A Phuulish Fellow

Last year, I worked my way through the Complete Works of Shakespeare, plus Apocrypha. This month I’ve tackled something a bit less intimidating: the Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe. It’s less intimidating because rather than dealing with dozens upon dozens of plays, Marlowe left behind just seven (double-counting Tamburlaine). Plus three poems, plus a couple of translations of ancient Roman texts. The reason for this comparative scarcity? Simple. Marlowe was killed in a tavern brawl in 1593, when still in his 20s.

Live fast, die young, and all that, and honestly, Marlowe’s body of work is very different from Shakespeare’s, and not just because you can read the lot of it in a weekend. Billy strikes me as the guy who sits in the corner, watching you, getting inside your mind. He’s a cynical, pragmatic weather-vane with a talent for plagiarism, and a fondness for dirty jokes. Marlowe, by contrast, comes across as the guy who likes to dance a bit too close to the edge, pushing unsafe ideas, and seeing how much he could get away with. He’s not interested in character depth or psychology… but he is interested in the raw power of writing, with all that entails.

Put it this way: Marlowe not only delights in having villain protagonists, he has so much fun with them, it almost borders on Do Not Do This Cool Thing. His solution to getting away with this? Have the character come to an end almost as entertaining as they are, and make sure they take time out from their villainy to tweak the nose of the Catholic Church. Seriously. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Jew, a homosexual, a German university lecturer who has just sold his soul to Satan, or even (gasp) a Frenchman, Marlowe will make you likeable to his (Protestant) late Elizabethan audience by making you anti-Catholic. It’s the all-purpose Marlovian shield…

Shakespeare, of course, rarely does this. It’s there in King John, where our Basil Fawlty-esque monarch is portrayed as the victim of clerical machinations, but King John itself is pretty much stolen from the anonymous/apocryphal Troublesome Reign of King John, so chances are, Shakespeare was just re-working existing material. A Shakespearean villain protagonist like Macbeth or Richard III normally does not take time out to make fun of Catholicism in the way that Marlovian protagonists do, though, quite apart from speculating about Billy’s religious inclinations, I’d suggest that Shakespeare didn’t need that sort of cover. Our Billy played it safe, even as Kit was living dangerously, both off the page and on it.

So without further ado, my specific thoughts on Marlowe’s material. I stole the dates from Wikipedia.

I. The Plays

(i) Dido, Queen of Carthage (c. 1586)

The first, and least adventurous of the plays, this one is literally just a dramatisation of the relevant sections of Virgil’s Aeneid. It may have been co-written by Thomas Nashe, and unusually for a Marlowe play, it actually has an active female character (Marlowe is much, much worse than Shakespeare in this department). What it does have, of course, is that trademark Marlovian horror-ending for the protagonist… Dido, as per Virgil, burns herself alive on a pyre, once Aeneas leaves her. For obvious chronological reasons, there isn’t any explicit anti-Catholic stuff, though given that Aeneas was the legendary forefather of Rome, a play focused on the tragic victim of a proto-Roman makes for an interesting choice of subject for Marlowe.

(ii) Tamburlaine Part I (c. 1587) and Part II (c. 1587-1588)

I’ve mentioned the two Tamburlaine plays previously, in my look at the Shakespeare Apocrypha. They’re very much my favourite Marlovian pieces, and are, quite frankly, outrageous, so far as pushing the envelope goes. Recall that Tamburlaine, also known as Timur the Lame, was one of history’s nastier conquerors. And, sure enough, in his fictional depiction, Marlowe goes to town in portraying the protagonist as a blood-drenched maniac. But Tamburlaine is not simply Richard III from the Steppes – he’s a Richard III from the Steppes who is made absolutely invincible, and has so much fun steam-rolling his way through all opposition that you really want to cheer for him. There is something quite neat about a Scythian shepherd boy who grows up to use the Emperor of the Turks as a foot-stool, and Marlowe never lets us forget our protagonist’s humble origins. I’d also point out that Marlowe (in contrast to his posh-boy portrayal in Upstart Crow) was himself the son of a shoe-maker…

The obligatory Catholic-bashing is, of course, there. In this case, the (implicitly Catholic) Hungarian leadership agrees a truce with Tamburlaine, and then promptly betray him like hypocritical shit-weasels, because everyone knows Good Christians can’t do deals with the Muslims. Not that the betrayal actually does them any good. What brings Tamburlaine down is something much stranger. You see, burning and pillaging his way across the known world has given him an inflated idea of himself… so he burns the Koran and blasphemes the Prophet Mohammed. He’s then mysteriously struck down with a hideous illness, and dies. People who criticise the play for being anti-Islamic really need to remember what happens to Tamburlaine after he burns the Koran… and that Marlowe was a sixteenth century Englishman. Allah smites blasphemers, Kit?

(iii) The Jew of Malta (c. 1589)

I went into this one under the misguided notion that The Jew of Malta was basically a more anti-semitic version of The Merchant of Venice. Having now read it for myself, I think I am safe in saying it’s actually a good deal more complicated than that, and there have probably been entire university dissertations done on comparing and contrasting these two plays.

Let’s just say up-front that both The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice are indeed anti-semitic works when evaluated through a modern lens. Of course they are – they’re four hundred years old, written at a time when Jews were still officially banned from England (they wouldn’t be allowed back in until Oliver Cromwell). The question is how Shakespeare and Marlowe, both being excellent writers, deal with this:

• Shakespeare’s solution is, of course, to give his Jewish villain psychological depth, and genuinely great and memorable lines. Modern adaptations are thus in a position to make Shylock a tragic villain… though don’t forget that Shakespeare wrote the thing as a Comedy, with the evil Jew’s forced conversion to Christianity being a happy event for his audience.
• Marlowe doesn’t do psychological depth. That’s not his strength. His strength is raw power, and villain protagonists who are so out-there you start cheering for them. So his Jewish villain – unlike Shakespeare’s Shylock – is indeed a monster. He poisons an entire nunnery, including his own daughter, out of revenge, and keeps on causing chaos until he’s literally boiled alive in a cauldron he intended for others. What makes the play interesting, however, is that the (Catholic) victims of Barabas aren’t admirable. Not at all. In fact, it’s almost as if they’re getting what they deserve at the hands of a Jewish Merchant Gone Postal. This is all very different from Shakespeare, where we really are supposed to be cheering for the Christians. In short, the modern solution to adapting The Jew of Malta isn’t tragedy… it’s the blackest of black comedy.

It rather goes without saying that Marlowe makes sure to include anti-Catholic stuff. When a Friar considers Barabas’ poisoned daughter, he takes time out to comment that it was a shame she died a virgin (note that she was in the process of becoming a Nun). But don’t worry, our Mad Jewish Rampage will soon take care of this horny cleric, rather like how a villain in a cheap slasher film will take out the annoying (and horny) teenagers.

(Now there’s an idea… Barabas as a Renaissance Freddy Krueger?)

(iv) Doctor Faustus (c. 1590)

The one everyone’s heard of, and probably the most famous piece of Elizabethan drama not written by Shakespeare. It’s also the only Marlovian play I’ve ever acted in, as part of a Dunedin Medieval Society pantomime and puppet adaptation a few years ago (I played Sloth, by the way. The Deadly Sin, not the three-toed variety).

In contrast to Goethe’s later, and better, version, Marlowe’s Faust is really a straight-forward morality play. Don’t sell out to Satan, children, even if he is offering power and sex, and you’re bored by your current teaching job. Your immortal soul isn’t worth it, even if you think (like Faust, and allegedly like Marlowe himself) there is no such thing.

Well, yes. The image of our protagonist being dragged off to the fires of Hell is fun and memorable, but because this is Christopher Marlowe, he can’t resist the temptation to make his anti-hero cool along the way. And, again, because this is Christopher Marlowe, his notion of coolness involves making a short trip to Rome to make fun of the Pope. For an Elizabethan audience in the 1590s, this would be rather like having someone in 1940 sell their soul to Satan, then use the power to travel to Berlin to screw with Hitler. Sure, the protagonist’s just done something horrible, and he doesn’t believe in an immortal soul, which is pretty damned risque when you live in a regime like Elizabethan England that tortures people for not following the party line… but, in Marlowe’s world, someone who screws with the Pope can’t be all bad, right?

(v) Edward II (c. 1592)

We’ve had a woman, an Asiatic warlord, a Jew, and a guy who sells his soul to the Devil. Time for Marlowe to give us a homosexual protagonist. And, sure enough, he does. Edward II is one of those plays that really make you wonder whether the Elizabethan censors were asleep at their desks… we have a gay, and pretty sympathetic, King, who, to compound the sixteenth century edginess, gets overthrown by overt villains and murdered on-stage via having a red-hot poker inserted up his rear-end. And we know Marlowe intended us to feel sympathy for Edward because he mocks and abuses the Bishop of Coventry.

Edward II also, conveniently, invites another compare and contrast with Shakespeare. This time it’s Richard II. Shakespeare’s Richard II is high art – it’s honestly the most intelligent of his history plays, even if it gets obscured by the more low-brow and fun Richard III. Shakespeare uses his play to wax poetic and philosophical on the nature of power. Marlowe… well, it’s Marlowe, so he doesn’t do that. His overthrown monarch is overtly a victim, and dies horribly (even Richard II gets to fight back). Meanwhile, young Edward III manages to overthrow his evil mother and her lover in what amounts to a happy ending… but the new young King is left vulnerable, and there is the sense that much is unresolved.

(vi) The Massacre at Paris (c. 1593)

This is Marlowe’s least user-friendly play, primarily because the original script is missing, and what we have appears to be a stitched-together version written out by an actor from memory. There are no Act breaks, just a bunch of scenes strung together. It’s also, as you may have guessed, a dramatisation of what for Marlowe was a comparatively recent event – the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572, though it also deals with the ensuing French political shenanigans up until Henry IV.

Somewhat curiously, given that this is an Elizabethan English play, the French monarchy is not actually portrayed negatively. Rather, the root of the problem is those evil (and very Catholic) Guises, with all their evil Papist scheming. Against this, we have the likes of Henry of Navarre, who winds up as Henry IV… and he is, of course, a good Protestant who speaks highly of Queen Elizabeth. Marlowe does not show Henry’s later conversion to Catholicism, nor the famous line “Paris is worth a mass.” He’s an Elizabethan dramatist, not an historian.

(vii) Lust’s Dominion (c. 1600?)

It wouldn’t be A Phuulish Fellow without a description of apocryphal works. Lust’s Dominion is Marlovian Apocrypha – initially attributed to Kit, but now considered to be the work of Thomas Dekker. The fact that the play uses source material from 1599 is rather a give-away, considering Marlowe’s death in 1593.

That said, given that Marlowe likes to serve up “unusual” villain protagonists/anti-heroes… I can see some Marlowe-esque aspects in the piece. Most notably there’s the envelope-pushing. The anti-hero (it’s a revenge tragedy) is black, plays everyone around him like a fiddle, and gets at least one very memorable line:

Think you my conscience and my soul is so, Black faces may have hearts as white as snow. And ’tis a general rule in moral rules, The whitest faces have the blackest souls. 

Eleazar, as a schemer, is actually being insincere about his innocence, but it is an interesting meta-commentary on sixteenth century dramatic conventions.

Oh, and Lust’s Dominion also has a strong erotic element – most characters (apart from our anti-hero) can only think with their wild, irrational, animal passions. Including a Church Cardinal. Somewhere, the ghost of Christopher Marlowe is smiling.

II. The Poems

(i) The Passionate Shepherd to His Love (pre-1593)

This is a short, pastoral love poem. Famous, and you can read it in less than a minute. It’s also notable for starting its only little poetic sub-genre – Marlowe’s initial poem is strongly idealistic about Love, to a degree that others disagreed with. Sir Walter Raleigh, cynical bastard that he was, wrote a reply that pokes holes in Marlowe’s idealism, and soon others got in on the conversation too. As late as the twentieth century, William Carlos Williams was having his twenty cents worth on the subject.

(ii) Hero and Leander (c. 1593)

This one’s much, much longer. And unfinished, but we’ll get to that.

At a time when Shakespeare was producing lengthy narrative poems like Venus and Adonis, Marlowe was writing his own Classical Myth poem, this time a re-telling of the story of Hero and Leander. As with Venus and Adonis, there’s a strong erotic element to the piece – the focus here being on Leander (successfully) persuading Hero the Priestess to abandon her virginity. The poem also tends to get brought up in discussions of Marlowe’s own sexuality, as though art were inherently biographical (it isn’t, but I disgress); Leander in the poems earns this description:

Some swore he was a maid in man’s attire,

For in his looks were all that men desire,

One of Marlowe’s biographers, A.L. Rowse, suggests that Marlowe was modelling Leander off the Earl of Southampton… in which case one really wonders whether there was a poet in England at the time who didn’t secretly want to get into Southampton’s tights.

Hero and Leander is rather more awkwardly written than Venus and Adonis, though whether you want to put that down to Marlowe being an inferior poet to Shakespeare (I think he was, but there’s no shame in being inferior to Billy), or the fact that it was left unfinished by Marlowe’s early death is up for discussion. Two other poets then took up the task of completing the work – George Chapman, whose effort is traditionally considered the official continuation, and printed accordingly, and Henry Petowe’s much weaker and sillier effort. Petowe actually gives the thing a happy ending, which just feels wrong.

(iii) On the Death of Sir Roger Manwood (1593)

Marlowe’s most obscure poem (and his only original piece of Latin poetry) is a eulogy for Sir Roger Manwood. There’s something vaguely funny about the context of this one, considering that Manwood was the judge who let Marlowe off an earlier criminal charge (Marlowe being Marlowe had killed a man in a duel). The moral clearly is, if you want to be immortalised by great writers… let them get away with the occasional street-killing.

III. The Translations

In addition to his original creative works, Marlowe also produced a couple of translations from Latin into English: Ovid’s Elegies (Books I-III), and Lucan’s Pharsalia (Book I). In both cases, these were the first English translations of those ancient Roman texts. Stephen Orgel’s Penguin Classics edition argues that the Ovid translation can be seen as Marlowe’s equivalent of the Sonnets. I think that’s taking things a bit far, not least because the Sonnets were original, and this isn’t, though the subject matter is very definitely about Love, so there is the thematic element at work. As for Lucan, the piece is an horrific extended description of Civil War… the fact that Marlowe was drawn to it says a fair bit about the psychology of Elizabethan England. Beneath the veneer of stability always lurked the potential for calamity.

***

So yeah. The works of Christopher Marlowe. Less intimidating a read than William Shakespeare, at least in terms of quantity of works (I’ve literally just described the entire Marlovian corpus in this single blog post), and very different from Billy in terms of style. It’d be wrong to consider his stuff the sixteenth century version of cheesy action movies, though there is an element of that… maybe cheesy action movies that often convey a lot of socially risque material?  Marlowe was certainly a powerful and dangerous writer, and what, exactly, he’d have come up with had he lived longer is one of the great what-ifs of English Literature. As it is, he got caught a bit too close to the edge.