The Freedom of the Poet
I
Marlowe's Damnations
SHAKESPEARE AND BEN JONSON APART, ONLY OF CHRISTOPHER Marlowe among the playwrights of the first Elizabeth is enough known personally to make feasible an exploration of those connexions, now illuminating, now mysterious, between the artist's life and his work, which interest an increasing number of readers in this century, and the existence of which is denied only by very young persons or writers whose work perhaps really does bear no relation to their lives, tant pis pour eux. Marlowe was a professional secret agent, a notorious unbeliever, a manifest homosexual, cruel, quarrelsome, and perhaps murderous, his habitual associates scoundrels and traitors. He reminds us, learned and drastic, rather of Villon or Rimbaud than of any English writer.
Let us take both the atheism and the homosexuality seriously, because Marlowe did: he was missionary about both and he could have been burned for either. As William Empson has remarked, he was lucky to be murdered before he was burned. A French critic, Michel Poirier, observes that Marlowe did not really write either for money (plays brought too little) or for fame (plays hardly ranking as literature). This last notion we had better qualify, for the playwright seems to have revised Tamburlaine between its production and publication, in the light of his admiration for some things in the new Faerie Queene, and he was dead too soon for us to decide whether he would have gone on publishing his work. But though presumably he liked applause, it is a fair impression that in an unusual degree he wrote simply to gratify himself. His mind had no popular cast. He works proverbs, for instance, less than any other serious Elizabethan playwright, and Caroline Spurgeon (in Shakespeare's Imagery) has shown how heavily Marlowe drew on classical learning for images, how singularly little on contemporary life, sport, and so on. He suited himself. He flaunted himself--perhaps to win converts. In Edward II he fastens on what is shortly mentioned in the chroniclers,the king's homosexual indulgence as a young man, and makes half his play with it. The king's extremely horrible murder, Empson once said, parodies his vice. In fact, Marlowe found this in Holinshed: putting "into his fundament an horne ... through the same they thrust up into his bodie an hot spit" and so killed him--the point being to leave no sign of how he was killed. But how the poet's imagination has seized on this piece of history is clear from Lightborne's opening words "I must haue the king" and some even more ambiguous and startling lines later. But "Lightborne" (one of Marlowe's few real characters) is, as Harry Levin notices in his new book,1 synonymous with "Lucifer." Marlowe has fused his two vices.
The fate of Faustus later can be understood in the light of this scene, with the help of an insight from a surprising source, the great textual authority Sir Walter Greg. The weakness of the middle acts of Doctor Faustus is to be accounted for partly by the probability that Marlowe did not write much of them. But Greg thinks he laid down the plan for his collaborator or collaborators, and the plan was this: Faustus, being damned from the moment of his bargain, naturally will disappoint the high expectations of the audience as to what he will do with his power--he deteriorates--and did not in the process interest Marlowe enough even to compose it. There are difficulties in the way of accepting this impressive theory. But it alone seems to reconcile the burden of the play as we have it (not so corrupt textually as criticism has been used to suppose) with the tragic profundity of Act I:
FAUSTUS. Where are you damned? MEPHASTOPHILUS. In hell. FAUSTUS. How comes it then that thou art out of hell? MEPHASTOPHILUS. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.
and the supreme terror of Act V:
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned. Oh I'll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down? See see where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!
Now, under this conception, what does finally damn Faustus is his intercourse with Helen, a demon, the analogy to demoniality (Greg proves) being "bestiality." And therefore, again, Lucifer must havehim. I pass by the masochism here, the sadistic images here and in Hero and Leander, the weird joke (iv. 7. 47.) about Faustus's committing incest with his father. The point is that twice at the summits of his art Marlowe has damned himself in a particular way for the same particular things. The impression is unavoidable that he enjoyed writing these scenes, and was excruciated. His sinister art ran exactly with his life.
Marlowe's life and the text of his work, which reaches us rather mutilated, have been examined at length by scholarship, but literary criticism has been oddly scanty. There was a history-of-ideas study by Paul H. Kocher, and then a pleasant, semi-psychological study by M. Poirier of the Sorbonne translated in England last year (1951). With Harry Levin's book, more ambitious and much better than these, the subject may be said to have become a going concern. His scholarship is careful, his range of reference wide, his quotations apt, his curiosity as to what the dramatist is up to genuine, his analysis of his heretical ambitiousness exemplary, and from the first page of his laboured preface to the last page of his ninth appendix, his book contains nothing unconsidered. Perhaps it may seem a little forbidding to most readers, a little fussy to some, and it has definite weaknesses. The beauty and the malice of this magnificent poet hardly appear. Instead, of one distich in a famous passage,
Our soules, whose faculties can comprehend The wondrous Architecture of the world,
Levin admires "the enjambment that carries the first line so breathlessly into the second." But is there anything really unusual about that runover? On the other hand, a moment later, he is rescuing from the contempt of Victorian critics the splendid climax of this speech (l Tamburlaine 11. 6.), which he rightly regards as blasphemous. So with his discussion of Hero and Leander, from which, except for some technical remarks and quotations, one would scarcely suppose the subject a work in verse, much less one of the finest sensuous poems in the language, rich with passages like this sly, exquisite creation of the church, which Eliot might envy as hard as Keats:
So faire a church as this, had Venus none, The wals were of discoloured lasper stone, Wherein was Proteus carued, and o'rehead; A liuelie vine of greene sea agget spread; Where by one hand, light headed Bacchus hoong ...
On the other hand, Levin's analysis of Marlowe's special mythology in the poem (pp. 142--4) is immaculate. His third chapter, on the crosscurrents of faithlessness in The Jew of Malta, is intent, rapid, full, astute; and the pages on Edward II that follow are nearly as good, though some readers may feel he insufficiently emphasizes the superiority of its final scenes.
Of the imposing work that preceded these influential plays, Tamburlaine, and the intense fragment that evidently followed them, Doctor Faustus, his accounts are less satisfactory. Our taste seems bound to be uneasy with these simpler works. Tamburlaine is crude, humanly; most of Faustus's middle is insipid; their actions are episodic, and their ends--sovereignties of power and knowledge--affect us as abstract or unreal; neither the bombast of Tamburlaine nor the plain and solemn style of Faustus is as attractive as the middle style of the other plays; there exist particular reasons why both works appear to us stupid. But Levin neglects an element, not indeed considerable in Tamburlaine, but striking. Bajazet, conquered and being bound, cries out,
Ah villaines, dare ye touch my sacred armes? O Mahomet, Oh sleepie Mahomet.
When the Governor of Babylon is about to be hung up in chains and shot, he boasts,
nor death nor Tamburlaine,
Torture or paine can daunt my dreadlesse minde--
to which Tamburlaine:
Vp with him then, his body shalbe scard.
In an art of grandiose overreaching and magniloquence these touches have an enlivening effect, and the critics by the way who have solemnly debated whether or not Marlowe possessed a sense of humour must have slept through this line.
But Marlowe had little enough humour, even of this grim sort. The two modes through which he speaks to us are the seductive, the languorous (displayed in Dido, the first half of Edward, and Hero and Leander), and the vast and atrocious (displayed nearly everywhere else in the extant intact work of high quality). These modes possess in common a certain self-indulgence and a concern with persuasion, but clearly in most respects they stand opposed. What I wish to claim is that his deepest dramatic effects are the result of an interpenetration of the modes which is not only mature but diabolical.These effects are intimately associated with his life. It is true that once, briefly, in Edward, Marlowe was enlightened and drawn out of himself into emulation of the dexterous apportionment of interest among various characters as well as the concentration achieved by Shakespeare when he enlarged and rewrote the "Contention" plays (2 and 3 Henry VI); so that this play treats characters other than the single Marlovian hero-figure. But by the end of it he is back with his hero (Mortimer rather than Edward)--to whom in Faustus he then wholly returned.
Putting it once more: the union of the seductive and the atrocious has for its purpose an insolent defiance of salvation. We may disagree about Marlow's "atheism," depending on what we take the word to mean, but about his hostility to Christianity there can be little question except for churchmen reluctant to give him up. Not unnaturally, the service which his work shows him most sensitive toward, and most harshly satirical of, is the Commination Service. But I ought to add that it is just possible, if the unfinished Hero and Leander followed Faustus and was his final production, that Marlowe had begun to grow out of his hatred of God, or had become less insistent upon it. This poem is still obsessedly inverted (II, 181 ff., which Miss Tuve tries in vain to explain away), but its satire, such as that in the passage quoted earlier, nowhere deepens to blasphemy.
When Frizer's dagger entered his arrogant and corrupt brain, Marlowe was twenty-nine--an age at which Congreve had retired. Marlowe's dramatic accomplishment stands that comparison poorly. Some recent revivals cited by Levin tend to prove rather, as Poirier says, that his works have not survived on the stage than that they have. Kyd was a greater dramatist, as Eliot decided long ago. But Marlowe was a great poet, which Kyd was not, and his dramatic strokes were grander. He lives, however (the academic interest and his poetry's spell for a few readers, apart), and the same is true of his contemporaries, for a reason better still: that he helped in the initial formation of the most powerful artist the race has produced. Levin inclines to feel that Marlowe has received some injustice by being bracketed with Shakespeare. But in the first place he does certainly not deserve to be so bracketed, and in the second place what higher honour is conceivable? His role in Shakespeare's early development was not less vivid for having been exaggerated by most critics. He established a musical and strong verse on the stage; Tamburlaine and the rest eased the births of York and Richard III and the rest, Barabas of Shylock, Edward II of Richard II, his murderers of Shakespeare's,his long poem inspired Shakespeare's early poems and echoes verbally sometimes through the plays all the way down to a song of Ariel's. It was even shown last year that one of Shakespeare's characteristic image clusters (Love-book-eyes-beauty) has its germ in Tamburlaine. Auden on the occasion of Yeats's death observed that one of a poet's real ambitions is to be useful in this technical way. A dramatic poet of civilization needs at hand developed materials for high achievement, and Marlowe out of his contumacy and agony produced them to his master.
1952
Copyright © 1940, 1944, 1945, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1956, 1959, 1961, 1964, 1966 by John Berryman, copyright © renewed 1972 by John Berryman. Copyright © 1951, 1953, 1960, 1965, 1966, 1975, 1976 by Kate Berryman, copyright © renewed 1973, 1975, 1976 by Kate Berryman.
