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CONCLUSION
The Renaissance was the name of a many-sided but yet
discovered movement of the fresh sources of art: new experiences,
new subjects, new approach, new forms of art etc. One of the main
aspects of the new learning was, as pointed out earlier, freedom
from tutelage of the ancients and arbitrary authority. It came to
mean hope and self-reliance, the motive force of knowledge and
power, and of the discovery of man and the world. The Renaissance
obviously affected the plays of Christopher Marlowe.
Christopher Marlowe (1564-93), predecessor of Shakespeare
and one of the ‘University Wits’, was an enlightened English
dramatist and poet, who established himself first as a master of
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blank verse, a creative form of dramatic expression. His
biographical sketch; his literary achievements; and unique dramatic
style and technique; containing relevant facts and impressive
information about the Renaissance period are presented in the
foregoing chapters of this thesis.
It contains studies on the valuable elements of the period
right from 14th to 16th century, especially Renaissance spirits
reflected in the different plays of Christopher Marlowe. Christopher
Marlowe’s original works were the two parts of Tamburlaine the
Great (1587); Doctor Faustus (1588); The Jew of Malta (1590);
and Edward the Second (1592).
The period of Marlowe’s dramatic activity comprises six
brief years, from 1587 to 1593. Yet during those six years he wrote
his splendid plays – all reflecting his essential spirit and nature, all
full of passions. Each drama centers round some overmastering
passion – wild and intemperate passion that grows and develops. He
created genuine blank verse and firmly established it as the most
appropriate medium of poetic drama. The lust for empire, the lust
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for lucre, the lust for knowledge and the lust for beauty and passion
– these form the background as well as the mainspring of his plays.
A master-idealist Marlowe is one of the foremost
representative writers of Elizabethan artistic movement who lived
for his art. Marlowe is to be remembered and valued not as a mere
impulse giver and path-finder who paved the way for the typical
English tragedy; and not merely as the wielder of blank verse as a
noble poetic instrument, but also as a master of the ‘mighty line’.
Marlowe blazed a new trial both in thought and technique –
in matter as well as manner, and in its footsteps a new perfection
treads. His familiar domain was not of men’s manners and habits,
and customs and conventions. But his concern was with needs and
necessities of human souls. Not man’s relation to man but man’s
relation to God and to the universe was the theme dear to Marlowe.
The element that is eternal in man, and the spirit that is significant
of man who have the potency of arraying themselves against the
universe if necessary, were the sole concerns of Marlowe as a
playwright.
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The following three characteristics of Marlowe’s works are
the most striking ones viz.: its pictorial quality, its ecstatic quality
and its vitalizing energy. His pictorial quality is not mere
visualizing of a dreamer’s fancy; it shows the inspiration of that
spirit
of
adventure
which
characterized
the
Renaissance.
Tamburlaine’s passion for conquest is similar to the passion of the
explorers and adventurers like Drake and Hawkins.
Marlowe, at first raised the subject matter of his plays to a
higher level by providing heroic subjects that readily appealed to
the imagination of the audience. For instance, we find in Marlowe’s
plays that Tamburlaine is great conqueror, that Faustus is a great
seeker of knowledge and power, that Barabas has the strongest lust
for unlimited wealth and that Edward II has great nobility mingled
with worthlessness. The insatiable spirit of adventure, the master
passions of love and hate, ideas of beauty, the greatness and
littleness of human life – these were Marlowe’s subjects. By using
his brilliant poetic imagination and passionate emotions he glorified
and vitalized and subject matter of his dramas.
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Moreover, Marlowe, by his high poetic artistry and genius,
made it respond to every note in the scale of human passion, and
gave it such naturalness, such ethereal beauty and suppleness, that it
quickly established itself as the most suitable metre for English
poetic drama.
The ecstatic quality of Marlowe’s poetry reveals his easily
excitable moods which are moved to exuberant expression by
certain appeals to the imagination such as the appeal to beauty.
Marlowe, the wistful visionary who always followed the trial of
adventure in life as well as in literature, lived in a self-wrought
world of beauty and wonder. The vitalizing energy of Marlowe’s
poetry is evident in all his four great tragedies.
It is this pervading energy in these plays that forms many an
absurdity and endows them with compelling beauty and elevating
power. Not satisfied with vague descriptions, Marlowe often
actualizes his theme as in the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins in
Doctor Faustus. Such a thing is native to Marlowe’s genius, and is
the outflowing of virile and vital imagination. It is this vitalizing
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energy that imparts to the young poets’ eloquence a vibrant music
that compels the reader’s admiration.
So, the ecstatic quality of Marlowe’s works finds its best
illustration in Faustus’s address to Helen: “Was this the face that
launched a thousand ships?” Thus, the ecstatic note is found in
Tamburlaine the Great and even in The Jew of Malta. It was his
vitalizing energy that redeemed Tamburlaine the Great from
absurdity. The same vitalizing energy lifted his Doctor Faustus to a
high level. This is seen in his characterization. Apart from that, he
used the dramatic blank verse – by infusing variety, vigour and
spontaneous flow and cadence. His successive dramas were
wonderful and almost overwhelming embodiments of the spirit of
Renaissance. All the four plays from his pen were indeed
exemplary of the tragic art in dramatic poetry.
Actually, the plays of Marlowe are so full of poetry that
while culling illustrative extracts, it is difficult to decide what to
leave out and what to include. Poetry transforms material reality of
things into a vision. He was undeniably a poet, but a glance at his
output in poetry will convince anyone that if his fame were to
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depend solely on it, he would have been counted a minor figure
among Elizabethan giants.
Marlowe took his poetic genius into the realm of drama and
infused a new life to drama. Substantial evidence can be brought
forward to show that he frittered away his gift of poetry by
‘straying’ away into drama. To his censure, it has been said that he
becomes unmindful of the dramatic situation and let himself go
when poetic conceits fire his imagination.
In Tamburlaine, Tamburlaine speaks high poetry of
unquenchable aspirations in the most melodious responding verses;
and he gives clean utterance in poetry to express Marlowe’s love of
the impossible power and glory. So also all the dramas had plenty
of descriptive passages and declamatory verses which clearly
indicate the poetic genius and excellence of Marlowe. When
Edward II is asked to surrender his crown we feel the high strain of
poetic emotion of the abdicating king who feels the acutest pain of
resigning the crown:
But stay a while, let me be King till night,
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That I may gaze upon this glittering crown;
So shall my eyes receive their last content,
My head, the latest honour due to it,1
So, the metaphorical fusion of the idea of Marlowe is quite unique.
The style of the verse is the poetic counterpart in unrealized
intention of dramatic action which is often no more than ‘a good
idea for a play’. One of the most perceptive things in Marlowe’s
writing is the dramatic perception derived from a poetic body.
In Kent’s soliloquies, there is the presentation of the usual
varieties of rhetorical embellishment and inflation:
Rain showers of vengeance on my cursed head,
Thou God, to whom in justice it belongs
To punish this unnatural revolt. 2
Marlowe made momentous and revolutionary contribution to
English drama:
i.
He created genuine blank verse, and
most appropriate medium of poetic drama.
165
ii.
He founded English Romantic tragedy.
iii.
He wrote the first great English history play.
And also, at the same time the main defects of his plays are:
imperfect characters of women, want of humour, lack of patriotism,
and gift of individuality etc. It is true that Marlowe could contribute
almost nothing to the genuinely comic side of the drama, nor to the
grace and loveliness of prose dialogue. But he gave strength, force
and vigour to the drama which once for all turned its career for both
greatness and stability. He lifted the drama into the sphere of high
literature. The English stage in his time was in great need of
intensity. Grace, sentiment, wit and fancy had been communicated
to the English drama by various talents of the age – communicated
with reckless and very often ridiculous excess, But Marlowe can
make a drama as a whole a living, pulsating expression of life. The
wits of the age, even some of his close collaborators might mock at
his ‘spacious volubility of a drumming decasyllable’ or at his
‘bragging blank verse’; serious, critical-minded dramatic talents
might find fault with his extravagant one man show, but all the
same they all had to fall in line with him to give their own
productions life and vigour.
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Character of women: Marlowe had little aptitude for
delineating women. In spite of these shortcomings, he possessed a
supreme quality which enabled him to lift drama into the sphere of
high literature. He was a great poet, a lyrical writer who carried
with his own unique conception of man and life. Marlowe’s preoccupation with the overmastering central character, who is always
a male, gives no scope of introduce women. Perhaps there was
something in his temperament which made him unable to study
women. The gentle grace, feminine loveliness, and the warmth of
devoted love, the softness and charm of womanly care-all these
seem to lie beyond the range of Marlowe’s limited comprehension.
Marlowe’s Zenocrate in Tamburlaine plays a shadowy part;
her beauty is celebrated by the mighty Scythian but we have no
acquaintance with her personality. So also in The Jew of Malta
Abigail remains always in the background. Only Isabella in Edward
II is something of a woman; but her womanliness is less prominent
than her part in inflicting the tragic death of her husband. Helen in
Doctor Faustus appears only as a vision. The poetry in which the
167
magician turns to her is noble and sublime but there is no touch of
her character.
Humour: Marlowe’s plays are too serious; there is no comic
relief as there is even in the most serious of Shakespeare’s plays.
The comic scenes in Doctor Faustus are so inapt and incongruous
with the tragic somberness of the main theme that they shock the
sense of artistic propriety of even a sympathetic critic of Marlowe
like Wynne who is forced to remark: “Marlowe must be blamed for
the utter in cogently of so many scenes with high tragedy. The
harmony which rules the construction of Tamburlaine, giving it a
lofty coherence and consistency, is lamentably absent from Doctor
Faustus.” 3
Patriotism: Though Tamburlaine and to some extent Doctor
Faustus with their passionate declaiming sweltered the English
heart with dreams of distant conquests, illimitable power and
mastery of the world, it is remarkable to note that in none of them,
not even in the chronicle play in Edward II, Marlowe breathes any
spirit of national patriotism. Of course, there is nothing of the spirit
of the patriotism. The distinction of Marlowe’s dramatic art is the
168
depiction of the conflict in the tragic hero. There is for instance, on
the eve of signing the contract with the devil, Faustus has an
internal conflict which has been externalized by Marlowe by the
medieval morality device of promptings of the Good Angel and
Evil Angel.
Gift of individuality: Marlowe was the founder of genuine
romantic tragedy, as regards both plot and character. He infused his
central characters and the whole of his dialogue with life and
passion. He was an admirer of Machiavelli whose ideal as
understood by that age was the superman who, having decided what
his goal is to be, presses on to it regardless of scruples of
conscience. It depicts that one character dominates throughout in
Marlowe’s plays. Each of the three main tragedies of Marlowe
Tamburlaine the Great, Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta and
to a great extent his chronicle play of Edward II may be spoken of
as a one-man show. The central character, the hero so much
dominates the play from beginning to end that his towering
personality overshadows everything. “With Marlowe we are in the
presence of a distinctly passionate but unbalanced genius, a man
169
lacking the serenity and the calm-eyed power which gave to
Shakespeare a large part of his greatness.”
A necessary effect of this quality is that the other characters
are vividly drawn and some of them tend to be dwarfed; and that as
the masculine elements predominates the feminine characters
become mere foils to it. The ardour and passion which inspire
Marlowe’s play partly account for the absence of true humour.
Marlowe was a pioneer in those ages of experiment. It is a credit
that he gave a superb individuality to his characters – the heroes of
his tragedies. In fact, Marlowe was too much under the influence of
the Renaissance conception of greatness. On this point we can do
nothing better than quote at some length from the illuminating
observation of A. Nicoll: “we may note the influence of
Machiavelli …… Most heard of him by report, and took him as a
symbol of all that was aesthetically, immoral and corrupt. His
Prince is merely a summing up of regular Renaissance ideals of
conduct; it is the culmination of that individualism which marks off
the newly awakened Europe from the anonymity and communal
ideals of the Middle Ages. Machiavelli had made a god of Virtue,
that quality in man which drives him to find free and full expression
170
of his own thought and emotions. It is this Virtue on which
Marlowe has seized, not without some tremors of conscience in
spite of his liberated mind. So he presents his heroes, Tamburlaine,
Doctor Faustus, and Barabas, over-riding the ordinary moral codes
of their times in order to fine the complete realization of their
particular ideals; in The Jew of Malta he brings Machiavelli
forward in person to speak the prologue to his tragedy.”4 One
important result of this insistence upon Virtue must be noted. Call it
what we please, Virtue, ambition will tend to overlook class, and
accordingly the dramas of Marlowe break away slightly from the
more ancient medieval plan. For the Middle Ages tragedy was a
thing of princes only; for Marlowe it was a thing of individual
heroes. Thus his Tamburlaine, king though he may be by the end of
the drama, is born a simple man. The Jew is but a Mediterranean
money-lender, and Faustus an ordinary German doctor and
alchemist. The medieval conception of the royalty of tragedy is here
supplanted by the Renaissance ideal of individual worth. This is one
of Marlowe’s most outstanding contributions to the development of
English tragedy.
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Style: It was Marlowe and no other dramatists who effected a
magic transfiguration of dramatic matter and dramatic metre;
moulded a new type of heroic and tragic character, designed
tragedies on a magnificent scale and elevated them to heights as yet
un-apprehended in his days, made the instrument of language
produce rolling thunders and whispering sighs, and draped his plays
in the purple robes of his imperial imagination.
Indubitably born a poet, he was the proud possessor of a
magnificent and matchless poetic force. He is an admirable painter
of the human passion. Really he is a man of powerful intellect and
fertile imagination, of indomitable courage and invincible
confidence, a poet of wonderful vision and voice, of peerless beauty
and lustrous intensity, and a supreme master of his own gifted mind
and of golden thought and silver speech.
One the aesthetic side, love of physical beauty mentioned
above goes in him hand in hand with love of the beauty of
harmony; the high astounding terms of his blank verse, the thrills
and echoes of his phrases, the resounding roll of his declamations,
the surfeit of mythological allusions – all these run into excess; but
172
the excesses only point to the essential ambition of reacting beyond
the narrow and the limited into the infinity of achievement, which is
the noblest gift of Renaissance. The writings of Marlowe are the
most prominent embodiments of the spirit of the Renaissance.
Mode of language: The grand, monumental style of the
speeches, with their lyricism and their strong appeal to the
emotions, has found its counterpart in the stage. For instance, the
last scene of the second part of Tamburlaine is a death-bed scene, at
the end of which the protagonist himself dies. In its construction
this scene again illustrates Marlowe’s development of a
‘monumental’ style of presentation, a style which no longer leaves
the set speech in a vacuum. The few critics consider the style and
observe that Marlowe is a master of metaphor. His language style is
enthusiastic commendation. More recent criticism has been more
attentive to the variety of Marlowe’s language in the plays;
especially in Doctor Faustus, the Helen speech, as Harry Levin
notes, stands out from ‘the pithy prose, sharp dialectic, nervous
soliloquies and rhythmic variations of Marlowe’s maturing style’.5
The language of the play is at times reminiscent of Tamburlaine the
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Great, but as M.C. Bradbrook followed by many others – points
out, ‘it can also be more relaxed and colloquial’.6
In the final soliloquy, antithesis seems to be ‘a mere
rhetorical trick’ but is overlaid with reality’. By these means
Wolfgang Clemen considers that Marlowe created a new dramatic
language for the expression of spiritual conflict. 7
If we examine again, the series of important speeches at the
end of Part I of Tamburlaine solely from the point of view of the
language they employ, we cannot avoid the conclusion that here, as
in other episodes, Marlowe’s starting-point was the epic style.
However, he always succeeded in combining these forms of
expression with a dramatic setting. Indeed he created for himself a
dramatic style of presentation which was capable of absorbing a
very large proportion epic language. 8
There are six chapters in the thesis. The following is the
summary contents of these chapters.
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In Chapter I, I have dealt with how the knowledge places in
one’s hands the key to power, desires, ambitions and aspirations
and how in their fulfilment one strays from the path of
righteousness. There is the main social-background of Marlowe’s
dramas.
Chapter II depicts the Renaissance essentially as an
intellectual awakening. It was an effort of the human individual to
rise above the rigidity and narrowness of feudalism and Churchism
and find an expression of his mind and heart in various ways. For
example, the Renaissance spirit stood against self-control and
asceticism on the one hand; it expired after freedom, humanism,
beauty, versatility and such other things which granted the human
soul its utmost scope of expression on the other hand. As a result of
this new spirit of learning and thinking, God went into the
background while man came to the forefront. And also other main
characteristics of Renaissance can be recounted as:
i)
Discovery.
ii)
Expedition.
iii)
Concurrence of the Renaissance with Reformation.
175
iv)
Fine Arts besides poetry, etc.
Chapter III depicts undoubtedly, the fact that all the heroes of
Marlowe are brave, boastful, ambitious, adventurous, rebellious and
thoughtful. The analytical view eventually emerged to explain
Tamburlaine’s ambivalent character. The first view stresses that
Tamburlaine is a brutal and un-Christian tyrant whose power and
ambition is reprehensible. “Tamburlaine’s rise to power is usually
at the expense of a series of legitimate rulers. Might is shown to
triumph over right.” The second main analytical view stresses,
instead, that Tamburlaine’s glory and majesty inspire the audience
to recognize the highest limits of human achievement. There is
certainly some evidence to support a reading of Tamburlaine as a
reaffirmation of its author’s supposed atheism, since almost
invariably the calls for divine intervention seem to be ignored by a
heaven indifferent to human plight. Therefore, those who have
argued that the play works within a moral and religious framework
can point to the blasphemy of burning the Moslem holy books as
evidence that Tamburlaine is punished, the sudden sickness that
finally lays him low acting as Mahomet’s revenge. For instance, in
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Tamburlaine there are elements of cruelty, tyranny, pride, atheism,
defiance to the authorities on earth as well as in heaven. In order to
fulfil his mission, Tamburlaine goes out into the world, marches
against Persia, wins over the military general of Persia, then
proceeds against all the Kingdoms of East, makes captive of the
Kings and humiliated them like a beast.
Tamburlaine’s passion for world conquest by using his
supreme military power is as strong as his passion for Zenocrate
whom he marries. These two tempestuous passions which were the
products of the Renaissance are vividly dealt with in this chapter.
Chapter IV deals with Renaissance man’s unlimited thirst for
knowledge and power, wealth, endless sensuous pleasures, atheism
and revolt against conventional religion and morality. For acquiring
the limitless power, knowledge, wealth and sensuous pleasure, he
can give away his soul to the devil.
There, however, is dealt with the theme of the universal
human conflict between good and evil. A spiritual conflict had, it is
true, been dramatized in the morality plays, for example. In contrast
177
to this although to some extent he employs the same technique as
the Moralities. Thus Doctor Faustus develops into a spiritual
tragedy, in the sense that the external circumstances and events of
the play no longer have any intrinsic value but are significant only
in so far as they enable us to understand Faustus’s spiritual state
and to see what goes inside his mind.
Marlowe has depicted Faustus as fully the spirit of
Renaissance, with its rejection of the medieval, God-centered
universe, and its embrace of human possibility. Faustus also
possesses an obtuseness that becomes apparent during his
bargaining sessions with Mephistophilis. Signing a pact with the
devil is the only way to fulfil his ambitions. He imagines piling up
wealth from the four corners of the globe, and gaining access to
every scrap of knowledge about the universe. Desire and frustration
of desire, aspiration and its violent disappointment, here affect the
quality of the language itself, down to the very moment of the
sentence and the choice of diction.
Tamburlaine is ambitious of conquering the world by his
power and action while Faustus is ambitious of conquering the
178
elemental forces of Nature and using these forces for his own
benefit or pleasure. Finally, he becomes once again a tragic hero, a
great man undone because his aspirations have butted up against the
law of God.
In chapter V, I have treated the aspect of the great craving for
wealth and indulgence in crimes, and also an intermixture of hatred,
jealousy, greed and criminal madness that sweep through the play,
the Jew of Malta like a storm. It is exemplified by the hurricane of
the craving for wealth rushing through the play The Jew of Malta.
This very play is a dramatic presentation of a ‘Machiavellian’
man, full of greed and cunning, which will stop at nothing to obtain
his ends. But the ambition of Barabas, The Jew of Malta, lacks the
central drive of either Tamburlaine or Faustus, and the play, though
it has some effective moments of grim irony, which is lacking in
any of Marlowe’s other plays. The idea of Barabas as a selfconsciously performed ethnic stereotype is a potentially powerful
one. We can recognize in reading and accentuate in performance
this principle of performed ethnicity that is to say, identification of
Barabas as a villainous character. At the heart of the play, in terms
179
of race and ethnicity, the problem of anti-Semiticism remains to be
challenged in some way.
On the one hand, Abigail, daughter of Barabas herself is the
only character in the play that is not ruled by greed, and her
conversion represents an attempt to break free from the limitations
of the narrow and materialistic society which surrounds her. The
attempt is rendered pathetic by the fact that the religious, amongst
whom she hopes to find release, are as mercenary as the outside
world which they pretend to shun. Barabas’s sneer is substantiated
by the behaviour of the two religious caterpillars’. Lastly, Turk,
Moor, Christian and Jew are all as bad as each other, and in these
circumstances a cynical ‘policy’ is to be preferred to a hypocritical
‘profession’ which cloaks greed in a false devotion.
Chapter VI deals with Edward II as a historical play. It is the
matured product of Marlowe’s dramatic genius. This play is not
only the first historical drama in English literature but it also shows
other marks of advance in style and other qualities of dramatic arts.
Edward II is a story of human vulnerability. This historical play
presents the conflict of king with his barons over the issue of his
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friendship with Gaveston; the kings temporary victory over the
barons; the murder of Gaveston; the king’s adopting the Spensers as
his favorites in place of murdered Gaveston; the revolt of Queen
Isabella against her husband; her love-affair with the young
Mortimer; the ultimate defeat of the king by the force of Queen
Isabella and the young Mortimer and brutal murder of the king, etc.
These are all genuine elements of history making the play Edward
II, a historical tragedy.
Edward II is a play which shows close structural affinities
with the chronicle plays, in that it has a stirring plot with a rapid
flow of incident and plenty of variety, while on the other hand it has
points of contact with tragedy in its attempts to bring on heartrending scenes filled with passionate utterances, deep pathos, and
high tragic dignity.
In the first half Edward’s role is to a larger extent that of an
active participant in the action. In the second part he comes to the
force much more as a sensitive and suffering soul, and not the least
effective means of creating this impression is the entirely different
181
language, much more intense than that of the first part, by which he
is made to reveal himself.
In about the middle of the play Edward’s awakening to
necessity of resisting the Barons and the changes in him from
apathy to activity are indicated by means of a set speech containing
the great row of vengeance that he utters on his knees; so now, after
the reversal of his fortunes, his new role as a passive sufferer is also
inaugurated by means of speeches that are given special
prominence.
I have highlighted in the plays of Marlowe how he dealt with
heroic subjects that had a stirring effect on the imagination. His
heroes were Tamburlaine, a world conqueror; Faustus, a scholar
seeking supreme knowledge; Barabas, dreaming of fabulous wealth
and Edward II, with his mingling of nobility and ignobility,
reaching the heights and touching the depths of human nature.
Thus, his subjects were the boundless spirit of adventure, the
towering passions of love and hate, the ideal of beauty, and the
182
nobility and pettiness of human life. Thus, his plays are the vehicles
of the true spirit of Renaissance.
183
Reference
1.
Hazelton Spencer. Elizabethan Plays (London: Macmillan
and Company Ltd., 1933), p. 133.
2.
Wilbur Sanders.
The Dramatist and the Received Idea:
Studies in the Plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare (London:
Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 133.
3.
Dr. S. Sen. Doctor Faustus: A Critical Evaluation (New
Delhi: Unique Publishers, 2004), p.34.
4.
Dr. S. Sen. Doctor Faustus: A Critical Evaluation, p.30.
5.
Prof. Renu Bhardwaj, Dr. Rangnath Nandyal.Readings on
British Drama (New Delhi: New Chanab Offset Printers,
2001), p.19.
6.
Op. cit., p. 19.
7.
Op. cit., p. 19.
8.
Wolfgang Clemen. English Tragedy Before Shakespeare: The
Development of Dramatic Speech (London: Methuen & Co.
Ltd., 1961), p. 129.
184
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.
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_________.
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_________.
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Armstrong, W.A.
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ORIGINAL WRITINGS OF THE PIONEERS:
Erasmus, Desiderius.
In Praise of Folly. Large selection from
the treatise included in Renaissance edited
by E.H. Weatherly in Laurel Masterpieces
of World Literature series, pp. 132-169.
Luther, Martin:
Reformation Writing of Martin Luther
translated and annotated by Bertram Lee
Woolf (n.p., Lutterworth Press, 1952).
More, Sir Thomas.
Utopia English translation by Ralph
Robinson (1566), modern reprint in
Arber’s English Reprint (Constable,
London) n.d.