INTRODUCTION
Late medieval cultural movement in Europe brought renewed
interest in Classical learning and values. The Renaissance began in
Italy during the late 13th century and spread throughout Europe in
the 15th century, ending finally in the 16th and 17th century.1 This
‘spirit’ of Renaissance flowed north across Europe and entered
England as ‘New Learning’. Its adventurous ideas soon began to
affect most levels of English society. The main object was the
discovery of treasures of learning and literature of a remote past.
The period of this movement was revival of art and literature under
the influence of classical models between the 14th and 16th century.
2
The term Renaissance, therefore, etymologically means ‘to
be born again’, ‘rebirth’, and indicates a phenomenon of
regeneration in the life of an individual, or a nation, or a more
extensive part of the world comprising several nations.2
The essential condition for the coming of the Renaissance is
that this discovery should make an impact on the mind of
discoverer and goad him to reproduce literature to match what he
has discovered. It means that the Renaissance brought with it an
insatiable thirst for knowledge and power. The knowledge places in
one’s hand the key to power, desires, ambitions and aspirations, and
in their fulfilment one strays from the path of righteousness.
Although Renaissance had its advent in England quite latemuch after it was already in force in Italy and its flowering in
France, the new sensibility dates in England from very early times,
and the actual Renaissance in England has its distinctive
characteristics not found in the renaissance of any other country. As
compared with those in France and Italy the chief peculiarities of
the Renaissance in England are the following: the reviving breath
came to literature later and more slowly; humanism had for a long
3
time no decisive effect on either poetry or prose; and the language
scarcely attained its full growth by the beginning of the sixteenth
century. Rich in all its manifestations though the English literature
of the Renaissance may be, the drama is its chief glory, just as it is
the nation’s most direct and original expression. Drama, therefore,
is the most important subject for study at this time; it is also the
most difficult subject. The number and diversity of the plays make
classification difficult; while the lack of sufficient dates makes it
almost impossible to obtain a clear outline of the evolution of the
theatrical world. True, the so-called ‘University wits’, did at one
time think that English drama could come up only by observing
more rigorously the Aristotelian principles and it was true also that
there was in the beginning for sometime at least, a craze for
Seneca’s tragical devices and style.
They were all men of academic training, and had thus been
brought into personal touch with new learning and had absorbed its
spirit, at one or other of the two great institutions of scholarship.
But, with one exception, they gave their talents to the public stage,
and it is certain that the strongly pronounced taste of their audience
had a good deal to do with the class of drama which they produced.
4
Arranged roughly in order of time, they are: JOHN LYLY (1554?–
1606); THOMAS KYD (1557?–1595?); ROBERT GREENE
(1560?–1592); CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564-1593); and
THOMAS NASH (1576–1601). 3
The Renaissance was very much the glory of the Roman
Catholic Church. Bishops and abbots in England welcomed it.
There was in England Christopher Marlowe, one of the star figures
among the ‘University Wits’. He wrote these four famous plays:
Tamburlaine (1587), Doctor Faustus (1588), The Jew of Malta
(1590), Edward II (1592) and also The Massacre at Paris and
Dido, Queen of Carthage including a poem named Hero and
Leander.
Christopher Marlowe has been identified as one of the
greatest of the pre-Shakespearean dramatists. He was born in Parish
Church, St. George, the Martyr, at Canterbury in February 1564 of
a family that originated in Ospringe, to-day part of Faversham. His
father John Marlowe was a shoemaker in ancient Canterbury and
Katharine, formerly Katharine Arthur. Out of nine children
Marlowe was the second. At the age of fifteen, in 1579 he attended
5
the king’s school at Canterbury situated along the route from Dover
to London which was a busy city. And then in the winter of 1580,
Marlowe arrived in Cambridge at the Archbishop Parker scholar at
Corpus Christi College, one of the oldest colleges in the University.
When he arrived at Cambridge in December 1580, Marlowe was
seventeen and he formerly matriculated in March, 1581. A total of
six year’s study led to an M.A. which Marlowe achieved in 1587.
In 1587 the University authorities considered withholding his
M.A. (he was rumoured to be about to defect to the catholic
seminary at Rheims), until Privy Council intervened to point out
that in his absence from Cambridge he had done the queen ‘good
service’ a phrase usually taken to mean spying – ‘and deserved to
be rewarded for his faithful dealing’.4 He got his M.A. but instead
of taking holy orders he began writing plays for the London
theatres, disreputable places – at least in the eyes of the godlypeople, which were under constant attack as dense of iniquity.
Marlowe was one of the dramatists among a group of
educationists known as ‘University Wits’, who wrote dramas. By
6
1587, Marlowe had already made a name for himself among the
London Dramatists.
At Corpus Christi, Marlowe spent time in self-set tasks of
Latin translation from Lucan’s De Bello Civili into English blank
verse and Ovid’s Amores into rhyming couplets, such as he used
later in Hero and Leander. In this we see him honing this poetic
skill to emerge as England’s greatest poet-dramatist. Thus, he also
began to write his play, probably from the age of eighteen. At
Cambridge he is thought by some historians to have written the
lyrical drama ‘Dido, Queen of Carthage’ based on Virgil’s epic
poem. Marlowe had been writing poetry and performing plays ever
since his king’s school days. His education fashioned him to
become the innovative genius who first conceived and created
Shakespearean blank verse drama. This is why Tennyson hailed
him as “The Morning Star”5 of the great dramatic flowering of
Elizabethan England. In an incident, Ingram Frizer fatally stabbed
Christopher Marlowe. This happened in May 30, 1593 and he was
buried at Deptford on June 1.
7
Socio-Political Background: Elizabeth’s aim was always a
united and independent England. Unity meant also religious unity.
The main problem was how to balance the desire of the Catholics
with those of the Protestants. Her reign was one of the longest in
English history. Englishmen today think of it as also one of the
best. She had been given the friendly title, ‘Good Queen Bess’ –
‘Bess’ being a short name for Elizabeth. The country over which
she reigned became known as ‘Marrie England’. She had golden
red hair. Her body was tall and commanding. She was a proper
queen. She was clothed in rich purple when she rode at the centre of
a thousand lords and ladies into London. England under Elizabeth
had been compared with the human body. The queen-in parliament
was its head, guarding it from confusion and guiding its behaviour.
The church-men were its eyes, ‘to watch and not to sleep’. The
judge and the magistrates were its ears to hear complaints.
The great men – nobles and councillors, ministers and governors –
were its shoulders and arms, to hold up the head and defend the
commonwealth with might and force. The men of the lower classes
were merely the supporters of the body. Their duty was to work, to
produce wealth, so that the commonwealth could be developed.
8
There were two groups of lower classes, viz: Yeoman and Squire.
At court there were madrigals, sweet poems sung by four or five
voices together. At court, and also in the great country houses,
gentlemen wrote music for many sorts of stringed and winged
instruments. There were masques, too, in which poetry and music
were combined with dramatic action. And in whatever place the
queen stayed, there was always dancing.
Elizabeth’s court was a gay and colourful place. The
gentlemen wore stocking up to the knee, above that padded trousers
called trunk hose (gathered in at the knee), and above that a shirt
called a doublet with a jerkin over it, padded at the stomach. Ladies
wore, under long, full skirts, a padded roll round their hips-a French
farthingale. The farthingale made the skirt stand out square from the
body. The dress above it had a pointed waist.
So gentlemen and ladies were both colourful, and both kinds
of dress followed fashion. Everybody wore wide ruffs, stiff
ornamental collars, round their necks. Many men also grew
fashionable pointed beards.
9
The court was always moving, following the queen ‘on
progresses’ allover the southern shires. The court travelled from
Whitehall down the river to Greenwich, or up to Richmond,
Hampton, Windsor and Oxford, with crowds of people kneeling as
the queen passed by.
In each palace the queen enjoyed a private withdrawing
Chamber, where she lived with her ladies and received only her
favourite friends. In the Privy Chamber she talked business with her
councillors. To the outer Presence Chamber she came sometimes to
mix with the mass of her countries and be publicly entertained.
Statesmen and ministers, ambassadors and courtiers, scholars
and church-men and business-men, artists and musicians and
writers, all gathered round her like insects round a bright light.
Elizabeth’s royal manner, her quick brain, her sharp tongue and her
good common sense, all these turned confusion into order. The
court was a place of good government. It had been said that
Elizabeth’s courtiers came and went, but her ministers stayed for a
life-time. All the chief officials lived at court. It was the place of
their work and a second home. To be sent away from court was not
10
only to lose a good position; it was bad as being excommunicated
from church, or sent into the outer darkness. Perhaps it was even
worse. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ is an old English saying. With
Elizabeth, it was often ‘out of sight, in evil mind’. This queen
linked to see everything that was happening in the politics of her
kingdom. Her secretary of state kept royal spies everywhere.
A spy system was necessary to government in an unsafe age
and also as reward for good service. But the queen was the
government, and the government was the state, and the state was
the commonwealth, and the commonwealth was the good of the
people. It was all one thing, a unity in Elizabeth’s England, and it
could not be separated.6
Marlowe’s plays were produced to understand something of
the situations in which politics and religion interacted in
Elizabethan England. Marlowe’s texts are scarred with the traces of
religious and political conflict. This is to say that we can make a
tentative connection between the popular and the political when we
examine the kind of satire Marlowe unleashes of Catholicism in his
plays The Jew of Malta. This is a form of political propaganda that
11
would presumably have gone down well with the majority of a
London theatre audience as well as Queen Elizabeth and her court.
In this sense, not only were religion and politics enmeshed into one
another, but theatre and society were also. Furthermore, as we have
already seen, his life seems to have flared up and burned out at the
point where the two collided. In one sense, the issue of cultural
difference is again paramount when we come to investigate
Marlowe’s religious beliefs. There are passages in the major plays
that might strike us of being unorthodox for an Elizabethan, and we
shall consider the more details of the dramas in the following pages.
Doctor Faustus is obviously remarkable for its portrayal of a man
brave and foolish enough to dismiss hell as a ‘fable’ while
conducting a conversation with a devil. But there are numerous
other examples in Faustus and elsewhere of what an orthodox
Elizabethan would perceive as heresy. The social backgrounds of
Marlowe’s famous plays are as follows:
Tamburlaine: The first part of Tamburlaine was the most
likely written while Marlowe was still at Cambridge, possibly in
1587.
Tamburlaine certainly made a considerable impact on
London cultural life when it exploded onto the stage in 1587. In its
12
own fashion, it could be seen as the first “block-buster’ of its times,
or more accurately, the first blockbuster. Actually, Marlowe was
one of the first playwrights to take blank verse from epic poetry to
the English stage. The use of give-stress lines that were unrhymed
had a huge liberating effect, freeing writers from the tyranny of
rhyming couplets while also pinpointing the pattern that seems to
replicate most closely the natural rhymes of English Speech. It is
said that the Tamburlaine plays remain fairly conservative in terms
of metrical experimentation sometimes sticking uncomfortably and
rigidly to iambic pentameters when an unstressed syllable is
followed by a stressed syllable. The dying speech of Cosroe in
Tamburlaine is characteristic of such technique:
The strangest men the ever Nature made:
I know not how to take their tyrannies.
My bloodless body waxeth chill and cold,
And with my blood my life slides through my wound.
My soul begins to take her flight to hell,
And summons all my senses to depart:7
13
Outwardly, Tamburlaine is a ten-act history play: essentially, it is a
soaring piece of almost epical poetry, often wildly extravagant but
adorned with moments of dazzling lyric beauty. In part II the hero
extends his conquests, though he is somewhat shaken by the loss of
Zenocrate and the cowardice of one of their sons. At last, glutted
with blood, intoxicated with success and broken in health, the
madly orders an assault on the power of Heaven. But now his
armies are helpless; he is beaten at last; Death is the final victor.
Doctor Faustus: It was written in 1588. It was considered to
be the best play of Marlowe because in this play he was able to
handle quite successfully the classic elements of tragedy that is pity
and terror. The theme of Faustus is power and this time power
through knowledge. It is the insatiable hunger for knowledge
through which Faustus sought to subdue wealth and death to work
out his own doom.
Having failed in his attempt to gain infinite power through
knowledge, he strikes a bargain with the devil and the later half of
the play shows his ‘agonised struggle to escape damnation. In spite
14
of his such effort, Faustus is ultimately damned for his intellectual
presumption.
He achieved so little as the price of his soul in the second
half of the play. Faustus begins to waver and bitterly accuses
Mephistopheles of depriving him of the everlasting joys of heaven,
when he realizes that his twenty four years’ lease of life is up and
that nothing can save him from an eternity of torment. Marlowe
excelled in depicting the scenes of agony. In a sense, this is also
true of Doctor Faustus. As a dark morality play, the play ‘tells the
world – story of a man who, seeking for all knowledge, pledged his
soul to the devil, only to find the misery of a hopeless repentance in
this world and damnation in the world to come. 8
As Tamburlaine aspired to be the world’s master by force of
arms, Faustus sought it through knowledge; thus Marlowe exhibits
in this play another aspect of the Renaissance, will to freedom. In
its original form Doctor Faustus must have been a sublime poem,
and it still retains what Tamburlaine lacks, scenes of primarily
dramatic power.
15
The Jew of Malta: It was written in 1590 and was
performed on 26th February 1592. The central theme here is pursuit
of wealth and like Tamburlaine, its hero Barabas, the Jew, is
conceived on a grand scale in the beginning of the play. Briefly, it
tells the story of a villainous Jew named Barabas who, having had
his wealth confiscated by the Christians who ruled the island of
Malta, takes his revenge on the Governor and his knights. The very
idea of the Jew makes the use of these figures as an associate of the
Christian audience alarming, cunning and subversive. What is setup
in The Jew of Malta is something that will be far less certain in the
Merchant of Venice when it appears several years later. Barabas too
is motivated by the will for power which he seeks to fulfil through
possession of gold. He becomes then a prototype of the
Machiavellian-villain on English stage and is characteristic
enunciated by the Florentine Philosopher that is Machiavelli
himself, whom Marlowe brings on the stage. Herry Levin says:
Barabas, the Jew, is a man whith
A grievance, but his relation
Outturns the provocation. His revenges,
argumented by his ambitions,
16
are so through – going that the
revenger becomes a villain.
He is not merely less sinned
Against than sinning;9
The Jew of Malta is undoubtedly the most problematic of
Marlowe’s plays. The portrayal of a Jew in terms that are hard to
see as anything other than anti-Semitic brings us up against the
important issue of ethnic identity and social prejudice.
Barabas, like Faustus and Tamburlaine, is a child of
Renaissance; though he is not like them a hero, but a hero-villain.
The play is a melodrama rather than a tragedy, or, as has been
seriously suggested, a farce. Barabas is the crafty (to the
Elizabethans, Machiavellian) scoundrel who, clever as he is, finally
overreaches himself. The conclusion is irresistible that, whatever
his original intention, Marlowe turned his efforts into capitalizing
anti-Semitic prejudice.
Edward II: Marlowe’s last play is Edward II, a tragic study
of king’s weakness and misery. In point of style and dramatic
17
construction, it is by far the best of Marlowe’s plays, and is a
worthy predecessor of Shakespeare’s historical drama. This play is
a case in point: probably first performed during the winter of 1592,
it was a key text in the establishment of a new genre in English
drama, the ‘history’ play.
On the greater dramatist’s technical development afterwards
Marlowe’s most mature play may have exerted considerable
influence. On the other hand, there are fewer lyrical outbursts in it
than in the earlier works; and it is curious that Marlowe’s best play
seems less Marlovian than the others.
When Marlowe composed Edward II, can be seen from a
number of different perspectives, and over the centuries of
performance and critical commentary, it has been interpreted as a
story about the conflict between the personal and the political; as a
story of the legitimacy of revolt against an inadequate and
ineffectual monarch; as a homosexual love story; and as a story of
an ‘Overreacher’ – Mortimer.
18
It depicts the beginning of the erosion of a rigid, stratified
social hierarchy, with clear-cut division between the classes, from
peasant and labourer, all the way through the ranks to the monarch
who balances at the hierarchy’s apex. Apparently, what irks the
barons is not the nature of the sexual relationship between Edward
and Gaveston, but the fact that Gaveston is of a low social class and
obscure birth.
The structure of Edward II shows the unevenness of a
transitional work. It is evident that Marlowe was developing, both
technically and in the more important scenes. It might even be
hazarded that he was developing towards a more “Shakespearean”
(That is, a more inclusive) style, for in Edward II. There can be
found the most formalized qualities of feeling, and the most
naturally human.
Renaissance Movement in Art: Inspired by the works of
writers of ancient Greece and Rome, Renaissance artists produced
painting and sculpture based on the observation of the visible and
practical world according to mathematical principles of balance,
harmony and perspective. The new static’s tenets found expression
19
in the work of such Italian artists as LEONARDO DA VENCI,
SANDRO
BOTTICELLI,
RAPHAEL,
TITIAN,
and
MICHELANGELO, and the city of Florence became the centre of
Renaissance art. In the world by letters, HUMANIST such as
DESIDERUS ERASMUS rejected religious orthodoxy in favour of
the study of human nature and such writers as PETRARCH and
GIOVANI BOCCACCIO in Italy, FRANCOIS RABELAIS in
France, and WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE in England produced
works that emphasized the intricacies of human character.10
The term has also been applied to cultural revivals in
England in the 8th century, the Frankish kingdoms in the 9th century,
and Europe in the 12th century. Even the style of architecture,
reflecting the rebirth of classical culture that originated in Florence
in the early 15th century spread throughout Europe, replacing the
medieval Gothic style of the Cathedrals of Salisbury and old St.
Paul’s in England and Natre Dame de Paris in France. It shows that
Renaissance architecture developed the principles and forms of
antique classics on a new basis. Classicism canonized the
compositional devices of antiquity. So, the style was marked by
heavy ornament, complex articulation and spatial relationships,
20
decorousness, emotional elevation and exultation and contrasting
forms. On other hand, in antiquity drawing and painting were close
to each other and to literature. In the Renaissance period painting
flourished and became the leading art. It seemed to be best medium
for expressing anti ascetic and anti-scholastic pathos of the epoch.
The rejoicing in the richness of life, its spiritual and sensuous
beauty, Renaissance artists asserted the universal human relevance
of painting which did not, like literature, need translation
(Raphael’s Madonna).11
Moreover, re-discovery was symbolically announced through
two works of art, both by Michelangelo (1475-1564) – one, a
painting and the other, a piece of sculpture, to wit, ‘The Creation of
Man’ and ‘David’. Encouraged by Florentine Neo-Platonism,
Michelangelo took inspiration for all his works of art from the
beauty and divine grace of the human body. Between 1508 and
1512, he painted on the ceiling of Sistine Chapel at Rome, nine
paintings of which only one is generally referred to in the context of
the Renaissance – ‘The Creation of Man’. In the “Creation of Man”
he has depicted Adam sprawling in all his muscular nudity as
though awakened out of sleep, and not ashamed but proud of his
21
nude body, and the same quality in his sculpture ‘David’, the
anatomical exactitude with which we view the best pieces of Greek
sculpture, showing an improvement on the latter in its mobile
expressiveness. There is nothing in human body to be ashamed of,
or which needs to be mortified. This is what Michelangelo has
depicted in the other eight panels. 12
To conclude this chapter it can be said that, the Renaissance
and the new learning had led to a spirit of adventure. This spirit was
given freedom by the political peace and unity which existed during
Elizabeth’s reign. Adventures of the mind led to splendid literature,
music and art. Adventures of the body resulted in the exploration of
the oceans and discovery of far lands. The national spirit and spirit
of the adventure both sprang, mainly, from the Anglican protestant
society and the strength of both of them lay mainly into two
particular social groups: The yeoman and the squire. Although men
were not equal but were free at that time. There were freedoms to
mix with other classes, freedom of opportunity to make profits and
freedom to rise up the social ladder. Men of the different religious
opinions were willing to come together in order to defend these
freedoms against threats from inside and outside the country. Such
22
images were reflected in the plays of Christopher Marlowe and
further, the various characteristics of Renaissance in Marlowe’s
plays will be discussed in detail in the forthcoming chapters.
23
Reference
1.
Alok Wadhwa. Britannica: Ready Reference Encyclopedia
(New Delhi: Britannica Pvt. Ltd., n.d.) p.143.
2.
Naresh Chandra. The Literature of the English Renaissance
(New Delhi: DOABA HOUSE, 1985), p.2.
3.
William Henry Hudson. An outline History of English
Literature (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors,
1999), p. 67.
4.
Frederick S. Boas. Christopher Marlowe: A Biographical
and Critical Study (Oxford: n.p. 1940), p.22.
5.
C. David. Christopher Marlowe : A Critical Study (New
Delhi: Anmole Publication Pvt. Ltd.., 2007), p.4.
6.
Anthony Toyne. An English – Reader’s History of England
(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 125.
7.
Stevie Simkin. Marlowe (Delhi: Pearson Education Ltd.,
2003), p.74.
8.
Felix E. Schelling. English Drama (London: n.p. 1914), p.
68.
24
9.
A.K. Khullar. Christopher Marlowe’s Edward the Second
(Chandigarh: Abhishek Publication, 1980), p.7.
10.
Alok Wadhwa. Britannica: Ready Reference Encyclopedia.
p.143.
11.
Yuri Borev. Aesthetics (USSR: Progress Publication, 1985),
p. 251.
12.
Naresh Chandra. The Literature of the English Renaissance,
p. 47.