A History of English Literature

zest for the beautiful. It is rich with extravagant sensuous descriptions,
notable among those which abound gorgeously in all Elizabethan poetry. But
finest of all is the description of beauty by its effects which Marlowe
puts into the mouth of Faustus at the sight of Helen of Troy:
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Much of Marlowe's strength, again, lies in his powerful and beautiful use
of blank verse. First among the dramatists of the popular stage he
discarded rime, and taking and vitalizing the stiff pentameter line of
'Gorboduc,' gave it an immediate and lasting vogue for tragedy and high
comedy. Marlowe, virtually a beginner, could not be expected to carry blank
verse to that perfection which his success made possible for Shakspere; he
did not altogether escape monotony and commonplaceness; but he gained a
high degree of flexibility and beauty by avoiding a regularly end-stopped
arrangement, by taking pains to secure variety of pause and accent, and by
giving his language poetic condensation and suggestiveness. His workmanship
thoroughly justifies the characterization 'Marlowe's mighty line,' which
Ben Jonson in his tribute to Shakspere bestowed on it long after Marlowe's
death.
The greatest significance of 'Tamburlaine,' lastly, lies in the fact that
it definitely established tragedy as a distinct form on the English popular
stage, and invested it with proper dignity.
These are Marlowe's great achievements both in 'Tamburlaine' and in his
later more restrained plays. His limitations must also be suggested. Like
other Elizabethans he did not fully understand the distinction between
drama and other literary forms; 'Tamburlaine' is not so much a regularly
constructed tragedy, with a struggle between nearly equal persons and
forces, artistically complicated and resolved, as an epic poem, a
succession of adventures in war (and love). Again, in spite of the prolog
in 'Tamburlaine,' Marlowe, in almost all his plays, and following the
Elizabethan custom, does attempt scenes of humor, but he attains only to
the coarse and brutal horse-play at which the English audiences had laughed
for centuries in the Mystery plays and the Interludes. Elizabethan also
(and before that medieval) is the lack of historical perspective which
gives to Mongol shepherds the manners and speech of Greek classical
antiquity as Marlowe had learned to know it at the university. More serious
is the lack of mature skill in characterization. Tamburlaine the man is an
exaggerated type; most of the men about him are his faint shadows, and
those who are intended to be comic are preposterous. The women, though they
have some differentiating touches, are certainly not more dramatically and
vitally imagined. In his later plays Marlowe makes gains in this respect,
but he never arrives at full easy mastery and trenchantly convincing
lifelikeness either in characterization, in presentation of action, or in
fine poetic finish. It has often been remarked that at the age when Marlowe
died Shakspere had produced not one of the great plays on which his
reputation rests; but Shakspere's genius came to maturity more surely, as
well as more slowly, and there is no basis for the inference sometimes
drawn that if Marlowe had lived he would ever have equalled or even
approached Shakespere's supreme achievement.
THEATRICAL CONDITIONS AND THE THEATER BUILDINGS. Before we pass to
Shakspere we must briefly consider those external facts which conditioned
the form of the Elizabethan plays and explain many of those things in them
which at the present time appear perplexing.