was born in February of 1564, the same
year as Shakespeare. He was the son of a Canterbury shoemaker, and
attended the King’s School there. With fellowship support endowed
by the Archbishop of Canterbury, young Marlowe matriculated at Corpus
Christi College in Cambridge University in 1580 and received the BA
degree in 1584. He may have served Queen Elizabeth’s government in
some covert capacity, perhaps as a secret agent in the intelligence
service presided over by Sir Francis Walsingham. He may have been
recruited to this service during his stay at Cambridge. In 1597, the
Privy Council ordered the university to award Marlowe the MA degree,
refusing to credit the rumor that had intended to study at the
English College at Rheims, presumably on order to prepare for
ordination as a Roman Catholic priest. He spent lavishly on food and
drink while at Cambridge to the extent that his fellowship would
presumably not have afforded. He was absent for prolonged periods
during his stay at the university. By 1587 he appears to have moved
to London. Part I of Tamburlaine
the Great, first performed in that
year, took London by storm.
Ten days before he died by violent death, on 30
May 1593, Marlowe was commanded to appear before the Privy Council
and then to attend them daily thereafter until “licensed to the
contrary.” Although the details of this investigation are not
known, a warrant for his arrest had been issued on May 18, possibly
because he was suspected of having authored a treatise containing
“vile heretical conceits.” He had been arrested in the
Netherlands in 1592 for alleged involvement in the counterfeiting of
coins. Apparently he was living at that time with Thomas Walsingham,
a cousin of his more famous Sir Francis Walsingham. When Thomas Kyd’s
living quarters were searched on May 12, papers of a heretical cast
were found and were asserted by Kyd to have been written by Marlowe.
When Marlowe was then stabbed to death at a
tavern in Deptford, the coroner’s report concluded that Marlowe had
quarreled with Ingram Frizer over payment of the tavern reckoning,
and that Marlowe had seized Frizer’s dagger, wounding him on the
head, at which point Marlowe was stabbed fatally in the right eye.
Frizer was exculpated on the grounds of self-defense. He, along with
Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley, had been employed by the
Walsinghams in (among other matters) helping to foil the infamous
Babington conspiracy in behalf of Mary, Catholic Queen of Scots.
Whether Marlowe’s death was related to matters of Catholic
conspiracy is not known. What is certain is that the Puritan-leaning
divines of London trumpeted his death in 1593 as an exemplary
demonstration of God’s just vengeance against a man and writer who
had earned for himself the reputation of atheist blasphemer, glutton,
Machiavel, and sodomist. Francis Meres wrote in 1598 that Marlowe had
been “stabbed to death by a bawdy servingman, a rival of his in his
lewd love” as punishment for “epicurism and atheism” (Palladis
Tamia, 286v-287).
Unidentified Corpus Christi student assumed to be Christopher
Marlowe. Public Domain via Wikimedia
Commons.
Tamburlaine erupted
onto the London stage in two parts, in 1587 and 1588. Its subversive
quality is especially manifest in the realm of struggles for
political power. Tamburlaine is presented as a man who rose from
rustic obscurity to imperial greatness as the “scourge of God.”
He triumphed in Part I over one ruler after another, from Mycetes
King of Persia to Bajazeth, Emperor of the Turks, and the Sultan of
Egypt, and then, in Part II, the kings or governors of Natolia,
Hungary, Bohemia, Jerusalem, and Babylon. His astonishing successes
thrive on the decadence of the rulers he overthrows; an insistent
theme of these plays is that established and inherited rule
inevitably declines into dissipation and worldly extravagance. Given
that inborn weakness of hereditary power, a shepherd of supreme
self-confidence and ruthless determination can prevail against all
his enemies. He relies too on his followers, Theridamas, Techelles,
and Usumcasane, whom he rewards by making them monarchs under his
authority and who are accordingly loyal to him to the last extreme.
He is, in other words, a self-made man who exploits what English
audiences understood to be the gospel of Nicolò Machiavelli: might
makes right. When he lays siege to a fortress, he displays his
banners of white, red, and black on succeeding days: offering at
first mercy to those who surrender, then death to all but women and
children, then total mayhem. By invariably carrying out the dire
threat signaled by these icons, even when women come to him pleading
for lenity those who are innocent, he terrifies his enemies into
accepting his invincible might.
Roy Battenhouse, in his Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine, a Study in Renaissance Moral Philosophy (1941),
has argued that the two plays of Tamburlaine constitute
a composite whole ending in a way that is morally and religiously
orthodox: Tamburlaine’s victories lead finally only to his death
and the end of his empire. His death is edifying and divinely
purposeful, Battenhouse insists. But this argument really won’t do.
The two plays were performed in separate years, and the first ends
with Tamburlaine supremely powerful. His ruthlessness has been
vindicated, along with its subversive suggestion that any ordinary
man could do the same if sufficiently ready to practice Tamburlaine’s
scorched-earth methods. Moreover, Tamburlaine’s eventual death in
Part II is not clearly the result of divine retribution. He has dared
the authority of the gods in the name of human self-assertion, but
the causes of his eventual death may well be simply those of aging
and normal mortality. Wherever he goes he has taken with him the
embalmed and lead-encases corpse of his wife, Zenocrate, in an
attempt to defy death itself. This is a battle he cannot win. For the
rest, however, he offers an unsettling model of human striving that
the gods themselves do not seem to be able to prevent.
Marlowe’s other plays are no less defiant of
moral order in human life or in the cosmos. The
Jew of Maltacenters on a Jewish
merchant who plays Christian monarch off against Turkish tyrants in
their struggle to dominate commerce in the Mediterranean, and does so
with such audacity and cunning that he eventually becomes the ruler
of Malta. To be sure, he is defeated in the end by being dropped into
a cauldron of boiling oil, but this may be little more than a
nominally convenient moral conclusion for a play that seethes with
hubris and ingenious maneuvering. Marlowe’s best-known play, Doctor
Faustus, similarly frames its action
with a moral perspective by insisting that the famous magician will
be damned for selling his soul to the devil in return for 24 years of
pleasure and power. Faustus is dragged off to hell by devils at the
end of the play. What could be more edifying? Yet in the course of
the play Faustus turns out to be doggedly insistent on learned
secrets about planetary motion and the like, daring to “practice
more than heavenly power permits” (the Epilogue). Why do heavenly
powers deny him the right to ask questions? In these terms Faustus
becomes in part a Promethean figure, wresting powers for humanity
that the jealous gods wish to deny us. And then Edward
II, though it too espouses a nominal
orthodoxy by having the kingship of England finally restored to just
political rule, presents readers with a monarch who openly defies
sexual conventionality in order to enjoy the embraces of his
favorite, Gaveston.
A major contribution of Marlowe to the
Renaissance and to the Reformation, then, is to dramatize the heady
excitement of being what Harry Levin memorably calls him, an
“overreacher” (The Overreacher, A
Study of Christopher Marlowe, 1974).
Marlowe overreaches in the realms of real politics, sexuality, the
quest for knowledge, and still more. In this sense Marlowe stands
before us as the quintessential Renaissance man, daring to open our
eyes to possibilities that are at once visionary, frightening, and,
above all, ineluctably human.
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