Much of this dramatist’s work has been lost. Of the surviving plays The Spanish Tragedy (about 1585) is the most important. Its horrific plot, involving murder, frenzy, and sudden death, gave the play a great and lasting popularity. There is a largeness of tragical conception about the play that resembles the work of Marlowe, and there are touches of style that dimly foreshadow the great tragical lines of Shakespeare. Other plays of Kyd’s are Soliman and Perseda (1588), Jeronimo (1592), a kind of prologue to The Spanish Tragedy, and Cornelia (1594), a tedious translation from the French.
6. Christopher Marlowe (1564–93) is symbolical both of the best and the worst of his boisterous times. The eldest son of a shoemaker, he was born at Canterbury, and educated there and at Cambridge. Like so many more of that day, he adopted literature as a profession, and became attached to the Lord Admiral’s players. Marlowe’s great mental powers had in them a twist of perversity, and they led him into many questionable actions and beliefs. He became almost the pattern of the evil ways of his tribe. Charges of atheism and immorality were laid against him, and only his sudden death saved him from the experiences of his friend Kyd. Marlowe is said to have met his death in a tavern brawl, “stabbed to death by a bawdy servingman, a rival of his in his lewde love.” In fairness to the memory of Marlowe it must be remembered that these charges were made against him by the Puritanical opponents of the stage.
With Marlowe’s tragedies we at length come within measureable distance of Shakespeare. The gulf between the work of the two men is still very great. In Marlowe there is none of that benign humanity that clings to even the grimmest of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Marlowe’s characters are bleak in nature and massive in outline; enormous and majestical, but forbidding and almost inhuman. His style has the same qualities: glowing with a volcanic energy, capable of a mighty soaring line and phrase (“Marlowe’s mighty line,” as Ben Jonson called it), but diffuse, truculent, exaggerated, and bombastic. It is a lopsided style lacking the more amiable qualities of humor, flexibility, sweetness, and brevity.
His four great plays, all written within a few years, are Tamburlaine the Great (1587), Doctor Faustus (1588), The Jew of Malta (1589), and Edward II (1593). All four, in their march of horrors and splendors, are not unlike one another. The last has a conclusion which for pity and terror ranks among the great achievements of Elizabethan tragedy. The plays, moreover, show a progressing dexterity in the handling of blank verse. Marlowe’s life was pitiably short. If he had lived there might have been another triumph to chronicle.
He also collaborated with Nash in the tragedy of Dido (1593), and left uncompleted a poor fragment of a play called The Massacre at Paris.
We give a brief extract to show the “mighty line.” In the passage Tamburlaine, “the Scourge of God,” mentally reviews his past conquests.
And I have marched along the river Nile
To Machda where the mighty Christian priest,
Called John the Great, sits in a milk-white robe,
Whose triple mitre I did take by force,