Christopher Marlowe (1564 –1593, also known as Kit Marlowe) was, after William Shakespeare, the most famous playwright of the Elizabethan era. His brilliant career was cut short when he was murdered in a controversial fight over a meal check. Experts to this day argue about the circumstances with endless conspiracy theories, usually linked to his secret work for the Elizabethan Spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham. Even an official coroner’s account of Marlowe’s death, discovered in 1925, did little to persuade scholars that it told the whole story.
But no one doubts his brilliance and his influence on English literature and on William Shakespeare, with whom he worked with on some plays in which Marlowe’s influence is obvious. Some even think that he wrote much of Shakespeare’s work. But whereas Shakespeare set out to entertain, Marlowe wanted to challenge and shock, which in the febrile atmosphere of Elizabethan England was a huge risk that put his life almost constantly in danger. His plays combined controversial ideas of power and anti-clericalism and humanism with extreme physical violence, cruelty and bloodshed. Which appealed to the audiences of his days, when all kinds of cruelty – bear baiting, cock fighting and dogs tearing bulls to pieces in public arenas – rivaled the emerging theater for popularity.
At that moment in time England was at the crossroads. It was a divided, poor country caught between the richer and more powerful Catholic powers of Spain, France and Portugal. It was under constant threat of invasion and was riven with religious conflicts, different ideologies being forced on reluctant citizens by successive monarchs. You could be burnt at the stake (another popular entertainment) at one moment for being a Catholic and the next for being a Protestant, and a whole range of variations. We may think religious tensions in our era are dangerous and divisive. We haven’t yet reached the murderous conflicts of those days, at least in the West.
Favorites jockeyed for power and rose to the top, only to be cut down on whims, suspicions and jealousies. England was weak economically and resorted to piracy to fill government coffers. Almost everyone was suspected of heresy or betrayal, and the punishment was a horrible death. Friends and families turned against each other. Either for survival or gain. Marlowe was almost constantly under suspicion of heresy precisely because he was not afraid to shock, to challenge authority and convention. Anyone at that time who thought the sun revolved around the earth, or that it was older than a few thousand years, was regarded as dangerous.
Marlowe was born into a modest family at a time when England was a highly stratified society dominated by the aristocracy and landed gentry. Unlike Shakespeare, Marlow went to Cambridge University which meant that he was immersed in the classics. But to survive and rise with neither class nor wealth, he had to struggle financially and find ways of being useful to the hierarchies. Which was why he got involved in various nefarious activities and unsavory people.
The genius of Marlowe was in plays, in some ways cruder and less nuanced than Shakespeare’s, but pushing boundaries in ways that Shakespeare’s did not. Of his plays three stand out from the rest: Tamburlaine the Great, The Jew of Malta and Dr. Faustus. All concerned with lust for power and wealth. I will ignore the crude Jew hatred poured into the character of the Jew in The Jew of Malta. He was after all a child of his times even though there were no Jews in England. It made Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice look positively benign.
Marlowe was influenced by Niccolo Machiavelli the controversial Florentine political thinker known for his pragmatic theory of power. “It is much safer to be feared than loved,” “Men must either be caressed or annihilated,” “In actions of men, especially princes, the end justifies the means.” And most relevant to us at this moment of political upheaval, uncertainty and hypocrisy “He who studies what ought to be done, rather than what is done, will learn the way to his downfall rather than his preservation.”
All this is in response to an impressive book, Christopher Marlowe: Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival. Written by Stephen Greenblatt. A delight, combining history with literature. Going into the sources of Marlowe’s humanism, and what was called atheism simply because he challenged contemporary orthodoxies. Something I have some sympathy for.
I recommend it heartily, not only to anyone interested in English history and the evolution of the great flowering of intellectual creativity, literature and culture that emerged from the turmoil of the times and, as Stephen Greenblatt says, produced another Renaissance and laid the foundations for magnificent cultural wealth – the cultural wealth that is now being dismissed, diminished, proscribed and rejected by the new barbaric culture warriors reminiscent of the Savonarola of Florence.
We have just witnessed in New York politics what can happen when the mob, blinded by insecurity and the record of failed ideology takes charge of the asylum. One can only pray that wiser counsel will prevail.
