of the clock; and then, being without fires, are fain to walk or run up and down half-an-hour to get a heat on their feet when they go to bed." How would the gilded youth of our days face such an example of “plain living and high thinking?" However, Marlowe's College was not quite so poorly provided with creature comforts as thisthanks mainly to the liberality of Archbishop Parker, who was one of those who think that if you take care of the stomach the brains will take care of themselves. At Cambridge the future Dramatist found himself among young men of wit and promise, with whom he was doubtless well able to hold his own, for assuredly neither University at that time sheltered a greater genius than the Canterbury shoemaker's son. It is a significant fact, viewed in connection with the allegations which were afterwards made against Marlowe, that one of his fellow collegians was the unfortunate Frances Kett, who published certain unorthodox views about the Trinity, for which in 1589, he was burnt to death at Norwich. It is not the purpose of this Lecture to inquire into Marlowe's religious opinions, but as statements concerning them unsupported by credible evidence. have acquired authority by the mere force of re-iteration, a few words must be devoted to this subject. The blackest indictment against Marlowe's character is that written by a man named Bame, who was probably bribed by the Puritans, and whose veracity is further impugned by the damaging fact that he was afterwards hanged at Tyburn. That Marlowe was sceptical in theological matters, and that he had the courage of his opinions and expressed them freely, cannot reasonably be doubted; it must also be granted that his ardent temperament led him into excesses which were then, alas! too commonly committed by men of his profession; but that he was the vulgar atheistical monster depicted by Bame, Beard, and others, is most emphatically not proven. The truth is, the Puritans, who hated all dramatists, had a double grudge against Marlowe; first, because by reason of his commanding genius he was more successful in filling the theatres than they were in filling the places of worship; and secondly, because of his fearless criticism of priests and dogmas. Happily, we live in a more tolerant age, when a man cannot be openly persecuted for holding opinions different from those held by the persecutors. We no longer think that the best way to convert a man is to burn him. Now, as the Laureate sings: "A man may speak the thing he will." After all, what have we to do with Marlowe's religion? Do we enjoy Homer or Horace the less because they were pagans? It is Marlowe the dramatic poet who extorts our admiration and holds us by the potent magic of his genius, and his theories of religion (which are not forced upon us in his writings) do not at all affect the splendour of his poetry. We now resume the main thread of his career. Without being a model student, Marlowe must have done some good work at Cambridge, for in 1583 he took his B.A. degree, proceeding M.A. in 1587. What he did in the interval between these two dates has not been satisfactorily ascertained. Some say, with a certain degree of probability, that he became a soldier; others think that he turned sailor; possibly he remained at Cambridge, gaining his livelihood by tuition. However this may have been, he was in London in 1587, for in that year his first tragedy was produced. Like Shakespeare, Peele, and Ben Jonson, he became an actor; and doubtless the stage experience thus gained was afterwards of great assistance to him. Shakespeare, it will be remembered, went to London about the same time as Marlowe; but he commenced life there under very different circumstances, for whilst he was, to all appearance, an inexperienced rustic youth, -Marlowe was a practised wit, a graduate of the University, and a complete man of the world. The year 1587, the date of Marlowe's first tragedy, Tamburlaine, is the turning point in the poet's career. But it is something more than this-it marks a new era in English literature. In order to make this apparent we must take a swift glance at the condition of the English drama when Marlowe began to write. English comedy begins with Ralph Roister Doister, written about 1550; and English tragedy with Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc, represented in 1562. Then followed a series of heavy dramas either translated from the Greek or Italian, or founded on classical stories; but as yet there was no national drama -nothing which reflected the life of the nation, or embodied its aspirations. After this came the more original work of Lyly, Peele, Greene, and others, in whose plays there is an evident attempt to reproduce the feelings of real men and women. The form of these plays shows that no master-poet had yet arisen to assert the superiority of one mode of expression over the others; for some of the plays were written in prose, others in rhyme, and others again in a curious mixture of prose, rhyme, and blank verse. Marlowe, with the unerring instinct of genius, felt the capacity of blank verse to express all the passions of the human soul, employed it in his Tamburlaine, and thus consecrated it to the use of the English poetic drama for ever. But he did more than merely adopt blank verse-he transformed it. He found it a stiff, clumsy, monotonous mode of expression: he gave it pliancy, strength, and beauty, and made it the supreme instrument of tragic poetry. To show the difference between Marlowe's blank verse and blank verse anterior to him, two examples will now be given, the first taken from Gorboduc, and the second from Tamburlaine. This is Marcella's complaint from Gorboduc: "O queen of adamant, O marble breast, If this might not have moved the bloody heart, Compare this with the following speech by Marlowe's Tamburlaine, and the dullest ear will be able to mark the advance in rhythmical music : "The thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown, The sweet fruition of an earthly crown." What blank verse afterwards became in the hands of Shakespeare and Milton-how it expanded in the one so as to express the whole gamut of human emotions, and how it swelled in the other to organ-like tones of massive grandeur-you all know; but it ought never to be forgotten that the man who paved the way for these supreme artists in verse was the Canterbury tradesman's son -Christopher Marlowe. But he did more than this. He not only determined the vehicle of dramatic expression, but he clothed the dry bones of the English drama with flesh, and poured into it the life-blood of passion, so that the production of Tamburlaine in 1587 is doubly memorable. It was the true beginning of that unparalleled outburst of human genius which we call the Elizabethan drama, and which included such stars as Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Massinger, Chapman, Ford, Dekker, Heywood, Middleton, and Tourneur. Such a blaze of poetic glory, the world had never seen before, has not seen since, and will probably never see again. Truly may we say in the words of Dryden "Theirs was the giant race before the flood," and Canterbury ought be proud indeed to know that this glorious race begins with her own wild son, Christopher Marlowe. To return to Tamburlaine. Of course it is not contended that this play is made up of beauties only; on the contrary, its faults are glaring-sometimes even outrageous, but they are the faults of a lusty overflowing genius, and were the natural outcome of that stirring period of boundless confidence and youthful strength. The word exaggeration perhaps best sums up these defects: too much bombast, too much fiery passion, too much blood, too much of everything except restraint this is what strikes one in Marlowe's work as well as in the earliest plays of Shakespeare himself. But we must bear in mind that the audiences were very different then from what they are now. In those days the theatregoers did not languidly whiff at cigarettes, nor chew quill toothpicks, nor play with an eye-glass, nor sip soda and brandy; nor do they appear to have suffered from weak digestions which are answerable for so much in these degenerate days. On the contrary, they were accustomed to rough sports, and plenty of beef and beer; and they had an abundance of good red blood dancing through their veins. The poet knew his audience. He wrote his words for men of daring, men of action, men well-nigh as ardent as himself, and the result was that the fiery energy of his play rendered it a triumphant success. Let us now examine a few passages from Marlowe's epoch-making work. Is there in the whole domain of poety a more glorious description of beauty and virtue than those glowing words of Tamburlaine which seem to burn into the reader's brain ?— Ah, fair Zenocrate !-divine Zenocrate! That in thy passion for thy country's love, What is beauty, saith my sufferings, then? Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, Yet should there hover in their restless heads But how unseemly is it for my sex, My discipline of arms and chivalry, My nature, and the terror of my name, To harbour thoughts effeminate and faint! Save only that in beauty's just applause, With whose instinct the soul of man is touched ; Must needs have beauty beat on his conceits : I thus conceiving and subduing both That which hath stooped the chiefest of the gods, And fashions men with true nobility. This is how Tamburlaine reproaches one of his sons for prefering to stay with his mother rather than go to the wars : 66 Bastardly boy, sprung from some coward's loins, And not the issue of great Tamburlaine : Of all the provinces I have subdu'd Thou shalt not have a foot, unless thou bear A mind courageous and invincible ; For he shall wear the crown of Persia Whose head hath deepest scars, whose breast most wounds, Which, being wroth, sends lightning from his eyes, And in the furrows of his frowning brows Harbours revenge, war, death, and cruelty; For in a field whose superficies Is cover'd with a liquid purple veil, And sprinkled with the brains of slaughtered men, And he that means to place himself therein, |