CHAPTER VIII. MARLOWE. MARLOWE, b. 1563-64; educated at King's School, Canterbury, and at Corpus Christi (Bene't) College, Cambridge; d. 1593.- Tamburlaine the Great, before 1587; Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, 1588; Jew of Malta, 1588-90; Massacre of Paris, 1590 circ.; Edward II., 1590 circ.; Tragedy of Queen Dido, prob. left unfinished at Marlowe's death, and completed by Nash, prob. 1594. MARLOWE is the greatest of Shakspere's predecessors; his work comes nearest, both in form and in idea, to that of the greatest of English dramatists. It may have been time alone that prevented him from making still narrower the gulf that separated him from his great contemporary; for Marlowe, born in 1564, died in 1593. After that university training common to all Elizabethan dramatists,-a training which gave enough knowledge of classics to allow of their use as literary appendages, as mines from which could be extracted illustrations, apt quotations, strings of well-sounding names, etc.,—his life seems to have been one of the wildest Bohemianism, ending in inglorious death in some trivial quarrel. "Unhappy in thy end, Marley, the Muse's darling for thy verse, Of the genius, of the very great promise, of that "wit lent from Heaven," neither contemporaries nor posterity can have any doubt. It was never obscured in his works by "those vices sent from hell;" even Greene's solemn address to him in the Groatsworth of Wit-which begins by greeting him as an atheist : "Wonder not, thou famous gracer of tragedies, that Green, who has said with thee there is no God"-cannot convict him of wilful and utter abandonment to a life of thoughtless dissipation. Marlowe was not like the Vanbrughs, Farquhars, and Wycherleys of after-days, who felt at home and satisfied with wickedness, and to whom life was no problem. Marlowe lived the life from which at first there was no escape for the Elizabethan dramatists; he experienced to the full all the temptations to which they as actors and artists were exposed, and which was often the ruin of many eager emotional natures. But life to Marlowe had many interests, personal and impersonal; it had good sides as well as bad; it was not merely a thing to be enjoyed with thoughtless self-indulgence, it was a problem in itself; it offered food for a curiosity, both high and low. "The History of Faustus," says Charles Lamb, "must have been delectable food for a mind like Marlowe's: he loved 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." But whether or not these speculations are the rottenest fruit of the tree of knowledge, the fact that Marlowe indulged in them proves that he had a soul, and that it was unsatisfied. We feel that his wide and active mind-interested in the problems of life and death, interested in human character, in the play of human emotions—was undeniably a great mind, great enough, perhaps, to be modified by and to assimilate experience instead of being entirely moulded by it. We shall never know whether, like Shakspere, he would, if he had lived, have succeeded in emancipating himself from the necessary degradations of his surroundings as an actor and dramatist; we can only guess from the true tone of power and sometimes of dignity that distinguishes some of his work that he might in time have acquired that self-control which would have prevented him from being the victim of circumstances, and without which the best talents and the best impulses both in actual and imaginative life are wasted. He might in time have acquired that deeper insight, that tolerance, which is only another word for sympathy, which specially distinguishes Shakspere, and which rarely comes save to those who have lived a long and independent life full of experience. Drayton, whose opinion is worthy of respect, bears full testimony to his genius— "Next Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs, And he had in addition to that "fine madness"-that unrestrained freedom of thought and imagination which often makes a Bohemian life the only possible one for an artist—an understanding of high and deep passion, of aspirations which a debased mind could never have grasped. Marlowe felt with Shelley— "It needs not the hell that bigots frame To punish those who err. He knew perhaps "the varied agonies" of a spiritual remorse, "that prey like scorpions on the springs of life." He makes Mephistopheles reply thus to Faust's question as to the bounds of hell "Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it; Thinkst thou that I, that saw the face of God Am not tormented with ten thousand devils Remorse is the hell into which are plunged the souls of those that have done evil; and although we may wonder whether it be possible for the Archfiend to be a prey to this nobler sort of torment (Goethe's Mephistopheles, for certain, never felt it), yet we cannot doubt but that Marlowe had felt it; and we cannot help feeling that with him it might have developed into a lasting power over conduct, nobler than Greene's fear of a "God that can punish enemies," that Marlowe, if he had lived, might have been a rival to Shakspere in more than mere youthful promise. We must not forget also, in estimating the value of Marlowe's work, that he had much pioneering work to do; that he found the stage more shackled by conventions, more oppressed by barbarisms, than Shakspere; that both in choice of subject and in versification Marlowe's energy was employed in working reforms by which Shakspere profited. Like Shakspere and all other dramatists of the time, he relied for fame on his purely poetic compositions. On the poem of Hero and Leander, of which, however, he only lived to complete what forms the two first sestiads; on his translations of some of Ovid's elegies, of which, unhappily, he chose the worst,-he meant to rest his fame: but a more justly discriminating posterity finds that his fame has been earned as a dramatist, as the capable artistic reformer of dramatic blank verse, as the author of plays which first (if we except the Spanish tragedy) introduce real interest in character, which, by the superiority of their sub jects and treatment, raised once and for all the dramatic level, and "made it impossible for the Elizabethan stage to go back to the bloody horrors and tame declamations of the early Shaksperian drama." Yet Marlowe's first play of Tamburlaine belongs in plot to the old sensational drama; it is in the introduction and treatment of really human and ordinary incidents, such as, for instance, of the scenes between Tamburlaine and Zenocrate, that its superiority lies. The plot is made up of gigantic incidents and awful events. Tamburlaine, originally a Scythian shepherd, rises to be conqueror of the world. In spite of the tremendous occurrences there is a certain monotony and lack of excitement in the play, for against Tamburlaine nothing can stand everything and everybody give way, leaving him invariably the conqueror. Marlowe has not the power of making his terrible world seem real indeed it would require the strongest and weirdest imagination to transport us back to this hideous past: for the most part we realise Tamburlaine as we should do any monster out of a fairy tale. Driving in a chariot drawn by two mighty kings, the kings of Syria and Trebizond, he is represented to us as scourging them and addressing them as "pampered jades," because they cannot draw more than twenty miles a day. "To make you fierce," he says "and fit my appetite. You shall be fed with flesh as raw as blood, Thus am I right, the scourge of highest Jove." This bloody-minded king, who, "without respect of sex, degree, or age, raiseth all his foes with fire and sword," is described as "Of stature tall and straightly fashioned: So large of limb, his joints so strongly knit ; A heaven of heavenly bodies in their spheres, Where honour sits invested royally. Pale of complexion, wrought in him with passion, Should make the world subdue to Tamburlaine." Verse of this lofty, haughty, not to say pompous strain-blank verse, whose "high astounding terms " shall mark the metre and render it impressive-is the fit characteristic of this sensational tragedy. Only occasionally does Marlowe fail in sustaining that grandiloquent manner which should match the majestic height of the personages and occurrences. The King of Persia, tired of state and its vicissitudes, who wishes humbly to bury his crown "in a simple hole," and indeed begins to dig with that object,-is meant perhaps to contrast with the stately, all-conquering Tamburlaine; but his mean figure and his mean language produce a bathos quite grotesque and inartistic in its depth; the dispute between him and Tamburlaine is a mean bickering, worthy only of stage-clowns. But really excellent are the scenes where Marlowe leaves the stage conventions which bade the dramatists treat of emotions and occurrences quite beyond their experience, and comes into the sphere of real passion and emotion. With characteristic Elizabethan genius, delighting in the play of unbridled feeling, he draws the scene of madness, when the wife of Bajazet, the Soldan of Turkey, the tortured prisoner of Tamburlaine, insane with misery, commits suicide; and the scenes between Tamburlaine and Zenocrate, when the great conqueror has fallen a victim to a love touching in its strength and its constancy, are perhaps the best in the play. Zenocrate also loves him, and in order to marry him has given up her betrothed: when she dies his grief is deep and excessive. He is furious when Death thwarts him, robbing him of what he values more than his conquests. After her death he still continues devoted to her memory: he has her portrait hung before him "Sweet picture of divine Zenocrate, That hanging here will draw the gods from heaven, |