Had every copy of Marlowe’s boyish version or perversion of Ovid’s Elegies (P. Ovidii Nasonis Amorum compressed into three books) deservedly perished in the flames to which it was judicially condemned by the sentence of a brace of prelates, it is possible that an occasional bookworm, it is certain that no poetical student, would have deplored its destruction, if its demerits could in that case have been imagined. His translation of the first book of Lucan alternately rises above the original and falls short of it,—often inferior to the Latin in point and weight of expressive rhetoric, now and then brightened by a clearer note of poetry and lifted into a higher mood of verse. Its terseness, vigour and purity of style would in any case have been praiseworthy, but are nothing less than admirable, if not wonderful, when we consider how close the translator has on the whole (in spite of occasional slips into inaccuracy) kept himself to the most rigid limit of literal representation, phrase by phrase and often line by line. The really startling force and felicity of occasional verses are worthier of remark than the inevitable stiffness and heaviness of others, when the technical difficulty of such a task is duly taken into account.
One of the most faultless lyrics and one of the loveliest fragments in the whole range of descriptive and fanciful poetry would have secured a place for Marlowe among the memorable men of his epoch, even if his plays had perished with himself. His Passionate Shepherd remains ever since unrivalled in its way—a way of pure fancy and radiant melody without break or lapse. The untitled fragment, on the other hand, has been very closely rivalled, perhaps very happily imitated, but only by the greatest lyric poet of England—by Shelley alone. Marlowe’s poem of Hero and Leander (entered at Stationers’ Hall in September 1593; completed and brought out by George Chapman, who divided Marlowe’s work into two sestiads and added four of his own, 1598), closing with the sunrise which closes the night of the lovers’ union, stands alone in its age, and far ahead of the work of any possible competitor between the death of Spenser and the dawn of Milton. In clear mastery of narrative and presentation, in melodious ease and simplicity of strength, it is not less pre-eminent than in the adorable beauty and impeccable perfection of separate lines or passages. It is doubtful whether the heroic couplet has ever been more finely handled.
The place and the value of Christopher Marlowe as a leader among English poets it would be almost impossible for historical criticism to over-estimate. To none of them all, perhaps, have so many of the greatest among them been so deeply and so directly indebted. Nor was ever any great writer’s influence upon his fellows more utterly and unmixedly an influence for good. He first, and he alone, guided Shakespeare into the right way of work; his music, in which there is no echo of any man’s before him, found its own echo in the more prolonged but hardly more exalted harmony of Milton’s. He is the greatest discoverer, the most daring and inspired pioneer, in all our poetic literature. Before him there was neither genuine blank verse nor a genuine tragedy in our language. After his arrival the way was prepared, the paths were made straight, for Shakespeare.
(A. C. S.)
Marlowe’s fame, so finely appreciated by Shakespeare and Drayton, was in obscuration from the fall of the theatres until the generation of Lamb and Hazlitt. A collected edition was brought out by Pickering in 1826. This was greatly improved upon by A. Dyce (1858, 1865, 1876). A one-volume edition was prepared by Colonel Francis Cunningham in 1871. The standard edition of Mr A. H. Bullen in 3 vols. appeared in 1884-1885 and is now under revision. The “Best Plays” were edited for the Mermaid series by Havelock Ellis with an Introduction by J. A. Symonds (1887-1889). The best modern text is that edited by C. F. Tucker Brooke (Oxf. Univ. Press, 1910). A sketch in outline of Marlowe’s Life was essayed by J. G. Lewis (Canterbury, 1891). A not very conclusive monograph on Christopher Marlowe and his Associates by J. H. Ingram, followed in 1904. For further information the reader should consult the histories of the stage by Collier, Ward, Fleay, Schelling, and the studies of Shakespeare’s Predecessors by Symonds, Mezières, Boas, Manley, Churton Collins, Feuillerat and J. M. Robertson. See also Verity’s Essay on Marlowe’s Influence (1886); Mod. Lang. Rev. iv. 167 (M. at Cambridge); Swinburne, Study of Shakespeare (1880); Elze, Notes, and Hazlitt Dramatic Lit. of the Age of Elizabeth; Fortnightly Review, xiii., lxxi., and Sept.-Oct., 1905; Jusserand, Hist. of English Lit.; the Cambridge Hist. of English Lit.; Seccombe and Allen, Age of Shakespeare (vol. ii. 3rd ed., 1909), and the separate editions of Dr Faustus, Edward II., &c. The main sources of Marlowe were as follows: for Tamburlaine, Pedro Mexia’s Life of Timur in his Silva (Madrid, 1543), anglicized by Fortescue in his Foreste (1571) and Petrus Perondinus Vita Magni Tamerlanis (1551); for Faustus: a contemporary English version of the Faust-buch or Historia von D. Johann Fausten (Frankfort, 1587), and for Edward II., the Chronicles of Fabyan (1516), Holinshed (1577) and Stow (1580).
(T. Se.)
MARLOWE, JULIA [Sarah Frances Frost] (1870- ), American actress, was born near Keswick, England, on the 17th of August 1870, and went with her family to America in 1875. Her first formal appearance on the stage was in New York in 1887, although she had before that travelled with a juvenile opera company in H.M.S. Pinafore, and afterwards was given such parts as Maria in Twelfth Night in Miss Josephine Riley’s travelling company. Her first great success was as Parthenia in Ingomar, and her subsequent presentations of Rosalind, Viola, and Julia in The Hunchback confirmed her position as a “star.” In 1894 she married Robert Taber, an actor, with whom she played until their divorce in 1900. Subsequently she had great success as Barbara Frietchie in Clyde Fitch’s play of that name, and other dramas; and from 1904 to 1907 she acted with E. H. Sothern in a notable series of Shakespeare plays, as well as in modern drama.
MARLY-LE-ROI, a village of northern France in the department of Seine-et-Oise, 5 m. N. by W. of Versailles by road. Pop. (1906), 1409. Notwithstanding some fine country houses, Marly is dull and unattractive, and owes all its celebrity to the sumptuous château built towards the end of the 17th century by Louis XIV., and now destroyed. It was originally designed as a simple hermitage to which the king could occasionally retire with a few of his more intimate friends from the pomp of Versailles, but gradually it grew until it became one of the most ruinous extravagances of the Grand Monarque. The central pavilion (inhabited by the king himself) and its twelve subsidiary pavilions were intended to suggest the sun surrounded by the signs of the zodiac. Seldom visited by Louis XV., and wholly abandoned by Louis XVI., it was demolished after the Revolution, its art treasures having previously been dispersed, and the remains now consist of a large basin, the Abreuvoir, a few mouldering ivy-grown walls, some traces of parterres with magnificent trees, the park, and the forest of 81⁄2 sq. m., one of the most pleasant promenades of the neighbourhood of Paris, containing the shooting preserves of the President of the Republic.