“Here, receive my crown.
Receive it? No; these innocent hands of mine
Shall not be guilty of so foul a crime:
He of you all that most desires my blood,
And will be called the murderer of a king,
Take it. What, are you moved? Pity you me?
Then send for unrelenting Mortimer,
And Isabel, whose eyes, being turned to steel,
Will sooner sparkle fire than shed a tear.
Yet stay, for rather than I’ll look on them,
Here, here!--Now, sweet God of Heaven,
Make me despise this transitory pomp,
And sit for aye enthronizèd in Heaven!
Come, Death, and with thy fingers close my eyes,
Or, if I live, let me forget myself.”
Surely one might fancy that to be from the prentice hand of
Shakespeare. It is no small distinction that this can be said of
Marlowe, for it can be said of no other. What follows is still finer.
The ruffian who is to murder Edward, in order to evade his distrust,
pretends to weep. The king exclaims:--
“Weep’st thou already? List awhile to me,
And then thy heart, were it as Gurney’s is,
Or as Matrevis’, hewn from the Caucasus,
Yet will it melt ere I have done my tale.
This dungeon where they keep me is the sink
Wherein the filth of all the castle falls,
And there in mire and puddle have I stood
This ten days’ space; and, lest that I should sleep,
One plays continually upon a drum;
They give me bread and water, being a king;
So that, for want of sleep and sustenance,
My mind’s distempered and my body numbed,
And whether I have limbs or no I know not.
O, would my blood dropt out from every vein,
As doth this water from my tattered robes!
Tell Isabel the queen I looked not thus,
When, for her sake, I ran at tilt in France,
And there unhorsed the Duke of Clerëmont.”
This is even more in Shakespeare’s early manner than the other, and
it is not ungrateful to our feeling of his immeasurable supremacy to
think that even he had been helped in his schooling. There is a truly
royal pathos in “They give me bread and water”; and “Tell Isabel the
queen,” instead of “Isabel my queen,” is the most vividly dramatic
touch that I remember anywhere in Marlowe. And that vision of the
brilliant tournament, not more natural than it is artistic, how does
it not deepen by contrast the gloom of all that went before! But you
will observe that the verse is rather epic than dramatic. I mean by
this that its every pause and every movement are regularly cadenced.
There is a kingly composure in it, perhaps, but were the passage not
so finely pathetic as it is, or the diction less naturally simple, it
would seem stiff. Nothing is more peculiarly characteristic of the
mature Shakespeare than the way in which his verses curve and wind
themselves with the fluctuating emotion or passion of the speaker
and echo his mood. Let me illustrate this by a speech of Imogen when
Pisanio gives her a letter from her husband bidding her meet him at
Milford-Haven. The words seem to waver to and fro, or huddle together
before the hurrying thought, like sheep when the collie chases them.
“O, for a horse with wings!--Hear’st thou, Pisanio?
He is at Milford-Haven: read, and tell me
How far ’t is thither. If one of mean affairs
May plod it in a week, why may not I
Glide thither in a day?--Then, true Pisanio--
Who long’st like me to see thy lord; who long’st
O, let me ’bate--but not like me--yet long’st--
But in a fainter kind:--O, not like me;
For mine’s beyond beyond: say, and speak thick,--
Love’s counsellor should fill the bores of hearing,
To the smothering of the sense,--how far it is
To this same blessed Milford: and, by the way,
Tell me how Wales was made so happy as
To inherit such a haven: but, first of all,
How we may steal from hence.”
The whole speech is breathless with haste, and is in keeping not only
with the feeling of the moment, but with what we already know of the
impulsive character of Imogen. Marlowe did not, for he could not, teach
Shakespeare this secret, nor has anybody else ever learned it.
There are, properly speaking, no characters in the plays of
Marlowe--but personages and interlocutors. We do not get to know
them, but only to know what they do and say. The nearest approach
to a character is Barabas, in “The Jew of Malta,” and he is but the
incarnation of the popular hatred of the Jew. There is really nothing
human in him. He seems a bugaboo rather than a man. Here is his own
account of himself:--
“As for myself, I walk abroad o’ nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls;
Sometimes I go about and poison wells;
And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves,
I am content to lose some of my crowns,
That I may, walking in my gallery,
See ’em go pinioned by my door along;
Being young, I studied physic, and began
To practise first upon the Italian;
There I enriched the priests with burials,
And always kept the sexton’s arms in ure
With digging graves and ringing dead men’s knells;
And, after that, was I an engineer,
And in the wars ’twixt France and Germany,
Under pretence of helping Charles the Fifth,
Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems.
Then, after that, was I an usurer,
And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,
And tricks belonging unto brokery,
I filled the jails with bankrupts in a year.
And with young orphans planted hospitals;
And every moon made some or other mad,
And now and then one hang himself for grief,
Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll
How I with interest tormented him.
But mark how I am blest for plaguing them--
I have as much coin as will buy the town.”
Here is nothing left for sympathy. This is the mere lunacy of
distempered imagination. It is shocking, and not terrible. Shakespeare
makes no such mistake with Shylock. His passions are those of a man,
though of a man depraved by oppression and contumely; and he shows
sentiment, as when he says of the ring that Jessica had given for a
monkey: “It was my turquoise. I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor.”
And yet, observe the profound humor with which Shakespeare makes him
think first of its dearness as a precious stone and then as a keepsake.
In letting him exact his pound of flesh, he but follows the story as
he found it in Giraldi Cinthio, and is careful to let us know that
this Jew had good reason, or thought he had, to hate Christians. At
the end, I think he meant us to pity Shylock, and we do pity him.
And with what a smiling background of love and poetry does he give
relief to the sombre figure of the Jew! In Marlowe’s play there is
no respite. And yet it comes nearer to having a connected plot, in
which one event draws on another, than any other of his plays. I do
not think Milman right in saying that the interest falls off after the
first two acts. I find enough to carry me on to the end, where the
defiant death of Barabas in a caldron of boiling oil he had arranged
for another victim does something to make a man of him. But there is
no controlling reason in the piece. Nothing happens because it must,
but because the author wills it so. The conception of life is purely
arbitrary, and as far from nature as that of an imaginative child.
It is curious, however, that here, too, Marlowe should have pointed
the way to Shakespeare. But there is no resemblance between the Jew
of Malta and the Jew of Venice, except that both have daughters whom
they love. Nor is the analogy close even here. The love which Barabas
professes for his child fails to humanize him to us, because it does
not prevent him from making her the abhorrent instrument of his wanton
malice in the death of her lover, and because we cannot believe him
capable of loving anything but gold and vengeance. There is always
something extravagant in the imagination of Marlowe, but here it is
the extravagance of absurdity. Generally he gives us an impression of
power, of vastness, though it be the vastness of chaos, where elemental
forces hurtle blindly one against the other. But they are elemental
forces, and not mere stage properties. Even Tamburlaine, if we see in
him--as Marlowe, I think, meant that we should see--the embodiment of
brute force, without reason and without conscience, ceases to be a
blusterer, and becomes, indeed, as he asserts himself, the scourge of
God. There is an exultation of strength in this play that seems to add
a cubit to our stature. Marlowe had found the way that leads to style,
and helped others to find it, but he never arrived there. He had not
self-denial enough. He can refuse nothing to his fancy. He fails of his
effect by over-emphasis, heaping upon a slender thought a burthen of
expression too heavy for it to carry. But it is not with fagots, but
with priceless Oriental stuffs, that he breaks their backs.
Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus” interests us in another way. Here he again
shows himself as a precursor. There is no attempt at profound
philosophy in this play, and in the conduct of it Marlowe has followed
the prose history of Dr. Faustus closely, even in its scenes of mere
buffoonery. Disengaged from these, the figure of the protagonist is not
without grandeur. It is not avarice or lust that tempts him at first,
but power. Weary of his studies in law, medicine, and divinity, which
have failed to bring him what he seeks, he turns to necromancy:--
“These metaphysics of magicians
And necromantic books are heavenly.
* * * * *
Oh, what a world of profit and delight,
Of power, of honor, of omnipotence,
Is promised to the studious artisan!
All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command. Emperors and kings
Are but obeyèd in their several provinces,
Nor can they raise the winds or rend the clouds;
But his dominion that exceeds in this
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man;
A sound magician is a mighty god:
Here, Faustus, tire thy brains to gain a deity.”
His good angel intervenes, but the evil spirit at the other ear tempts
him with power again:--
“Be thou on earth as Jove is in the sky,
Lord and commander of these elements.”