The Insatiable Speculator
THE difficulty with Marlowe is that he does not yield much to research and remains a highly enigmatic figure. One may approach him cautiously, as Professor Wilson does, in the Clark Lectures delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the Lent Term of 1951, as an impersonal dramatist, a master of Elizabethan stagecraft, who does not reveal himself in his works. Or one can see him, with Professor Una Ellis-Fermor and Dr. Kocher, as a subjective writer using the drama as a vehicle for covert gibes at the orthodoxies of his age—an approach, Professor Wilson complains, which does less than justice to his dramatic powers. In a sense, we know too much about Marlowe, and too little. From academic, police and secret service records, and the scandalised reports of his contemporaries, we know far more about him than we do about Shakespeare. On the other hand, much of his work has come down to us in fragmentary texts, and we assume them to have been mangled by theatrical hacks. But it is also possible to attribute this fragmentariness both to Marlowe's manner of working and to the character of the man him- self—" morbid and tormented by the soil de !'impossible," as Professor Praz has written.
Professor Wilson, however, refuses to be drawn into such con- siderations in his brief summary of Marlowe's life and opinions. But the problem is such a fascinating one and what Marlovian research of the last twenty-five years has revealed is so tantalising, that one wonders whether the best way of dealing with him is to turn' aside with Matthew Arnold's exclamation about the Romantics : " What a set What a world ! " After all, this was Marlowe's world and in both his life and his work. he reveals himself as in many Ways a typical Renaissance figure.
His relationship to Shakespeare is confined here principally to a discussion of the chronology of the early history plays, and it is emphasised that if King John is to be assigned to a date round about 1590, then " we shall have completely to revise our ideas about Shakespeare's relationship to Marlowe and to other contempo- raries." But even at the beginning of his career, Shakespeare is occupied with problems of order and degree, and the disastrous con- sequences which follow when they are broken down. In com- parison,, Marlowe is an anarchist, an insatiable speculator like his own Faustus, for whom " peril is the chiefest way to happiness." It is not surprising that such a man should have been stabbed in a tavern, whether by accident or design ; nor is it surprising that Shakespeare should have lived to be the master of New Place, com- memorated by a bust in his parish church. PHILIP HENDERSON.
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