Introducing Christopher Marlowe
Original Source Of The Shakespeare-X Message.
Christopher Marlowe, wounded child of the angels, you are made immortal with a kiss.
We're all going to be hearing a lot about Christopher Marlowe for the rest of all history, so these articles will help you get up to speed. He's a far more fascinating character than that faceless William Shakespeare actor fellow.
Christopher Marlowe was a lot more like James Bond than like the dull minor actor we have known until now as William Shakespeare. Even if Marlowe had not written the plays (and he wrote every one of them), he would still have been a remarkable man.
Christopher Marlowe was a man so intellectually dangerous that he was banished from his own country despite being the most famous artist in it.
Marlowe In His Time:
Marlowe’s biographical record burns across his age. His life was expressive and imaginative beyond containment. He was a scholar and a spy, an intellectual and a political dissident. He was raised poor among common people (his father was a shoemaker), and rose up to the aristocratic heights of Court success on his talent and intellect.
He was celebrated and famous for his literary genius by the age of 23. He was loved and admired for his comic wit by most, complimented on his talent and spirit by almost all. He was apparently grand and sociable company, with no shortage of companions and friends who protected and defended him for a lifetime.
He was almost expelled from Cambridge University, he was jailed after a sword fight in the street in which a man was killed, and jailed again for counterfeiting coins while on a government spying mission abroad.
By the age of 29 he had lived enough life for three men, and all of it was the wild expressive life of a man so full of imagination that it cannot be contained.
Marlowe's life displays the kind of imagination that it takes to write 37 plays of the caliber of Shakespeare. And by the age of 29 he had also already written at least 7 other plays and several books of poetry under his own Marlowe name. Plays and poetry which are similar to Shakespeare’s later work, and of a similar literary caliber.
Oh and he faked his own murder and disappeared abroad into exile too.
And he left us a secret message to tell us that he did.
Marlowe went off to Italy to join an artistic and scientific Renaissance. And then he wrote the literary works of Shakespeare while hiding in exile. Christopher Marlowe was exactly the kind of man we would expect to be capable of writing the magnificent works of Shakespeare. A brilliant, imaginative, learned man who lived a brilliant imaginative adventurous life.
Marlowe was so much the kind of expressive humanistic personality who can create this kind of towering artistic achievement of the imagination, that his very life itself is essentially Shakespearean.
He burns across the history of human civilization like a dazzling meteor.
Some Quotes on Marlowe by his Contemporaries
'One of the wittiest knaves that God ever made' - Thomas Nash, writer, friend
'Kind Kit Marlowe' - Anonymous
'Unhappy in thy end. Marlowe, the muses darling, for thy verse. Fit to write the passions for the souls below. - George Peale, poet.
'What soul more happy than that soul of thine!' - Henry Petowe, poet.
'To Marlowe's deathless memory' - George Chapman, friend, poet.
'The admired Marlowe; whose honney-flowing vein, no English writer can as yet attain' - Henry Petowe, 1598.
'The impression of that man who hath been dear to us..' - Blunt, 1598
'Marlowe's gone to live with Beauty in Elysium' - Henry Petowe, poet.
'King of poets'
'Free soul'
'The Muses darling' - George Peele
'Famous gracer of tragedians'
'The highest mind that ever haunted St Paul's [bookstores]' - Gabriel Harvey, 1593
'Marlowe.. Had in him those brave translunary things. That your first poets had; his raptures were all air and fire, which made his verses clear. For that fine madness did he still retain, which rightly should possess a poet's brain. - Michael Drayton, poet.
He sounds like a very fine man to me. - Lee Vidor, poet.
Something Important To Know And Understand About Marlowe
Marlowe was charged with atheism, we are probably going to be reading this a lot in the media reports regarding the astonishing Shakespeare-X Message, but this did not mean atheism as we know it today. Marlowe was a theology scholar at Cambridge University and there is nothing whatsoever in the entire canon of writings of Shakespeare which is atheistic. And we have thousands of pages of his philosophy and poetry to examine.
In the Elizabethan Age, atheism meant that he was advocating reason rather than superstition. For this the church of the time would torture and murder even poetic geniuses like Christopher Marlowe. It was a matter of power, not of religious spirituality.
Marlowe’s stance for reason was something which challenged the long term power which the church held over the general population, which is why he was charged with atheism by powerful religious factions.
Marlowe and his intellectual circle were the early beginnings of the Enlightenment, the very first to challenge the absolute power of the church.
Some Articles On Marlowe
Here below are some interesting articles written about Christopher Marlowe in relatively recent years. Read them and celebrate that we finally know the man who was the genius Shakespeare. He's worth marveling over.
Remember these articles were written before the discovery of the Shakespeare-X Message. The future will know a great deal more authentic truth about Shakespeare-Marlowe than these articles are able to display.
Also note that all of the plays we know as Marlowe’s and which carry his name, were probably written while he was still a student or soon afterwards. Some were probably written before he was even 20. This means they are the brilliant but immature Shakespeare, a writer still learning his craft, himself, and the world, an artist still searching for his true self and his true vision, as all young writers do.
All these articles are from the Guardian UK, together they'll give you a reasonable picture of the great genius Christopher Marlowe before he became Shakespeare.
Guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 July 2008 15.40 BST
Birthplace
Canterbury, England
Education
The son of a shoemaker, he won a scholarship to Corpus Christi, Cambridge (history, philosophy, theology). His MA was delayed by long absences, possibly spying abroad, and suspicion over his religion.
Other Jobs
He was expected to take holy orders after university, but plunged into London's dramatic circle instead - and also, some scholars insist, secret service work abroad for Walsingham, Elizabeth I's secretary of state. He may also have fought in the Low Countries.
Did You Know?
A phrase in As You Like It, "it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room", is thought to refer to Marlowe's murder.
Critical Verdict
Heretic, bisexual?, secret agent... the debatable details of his debatable life have always sparked curiosity. Shakespeare's early histories are strongly influenced by Marlowe; dead at 29 while Shakespeare, born the same year, worked for two decades longer, his genius is one of the great 'what ifs' of literature. Or perhaps, as some insist, he was Shakespeare, and his murder at Eleanor Bull's tavern in Deptford merely a politic disappearance (see AD Wraight's The Story the Sonnets Tell for a convincingly argued piece of propaganda). But it was dramatic blank verse that was his real bequest to Elizabethan drama (Ben Jonson called it "Marlowe's mighty line"), while his pre-Byronic villain-heroes, with an individualist thirst for knowledge ("the only sin is ignorance") and will to power, conjured a new and enduring mood in literature.
Influences
He was classically learned and translated Ovid and Lucan; his London circle included Kyd, Greene and Nashe.
Dramas and Crises
Christopher Marlowe's uproarious life is a gift to a biographer and Park Honan doesn't disappoint in his account of the master playwright.
Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy
by Park Honan, 448p
Reviewed by Stanley Wells
The Guardian
Did any major British writer lead so exciting a life as Christopher Marlowe? While at Cambridge, he was recruited as a spy. A year or two later, he was imprisoned for suspected homicide after an entanglement with another poet in a street fight. After travelling to the Netherlands, he was imprisoned and deported for conspiring to counterfeit coins. He was arrested on charges of heresy and accused of propagating atheism and homosexuality. According to spy Richard Baines, he said that 'Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest', and that 'all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools'.
And in a grand climax of self-sacrifice to the needs of novelists and playwrights as well as biographers, at the age of 29, he had himself stabbed in the eye in mysterious circumstances and died in a Deptford boarding house.
Marlowe's public activities alone would make his life worth chronicling, but amazingly he found the time and mental energy to project a no-less turbulent inner life in a series of poems and plays of extraordinary accomplishment and originality. His pioneering translations of Ovid anticipate Byron in their racy sensuality. Tamburlaine is our first great heroic drama and still one of the finest; The Jew of Malta is a mordant masterpiece of ironic tragedy; Edward II the boldest treatment of tragic homosexuality before the late 20th century; and Dr Faustus an essentially religious tragedy of astonishing, if uneven, power.
For all their qualities as entertainment, these plays add up, says Park Honan, Marlowe's latest biographer, to 'a grave, doubting inquiry into the accepted notions of human society and behaviour'. (I'm not so sure about 'grave'; Marlowe is one of our wittiest writers.) And in Hero and Leander, Marlowe wrote a poem of which Honan can claim: 'No other short narrative in English is so filled with the bustle and turmoil of erotic power or has such an overwhelming mood of amorousness.'
We are lucky to have far more revealing evidence about Marlowe's life than about Shakespeare's, who was almost his exact contemporary, partly because Marlowe was so much more flamboyant a character. The survival of the buttery books of Corpus Christi while Marlowe was a student, showing how much he spent on food and drink, tells much about his absences from college and about the fluctuations in his finances and so enables revealing deductions about his espionage activities.
Some statements from his contemporaries, including letters from dramatist Thomas Kyd, with whom Marlowe shared a room, along with the infamous 'Baines Note', with its allegations of heresy, blasphemy, and homosexuality, cannot be regarded as objective or unprejudiced but must be sceptically assessed.
Honan assembles and analyses all the evidence with fastidious care. While he does not offer major new discoveries, he is scrupulous in his re-examination of what is known and ingenious in the connections he makes between apparently disparate facts. His fascinating re-evaluation of the evidence relating to the discovery at Corpus Christi of the supposed portrait of Marlowe and of its provenance goes a long way towards rehabilitating claims that it is authentic, and even that Marlowe may have commissioned it.
In the face of contemporary accusations of atheism, Honan argues that 'one of Marlowe's assets as a playwright was that he profoundly and urgently concerned himself with religion', whatever his opinions may have been. And he has winkled out some intriguing curiosities, such as a recent photographic mock-up of a skull penetrated as Marlowe's fatally was, and the fact that for more than a century after the composition of Marlowe's first great success, Tamburlaine was in popular use as a boy's name.
A strength of Honan's book is his probing examination of the relationships between Marlowe's day-to-day life and his writings in the construction of an intellectual as well as a diurnal biography. He may sometimes be a bit too fanciful in his attempts to relate the domestic events of Marlowe's incompletely recorded childhood to the portrayal of family relationships in the plays, but his account of Canterbury schoolmaster John Gresshop, and especially his analysis of the contents of the teacher's library, which ranged from the expected theological treatises through Greek and Latin drama to high-class French pornography, is illuminating about the educational standards of a provincial Elizabethan grammar school.
Marlowe's remarkably frank dramatisation of homoerotic relationships leads inevitably to a consideration of his sexuality. He may well have been impelled to translate Ovid in part because of the Roman poet's concern with what Honan calls 'the unpredictability of the penis', and it is natural to suppose that the sexual attraction of Jupiter for Ganymede in Dido, Queen of Carthage, of Neptune for Leander in Hero and Leander and, above all, of Edward and Gaveston, spring from Marlowe's predilections, even obsessions.
His writings are soaked in homoerotic sensibility. Undoubtedly he had, as Honan writes, 'his own views and special understanding of a man's love for a man'. But direct evidence about his behaviour is lacking and Honan goes too far in asking, on the flimsiest of deductive evidence: 'Was Marlowe impotent?' I suspect that if he had had the effrontery to pose this question directly, he, too, would have ended up with a dagger in his cranium.
While Honan's book does not have the compelling narrative excitement of Charles Nicholl's classic but less comprehensive study, The Reckoning, which concentrates on the poet's death and the events leading up to it, it is an elegantly written study which must now stand as the best overall biography of one of our most fascinating writers.
· Stanley Wells is chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
Deptford Secrets
Did Marlowe die in a tavern brawl or did he escape to France and adopt 'William Shakespeare' as his pen-name?
by Robert McCrum
The Observer-Guardian, Sunday 14 July 2002
When it comes to a literary posterity, premature death can be a good career move (Chatterton, Keats, Georg Büchner, Wilfred Owen), but not always. If your untimely demise is also violent and mysterious, you will be remembered long after your contemporaries are forgotten, but more for your dramatic end than for your dramatic genius. And if your early decease coincides with one of the great periods of English literary creativity, you will be argued about for centuries, but as much for what you might have written as for what you actually composed.
Such is the case with Christopher Marlowe. The brouhahas over his death, which surfaced again last week, has long impeded a clear view of his extraordinary gifts. The author of 'Come live with me and be by love', 'Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships?' and 'What is beauty saith my sufferings, then?' deserves to be remembered for more than just his turbulent career, as a writer, not as a high-profile theatrical personality. But that, alas, seems to be his fate.
Marlowe is a fascinating and strangely modern figure, whose life, as Tom Stoppard implied in his witty Shakespeare in Love cameo, is pure Hollywood. Playwright, 'free-thinker', homosexual and government agent, he was also, according to Swinburne, the father of English tragedy and the 'creator of English blank verse'.
Marlowe's plays - Edward II, Dr Faustus, The Jew of Malta and Tamburlaine - are gorgeous, high octane and spectacular. They glitter with memorable speeches of breath-catching beauty. They are almost impossible to stage successfully. And they seem to anticipate Shakespeare.
This is where the trouble starts. Although the commonsense view of Marlowe's death, backed up by good scholarship, is that he died after a fight in a tavern, there has always been a vociferous minority who contend that there's another side to his story.
Briefly, the Marlovians claim that, worldly, well-connected and controversial as he was, Marlowe faked his death to avoid charges of heresy, fled to France, continued to write plays and arranged to have them published in England under the name of a country bumpkin from Stratford, William Shakespeare.
Preposterous? You might think so. Some members of the Marlowe Society would beg to disagree. Although a mass of scholarly research from Leslie Hotson to William Urry to Charles Nicholl (in The Reckoning) has established quite clearly that he was killed, and seen to be killed, in Deptford by one Ingram Frizer on 30 May 1593, there are diehard conspiracy theorists who maintain the opposite.
The reason is quite simple. A dead Marlowe could not possibly write Shakespeare. A secretly living one could. It's at this point that 'Marlowe scholarship' seamlessly merges, and starts to compete, with the equally contentious claim that Shakespeare was actually written by Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, even the Virgin Queen herself.
In other words, poor old Kit Marlowe, the shoemaker's son from Canterbury and star graduate of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (where you can still see his room), gets caught up in some of the dottiest literary theories in the known world. That, at least, is how it stood until last year.
When it was announced in 2001 that Marlowe was finally to get a place in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, a number of prominent literary figures, from Seamus Heaney to Professor Andrew Motion, heaved a sigh of relief. At last Marlowe was getting his due. The old hellraiser could be taken into the bosom of the literary establishment, alongside his contemporaries, Shakespeare, Jonson and Spenser.
Why, exactly, it should now matter that Marlowe should get this dubious recognition beats me (Poets' Corner contains memorials to some very weird poetical birds), but from afar it looked as though the nuttier Marlovians were letting their man go straight for a change.
Fat chance. When the stained-glass lozenge in the north-east window of the south transept was unveiled last week, it turned out to contain a gratuitous and provocative detail designed to reignite the Marlowe-Shakespeare debate. Beneath the poets's name are his dates - 1564-?1593.
The '?' says that perhaps he did not die. Perhaps he did escape to France. Perhaps he did write Shakespeare. Blah blah blah. It's a shame that a great writer's achievements should be trivialised by such a publicity stunt. The author of some groundbreaking plays, Hero and Leander and 'The Passionate Shepherd to his love' deserves better than this and will be remembered long after the Christopher Marlowe Society is mercifully defunct.
Is There Life After Deptford?
For 400 years, Christopher Marlowe has divided the literary fraternity. Michael Billington casts his vote.
by Michael Billington
The Guardian, Saturday 3 April 1993 22.21 BST
Shaw, who cordially loathed the Elizabethans, once suggested a statue be erected at Deptford to 'the benefactor of the human species who exterminated Marlowe'. He based his modest proposal on a dislike of the dramatist's 'clumsy horseplay and butcherly rant'.
With the quatercentenary of Marlowe's death looming on May 30 and with Peter Whelan's speculative Marlovian thriller, The School Of Night, transferring from Stratford to The Pit, it seems a good time to ask whether Shaw may have had a point.
We all know the correct line on Marlowe: the 'morning star' of English drama (according to Tennyson), the fabled creator of the 'mighty line', the Renaissance pioneer who explored the potentialities of man's nature and made Shakespeare possible. But I would argue that we now find Marlowe's mysterious death more exciting than his overweening tragedies - and that he was an infinitely greater poet than dramatist. Having lately re-read the first two sestiads of Hero And Leander - all Marlowe lived to finish - I would say it is worth most of the plays put together.
What is extraordinary about Marlowe's life is the fierce passion it still arouses. Last year Charles Nicholl wrote a book, The Reckoning, which argued that 'sweet Kit Marlowe' was 'an atheist, a blasphemer, a dissolute homosexual', a practised poet-spy who kept sinister company, who possessed an almost pathologically violent nature, and whose death in a tavern fight was connected with political rivalry.
But I have just received a spirited, detailed and scholarly 35-page riposte, written by AD Wraight for The Marlowe Society, which goes for Nicholl's jugular. Among other things, Wraight suggests Marlowe was not just a loyal servant of the state who gleaned vital information about the Catholic plotters in Rheims, but also 'the epitome of Renaissance man who was reaching out to embrace scientific knowledge' and 'a lamb led to the slaughter at Deptford'.
Wraight may have a point. But methinks he doth protest too much when he describes Marlowe as someone 'who hated homosexuality but had compassion for the person who was thus enslaved'. This of the man who, in Edward II, gave us the first sympathetic portrait of a gay hero (confronted by Gaveston, Edward 'smiles in his face and whispers in his ears') in English drama? The man who in Dido, Queen Of Carthage, shows Jupiter fumbling with Ganymede, 'that female wanton boy'? The man who, in Hero And Leander, shows lascivious Neptune stealing kisses from the Hellespont-swimming hero and prying upon 'his breast, his thighs and every limb'? You can't just put that down to the filthy gods and goddesses. Marlowe clearly gets a kick out of describing the blatant sex appeal of androgynous boys.
I am not qualified to arbitrate in the Nicholl vs Wraight argument: except to say that I find the image of the gay, tobacco-smoking, atheist spy more intriguing - and more consonant with the plays - than that of the straight, pacific, anti-Catholic monarchist who might have made an ideal head of school at King's Canterbury.
What is clear is that there is something magnificently fishy about Marlowe's death in the course of an eight-hour tavern meeting with two espionage agents and a known con man, Ingram Frizer, who was speedily pardoned for the murder. Part of a blitz against free thinkers? A political plot? A le Carré-like dead man switch, as Peter Whelan ingeniously suggests? It remains one of the great unsolved mysteries.
I wish I could get as excited by Marlowe's major plays, all revived by the RSC in the past five years. To be fair, Marlowe escaped from the rigidities of neo-classicism, exploited what George Steiner called 'the licentious geography of the Elizabethan theatre' and created grandiose star roles. But Tamburlaine is a gloatingly sadistic picture of giant the Jack killer, Dr Faustus is a bathetic valley situated between twin poetic peaks and Edward II, though sexually pioneering, lacks any hint of Richard II's intricate political complexity.
Oddly, Marlowe's best play is the one that, theoretically, seems least defensible: The Jew Of Malta.TS Eliot's famous reference to its 'savage, comic humour' has been triumphantly vindicated in productions by Clifford Williams and Barry Kyle: even the lurking anti-semitism pales before Marlowe's exuberantly farcical picture of a world ruled by Machiavellian policy and naked expediency.
But, in the final analysis, I would classify Marlowe as a major poet but a minor dramatist (even Kyd had a better sense of structure). Technically, his one real achievement, as MR Ridley pointed out many years ago, was to give a new freedom and flexibility to the grinding monotony of Gorboduc-style English blank verse. The point was not that he created a regular, five-stress iambic line, but that he didn't: that he offered infinite variations on the norm.
Ridley quotes one of his most famous lines - 'See, see where Christ's blood streams in the firmament' - with its five heavy stresses in the first six syllables, as conclusive proof of his liberating non-conformity.
For the real evidence of his genius, however, read Hero And Leander. It switches, easily and blithely, as JB Steane noted, from heroic and romantic to mock heroic and burlesque. It also makes brilliant use of couplets, both to satirise the nice delays of virginal teasing and to celebrate the giddy raptures of sexual fulfilment. You won't find a much better description of night-before coquetry than:
She, with a kind of granting, put him by it,
And ever, as he thought himself most nigh it,
Like to the tree of Tantalus she fled,
And, seeming lavish, sav'd her maidenhead.
Nor will you find many better accounts of morning-after skittishness than:
But as her naked feet were whipping out,
He on the sudden cling'd her so about,
That mermaid-like unto the floor she slid,
One half appeared, the other half was hid.
Playful, grave, ironic and impassioned, it is one of the best poems about sex in the language. It also suggests that Marlowe's genius was for the lyric-satiric rather than the strenuous demands of dramatic storytelling and characterisation. For dedicated Marlovians, as the quatercentenary of his death approaches, it offers the best possible defence against Shaw's brutal, intemperate iconoclasm.
Dido, Queen of Carthage
A theater review
Cottesloe, London
by Michael Billington
The Guardian, Wednesday 25 March 2009
Aside from a grotesquely silly, adventure-playground production at Shakespeare's Globe, Marlowe's first play has been little seen on the modern stage.
But James Macdonald's fascinating revival proves that the piece, written around 1585 for the Children of the Chapel Royal, is much more than an historical curiosity: it has about it the authentic whiff of tragedy.
Marlowe's play looks backward to Virgil, and forward to Shakespeare. It goes to the Aeneid of Virgil for its basic story of how the Trojan survivor Aeneas was rescued by the Carthaginian queen and then dumped her to fulfil his destiny of founding a new race in Italy.
But it is also intriguing to see how much Shakespeare later took from Marlowe. Aeneas's graphic description of Priam's grisly fate is echoed and parodied by the First Player in Hamlet.
The hero's attempt to escape Dido's clamorous clutches prefigures Antony and Cleopatra.
Even Shakespeare's final play, The Tempest, with its references to Carthage and widow Dido, owes a debt to Marlowe's first.
But, in reviving the play, Macdonald has done something increasingly rare: he has given us a straight, sober rendering of an unfamiliar work and forced us to listen to the text.
And what we learn is that Marlowe's characters are constantly torn between divine intervention and human impulse.
Why does Dido first fall for Aeneas? Because she has been pierced by Cupid's love-dart. And why does Aeneas finally desert Dido? Because he is under orders from Jove's messenger.
Yet, within these imperatives, the characters agonisingly wrestle with the heart's affections. The wretched Aeneas declares himself loath to leave his Libyan bonds. Even more movingly, Dido cries "If thou wilt stay, leap in mine arms; mine arms are open wide" – lines that TS Eliot accurately declared Shakespeare himself might have written.
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