Christopher Marlowe, Individualist

CHRISTOPHER MARLOV\'E, INDIVIDUALIST PAUL H. KocHER THE literary detectives have had their way with Marlowe in recent years. Hotson, EccJes, and others have made brilliant discoveries about his turbulent career and his mysterious death under the dagger of . Ingram Frizer in the inn· at Deptford. But3 for all that, we are not much wiser in the central literary problem, which is to understand his plays in relation to hiscomplex personality. The present essay intends to explore in a general way the main areas of that problem and to offer a provis1onal hyp'othesis. Fortunately, interpretation of the dramas is made easier by the existence of a:considerable body of contemporary report about Marl~we•s views on the religious question· supplied by men who knew him, like Greene, Kyd, and Baines. On other subjects there surviv.es no e)(tcrnal record of his ideas, and these must be found, if found at all, within the plays themselves. These dramas should be approached, naturally, against a background of Elizabethan, not modern, thought and dramatic- practice. As critics we must insist upon the relevance of the whole intellectuaJ and emotional atmosphere in which Marlowe lived an·d conceived the plays, while at- the same tim.e remaining no less vigilant against the kind of pedestrianism which loses the Jjving man and the living audience in the assumption that everybody in the Elizabethan age must have had the same thoughts as everybody else. ~ Now if there is one thing which the biographical documents most amply demonstrate it is that in the field of religion Ma~lowe emphatically did not have the same ideas as everybody else. From b6th Kyd and Baines, who give verbatim accounts of Marlowe's conversation, comes testimony that he was an aggressive, sardonic, and determined polemist against the accepted Christianity of his day. Kyd writes that it was the dramatist's custom in 'table talk to jest at the Scriptures, gibe at the efficacy of prayer, and strive in argument to confute the sayings of prophets and holy men. Baines summarizes his impression of Marlowe by saying that ''almost into every Company he Cometh he persuades men to Atheism willing them not to be afeard of bugbeares and hobgoblins.)) This evidence, with the .many collateral lines which reinforce it, need not be repeated in detail.. Sufficient to s.ay that it is fairly voluminous, derived from numerous different people, some of whom knew Marlowe personally, s·trictly contemporaneous, and substantially uncontradicted by opposing external evidence. The first question on which any critic of Marlowe should make up his mind, I believe, is whether he considers this evidence au then tic, at least in its broad outlines. If it is, then there is no escaping the conclusion that the playwright was a violent and·active campaigner against Christianity in 'his Ill 112 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY personal life, and this fact must have a bearing on the interpretation of his work. The validity of this evidence, however, has often been attacked, usually on the ground that witnesses like Kyd and Baines were interested in getting Marlowe Into trouble and themselves out.·. This type of attack ignores, I think, the remarkable similarity between the charges brought 'quite rndependentl y by the two witnesses) the very detailed and specific nature of _these charges, and the support they receive from other contemporaries like Greene, Beard, Vaughan, and Harvey. It also fails to examine carefuny enough the detailed allegations of the Baines note, which·can be seen upon inspection to be anything but a random series of blasphe-mies . On the contrary, these form a carefully calculated, brilliantly ironic assault on the foundations of Christian dogma, made by. a man obviously of considerable theological learning. Marlowe had studied divinity at Cambridge. Many of the individual allegations are based on biblical texts skiHully and wryly twisted into arguments against the very persons they were intended to exalt-Moses, Christ1 the Virgin Mary, St. Paul, and the apostles. Take, for example, Marlowe's statement recorded by Baines that«IYtoses was but a Jugler" and that "it was an easy matter for Moyses being brought up in all the artes ofthe Egiptians to abuse the...