Christopher Marlowe, 1564–1593. Born, at Canterbury, Feb. (?) 1564; baptized, 26 Feb. Educated at King’s School, Canterbury. Matric. Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 17 March 1581; B.A., 1583; M.A., 1587. Probably settled in London soon afterwards. Warrant for his arrest, on ground of heretical views expressed in his writings, issued 18 May 1593. Killed, in a tavern quarrel at Deptford, 1 June 1593. Works: “Tamburlaine the Great” (anon.), 1590. Posthumous: “Edward II.,” Cassel, 1594 (only one copy known; another edn., London, 1598); “The Tragedy of Dido” (with T. Nash), 1594; “Hero and Leander,” 1598; “The Tragical History of … Dr. Faustus,” 1601 (?), (earliest copy extant, 1604); “The Massacre at Taris” (1600); “The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta,” 1633; “Lust’s Dominion,” 1657; “A Most Excellent Ditty of the Lover’s promises to his beloved” (1650?). He translated: Ovid’s “Amores,” 1590 (?) and 1598 (?); “Lucan’s First Booke,” 1600. Collected Works: ed. by G. Robinson, 3 vols., 1826; ed. by A. Dyce, 3 vols., 1850; ed. by A. H. Bullen, 3 vols., 1885.

  Christopher Marlow, slain by ffrancis Archer, the 1 of June 1593.

  By practice a play-maker and a poet of scurrilitie, who, by giuing too large a swing to his owne wit, and suffering his lust to haue the full reines,… denied God and his sonne Christ, and not onely in word blasphemed the Trinitie, but also (as it is credibly reported) wrote bookes against it, affirming our Sauiour to be but a deceiuer, and Moses to be but a coniurer and seducer of the people, and the Holy Bible to bee but vaine and idle stories, and all religion but a deuice of policie. But see what a hooke the Lord put in the nostrils of this barking dogge! So it fell out, that, as he purposed to stab one whom he ought a grudge vnto, with his dagger, the other party perceiuing so auoyded the stroke, that withall catching hold of his wrist, hee stabbed his owne dagger into his owne head, in such sort that, notwithstanding all the meanes of surgerie that could bee wrought, hee shortly after died thereof; the manner of his death being so terrible … that it was not only a manifeste signe of God’s judgement, but also an horrible and fearefull terror to all that beheld him. But herein did the justice of God most noteably appeare, in that hee compelled his owne hand, which had written these blasphemies, to bee the instrument to punish him, and that in his braine which had deuised the same.

  As Jodelle, a French tragical poet, being an epicure and an atheist, made a pitiful end: so our tragical poet Marlow, for his Epicurism and Atheism, had a tragical death; as you may read of this Marlow more at large, in the Theatre of God’s judgments, in the 25th chapter, entreating of Epicures and Atheists. As the poet Lycophron was shot to death by a certain rival of his: so Christopher Marlow was stabbed to death by a baudy Servingman, a rival of his, in his lewd love.

  Not inferior to these was one Christopher Marlow, by profession a playmaker, who as it was reported, about fourteen years ago wrote a book against the Trinitie. But see the effects of God’s justice! It so hapned that at Detford, a little village about three miles distant from London, as he meant to stab with his poniard one named Ingram, that had invited him thither to a feast, and was then playing at tables, hee quickly perceiving it, so avoyded the thrust, that with all drawing out his dagger for his defence, hee stabd this Marlowe into the eye, in such sort, his braynes comming out, at the daggers point, hee shortly after dyed. Thus did God, the true executioner of divine justice, work the end of impious atheists.

	Marlowe was happy in his buskin(’d) Muse—
	Alas, unhappy in his life and end!
	Pitty it is that wit so ill should dwell,
	Wit lent from heaven, but vices sent from hell.
	Our theater hath lost, Pluto hath got
	A tragick penman for a driery plot.

  We read of one Marlow a Cambridge scholler, who was a poet and a filthy playmaker; this wretche accounted that meeke servant of God, Moses, to be but a conjurer, and our sweete Saviour but a seducer and deceiver of the people. But harken, ye brain-sicke and prophane poets and players, that bewitch idle eares with foolish vanities, what fell upon this prophane wretch:—having a quarrell against one whom he met in a streete in London, and would have stab’d him; but the partie perceiving his villany prevented him with catching his hand and turning his owne dagger into his braines, and so blaspheming and cursing he yeelded up his stinking breath. Marke this, ye players, that live by making fooles laugh at sinne and wickedness.

	Marlow, renown’d for his rare art and wit,
	Could ne’er attain beyond the name of Kit;
	Although his “Hero and Leander” did
	Merit addition rather.

  But whatever our opinions may be as to the attending circumstances, the parish register leaves us in no doubt as to the main fact by recording the burial of “Christopher Marlow, slaine by ffrancis Archer, the 1 of June, 1593.” The old church of St. Nicholas at Deptford, has been enlarged and rebuilt, and restored and re-restored, till nothing of the original except the old grey tower remains, and it is vain even to guess at the spot in which the body of the young poet was laid. He died we may well suppose in the worst inn’s worst room, and his grave was dug we may be certain in the obscurest corner of the churchyard; but even had it been otherwise, all knowledge of the locality would have passed away during the dark hundred years in which Christopher Marlowe became a name unknown.

  The death of Marlowe was seized upon with avidity by the Puritans, and he was held up as an awful example of the judgment of God. He was a free-thinker, an atheist, a blasphemer; there was no known crime that was not imputed to him. As no one man could have been guilty of all the wickedness he was charged with, and as one of his accusers was afterwards hanged at Tyburn, let us charitably render the Scotch verdict—“Not proven.” The Devil himself is not as black as he is painted by the theologians.

  The accounts of his death are doubtful and confused, but the most probable account is that he was poniarded in self-defence by a certain Francis Archer, a serving-man (not by any means necessarily, as Charles Kingsley has it, a footman), while drinking at Deptford, and that the cause of the quarrel was a woman of light character. He has also been accused of gross vices not to be particularised, and of atheism. Fortunately or unfortunately, there is absolutely no valid testimony to support this latter charge, the expressions respecting it being for the most part quite vague and traceable on the one side to the Puritan hatred of plays, on the other to the unquestionably loose life of Marlowe and his set; while the one specified accusation existing is due to a scoundrel called Bame, who was afterwards hanged at Tyburn. That Marlowe was a Bohemian in the fullest sense is certain: that he was anything worse there is no evidence whatever.

  It is certain he had friends among the finest-natured men of his time. Walsingham was his patron; there seems a touch of tenderness in Shakespeare’s apostrophe of the “dead shepherd” in “As you Like It;” Nash, who had sometimes been a jealous rival wrote an elegy “on Marlowe’s untimely death” which has not survived; an anonymous writer in 1600 speaks lovingly of “kynde Kit Marloe;” Edward Blunt, Marlowe’s friend and publisher, writes, in words that have a genuine ring, of “the impression of the man that hath been dear unto us, living an after-life in our memory;” Drayton’s well-inspired lines are familiar…. There is no alloy of blame in the words of these men, Drayton and Chapman, and they were among the gravest as well as the best-loved of their time. One lingers over the faintest traces of this personality which must have been so fascinating, for we have no further trustworthy indications of the manner of man that he was in the eyes of those who knew him.

  The passionate, defiant youth, surcharged with genius, was fair game for the bigots and Pharisees, who found it only too easy to besmirch his memory.

Tamburlaine, 1590

  Tamburlaine the Great. Who, from a Scythian Shephearde by his rare and woonderfull Conquests, became a most puissant and mightye Monarque. And, (for his tyranny, and terrour in Warre) was tearmed, The Scourge of God. Deuided into two Tragicall Discourses, as they were sundrie times shewed vpon Stages in the Citie of London. By the right honourable the Lord Admyrall, his seruauntes. Now first, and newlie published. London. Printed by Richard Ihones: at the signe of the Rose and Crowne neere Holborne Bridge, 1590.

  Idiote art-masters that intrude thēselues to our eares as the alcumists of eloquence; who (mouted on the stage of arrogance) think to outbraue better pens with the swelling bumbast of a bragging blank verse. Indeed it may be the ingrafted ouerflow of some kilcow conceipt, that ouercloieth their imagination with a more than drunken resolution, beeing not extemporall in the inuention of anie other meanes to vent their manhood, commits the digestion of their cholerick incumbrances to the spacious volubilitie of a drumming decasillabon.

  I keep my old course, to palter vp some thing in Prose, vsing mine old poesie still, Omne tulit punctum, although latelye two Gentlemen Poets, made two mad men of Rome beate out of their paper bucklers: & had it in derision, for that I could not make my verses ilt vpon the stage in tragicall buskins, euerie worde filling the mouth like the faburden of Bo-Bell, daring God out of heauen with that Atheist Tamburlan, or blaspheming with the mad preest of the sonne.

	From jigging veins of rhyming 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.
	View but his picture in this tragic glass,
	And then applaud his fortune as you please.

  The true artificer will not run away from Nature as he were afraid of her; or depart from life, and the likeness of truth; but speak to the capacity of his hearers. And though his language differs from the vulgar somewhat it will not fly from all humanity, with the Tamer-lanes and Tamer-chams of the late age, which had nothing in them but the scenical strutting, and furious vociferation, to warrant them to the ignorant gapers.

  It hath been told me there is a Cock-pit play going under the name of “The Scythian Shepherd, or Tamberlain the Great,” which how good it is any one may judge by its obscurity, being a thing not a bookseller in London, or scarce the players themselves who acted it formerly, cow’d call to remembrance.

  Marlow could not have selected for his purpose a better subject than the life and conquests of Tamburlaine, who rose from the lowest grade of life to the loftiest honours of a throne: instead of the “conceits which clownage kept in pay,” he carried the spectators “to the stately tent of war,” and took ample room for striking effects and novel situations. He seems, however, to have apprehended that he could not accomplish his great change instantly; and in order, to a certain extent, to gratify the appetite of the mob, he introduced into his performance scenes of low humour and buffoonery, which are omitted in the printed copies, the publisher informing the reader that he considered them derogatory “to so honourable and stately a history.” The reason for their insertion was the same as for the employment of “high astounding terms”—not that they were good, but that they would be applauded; and Marlow himself no more approved of the one than of the other…. It is by no means fair, therefore, to examine “Tamburlaine the Great” without bearing this fact in memory:—that it was the first attempt of the kind, and that Marlow made great sacrifices, as a poet, to promote its success. It will at once account for all the fustian and hyperbole by which the production unquestionably is disfigured, but which is sometimes of such a striking character, that we must pronounce even its absurdities the work of a man of fervid and exalted genius.

  “Tamburlaine” was ridiculed on account of its inflated style. The bombast, however, which is not so excessive as has been alleged, was thought appropriate to such oriental tyrants. This play has more spirit and poetry than any which, upon clear grounds, can be shown to have preceded it. We find also more action on the stage, a shorter and more dramatic dialogue, a more figurative style, with a far more varied and skilful versification.

  A strange compound of inspiration and desperation, has the mark of power equally on its absurdities and its sublimities.

  Laugh as we will, in this first of Marlowe’s plays there is that incommunicable gift which means almost everything, style; a manner perfectly individual, and yet, at its best, free from eccentricity. The “mighty line” of which Jonson spoke, and a pleasure, equal to Milton’s, in resounding proper names, meet us in the very first scene; and in not a few passages passion, instead of vociferating, finds its natural expression, and we hear the fully-formed style, which in Marlowe’s best writing is, to use his own words,

“Like his desire, lift upward and divine.”

“Lift upward” Marlowe’s style was at first, and so it remained. It degenerates into violence, but never into softness. If it falters, the cause is not doubt or langour, but haste and want of care.

  It is difficult to over-estimate the importance of “Tamburlaine” in the history of the English Drama. To appreciate how immensely Marlowe outdistances at one bound all his predecessors, the reader must summon courage to make himself acquainted with such productions as “Gorboduc,” “The Misfortunes of Arthur,” and “Sir Clyomon” and “Sir Clamydes.” He will then perceive how real is Marlowe’s claim to be regarded as the father of the English drama. That the play is stuffed with bombast, that exaggeration is carried sometimes to the verge of burlesque, no sensible critic will venture to deny. But the characters, with all their stiffness, have life and movement. The Scythian conqueror, “threatening the world in high astounding terms,” is an impressive figure. There is nothing mean or trivial in the invention. The young poet threw into his work all the energy of his passionate nature. He did not pause to polish his lines, to correct and curtail; but was borne swiftly onward by the wings of his imagination. The absence of chastening restraint is felt throughout; and, indeed, the beauty of some of the most majestic passages is seriously marred by the introduction of a weak or ill-timed verse.

Edward II., 1594

  The troublesome raigne and lamentable death of Edward the second, King of England: with the tragicall fall of proud Mortimer. As it was sundrie times publiquely acted in the honourable citie of London, by the right honourable the Earl of Pembroke his servants. Written by Chri. Marlow Gent. Imprinted at London for William Jones, dwelling neare Holborne conduit at the Signe of the Gunne, 1594.

  In a very different style from mighty “Tamburlaine” is the tragedy of “Edward the Second.” The reluctant pangs of abdicating royalty in Edward furnished hints, which Shakespeare scarcely improved in his “Richard the Second;” and the death-scene of Marlowe’s king moves pity and terror beyond any scene ancient or modern with which I am acquainted.

  He has handled the history of “Edward the Second” in a very artless manner it is true, but with a certain truth and simplicity, so that many scenes do not fail to produce a pathetic effect. His verses are flowing, but without energy; how Ben Jonson could come to use the expression, Marlow’s mighty line, is more than I can conceive.

  “Edward II.” is, according to the modern standard of composition, Marlowe’s best play. It is written with few offences against the common rules, and in a succession of smooth and flowing lines. The poet, however, succeeds less in the voluptuous and effeminate descriptions which he here attempts, than in the more dreadful and violent bursts of passion. “Edward II.” is drawn with historic truth, but without much dramatic effect.

  Qualified, however, as must always be the praise assigned to the “Jew of Malta,” the critics combine in a chorus of approbation when they come to speak of “Edward the Second,” which is recognised by common consent as, after Shakspeare’s, the finest specimen of the English historical drama; while, as regards its only superiors, it possesses the important advantage of being anterior to them all in the date of its production. The conclusion, in particular, has called forth the admiration of the highest judges.

  Of the murder of the king Charles Lamb has written that it “moves pity and terror beyond any scene, ancient or modern, with which I am acquainted.” These may seem strong words when we think of Prometheus chained to the mountain top, or of Lear storm-tossed on the heath, but they are memorable as coming from so clear-eyed a critic. In any case there can be no doubt that the fifth act of Marlowe’s tragedy far surpasses the corresponding portion of Shakspere’s “Richard II.” This is partly due to a characteristic difference between the dramatists in the handling of their allied themes. Shakspere’s aim is to show how Richard’s weakness and sentimentality bring about his downfall. The purpose of the play would have been defeated had he awakened a reaction in the unhappy king’s favour by a vivid picture of his prison sufferings and death. This, on the contrary, is what Marlowe has done, and so persuasive is his art that our recollection of Edward’s sins is almost effaced in the contemplation of his long-drawn agony. Here, as always, Shakspere’s moral point of view is loftier than his forerunner’s, and “Richard II” moreover breathes a spirit of fervent patriotism absent in the earlier work. But in the variety of its situations, and in closely sustained dramatic interest, “Edward II” has without question the advantage over Shakspere’s play.

  Mention is made of “Edward II.” in Henslowe’s “Diary,” and the title-page of the last Quarto (1622) speaks of it as “acted by the Queenes Maiesties Seruants,” i.e., Queen Anne’s Company of actors, to whom had passed the rights of the original performers, Pembroke’s Company. Otherwise, nothing, it would seem, is known with regard to its stage-history, and it thus presents a striking contrast to “Faustus” and “The Jew of Malta,” the great popularity of which is attested by contemporary allusions and references, and the comments of later critics like Edward Phillips (in “Theatrum Poetarum,” 1675) and Langbaine (in “Dramatick Poets,” 1691). The fact that most of the prominent characters in “Edward II.” excite little sympathy must, one would think, have told somewhat against it. To the student, however, it is a play of surpassing interest, for its intrinsic merits, its just claim to be the first specimen in our language of true historical drama, and its relation to “Richard II.”

Faustus, 1601

  Of all that he hath written to the stage his “Dr. Faustus” hath made the greatest noise with its Devils, and such like tragical sport.

  Marlowe is said to have been tainted with atheistical positions, to have denied God and the Trinity. To such a genius the history of Faustus must have been delectable food: to wander in fields where curiosity is forbidden to go, to approach the dark gulf near enough to look in, to be busied in speculations which are the rottenest part of the core of the fruit that fell from the tree of knowledge. Barabas the Jew, and Faustus the conjurer, are offsprings of a mind which at least delighted to dally with interdicted subjects. They both talk a language which a believer would have been tender of putting into the mouth of a character though but in fiction.

  Though an imperfect and unequal performance, is his greatest work. Faustus himself is a rude sketch, but it is a gigantic one. This character may be considered as a personification of the pride of will and eagerness of curiosity, sublimed beyond the reach of fear and remorse.

  It is full of poetical beauties; but an intermixture of buffoonery weakens the effect, and leaves it, on the whole, rather a sketch by a great genius than a finished performance. There is an awful melancholy about Marlowe’s Mephistopheles, perhaps more impressive than the malignant mirth of that fiend in the renowned work of Goethe. But the fair form of Margaret is wanting; and Marlowe has hardly earned the credit of having breathed a few casual inspirations into a greater mind than his own.

  “Doctor Faustus” has many magnificent passages, such as Marlowe of the “mighty line” could not fail to write; but on the whole it is wearisome, vulgar, and ill-conceived. The lowest buffoonery, destitute of wit, fills a large portion of the scenes; and the serious parts want dramatic evolution. There is no character well drawn. The melancholy figure of Mephistopholis has a certain grandeur, but he is not the Tempter, according to the common conception, creeping to his purpose with the cunning of the serpent; nor is he the cold, ironical “spirit that denies;” he is more like the Satan of Byron, with a touch of piety and much repentance. The language he addresses to Faustus is such as would rather frighten than seduce him.

  With regard to the buffoonery of which Hallam so justly complains, I have no hesitation in saying that it must be attributed to any hand rather than Marlowe’s own. The edition of 1604 has been separately reprinted, with the view of showing that this debasing matter was of gradual introduction, the dose being made stronger and stronger to satisfy the taste of the groundlings, a proceeding which can hardly be complained of in a generation which appears to relish few things so much as the beastly grimaces, hurdy-gurdy tunes, and stupid threadbare jokes of pack after pack of buffoons smeared all over with filthy lampblack. If by any chance the original MS. of the “Tragical History of Dr. Faustus” is ever recovered, it is almost safe to predicate that Marlowe’s share would be found to consist solely and entirely of those grand, daring, and affecting scenes which will last as long as the English language.

  “His raptures were all air and fire.” In nothing has he shown himself so much a child of the Renaissance as in this repugnance to touch images of physical ugliness. Perondinus insists on Tamburlaine’s lameness, of which Marlowe says no word; the “Volksbuch” is crammed with details concerning the medieval Hell; Malrowe’s conception of Hell is loftier than Dante’s or Milton’s.

  This is unquestionably Marlowe’s greatest play; it is indeed one of the greatest plays that the world possesses; for in it the poet has been compelled, by the nature of his story and his own profound imagination, to pass beyond the limits of Machiavellism, and to sound the depths of the human heart, in an exhibition of that conflict between Will and Conscience which was embodied in outline in the old Moralities, and found its highest development in the dramas of Shakespeare. In this tragedy accordingly there are more distinct traces of the primitive traditions of the English theatre than in any other of Marlowe’s works.

  Although it is among the most chaotic, there can be little doubt that “Doctor Faustus” is the best of Marlowe’s plays. For the chaos here is not quite out of keeping with the wild theme; and that theme itself, in every other respect, is absolutely suited to Marlowe’s genius. The whole spirit of the Faust story comports with—nay, positively requires—not so much a regular dramatic action as a phantasmagoria; and its separate scenes are, most of them, well suited to stimulate the towering imagination, the passionate fancy, the tameless and restless energy of this wonderfully though partially endowed poet. That the Helen passage and the death scene contain, with the single exception—if with that—of the great purple patch of “Tamburlaine,” as to “the pens that poets held,” the most exquisite outbursts of sheer poetry in Marlowe is no more than we should expect from the coincidence of inspiring quality in the subject and formal competence in the worker.

Jew of Malta

  The author seems to have relied on the horror inspired by the subject, and the national disgust excited against the principal character, to rouse the feelings of the audience: for the rest, it is a tissue of gratuitous, unprovoked and incredible atrocities, which are committed, one upon the back of the other, by the parties concerned, without motive, passion, or object.

  The first two acts of the “Jew of Malta” are more vigorously conceived, both as to character and circumstance, than any other Elizabethan play, except those of Shakspeare.

  Whatever may be thought of the extraordinary accumulation of villanies perpetrated by the hero, the construction of the plot is extremely ingenious, and, notwithstanding its elaborateness, singularly clear and intelligible. Though the action rises from startling to more startling effects, a climax is reserved to the last. And in form the play deserves high praise; for the vigour and ease of its versification are alike remarkable.

  The masterful grasp that marks the opening scene was a new thing in English tragedy. Language so strong, so terse, so dramatic, had never been heard before on the English stage. In the two first acts there is not a trace of juvenility; all is conceived largely and worked out in firm, bold strokes. Hardly Shakespeare’s touch is more absolutely true and unfaltering; nor is it too much to say that, had the character been developed throughout on the same scale as in the first two acts, Barrabas would have been worthy to stand alongside of Shylock. But in the last three acts vigorous drawing is exchanged for caricature; for a sinister life-like figure we have a grotesque stage-villain, another Aaron. How this extraordinary transformation was affected, why the poet, who started with such clear-eyed vision and stern resolution, swerved so blindly and helplessly from the path, is a question that may well perplex critics.

Dido

  While following closely the story of the early books of the “Aeneid,” and even putting into the mouths of the leading characters several Virgilian lines, the drama is thoroughly original and merits more attention than it usually receives, especially as it contains Marlowe’s most elaborate picture of a woman.

Hero and Leander, 1598

  Sir,—We think not ourselves discharged of the duty we owe to our friend when we have brought the breathless body to the earth; for albeit the eye there taketh his ever-farewell of that beloved object, yet the impression of the man that hath been dear unto us, living an after-life in our memory, there putteth us in mind of farther obsequies due unto the deceased; and namely of the performance of what soever we may judge, shall make to his living credit and to the effecting of his determinations prevented by the stroke of death. By these meditations (as by an intellectual will) I suppose myself executor to the unhappily deceased author of this poem; upon whom knowing that in his lifetime you bestowed many kind favours, entertaining the parts of reckoning and worth which you found in him with good countenance and liberal affection, I cannot but see so far into the will of him dead, that whatsoever issue of his brain should chance to come abroad, that the first breath it should take might be the gentle air of your liking; for since his self had been accustomed thereunto, it would prove more agreeable and thriving to his right children that any other foster-countenance whatsoever.

	Liue still in heauen thy soule, thy fame on earth!
	Thou dead, of Marlos Hero findes a dearth.
	Weepe, aged Tellus! all on earth complaine!
	Thy chiefe-borne faire hath lost her faire againe:
	Her faire in this is lost, that Marlo’s want
	Inforceth Hero’s faire be wonderous scant.
	Oh, had that king of poets breathed longer,
	Then had faire beautie’s fort been much more stronger!
	His goulden pen had clos’d her so about,
	No bastard æglet’s quill, the world throughout,
	Had been of force to marre what he had made;
	For why they were not expert in that trade.
	What mortall soule with Marlo might contend,
	That could ’gainst reason force him stoope or bënd?
	Whose siluer-charming toung mou’d such delight,
	That men would shun their sleepe in still darke night
	To meditate vpon his goulden lynes,
	His rare conceyts, and sweet-according rimes.

	Then, now, most strangely intellectual fire
	That, proper to my soul, hast power to inspire
	Her burning faculties, and with the wings
	Of thy unspherèd flame, visits’t the springs
	Of spirits immortal. Now, as swift as Time
	Doth follow motion, find th’ eternal clime
	Of his free soul, whose living subject stood
	Up to the chin in the Pierian flood,
	And drunk to me half this Musæan story,
	Inscribing it to deathless memory:
	Confer with it, and make my pledge as deep
	That neither’s draught be consecrate to sleep:
	Tell it how much his late desires I tender
	(If yet it know not), and to light surrender
	My soul’s dark offspring.

  A kind of second Shakesphear (whose contemporary he was) not only because like him he rose from an actor to be a maker of plays, though inferior both in fame, and merit; but also because in his begun poem of “Hero and Leander,” he seems to have a resemblance of that clean and unsophisticated Wit, which is natural to that incomparable poet.

  The fragment of “Hero and Leander” is incomparably the finest product of Marlowe’s genius: it is one of the chief treasures of the language. (The poet is fairly intoxicated with the beauty of his subject: he has thought about the two lovers, and dreamed about them, and filled his imagination with their charms; he writes with ecstasy as if obeying an impulse that he can resist no longer, and in every other line expressions escape him that have all the warmth of involuntary bursts of admiration. He dashes into the subject with passionate eagerness, outlining the situation with a few impatient strokes.

  Written in the so-called heroic verse, it bears no resemblance to any other poem in that metre composed before, nor, perhaps, is there any written since which decidedly recalls it, unless it be “Endymion.” “Pagan” it is in a sense, with the Paganism of the Renascence: the more pagan the better, considering the subject. Nothing of the deeper thought of the time, no “looking before and after,” no worship of a Gloriana or hostility to an Acrasia, interferes with its frank acceptance of sensuous beauty and joy.

  No poem in our language is more classical, in the sense at least in which Politan and Sanazzaro would have understood the term, and assuredly no poem in our language is more sensuously lovely, than “Hero and Leander.” It reminds us in some respects of the best episodes in the “Metamorphoses,” and it reminds us still more frequently of Keats’s narratives, not, indeed, of “Isabella” or of “The Eve of Saint Agnes,” but indirectly of “Endymion,” and directly of “Lamia.”

General

	Marley, the Muses’ darling …
	Fit to write passions for the souls below,
	If any wretched souls in passion speak.

Marlow’s mighty line.

	Neat Marlowe, bathèd in the Thespian springs,
	Had in him those brave translunary things
	That the first poets had; his raptures were
	All air, and fire, which made his verses clear;
	For that fine madness still he did retain,
	Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.

  That smooth song which was made by Kit Marlow, now at least fifty years ago: and … an answer to it which was made by Sir Walter Raleigh in his younger days. They were old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good.

  His tragedies manifest traces of a just dramatic conception; but they abound with tedious and uninteresting scenes, or with such extravagancies as proceeded from a want of judgment, and those barbarous ideas of the times, over which it was the peculiar gift of Shakespeare’s genius alone to triumph and to predominate.

  Had he lived longer to profit by the example of Shakspeare, it is not straining conjecture to suppose, that the strong misguided energy of Marlowe would have been kindled and refined to excellence by the rivalship.

  Christopher Marlow, whose name will live as long as tender sentiment, clothed in language the most felicitous, shall be understood and felt, is known rather as a dramatist than a professed poet.

  Marlowe was in all essential points the direct opposite of Greene; while the latter delighted in a cheerful grace, and agreeableness of style, Marlowe aimed solely and exclusively at the forcible, extraordinary, and sublime. He possessed, in fact, a vigorous, and—not to lay too much stress upon the term—a great mind; but his heart was waste and rude, and it is from the heart that every truly great thought proceeds. Accordingly, under his hand, the forcible becomes the forced, the uncommon the unnatural, while the great and sublime sinks into the grotesque and monstrous…. To such a height does he frequently accumulate terrific and monstrous events, deeds of violence, enormities and crimes, that no corresponding catastrophe nor adequate punishment, can be devised for them; and the close of the piece consequently appears as a low and narrow outlet through which the mass of the action seeks in vain to force its way. Accordingly, the last moments of his heroes, however they may distress and agitate, never exalt or elevate the feelings. His notion of tragedy comprehends in it nothing of solace and atonement. Nevertheless, his mental vigour alone has enabled him to do that which was wholly beyond the power of Greene; his poetical matter is well connected and condensed; his dramas have for their basis a vital concrete idea, a fully defined view of life and the world, out of which the whole composition appears to have grown naturally, and organically to have perfected itself.

  He is intense, but narrow. The central principle of his mind was self-will, and this is the bond which binds together his strangely huddled faculties. Of all English poets, he most reminds us of Byron; ruder, it may be, but at the same time more colossal in his proportions. He is a glorious old heathen, “large in heart and brain,”—a fiery and fickle Goth, on whose rough and savage energies a classical culture has been piled, tossed among the taverns, and theatres, and swelling spirits of London, to gratify the demands of his senses in some other way than by acts of brilliant pillage. In his lustiness, his absence of all weak emotions, his fierce delight in the mere feeling of self, in the heedlessness with which he heaps together rubbish and diamonds, and in the frequent “starts and strange far-flights of his imagination,” he is the model of irregular genius. His mind, in its imperiousness, disregarded by instinct the natural relations of things, forced objects into the form of his individual passions, and lifted his vices into a kind of Satanic dignity, by exaggerating them into shapes colossal. His imagination, hot, swift, impatient of control, pervaded by the fiery essence of his blood, and giving wings to the most reckless desires, riots in the maddest visions of strength and pride. Of all writers, he seems to feel the heartiest joy in the mere exercise of power, regardless of all the restraints which make power beneficent.

  Æschylus of the English stage, like his great Athenian prototype, seems to have impressed his contemporaries with a most exalted respect for his sublime and irregular genius.

  The essential character of his mind was that of a lofty extravagance, shaping itself into words that may be likened to the trumpet in music, and the scarlet in painting—perpetual trumpet, perpetual scarlet…. Through five thousand lines have we the same pompous monotony, the same splendid exaggeration, the same want of truthful simplicity. But the man was in earnest. His poetical power had nothing in it of affectation and pretence.

  Marlowe had a rare imagination, a delicacy of sense that made him the teacher of Shakespeare and Milton in versification, and was, perhaps, as purely a poet as any that England has produced; but his mind had no balance-wheel.

  Although we cannot say much for the dramatic art of Marlowe, he has far surpassed every one that went before him in dramatic poetry. The passages that might worthily be quoted from Marlowe’s writings for the sake of their poetry are innumerable, notwithstanding that there are many others which occupy a border land between poetry and bombast, and are such that it is to us impossible to say to which class they rather belong…. His verse is, for dramatic purposes, far inferior to Shakspere’s.

	For thou, if ever godlike foot there trod
	These fields of ours, wert surely like a god.
	Who knows what splendour of strange dreams was shed
	With sacred shadow and glimmer of gold and red
	From hallowed windows, over stone and sod,
	On thine unbowed, bright, insubmissive head?
	The shadow stayed not, but the splendour stays,
	Our brother, till the last of English days.
	No day nor night on English earth shall be
	Forever, spring nor summer, Junes nor Mays,
	But somewhat as a sound or gleam of thee
	Shall come on us like morning from the sea.

  Marlowe was an ill-regulated, dissolute, outrageously vehement and audacious spirit, but grand and sombre, with the genuine poetic frenzy; pagan moreover, and rebellious in manners and creed…. Marlowe is to Shakspeare what Perugino was to Raphael.

  His was a wild, volcanic nature, storming through life with the licence of genius…. The glowing imagination of this poet delighted in portraying the terrific struggle between the most violent passions, but he was never able to keep within the bounds of beauty; the conciliatory and elevating element is wanting in his tragedies; his delineation of character generally degenerates into monstrosity, and his energetic diction into an inflated and bombastic style. The boldness of his genius led him to choose subjects of historical significance or such as allowed in revelling in demoniacal emotions.

  Marlowe has been styled, and not unjustly styled, the father of English dramatic poetry. When we reflect on the conditions of the stage before he produced “Tamburlaine,” and consider the state in which he left it after the appearance of “Edward II.,” we shall be able to estimate his true right to this title…. Out of confusion he brought order, following the clew of his own genius through a labyrinth of dim unmastered possibilities. Like all great craftsmen, he worked by selection and exclusion on the whole mass of material ready to his hand; and his instinct in this double process is the proof of his originality.

  Mr. J. A. Symonds has defined the leading motive of Marlowe’s work as L’Amour de l’Impossible—“the love or lust of unattainable things.” Never was a poet fired with a more intense aspiration for ideal beauty and ideal power. As some adventurous Greek of old might have sailed away, with warning voices in his ears, past the pillars of Hercules in quest of fabled islands beyond the sun, so Marlowe started on his lonely course, careless of tradition and restraint, resolved to seek and find “some world far from ours” where the secret springs of Knowledge should be opened and he should touch the lips of Beauty.

  The career of Marlowe was more illustrious, it seems to me, than that of any other English poet; for no other English poet, so far as I remember, ever surpassed all his contemporaries at so early an age as he, or ever achieved so much distinction by his first work. Other poets, the most eminent, served their apprenticeship in the divine art: from the beginning, Marlowe was a master. That his success was resented, as we are told it was, by Greene and Nash, was natural; for, not to insist upon the jealousy and envy with which the poetic temperament has always been credited, and of which they had, no doubt, their full share, it touched them in that vital part,—the pocket. They had the market to themselves before this young interloper from Cambridge set up a stall of his own, and had his wares preferred to theirs. It was monstrous, sirs, monstrous.

  He is the undoubted author of some of the masterpieces of English verse; the hardly to be doubted author of others not much inferior. Except the very greatest names—Shakespere, Milton, Spenser, Dryden, Shelley—no author can be named who has produced, when the proper historical estimate is applied to him, such work as is to be found in “Tamburlaine,” “Doctor Faustus,” “The Jew of Malta,” “Edward the Second,” in one department; “Hero and Leander” and the “Passionate Shepherd” in another. I have but very little doubt that the powerful, if formless, play of “Lust’s Dominion” is Marlowe’s, though it may have been rewritten, and the translations of Lucan and Ovid and the minor work which is, more or less probably attributed to him, swell his tale. Prose he did not write, perhaps could not have written…. Shakespere himself has not surpassed, which is equivalent to saying that no other writer has equalled, the famous and wonderful passages in “Tamburlaine” and “Faustus,” which are familiar to every student of English literature as examples of the ne plus ultra of the poetic powers, not of the language but of language. The tragic imagination in its wildest flights has never summoned up images of pity and terror more imposing, more moving, than those excited by “The Jew of Malta.” The riot of passion and of delight in the beauty of colour and form which characterises his version of “Hero and Leander” has never been approached by any writer…. It is impossible to call Marlowe a great dramatist, and the attempts that have been made to make him out to be such remind one of the attempts that have been made to call Molière a great poet. Marlowe was one of the greatest poets of the world whose work was cast by accident and caprice into an imperfect mould of drama; Molière was one of the greatest dramatists of the world who was obliged by fashion to use a previously perfected form of verse. The state of Molière was undoubtedly the more gracious; but the splendour of Marlowe’s uncut diamonds of poetry is the more wonderful.

  He had the freshness and splendour of Heosphoros, the bearer of light, the kindler of morning; as the dawn-star of our drama, he ascended the heavens, in the auroral flush of youth, to announce the approaching majesty of Shakespeare. But his early death, and the unexampled character of the genius who superseded him, have for centuries obscured the name of Marlowe, which scintillated half-extinguished in the blaze of “Hamlet” and “Othello.” His reputation has, however, increased during the last generation with greater rapidity than that of any other of our elder poets, and a time may yet come when we shall have popularly isolated him from Shakespeare to such a degree as to enforce a recognition of his individual greatness.

  It may be said that Marlowe did more in the way of indicating the dramatic capabilities of blank verse, by freeing it from some of the fetters in which it had been bound, than of realizing those capabilities on the higher planes of expression to which Shakespeare carried them. He certainly did not do all that John Addington Symonds credits him with, in his “Shakespeare’s Predecessors in the English Drama.” There is not, generally, in his plays, that sanity of mind and heart, that well-balanced and well-toned thought and genuine passion, to have brought out the higher capabilities of the verse.

  As the real founder, though not precisely the initiator, both of English tragedy and English blank verse—as being thus in a certain sense the father of our poetry more truly than even Chaucer, for Chaucer’s direct influence upon Shakespeare and Milton is not great, while Marlowe’s unquestionably is—the immense importance of his position can scarcely be overstated. And it is not merely a relative or historical importance either. Judged upon their absolute merits as poetry, such passages as those in which Faustus addresses the apparition of Helen, disclose by their magnificence of hyperbole a power of style belonging to the great poets alone. His imagination is of wide sweep, with an adventurous, intrepid, and untamable wing. Violent, sinister, rebellious, unblest, he has something of the grandeur of a fallen angel about him, and in the dayspring of our drama he is Lucifer, son of the morning.

	With wine and blood and wit and deviltry,
	He sped the heroic flame of English verse:
	Bethink ye, rhymers, what your claim may be,
	Who in smug suburbs put the Muse to nurse?

  In reading Marlowe one is brought face to face, not only with tragic situations, but with the elemental tragedy,—the tragedy which has its rise in the conflict between the infinite desires of the soul and the rigid restrictions of its activity. The master of “the mighty line” never learned that lesson of self-mastery which Shakespeare studied so faithfully; he was always wasting his immense force on the impossible, and matching his powerful genius against those immutable conditions imposed upon men, not to dwarf but to develop them.

  To no single man does our drama owe more than to this ill-starred genius. It was he who determined the form which tragedy and history were permanently to assume. It was he who first clothed both in that noble and splendid garb which was ever afterwards to distinguish them. It was he who gave the death-blow to the old rhymed plays on the one hand, and to the frigid and cumbersome unrhymed classical plays on the other…. He cast in clay what Shakspeare recast in marble…. It is more than probable that without the tragedies of Marlowe we should never have had, in the form at least in which they now stand, the tragedies of Shakspeare. Of the History in the proper sense of the title, Marlowe was the creator. In his “Edward I.” Peele had, it is true, made some advance on the old Chronicles. But the difference between Peele’s “Edward I.” and Marlowe’s “Edward II.” is the difference between a work of art and mere botchwork.

  Christopher Marlowe is one of the most fascinating figures in our own, or indeed in any, literature. In the temple of poetic fame the highest places are sacred to genius that has mounted securely to its meridian splendour, to Homer, Dante, Shakspere. But seats only lower than these, and hallowed with perhaps richer offerings of human sympathy and love, are granted to genius dead ere its time, cut down in the freshness of its morning radiance. It is here that Marlowe is to be sought, side by side with Collins and Shelley and Keats. What the world has lost by the untimely close of his career we cannot know; but we do know that, even had he lived, he could never have been “another Shakspere.” For nature, so lavish to him in other ways, had entirely withheld from him the priceless gift of humour, and the faculty of interpreting commonplace human experience. He never learnt the secrets of a woman’s heart, and he knew of no love lifted above the level of sense. Between him and his mighty successor there is, and there must always have been, an impassable gulf. Marlowe is the rapturous lyrist of limitless desire, Shakspere the majestic spokesman of inexorable moral law.

  For a moment, and from time to time, he shoots up to the utmost height of poetry, but only in a beam of light, which lasts for a very brief space and then sinks out of view.

  We often hear of “Marlowe’s mighty line,” but we seldom read it. This may be due to the fact that Shakespeare’s sprightly line is so much more attractive, yet Marlowe occupies a commanding position among pre-Shakespearean dramatists, and is worthy of study both because of his intrinsic value as a poet and because of his relation to Shakespeare. In splendor of imagination, richness and stateliness of verse, strength and warmth of passion, he is at times almost the equal of Shakespeare.