Marlowe and Shakespeare

An illustration from Marlowe's Dr. Faustus
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I've been looking at Christopher Marlowe's plays, trying to puzzle out how to assess them on their own terms. It's hard to beat the rap of second-best playwright of the Elizabethan era, but that's what he is--and it is a distant second.

Some critics like to point out that we don't know what Marlowe might have done had he lived to enjoy as long a career as the first-place playwright. But we can to a reasonable extent extrapolate from Shakespeare's earliest work the greatness that was to come. From Marlowe's work, it's hard to see that he would have produced anything else but more of the same. In Shakespeare's Henry VI, there is an overpowering sense of emerging yet still uneven craftsmanship. In the Marlowe that I have read, there is the sense of an assured and mature style. Of course, we could endlessly debate hypotheticals, but at the end of the day we can only rely on what talent and fate have given us. We wouldn't have had Shakespeare without Marlowe--at least not the same Shakespeare--but nevertheless W.S.'s work shows some markedly different--and more remarkable--characteristics from its precedent.

Marlowe himself was a powerful improvement on his own general precedent, the medieval morality tale. One becomes an English major in spite of the medieval morality tale, I like to think. If Marlowe's Faustus borrows a few of the common tropes of the morality tale, it also improves upon them immeasurably, giving us an exciting protagonist who thrills not so much by the lesson his damnation might provide for us but rather by the exhilaration we get to experience vicariously through his transgressions. He pays for the thrills so we don't have to.

Marlowe's characters, however, bear little of the human dimension of even Shakespeare's early work. Tamburlane is my favorite Marlowe play; it's about one man's fast-paced scramble for the "sweet fruition of an earthly crown." The hero is a prototype of Macbeth, but he bears only traces of the complexity that the wayward Scot displays. Marlowe's plays are intellectual to the core, driven not by character but by ideas, but the poetry of Shakespeare's work comes to us through the methods he uses to define his characters, particularly those soliloquies that spell out for the first time in the history of our language the nature of the fragmented consciousness. As choppy as Henry VI is, I would argue its superiority--in moments, at least--even to Marlowe's greatest hits, thanks in no small part to Queen Margaret, who makes Marlowe's Queen Isabel in Edward II seem the very paragon of virtue in comparison, but also thanks to young Richard of the Yorkist faction--the original Tricky Dick--who would in Richard III become Shakespeare's first truly great creation. As an ineffectual king, Edward II himself bears a certain resemblance not only to Henry VI but also--more so, perhaps--to Shakespeare's Richard II. Edward II fascinates in large part because of his love for Gaveston. We don't expect to find a character in Renaissance drama--much less a king--who so blatantly pursues a love affair with another man. However, Edward's interest to us is less a matter of his speechmaking than of the circumstances of his life, though I do greatly admire his evocation of "perfect shadows in a sunshine day." In Edward's love for Gaveston, Marlowe gives us little psychological insight into what it might have been like to be a gay man in pre-modern society. By contrast, Shakespeare's Richard II, though he inhabits a far from perfect play, amazes us with the consistently poetic force of his speeches. Through him, we see what it is like to be placed on the throne by historical circumstance when in fact the man belongs elsewhere.

A.D. Nuttall is right, I think, in pointing out that Shakespeare's Prospero is akin to--and in many respects represents a one-upsmanship of--Marlowe's Faustus. Faustus may well be a modern character on the Promethean bounds of a new and ever more secularized world, but again there is little to make Faustus seem like a real person as opposed to a walking idea. What is it, exactly, that makes Prospero by contrast seem real? For one thing, we have the moral complication resulting from Prospero's complicity in his own usurpation. Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, deliberately turned his attention away from affairs of state to pursue magic; he placed his brother Antonio in charge of governance of the state, thus giving Antonio the responsibility of leadership without any of the perks and in effect tempting his brother to usurp him. Thus Prospero inhabits an infinitely more grey moral climate than that of his predecessor--and this moral greyness is something we recognize from our own lives, from the decisions we face. Faustus voices some uncertainty about his bargain, but his doing so is superficial--it never bites deep. Shakespeare, who made the self-disclosing soliloquy the cornerstone of his art, in an odd move gives Prospero--often regarded as the bard's most autobiographical character--a curious inner life that he chooses not to reveal directly to us, and somehow, improbably, this method works as a new means of realizing the self on stage. Instead of outright pangs of conscience, Prospero experiences puzzling headaches. His doubt is implicit, understated, unexplained. In such a way, Prospero voices more than ambition, awe, and fear--the three tones that Faustus displays. Prospero is cranky, domineering even over those he loves, well aware not so much of the thrill of political power as he is burdened by it--by the memory of the duty he once neglected. The backstory of The Tempest casts aspersions on the value of knowledge; until he is on the verge of renouncing it, Prospero's magic bears no rewards; it merely serves to compensate somewhat for the damage Prospero's negligence had brought about. For years, Prospero bears the obligation of rectifying the damage wrought by his pursuit of magic, and a tremendous irony underscores Prospero's entire career as magician: in his pursuit of knowledge, he loses power. In short, Prospero is at the core of a dynamic that is far-reaching and intricate, and it is largely through context that he achieves dimensions of complexity. Prospero--along with Hamlet, one of Shakespeare's moodiest characters, not to be outdone by the non-human Ariel--possesses a range of emotions, from care and generosity to anger and callousness, but it is more than anything the fact that his love bears with it a trace of anger, his anger a trace of love, that makes Prospero seem real, complex, human--like someone you might know.

Early genius sometimes fades or fails to improve upon itself, and, as Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in a recent article in The New Yorker, sometimes it is the late bloomers--those who arrive upon their genius in mid-career or at mid-life--who provide the most enduring work. Shakespeare was hardly old when his career as we know it began, but if he was a youthful prodigy in his early twenties, we'll never know about it. Marlowe, by general accounts, lived fast, loved hard, and died young. He was an innovator who left an impressive body of work, but we will never know what kind of work he might have produced had he lived, like his great contemporary, to the age of fifty-two.