5. "The Complete Plays," by Christopher Marlowe, pp. 56-67

Dido, Queen of Carthage, Act V

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Aeneas has decided to stay in Carthage: "Here will Aeneas build a statelier Troy." But then Hermes enters with a rebuke: "Why, cousin, stand you building cities here / And beautifying the empire of this queen / While Italy is clean out of thy mind?" He also brings the real Ascanius. Aeneas comes to his senses, but also realizes he has a problem: Dido has "ta'en away my oars and masts / And left me neither sail nor stern aboard."

Iarbas seizes at the chance to get rid of his rival and offers to outfit Aeneas's ships. But Dido shows up to proclaim, "I die if my Aeneas say farewell," to which Aeneas has a rather snappy reply: "Then let me go and never say farewell." Dido fears the damage to her reputation if he leaves:

Hast thou forgot how many neighbour kings
Were up in arms for making thee my love?
How Carthage did rebel, Iarbas storm,
And all the world calls me a second Helen,
For being entangled by a stranger's looks?
So thou wouldst prove as true as Paris did,
Would, as fair Troy was, Carthage might be sacked
And I be called a second Helena! 

Aeneas tells her to save her breath and leaves. She vows to pursue him: "I'll frame me wings of wax like Icarus, / And o'er his ships will soar unto the sun, / That they may melt and I fall in his arms." Anna tells her to "leave these idle fantasies," and Dido sends her to have the servants bring the makings of a fire, "For I intend a private sacrifice / To cure my mind that melts for unkind love."

Iarbas asks, "But afterwards will Dido grant me love?" And she says, sure, "after this is done." But she sends him away and throws herself in the fire. Iarbas kills himself when he sees what she has done, and Anna follows suit.

4. "The Complete Plays," by Christopher Marlowe, pp. 43-55

Dido, Queen of Carthage, Act IV

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Achates, Cupid disguised as Ascanius, Iarbas and Anna enter, surprised at the sudden storm:

ACHATES 

I think it was the devils' revelling night, 

There was such hurly-burly in the heavens; 

Doubtless Apollo's axle-tree is cracked, 

Or aged Atlas' shoulder out of joint, 

The motion was so over-violent. 

And there's a bit of a stir when Dido and Aeneas come out of the cave together, especially from Iarbas, who in the next scene sacrifices to the gods to persuade them to get rid of his rival. As he tells Anna, "against this Trojan do I pray, / Who seeks to rob me of thy sister's love / And dive into her heart by coloured looks." (The note glosses "coloured" as "specious.") Anna makes a pitch for Iarbas, but he spurns her.

Meanwhile, Aeneas is getting ready to leave: "Hermes this night, descending in a dream, / Hath summoned me to fruitful Italy." He tells Achates that Dido is trying to get him to stay, but Achates urges him to "Banish that ticing dame from forth your mouth / And follow your foreseeing stars in all." Aeneas wavers a bit, but finally urges himself, "To sea, Aeneas, find out Italy!"

Dido and Anna enter in pursuit of Aeneas, who claims he's not leaving: "Hath not the Carthage Queen mine only son? / Thinks Dido I will go and leave him here?" She gives him a crown and sceptre to persuade him to stay and rule Carthage with her, and it seems to do the trick: He'll stay in Carthage and carry on the legacy of Troy there. Still, after he exits, she worries that she should do more to keep him there. She orders her attendants to have Ascanius taken to the country to her nurse's house and then wonders, "What if I sink his ships? O he'll frown!" (A lovely understatement.) "If he forsake me not, I never die, / For in his looks I see eternity, / And he'll make me immortal with a kiss." (Anticipating Faustus's plea to Helen.) The attendants return with "Aeneas' tackling, oars, and sails." The act ends with the Nurse enticing Cupid/Ascanius to her house.

3. "The Complete Plays," by Christopher Marlowe, pp. 27-42

Dido, Queen of Carthage, Act III

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Cupid, disguised as Ascanius, sets out to make Dido fall in love with Aeneas. Meanwhile, we discover that Iarbas is also pining for Dido. When Cupid's magic starts to work, Dido first orders Iarbas "Depart from Carthage! Come not in my sight" then has a change of heart and asks him to "stay a while" and then, presumably once the charm takes hold, sends him packing again. Anna, her companion, laments, "O that Iarbas could but fancy me!"

Dido begins to muse on Aeneas's beauty and when he enters offers to "repair thy Trojan ships, / Conditionally that thou wilt stay with me, / And let Achates sail to Italy." She shows him pictures of the suitors who have contended for her, and pretends not to be in love with him, presumably to make him jealous, and then proposes that they go hunting together.

Juno enters and sees the sleeping Ascanius, "Aeneas' cursed brat," but Venus enters to denounce Juno for having attempted to kill Aeneas. But then the two goddesses make up, and joins in the plot to get Aeneas and Dido together, Juno offering to create a storm so that "in one cave the queen and he shall meet. And Venus says,

Meanwhile, Ascanius shall be my charge,
Whom I will bear to Ida in mine arms,
And couch him in Adonis' purple down.

The hunting party enters, with Iarbas bemoaning Dido's apparent preference for Aeneas.

The storm drives Aeneas and Dido into the cave, where Dido makes her move.

2. "The Complete Plays," by Christopher Marlowe, pp. 5-26

Dido, Queen of Carthage, Acts I and II

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The play, written to be performed by the boy actors of the Children of the Chapel, begins rather startlingly with a love scene between Jupiter and Ganymede, which is interrupted by Venus, who scolds Jupiter for "playing with that female wanton boy." She tells Jupiter that Juno has tried to drown Aeneas by having Aeolus blow up a storm and wreck his ships. Jupiter dispatches Mercury (whom he also addresses as Hermes) to have Neptune calm down the seas.

Aeneas arrives on shore in Carthage with Ascanius and Achates. Venus disguises herself and tells them where they are. Aeneas recognizes her as she leaves: "Achates, 'tis my mother that is fled, / I know her by the movings of her feet."

Ilioneus, Cloanthus and Sergestus, separated from Aeneas and the others, are welcomed to Carthage by Iarbas.

The sight of Carthage's walls reminds Aeneas of Troy, and he has a fit of madness in which he's pursuing Greeks again but snaps out of it when they are reunited with Ileoneus and the others.

Dido enters with her retinue, including Anna and Iarbas. She orders a change of clothing for Aeneas, who is dressed in "base robes," but he continues to address her formally ("you" and "your") while she uses the more familiar "thou" and "thy." He tells her the story of the fall of Troy, and Dido suggests that they "think upon some pleasing sport, / To rid me from these melancholy thoughts." They all exit except Ascanius, who is held back when Venus enters with Cupid. They tempt him with "sugar-almonds, sweet conserves" and a bow and arrow like Cupid's. Venus lulls Ascanius to sleep, and orders

Now, Cupid, turn thee to Ascanius' shape, 

And go to Dido, who, instead of him, 

Will set thee on her lap and play with thee; 

Then touch her white breast with this arrow head, 

That she may dote upon Aeneas' love.

1. "The Complete Plays," by Christopher Marlowe, pp. vii-xliv

Preface, Chronology, Introduction, "The Baines Note," Further Reading, A Note on the Texts, eds. Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey

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"Helen haunted Marlowe's imagination. What fascinated him was the destructiveness of her beauty: men died and cities burned for it." But in the speech "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships," some of the beauty referred to "is male beauty, and the uncertainty of Faustus' imagining of ravishment plays back over the speech as a whole. The initial question -- was this the face? -- is only half-rhetorical: this is not Helen but a boy-actor and, more darkly, a succubus (an evil spirit in female form) who 'sucks forth [his] soul in ways that are indistinguishably erotic and terrifying."

"The self-destructive desire in these lines is a central preoccupation of all Marlowe's plays."

"The opening scene [of Dido, Queen of Carthage] sets the tone, beginning not with grand heterosexual passion but with the pederastic Jupiter 'dandling GANYMEDE upon his knee.'"

"The conflicts [in Tamburlaine] are at once religious and territorial, and the play is not on the Christian side. The perfidious Christians are overrun by a pious Muslim who calls on Christ; the God he reveres is one 'that sits on high and never sleeps, / Nor in one place is circumscriptible....' Beyond the vast Asiatic spaces over which the action is fought out, there is a vaster spiritual dimension."

In Tamburlaine's death, "Marlowe avoids conventional Christian moralizing. His final illness begins just after he has burned the Koran, an act which could be interpreted as a fatal defiance of divine power, except that he burns it in the name of God."

Of Marlowe's own religious views, nothing certain is known. The closest we come is the dubious record of "his damnable judgement of religion and scorn of God's word" preserved in the "note" Richard Baines delivered to the Privy Council close to the time of Marlowe's death. Baines was a hostile and unreliable witness (he had been apprehended with Marlowe for counterfeiting in Holland; each accused the other of intending to desert to the Catholic enemy), and his note is an informer's delation.

The Massacre at Paris "is virulently anti-Catholic; but, although the text in which it survives is too poor to make certain judgments, its satire seems also to cover the anti-Guisard backlash which follows."

The story told in [Doctor Faustus] is well on the way to its "degeneration" in the next two centuries into the popular media of ballads, farces and puppet shows -- the last being the form in which Goethe first knew it. Yet it is also a spectacle of damnation.

The Jew of Malta "is largely a satire on Christian venality and hypocrisy."

Edward the Second: "The barons' hatred of Edward's love is less homophobia than class-antagonism. Gaveston is an upstart on whom the King showers favours at the expense of the old nobility."

Modern criticism, concentrating on Marlowe's "subversiveness," sometimes makes him sound like Joe Orton in doublet and hose. To some Elizabethans, he was something more than dangerous. Richard Baines's testimony against Marlowe includes the pious wish that "all men in Christianity ought to endeavour that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped." Speculation continues that, when Marlowe was killed in Deptford in May 1593, that is exactly what happened.