Introduction 2 Life and literary career Christopher Marlowe’s 4

3.History of Carpe Diem Poetry

Had Spenser and Sidney been more nearly contemporary with Marlowe, it is hardly credible but that even they would have written plays as the author of Venus 0and Adonis afterwards did, for it was now clear that a man might be an exuberant poet and a playwright at once ; — not merely a lofty poet as was Sophocles ; for there was no kind of poetry which need be excluded from drama of this kind. It was Marlowe, in short, who made it certain that the English drama was to be of that gorgeous texturewhich we now see it to be. With this great good went some harm, and chiefly the awful example of putting any matter whatsoever into verse, his prose being, so far as. can be seen, introduced not as appropriate but as necessary to break the monotony; and of making dialogue falsely poetical by putting, for example, into the mouth of Tamburlaine such a comparison as like to an almond tree y-mounted high. . . . Marlowe chose Tamburlaine and the kings as he chose words and images and cadences, because they were magnificent, and because their violent passions and prodigious acts satisfied his need of agnificence. But the life and death of Tamburlaine was far from being an adequate theme.
The two plays were a freak of the infinite crude ambition of this young man of Kent in the marvelous company of young countrymen, wild, poor, laborious, who loved so well the small comprehensible England of this day. The plays were a tour de force. Marlowe cared nothing for emperors except for their clothes and cavalcades and for the pinnacle from which they would fall. We see him pouring out his poetry almost regardless of his characters. That the author of " Come live with me and be my love " was a great lyric poet there can be no doubt, but his lyric gift was so well satisfied with its opportunities in the plays that this poem is the only complete and separate lyric of his which we possess. The poetry was the thing. It would out; and with all respect for Tamburlaine, no one can read it without wishing that Marlowe had been able to give up one of the two parts for a narrative. In a life so brief and full and fiery as Marlowe's there are certain to be many losses which it is only mortal to imagine and then regret, and the greatest regret is not that he did not complete The Jew of Malta as he began it, but that he attempted only one narrative poem and left that half untold. Our iterature is not poor in narrative poetry on a large scale. In the first rank we have Chaucer, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and the author of Tristram of Lyonesse; in the second, Dryden, Byron, Crabbe, Scott, and Morris—to mention a few. But " Hero and Leander " is the half of a poem that would have been unsurpassed, and equalled by " Lamia"—and by how few others! The versification is superb in its massiveness, delicacy, and diversity. For a peer in pictorial effect it had to wait over two hundred years, and it passes from picture to action and dialogue with perfect fitness and ease. It combines a classic clearness with the rapture of romance, as if a Grecian statue had breathed to speak its welcome to the Renaissance, or were about to do so; but Marlowe died and Chapman knew not the incantation. In the legend of Doctor Faustus the poet had a perfect subject—the student " born of parents base of stock," who hoped by magic to encompass A world of profit and delight, Of power, of honour and omnipotence — to gain pearls and gold and "pleasant fruits and princely delicates," " strange philosophy," and the secrets and armies of kings. Into this subject Marlowe could without hesitation or obstacle put the whole of himself, his intellectual subtlety and experience, his love of beauty, of power, and of luxury. He used the legend with only just so much of the paraphernalia of the supernatural as was easily and almost universally credible in his day; and he made Faustus a human, individual student of that age, with a shade of rusticity—one can imagine him with an accent as probably Marlowe had the accent of Kent—which adds to the intense reality of the whole, to the beauty and dalliance of the central part, the kissing of Helen, the snatching of the pope's ish, and to the terrible splendor of the end.
His mighty line—mighty in its ovement as in its content—was at its proper task in expressing those " brave ranslunary things." Excluding the prose buffoonery which is unlikely to have been his, the play has the simplicity of a lyric. It is small wonder that Goethe should say how greatly it was all planned, and that Mr. Swinburne should call its author the first great English poet, seeing with what fitness the exquisite parts are subordinate to a noble whole. If in Tamburlaine the young Marlowe expressed his nature, so ardent, so luxurious, so volatile, against odds, and in Faustus with a perfect harmony between the subject and what we may surmise of himself, in Edward the Second the same nature found an outlet while at the same time creating a world outside itself. Edward the Second is not Marlowe as Tamburlaine was and as Faustus was, yet we have in his speeches not solely the tragic pleasure of watching him enjoying, struggling, sinking, to the end, but also that other pleasure of feeling that the maker of this vivid world is Marlowe himself, and that it is, therefore, what it is and not another world. Here as in Faustus, the soaring vein of the poet plunges with equal speed to agony. That a king spoke Marlowe's words in Tamburlaine was no advantage ; but in Edward the Second the king adds a precious colour to the canvas—a king in whom he shows that the woe of the Renaissance equalled its joy. In the character of Edward he anticipates all Shakespeare's sense of the tragedy of princes, a sense which must have been quickened in Shakespeare if he really corroborated with Marlowe in The True Tragedy. Here Marlowe's almost hectic love of loveliness—his characteristic word is "lovely," I think — is most finely expressed; here, too, his love of luxury, as in—
Music and poetry are his delight;
Therefore I'll have Italian masks by night,
Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows;
And in the day, when he shall walk abroad,
Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad;
My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns,
Shall with their goat- feet dance the antic hay.
Sometimes a lovely boy in Dian's shape,
With hair that gilds the water as it glides. . . .
Here his fancy is put to its apt dramatic use as in that, speech of the mournful Edward—My heart is as an anvil unto sorrow, Which beats upon it like the Cyclops' hammers. And with the noise turns up my giddy brain,And makes me frantic for my Gaveston. Here his tenderness and sense of fate are most powerful,whether in the great passages or in the lesser, as when the Queen says at a touch of courage in her child Ah, boy! this towardness makes thy mother fear Thou art not marked to many days on earth. Here is his sumptuous diction at its height as when he puts into young Mortimer's mouth the simple statement —This tottered ensign of my ancestors Which swept the desert shore by that dead sea Whereof we got the name of Mortimer Will I advance upon this castle's walls.
Here his blank verse, though almost uncontrollably sweet and swift, has gained in force and variety and, always delightful in itself, is yet equal to all the occasions of a tragedy. In none of the other plays have all of Marlowe's powers combined so happily to one great end. He was hurried, as in the later part of The Jew of Malta ; he was handling only a contemporary subject, and that more or less in the manner of a chronicle play, as in The Massacre at Paris ; or he had an intractable subject, as in Dido, Queen of Carthage. But in all he brought an intense poetic nature to bear upon human action and character, and, especially in Dido, enjoyed to the full the many opportunities of expressing luxury and barbaric simplicity of love and hate. No other poet would have made jEneas say, when he fears the farewell to his queen — Her silver arms will coil me round about And tears of pearl cry: " Stay, Eneas, stay." No other would have made the queen say,
when she suspects the Trojans of stealing away —
I would have given Achates store of gold
And Ilioneus gum and Libyan spice;
The common soldiers rich embroidered coats,
And silver whistles to control the winds,
Which Circe sent Sichaeus when he lived
or have made her beg her sister to mount ^neas on her jennet that he might ride as her husband through the streets while she goes up into a turret from which to gaze on him.Of the many plays doubtfully or in part attributed to Marlowe The True Tragedy is printed here. It is thought b>y some that Shakespeare, Greene, and Peele had also a hand in it, and that Shakespeare used only his own share in the third part of King Henry VI., into which it developed. Miss Elizabeth Lee, on the other hand, thinks that Marlowe and Greene, aided perhaps by Peele, wrote