5. The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs, pp. 98-126

Chapter Six: The Teacher of Desire

_____

Once he received his B.A., Marlowe had freedom to leave Corpus Christi for extended periods, and took advantage of it for weeks and sometimes months throughout his M.A. studies. The last time he was recorded as present at the college was in March 1587. But the only recorded appearance away from the college comes in Canterbury in August 1585, when he served as witness to the last will and testament of the mother of a fellow student. He signed his name as "Cristofer Marley." "It is his only extant autograph signature."

During this time, he may have devoted himself to translating Ovid's Amores, the "most obscure and lascivious" of Ovid's love poems.

Marlowe's translation of the Amores bears many traces of apprentice work. His line-for-line rendering frequently departs from the plain sense of the original, occasionally lapses into obscurity and lacks the sure metrical touch of his other verse, especially Hero and Leander, his later Ovidian poem. Although the botched translations in Marlowe's All Ovid's Elegies occasionally stem from errors in his Latin texts, many are his own doing. For this reason, scholars surmise that Marlowe put the Amores into English while a student at Cambridge. 

Marlowe's translation is "more direct and coarse" than the original, and he might have been prosecuted if he had published it under his own name. "The very act of translation forged a bond between Ovid and Marlowe, who revived the Roman poet's radical commitment to sexual licence and freedom of speech." When Marlowe's translations of the Elegies were published six years after his death, Archbishop Whitgift ordered them copies of them to be rounded up and burnt in St. Paul's Churchyard. Elements of the translation can be detected in his later work, including Hero and Leander, Dr. Faustus and Edward II. He also revived the ancient rivalry between Ovid and Virgil in Elizabethan England:

Edmund Spenser had staked his own claim to be the "Virgil of England" by publishing his inaugural book of pastoral eclogues, The Shepherd's Calendar (1579) and undertaking The Faerie Queene, a national epic of Virgilian proportions. Marlowe's translation of the Amores thus cast him in the Ovidian role of Virgil's ancient rival.

Marlowe's lyric, "Come live with me and be my love," is also an early work. He parodies it in his plays, including three times in Dido, Queen of Carthage, which dates from the mid-1580s. It was inspired by the song sung by the Cyclops to Galatea in Ovid's Metamorphoses. It was untitled until it was reprinted in the anthology The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, where it was called "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love." But the poem itself doesn't specify the genders of the speaker or the person spoken to -- the "kirtle" referred to in the poem could be either a man's tunic or a woman's dress or skirt.

In Marlowe's sources monologue turns into dialogue and the Passionate Shepherd becomes the protagonist in an Ovidian tragedy. After Galatea says no, the Cyclops crushes her lover Acis to death with a rock. ... When [Marlowe] recasts "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" in dramatic form, he does so in a context of rape, possession, prostitution and abandonment. 

The university men who turned to drama did so first for the children's companies made up of choirboys from the Chapel Royal, St. George's Chapel Windsor and St. Paul's, which performed at court throughout the sixteenth century. In 1576 the Chapel Children began performing for paying spectators at the Blackfriars Theatre under the supervision of William Hunnis, the Master of the Chapel Children, in a partnership with the Earl of Oxford and John Lyly. Like Marlowe, Lyly left Cambridge with no desire to have a career in the Church. So he wrote a prose narrative, Euphues: Or, The Anatomy of Wit, which became a bestseller in 1579 and was followed by an equally successful sequel, Euphues and His England in 1580.

Oxford, Lyly's patron, was trying to make a comeback at court after causing a scandal: He had secretly converted to Catholicism while in Italy, and when he returned to England he made friends with some Catholic noblemen whom he betrayed to the queen. In retaliation, the victims charged Oxford with "pederasty, atheism and repeated attempts to murder his enemies. Many of these accusations are quite believable." Some of the charges also echo the ones that Baines would later make against Marlowe, and "offer a glimpse of the libertine sentiments that circulated within Oxford's circle. Even if Marlowe did not belong to that circle, he knew people who did."

The evidence suggests that Dido, Queen of Carthage was written for the Chapel Children around 1584-85. It was not published until 1594, when it was attributed to both Marlowe and Thomas Nashe. But Nashe may simply have been the one who prepared the text for print; it "seems to be mostly Marlowe's work."

John Lyly gave Marlowe a model of what it meant to be a major playwright. Lyly had an immediate, transforming impact on the language of English comedy; his prose marked a qualitative leap forward from the rambling, invertebrate syntax of his predecessors. The finely crafted symmetries between the sound and the sense of Lyly's sentences enabled the children to project complicated ideas without losing their audience. Marlowe brought about a comparable revolution in the language of verse tragedy. Where Lyly invented an English approximation of Ciceronian prose, Marlowe captured the lofty sound of Virgil's epic verse in English poetry.

The difficulty was finding an equivalent for English verse to the quantitative metres of Latin, which are based on the length of the vowel sounds. For the long and short syllables of Latin, English poets were forced to substitute stressed and unstressed syllables. They "found it difficult to employ polysyllabic words without clogging the flow of the verse. Here is Surrey [in his translation of the Aeneid] on the run-up to Queen Dido's suicide: 'But trembling Dido eagerly now bent / Upon her stern determination.'" The alternative, sticking to monosyllables, produced monotonous lines like these from Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton's Gorboduc, the pioneering blank verse tragedy: "Yield not, O King, so much to weak despair, / Your sons yet live and long I trust they shall." In 1575, George Gascoigne published Certain Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Rhyme in English, in which he advocated "accentual iambic metres ('a foot of two syllables whereof the first is depressed or made short, and the second is elevate or made long') in a five-foot line.... Gascoigne had discovered iambic pentameter." But Gascoigne was skeptical about the ability of English verse to achieve "the richness and complexity that he recognized in classical poetry."

Marlowe's solution is found in the opening lines of Dido, Queen of Carthage:

Come, gentle Ganymede, and play with me:
w     s  w   s  ws     w   s    w   s
I love thee well, say Juno what she will.
w s    w    s     w   s w  s    w   s

Both verses contain the five pairs of alternating weak (w) and strong (s) syllables that constitute an iambic pentameter line.... In the first foot, "gen-" is at once the second syllable of the iamb "Come gen-" (ws) and the first syllable of the trochaic (sw) word "gentle." In the second "Gan-" likewise completes the iambic foot "-tle Gan-" (ws) and initiates the trochaic "Gany-" (sw).... Since polysyllabic words in English generally have trochaic (sw) rhythms ... trochaic words invariably disrupt iambic meters, however slightly. Marlowe turns this supposed liability into an asset. 

Marlowe also alters the tone of Virgil's story of Dido and Aeneas, which was supposedly "about manly Roman piety prevailing over effeminate Eastern passion." On the other hand, Ovid and Chaucer "saw Aeneas as a cad and a prig." "Marlowe considers this question from a queer point of view," juxtaposing the homosexual love of Jupiter for Ganymede and the heterosexual love of Aeneas for Dido. He parodies "Come live with me and be my love" by having Jupiter say "Come, gentle Ganymede, and play with me."

For Renaissance humanists, this was the definitive myth about homoerotic love, Jove's choice of Ganymede over Juno epitomized the Socratic preference for boys over women.... The distinction between eroticized male friendship and sodomy turned on cultural rather than exclusively sexual criteria. During the Renaissance, men were encouraged to love boys if both parties belonged to the same class and the relationship was not mercenary.... The stigma of sodomy attached to the base interloper who traded sex for reward and threatened the marital alliances that maintained class privilege.... The Earl of Oxford, the leading patron of boy actors in the mid-1580s, was himself a pederast, the only titled Elizabethan to be charged with sodomy.

As for Dido and her fate, Marlowe follows Ovid in minimizing her "moral culpability" and "enlarges the role of Cupid to show Dido as the victim of forces beyond her control."

Virgil's hero epitomizes the self-denying ethic taught in Renaissance Latin lessons, and Marlowe's play finds him wanting. Despite the misogyny that surrounds her, the radical will in this early play belongs to Dido. She alone speaks with the voice of desire that would become the trademark of Marlowe's tragic heroes.... When he writes Edward II a few years later, the conflict of king, queen and Ganymede descends from Mount Olympus into history, and the struggle between opposed sexualities comes to its appalling conclusion.

1. The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs, pp. 1-24

Prologue: Reinventing Marlowe. Chapter One: Citizen Marlowe.

_____

"This is a book about Marlowe's life, his works, and his world," David Riggs tells us.

Marlowe was present at the creation, or "born on the threshold of modern theatre, before the words playwright and dramatist had entered the English language." The English theater was a "rickety start-up venture" for which he created "a thrilling repertory of poetic tragedies" that dealt with such matters of concern to the theater-goers as "grinding poverty, class conflict, erotic desire, religious dissent, and the fear of hell." He had friends like Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, but lots of enemies who claimed that he was "a proselytizing atheist, a counterfeiter, and a consumer of 'boys and tobacco.'"

Riggs begins with the most familiar speech in Marlowe's best-known play, Dr. Faustus, the speech in which the scholar Faustus summons up the spirit of Helen of Troy, "the most beautiful woman in the best book ever written, Homer's Iliad," and asks,

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, 

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? 

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

Riggs notes that the answer to Faustus's question is both yes and no -- no because "From the standpoint of an early modern Christian, what Dr Faustus sees is a succubus." And, "The contrast between the hero's bookish fantasy life and the exterior world that he is up against gives Dr Faustus a subjective depth that was new to European theatre." He contrasts Marlowe's Faustus with Cervantes's Don Quixote:

Dr Faustus inhabits an older, more supernatural plane of reality than his Spanish contemporary does. The enchanted landscape of Dr Faustus is haunted by demons that expect the audience to believe in them. Where Dr Faustus is possessed, Don Quixote is crazy. Where Dr Faustus comes at the end of a waning tradition of Medieval religious drama, Don Quixote marks the birth of the modern novel.

 And he likens Marlowe to his "younger contemporary Caravaggio,"whose painting The Conversion of St Paul turns a spiritual moment into a very physical one:

"Marlowe too conceived of Scriptural events in entirely physical human terms. The core of Marlowe's atheism lay in his refusal to read the Bible 'after the spirit'. In taking Scripture literally, he read it 'after the flesh.'" But of course his atheism -- whatever it consisted of -- along with the allegations that he was a pederast and a spy put him in trouble with the Elizabethan authorities, and may have led to his murder when he was only 29.

Marlowe was forgotten for a long while after the theaters were closed during the English Civil War in 1642, but he was rediscovered in the nineteenth century, and Victorians went out of their way to portray his accusers as spiteful and malicious or to turn him into "a prototype of the romantic poet who lived for his art, suffered for his excesses, and died young. His immorality, like that of Byron and Shelley, was part of the artist's unrelenting search for the truth." Dr. Faustus began to be hailed as a moral fable.

In the twentieth century, moralizing went out of favor, and New Historicist scholars "have recently shown that Marlowe's writing voiced the aspirations of blasphemers, sodomites, foreigners, unemployed scholars and the mutinous poor in Renaissance England." Researchers have uncovered evidence of his criminal record. "We now know that Marlowe was a counterfeiter and landmark figure in the history of atheism and sedition" and that his murder may have been ordered by the authorities. "Within the history of modern unbelief, Marlowe bestrides the moment when English atheism comes out of the closet and acquires a public face."

Riggs's aim is to "describe the culture that created the wayward master lurking in the archives" by focusing on "the institutions -- city, church, grammar school, university, secret service and public playhouse -- that taught Christopher Marlowe what transgression was."

He begins with Christopher's father, John Marlowe, arriving in Canterbury in the mid-1550s. Because the Archbishop of Canterbury is the leader of the Church of England, the town had been the center of the religious troubles that had afflicted England. "During the reign of 'Bloody' Mary, Canterbury saw more executions for heresy than any place in England, apart from London. John Marlowe came to a city in crisis."

All told, the English state religion changed three times between 1547 and 1558: from the Anglo-Catholicism of the ageing Henry VIII to radical Protestantism under his short-lived son Edward VI; then to the reactionary Roman Catholicism of his elder daughter Mary I; and again to moderate Protestantism under his younger daughter Elizabeth I. Canterbury felt the full shock of these seismic alternations. 

In Canterbury, sometime in 1559 or 1560, John became an apprentice shoemaker. He married Katherine Arthur in 1561, and their first child, a daughter they named Mary, was born a year later. Canterbury was also the home of two future Elizabethan playwrights, Stephen Gosson and John Lyly. John Marlowe's son Christopher, born in February 1564, completed a Canterbury triumvirate. (Shakespeare was born two months after Marlowe, in Stratford-upon-Avon.) 

John Marlowe did not get involved in religious conflict. "The father's wary detachment gives the first inkling of his son's ironic, uncommitted stance on questions of religious belief.... Christopher Marlowe, the son of immigrants situated on the margin of their community, spent most of his life in a place where elementary structures of religious belief were constantly being discredited." In his plays, religion is treated "as a site of conflict ... between Muslim and Christian, Christian and Jew, Christian and Epicurean, and Protestant and Catholic."

John Marlowe rose from apprentice to master shoemaker in 1564 when his master died during an outbreak of bubonic plague, and had set up his own shop by 1565. Shoemakers were ranked lower middle class, but John had a distinction in that he was able to read and write. The former skill was less rare than the latter: In 1536 Henry VIII had "ordered all parents and masters to teach their children and servants the Lord's Prayer, the Apostle's Creed and the Ten Commandments" and to show them the texts in writing or print. But by learning to write as well, John had been "Educated beyond his station."

Katherine Marlowe bore nine children, six of whom survived infancy. When his sister Mary died at the age of six, four-year-old Christopher became the eldest child and at that time the only son, giving him a "privileged position" in the family.

John Marlowe seems to have been involved in numerous legal quarrels with his neighbors: He went to court ten times in 1573 alone. This gave him "a rudimentary knowledge of pleas, writs and depositions" at a time when "Literate tradesmen often found work as freelance law clerks." He began to do legal and clerical work and became a "professional bondsman, especially for couples seeking wedding licenses." Learning the value of education by becoming a "litigant-entrepreneur," Riggs says, made him conscious of the importance of seeing to it that Christopher was educated.