One of the Morning Stars
The Works and Life of. Christopher Marlowe. General Editor : R. H. Case.—The Life of Christopher Marlowe. By C. F. Brook Tucker.—Dido, Queen of Carthage. Edited by the same. Vol, I. 8s. 0d.—Tamburlaine the Great. I. and Ii. Edited by V. M. Ellis-Femur, MA., B.Litt. Vol. II. 10s. ad. (Methuen.) Or late years Marlowe has interested neither poet, critic, nor public very much. The pleasure in rhetoric, and that heady, youthful night-out feel* „ awakened by excitement over magic phrases ; these incentives have fallen into weariness. For we are old. We are born old. We do not like violence, or even demonstration. Our only enthusiasm is in under-, statement and quick elliptical allusion—as in the gesture of jazz dancing, or the poetry of Eliot, Herbert Read, Sherard Vines, Robert Graves, or the laconic stagecraft of Noel Coward.. Marlowe had the antithesis of all these qualities. He belonged to an urchin age that revelled in the gutters of culture, scooping tip in utiregarding handfuls the wine flowing wantonly front the vats broached in Constantinople, where it had been maturing for a thousand years. And with the whole energy of his nature he expressed that age of adolescence, gawdiness, and indiscriminate appetite. Professor Brook Tucker, in his heavily documented life of the poet, gives contemporary but conflicting evidence about Marlowe's personal character. Kyd, the dramatist, who shared rooms with him for two years, described hint as an intemperate atheist and of a cruel heart. But this accusation occurred in a self-exculpatory letter written, after the poet's violent death, by Kyd, whose papers had been ransacked by the offiCers of the Star Chamber in a search for irreligious writings. The only blameworthy stuff found was some manuscript by Marlowe left by chance amongst Kyd's papers.
Kyd appears to have been a timid sycophant and a craven, who during the two years of his intimacy with Marlowe was terrorized by the extravagant intellectual bravura of the young poet. Certainly what we know of Marlowe's personality and of the circumstances of his death suggest that he was a powerfully built man, ridden by a wilful and gusty temper that again and again landed him in trouble. He began life in an exemplary way by winning an ecclesiastical scholarship to Cambridge. Both as a child in Canterbury, and as a scholar of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, he won nothing but co llllll enda- tion, and it was fully expected that he would fulfil the purpose of his scholarship and take holy orders. Towards the end of his time at the University, however, something happened. He had occasion to go to Flanders, and as at this time Rheims was the centre of propaganda from the Roman Church, it was rumoured in Cambridge that he had become a " Papist." The Privy Council, headed by such mighty folk as the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Treasurer, wrote to the University as follows :- " Whereas it was reported that Christopher Marlowe was deter- mined to have gone beyond the seas to Rheims and there to remain, their Lordships thought good to certify that he had no such intent; but that in all his actions ho had behaved himself orderly and discreetly, whereby lie had done her Majesty good service and deserved to be rewarded for his faithful dealing. Their Lordships' request was that the rumour thereof should be allayed by all possible means, and that ho should be furthered in the degree he was to take this next Commencement ; because it was not her Majesty's pleasure that any one employed as he had been in matters touching the benefit of his country should be defamed by those who are ignorant in ti, affairs he went about."
Burghley and Walsingham had by this time organized the most efficient Secret Service in Europe, and it seems that they scanned the Universities for likely young scholars who could be attracted into their newly formed Service. Marlowe evidently saw in this civil occupation a means of escaping from the Church. His activities in this direction developed, and for the remainder of his short life, between leaving Cant- bridge in 1587 and his murder at Deptford in 1593, he was intimate with that shady character, Mr. Secretary Walsingham, and stayed frequently at his house near Chislehurst. Others who resorted there were the three men, Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres, and Robert Poley, who took part in the murder scene. These men were convicted money-lenders and cutpurses, who nevertheless were in Walsingham's pay, Foley being attendant on his daughter, the wife of Sir Philip Sidney. Such gentle facts throw a little mud at the romantic heroes and rulers of those spacious days. Mit in all ages facts have that subver- sive habit. They are, indeed, the greatest of all satirists.
After leaving Cambridge, Marlowe came to London and there suffered the metamorphosis which made him so typical a figure of the age. Ile became a young pagan of the Renais- sauce, using his intellect and his dagger interchangeably as instruments of destruction. As we see from passages in Faustus and Tatniturlaine, he was a fierce sceptic concerning the Divinity of Christ. He put his newly acquired intellectual and artistic freedom so indiscreetly into practice that on various occasions he was summoned before the Privy Council, who, remembering that he was their servant, appear to have treated hint with leniency.
On the circumstantial evidence, Marlowe's death was the result of one of his fits of violent passion. He had apparently been bullying Frizer, a furtive and abject swindler, until at last the worm turned. The proud young poet thereupon drew his dagger and jabbed at Frizer, who, like a rat at bay, attempted to seize the weapon. In the confusion Marlowe, by a deflected blow, stabbed himself above the eye, and died immediately. Such was the version given by Foley and Skeres, who were playing backgammon close by. Another version is that Sir Walter Raleigh, for some reason concerned in the diplomacy of ambition, had him assassinated. What- ever the immediate cause, we know that Marlowe's plunge into the stream of contemporary European thought—that sparkling flood which broke loose through the translations of Plato by Poliziano and Mirandola—made his life a gay but a short one. It also gave his work that freedom which, acting upon a native genius, broke down the restrictions of dogma upon the ecclesiastical drama, and of barbarism upon the folk drama. The superb flood of his verbal power came like an April southwester, with a passion of Mediterranean perfume and a riot of bird-song prophesying Shakespeare. In the space of about eight years he produced the work that made his death a tragic event to the greater poets of that mighty age, and which made Drayton say that
" Neat Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs,
• Had in him those brave translunary things That your 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."
Professor Brook Tucker's Life and edition of. Marlowe's first play, Dido, Queen of Carthage, open a new edition in six volumes of the poet's work. This volume is well done, a nice balance of enthusiasm and documentation, and the whole work should delight every scholar. Professor Ellis-Fermor's edition of Tandandaine is equally as scholarly and as free from pedantry as Vol. I.
RICHARD CHURCH.
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