ARLY in the sixteenth century Erasmus, accompanied by Colet, visited Canterbury. Long afterwards he remembered the cathedral and its vast towers that rise into the sky "so as to strike awe even at a distant approach," the sweet music of the bells heard from afar, the spacious majesty" of the newly completed nave. Here, fifty years later, was born Christopher, sometime called Kit, Marlowe.1 Meanwhile the spirit of Erasmus, and still more the ruder spirit of Colet, had heralded a revolutionary influx of new life. At the head of the movement was set by Providence, in a mood of Rabelaisian gaiety, the figure of Henry VIII. Like another Tamburlaine, Henry VIII. had carried off the rich treasures of Canterbury, the gold and the 1 Thomas Heywood wrote in 1635 : "Marlo, renowned for his rare art and wit, jewels, in six-and-twenty carts. The stream of pilgrims no longer passed along the familiar roads ; nothing remained of the shrine of St. Thomas but the bare stones, much as we see them now, worn away by the adoration of so many ages. All that was long ago; in those days events came fast, and Elizabethan men had a trick of speaking of the near past as remote and antique. On the 26th day of February, 1564, according to the register of the parish church of St. George the Martyr, "was christened Christofer, the sonne of John Marlowe.”1 We cannot tell the boy's dreams among the Kentish hills and fields, or beneath the jewelled windows of the great church in the city that not only still bore about it the lustre of its former sanctity, but was also the chief halting-place of princes and ambassadors who journeyed from the continent to the court of Elizabeth. Perhaps these things touched the youth little; his own life was too vivid to be concerned much with the antique sanctities at which Colet had laughed. Nor had he mixed largely with men; he rarely describes the actual external world of men and women; he had little of Ben Jonson's precise observation, and nothing of Shakespeare's gentle laughter. But every page he wrote reveals a peculiarly intense full-blooded inner life, the quintessence of youthful desires and youthful dreams. His father, it has 1 Shakespeare was christened exactly two months later. Chapman, Green, Peele, and Lyly were all, probably, born some ten years earlier; Nash and Chettle about the same time as Marlowe ; Heywood about 1570; Ben Jonson in 1573. now been ascertained, besides being "Clarke of St. Maries," was a shoemaker (Christopher appears to have been the second child and eldest son), and shoemakers have sometimes possessed and left to their children a strangely powerful endowment of idealism. He was educated at the King's School, Canterbury. In March, 1581, he matriculated as Pensioner of Benet College (now Corpus Christi), Cambridge; not having been elected, it seems, to either of the scholarships recently founded at Benet College for King's School boys. In 1583 he obtained his Bachelor's degree. Six years later, in 1589, Francis Kett, a fellow of Marlowe's college, was burnt at Norwich for heresies in regard to certain articles of the Christian faith, such as the Trinity and Christ's divinity. The youthful Marlowe, with his thirst for emancipation, could not fail to fall under the influence of this audacious Francis Kett. How were the years after 1583 spent? There is no reliable evidence. It was asserted, on the unsupported evidence of a late and often inaccurate authority, that he became an actor. It has been conjectured,1 as of Chapman, that he trailed a pike in the Low Countries, like Ben Jonson. The Eliza 1 By Colonel Cunningham, who points out that Marlowe's “familiarity with military terms and his fondness for using them are most remarkable,” and that at “his home at Canterbury he was in the very track of the bold spirits who [in 1585] followed Leicester and Sidney to the wars of the Low Countries." It may also be pointed out, however, that Marlowe displays, especially in Tamburlaine, a remarkably extensive (though not always accurate) knowledge of Elizabethan geography. His interest in military affairs and in the geography of the world were both manifestations of the spirit of adventure then in the air. bethan dramatists had the full Renaissance delight in facts and in the grasp of technical detail; they appear to have been nearly as careful about their documents" as contemporary French novelists; the broad and genial realism of men like Ben Jonson and Middleton and Dekker, sprang from actual contact with the life around them, and young Marlowe's bold spirit may, possibly, have been touched by the impulse of adventure which at that time drew Englishmen into all parts of the world. About the year 1588, Tamburlaine was acted.1 There is no hesitation in this first work. The young "god of undaunted verse," set free "From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits, is at once a perfect master of his "great and thundering speech." Gorboduc had been written in blank verse twenty-five years before, and there had been other essays in the use of this new medium of expression; on the whole, however, it had remained cold and artificial and ill-received. It is an immense leap from the tame pedestrian lines of Gorboduc to the organised verse, with its large swelling music, of Tamburlaine. It was not till later, however, that Marlowe realised the full power and variety of which blank verse is capable. The strong melody of his early verse is simple and little varied; the chief variation being a kind of blank verse couplet, generally introduced near the end of a speech, in 1 Alleyn took the part of Tamburlaine. For a brief account of this famous actor, whose name is so intimately associated with Marlowe's works, see Appendix. which a tumultuous crescendo is followed by a grave and severely iambic line : "And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere, In its later more developed form, Marlowe's "mighty line" is the chief creation of English literary art; Shakespeare absorbed it, and gave it out again with its familiar cadences in Romeo and Juliet, and later with many broad and lovely modifications. It has become the life-blood of our literature; Marlowe's place is at the heart of English poetry, and his pulses still thrill in our verse. He obtained his material for material for Tamburlaine chiefly from Pedro Mexia's Spanish life of Timur, which was published at Seville in 1543, and translated into Italian, French and English. The English translation, known as Fortescue's Foreste, appeared in 1571. Marlowe appears to have supplemented this source by the help of the Vita Magni Tamerlanis of Petrus Perondinus. There is abundant evidence to show the swift and extraordinary popularity of the new play, the work of the first great poet who uses our modern English speech; for Spenser was archaic even in his own day. The public were intoxicated with the high astounding terms-"the swelling bombast of a bragging blank verse," as Nash called it of the Scythian conqueror; not less, perhaps, with the novelty of the play's scenical effects; and for many years a host of writers, including Shakespeare, laughed at those royal and pampered jades Mar. ८ |