MARLOWE'S MIGHTY LINE

John Herndon explores Christopher Marlowe's impact on the playwrights of his day.

The seal of Louth Grammar School in 1552, with the motto "Spare the rod and spoil the child."

A shoemaker's son hunches over his writing tablet, scribbling line after line of Latin. Bored with his task, he fidgets in his chair, sending the schoolmaster scurrying over to whip the student into an academic attitude. Since 6 A.M., when he arrived frosty from the winter morning, he has been recopying Erasmus' On Copiousness, learning 150 different ways to say "Thank you for your letter." Finally, the afternoon comes, and freed from the tyranny of the desk, he bounds from his chair, eager for the next exercise. He has studied his part well and cannot wait to leap into the comedies of Terence and Plautus. Energized by this dose of sex and intrigue, he ends the day buoyed against the rote memorization left to do.

Thus Christopher Marlowe pursued his early education at the King's School in Canterbury. Long hailed as the keystone of a good education, Latin was pursued by all children whose parents could afford the cost of school supplies, and teachers across the country staged Latin comedies as a standard exercise. From an early age, Marlowe immersed himself in England's theatrical traditions, and his studies of the stage ranged further than the classroom. Itinerant theater troupes, with a flourish of trumpets and a swirl of bright costumes, paraded into town frequently, ready to perform in the square for food or money. Townsmen exploited every excuse for pageantry; any good religious festival required a miracle or morality play. These performances were wildly popular and stirred something so deep within Marlowe that, after pursuing his master's at Cambridge, he moved to London and became a playwright.

His work shows the influence of his early training. Doctor Faustus, the chronicle of one man's fall into temptation, is a morality play, and Dido, Queen of Carthage, a dramatization of Virgil's Aeneid, is the product of a university wit. Yet Marlowe transforms his sources. He turns the allegorical Everyman into the specific and personable scholar Faustus, who charms with his eloquence even as he repels with his egotism. He is neither monster nor fool, saint nor devil, and his demise is more complex than medieval theater would have shown. His poetry captivates ("Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?") even while his actions horrify. Paying the price of his bargain, Faustus is dragged to hell, but no audience member can feel entirely comfortable with his fate. Marlowe took the forms of his youth and created something new.

Dido Building Carthage, J.M.W. Turner, Tate Gallery, London

This pattern of innovation can be found in much of Marlowe's work. Blank verse had existed before him, but Marlowe made it far more powerful. He freed it from the constraints of the rhymed couplet, giving his characters fluidity of expression and a stronger voice, as in one of Faustus' final exhortations ("Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,/that time may cease and midnight never come./Fair nature's eye, rise, rise again, and make/perpetual day."). No longer "the jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits," poetry under Marlowe became, according to Ben Jonson, a "mighty line" charged with vigor and intensity.

Marlowe's early genius heavily influenced the other young writer of the time, Shakespeare. His Henry VI cycle is filled with Marlovian moments, so much so that scholars once thought that the two playwrights had collaborated on it. The characters' speeches frequently echo those in Tamburlaine. Thus, the Scythian's taunting of the kings he conquered ("Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia!/What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day?") is placed in the mouth of Ensign Pistol, a drunken soldier ("Shall pack-horses/and hollow pampered jades of Asia/which cannot go but thirty mile a day,/compare with Caesars and with cannibals,/and Trojan Greeks?"). Shakespeare, recognizing a good rival, simultaneously pays homage to Marlowe's poetry and challenges it. Similarly, Shakespeare had The Jew of Malta in mind when begetting Shylock. Marlowe's moneylender reeks of villainy, joyously cataloguing his many nefarious deeds; Shakespeare's, in response, has a complex inner life that humanizes him.

This influence worked in the other direction, as well. After attending a production of Richard II, Shakespeare's tragic tale of a weak and failed king, Marlowe decided to plunge through Holinshed's Chronicles and extract his own story, dramatizing the life of King Edward II, another ruler whose folly leads to his dethroning and death. For a brief period, Marlowe and Shakespeare worked contemporaneously, and their plays speak to each other, one stealing a plot device, another taking a poetic image and recasting it. The two were rivals, not collaborators, yet they interacted in a creative dialogue. Though he may have hated him professionally, Shakespeare respected Marlowe's wit and innovation. Thus, five years after Marlowe's untimely death, Shakespeare pays homage to him in As You Like It. Phebe, borrowing a line from Marlowe's Hero and Leander, sighs, "Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might:/"Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?"

John Herndon is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.