THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

dramatic explorations of the theme of revenge developed. Prominent in this line of ‘revenge plays’ are Marston’s The
Malcontent of 1604, Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy of 1607, and, above all, Shakespeare’s Hamlet published in
1603 (though Kyd himself is believed to have written an earlier, now lost, play on the same subject). Although it
continued to be revived into the early years of the seventeenth century, The Spanish Tragedy ultimately proved to be a
play as parodied and ridiculed by other dramatists (notably Jonson) as it had once been flattered by imitation. What
particularly established its reputation was its intermixture of dense plotting, intense action, swiftly moving dialogue,
and long, strategically placed, rhetorically shaped speeches. The soliloquies of Hieronimo, a father determined to
revenge the murder of his son, both gave prominence to an inward drama of private disillusion and created an
impression of an agonized soul writhing as it debated with itself. Unsubtle and declamatory these speeches may often
seem (‘O eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears; | O life, no life, but lively form of death; | O world, no world,
but mass of public wrongs, | Confus’d and fill’d with murder and misdeeds’), but they were integral to the fusion of
violent action, exaggerated gesture, and boisterous rhetoric which mark Kyd’s theatrical style.
Calculated exaggeration, coupled with a far greater control of metrical pace and inventive poetic effect, help to
determine the often startling and disconcerting quality of Marlowe’s dramatic verse, verse that brought English
iambic pentameter to its first maturity. If we can trust the evidence wrung from Kyd by the Privy Council in 1593, the
‘atheistical’ disputations found in the lodgings that he shared with his fellow playwright were Marlowe’s, not his. If
this is indeed so, the ‘atheistical’ speculations of Marlowe’s plays probably stem from a private fascination with
‘forbidden’ knowledge, with ambition, and with the disruptive leaps of the human imagination which the Elizabethan
political and religious establishment would readily have interpreted as seditious. What also emerges from his plays,
however, is the equally disruptive awareness that imaginative ambition must, for good or ill, confront its own limits.
In Marlowe’s first great theatrical success, Tamburlaine the Great (published 1590), for example, Tamburlaine sets
out to demonstrate that, though he was born a shepherd, his deeds will prove him a lord. Nature, he claims, teaches us
all to have aspiring minds, and he, the aspirer par excellence will seek to hold ‘the Fates bound fast in iron chains, |
And with my hand turn Fortune’s wheel about’. But Marlowe does not allow such naked military and political
ambition to parade itself unchallenged. In the fifth scene of Act II Tamburlaine relishes the prospect of sway in Persia
by revealing a commensurate relish for the rolling rhythm of words, names, and reiterations:
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And ride in triumph through Persepolis! -
Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles! -
Usumcasane and Theridamas,
Is it not passing brave to be a king,
And ride in triumph through Persepolis?
Tamburlaine’s subsequent question to his companion, ‘Why say, Theridamas, wilt thou be a king?’ receives the
disenchanted answer, ‘Nay, though I praise it, I can live without it’.
Marlowe impels his dramas forwards by evoking the power of dreams and then deflating them. His deflations can
be hard-headed refusals to believe in dreams or, sometimes comic, disinclinations to indulge in the fantasies enjoyed
by others. Both are equally subversive of pretensions to power. The two parts of Tamburlaine the Great (the second
written in response to the popularity of the first) confront audiences with a picture of a conquering ‘hero’, a breaker of
moulds and a forger of new orders. Nevertheless, somewhat like those nineteenth-century European writers who
belatedly attempted to come to terms with the phenomenon of Napoleon, Marlowe seeks to expose the concept of
heroism as well as to praise it. His Tamburlaine is not so much unheroic as hollow. He may not be presented as an
unwitting slave to historical or social circumstance, but he is shown as susceptible to the beauty and to the pleas of the
beloved Zenocrate and he is finally defeated by Time and Death. Although his aspiration is limitless, his ability to
obtain fulfilment is shown as being restricted by forces beyond his control.
A similar pattern can be observed in Marlowe’s other tragedies. Although God may seem to be an indifferent
observer and although his religion may be mocked as ineffective, his instruments continue to wreak havoc on those
who challenge his authority. If some commentators have chosen to see Marlowe as finally retreating from the
consequences of the freedom of thought and action that his plays begin to proclaim, the punishments he brings down
upon his protagonists in fact derive from their own unbending Promethean daring. In a significant way, each is
obliged to confront his own self indulgence. In The Jew of Malta (performed c. 1592 though not published till 1633)
the situation of the overreacher is presented with the kind of exaggerated gusto which threatens to topple over into
black comedy. Barabas, whose very name is likely to grate on Christian sensibilities, is glorious in his cupidity,
extravagant in his selfishness, and splendid in his ingenuity. His energy is directed to his advancement in the face of
his enemies and he glories in the kind of illicit manipulation spoken of in the play’s prologue by ‘Machiavel’. Barabas