6. Soul of the Age, by Jonathan Bate, pp. 131-161

Second Age: Schoolboy; Chapter 9, Shakespeare's Small Library; Third Age: Lover, Chapter 10, The Married Man

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Ben Jonson was a man of books. Although he didn't attend university, he collected books and commented on them, and played a large part in getting Shakespeare's First Folio published. When his library was destroyed by fire in 1623, perhaps taking his own copy of the First Folio with it, he began collecting again. As Bate comments, "If only Jonson's annotations on Shakespeare had survived instead of those on Justus Lipsius's De Calumnia or Clement Edmonds's Observations on the autobiographical and historical writings of Julius Caesar!"

But no books known to have been owned by or annotated by Shakespeare have shown up, or at least the ones that have shown up are mostly demonstrable forgeries, leading Bate and others to conclude, "Where Jonson was a methodical reader, Shakespeare was an opportune one. He snapped up phrases and ideas from his reading, storing them in his capacious memory. He may not have bothered with underlinings and marginal annotation."

Bate conjectures that he may have borrowed most of the books that served him as sources for the poems and plays, and that one of the people who loaned him books was Richard Field, whom he had known at school in Stratford and who printed not only Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece but also North's Plutarch and a Latin edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Field may also have supplied Shakespeare with Holinshed's Chronicles and John Harington's translation of Orlando Furioso, which was a source for Much Ado About Nothing. Shakespeare seems to have paid tribute to Field in Cymbeline with a reference to "a very valiant Briton" named Richard du Champ. When Field printed foreign language books, he sometimes translated his name into the corresponding language on the title page, as when he called himself Ricardo del Campo in several Spanish books.

Another source for borrowed books would have been Shakespeare's patron, the earl of Southampton, and one of the patron's of Shakespeare's acting company, the earl of Pembroke. Ben Jonson may also have loaned or sold him books from his own library of more than two hundred volumes. But "even among literary men in the period it was not common to own large numbers of books," Bate notes. "The greatest scholar of the age, splendidly named Julius Caesar Scaliger, left 1,382 volumes at the time of his death in 1609."
I suspect that Shakespeare skimmed many a new volume at the bookstalls outside St. Paul's, but closely rad fewer books than is often imagined by bookish scholars, who (like everyone who writes about Shakespeare) have a subliminal desire to make him more like themselves than he really was."

Books would also have been a encumbrance for a man who never took permanent lodgings in London and who traveled to Stratford at least once a year. Among the books that Shakespeare may have owned are Golding's translation of the Metamorphoses and North's Plutarch, some of Ovid's other works in the original Latin, Horace's Odes, the plays of Plautus and Seneca, Caxton's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, perhaps in the Thomas Speght edition of Chaucer in 1598 or 1602, which would have been where he read "The Knight's Tale," the source for The Two Noble Kinsmen, on which he and Fletcher collaborated. He may also have had a copy of Thomas Shelton's 1612 translation of Don Quixote, where he would have found the story of Cardenio that was the basis of the lost play on which he is said to have collaborated with Fletcher.

He may have known Gower's Confessio Amantis, the main source of Pericles, in which Gower himself appears as Chorus, but since the play was begun by George Wilkins, Shakespeare may have borrowed the book from Wilkins. There are no other borrowings from Gower in Shakespeare's work. When he was working on the history plays, he must have had a copy of Holinshed's Chronicles close at hand, as well as Edward Halle's Union of the Two Noble Illustre Families of Lancaster and York. His biblical allusions suggest a familiarity with the Bible in the Geneva translation and "the officially sanctioned Bishop's Bible," as well as the Book of Common Prayer.

Florio's translation of Montaigne influenced parts of The Tempest, and he probably consulted Florio's English-Italian dictionary and grammar, as well as a "teach-yourself-French handbook called Ortho-epia Gallica, by a Warwickshire contemporary named John Eliot," which would have taught him "enough French to put together the language lesson in Henry V." William Painter's Palace of Pleasure was a collection of stories by Greek, Roman, Italian and French authors, including Boccaccio, whose Decameron provided the story that is the basis of All's Well That Ends Well. The plots and details in Othello, Much Ado, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, and Measure for Measure come from a variety of Italian sources or French translations of them. Bate suggests that Italian would have been easier for Shakespeare to read than French because of his training in Latin.

Earlier plays were sources for King John, Henry V, King Lear and of course Hamlet. Robert Greene's prose romance Pandosto was a source for The Winter's Tale and Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde for As You Like It. It's unclear whether Shakespeare knew Spenser's The Faerie Queene, but he seems to have admired Samuel Daniel, particularly the sonnet sequence Delia, and probably read Philip Sidney's sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella. He knew Sidney's prose Arcadia, from which he borrowed for the Gloucester plot in King Lear.

Thanks to his undoubted friendship with Richard Field and his very probable acquaintance with John Florio, Shakespeare had easy access to these books. This body of literature offers a deep insight into the mental world in which he lived. If one bears in mind the method of close reading in which he was trained at school, not to mention his prodigious memory for both the plays that he saw or acted in and the other books he devoured and disposed of more casually, then there need be no anxiety about the idea of a middle-class provincial grammar-school boy having the intellectual resources to write the plays. 

The parish records of Stratford-upon-Avon for 1570 through 1630 reveal that three-fourths of the men who married for the first time did so between the ages of twenty and thirty. "The mean age was twenty-six. The most frequently occurring was twenty-four. These figures are consistent with national averages." Only three men were in their teens when they married, but there was only one of these "in the whole sxty-year period whose bride was pregnant on the day of their marriage: the glover's son, eighteen-year-old William Shakespeare." And people have been gossiping about that fact for the better part of the last four hundred twenty-eight years.

We know that "on November 27, 1582, a license was issued for the marriage of William Shaxpere and Anna Whateley of Temple Grafton." It was a special license, issued when the banns were not going to be read for three Sundays before the wedding, and it required "a bond of sureties, guaranteeing that the prospective partners were entitled to marry. The Worcester registry has such a bond, dated November 28, 1582, referring to William Shagspere and Anne Hathwey of Stratford.... The wedding may be assumed to have taken place in early December 1582.... Susanna Shakespeare was baptized on May 26, 1584, so even if she was born somewhat prematurely there can be no doubt that Anne was pregnant on her wedding day."

Which Anne was it? Whateley, for whom the license was issued, or Hathwey, the name on the bond? (The Shaxpere/Shagspere problem is a negligible one: "Elizabethans were slapdash about names.") And was she named Anne? "Miss Hathaway, whom we always call Anne, is actually referred to in her father's will as Agnes, which would have been pronounced "Annes." Unless you want to make a big deal about it, and some do, it's best to assume that the clerk who meant to write down "Hathwey" got confused in the process, "perhaps because that same day a William Whateley had been involved in a case before the church court." The reference to Temple Grafton, a village much further away from Stratford than Shottery, where the Hathaways lived, is harder to explain. One theory holds that Anne had "been born a Hathwey in Stratford and married a Whateley in Temple Grafton" and that she was a widow. But Anne Hathaway had been recorded as unmarried in her father's will in the autumn of 1581, so that's cutting the whole marriage-widowhood-remarriage thing pretty close. "The probability is that Anne was indeed a 'maiden' and that she was in some form of service, perhaps with a distant relative, in Temple Grafton.

Her pregnancy would not have been much of a scandal: "it was generally agreed that a union was legally binding once a solemn spousal promise had been made, so the bedding often preceded the wedding." The age difference was more unusual: William was eighteen; Anne was "in her twenty-sixth or twenty-seventh year." Some like to read Venus and Adonis, "in which an innocent boy is seduced by a sexually  voracious older woman (or rather goddess)" as autobiography.

I have an instinctive sense that the wooer whom Shakespeare most resembles is Bassanio in The Merchant of Venice: clever but cold, an adventurer and a wordsmith who always looks after himself, a man on the lookout for a wealthy woman to help him out of a financial crisis and who has the good fortune to find one who is beautiful, ultraintelligent, and attracted to him. But there is no more evidence for this fancy than for the idea that William was somehow like Adonis (or Petruchio or Orlando or any of his other characters) or that Anne was like Venus or Kate "the shrew" or Adriana, the put-upon wife of The Comedy of Errors. 

Shakespeare's marriage may be the result of adolescent infatuation or an arranged marriage between two families who were close to each other. Anne was an heiress and Shakespeare's father was in debt. But Bate finds only "two certainties" in what we know about the marriage: One is that Shakespeare "was a sexually active young man" who found himself the father of three children -- Susanna and the twins Hamnet and Judith -- before he turned twenty-one. The other is that "the first formal record of his life subsequent to his baptism emerges from the diocesan consistory court."

We don't know what happened next, though an old story holds that he became "a schoolmaster in the country," which he couldn't have done in a grammar school of any great repute without a degree from university, although "he could have gained a post in a lesser school or as an 'usher,' a master's assistant." He could have supported his family that way, but sometime in the late 1580s he went to London to seek his fortune. Which he succeeded in doing: "By the summer of 1597 he was in the position to buy his wife New Place, the second-largest house in town -- albeit a property that was in a neglected state of repair, allowing him to obtain it at a knock-down price."

But it's the way he went about making his fortune that's surprising: Nobody got rich as an actor, and even when he realized that and started writing plays as well as acting in them, that was "an even more unlikely source of income than playing.... There were no wealthy writers." Bate sketches out the lives of twelve of the "most highly regarded dramatists among his contemporaries" to prove his point:

• John Lyly, born 1556, Oxford educated, married once, died "in very modest circumstances," age 52. 
• George Peele, born 1556, Oxford educated, married once, died "reputedly of syphilis" and in "financial difficulties," age 40.
• Robert Greene, born 1558, Cambridge educated, married once, died "in extreme poverty," age 34. 
• Thomas Kyd, born 1558, grammar school educated, never married, died "in poverty," age 35. 
• George Chapman, born 1559 or 1560, education unknown, never married, died without achieving financial success, age 74.
• Anthony Munday, born 1560, privately educated, married twice, died, with "an estate valued at the not-insignificant sum of £135," age 73. 
• Michael Drayton, born 1563, education unknown, never married, died, "with an estate valued at just under £25," age 68. 
• Christopher Marlowe, born 1564, Cambridge educated, never married, died, "stabbed to death by a twelvepenny dagger inserted just above the eye," age 29. 
• William Shakespeare, born 1564, grammar school educated, married once, died, "leaving a considerable property portfolio and several hundred pounds in cash," age 52. 
• Thomas Nashe, born 1567, Cambridge educated, never married, died, in "almost certain poverty," age 33. 
• Thomas Dekker, born about 1572, probably grammar school educated, married twice, died, "in debt, leaving his second wife in straitened circumstances," age about 60. 
• Ben Jonson, born 1572, Westminster School educated, married once, died, "impoverished but not in debt," age 65. 
• Thomas Heywood, born 1573, Cambridge educated, married once, died, "in respectable circumstances," age 68.

Shakespeare's "predecessors can be divided into those who married for money and those who were bachelors, either because they preferred to keep the company of men or because they could not afford to marry. No other major writer of the age married before reaching his legal majority, as he did." Like Shakespeare, Chapman, Drayton, and Munday tried to make a living by writing, but none of them invested in an acting company as he did. Munday, Chapman, Drayton, and Jonson achieved what financial stability they managed from patronage, and not from publication or theater performance. "It is striking that the men who did best out of their writing were the ones who began as actors: Munday, Shakespeare, Jonson, Heywood." The career that most resembles Shakespeare's is Heywood's: He began as an actor, made his reputation with a poem, Oenone and Paris, that he modeled on Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, and also became a shareholder and playwright for a theater company, the Queen's Men.

Shakespeare made his fortune not by "literary innovation but by a business decision," buying into the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1594 and sharing in the profits. "The best estimate is that, once fully established, Shakespeare may have made between £150 and £200 per year from his shareholding. Modern comparisons are difficult to sustain, but in early-twenty-first-century terms, that is roughly the equivalent of £30,000-£40,000 or $60,000-$80,000 per year.... A few people in Elizabethan and Jacobean England were very much richer than Shakespeare, but the vast majority were very much poorer -- indeed, a high proportion of the residents of Stratford-upon-Avon were in poor relief." Moreover, Shakespeare sustained his wealth with investments in property in Stratford.

Becoming an investor of this kind, making enough money to keep the family going, and sustaining a marriage for well over thirty years: these are not the achievements of the romantic lover, but they are manifestations of love.

13. The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs, pp. 316-349

Chapter Fifteen: In the Theatre of God's Judgements; Epilogue

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Queen Elizabeth herself was said to have pronounced Christopher Marlowe's death sentence ("prosecute it to the full") at court. A few days later, Marlowe died from a puncture wound above the eye in the nearby home of a genteel widow. The Queen's Coroner attributed the killing to a quarrel over "the reckoning," a bill for food and drink, but many have long suspected that the murderer had ulterior motives. Was Marlowe dispatched in an act of sovereign power or in a tavern brawl? Was he guilty -- and if so, of what? -- or innocent? 

So many questions, so few answers. Or rather, so little unambiguous evidence.

In February 1593, a protest by Puritans and Separatists against the Archbishop of Canterbury's crackdown on dissent led the government to take a hard-line approach, invoking a statute against seditious speech that "collapsed the old ecclesiastical crimes of heresy and blasphemy into the secular offence of treason." It "soon turned into the first all-out heresy hunt since the reign of Elizabeth's sister Mary -- and the last in English history."

In April, mob violence directed against Protestant immigrants from Holland and Spain broke out, and in May a propagandist who called himself "Tamberlaine" began stirring up animosity against the immigrants with posted verses that not only invoked Marlowe's Tamburlaine but also alluded to The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris, both of which had been performed by Strange's Men in January. There was no evidence that Marlowe was "Tamberlaine," but he inevitably came under suspicion.

Thomas Kyd, Marlowe's former roommate, was arrested, and among his papers was found what the Royal Commissioners "called 'vile heretical Conceits denying the deity of Jesus Christ.'" Under torture, Kyd said that Marlowe had given him the document. The Privy Council decided to investigate further and commissioned an informant, a loan shark named Thomas Drury, to get more dirt on Marlowe. Drury had been imprisoned after his partner, Richard Cholmeley, turned on him. Cholmeley and his brother Hugh had been employed by Sir Robert Cecil to spy on well-to-do Catholics. Drury reported that Cholmeley had identified Marlowe as a preacher of atheism, and that one of those who had listened to Marlowe was Sir Walter Raleigh. "Richard Cholmeley was the real-life counterpart of Jack Cade, the plebeian rabble-rouser in Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI ... a loose cannon fired by underclass delusions of grandeur." 

Marlowe had been shielded by Lord Burghley from conviction of high treason in the counterfeiting case, which suggests that Marlowe was working as an agent of Burghley's and had possibly been spying on Cholmeley and his gang. But as always, there was also the possibility that Marlowe was "prepared to 'go to the enemy' in earnest." Drury's account of Marlowe's blasphemies, along with Kyd's testimony about his atheism, would be echoed in Richard Baines's testimony. On May 18, Henry Maunder, a messenger of the Queen's Chamber, was ordered to arrest Marlowe and bring him before the court. Marlowe posted bail on May 20. Around the 27th, Drury delivered to the Privy Council Baines's note listing seventeen items of atheistic speech attributed to Marlowe.

The penalty for attempting to persuade others not to attend church was banishment, and Baines asserted that Marlowe talked about going to Spain or Rome. But it's possible that Marlowe was more interested in Scotland and the court of James VI, where his friend Matthew Royden had found a position in the household of the Earl of Haddington. The penalty for sedition was harsher: the lopping off of both ears and a fine of 200 pounds. But a trial of Marlowe, who could testify in his own defense, would have caused a sensation. "With her exquisite sense of occasion, Queen Elizabeth gave the order to 'prosecute it to the full' just when Marlowe was ready to enter history as the overreacher, a wholesome caution for aspiring minds."

On May 30, Marlowe was joined at the Deptford home of Eleanor Bull by Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skerres and Robert Poley. Frizer and Skerres were employed by Thomas Walsingham and Poley by Burghley, who was also acquainted with Eleanor Bull. "Poley was a veteran secret service agent who dealt with threats to Queen Elizabeth's security." According to the coroner's report, Frizer and Marlowe got into an argument over who should pay the bill for this private party. (It's unclear whether Eleanor Bull ran a tavern or a public house, or if the party had been catered in her home.) "At the climax of the quarrel, Frizer plunged his dagger into Marlowe's face, just above the right eye. The blade entered Marlowe's brain, killing him instantly. Frizer pleaded self-defence."

Some details provided at the coroner's inquest lay suspicion on the self-defense plea, though the jury found in Frizer's favor, and he was pardoned by Queen Elizabeth "just two weeks later, a remarkably brief interval for a capital offence." It seems that "Queen Elizabeth paid Marlowe the fatal compliment of taking him seriously, as a political agent to be reckoned with."

In June 1599, the Bishop of London burned Marlowe's translations of Ovid. And about the same time, Shakespeare had Marlowe in mind, when he makes reference to him in As You Like It. One is the couplet "Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might / 'Who ever lov'd, that lov'd not at first sight?'" The other seems to be a reference to Marlowe's death, when Touchstone mentions the exile of Ovid "among the Goths" and observes:

When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.

This is both an allusion to the line "Infinite riches in a little room" from The Jew of Malta and a reference to the fatal "reckoning" at Eleanor Bull's. "Of all the contemporary observers who wrote about the killing, Shakespeare alone refers to the coroner's inquest" six years after it took place.

Such was the lesson of Marlowe's meteoric career. Teachers of desire play a dangerous game; when they cross the line that separates art from politics, they are in for a reckoning.

10. The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs, pp. 250-274

Chapter Twelve: Double Agents

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In September 1589, Marlowe was involved in a fight in which Thomas Watson killed an innkeeper named William Bradley. Earlier, Bradley had defaulted on a debt he owed to John Alleyn, the brother of the player Edward Alleyn, and had then charged that Alleyn, Watson and an attorney named Hugo Swift, Watson's brother-in-law, were plotting to kill him. Marlowe's quarrel with Bradley gave Watson an opportunity to end the feud.

Watson and Marlowe were arrested for murder and sent to Newgate, which was where Marlowe encountered John Poole, a counterfeiter and a member of the Catholic underground. Poole was related by marriage to Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, who was an object of surveillance by the government. Strange was also patron of a theater company, Strange's Men. "In gathering information about Poole's associates, Marlowe stood to gain in two ways: he could sell his discoveries to Watson's friend Thomas Walsingham, or he could pursue relations with the rebel faction."

Marlowe was exonerated by the coroner's jury and released on bail pending a hearing in criminal court, which took place in December, when he was freed. Watson, a spy employed by Thomas Walsingham, was returned to prison until he received a pardon from the queen in February 1590. His "connection with the Walsinghams offered Marlowe an entrée into up-market Kentish patronage and the secret service." By the winter of 1591-92, Marlowe was roommate and perhaps bedmate of the spy Richard Baines.

Strange's Men included Thomas Kyd, Thomas Heminges, "who later prepared Shakespeare's first folio," Thomas Pope, George Bryan and the comedian Will Kempe. Both Strange's Men and the Admiral's Men performed at the Theatre, owned and managed by Richard Burbage, until Strange's Men moved to the Rose, Philip Henslowe's playhouse. John and Edward Alleyn joined the company after a quarrel with Richard Burbage and his brother John. The Alleyns probably drew Marlowe into the company. He shared quarters with Kyd.

Marlowe wrote The Jew of Malta for the company, probably in 1591, though perhaps a year earlier. "Where the dominant trope of Tamburlaine is hyperbole, The Jew abounds in irony." It is "a war between vice and virtue" modeled on the morality play.

Jewish exiles from Spain and Portugal were usually required to profess Christianity in their new countries; the converts were called Marranos.... In common parlance the word Marrano signified "one descended of Jews or infidels, and whose parents were never christened, but for to save their goods will say they are Christians"; or more simply, "a Jew, an infidel, a renegado, a nickname for a Spaniard." Doubly displaced by exile and forced conversion, the Marrano became a displaced image of the duplicity inherent in espionage and intelligence work. 

Barabas is the embodiment of this duplicity, bragging about his role as double agent.  The biblical Barabbas, chosen by the Jews over Jesus to be spared from crucifixion, "personified the so-called 'Jewish choice' of materialism over spirituality" for Elizabethan Christians, who would have recognized the reference by Marlowe's Barabas to his hoard of gems and gold, "Infinite riches in a little room," as an echo "of the allegory, which was available from a wide range of devotional works, of the infant Christ enclosed in the Virgin Mary's womb."

But Marlowe's Christians are hypocrites who, like Dr. Faustus, "are deaf to spiritual meanings but alert to literal ones" and adhere to the letter but not the spirit. "Although The Jew of Malta abounds in Scriptural allusions, no one grasps their religious meaning."

Barabas defends the ironist's stance in the course of explaining why a Jew who falsely converts to Christianity is better off than a Christian, like Governor Ferneze, who confuses religion with avarice: "A counterfeit profession is better / Than unseen hypocrisy.

Marlowe even parodies his "live with me and be my love" by putting it into the mouth of Ithamore. 

In Barabas's end, he is hoist with his own petard, plunging into the boiling oil he thinks is being prepared for the Turks. Marlowe here plays on the "lurid fascination" of public executions, which were supposed to represent "the operations of divine justice" and whose gruesome punishments "(burning, mutilation, disembowelling and even, as here, boiling alive) foreshadowed the endless pain that awaited the criminal in Hell." But he "withholds any sense of moral resolution" from the depiction of  Barabas's death.

9. The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs, pp. 221-249

Chapter Ten: Notoriety. Chapter Eleven: "He Is Like Dr Faustus"

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Marlowe's play turned Tamburlaine into a popular-culture hero, "an urban legend of plebeian self-assertion," but it also "had a galvanizing influence on the career of his twenty-three-year-old creator." It also led other university graduates, such as Robert Greene, George Peele and Thomas Lodge, to venture into the theater with plays that imitated Tamburlaine. But only Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy came close to matching Marlowe's poetic and dramatic skill, and the success of their plays revolutionized English dramatic verse: "Before Marlowe and Kyd, tragic playwrights used rhymed lines; henceforth the dominant medium would be blank verse." Moreover, "In The Spanish Tragedy and Tamburlaine, subjects punish their rulers. Before Marlowe and Kyd, tragic violence runs from the top down or circulates among equals; henceforth, it issues from the bottom up as well."

Tamburlaine benefited from accidental good timing as well:

The zenith of Tamburlaine's war upon the world ... comes with the destruction of Babylon. In biblical typology, this event prefigured the coming of Antichrist and the end of the world. For the spectators of 1587, confronting the imminent arrival of the Spanish Armada and the armies of the Pope, the fall of Babylon warned the English that they too lay in the path of divine vengeance.

There were critics, of course. Thomas Nashe belittled Marlowe and Kyd for their use of "the swelling bombast of bragging blank verse." And Ben Jonson would later refer to "the Tamerlanes, and Tamer-Chams of the late Age, which had nothing in them but the scenical strutting, and furious vociferation, to warrant them to the ignorant gapers," although Jonson's put-down is perhaps aimed more at the imitations than at the original. Then, as now, there was a sense that popular acclaim vitiated a work's pretense to be Art. And then there was the problem of upstart writers with no university education, such as Kyd and, later, Shakespeare.

The art of making "pure iambic verse," formerly the preserve of educated scholars, had become available to any customer who could afford standing room in the yard or the price of a drink. That is why a social conservative like Nashe found Marlowe's blank verse so disturbing: anyone could make it.

The images in Tamburlaine that most caught the imagination of the time were the caging of the emperor Bajazeth; the white, red and black tents; and the harnessed kings with the bits in their mouths drawing Tamburlaine's chariot. They captured not only the popular imagination but also the religious: The Puritan John Field preached a sermon comparing the black tents to the wrath of God. "John Field, the prominent anti-theatrical writer, apparently refers to a live performance of Tamburlaine."

Next up seems to have been Dr. Faustus, although exact dating of the play is difficult. There was a vogue of plays about magicians in late Elizabethan times, but no one knows whether Marlowe set the fashion or followed it. His main source was an English translation of the German Historia von D. Johann Faustus. The German book appeared in 1587, and the translation may have appeared shortly after, although the only surviving text dates from 1592. The German book was such a success on the continent that translations into Danish, Dutch, French and Czech came out immediately, so it's not likely that the English version should have been five years behind.

The Faust legend seems to begin with Simon Magus, a first century C.E. Samaritan who is referred to in Acts 8:9-24, and in the Apocrypha. He was said to have "kept the reincarnated Helen of Troy as his consort" and to have had a disciple named Faustus whom he turned into his double. The real-life George (or Johann) Faust died about 1540. Philipp Melanchthon, the follower of Luther, is responsible for publicizing the legend that Faust had sold his soul to the devil, part of the hard line that the Lutherans took on witchcraft.

Marlowe's version doesn't take Faust nearly as seriously as the Lutherans did. His Faustus is given to mistakes such as quoting Cicero when he's supposedly reading Aristotle, quoting Aristotle when he thinks he's talking about Galen, and so on. "The erudite author, Christopher Marlowe, did know the right citations and scripted the wrong ones into Faustus's part." He also mangles quotations from Scripture: "Faustus chops each of the Scriptural verses in half, in both cases citing the divine condemnation while omitting the promise of redemption that follows. After proclaiming 'The reward of sin is death,' St Paul writes, 'but the gift of God is eternal life' (Romans 6:23)." In doing so he follows the example of Calvin, who also "isolates the first half of Romans 6:23 and insists that 'all sin is mortal.'" In Calvinist doctrine, only the elect will receive the forgiveness of God and receive eternal life.

Critics rightly point out that Faustus is hideously mistaken about the Bible; but the Church he is rejecting has taught him to make precisely these mistakes. Marlowe, who had already been taxed with atheism, unveils in Dr Faustus the ecclesiastical basis of his own unbelief.... Divine justice was supposed to terrorize the reprobate into good behaviour; yet the godless had ample reason to disbelieve in a God who had already condemned them to sin and damnation regardless of their earthly conduct.

And despite Faustus's ambitions to "wield godlike powers," he becomes nothing more than "a magician for hire and confidence man," reduced near the end of the play to practical jokes on a horse trader. In this respect, Faustus is something of a self-portrait of Marlowe: "Herein lay the irony of giving poor boys like John Faustus and Christopher Marlowe a classical education. Books instilled a desire for what they could never have: material wealth, social legitimacy and cultural authority.... Dr Faustus signals Marlowe's awareness of his own position in the world after Cambridge."

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.