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Gift of individuality: Marlowe was the founder of genuine
romantic tragedy, as regards both plot and character. He infused his
central characters and the whole of his dialogue with life and
passion. He was an admirer of Machiavelli whose ideal as
understood by that age was the superman who, having decided what
his goal is to be, presses on to it regardless of scruples of
conscience. It depicts that one character dominates throughout in
Marlowe’s plays. Each of the three main tragedies of Marlowe
Tamburlaine the Great, Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta and
to a great extent his chronicle play of Edward II may be spoken of
as a one-man show. The central character, the hero so much
dominates the play from beginning to end that his towering
personality overshadows everything. “With Marlowe we are in the
presence of a distinctly passionate but unbalanced genius, a man
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lacking the serenity and the calm-eyed power which gave to
Shakespeare a large part of his greatness.”
A necessary effect of this quality is that the other characters
are vividly drawn and some of them tend to be dwarfed; and that as
the masculine elements predominates the feminine characters
become mere foils to it. The ardour and passion which inspire
Marlowe’s play partly account for the absence of true humour.
Marlowe was a pioneer in those ages of experiment. It is a credit
that he gave a superb individuality to his characters – the heroes of
his tragedies. In fact, Marlowe was too much under the influence of
the Renaissance conception of greatness. On this point we can do
nothing better than quote at some length from the illuminating
observation of A. Nicoll: “we may note the influence of
Machiavelli …… Most heard of him by report, and took him as a
symbol of all that was aesthetically, immoral and corrupt. His
Prince is merely a summing up of regular Renaissance ideals of
conduct; it is the culmination of that individualism which marks off
the newly awakened Europe from the anonymity and communal
ideals of the Middle Ages. Machiavelli had made a god of Virtue,
that quality in man which drives him to find free and full expression
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of his own thought and emotions. It is this Virtue on which
Marlowe has seized, not without some tremors of conscience in
spite of his liberated mind. So he presents his heroes, Tamburlaine,
Doctor Faustus, and Barabas, over-riding the ordinary moral codes
of their times in order to fine the complete realization of their
particular ideals; in The Jew of Malta he brings Machiavelli
forward in person to speak the prologue to his tragedy.”
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One
important result of this insistence upon Virtue must be noted. Call it
what we please, Virtue, ambition will tend to overlook class, and
accordingly the dramas of Marlowe break away slightly from the
more ancient medieval plan. For the Middle Ages tragedy was a
thing of princes only; for Marlowe it was a thing of individual
heroes. Thus his Tamburlaine, king though he may be by the end of
the drama, is born a simple man. The Jew is but a Mediterranean
money-lender, and Faustus an ordinary German doctor and
alchemist. The medieval conception of the royalty of tragedy is here
supplanted by the Renaissance ideal of individual worth. This is one
of Marlowe’s most outstanding contributions to the development of
English tragedy.
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Style: It was Marlowe and no other dramatists who effected a
magic transfiguration of dramatic matter and dramatic metre;
moulded a new type of heroic and tragic character, designed
tragedies on a magnificent scale and elevated them to heights as yet
un-apprehended in his days, made the instrument of language
produce rolling thunders and whispering sighs, and draped his plays
in the purple robes of his imperial imagination.
Indubitably born a poet, he was the proud possessor of a
magnificent and matchless poetic force. He is an admirable painter
of the human passion. Really he is a man of powerful intellect and
fertile imagination, of indomitable courage and invincible
confidence, a poet of wonderful vision and voice, of peerless beauty
and lustrous intensity, and a supreme master of his own gifted mind
and of golden thought and silver speech.
One the aesthetic side, love of physical beauty mentioned
above goes in him hand in hand with love of the beauty of
harmony; the high astounding terms of his blank verse, the thrills
and echoes of his phrases, the resounding roll of his declamations,
the surfeit of mythological allusions – all these run into excess; but
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the excesses only point to the essential ambition of reacting beyond
the narrow and the limited into the infinity of achievement, which is
the noblest gift of Renaissance. The writings of Marlowe are the
most prominent embodiments of the spirit of the Renaissance.
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