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The Elizabethan theatre
75
It is King Edward’s love for Gaveston which brings about his downfall.
In his imprisonment, Edward reaches a tragic dignity in the face of
humiliation and disgrace:
Immortal powers, that know the painful cares
That waits upon my poor distressed soul,
Oh, level all your looks upon these daring men
That wrongs their liege and sovereign, England’s king!
O Gaveston, it is for thee that I am wrong’d,
For me both thou and both the Spencers died;
And for your sakes a thousand wrongs I’ll take.
The Spencers’ ghosts, wherever they remain,
Wish well to mine; then, tush, for them I’ll die.
Marlowe’s plays explore the boundaries of the new world and the
risks that mankind will run in the quest for power, for knowledge, for
love. His plays are full of spectacular action, bloodshed, and passion, to
match the language he uses. When Doctor Faustus must yield his soul to
the Devil, Mephistopheles, at the end of the tragedy, it can be interpreted
as a moment of self-knowledge – an epiphany of how weak, how transient,
how empty is man’s life on earth, especially in relation to the eternal and
the powerful. This transience of human life is echoed again and again in
Elizabethan writing, and the ‘two hours’ traffic of our stage’ becomes the
symbol and emblem of man’s role in the world. The Chorus proclaims:
Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
with the warning not
To practise more than heavenly power permits.
(Doctor Faustus)
FROM THE STREET TO A BUILDING – THE
ELIZABETHAN THEATRE
By the time Marlowe was writing, a new type of audience had been
created for a different kind of theatrical performance. Earlier in the
century, the mystery and morality plays had been performed almost
anywhere, outside, often moved from location to location by wagon.
In contrast, ‘interludes’ – little more than dramatic verse – were