Why Christopher Marlowe Is Still Making Trouble
Do you know the one about the Jewish guy and the Muslim Turk? They gang up on this Christian friar and strangle him. Then they take him into the street and prop him up on a staff, as if he were alive and begging. Along comes another friar, who doesn’t like the first friar, so he grabs the staff and beats the life out of him, unaware that he’s already dead. When the Jew and the Muslim turn up again, they accuse Christian No. 2 of killing Christian No. 1. And the Muslim points to the body and says that his brains are dropping out of his nose. Honestly, it’s a scream.
Then, there’s the one about the two Asian guys who are harnessed to a chariot and made to pull it along, like horses, with bits in their mouths, while this other Asian guy, holding the reins, lashes them with a whip. And here’s the joke: they used to be kings! And they’re lucky, because there’s another king, a British one, who has to stand in filthy water for ten days, with the sound of a drum to stop him from sleeping. You know, like at Abu Ghraib. At last, he lies down on a feather bed, which sounds nice, except a table is laid on top of him and men stomp on it. Then he gets raped with a red-hot poker. And that’s the end of him.
What sort of sickos, you might ask, would watch this stuff for fun? Answer: Londoners in the last two decades of the sixteenth century. All the scenes above come from plays by Christopher Marlowe—respectively, “The Jew of Malta,” first performed in 1592, “Tamburlaine, Part 2” (1587), and “Edward II” (1592). Going to the theatre in that period was hardly an entertainment for the fainthearted, and calamity was not confined to the stage. Venues, known to be breeding grounds for infection, were often closed to prevent the spread of plague, and, at a performance of “Tamburlaine, Part 2” in November, 1587, a gun was mistakenly loaded with a projectile, rather than with powder alone, and fired. The shot went into the audience, killing a pregnant woman and a child.
That play is a sequel, written by Marlowe in startling haste on the back of “Tamburlaine the Great,” which was, in the most brutal sense, a smash hit. Most of the smashing is done by Tamburlaine, a Scythian shepherd by birth, who rises to the peaks of power, lays waste to one kingdom after another, and has the temerity, at the climax of Part 1, not to die. Hence the resumption of mayhem in Part 2. When both halves appeared in print in 1590 (the only plays of Marlowe’s to be printed in his lifetime), they were described as “tragical discourses,” but where’s the tragedy? The hero carries on conquering, untrounced; when he eventually expires, it is from disease, not from the swipe of an enemy’s sword.
Mind you, one of Tamburlaine’s final deeds is to burn a copy of the Quran, so maybe he did, after all, trigger his own downfall—not the only occasion on which Marlowe, from a distance of almost four hundred and fifty years, strikes us as frighteningly up to date. When the play was performed in London in 2005, the reference to the Quran was altered; the director, David Farr, mounted a robust defense, stating that “never in our rehearsal discussions did we receive any pressure from the Muslim community” and that Tamburlaine was insulting “the entire theological system,” not just a single faith. Nice try. If you pursue that logic, how will you handle “The Jew of Malta,” which is drenched in the antisemitic attitudes of Marlowe’s day, and whose hero, Barabas, could not be more energetically gleeful in his plans, or more theologically specific? Here he is, having engineered a mass poisoning:
Diluting the offensiveness won’t be easy. Maybe the nuns could be transformed into spa therapists at a wellness retreat and the toxin explained away as a surfeit of matcha. What rises from such disputes is the overarching fact that Marlowe was, is, and will doubtless remain a troublemaker—who, moreover, taps into the gravely comical troubles into which we tumble. His most celebrated play, “Doctor Faustus,” is about a man who sells his immortal soul for twenty-four years of unlimited earthly delight. (Terms and conditions apply.) Marlowe himself made it only to the age of twenty-nine. After supper, one late-spring evening in 1593, he was stabbed in the eye in a house on the Thames, to the southeast of London, and, according to the coroner, “then and there instantly died.” A later report asserted that he “dyed swearing,” which is not quite the same thing. The destination of his soul is not established.
Marlowe’s rackety reputation outlasted his death and then went quiet. Not until the twentieth century, and yet more so in our own time, did it become cacophonous again, amplified by claims that he spied for his country, and that he and his work exult in a flourish of gayness. (“Edward II” is dominated by the monarch’s obsession with his favorite courtier, Piers Gaveston.) There are mounds of commentary on Marlowe—historical, biographical, critical, and wildly fantastical—and all sorts of reasons to add to the heap. The latest addition is by Stephen Greenblatt, whose densely textured account of Shakespeare’s life, “Will in the World,” was published in 2004. Now he brings us “Dark Renaissance” (Norton). The title makes it sound like a low-rent knockoff of Assassin’s Creed, with hooded malefactors swarming over pixelated piazzas, and the subtitle, “The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival,” is equally brazen. Yet Greenblatt is right to sound the trumpet. If anyone’s story tugs and bullies us back into the past, it has to be Marlowe’s. Roll up and enjoy the show.
Should you find yourself in England and minded to make a pilgrimage to Canterbury, here’s a tip. Beef up your spirit by attending choral Evensong at the cathedral, then nourish the rest of you with a McSpicy and medium fries at the McDonald’s on St. George’s Street. As you leave the premises, licking the rarefied sauce from your fingers, look to your right. There, forty yards away, stands a tower. That is what remains of the church in which Marlowe was baptized, on February 26, 1564—two months to the day before Shakespeare was baptized, in Stratford-Upon-Avon. The two of them are tightly bound not just by chronology but also by the stratifications of class; Marlowe’s father made shoes, and Shakespeare’s father made gloves. If you want to sneak into the loftiest chambers of English literature, start at the tradesmen’s entrance.
In those days (and in these days, too), the most thorough education in Canterbury—and, with it, the best chance for social propulsion—was offered by the King’s School. That, as Greenblatt says in a semi-Dickensian reverie, is “where the boy from the filthy lanes near the cattle market would have glimpsed for the first time the gowned students and where he may have suddenly thought to himself, against all likelihood, ‘This could be me!’ ” Who knew that Elizabethan kids spoke as if they were buying lottery tickets? As things turned out, Marlowe was given a scholarship and a formidable grounding in the classics. The headmaster, John Gresshop, had a private library, in Latin, Greek, and English, of which we have an inventory. Did Marlowe get a peek at it? Greenblatt muses on the possibilities:
