Christopher Marlowe

Of the life of Christopher Marlowe, son of a Canterbury shoemaker & a clergyman’s daughter, there is little on record. To some of his contemporaries, & to later biographers, interest in his personality has been confined to an exaggerated tale of blasphemy & evil living; above all, to his death at the early age of 29 in a tavern brawl at Deptford, by the hand of a “bawdy serving-man,” named Archer, or Fraser, or Ingram. The recent elucidation of the facts of the poet’s career at Cambridge has happily diverted attention from the sordid ending & adjusted the balance of the scanty biography. In this short career there must, of necessity be little available to the antiquary; and yet we know as much of the man Marlowe as of the man Shakespeare, or, indeed, of any of the greater Elizabethans, Jonson excepted. Marlowe proceeded from the King’s school at Canterbury to Bene’t (now Corpus Christi) college, Cambridge in 1580. He was in residence, with occasional breaks, till 1587, when he took his MA, following on his BA in 1583–4. There is evidence that, soon after 1587, he had fallen into disfavour at the university, was already settled in London. He had probably been there for some time before the production of Tamburlaine in that year or the next. We must, however, treat the ballad of The Atheist’s Tragedie, which describes Marlowe’s actor’s life & riot in London, as 1 of Collier’s mystifications, &, together with it, the interpolation in Henslowe’s diary about “addicions” to Dr. Faustus and a “prolog to Marloes tambelan.” The only extant piece which, with some show of reason, may be ascribed to this early period is the translation of Ovid’s Amores, which was printed posthumously, c. 1597. Marlowe’s I original work was the 2 parts of Tamburlaine the Great, played in 1587 or 1588, and printed in 1590. The grandeur of the style, the gorgeous strutting of Alleyn in the title rôle, the contrast of the piece with the plays which had held the popular stage, gave Tamburlaine a long lease of popularity. How strongly it impressed the public mind may be gauged by the number of attacks, some reasonably satirical, others merely spiteful, which came from literary rivals. From this onslaught, directed against what appeared, to classicists (like Jonson) & to “rhyming mother wits,” to be an intolerable breach of all the laws of “decorum,” has sprung the tradition of “bombast” & “brag” which has clung to Marlowe’s literary name—a tradition which is at fault, not because it has no measure of truth, but because it neglects much that is not less true.

This sudden success confirmed Marlowe in his dramatic ambition. On the heels of his I triumph came The tragicall History of Dr. Faustus, probably produced in 1588, though its entry in the Stationers’ register is as late as January, 1601, & the earliest known edition is the posthumous quarto of 1604. Interest in this play has been seriously warped by speculation on the crude insets of clownage. Many readers have felt that the comic scenes are disturbing factors in the progress of the drama, & that Marlowe’s text has suffered from playhouse editing. The presumption is supported by the evidence of the printer Jones, who tells us apologetically, in his edition of Tamburlaine, that he “purposely omitted … some fond and frivolous gestures, digressing, &, in my poor opinion, far unmeet for the matter.” The same problem, but in a more difficult form, is presented in the next play, The Jew of Malta. The I record of this piece is in Henslowe’s diary, February, 1592, and 2 years later it is named in the Stationers’ register; but, as there is no evidence that it was printed before 1633, when it received the editorial care of Thomas Heywood, we have a ready excuse for disclaiming the poorer passages as the result of the playhouse practice of “writing-up” for managerial ends.

Tamburlaine, Dr. Faustus and The Jew of Malta constitute the I dramatic group. In his next play The Troublesome Raigne and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second, Marlowe turned from romantic tragedy to history. It is the I English “history” of the type which Shakespeare has given in Richard II; a drama of more sustained power, and showing some of Marlowe’s best work. It is this sustained power which has won for it, since Charles Lamb’s time, the honour of comparison on equal terms with the later masterpiece; on the other hand it has stimulated the suspicion of Marlowe’s responsibility for the inequalities of the earlier plays. The most convincing proof of the dramatist’s genius is conveyed in the transformation of the existing “chronicle” habit of the popular stage into a new genre. The V and the VI plays— The Massacre at Paris & The Tragedie of Dido Queene of Carthage —complete the list of the accredited dramas. The I known edition of the former has been dated between 1596 & the close of the century; the earliest text of the latter belongs to the year 1594.

There remains the question of Shakespearean association. 4 points of contact have been assumed: in King John, in The Taming of the Shrew, in Titus Andronicus, & in the 3 parts of Henry VI. That Marlowe had any share in the old play The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England cannot be admitted; the refutation lies in the appeal of the prologue for welcome to a “warlike Christian & your countryman” from those who had applauded the infidel Tamburlaine. That Marlowe is the author of the older shrew play, The Taming of a Shrew, is not more reasonable; for the mosaic of quotations & reminiscences of Tamburlaine and Dr. Faustus prove that the author could not be the writer of these plays. There is a spirit of burlesque throughout in which the most incorrigible self-critic would have hesitated to indulge, and which only a “transformed” Marlowe would have essayed. In the case of the much debated Titus Andronicus & the 3 parts of Henry VI there is some show of argument for Marlowe’s hand. The more full-bodied verse of Titus, the metaphorical reach might well be the work of the author of Tamburlaine. But similar arguments, not less plausible, have discovered the pen of Peele, & of Greene. More has been said for the view that Marlowe had a share in Henry VI; but it is difficult to come nearer an admission of his association than to say that he probably had a hand in The Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of Yorke and Lancaster (written before 1590) which serves as the basis of the Second Part. On the other hand, it is clear that the author of the First Part was familiar with Tamburlaine, and in a way not to be explained as reminiscence.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-31