In his youth, if we may interpret his nature by his early plays, Marlowe was "a desirer of things impossible," intoxicated with the thought of what man may achieve. "Nature," he makes Tamburlaine say,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:
Our souls whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest,
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all...
but after this scientific prelude, worthy of Bacon, Tamburlaine sinks to finding felicity in "an earthly crown".
The genius of Marlowe, which was great, but scarcely dramatic, places in the lips of his ferocious monster these astonishing lines on the aspiration of the poet towards the beautiful:—
If all the pens that poets ever held
Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds and muses on admired themes,
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy,
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit;
If these had made one poem's period,
And all combined in beauty's worthiness
Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least,
Which into words no virtue can digest.
This is the vision of beauty which haunts and evades Marlowe, as the shadow of the mother of Odysseus in Hades fades away from his embrace. Sometimes it appears to him
like women or unmarried maids,
Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows
Than have the white breasts of the Queen of Love.
Again, in "Dr. Faustus," a new Tamburlaine who seeks the impossible in magic, not by arms, and sells his soul to the Adversary, the vision arises in the form of Helen of Troy, that ancient symbol of the World's Desire.
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium...
Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.