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

Logan's book provides an exhaustive assessment of Christopher Marlowe's influence on Shakespeare's creative life from Venus and Adonis to The Tempest. The book contains some new material and reexamines some familiar facts. Logan argues that as Shakespeare "became more sure-footed in composing his plays, his absorption of Marlowe's influence deepened, enhancing both his creative intelligence and artistic artistry" (143). He addresses "various forms of influence, from the most to the least definite" (3), including language and verse, dramatic structure and plot, values and ideologies, and characterization and themes. The book assumes that Marlowe's influence on Shakespeare was continuous and a matter of course, whether conscious or unconscious, which is both a stimulating proposition and a problem of convincing evidence. Logan's method and conclusions are more persuasive when he discusses Shakespeare's earlier career, when Marlowe's influence was the strongest and more apparent and when both playwrights were contemporaries in London, than in the later period, when Marlowe was long gone and his challenge had faded.

Logan should be applauded for looking for the influence of Marlowe in plays, such as Macbeth or King Lear, which few critics before him have considered. Yet, in his eagerness to address every link, Logan resorts to evidence that shows neither direct nor indirect influences. To argue for such instances as influences, he adopts a flexible method, which allows him to treat as sources both clear-cut and easily substantiated evidence, and speculative influences, whose status as sources is spurious. This approach also enables him to consider obvious verbal borrowings (and stylistic similarities) as direct influences, even when they originated in a shared literary context from which Renaissance writers in general drew inspiration. Consider the unstable terminology, such as influence, verbal echo, engagement, source, force, imprint, intertexts, likeness, and parallel, used to address Marlowe as a resource for Shakespeare. These concepts reflect a different order, even nature, of influence; some are vague and remained unexplained. Although he cautions (not often enough) that these factors do not carry the same weight as influence, he proceeds to argue for influence as the basic principle of Shakespeare's relationship with Marlowe.

This loose terminology contrasts with Logan's clear, opening remark that his book takes into account "not only what Shakespeare appropriated and, through refinements, made his own, but also what he rejected, especially in the realm of Marlovian values" (2), which announces a level of selectiveness not maintained throughout the book. Yet, the proposition itself is pertinent, because it is difficult to prove with any certainty what is rejected. It would be even more difficult to prove what Shakespeare rejected when he looked at Marlowe because what he accepted is already difficult to ascertain, except in some obvious cases of direct echoes. And, what specific "Marlovian values" (moral? esthetic? political? religious?) Logan has in mind are never explained, let alone placed in a historical or literary context.

The book contains eight chapters. It begins with a chapter on methodology and sources, which engages critically with both Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence" and Jonathan Bate's "endorsement of Bloom's principle" (6); it lists works on which some of the most obvious influences are tested; and it provides a conceptual framework. The most problematic statement is that "Marlowe had the strongest continuing impact on Shakespeare's psychology as he composed his works" (8). This might be so, but only if historicizing the complex concept of psychology (Shakespeare's in particular) were an easier task. Luckily, in this opening chapter, Logan emphasizes how difficult it is to "access" (13) the route and nature of influences in general.

In other chapters, Logan addresses clusters of plays and nondramatic literature. In chapter 2, he analyzes the impact of verbal echoes from The Massacre at Paris on characterization in Titus Andronicus and Richard III. While the influence on Titus appears convincing...