Shakespeare's Marlowe: the Influence of Christopher Marlowe on Shakespeare's Artistry (review)

In Shakespeare's Marlowe, Robert A. Logan offers a new perspective on an old problem: how to define the relationship between Shakespeare and Marlowe. Is Marlowe simply an evolutionary step on the way to the Bard? The antithesis in every way? The rival poet of Sonnet 86? The unacknowledged ghost writer?

Most recent attempts to gauge the impact of Marlowe on Shakespeare have adapted Harold Bloom's 'anxiety of influence'. James Shapiro, Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (1991), traces a process of parody to appropriation, ending about 1600 with Henry V and Hamlet. Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (1997), develops a 'sibling rivalry' version but finds Doctor Faustus still haunting The Tempest.

Logan rejects anxiety, rivalry, and biographical speculation. He considers Shakespeare and Marlowe as practising dramatists and poets; and 'this is where the influence begins and ends' (p. 21). He contends that 'Shakespeare shows himself primarily interested in the theatrical and literary techniques that made him [Marlowe] a successful commercial playwright, and not in Marlowe, the Cambridge intellectual reflecting and moralizing on serious issues' (p. 120). Shakespeare was familiar with Marlowe's plays from seeing them staged. He saw what worked in the theatre, especially what appealed to audiences.

'Influence' is defined in the introductory chapter as 'not simply the conscious or subconscious selection of elements in another writer's work but, more significantly, the use(s) to which they are put' (p. 9). Source studies may provide a starting point, but should extend to a 'free-ranging intertextual study of influence' (p. 10).

In the seven chapters which follow Logan explores Marlowe's complex and variable influence on Shakespeare's writing career. Each chapter sets a work by Marlowe against one or more of Shakespeare's. Logan identifies the most powerful aspects of Marlowe's influence as 'his verbal dexterity, his flexibility in reconfiguring standard notions of genre, and his use of ambivalence and ambiguity' (p. 231). Although Shakespeare 'showed much less interest in the ideas, values, and points of view expressed in Marlowe's works', the latter fuelled his 'fires of inventiveness and unconventionality' (p. 231).

Logan suggests that Shakespeare responded first to Marlowe's imagination and daring, but with developing control and individuality. Some of the early plays show the absorption of a general 'Marlovian complex' (p. 49) of villainy, violence, and vaunting, even though conventional morality prevails. The narrative poems are different, however: despite some thematic overlap the similarities between Venus and Adonis and Marlowe's Hero and Leander 'originate in the independent demands of each epyllion' (p. 56).

The plays Shakespeare wrote in the years following Marlowe's death in 1593 exhibit more direct kinds of influence. Richard II responds specifically to the generic advances and dramaturgical strategies of Edward II. The key strategy appropriated by Shakespeare is the exploiting of ambiguities, thus 'continually unsettling a secure response of moral certainty' (p. 84). For Logan, the influence of Marlowe's The Jew of Malta on The Merchant of Venice lies less in the figure of the Jew, which is subject in both plays to 'dramatic necessity' (p. 136), than in experiments with language and genre.

These and other plays of the mid to late 1590s do allude directly to details of Marlowe's plays but, Logan argues, the verbal and other echoes are not instances of 'anxiety' or 'rivalry' or even, in most instances, parody. At this point in his career Shakespeare acknowledges Marlowe's legacy as a 'standard of measurement' (p. 123), while at the same time asking the audience to recognise 'his own inventiveness, distinctiveness, and excellence as a writer' (p. 123).

From the late 1590s this self-advertising diminished, with a 'mature acceptance' of Marlowe's legacy' (p. 144). Henry V marks a coming to terms with 'the deepest and most pervasive element of Marlowe's influence: ... the Tamburlainian overreacher' (p. 144). Shakespeare's version of the 'mighty line...