that no one has any hope of winning divine grace and mercy. Faustus is fatally foolish like so many other tragic protagonists, and the implication is that his foolishness is an intrinsic part of the limitations imposed on his mind and spirit by the nature and working of his apparently grand aspirations.[26] He sells his soul for knowledge and power but gets very little of either, as Mephistopheles gives him only the knowledge of the material world.[27] So, for Faustus it seems knowledge still comes from books, but they are unauthorised texts, secret papers full of information, somehow pirated by the devil: Meph. Here, take this book and peruse it well. The iterating of these lines brings gold: The framing of this circle on the ground Brings thunder, whirlwinds, storm, and lightning; Pronounce this thrice devoutly to thyself, And men in harness shall appear to thee, Ready to execute what thou command'st. Faust. Thanks Mephistophilis for this sweet book. This I will keep as chary as my life. (II.1.161-69) Faustus asks Mephistopheles a series of questions in Act II about the nature of the universe, receiving standard Ptolemaic replies to all. Between the lines we can easily notice the rejection of the Copernican theory, which was well known in a casual way to so many in England. The chorus tells us: Learnèd Faustus, To find the secrets of astronomy Graven in the book of Jove's high firmament, Did mount him up to scale Olympus' top: Where... He views the clouds, the planets, and the stars, The tropics, zones and quarters of the sky From the bright circle of the hornèd moon even to the height of primum mobile: (III.1-10) The new information that he can use about the physical world impresses his fellow academics; Dr. Faustus humiliates a rude knight and a horse-dealer, he pleases a pregnant Duchess, bringing her grapes in the middle of winter, he brings back Helen of Troy to prove that she was the most beautiful woman in the world, but these are signs that he can manipulate Nature mechanically.[28] Magic in Dr. Faustus is a unifying symbol which draws together the three aspects of Renaissance thought with which Christopher Marlowe was typically concerned: the indulgence of the senses and the enjoyment of worldly beauty, the quest for wealth and political power, and the pursuit of infinite knowledge. The play itself, as well as the relevant historical and biographical evidence, suggests that Marlowe was aware that each of these pursuits had at times been justified by Renaissance occult philosophers.[29] Dr Faustus’ tricks are yet superficial, they are nothing but empirical evidence, and in fact Dr. Faustus still lacks control of the ultimate nature and causes of Creation.[30] In fact, he thought he would get true wisdom, true understanding of the nature of Man and of the universe he inhabits,[31] and did not understand that they needed more than the type of knowledge that Mephistopheles could offer him. Faustus understands the essence of the power that he got too late, when he shows himself that he is still unsatisfied with the authority of books and of Mephostopheles. The closing soliloquy does not show us Faustus actually burning in hell, but Faustus in the anticipation of the agony. His hopeless cry [...] epitomises his problem, torn as he is between the higher reason and faith that can bring repetance, and the lower reason that offers only despairs. It also shows his tragic confusion, his inability to realise his true difficulty; if he were able to repent, he could ask for mercy, and despair would be impossible.[32] The ending of the play deserves close attention, for it focuses explicitly on the conflicting Calvinist and anti-Calvinist views. According to the Old Man, Faustus can still be saved: he has only to "call for mercie and auoyd dispaire" (line 1323). Just such a line of reasoning would be held by Perkins's opponent, Peter Baro, who argued that "to each and every man God desires to give grace sufficient for salvation, for Christ died for each and every man."[33] The saving grace is supposed to be available to all, as we can hear from the Old Man's encouragement to Faustus in the lines: I see an Angell houers ore thy head, / And with a violl full of precious grace, / Offers to powre the same into thy soule (V, 1320-22). Only by rejecting the grace, men shut themselves out of heaven.[34] Thus, the ending of the play holds the non-Calvinist view that Faustus can still attain salvation by an act of faith, by repentance and prayer.[35] Yet Faustus cannot save himself, as his faith proves too weak and insufficient: I do repent, and yet I do dispaire (V, 1330). He is not a believer, so he cannot be forgiven by God, as he hath abjurde ... whome Faustus hath blasphemed.[36] When Dr. Faustus appeals against damnation, he is in a way already in hell, as Hell has already become his state of mind. The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta (first performed in 1591 or in 1592), a five-act play, concentrates on Barabas’ murderous career; its climax is at the point when he kills his own daughter, Abigail, for fear he might lose his gold. The Prologue to The Jew of Malta, spoken by Machiavelli, is more than the prologue to a single play: it introduces a new phase of Marlowe's work and is the brief epitome of a philosophy of life and statecraft that he was to consider and re-consider and upon which his next five plays were to furnish forth comments, now from one point of view, now from another. It sums up the main motives of Barabas, though the principles of Machiavelli do not entirely contain him, nor he them; it represents very fairly the Guise and Richard of York, though both fall a little short of it in imagination and poetry; its spirit reappears in part in the younger Mortimer, though he is often but a mechanical exponent of its forces. The dominant figures of all these plays are, in one way or another, to greater or less degree, representatives of those methods and principles which, to Marlowe and his contemporaries, went under the name of Machiavellianism.[37] The lines: I count religion but a childish toy,/ And hold there is no sin but ignorance, from the Prologue to The Jew of Malta, seem to substantiate the charge of atheism brought against Christopher Marlowe, and to encourage the view that he was an advocate of immoral and licentious behaviour. However, if we take a second look at Marlowe’s lines, we can see that in fact he just expressed the basis of an essentially gnostic religious viewpoint that was very prevalent in the Elizabethan age. 'Gnosis' means 'knowledge,' and the system of knowledge that springs from it forms the basis of Alchemy, Rosicrucianism, early Freemasonry, the teachings of John Dee and Giordano Bruno etc, all of which flourished, albeit secretly, in Marlowe's day. It was this 'knowledge' that, in a crude form, Marlowe's Faustus yearned for and, in a mature form, Shakespeare's Prospero achieved in The Tempest. It would certainly have been on the agenda of Ralegh's famous 'School of Night’.[38] The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second (written in 1592', printed in 1594) was often compared to Shakespeare’s Richard II, due to many similarities between the heroes of the plays. The first complete edition of Edward II was printed in 1594 with the statement that the play had been acted by the Earl of Pembroke's players. The source of the play is Holinshed's Chronicles. Edward II represents a great advance over the known plays on English history that preceded it, and is the best of Marlowe's work in construction, in characterization, and in sustained tone. Against a background of the fierce feudal barons, Marlowe has drawn a very effective picture of the sentimental and weak but stubborn king.[39] Christopher Marlowe's Edward II is generally applauded as an aesthetic achievement, as it is a history play that brings form and meaning to the incoherent material of its chronicle source by retelling the king's slightly dull, twenty-year reign as the fierce and deadly struggle of a few willful personalities. Within the development of Elizabethan drama, Edward II is granted a crucial role in bringing to the English "chronicle play" - including Shakespeare's Henry VI plays and Richard III - the unity and purpose of the mature "history" play, epitomized by Shakespeare's later, more aesthetically sophisticated tetralogy.[40] Joan Parks, however, finds these readings of Edward II relying upon too superficial an understanding of the chronicle tradition, as we cannot keep the play's formal success separate from the Elizabethan debates about historiography.[41] Therefore, Parks proposes another approach to the play, which should not be read as mere "material" but as a coherent and influential projection of national identity and historical process.[42] From this perspective, we can see that Marlowe's play significantly redefines the nation and the forces of historical change; in Edward II, Marlowe delineates and focuses on a private realm, which he sets up in opposition to the public as a volatile source of decisions affecting the state.[43] In the chroniclers (Holinshed’s Chronicle, Stow’s Chronicle), Edward is repeatedly described as a source of disorder, a force negative to the reasonable operations of the state and a man whose lack of self-government parallels his inability to govern the realm.[44] Holinshed recounts that Edward began to... take small heed unto the good government of the commonwealth, so that within a while he gave himselfe to wantonness, passing his time in voluptuous pleasure, and riotous excesse.[45] Edward is repeatedly defeated because he rashlie and with not good advisement ordered his doings, while the Scots’ attack is in good order of battell.[46] Marlowe offers his reader a radical retelling of the stories that he had read, and he sees Edward from a different angle: for Marlowe, Edward continually falls away from the role of an ideal governor because he is weak, but because his will moves him in a different direction.[47] As has been noted by most scholars interested in a detailed comparison of Marlowe's play with its sources (John Bakeless, H. B. Charlton and R. D. Waller, and, more recently, Vivien Thomas, William Tydeman, and Charles R. Forker), Marlowe, by focusing on Edward's favoritism and fall, and narrowing the chronicles' scope and diversity of actors, telescopes the twenty-year reign into a short sequence of inevitable actions, introduces the Spencers as an immediate continuation of the problems first represented by Gaveston, foregrounds the adulterous relationship between Mortimer and Isabel, and makes Mortimer the one, central figure in Edward's opposition, obscuring the roles of the other barons.[48] Thus, what Marlowe does is to replace the chronicles' concern with civic order.[49] Joan Parks’s conclusion is that the image that Marlowe offered to his audience was that of a monarch-centered nation, driven by private forces. […] Denying his own artifice while aggressively reworking the chronicle account in the elevated style of classical tragedy, Marlowe identifies artifice and fiction as fundamental principles governing not only the writing of history but also historical action itself. He thus establishes the historical significance of his own play even as he acknowledges its fictionality.[50] The Masacre at Paris (1592') describes the facts connected with the bloody massacre of more than two thousand French Protestant Huguenots in Paris on August 23/24, 1572. The massacre was contrived by the Catholic Catherine of Medici, the mother of the French king Charles IX, she being discontented with the growing authority of Admiral Coligny, one of the Huguenot leaders. It extended all over France and gave rise to the religious wars which were put an end to by Henry IV, king of Navarre and supreme leader of the Huguenots, who was crowned king of France in 1589.[51] The lengthy poem Hero and Leander is the well-known mythological story of Leander, the youth of Abydos who swam every night across the Hellespont to see Hero of Sestus, the priestess of Venus-Aphrodite, until he died. Hero and Leander, Kentish in its underlying locale, stands as a self-professed sequel to Venus and Adonis. The Passionate Shepherd to his Love (published in 1599) is a masterpiece of Marlowe’s, written in very simple English that does not obey the rules of rhetoric that Marlowe adhered to in all his plays. Come live with me, and be my love; And he will all the pleasures prove That hills and valleys, dales and fields, Woods or steepy mountain yields And he will sit upon the rocks, Seeing the shephers feed their flocks By shallow rivers, to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals. And I will make thee beds of roses, And a thousand fragrant posies; A cap of flowers, and a kirtle Embroider’d all with leaves of myrtle; A gown made of the finest wool Which from our pretty lambs we pull; Fair-lined slippers for the cold, With buckles of the purest gold; A belt of straw and ivy-buds, With coral clasps and amber studs; And if these pleasures may thee move, Come live with me, and be my love. The shepherd-swains shall dance and sing For thy delight each May morning; If these delights thy mind may move, Then live with me, and be my love[52]. Once again, we may notice the refined expression, the subtlety of thought, the natural of Marlowe’s speech. This is why, both with his plays and poetry, Christopher Marlowe had a huge success with Renaissance audiences and his readers. ----------------------- [1] Ellis-Fermor (1927), p. XI. [2] Idem, pp. 1-2. [3] Idem, p. 2. [4] Leon Levic[pic]chi (1974), p. 335. [5] Idem, p. 341. [6] W.L. Godshalk (1974), pp. 57-58. [7] Donald Stump, "Marlowe's Travesty of Virgil: Dido and Elizabethan Dreams of Empire", Comparative Drama, Vol. 34, 2000, at http://freessays.0catch.com/marlowestump.html, last accessed on February 23, 2006. [8] Ibidem. [9] Ibidem. [10] In fact, with the exception of Edward II, all Marlowe’s plays represented a starting point in colonialist interpretations. As Lisa Hopkins has suggested, all of his plays except one, 'Edward II', are set abroad - two, 'Doctor Faustus' and 'Tamburlaine', in more than one country; and many of them also involve heroes, or other characters, who are foreign visitors or residents. [...] 'The Jew of Malta' boasts a whole complement of invading Turks as well as the inherently exiled Jew himself (the Knights themselves are also not indigenous inhabitants but of foreign origin); and 'Dido, Queen of Carthage' features the man who in many ways can stand for the ur-coloniser, Aeneas. Running through all of these works is an concern with alienness, with the viability of normative perspectives, and with the problematics of the relationship between personal and national identities. (Lisa Hopkins, "And shall I die, and this unconquered'': Marlowe's Inverted Colonialism", Early Modern Literary Studies, vol. 2, iss. 2, 1996, p. 23, retrieved from http://purl.oclc.org/emls/02-2/hopkmarl.html, last accessed on February 26, 2006). [11] J. C. Maxwell, "The Plays of Christopher Marlowe", in Boris Ford (ed) (1991), p. 261. [12] Lisa Hopkins, "And shall I die, and this unconquered'': Marlowe's Inverted Colonialism", Early Modern Literary Studies, vol. 2, iss. 2, 1996, p. 23, retrieved from http://purl.oclc.org/emls/02-2/hopkmarl.html, last accessed on February 26, 2006. [13] See Alexandru Olaru (1976) [14] Quoted in Leon Leviţchi, "Christopher Marlowe, The Scourge and the Book", in Ioan Aurel Preda (ed) (1983), p. 86 [15] Roy W. Battenhouse (1966), pp. 132-133 [16] This epithet was also used about Attila the Hun. [17] Leon Leviţchi, "Christopher Marlowe, The Scourge and the Book", in Ioan Aurel Preda (ed) (1983), p. 86. [18] Leon Leviţchi, "Christopher Marlowe, The Scourge and the Book", in Ioan Aurel Preda (ed) (1983), p. 87. [19] Ibidem. [20] Ibidem. [21] Leon Leviţchi (1974), p. 358. [22] Boorman (1987), p. 271. [23] Idem, pp. 273-274. [24]Leon Leviţchi, "Christopher Marlowe, The Scourge and the Book", in Ioan Aurel Preda (ed) (1983), p. 88. [25] G.M. Pinciss, "Marlowe's Cambridge years and the writing of Doctor Faustus", Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 33, 1993, from http://freessays.0catch.com/marlowepinciss.html, last accessed on February 26, 2006. [26] Boorman (1987), p. 275. [27] Ibidem. [28] Idem, p. 274. [29] John S. Mebane (1992), p. 113. [30] Boorman (1987), p. 274. [31] Idem, p. 275. [32] Idem, p. 278. [33] G.M. Pinciss, "Marlowe's Cambridge years and the writing of Doctor Faustus", Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 33, 1993, from http://freessays.0catch.com/marlowepinciss.html, last accessed on February 26, 2006. [34] Quoted in G.M. Pinciss, Marlowe's Cambridge years and the writing of Doctor Faustus, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 33, 1993, from http://freessays.0catch.com/marlowepinciss.html, last accessed on February 26, 2006. [35] Ibidem. [36] Ibidem. [37] Ellis-Fermor (1927), p. 88. [38] Joan Modlin, from The Marlowe Society Newsletter 15, Autumn 2000, at http://www.marlowe-society.org/research.htm, last accessed on February 10, 2006. [39] http://www.theatrehistory.com/british/marlowe001.html, last accessed on January 2, 2006. [40] Joan Parks, "History, tragedy, and truth in Christopher Marlowe's 'Edward II'", Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 39, 1999, at http://freessays.0catch.com/ marloweparks.html, last accessed on January 7, 2006 [41] Ibidem. [42] Ibidem. [43] Ibidem. [44] Ibidem. [45] Raphael Holinshed (1807-1808), 2:570-1, p. 547. [46] Idem, p. 558. [47] Joan Parks, "History, tragedy, and truth in Christopher Marlowe's 'Edward II.'", Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 39, 1999 retrieved from http://freessays.0catch.com/marloweparks.html, last accessed on January 18, 2006. [48] Ibidem. [49] Ibidem. [50] Ibidem. [51] Leon Leviţchi (1974), p. 377. [52] Retrieved from http://www.bartleby.com/106/5.html, last accessed on February 26, 2006. ----------------------- [pic] [pic]