The Sheila Variations

Happy birthday to Christopher Marlowe

"The 26th day of February was christened Christofer the sonne of John Marlow." -- the register of St. George the Martyr, Canterbury

(So today is his baptism day, not his actual birthday, but whatever, it's close enough.)

(this 1585 portrait is widely thought to be of Marlowe)

I love Christopher Marlowe.

This is from Doctor Faustus - a famous excerpt:.

The Face that Launched a Thousand Ships

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss:
Her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies:
And all is dross that is not Helena:
I will be Paris, and for love of thee,
Instead of Troy shall Wertenberg be sack'd,
And I will combat with weak Menelaus,
And wear thy colours on my plumed crest:
Yea I will wound Achillis in the heel,
And then return to Helen for a kiss.
O thou art fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars,
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter,
When he appear'd to hapless Semele,
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa's azur'd arms,
And none but thou shalt be my paramour.

SOME QUOTES ON MARLOWE:

"No leaf he wrote on but was like a burning glass to set on fire all his readers." -- Thomas Nashe, a friend of Marlowe's

"His father lacked cash, always a grave trouble for the family. The chief cause of this lay not in John's imprudence, but in the fact that payments to shoemakers were often made by either bond or book, which meant that a cobbler often waited for cash while his tanning needs made matters worse. Still, if cash and credit's mysteries intrigued Christopher, his father's shop did not. In a juvenile play - which may be his apprentice work if it dates from about 1580 - the script refers, somewhat condescendingly, to Kent and cobblers. Certainly, throughout his writing career, Marlowe avoided his father's trade, and in this he was unlike the poet of Stratford. Whereas Shakespeare, as the son of a Midlands glover and processor of leather, readily alludes to a glover's implements or to animal skins, Marlowe, in his known work, never uses words such as shoe, shoemaker, sew, or sole (as for a shoe), but distances himself from his father's concerns. At various times, when he refers to leather, or boots, or even when he uses the word sell, the allusions are oddly repulsive:

Covetousness: begotten of an old Churl in a leather bag (Doctor Faustus (1616)

wormeaten leathern targets (His version of Lucan's Pharsalia)

As if he had meant to clean my Boots with his lips (The Jew of Malta)

our boots which lie foul upon our hands (Doctor Faustus, (1604)

You will not sell it [a sacred crown], would you? (Tamburlaine, Part One)

"Such lines may suggest hatred not of the cobbler but of his work, and we can be sure that he never envied John Marlowe's slavery." -- Park Honan, "Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy"

"The place and the value of Christopher Marlowe as a leader among English poets it would be almost impossible for historical criticism to over-estimate. To none of them all, perhaps, have so many of the greatest among them been so deeply and so directly indebted. Nor was ever any great writer's influence upon his fellows more utterly and unmixedly an influence for good. He first, and he alone, guided Shakespeare into the right way of work; his music, in which there is no echo of any man's before him, found its own echo in the more prolonged but hardly more exalted harmony of Milton's. He is the greatest discoverer, the most daring and inspired pioneer, in all our poetic literature. Before him there was neither genuine blank verse nor a genuine tragedy in our language. After his arrival the way was prepared, the paths were made straight, for Shakespeare. " -- Algernon Charles Swinburne

"Everyone imitated Marlowe. His first play, Tamburlaine, was staged when he was 23, and its success can most readily be gauged by its imitators. As David Riggs notes in his new biography, The World of Christopher Marlowe, within the next couple of years three new plays were staged that were more or less direct copies of Marlowe's original, while Shakespeare wrote his early Henry VI plays under the influence of Marlowe's style. A decade later, as the church authorities burned copies of Marlowe's semipornographic love poems in the streets, Shakespeare again returned to imitating his predecessor in As You Like It. Marlowe's contemporaries regarded him with a mixture of awe and fear." -- Daniel Swift in "The Nation"

"In common with the greatest - Marlowe, Webster, Tourner, and Shakespeare - they had a quality of sensuous thought, or of thinking through the senses, or of the senses thinking, of which the exact formular remains to be defined." -- T.S. Eliot on the Elizabethan-Jacobean poets

"What an example for our distracted poetry, which so often now strikes at the absolute and achieves the commonplace! These poets [George Chapman and Christopher Marlowe] lived life from the ground upwards." -- Edgell Rickword, 1924

"The unity of tone and purpose in Doctor Faustus is not unrelieved by change of manner and variety of incident. The comic scenes, written evidently with as little of labour as of relish, are for the most part scarcely more than transcripts, thrown into the form of dialogue, from a popular prose History of Dr Faustus, and therefore should be set down as little to the discredit as to the credit of the poet. Few masterpieces of any age in any language can stand beside this tragic poem - it has hardly the structure of a play - for the qualities of terror and splendour, for intensity of purpose and sublimity of note. In the vision of Helen, for example, the intense perception of loveliness gives actual sublimity to the sweetness and radiance of mere beauty in the passionate and spontaneous selection of words the most choice and perfect; and in like manner the sublimity of simplicity in Marlowe's conception and expression of the agonies endured by Faustus under the immediate imminence of his doom gives the highest note of beauty, the quality of absolute fitness and propriety, to the sheer straightforwardness of speech in which his agonizing horror finds vent ever more and more terrible from the first to the last equally beautiful and fearful verse of that tremendous monologue which has no parallel in all the range of tragedy." -- Algernon Charles Swinburne

"His narrator [in Hero and Leander] is abrupt, devil-may-care, often unreliable, but brilliant enough to be worth listening to, even though he might be asking us to buy him another drink. One thinks of Chaucer's Canterbury-bound raconteurs, but a much closer parallel exists in works such as T.S. Eliot's 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', or again in monologues by Frost, Lowell, or Tony Harrison. In other words, Marlowe foreshadows the method of the dramatic and psychological monologue. What the narrator says is slanted, but one is encouraged to see through the aberrant report to the real state of psyches, and beyond that to symbols of the human condition. The poem takes a giant step ahead in form, and the form itself partly arises from Marlowe's need to conceal his feelings; he never permits himself, here or elsewhere, a direct viewpoint of his own. He uses hyperbolic images to distance sexual love, but then explores what might be his, or anyone's initial experience of it. If the action is cruel, its shame and pain are offset by fumbling tenderness. Nor can we blame the tale-teller for being perverse of inconsistent. Typically, the narrator digresses in an anecdote about Mercury, loses the story's thread or its relation to the love-story, and so becomes irrelevant, only to enthral in all that he says. His voice has so strong a movement that nothing impedes it, and the poem's beauty begins to look inevitable, though no more consciously planned than nature's forms may be. Nothing is overtly patterned in Hero except for the stepping stones of its couplet rhymes. One result is that it becomes a laboratory of the imagination, even a discourse about writing, and a work so free of correctness that it exhibits at every turn the primacy of creativity itself.

"Marlowe's major poem has been admired for centuries, though never more avidly than by the Victorians. It's 'riot of passion and of delight in the beauty of colour and form,' wrote George Saintsbury, 'has never been approached by any writer'. For Havelock Ellis, the poem was 'the brightest flower of the English Renaissance,' and Swinburne, with Hero and Leander doubtless in mind, called its poet 'alone the true Apollo of our dawn.' Such praise had been foreshadowed in lines which Sir Francis Verney sent to Robert Cecil, then earl of Salisbury, only a few years after Hero was published. Verney hails Marlowe as 'the splendour of our worthless time', as if no other Renaissance poet could touch him." -- Park Honan - on Marlowe's poem "Hero and Leander"

"He took his BA in 1584, his MA three years later, by which time he had probably completed Tamburlaine. He was the first of the university wits to employ blank verse. It's generally thought that most if not all of his small surviving body of nondramatic verse - Hero and Leander, 'The Passionate Shepherd', and the Ovid and Lucan translations - were written in his university years, the fruit of youth and relative leisure. The six years that elapsed between his taking his MA and his shadowy death - possibly as a result of drink, or low political intrigue, or a romantic entanglement with a rough character 'fitter to be a pimp, than an ingenious amoretto', or perhaps a tussle over the bill ('le recknynge') - at the hand of Ingram Frisar in a Deptford tavern on 30 May 1593 were busy ones. He wrote plays, was attacked for atheism, was associated (if it existed) with Raleigh's 'School of Night,' and lodged with Thomas Kyd (author of The Spanish Tragedy), who later brought charges of blasphemy against him. These he had to answer before the Privy Council in 1593, the very council that secretly employed him to spy on English Catholics on the Continent. He achieved much in a short life." -- Michael Schmidt, "Lives of the Poets"

"If one takes The Jew of Malta not as a tragedy, or as a 'tragedy of blood,' but as a farce, the concluding act becomes intelligible; and if we attend with a careful ear to the versification, we find that Marlowe develops a tone to suit this farce, and even perhaps that this tone is his most powerful and mature tone." -- T.S. Eliot

"He was no timorous servile flatterer of the commonwealth wherein he lived. His tongue and his invention were foreborn; what they thought, they would confidently utter. Princes he spared not, that in the least point transgressed." -- Thomas Nashe

"In Marlowe's superb verse there is very little to indicate that the writer had ever encountered any human beings." -- James Branch Cabell

"Marlowe painted gigantic ambitions, desires for impossible things, longings for a beauty beyond earthly conception, and sovereigns destroyed by the very powers which had raised them to their thrones. Tamburlaine, Faust, Barabbas are the personifications of arrogance, ambition and greed. There is sometimes a touch of the extravagant or bombastic, or even of the puerile in his plays, for he had no sense of humor; nor had he the ability to portray a woman. He wrote no drama on the subject of love. Furthermore, his world is not altogether our world, but a remote field of the imagination." -- Martha Fletcher Bellinger, 1927

"Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, like Goethe's Faust, finds himself before the specter of Helen (the idea that Helen of Troy was a ghost or apparition is already present in the ancients) and says to her, 'Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.' And then, 'O thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.' He does not say 'evening sky,' but 'evening air.' All of Copernican space is present in that word air, the infinite space that was one of the revelations of the Renaissance, the space in which we still believe, despite Einstein, that space that came to supplant the Ptolomaic system which presides over Dante's triple comedy." -- Jorge Luis Borges

"And so it befell, in that affray, that the said Ingram, in the defence of his life, with the dagger aforesaid of the value of twelve pence, gave the said Christopher a mortal wound above his right eye." -- Coroner's inquest, 1593

I'm armed with more than complete steel,
The justice of my quarrel.
Christopher Marlowe, Lust's Dominion. Act iii. Sc. 4.

"He came to London to seek his fortune . . . a boy in years, a man in genius, a god in ambition. Who knows to what heights he might have risen but for his untimely end?" -- Swinburne

More on Christopher Marlowe here.

Here's a link to Marlowe's Hero and Leander.

Excerpt from Tamburlaine here.

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