INTRODUCTION

Late medieval cultural movement in Europe brought renewed

interest in Classical learning and values. The Renaissance began in

Italy during the late 13th

century and spread throughout Europe in

the 15th

century, ending finally in the 16th

and 17th

century.1 This

‘spirit’ of Renaissance flowed north across Europe and entered

England as ‘New Learning’. Its adventurous ideas soon began to

affect most levels of English society. The main object was the

discovery of treasures of learning and literature of a remote past.

The period of this movement was revival of art and literature under

the influence of classical models between the 14th

and 16th

century.

2

The term Renaissance, therefore, etymologically means ‘to

be born again’, ‘rebirth’, and indicates a phenomenon of

regeneration in the life of an individual, or a nation, or a more

extensive part of the world comprising several nations.2

The essential condition for the coming of the Renaissance is

that this discovery should make an impact on the mind of

discoverer and goad him to reproduce literature to match what he

has discovered. It means that the Renaissance brought with it an

insatiable thirst for knowledge and power. The knowledge places in

one’s hand the key to power, desires, ambitions and aspirations, and

in their fulfilment one strays from the path of righteousness.

Although Renaissance had its advent in England quite late-

much after it was already in force in Italy and its flowering in

France, the new sensibility dates in England from very early times,

and the actual Renaissance in England has its distinctive

characteristics not found in the renaissance of any other country. As

compared with those in France and Italy the chief peculiarities of

the Renaissance in England are the following: the reviving breath

came to literature later and more slowly; humanism had for a long

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time no decisive effect on either poetry or prose; and the language

scarcely attained its full growth by the beginning of the sixteenth

century. Rich in all its manifestations though the English literature

of the Renaissance may be, the drama is its chief glory, just as it is

the nation’s most direct and original expression. Drama, therefore,

is the most important subject for study at this time; it is also the

most difficult subject. The number and diversity of the plays make

classification difficult; while the lack of sufficient dates makes it

almost impossible to obtain a clear outline of the evolution of the

theatrical world. True, the so-called ‘University wits’, did at one

time think that English drama could come up only by observing

more rigorously the Aristotelian principles and it was true also that

there was in the beginning for sometime at least, a craze for

Seneca’s tragical devices and style.

They were all men of academic training, and had thus been

brought into personal touch with new learning and had absorbed its

spirit, at one or other of the two great institutions of scholarship.

But, with one exception, they gave their talents to the public stage,

and it is certain that the strongly pronounced taste of their audience

had a good deal to do with the class of drama which they produced.

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Arranged roughly in order of time, they are: JOHN LYLY (1554?–

1606); THOMAS KYD (1557?–1595?); ROBERT GREENE

(1560?–1592); CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564-1593); and

THOMAS NASH (1576–1601). 3

The Renaissance was very much the glory of the Roman

Catholic Church. Bishops and abbots in England welcomed it.

There was in England Christopher Marlowe, one of the star figures

among the ‘University Wits’. He wrote these four famous plays:

Tamburlaine (1587), Doctor Faustus (1588), The Jew of Malta

(1590), Edward II (1592) and also The Massacre at Paris and

Dido, Queen of Carthage including a poem named Hero and

Leander.

Christopher Marlowe has been identified as one of the

greatest of the pre-Shakespearean dramatists. He was born in Parish

Church, St. George, the Martyr, at Canterbury in February 1564 of

a family that originated in Ospringe, to-day part of Faversham. His

father John Marlowe was a shoemaker in ancient Canterbury and

Katharine, formerly Katharine Arthur. Out of nine children

Marlowe was the second. At the age of fifteen, in 1579 he attended

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the king’s school at Canterbury situated along the route from Dover

to London which was a busy city. And then in the winter of 1580,

Marlowe arrived in Cambridge at the Archbishop Parker scholar at

Corpus Christi College, one of the oldest colleges in the University.

When he arrived at Cambridge in December 1580, Marlowe was

seventeen and he formerly matriculated in March, 1581. A total of

six year’s study led to an M.A. which Marlowe achieved in 1587.

In 1587 the University authorities considered withholding his

M.A. (he was rumoured to be about to defect to the catholic

seminary at Rheims), until Privy Council intervened to point out

that in his absence from Cambridge he had done the queen ‘good

service’ a phrase usually taken to mean spying – ‘and deserved to

be rewarded for his faithful dealing’.4 He got his M.A. but instead

of taking holy orders he began writing plays for the London

theatres, disreputable places – at least in the eyes of the godly-

people, which were under constant attack as dense of iniquity.

Marlowe was one of the dramatists among a group of

educationists known as ‘University Wits’, who wrote dramas. By

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1587, Marlowe had already made a name for himself among the

London Dramatists.

At Corpus Christi, Marlowe spent time in self-set tasks of

Latin translation from Lucan’s De Bello Civili into English blank

verse and Ovid’s Amores into rhyming couplets, such as he used

later in Hero and Leander. In this we see him honing this poetic

skill to emerge as England’s greatest poet-dramatist. Thus, he also

began to write his play, probably from the age of eighteen. At

Cambridge he is thought by some historians to have written the

lyrical drama ‘Dido, Queen of Carthage’ based on Virgil’s epic

poem. Marlowe had been writing poetry and performing plays ever

since his king’s school days. His education fashioned him to

become the innovative genius who first conceived and created

Shakespearean blank verse drama. This is why Tennyson hailed

him as “The Morning Star”5 of the great dramatic flowering of

Elizabethan England. In an incident, Ingram Frizer fatally stabbed

Christopher Marlowe. This happened in May 30, 1593 and he was

buried at Deptford on June 1.

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Socio-Political Background: Elizabeth’s aim was always a

united and independent England. Unity meant also religious unity.

The main problem was how to balance the desire of the Catholics

with those of the Protestants. Her reign was one of the longest in

English history. Englishmen today think of it as also one of the

best. She had been given the friendly title, ‘Good Queen Bess’ –

‘Bess’ being a short name for Elizabeth. The country over which

she reigned became known as ‘Marrie England’. She had golden

red hair. Her body was tall and commanding. She was a proper

queen. She was clothed in rich purple when she rode at the centre of

a thousand lords and ladies into London. England under Elizabeth

had been compared with the human body. The queen-in parliament

was its head, guarding it from confusion and guiding its behaviour.

The church-men were its eyes, ‘to watch and not to sleep’. The

judge and the magistrates were its ears to hear complaints.

The great men – nobles and councillors, ministers and governors –

were its shoulders and arms, to hold up the head and defend the

commonwealth with might and force. The men of the lower classes

were merely the supporters of the body. Their duty was to work, to

produce wealth, so that the commonwealth could be developed.

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There were two groups of lower classes, viz: Yeoman and Squire.

At court there were madrigals, sweet poems sung by four or five

voices together. At court, and also in the great country houses,

gentlemen wrote music for many sorts of stringed and winged

instruments. There were masques, too, in which poetry and music

were combined with dramatic action. And in whatever place the

queen stayed, there was always dancing.

Elizabeth’s court was a gay and colourful place. The

gentlemen wore stocking up to the knee, above that padded trousers

called trunk hose (gathered in at the knee), and above that a shirt

called a doublet with a jerkin over it, padded at the stomach. Ladies

wore, under long, full skirts, a padded roll round their hips-a French

farthingale. The farthingale made the skirt stand out square from the

body. The dress above it had a pointed waist.

So gentlemen and ladies were both colourful, and both kinds

of dress followed fashion. Everybody wore wide ruffs, stiff

ornamental collars, round their necks. Many men also grew

fashionable pointed beards.

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The court was always moving, following the queen ‘on

progresses’ allover the southern shires. The court travelled from

Whitehall down the river to Greenwich, or up to Richmond,

Hampton, Windsor and Oxford, with crowds of people kneeling as

the queen passed by.

In each palace the queen enjoyed a private withdrawing

Chamber, where she lived with her ladies and received only her

favourite friends. In the Privy Chamber she talked business with her

councillors. To the outer Presence Chamber she came sometimes to

mix with the mass of her countries and be publicly entertained.

Statesmen and ministers, ambassadors and courtiers, scholars

and church-men and business-men, artists and musicians and

writers, all gathered round her like insects round a bright light.

Elizabeth’s royal manner, her quick brain, her sharp tongue and her

good common sense, all these turned confusion into order. The

court was a place of good government. It had been said that

Elizabeth’s courtiers came and went, but her ministers stayed for a

life-time. All the chief officials lived at court. It was the place of

their work and a second home. To be sent away from court was not

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only to lose a good position; it was bad as being excommunicated

from church, or sent into the outer darkness. Perhaps it was even

worse. ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ is an old English saying. With

Elizabeth, it was often ‘out of sight, in evil mind’. This queen

linked to see everything that was happening in the politics of her

kingdom. Her secretary of state kept royal spies everywhere.

A spy system was necessary to government in an unsafe age

and also as reward for good service. But the queen was the

government, and the government was the state, and the state was

the commonwealth, and the commonwealth was the good of the

people. It was all one thing, a unity in Elizabeth’s England, and it

could not be separated.6

Marlowe’s plays were produced to understand something of

the situations in which politics and religion interacted in

Elizabethan England. Marlowe’s texts are scarred with the traces of

religious and political conflict. This is to say that we can make a

tentative connection between the popular and the political when we

examine the kind of satire Marlowe unleashes of Catholicism in his

plays The Jew of Malta. This is a form of political propaganda that

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would presumably have gone down well with the majority of a

London theatre audience as well as Queen Elizabeth and her court.

In this sense, not only were religion and politics enmeshed into one

another, but theatre and society were also. Furthermore, as we have

already seen, his life seems to have flared up and burned out at the

point where the two collided. In one sense, the issue of cultural

difference is again paramount when we come to investigate

Marlowe’s religious beliefs. There are passages in the major plays

that might strike us of being unorthodox for an Elizabethan, and we

shall consider the more details of the dramas in the following pages.

Doctor Faustus is obviously remarkable for its portrayal of a man

brave and foolish enough to dismiss hell as a ‘fable’ while

conducting a conversation with a devil. But there are numerous

other examples in Faustus and elsewhere of what an orthodox

Elizabethan would perceive as heresy. The social backgrounds of

Marlowe’s famous plays are as follows:

Tamburlaine: The first part of Tamburlaine was the most

likely written while Marlowe was still at Cambridge, possibly in

1587. Tamburlaine certainly made a considerable impact on

London cultural life when it exploded onto the stage in 1587. In its

12

own fashion, it could be seen as the first “block-buster’ of its times,

or more accurately, the first blockbuster. Actually, Marlowe was

one of the first playwrights to take blank verse from epic poetry to

the English stage. The use of give-stress lines that were unrhymed

had a huge liberating effect, freeing writers from the tyranny of

rhyming couplets while also pinpointing the pattern that seems to

replicate most closely the natural rhymes of English Speech. It is

said that the Tamburlaine plays remain fairly conservative in terms

of metrical experimentation sometimes sticking uncomfortably and

rigidly to iambic pentameters when an unstressed syllable is

followed by a stressed syllable. The dying speech of Cosroe in

Tamburlaine is characteristic of such technique:

The strangest men the ever Nature made:

I know not how to take their tyrannies.

My bloodless body waxeth chill and cold,

And with my blood my life slides through my wound.

My soul begins to take her flight to hell,

And summons all my senses to depart:7

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Outwardly, Tamburlaine is a ten-act history play: essentially, it is a

soaring piece of almost epical poetry, often wildly extravagant but

adorned with moments of dazzling lyric beauty. In part II the hero

extends his conquests, though he is somewhat shaken by the loss of

Zenocrate and the cowardice of one of their sons. At last, glutted

with blood, intoxicated with success and broken in health, the

madly orders an assault on the power of Heaven. But now his

armies are helpless; he is beaten at last; Death is the final victor.

Doctor Faustus: It was written in 1588. It was considered to

be the best play of Marlowe because in this play he was able to

handle quite successfully the classic elements of tragedy that is pity

and terror. The theme of Faustus is power and this time power

through knowledge. It is the insatiable hunger for knowledge

through which Faustus sought to subdue wealth and death to work

out his own doom.

Having failed in his attempt to gain infinite power through

knowledge, he strikes a bargain with the devil and the later half of

the play shows his ‘agonised struggle to escape damnation. In spite

14

of his such effort, Faustus is ultimately damned for his intellectual

presumption.

He achieved so little as the price of his soul in the second

half of the play. Faustus begins to waver and bitterly accuses

Mephistopheles of depriving him of the everlasting joys of heaven,

when he realizes that his twenty four years’ lease of life is up and

that nothing can save him from an eternity of torment. Marlowe

excelled in depicting the scenes of agony. In a sense, this is also

true of Doctor Faustus. As a dark morality play, the play ‘tells the

world – story of a man who, seeking for all knowledge, pledged his

soul to the devil, only to find the misery of a hopeless repentance in

this world and damnation in the world to come. 8

As Tamburlaine aspired to be the world’s master by force of

arms, Faustus sought it through knowledge; thus Marlowe exhibits

in this play another aspect of the Renaissance, will to freedom. In

its original form Doctor Faustus must have been a sublime poem,

and it still retains what Tamburlaine lacks, scenes of primarily

dramatic power.

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The Jew of Malta: It was written in 1590 and was

performed on 26th February 1592. The central theme here is pursuit

of wealth and like Tamburlaine, its hero Barabas, the Jew, is

conceived on a grand scale in the beginning of the play. Briefly, it

tells the story of a villainous Jew named Barabas who, having had

his wealth confiscated by the Christians who ruled the island of

Malta, takes his revenge on the Governor and his knights. The very

idea of the Jew makes the use of these figures as an associate of the

Christian audience alarming, cunning and subversive. What is setup

in The Jew of Malta is something that will be far less certain in the

Merchant of Venice when it appears several years later. Barabas too

is motivated by the will for power which he seeks to fulfil through

possession of gold. He becomes then a prototype of the

Machiavellian-villain on English stage and is characteristic

enunciated by the Florentine Philosopher that is Machiavelli

himself, whom Marlowe brings on the stage. Herry Levin says:

Barabas, the Jew, is a man whith

A grievance, but his relation

Outturns the provocation. His revenges,

argumented by his ambitions,

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are so through – going that the

revenger becomes a villain.

He is not merely less sinned

Against than sinning;9

The Jew of Malta is undoubtedly the most problematic of

Marlowe’s plays. The portrayal of a Jew in terms that are hard to

see as anything other than anti-Semitic brings us up against the

important issue of ethnic identity and social prejudice.

Barabas, like Faustus and Tamburlaine, is a child of

Renaissance; though he is not like them a hero, but a hero-villain.

The play is a melodrama rather than a tragedy, or, as has been

seriously suggested, a farce. Barabas is the crafty (to the

Elizabethans, Machiavellian) scoundrel who, clever as he is, finally

overreaches himself. The conclusion is irresistible that, whatever

his original intention, Marlowe turned his efforts into capitalizing

anti-Semitic prejudice.

Edward II: Marlowe’s last play is Edward II, a tragic study

of king’s weakness and misery. In point of style and dramatic

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construction, it is by far the best of Marlowe’s plays, and is a

worthy predecessor of Shakespeare’s historical drama. This play is

a case in point: probably first performed during the winter of 1592,

it was a key text in the establishment of a new genre in English

drama, the ‘history’ play.

On the greater dramatist’s technical development afterwards

Marlowe’s most mature play may have exerted considerable

influence. On the other hand, there are fewer lyrical outbursts in it

than in the earlier works; and it is curious that Marlowe’s best play

seems less Marlovian than the others.

When Marlowe composed Edward II, can be seen from a

number of different perspectives, and over the centuries of

performance and critical commentary, it has been interpreted as a

story about the conflict between the personal and the political; as a

story of the legitimacy of revolt against an inadequate and

ineffectual monarch; as a homosexual love story; and as a story of

an ‘Overreacher’ – Mortimer.

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It depicts the beginning of the erosion of a rigid, stratified

social hierarchy, with clear-cut division between the classes, from

peasant and labourer, all the way through the ranks to the monarch

who balances at the hierarchy’s apex. Apparently, what irks the

barons is not the nature of the sexual relationship between Edward

and Gaveston, but the fact that Gaveston is of a low social class and

obscure birth.

The structure of Edward II shows the unevenness of a

transitional work. It is evident that Marlowe was developing, both

technically and in the more important scenes. It might even be

hazarded that he was developing towards a more “Shakespearean”

(That is, a more inclusive) style, for in Edward II. There can be

found the most formalized qualities of feeling, and the most

naturally human.

Renaissance Movement in Art: Inspired by the works of

writers of ancient Greece and Rome, Renaissance artists produced

painting and sculpture based on the observation of the visible and

practical world according to mathematical principles of balance,

harmony and perspective. The new static’s tenets found expression

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in the work of such Italian artists as LEONARDO DA VENCI,

SANDRO BOTTICELLI, RAPHAEL, TITIAN, and

MICHELANGELO, and the city of Florence became the centre of

Renaissance art. In the world by letters, HUMANIST such as

DESIDERUS ERASMUS rejected religious orthodoxy in favour of

the study of human nature and such writers as PETRARCH and

GIOVANI BOCCACCIO in Italy, FRANCOIS RABELAIS in

France, and WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE in England produced

works that emphasized the intricacies of human character.10

The term has also been applied to cultural revivals in

England in the 8th

century, the Frankish kingdoms in the 9th

century,

and Europe in the 12th

century. Even the style of architecture,

reflecting the rebirth of classical culture that originated in Florence

in the early 15th century spread throughout Europe, replacing the

medieval Gothic style of the Cathedrals of Salisbury and old St.

Paul’s in England and Natre Dame de Paris in France. It shows that

Renaissance architecture developed the principles and forms of

antique classics on a new basis. Classicism canonized the

compositional devices of antiquity. So, the style was marked by

heavy ornament, complex articulation and spatial relationships,

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decorousness, emotional elevation and exultation and contrasting

forms. On other hand, in antiquity drawing and painting were close

to each other and to literature. In the Renaissance period painting

flourished and became the leading art. It seemed to be best medium

for expressing anti ascetic and anti-scholastic pathos of the epoch.

The rejoicing in the richness of life, its spiritual and sensuous

beauty, Renaissance artists asserted the universal human relevance

of painting which did not, like literature, need translation

(Raphael’s Madonna).11

Moreover, re-discovery was symbolically announced through

two works of art, both by Michelangelo (1475-1564) – one, a

painting and the other, a piece of sculpture, to wit, ‘The Creation of

Man’ and ‘David’. Encouraged by Florentine Neo-Platonism,

Michelangelo took inspiration for all his works of art from the

beauty and divine grace of the human body. Between 1508 and

1512, he painted on the ceiling of Sistine Chapel at Rome, nine

paintings of which only one is generally referred to in the context of

the Renaissance – ‘The Creation of Man’. In the “Creation of Man”

he has depicted Adam sprawling in all his muscular nudity as

though awakened out of sleep, and not ashamed but proud of his

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nude body, and the same quality in his sculpture ‘David’, the

anatomical exactitude with which we view the best pieces of Greek

sculpture, showing an improvement on the latter in its mobile

expressiveness. There is nothing in human body to be ashamed of,

or which needs to be mortified. This is what Michelangelo has

depicted in the other eight panels. 12

To conclude this chapter it can be said that, the Renaissance

and the new learning had led to a spirit of adventure. This spirit was

given freedom by the political peace and unity which existed during

Elizabeth’s reign. Adventures of the mind led to splendid literature,

music and art. Adventures of the body resulted in the exploration of

the oceans and discovery of far lands. The national spirit and spirit

of the adventure both sprang, mainly, from the Anglican protestant

society and the strength of both of them lay mainly into two

particular social groups: The yeoman and the squire. Although men

were not equal but were free at that time. There were freedoms to

mix with other classes, freedom of opportunity to make profits and

freedom to rise up the social ladder. Men of the different religious

opinions were willing to come together in order to defend these

freedoms against threats from inside and outside the country. Such

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images were reflected in the plays of Christopher Marlowe and

further, the various characteristics of Renaissance in Marlowe’s

plays will be discussed in detail in the forthcoming chapters.

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Reference

1. Alok Wadhwa. Britannica: Ready Reference Encyclopedia

(New Delhi: Britannica Pvt. Ltd., n.d.) p.143.

2. Naresh Chandra. The Literature of the English Renaissance

(New Delhi: DOABA HOUSE, 1985), p.2.

3. William Henry Hudson. An outline History of English

Literature (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors,

1999), p. 67.

4. Frederick S. Boas. Christopher Marlowe: A Biographical

and Critical Study (Oxford: n.p. 1940), p.22.

5. C. David. Christopher Marlowe : A Critical Study (New

Delhi: Anmole Publication Pvt. Ltd.., 2007), p.4.

6. Anthony Toyne. An English – Reader’s History of England

(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 125.

7. Stevie Simkin. Marlowe (Delhi: Pearson Education Ltd.,

2003), p.74.

8. Felix E. Schelling. English Drama (London: n.p. 1914), p.

68.

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9. A.K. Khullar. Christopher Marlowe’s Edward the Second

(Chandigarh: Abhishek Publication, 1980), p.7.

10. Alok Wadhwa. Britannica: Ready Reference Encyclopedia.

p.143.

11. Yuri Borev. Aesthetics (USSR: Progress Publication, 1985),

p. 251.

12. Naresh Chandra. The Literature of the English Renaissance,

p. 47.