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Doctor Faustus. Such a thing is native to Marlowe’s genius, and is
the outflowing of virile and vital imagination. It is this vitalizing
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energy that imparts to the young poets’ eloquence a vibrant music
that compels the reader’s admiration.
So, the ecstatic quality of Marlowe’s works finds its best
illustration in Faustus’s address to Helen: “Was this the face that
launched a thousand ships?” Thus, the ecstatic note is found in
Tamburlaine the Great and even in The Jew of Malta. It was his
vitalizing energy that redeemed Tamburlaine the Great from
absurdity. The same vitalizing energy lifted his Doctor Faustus to a
high level. This is seen in his characterization. Apart from that, he
used the dramatic blank verse – by infusing variety, vigour and
spontaneous flow and cadence. His successive dramas were
wonderful and almost overwhelming embodiments of the spirit of
Renaissance. All the four plays from his pen were indeed
exemplary of the tragic art in dramatic poetry.
Actually, the plays of Marlowe are so full of poetry that
while culling illustrative extracts, it is difficult to decide what to
leave out and what to include. Poetry transforms material reality of
things into a vision. He was undeniably a poet, but a glance at his
output in poetry will convince anyone that if his fame were to
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depend solely on it, he would have been counted a minor figure
among Elizabethan giants.
Marlowe took his poetic genius into the realm of drama and
infused a new life to drama. Substantial evidence can be brought
forward to show that he frittered away his gift of poetry by
‘straying’ away into drama. To his censure, it has been said that he
becomes unmindful of the dramatic situation and let himself go
when poetic conceits fire his imagination.
In Tamburlaine, Tamburlaine speaks high poetry of
unquenchable aspirations in the most melodious responding verses;
and he gives clean utterance in poetry to express Marlowe’s love of
the impossible power and glory. So also all the dramas had plenty
of descriptive passages and declamatory verses which clearly
indicate the poetic genius and excellence of Marlowe. When
Edward II is asked to surrender his crown we feel the high strain of
poetic emotion of the abdicating king who feels the acutest pain of
resigning the crown:
But stay a while, let me be King till night,
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That I may gaze upon this glittering crown;
So shall my eyes receive their last content,
My head, the latest honour due to it,
1
So, the metaphorical fusion of the idea of Marlowe is quite unique.
The style of the verse is the poetic counterpart in unrealized
intention of dramatic action which is often no more than ‘a good
idea for a play’. One of the most perceptive things in Marlowe’s
writing is the dramatic perception derived from a poetic body.
In Kent’s soliloquies, there is the presentation of the usual
varieties of rhetorical embellishment and inflation:
Rain showers of vengeance on my cursed head,
Thou God, to whom in justice it belongs
To punish this unnatural revolt.
2
Marlowe made momentous and revolutionary contribution to
English drama:
i.
He created genuine blank verse, and
most appropriate medium of poetic drama.
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ii.
He founded English Romantic tragedy.
iii.
He wrote the first great English history play.
And also, at the same time the main defects of his plays are:
imperfect characters of women, want of humour, lack of patriotism,
and gift of individuality etc. It is true that Marlowe could contribute
almost nothing to the genuinely comic side of the drama, nor to the
grace and loveliness of prose dialogue. But he gave strength, force
and vigour to the drama which once for all turned its career for both
greatness and stability. He lifted the drama into the sphere of high
literature. The English stage in his time was in great need of
intensity. Grace, sentiment, wit and fancy had been communicated
to the English drama by various talents of the age – communicated
with reckless and very often ridiculous excess, But Marlowe can
make a drama as a whole a living, pulsating expression of life. The
wits of the age, even some of his close collaborators might mock at
his ‘spacious volubility of a drumming decasyllable’ or at his
‘bragging blank verse’; serious, critical-minded dramatic talents
might find fault with his extravagant one man show, but all the
same they all had to fall in line with him to give their own
productions life and vigour.
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