I've been reading up on Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan dramatist I referred to the other day (because a line from one of his plays gave Hemingway the title for "In Another Country"), and I see that a correction is in order: I said that Marlowe was murdered when he was 30, but actually he was 29. I think he gets the silver medal in English literature's "What Might He Have Achieved" competition, the gold going to the poet John Keats, who died, of tuberculosis, in 1821 at the age of 25.
The circumstances around Marlowe's death are a topic of intrigue. According to Hallett Smith, author of the headnote to the section on Marlowe in The Norton Anthology, the dramatist was killed on May 30, 1593, at a London tavern, over a dispute about the bill. The method was stabbing with a dagger. It's possible for a Law and Order fan to imagine a jaded 16th-century London homicide detective debating with himself whether there might be more to the story. On the one hand, your work experience has impressed on you the sorry drab circumstances that can end in homicide. A person might very well be murdered over a dispute about a bar tab, especially considering the effects of alcohol on inhibition and judgment. But Marlowe was a notorious figure whose sudden death in a bar fight might attract suspicion—and it has attracted suspicion. Smith's headnote includes the following information:
From the time of his first great success, when he was 23 [Smith refers to the first production of the play Tamburlaine], Marlowe had only six years to live. They were not calm years. In 1589 he was involved in a brawl with one William Bradley, in which the poet Thomas Watson intervened and killed Bradley. Both poets were jailed, but Watson got off on a plea of self-defense and Marlowe was released. In 1591 Marlowe was living in London with the playwright Thomas Kyd, who later gave information to the Privy Council accusing Marlowe of atheism and treason.
In an essay called "Marlowe's Damnations," the poet and critic John Berryman energetically amplifies:
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 ["so much the worse for them"—French phrases, British spellings: you'd never guess Berryman was born in Oklahoma]. Marlowe was a professional secret agent, a notorious unbeliever, a manifest homosexual, cruel, quarrelsome, and perhaps murderous, his habitual associates scoundrels and traitors. . . .
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.
Thus a cottage industry of criminal theories. He was murdered by the Church. He was murdered by a double-crossed spy. He was murdered by a double-crossed gay lover. He was murdered by the Privy Council, which was Queen Elizabeth's version of the FBI. It's wild that all these are defensible, though only one could be true, and it's also possible that a barroom fight was just a barroom fight. In his dramatic works, Marlowe's theme of themes is the transgressive pursuit of forbidden things. It's not surprising, for example, that one of his plays is a version of the Faust legend and that, in his hand, the tale is a parable of intellectual history: the medieval view that the purpose of human life is to work out one's religious salvation is contrasted with the desire—the lust—to find things out, to get knowledge.
He had been born at Canterbury in February, 1564, and was therefore older than Shakespeare by two months, a circumstance that has resulted in Marlowe being often compared to the GOAT. This hasn't necessarily worked to Marlowe's disadvantage. For example, in one of Shakespeare's best known sonnets, the 29th, the speaker acknowledges having "desir[ed] this man's art and that man's scope," which has caused some to speculate that Shakespeare envied Marlowe's art and scope. (Because who else could possibly have aroused his jealousy?) Smith states that Shakespeare would "scarcely be known today" had he died at the same age as Marlowe. Investigating this claim, I discover that, by the best estimate of scholarship, only four of Shakespeare's extant plays clearly belong to 1593, the year he turned 29, or before. These are the first, second, and third parts of Henry VI and Richard III—a linked series of English history plays about strife between the Houses of York and Lancaster. The comedies Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, and Love's Labour's Lost all belong to his 30th year, give or take a year. From what we can tell, Shakespeare's 20s were devoted to acquiring practical work experience in the London theatre world. At first, the principal vehicle was acting, and he was in his late 20s before writing plays supplanted acting in them as a career path. He would have known Marlowe, or at least been familiar with his work, and you don't have to think the man two months his senior is lurking in the 29th sonnet to have fun wondering what he thought about him. The two were in many ways opposites. Shakespeare seems to have possessed an essentially conservative temperament, and, though it's easy to see that he had knowledge of drink, drunks, and alcoholic dissipation, he was himself a poor candidate for getting stabbed in a tavern—and, indeed, he did not. He was also one of the world's preeminent autodidacts, whereas Marlowe spent six years on scholarship at Cambridge. Berryman points out that Marlowe's plays are full of his classical education, and I identified what I take to be his "theme of themes." Such notions suggest the limits of his art and scope. It's possible to detect his obsessions in his work. Shakespeare's output is too variegated for that. No one speaks of Shakespeare's obsessions.
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