8. The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs, pp. 190-220

Chapter Nine: In the Theatre of the Idols

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James Burbage built the first commercially successful theater (called the Theatre) in Shoreditch, by Finsbury Fields, in 1576. It soon acquired a neighbor, the Curtain. Yet another theater was built on the other side of the Thames at Newington Butts at about the same time. In 1587, Philip Henslowe built the Rose just north of London Bridge. These were all pretty "unsavoury places," near sewers and bear-baiting rings and brothels, and the actors and playwrights lived near their places of work. Marlowe's neighbors included James Burbage, actor James Alleyn, playwrights Thomas Watson and Richard Tarlton, and Shakespeare "probably moved to Shoreditch in the late 1580s. The theater companies "led a precarious existence on the margins of Elizabethan society." They were also subject to attacks from the pulpit: "the players were recreating the libertine culture of pagan antiquity on the outskirts of Protestant London. They had to be suppressed."

In 1583, the Privy Council banned Sunday performances, but also tried to bring the theaters under government control by authorizing Edmund Tilney, whom the queen had appointed Master of the Revels, to form a company called the Queen's Men. It recruited the leading players from the companies under the patronage of the Earls of Leicester, Sussex, Oxford and Derby, forcing the remains of these companies to support themselves by touring the provinces. The Queen's Men also toured, not only the London theaters, but also in the country. "Their repertory featured patriotic plays about English history, preferably with an anti-Catholic or pro-Tudor bias. They also specialized in old-fashioned morality plays and fairy-tale romances about long-lost aristocrats.... This state-sponsored version of wholesome morality and good clean fun was the high-water mark of English theatre when Marlowe came on the scene."

Those who wrote for the common players, like Richard Tarlton, Robert Wilson and Stephen Gosson, did so anonymously. Gosson, like Marlowe, grew up in Canterbury, attended the King's School and won a scholarship to Corpus Christi, and he had difficulty finding employment after he left the university. But after trying to become an actor and playwright, he turned against the theater and wrote tracts attacking it, such as The School of Abuse, which he dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. In An Apology for Poetry, Sidney "had nothing but scorn for English playwrights." Even Thomas Kyd, whose Spanish Tragedy is one of the early distinguished works for the popular stage, was "careful to cover his tracks."

And so was Marlowe, who would "expend the lion's share of his prodigious talent on popular plays" but "never publicized the fact. The first explicit ascription of Tamburlaine to Marlowe did not appear until 1609." But it was lucrative work: "The going rate for a new play was six pounds, a sum that compares favourably with the ten pounds a year Marlowe would have earned as a parson." Added to this was the extra revenue that came with a hit: "The players sometimes gave playwrights whose work proved especially popular the receipts for the second day's performance.... The receipts for the earliest recorded performance of Dr Faustus, for example, came to three pounds twelve shillings -- and by this time the play was already familiar to playhouse audiences."

Marlowe wrote Tamburlaine for the Lord Admiral's Men, a company under the patronage of Charles Howard, who had been Lord Chamberlain and arranged for Tilney, his cousin, to become Master of the Revels. The company included John Alleyn and his brother Edward, who were well-connected at court. Edward Alleyn performed the role of Tamburlaine for the Admiral's men, "most likely in its 1587 debut. Marlowe's work with the Alleyns "brought him close to one of the most powerful and sought-after patrons in England."

The play is based on the story of Tamburlaine the Great found in George Whetstone's English Mirror, which was published in 1586. Tamburlaine was looked on with favor by Christians because, by defeating Bajazeth, he ended the Turkish siege of Constantinope, thereby saving the eastern capital of Christendom. "Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian humanists transformed Tamburlaine into an avatar of the heroic Prince, favored by fortune, who imposed order on history through his innate ability." He appealed to Marlowe, and to Marlowe's audience, because of his rise out of poverty, which had grown enormously in Elizabethan England, a consequence of the takeover of common lands, the destruction of the monasteries that had been a source of charity, and the return of soldiers from the war with Spain. Tamburlaine's antagonists scorn him as a "base-bred thief" and a "vagabond" but Marlowe gives him an "intellectual reach [that] transcends his lowly origins. Tamburlaine justifies his villainy with poetic philosphy, arguing that upward mobility is the universal law of nature." Tamburlaine, presented in the sources as a Muslim, becomes in the play "a Graeco-Roman sage promulgating poetic theology."

Marlowe also announces his revolution in verse drama in this "first public exhibition of an unrhymed English line that merited comparison with the classical hexameters devised by the classical poets." The Prologue begins with the line "From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits."

The line scans as an iambic pentameter, but employs trochaic words ("jigging," "rhyming," "mother") to segment the prepositional phrases into metrical units. Ben Jonson replicates this pattern in the encomium recalling how far Shakespeare outshone three of his finest peers: Lyly, "Or sporting [Kyd],  or Marlowe's mighty line." Every stress in Jonson's verse conforms to those of the first line of Tamburlaine, while the evolutionary leap from "rhyming mother wits" to "Marlowe's mighty line" measures the poet's contribution to English prosody.

Marlowe seems to have been inspired by more than just the opportunity to transform dramatic verse. Telling the story of the upwardly mobile Tamburlaine is also a way of echoing his own ambitions to break out of the limitations imposed by humble birth. Tamburlaine's ambitions are materialistic: "The sweet fruition of an earthly crown." But he also aims at divinity, challenging the gods. "The latent irony of great expectations belied by limited horizons would become explicit in Dr Faustus, where Marlowe's "studious artisan" sells his soul for twenty-four years of omnipotence, only to be betrayed by the emptiness of his own desires." Tamburlaine's horizons are unlimited, and his "favourite expressive device is hyperbole, the trope that best conveys the cosmological reach of figurative language.... The Puritans equated theatre with idolatry; Marlowe furnished the players with an idol of godlike proportions."

Tamburlaine becomes a figure out of the Apocalypse: His tents --  first white while he's demanding surrender, then red while he's giving final warning, and finally black when he moves in for the kill -- recall "the four horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation, where white, red and black riders precede the 'pale horse' bearing death." The play echoes the anxieties of the age, when people awaited the fulfillment of the prophecy of the fifteenth-century German astronomer Regiomantus that "universal disaster" would occur in 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada.

"Judged as a crowd-pleaser, Marlowe's work set a standard that was unexampled, and would be unexcelled by any of the Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights who came after him, including Shakespeare and Jonson." The success of the first play necessitated a sequel, as the Prologue to The Second Part of the Bloody Conquests of Mighty Tamburlaine acknowledged. It focuses on "the issue of mortality," and is influenced by the moral allegory of Spenser's Faerie Queene, the first book of which Marlowe had seen in manuscript. He even borrows directly from the description of Prince Arthur's helmet in describing Tamburlaine's. But where Spenser's allegory describes a progress toward salvation, Marlowe "recounts a secular journey towards eternal death.... Where Christ redeems the Redcross Knight from sin and damnation, Tamburlaine comes to the Epicurean realization that the soul perishes with the body."

In the play, the destruction of Babylon becomes a "grotesque parody of the Last Judgment" and the "mockery of religion comes to a climax when Tamburlaine burns the Koran and dares Muhammed to retaliate." This taunt is followed shortly by the first signs of Tamburlaine's fatal illness, which gave "an Elizabethan audience the momentary sensation of believing in an alien god." And Tamburlaine has a vision of "the ugly monster Death" that "recalls the coming of death in homiletic morality plays like Everyman." But this vision "is a symptom, not a cause, of his imminent demise." A physician diagnoses an imbalance of elements, a diagnosis that "rests on the Lucretian precept that 'the soul is no simple substance, but rather a temperature of the four elements.'"

That is the thrust of Epicurean medicine. Death belongs to the nature of things; anxiety only makes matters worse; those who grasp this lesson have nothing to fear from mortality. The doctor's diagnosis has the effect of a Lucretian cure. Tamburlaine survives the crisis, surmounts his anxiety about death and comes to a peaceful end surrounded by his loving family and friends. His final conquest is death itself.

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

Prologue: Reinventing Marlowe. Chapter One: Citizen Marlowe.

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"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.