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72 The Renaissance 1485–1660
I had a husband, till a Richard kill’d him:
Thou hadst an Edward, till a Richard kill’d him;
Thou hadst a Richard, till a Richard kill’d him.
DUCHESS OF YORK I had a Richard too, and thou didst kill him;
I had a Rutland too: thou holpst to kill him.
QUEEN MARGARET Thou hadst a Clarence too, and Richard kill’d him.
This contrasts with the lighter language of comedy, full of sexual play
and even geography, as Dromio of Syracuse describes a woman to
Antipholus in Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors (c.1589) as ‘One
that claims me, one that haunts me, one that will have me’:
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE Then she bears some breadth?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE No longer from head to foot than from
hip to hip. She is spherical, like a globe. I could find out
countries in her.
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE In what part of her body stands
Ireland?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE Marry, sir, in her buttocks. I found it out
by the bogs.
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE Where Scotland?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE I found it by the barrenness, hard in the
palm of her hand.
As this shows, Shakespeare’s audience was quite happy to laugh at fat
ladies, lavatorial humour and legendary Scottish meanness!
William Shakespeare moves rapidly on from his classical models.
Christopher Marlowe, however, who was to achieve great success as
a playwright, used his classical background to create rich, rolling,
heroic verses whose heightened rhetoric matched the hugely
spectacular dramatic intentions of the writing. Hero and Leander, a
long poem on a classical subject, contains the famous line:
Whoever loved who loved not at first sight?
This is indicative of Marlowe. Romantic, rhetorical, subversive, radical and
powerfully memorable, all his writing is exciting, stretching the bounds of
language and imagination to new limits, making his heroes overreach