10. Soul of the Age, by Jonathan Bate, pp. 268-318

Fourth Age: Soldier, Chapter 15, The Clash of Civilizations; Chapter 16, Shakespeare and Jacobean Geopolitics; Fifth Age: Justice, Chapter 17, At Clement's Inn; Chapter 18, After Machiavelli

_____

In 1600, the conflict with Spain brought to London representatives from the northern African region known as Barbary, which included modern-day Morocco, seeking an alliance. The presence of such exotic figures in Elizabethan London would certainly have come to Shakespeare's notice, and since the Lord Chamberlain's Men performed before the queen during their visit, Shakespeare may have seen them in person.

Abd-el-Oahed ben Massaood

The ambassador himself, Abd-el-Oahed ben Massaood, sat -- or rather stood -- for his portrait. The very image of a noble Moor, berobed and wearing a magnificent sword: as many critics have recognized, the figure of ben Massaood must have been in the hinterland of Shakespeare's imagining of Othello a few years later. An ambassador in London transformed into a general in Venice. 

The Mediterranean was then divided between Spain and the Ottoman empire. Spain dominated the northern shore of the western section, from Cádiz to Naples to Messina. "The southern shore, from Alcazar to Algiers to Tunis, was a place of uncertainty, ruled by a wild mix of client regimes and wayward corsairs."  Much of the conflict in the region centered on the islands of Sicily, Cyprus, and Rhodes. For Shakespeare, Bate conjectures, islands may have held a particular interest "because they constitute a special enclosed space within the larger environment of geopolitics, perhaps a little like the enclosed space of the theater within the larger environment of the city." [And maybe because he lived on one: the island known as Britain.] 

Christopher Marlowe may have recognized the efficacy of setting a play on an island, too. After Tamburlaine "name-checked the whole of known Asia and Africa," Marlowe may have recognized, "that Tamburlaine's dramatic weakness was its episodic structure, the inevitable consequence of the Scythian shepherd's long-distance marches," so in his next play, The Jew of Malta, "he invented a story that focused the contest between Christianity and Islam on a single pressure point, the island of Malta." He gave Barabas's henchman Ithamore a complex "alien" background: his "name suggests 'Moor,' though he is described as a Turk. Since a specific point is made of his having been born in Thrace, he may have originated as a Christian child abducted from the Balkans and forcibly converted to Islam. To complicate matters further, his name seems to derive from the Jewish Ithamar, one of the sons of Aaron in the Bible." In Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare names his Moorish villain Aaron. The character is "clearly influenced by that of Ithamore ... so Shakespeare wittily calls him after Ithamar's father!"

Shakespeare also inverted things when it came to Othello, The Moor of Venice. The Jew of Malta was so popular that someone going to a play called The Moor of Venice would expect "that this Moor too would be a Barabas or an Aaron, a barbarian who puts Venice in peril." He made many significant changes to his source, a story in Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio's Gli Hecatommithi. He enriched the atmosphere of the story, which is pretty much all plot and dialogue, with details that gave it "local texture -- Venetian, Cypriot, and Moorish," probably drawn from recently published books about the region. He adds the conflict with the Turks, representing "Cyprus as an island embattled in the Ottoman sea," a detail that recalls the Malta of Marlowe's play.

To Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Turk, Arab, and Moor all represented the Islamic "other," but they were not necessarily homogenized into a single image of generic "barbarianism." Arabic culture was frequently associated with learning and civilization, in contrast to the prevailing images of Turk and Saracen.... How you judged the Islam "other" depended not only on ideological stereotype but also on the particularities of diplomatic liaison and changing allegiance in a world of superpower rivalry.

To the original audience of Othello, the word "Moor" meant Muslim, and "was frequently used as a general term for 'not one of us,' non-Christian." But Shakespeare's Othello is a Christian convert, so one of the marks of Iago's villainy for the audience would have been that he "re-converts Othello from Christianity.... In this sense, it is fitting that Iago appeals to a 'Divinity of hell' and that Othello acknowledges at the end of the play that he himself is bound for damnation." To the Elizabethans, "Moor" also meant a native of Mauretania, which encompassed parts of today's Morocco and Algeria. "Given that the Spanish empire was England's great enemy, there would have been a certain ambivalence toward the Moors -- they may have overthrown Christianity, but at least it was Spanish Catholic Christianity." There may also be some significance in the fact that the villain in Othello has "a Spanish name, reminiscent of St. Iago of Compostela, who was known as Matamoros, the Moor killer."

The Winter's Tale also has some unexpected twists that seem to be the product of Jacobean diplomacy. In the source for the play, Robert Greene's Pandosto, it is the king of Bohemia who accuses his wife of being unfaithful with the king of Sicilia. Shakespeare turns it around: "The jealous fit falls upon Sicilia instead of Bohemia." It's an odd change, since the original places "the chilly court of Leontes in snowy middle Europe and the summer shepherding in sunny Sicily, which was, besides, the reputed birthplace of Theocritus, father of the pastoral genre." Moreover, Shakespeare's change results in one of his most famous gaffes: a stage direction indicating a seacoast in landlocked Bohemia. Bate notes that Stephen Orgel argues that Shakespeare made the change to remove "the action from the world of literal geographical space as it is removed from historical time."

But Bate argues that even the romances are not without geopolitical concerns: "The Tempest is very interested in statecraft and dynastic liaison, while Cymbeline is one of Shakespeare's two extended meditations on what political historians call the British Question." He thinks the switch may have been made because "Sicilia -- or more exactly the kingdom of the two Sicilies, one consisting of the island and the other of southern Italy (otherwise known as the kingdom of Naples) -- was at the heart of the Mediterranean empire of Philip II of Spain, while Bohemia (the western two thirds of what is now the Czech Republic) became the core of the Holy Roman Empire." Moreover, Sicily was Catholic, whereas Bohemia had been the site of the Hussite rising of 1419-20, one of the first Reformation movements. "There were strong links between the courts of James in England and Rudolf [II] in Prague."

Bate thinks it "eminently plausible" that "Shakespeare thought it would be politic to make the monarch with Spanish associations the one who is irrational, cruel, and blasphemous" and that "tact was required in the invocation of the names of European kingdoms." That Shakespeare knew of Sicily's ties to Spain is evident in his other play set in Sicily, Much Ado About Nothing, in which "the Messina of Don Pedro is manifestly in Spanish hands."

The Tempest also reflects some of the animosity toward Spain. "In the imaginary afterlife of the play's plot, Ferdinand, son of Alonso, will one day be both king of Naples and duke of Milan. In the historical reality of early modern Italy, both Milan and Naples were under the dominion of the Spanish crown." Moreover, the names of both Ferdinand and Alonso echo those the Spanish rulers of Naples: "Alfonso V, the first Iberian king of Naples was succeeded by his illegitimate son Ferdinand." And his son, another Alfonso, abdicated to a son named Ferdinand. "Prospero is ... likely to have been regarded as the victim of intrigue that had Spanish villainy behind it." But the play as written has no actual historical references. "The evacuation of historical specificity from The Tempest is a conjuring trick that creates the illusion that Shakespeare prophesied the subsequent history of British imperialism. This made possible the manner in which the play was most frequently read in the post-Vietnam, postcolonial portion of the twentieth-century Cold War."

Othello is located on the east-west frontier between Christianity and Islam, with Othello himself functioning as the tertium quid that veers between the world's two dominant religions. The Winter's Tale plays off the Catholic south and the Protestant north. The Tempest returns to Marlowe's strategy in The Jew of Malta of compression all the world onto the stage of a single island. But with a difference. Shakespeare could have grounded his play in the Balearics, made Caliban a renegade, Prospero an exile from Spanish power, Stephano and Trinculo English privateers. He did not. He replaced Malta with a darkened version of Utopia, rendering the island a pure conceptual space -- or rather a purely theatrical space, for it is here that our sense of the resemblance between an island and a theater is strongest. 

Shakespeare's "lost years," the seven-year period between the christening of his twins Hamnet and Judith in February 1585 and the disparaging reference to him by Robert Greene in autumn 1592, are a challenge to biographers. But in fact he didn't completely disappear: His name appears in a legal document in 1588 pertaining to a suit brought by his father, John Shakespeare, in which William is named as a party to the suit. "The case might just be the missing link between Shakespeare and London."

In Henry IV Part 2, we meet Justice Shallow and Justice Silence, "the justices of the peace in the Gloucestershire scenes, [who] are embodiments of the process whereby the Tudor regime sought to unify the administration of the nation through a network of local officials." They are "mildly corrupt officials who are all too often sentimentalized on the stage." In the scene in which Shallow and Silence meet, Shallow refers to "before I came to Clement's Inn," which Silence observes was "fifty-five years ago." Clement's Inn was one of the Inns of Chancery, where attorneys began their training. "Shakespeare was the only dramatist, indeed the only literary author, of the period ever to mention Clement's Inn by name. So how did he know about it?"

In 1588 John Shakespeare filed suit against John Lambert for £20 that Lambert owed him, naming William as partner in the suit. Their attorney was John Harborne, who had begun his legal studies at Clement's Inn. It is possible that 24-year-old William was the one who went to London to confer with Harborne on the case, which "provides as good an explanation as any as to why Clement's is repeatedly mentioned in the reminiscences of legal training in Henry IV Part 2." It also suggests that Shakespeare was in London "in the Armada year of 1588, when the drama was beginning to flourish, above all in the plays of Marlowe. Could this have been the moment when he decided to stay in town and try his fortunes on a larger stage than that of the small provincial town where his father was still struggling?"

Shakespeare's plays are full of knowledge of the law and lawyers, but "It is thin in comparison with that to be found in the dramas of many of his contemporaries, such as fellow Warwickshire man John Marston, who trained at the Middle Temple.... But we cannot rule out the possibility that Shakespeare underwent some kind of rudimentary legal training in the 1580s." Justice Shallow refers to "my cousin William" who is at Oxford and who "must then to the Inns of Court shortly," repeating the fact that Shallow himself "was once of Clement's Inn." John Shakespeare could not afford to send his son William to Oxford, but "it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that this snatch of dialogue contains the trace of a plan for Shakespeare to follow the road taken by Harborne." The grammar school education he had received "was undertaken with an eye as much on the law as on the church."

While he was in London conferring with Harborne, he may have begun his writing career. Marlowe's The Jew of Malta was probably performed early in 1589, and it certainly made its impression on him: "His Aaron in Titus Andronicus is a part written in response to Marlowe's Ithamore, and his Shylock in The Merchant of Venice is his answer to Barabas the Jew, with the play's resolution achieved through a courtroom instead of a boiling cauldron and a bloodbath."

Marlowe's play begins with a prologue spoken by Niccolò Macchiavelli, the name "anglicized to 'Machevil,' creating a suggestion of 'much evil.'" [Or "make evil."] The speech advances some subversive ideas:

Religion as an illusion; the idea that human knowledge does not require divine sanction; the notion that it is "might" not "right" that decides who rules; the proposition that the most effective laws are those based not on justice but on the severity exemplified by the ancient Greek lawgiver Draco (from whose name we get the word draconian). French and English thinkers of Shakespeare's time demonized Machiavelli for holding these views, but for Marlowe the act of thinking the unthinkable made Machiavelli a model for his own overreaching heroes.

Shakespeare has his own Machiavels: Aaron, Richard III, Iago, Edmund in Lear. But his put the emphasis on "not so much the subversive politics as the stage panache of the unapologetic villain." The character of Richard III is what makes the play about him "a better play than the three parts of Henry VI that precede it." He is the first Shakespearean "figure with the compelling stage presence of a Falstaff or an Iago." Marlowe had to introduce Machiavelli himself to establish Barabas as a villain in his mold. Shakespeare does it by beginning the play with Richard's "Now is the winter of our discontent" speech. "Where Marlowe had cast Barabas in the role of the Machiavel by means of a pointed structural device, Shakespeare's Richard casts himself."

Unlike Marlowe, Shakespeare was careful, even conservative; he "never wrote plays that put him on the wrong side of the law." His "reputation for being able to handle potentially explosive material with equanimity" made him the man to call on when Henry Chettle was having trouble with his play Sir Thomas More. The master of the revels objected particularly to a scene in which More addresses a rioting crowd. In the speech, More judiciously balances the "old idea that sovereignty derives from God" with "the (much more modern-sounding) idea that the maintenance of law depends on a social contract, which is best understood by means of imaginative empathy." The argument advanced by Shakespeare is very much like that found in Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. [This edition of Bate's book misprints Polity as "Policy."] (There is no evidence otherwise that Shakespeare read Hooker.) 

Shakespeare's plays are full of usurpers who are "usually self-serving Machiavels. But this does not make Shakespeare an uncritical apologist for the divine right of kings: when a Richard II or a Henry VI fails to fulfill the responsibilities of sovereignty, the state totters." In Henry V the king himself, the son of a usurper, grapples with the question of sovereignty and the king's responsibility to his subjects on the eve of Agincourt, when he goes out disguised and talks to his soldiers. He even "confronts the possibility that the whole edifice of sovereignty is nothing more than a quasi-theatrical performance.... The notion that the 'ceremony' on which kingship depends may be a device for the creation of  'awe and fear in other men' is deeply Machiavellian. Shakespeare's deep political cunning manifests itself in the decision to put this thought not into the mouth of Machiavelli, as Marlowe did, but into that of his most heroic king."

This complex scene on the eve of Agincourt reveals that for Shakespeare politics was a matter for serious debate. And debate is premised on the notion of opposing points of view each having an element of validity. Shakespeare does not impose his own political views. He leaves a space for his audience to make up their own minds, and that is inherently a way of giving the power of free thought to the people.

Even Shakespeare couldn't save Sir Thomas More: "the script languished in manuscript until the nineteenth century, when a scholar realized for the first time that here were a few precious pages in Shakespeare's fluent, barely punctuated hand. He had succeeded much earlier in his career with his handling of the Jack Cade rebellion in Henry VI Part 2, where he undercut Cade's radical ideas by demonstrating that "Cade does not really want representative government. He wants to be king himself." He returned to this trick in The Tempest, in which Gonzalo's utopianism is undercut by the observation that he advocates "No sovereignty. / Yet he would be king on't."

Shakespeare's political beliefs are as elusive as his religion, his sexuality, and just about everything else about him that matters. Precisely because he was not an apologist for any single position, it has been possible for the plays to be effectively reinterpreted in the light of each successive age. In the four centuries since his death, he has been made the apologist for all sorts of diametrically opposed ideologies, many of them anachronistic -- we should not forget that he was writing before the time when toleration and liberal democracy became totemic values.

But just as we reinterpret Shakespeare's plays in the light of our own concerns, so he rewrote history to suit his time. He took the concerns of Roman history, early Britain in King Lear and Cymbeline, and the Wars of the Roses and afterward "and mapped them onto his own time and state with fascinating effect."

He had to do some backpedaling after the Essex affair. One of the supporters of Essex who was killed by a sniper on the day the plot was put down was Owen Salusbury. His brother, John Salusbury, was on the other side and was knighted by the queen for his loyalty. A volume of poems called Love's Martyr was published on the occasion, and contributions were sought from all the major poets. "Shakespeare, who ... did not usually undertake such commissions, contributed his own brilliant little vignette of the mystical marriage of the phoenix and the turtle[dove], the Virgin Queen and her loyal courtier. It was a very good way of aligning himself with the loyal Salusbury rather than the disloyal one.

"Troilus and Cressida, written soon after the dramatic events of 1601 may have been another subtle repositioning on Shakespeare's part." George Chapman had dedicated his translation of the Iliad to Essex, describing him as "the modern Achillles -- an obvious analogy, in the light of Essex's espousal of the cult of chivalry and military honor." But Shakespeare turns the Homeric heroics upside down: "In its love plot the play is an antiromance, while in its martial plot it is an antiepic. In his antiheroic representation of the exemplary heroes of the Trojan War, Shakespeare undermines both the style and the attitudes of Chapman's recent translation." Hector is killed in the midst of an act of vanity, when he takes off his armor to put on the golden armor of a slain warrior. Ajax is "a singularly unheroic blockhead." And Achilles "has withdrawn from the battle and is camping around in his tent with his gay lover, Patroclus."

Again and again Troilus and Cressida reveals the discrepancy between the polished surface that is projected by a value system, whether the heroic code or courtly love, and the tawdry reality beneath. At a philosophical level, the effect of this is deeply troubling: it is to question whether there can be such a thing as an absolute moral value.

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

_____

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.

4. Soul of the Age, by Jonathan Bate, pp. 53-92

First Age: Infant; Chapter 4, Old World, New Man? Second Age: Schoolboy; Chapter 5, Stratford Grammar.

_____

In 1564, the year of Shakespeare's birth, Michelangelo and John Calvin died, and in addition to the plague, England suffered extreme weather including floods in September and a great freeze at Christmas. When nature deviated from routine, Elizabethans got nervous:

In pulpit and classroom, people were taught about the magical correspondences between the order of nature and the structure of society. There was a cosmic hierarchy, with God at the top, and then the angels, and then humankind, and then the beasts. By the same account, there was a social hierarchy, with kings and queens at the top.... Some of Shakespeare's characters -- those who have a vested interest in doing so -- talk about the importance of maintaining this structure of "degree" and "order." But it is disorder that makes good theater.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare plays with the disorder that makes good theater, particularly in the character of Bottom, who moves ambiguously about the hierarchy: a human who becomes part animal, a humble man who is wooed by the queen of the fairies. When he is returned to reality, he thinks of his experience as "a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was.... The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was."

The wit of this comes from its play on a famous biblical phrase that must have long since lodged itself in Shakespeare's memory. Many members of the original audience, steeped as they were in the New Testament, would have recognized Bottom's account of his dream as an allusion -- with the attributes of the different sense comically garbled - to a famous passage in the first Epistle to the Corinthians.... In the Geneva translation of the Bible, which Shakespeare knew well, the passage speaks of how the human spirit searches "the bottom of God's secrets." Jesus said that in order to enter his kingdom, one had to make oneself as a child. The same may be said of the kingdom of theater. It is because Bottom has the uncynical, believing spirit of a child that he is vouchsafed his vision. Where does this childlike sense of wonder come from? Perhaps from a country boy remembering how as a child he loved stories of animals and transformations and queens, but how he never dreamed that one day his stories would be played out with all the pomp of court before the very eyes of the Virgin Queen herself. 

One of Shakespeare's friends in later life was Thomas Russell, a prosperous landowner who was executor of Shakespeare's will, and whose stepson, Leonard Digges, wrote a poem published in the First Folio that mentions the monument to Shakespeare in Holy Trinity Church. Leonard's brother, Sir Dudley, may have been the one who told Shakespeare about the wreck of the Sea Venture in Bermuda, which seems to be the source of the title event of The Tempest. The Digges brothers' father was Thomas Digges, "the greatest English geometrician and astronomer of the age."

In 1572, a bright new star appeared in the sky, and Digges suggested that it presented an opportunity to test out Copernicus's recent theory that the Earth revolved around the sun. The supernova faded before it could prove of use, but "It was primarily through Digges ... that the new Copernican cosmology reached an English audience." John Donne's lines, "And new philosophy calls all in doubt, / The element of fire is quite put out," reflect the shock of "the Pythagorean / Copernican / Diggesian theory of a heliocentric universe. According to Donne's ranging, associative mind, the fact that people such as Galileo Galilei -- like Shakespeare, a child of the year 1564 -- have sgtarted looking for new worlds through their telescopes proves that our world has had its day and is in a state of decay.... Stable relationships between prince and subject, father and son, are seen to be subject to the same stress as the cosmic hierarchy, the 'great chain of being.'"

Shakespeare, too, reflects this new uncertainty, as in Ulysses's speech on order in Troilus and Cressida. Ulysses's insistence that society needs "to maintain a strict hierarchical order or 'degree' is a political strategy," but the irony is that to achieve the end of maintaining hierarchy, Ulysses is willing to use disorderly means. And in warning against the consequences of disorder, Ulysses observes that "justice resides not inherently on the side of right, as one would expect it to, but rather in the 'endless jar' between right and wrong." The play reveals "that order, moral and social, is not a predetermined value system answerable to a harmonious cosmic design, but rather a process, an endless debate and negotiation of terms, in which reason and judgment cannot be separated from appetite and will."

The breakup of the settled order of the universe and of society is also at the heart of King Lear, in which Edmund mocks the notion that the stars influence the doings of humankind. For Edmund "the whole notion of astral influences is merely an excuse for the failure of individuals to take responsibility for their own destinies.... Edmund is the embodiment of the 'new man' who emerged in tandem with the 'new philosophy.' The man who, following Machiavelli, defines himself as first and foremost himself, in contrast to the 'old man' who would have defined himself in terms of the old hierarchies as a dutiful subject to his prince and son to his father."

Shakespeare himself was a product of his birthplace: "It is a universal phenomenon that rural communities, regulated by the rhythm of the seasons, are conservative." If he stayed true to his roots, his "own instincts and inheritance were cautious, traditional, respectable, suspicious of change. We may as well say conservative. But then he got the acting bug." It's probable that John Shakespeare was "flabbergasted" when his son wound up in a profession as disreputable as the theater. But we can see how conservative William Shakespeare was when we compare him with Christopher Marlowe, who was also "born in 1564, and there were other similarities in their beginnings -- provincial rather than London, a father in trade, an education at a local grammar school." But Marlowe had gone to Cambridge and embraced "atheism and Machiavellianism. What is more, he made the autonomous self the very basis of his drama: what are Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas if not new men incarnate?" But Marlowe died young and Shakespeare was "the great survivor," who was never "imprisoned or censured in connection with his work," who became wealthy and retired when he was ready to.

He abhorred and yet he was fascinated by the new men, of whom his great examples were Edmund in Lear and his forerunners, Richard III, Aaron in Titus Andronicus, the Bastard in King John, and Iago in Othello. Perhaps that was because he was the true new man himself.

 
Shakespeare's school day began at 6 a.m. in the summer, 7 a.m. in the winter, and lasted until dusk. Every day except Sunday was a school day, year round, though Thursday and Saturday were half days. His school was the King's New School, established during the short reign of Edward VI, Henry VIII's son, and its curriculum consisted entirely of Latin grammar. "For a bright boy like Will, a few years in an Elizabethan grammar school would have yielded enough Latin to last a lifetime. He would have achieved a level of proficiency above that of many a modern undergraduate student of the classics."

In the first form, student learned to "read perfectly, pronounce also and sound their words plainly and distinctly." In the second, they were introduced to grammar by learning by rote William Lily's Introduction of the Eight Parts of Speech.  The third form read Terence, Aesop's Fables, Virgil, and Cicero's Epistles, and as soon as the master thought they were ready they moved on to the fourth form and Sallust, Ovid, Cicero's Offices, Caesar's Commentaries, Erasmus, and the art and rules of "versifying (if he [the master, that is] be expert therein)." The fourth form also translated sentences from English to Latin and vice versa, and learned to compose letters in Latin. The third and fourth forms also spoke nothing but Latin in the classroom -- except when they were assisting the first and second form students.

Shakespeare parodies the instruction in The Merry Wives of Windsor, when the Welsh schoolmaster Hugh Evans drills a young student named, of all things, William in Latin grammar as Mistress Quickly listens and converts the Latin into bawdy English:

WILLIAM  Genetive: horum, harum, horum.

MISTRESS QUICKLY:  Vengeance of Ginny's case, fie on her! Never name her, child, if she be a whore. 

Bate points out that schoolboys, weary of the drudgery of rote memorization, were probably the source of the jokes that Shakespeare converted into Mistress Quickly's misunderstandings: "A clever boy survives such a regime by sniggering: hog for hoc, fuck-ative for vocative, whore for horum, root and case as not only technical terms in grammar but also slang for, respectively, the male and female parts." He also speculates that Hugh Evans may have been based on one of Shakespeare's masters, Thomas Jenkins, who was "perhaps a Welshman."

There is actually no documentary evidence that Shakespeare attended the King's New School, but his father's status in the community entitled him to such an education. The evidence is provided only "by the exact knowledge of Elizabethan grammar school methods of education revealed in the exchange between William and teacher Evans, together with the pattern of allusions to grammar school texts scattered across the plays." This second of Jaques's ages also reflects "the life of the commoner, not the courtier. Aristocrats such as the earls of Oxford and Southampton had private tutors and did not attend grammar school." [Score another one against Oxford as a "contender" for the authorship of Shakespeare's plays.]

"The way in which Shakespeare learned Latin shaped his subsequent life of writing as decisively as did the content of the books he went on to read in later years." Bate is referring here to the influence of Latin grammar and rhetorical devices that were drilled into Shakespeare:

In order to illustrate Latin grammar at work, textbook and master have to keep building word upon word. An adjective is added to a noun and the class is required to make them agree. Then bring together a pair of adjectives and a pair of nouns. Such doublings and amplifications were drilled into Shakespeare in the classroom so thoroughly that they became second nature in his writing, sometimes obsessively so, as in Hamlet, where one epithet will never do when two are possible: "one auspicious and one dropping eye," "disjoint and out of frame," "impotent and bedrid," "the trappings and the suits of woe," "An understanding simple and unschooled" -- all these and more are to be found in the first hundred lines of the first court scene of the play.

Lily's textbook was also full of examples of the changing agreement of subject and verb, such as

Ego pauper laboro, I being poor do labour.
Tu dives ludis, Thou being rich dost play.

This sort of thing is echoed in Richard III:

QUEEN MARGARET.  I had an Edward, till a Richard killed him:
I had a husband, till a Richard killed him:
Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard killed him:
Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard killed him.

Shakespeare would also have been exposed to Latin rhetorical devices when it came to translating the orator Cicero's words into English, thereby, at a very early age, learning to speak "like a poet, seeking to move an audience through the elaborately patterned manipulation of language." The most familiar example of this comes in the play Julius Caesar, in which Cicero himself has a small role. "And in dramatizing the Ciceronian world, Shakespeare will also take to new heights that art of moving a public audience through the force of rhetorical patterning," most famously in Mark Antony's "Friends, Romans, countrymen" speech, with its ironic repetition of "Brutus is an honourable man." "The art of rhetoric, whereby advanced students were taught to argue both sides of a case, is what makes the dramatic opposition possible." 

In the third form he would begin writing in Latin, often by imitating writers such as Erasmus, who in a discussion of the use in correspondence of the salutation Salve moved from common uses such as "Salve pater: 'greetings, father'" and "Salve mi frater: 'greetings, my brother,'" to facetious ones such as "Salve vini pernicies: greetings, 'consumer of quart-sized pots of wine.' And in response: Salve et tu, gurges helluoque placentarum, 'greetings to you too, you who devours cakes into the bottomless pit of your stomach.' The flyting of Hal and Falstaff, the wit combats of Beatrice and Benedick, have their origins here." Other exercises called on pupils to "Write a letter as if you were Antenor persuading Priam that he should return the stolen Helen to her Menelaus." Bate observes, "Write that, Master William, and you're on the road to inventing dramatic character, to composing Troilus and Cressida."

Hugh Evans is not the only schoolmaster in the plays. There's also the pedantic Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost, "a distinct suggestion on Shakespeare's part that there is something insane about the verbosity of so-called learning." After a long speech, Holofernes "turns to Dull the Constable and says, 'Via, goodman Dull! Though has spoken no word all this while.' To which Dull replies, in a line that guarantees a huge laugh in the theater, 'Nor understood none neither, sir.' There is more warmth than scorn in Shakespeare's remembrance of both the schoolmasters and the dullards of his Stratford boyhood. The key to his theatrical magnanimity was his capacity to imagine Holofernes and Dull with equal affection."

Ben Jonson, who was a city boy who learned his Latin at Westminster School, famously remarked on country boy Shakespeare's "small Latin," and in Timber: or, Discoveries made upon Men and Matter also criticized Shakespeare's rhetorical excesses, and accused him of writing nonsense, "as when he said in the person of Caesar, one speaking to him, Caesar thou dost me wrong. He replied: Caesar did never wrong, but with just cause and such like, which were ridiculous. But," Jonson added, "he redeemed his vices with his virtues. There was ever more in him to be praised than to be pardoned." To which Bate comments, eliciting cheers from those of us who are fed up with the so-called "authorship controversy":  "In passing, it is worth wondering how anybody who has ever meditated upon this passage could ever again doubt that the author of the plays was William Shakespeare of Stratford, friendly rival of Jonson and colleague of the players." But the point here is that Jonson "regards Shakespeare as an overintelligent schoolboy who has gone too far with the advice of Erasmus's fourth-form handbook concerning the art of copiousness in composition: he just does not know when to stop.... To Jonson's more logical mind, the reply [of Caesar] is ridiculous: if the cause is just, the action cannot be wrong. Shakespeare nearly always preferred the doubleness of rhetoric to the singularity of logic." Moreover, Shakespeare is always willing to sacrifice logic in order to be true to his character: "Dramatically, it is perfectly appropriate for a character as powerful as Julius Caesar to assume that he can do wrong with just cause." (In any case, the phrase Jonson objected to doesn't appear in the surviving text of Julius Caesar. Did Shakespeare take Jonson's advice and "blot" the line?)

If Shakespeare made it to the fourth form, he would have begun learning "the art and rules of versifying," because Stratford did have a master who was "expert therein," John Brownsword. The model used for verse composition was "the pastoral Eclogues of the Italian neo-Latin poet Giovanni Baptista Spagnuoli, known (from his birthplace) as Mantuan." Holofernes quotes "good old Mantuan" in Love's Labour's Lost. But Shakespeare's favorite Latin poet was a greater one, Ovid. "We do not know exactly how much Ovid he read in school, but it is demonstrable from his work that of all the writers on the syllabus Ovid was the one who appealed to him most strongly, and whom he sought out -- albeit mostly in English translation -- after he left school."

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

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

_____

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.

12. The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs, pp. 293-315

Chapter Fourteen: Waiting for the End

_____

The playhouses were shut down as "a menace to public safety" on June 23, 1592, and remained closed when the plague arrived in August. In the meanwhile, Robert Greene wrote an anti-theatrical open letter, published in A Groatsworth of Wit Bought With a Million of Repentance, to Marlowe, Nashe and Peele, urging them to stop writing for the theaters. Greene accuses Marlowe of a Machiavellian atheism and predicts he will come to a bad end.

Marlowe returned to Canterbury that summer, and in September was charged with brawling in the streets. He was sued by William Corkine, a tailor, who said Marlowe attacked him. Marlowe's lawyer countered with the charge that Corkine had attacked Marlowe. The case was settled out of court.

Marlowe was accumulating a substantial criminal record. He had been arrested and jailed on suspicion of murder. He had been taken for coining and remanded to Lord Burghley. The justices of Middlesex Country and the City of Canterbury knew him as a street fighter and violent man. He had failed to keep his bond. He had been publicly accused, albeit under an alias, of atheism, a crime punishable by death. To make matters worse, the attacks on the stage, coupled with the resurgent plague, threatened his livelihood.

During the theatrical hiatus, Marlowe returned to Ovid and to verse, responding to the Countess of Pembroke's wish for Ovidian poems. He set out to retell the story of Hero and Leander, basing his poem on the version by Musaeus. "Marlowe's narrator weaves in and out of Musaeus's story, embellishing his Greek source with decorative tableaux, meandering digressions and seductive ploys." Hero and Leander "taught Elizabethan readers everything they needed to know about sex but were afraid to ask -- both normative and illicit, heterosexual and homosexual." The first edition, published posthumously in 1598, was dedicated to Thomas Walsingham by the printer, Edward Blount, who claimed that Marlowe would have wanted it that way. (Shakespeare, too, was using the period when the theaters were closed to write verse such as Venus and Adonis and to hunt for patronage.)

Marlowe's translation of Lucan's Civil Wars was also probably done about this time, and was also published posthumously. Lucan was on the side of the Republic, and his work "sides with the losers, Brutus, Cassius, Cato and Pompey.... If the Aeneid is about the creation of the Roman empire, the Civil Wars looks toward its destruction.... Writing rapidly, and under a virtual death sentence, Lucan portrays a world governed by accident, where radically contingent events destabilize te master-narrative of the imperial regime."

The theaters reopened in at the very end of 1592, and at the end of January Marlowe's last play, The Massacre at Paris was performed by Strange's Men. The existing text seems to be a "memorial reconstruction," based on the actors' recollections of the play and the roles they played in it. It is half the length of each of the parts of Tamburlaine and of The Jew of Malta and Edward II. It covers the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572 and the conflict between the Duke of Guise and King Henri III that took place in 1586-88. Marlowe's intent was "to set the most shocking aspects of the French religious wars before English theatregoers."

Although his play follows the historical record, Marlowe introduces the fictional murder of the Protestant philosopher Peter Ramus by the Duke of Guise, again to demonstrate the abuse of a base-born scholar. And the story of Guise and Henri III follows the same pattern as Edward II:  "Henri takes up Edward's part, Gaveston, Spencer and Baldock metamorphose into Epernoun, Mugeroun and Joyeux; Mortimer becomes the Guise; and the young Edward III finds his counterpart in the Protestant King of Navarre."

Some of the material in the play is based on Marlowe's firsthand knowledge of the conflict between the king and Guise, which he had obtained during his work as a spy. "The brief documentary scenes that succeed one another in The Massacre at Paris resemble diplomatic dispatches; these were the raw material of intelligence fieldwork.... His dramatization of Henri's final testament includes at least one detail that appears only in Lyly's confidential report to Queen Elizabeth about the assassination.... To judge simply from what the actors remembered, Marlowe was evolving away from the stage and towards a more direct confrontation with the history of his own times."

11. The World of Christopher Marlowe, by David Riggs, pp. 274-292

Chapter Thirteen: The Counterfeiters

_____

In the winter of 1591-92, Marlowe went to the town of Flushing, in the Netherlands, where he lodged with Richard Baines and a goldsmith named Gifford Gilbert. They started turning out counterfeit, which constituted treason punishable by death in England. When they put one of their Dutch coins into circulation, Baines went to the English authorities to reveal what was going on. He claimed that they had urged Gilbert to make the bogus money out of curiosity, a desire "to see the goldsmith's cunning."

The Dutch had given the English control of Flushing in exchange for military help against Spain. The town was governed by Sir Robert Sidney, who reported to Lord Burghley, the head of the English secret service, that Marlowe and Baines each accused the other of planning to continue counterfeiting after the first test. They also accused each other of planning to go over to the enemy, the Catholics who were plotting to assassinate Elizabeth and invade England. One of the means of financing this plan was counterfeiting. So both Marlowe and Baines may have been spying on the plotters.

Lord Strange was thought to be involved in the plot, and Marlowe was in a good position to provide information about Strange because of his work with Strange's theater company. After getting cold feet about the counterfeiting, Baines may have decided that Marlowe really was going to go over to the enemy. Or maybe the impecunious Marlowe really did plan to go "to Rome." Sidney placed Marlowe and Gilbert under arrest, but let Baines go. By doing so, "he implied that the scholar and the goldsmith were the guilty parties, while Baines was merely being sent back for questioning. On the other hand, if Marlowe was an English agent, putting him under arrest reduced the likelihood of blowing his cover." All three men were sent back for questioning by Lord Burghley, who had the power to hang them. But there is no record "that Marlowe underwent any punishment or received a pardon." The likelihood is that Marlowe was being kept alive until he could be of some use.


In May 1592, Marlowe was in court again for making "threats against a constable and beadle," facing the same Justice Owen Hopton before whom he had appeared on suspicion of murdering William Bradley. Marlowe was placed under bond to keep the peace and to appear at the next session of the county court, or forfeit twenty pounds.


Strange's Men had revived The Jew of Malta in February, and it and Kyd's Spanish Tragedy were the most popular plays in the repertory until the first part of Shakespeare's Henry VI was staged in March 1592. It was performed fourteen times before the theaters were closed in June. Its success apparently inspired Marlowe to write his own history play, Edward II, that year. It joined the repertory of the Earl of Pembroke's Men in 1593-94, along with Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and adaptations of the second and third parts of Henry VI and The Taming of the Shrew. Shakespeare probably also acted with the company. "The Earl of Pembroke is the only English aristocrat that Edward II portrays in a favorable light.... The earl's wife, Mary Herbert, née Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, was a major literary patroness and a dramatist in her own right."


There is no record of Marlowe's acquaintance of Shakespeare, and as a university man he was a notch on the social ladder higher than the glover's son from Stratford. Shakespeare would allude to his work seven years after Marlowe's death, but the influence of Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta is evident in his early work. "Indeed, for two centuries the pervasive debt to Marlowe's style and sensibility persuaded scholars that Marlowe actually did write most of Henry VI." But Marlowe's debt to Shakespeare is seen in Edward II, which like Henry VI is based on Holinshed's English Chronicles, where Marlowe "found yet another story of a strong king (Edward I) whose weak son (Edward II) is destroyed by over-mighty barons (Mortimer) and a masculine queen (Isabella). The 'weak king' formula was well-suited to Pembroke's Men, who lacked a leading actor of Edward Alleyn's stature."


Marlowe departed from Holinshed in making the Gaveston affair the central crisis in Edward's rule. "Edward II is the only Elizabethan play that portrays a homosexual relationship in the terms in which orthodox moralists conceived of it -- as illicit, compulsive and intolerably destructive." In Richard II, another "weak king" play, "Shakespeare suppresses, where Marlowe emphasizes, the homoerotic overtones of his chronicle sources." In Marlowe's play, the crisis is not caused by homosexuality so much as class:  "What enrages the hereditary nobles is that a commoner should enjoy the lucrative offices that would ordinarily fall to them. The base-born Marlowe presses hard on this issue.... Since both of Edward's lovers are lowly interlopers, the king's decision to elevate them above his peers inevitably provokes civil war." The characters most akin to Marlowe are Spencer and Baldock: "Because of their superior education, both men have a special facility with rhetoric and elocution; both are also ready to 'stab, as occasion serves.'"


Marlowe's treatment of Edward's imprisonment and death differs from Holinshed's. Edward is jailed in the sewer of the castle, covered in shit, "the stigmatic regalia of an anal sodomite." But the violation of the king with the red-hot spit depicted in Holinshed is muted in Marlowe's treatment:

Critics and directors usually assume that Lightborn finishes him off with the red-hot poke (Derek Jarman's brilliant film adaptation is a notable exception.) But Marlowe's text, whether by accident or design, stubbornly omits to supply this implement. When the time comes to use it, the spit remains in the other room.... The last act of Edward II, with its brooding, introspective soliloquies and drawn-out scenes of bodily torment, marks a shift in Marlowe's sensibility. His new subject is physical suffering and resistance. He sympathizes with the victim. Despite Edward's follies, Marlowe grants the unrepentant sodomite a measure of redemption in the end. This development coincides with a comparable shift in the course of Marlowe's own fortunes. During the fourteen months of life that remained after his return from Flushing, Marlowe himself would be cast in the role of victim.

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

Chapter Twelve: Double Agents

_____

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"

_____

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

_____

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.