The Complete Plays Read online

  THE COMPLETE PLAYS

  CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (b. 1564) was the eldest son of Canterbury shoemaker John Marlowe, and his wife, Katherine. He was elected to the King’s School Canterbury at the age of fourteen, and within two years had secured a scholarship which took him to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he was supposedly destined for a career in the Anglican Church. He successfully completed his BA examinations in 1584, and continued his studies as a candidate for the MA. During this period his absences from Cambridge stirred rumours that he was about to flee to the Catholic seminary at Rheims in France. In 1587 the Privy Council took the unusual step of persuading the University authorities to grant Marlowe his MA since he had been employed ‘in matters touching the benefit of his country’; this has fuelled speculation that he was working as a government agent.

  Marlowe probably began his writing career at Cambridge, composing translations of Ovid’s Amores, and Lucan’s Pharsalia, as well as producing Dido, Queen of Carthage for the Children of the Chapel in 1586 (possibly co-written with Thomas Nashe). In 1587–8 he acquired his reputation as one of the leading new talents on the London stage with Tamburlaine the Great. His finest play, Doctor Faustus, was written in 1588–9, and was followed by The Jew of Malta (c. 1590), Edward the Second and The Massacre at Paris (both c. 1592). The erotic epyllion Hero and Leander was probably written in 1592–3 when the plague forced the theatres to close.

  Throughout this period, Marlowe was frequently in trouble with the authorities, though for his actions and not his play-writing. He and the poet Thomas Watson were briefly imprisoned in September 1589 for their involvement in the death of William Bradley; in 1592 Marlowe was deported from Flushing, Holland, having been implicated in a counterfeiting scheme. He acquired a dangerous reputation as an atheist, and the following year he was summoned to appear before the Privy Council on charges of blasphemy, arising from evidence provided by Thomas Kyd, the author of the hugely popular play The Spanish Tragedy. Several days later, on 30 May 1593, Christopher Marlowe was fatally stabbed in Deptford.

  FRANK ROMANY was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he also taught for some years. He was until September 2003 Lecturer and Tutor in English at St John’s College, Oxford. He has published on Shakespeare and is at work on a book on John Milton.

  ROBERT LINDSEY is the Associate Editor of the journal Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England. He has edited Marlowe’s Edward the Second and has completed a new edition of the plays of John Webster. He is a lecturer in Classical Acting at the Central School of Speech and Drama, London.

  CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

  The Complete Plays

  Edited by FRANK ROMANY

  and ROBERT LINDSEY

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 2003

  9

  Editorial material copyright © Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey, 2003

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the editors have been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 9781101488508

  Contents

  Preface

  Chronology

  Introduction

  ‘The Baines Note’

  Further Reading

  A Note on the Texts

  DIDO, QUEEN OF CARTHAGE

  TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT, PART ONE

  TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT, PART TWO

  THE JEW OF MALTA

  DOCTOR FAUSTUS

  EDWARD THE SECOND

  THE MASSACRE AT PARIS

  Appendix: The Massacre at Paris, Scene 19

  Notes

  Glossary

  List of Mythological, Historical and Geographical Names

  Preface

  This is an edition of the seven plays which modern scholarship has convincingly attributed to Marlowe. The texts have been edited from the earliest printed editions and are fully modernized. Although it has become fashionable to print two versions of Doctor Faustus (the A- and B-texts), we have included only the A-text, in the belief that the B-text is for the most part a later, post-Marlovian adaptation of the play, the inclusion of which would have made this already large volume unwieldy for its readers. The text of Doctor Faustus is discussed in more detail in the Notes, while general editorial procedures are explained in the Note on the Texts.

  Individual English words which are unfamiliar, obsolete or obscure are, as far as possible, explained in the Glossary (G); allusions to named people and places in the List of Mythological, Historical and Geographical Names (N). These provide core information only (such as the essential meanings of words and the outlines of myths). For further help with the understanding of the texts, the reader is referred to the Notes. Each play has a headnote dealing with matters such as the date, sources and interpretation of the play, followed by more detailed notes on the text. These deal with individual words in cases where fuller discussion is required than is possible in (G), or where the reader might not realize that an unfamiliar Elizabethan meaning is intended (‘false friends’), or where Marlowe’s usage is idiosyncratic; with the meaning of larger sense-units; with matters of theatrical and literary interpretation; and with the specific local pertinence of mythological and historical allusions. The Notes also record substantive emendations to the text, and include translations, as literal as possible, of passages in languages other than English.

  This edition is a close collaboration between the editors, but readers may wish to know that the texts have been prepared by Robert Lindsey, while Frank Romany is principally responsible for the Introduction and Notes. Both editors wish to express their gratitude to Monica Schmoller for her patient work as copy-editor, and to the British Library and the Folger Shakespeare Library for their permission to reproduce manuscript materials in their collections.

  Chronology

  1564 26 February: Christopher, son of John Marlowe, a shoemaker, and his wife Katherine, baptized at St George the Martyr, Canterbury.

  1579 Awarded scholarship at the King’s School Canterbury (where he had perhaps received his earlier education).

  1580 December: Earliest recorded residence at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

  1581–7 Parker Scholar at Corpus Christi.

  1584 Petitions for BA degree.

  1585–6 Some absences from Cambridge.

  1586? Dido, Queen of Carthage, perhaps co-written with Thomas Nashe.

  1587 July: MA, after certification from the Privy Council that rumours that Marlowe intended to leave England for Rheims, home of an
English Catholic seminary, were untrue, and that he had done the queen ‘good service’.

  1587–8 Tamburlaine the Great Parts One and Two performed in London.

  1588? At work on translations of Ovid’s Amores, published as All Ovid’s Elegies, and of Book One of Lucan’s epic Pharsalia (De Bello Civile), published as Lucan’s First Book.

  1588–9 Earlier possible date of composition of Doctor Faustus.

  1589 18 September: Imprisoned in Newgate on suspicion of murder after William Bradley, a little-known figure with a history of violence, is killed in a fight with Marlowe and his friend the poet Thomas Watson.

  3 December: Appears before justices and is discharged.

  1590 Perhaps acting as a courier in France.

  ?Writes The Jew of Malta.

  1591 Shares lodgings with the dramatist Thomas Kyd.

  1592 26 January: Deported from Flushing, Holland, after Richard Baines, convert from Catholicism and intelligence agent, implicates him in a counterfeiting scheme.

  9 May: Bound over to keep the peace after a brawl with constables in Shoreditch.

  ?Writes Edward the Second and The Massacre at Paris.

  1592–3 Theatres closed because of plague. Possible composition of erotic narrative poem Hero and Leander. Later possible date of composition of Doctor Faustus.

  1593 18 May: Privy Council issues warrant for his arrest, at the house of Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe’s patron, in Kent or elsewhere, after Kyd claims that supposedly heretical papers found in his rooms belong to Marlowe.

  20 May: Answers warrant and appears before Privy Council.

  30 May: Murdered apparently in self-defence by Ingram Frizer, servant of Walsingham, in Deptford.

  1 June: Buried at St Nicholas church, Deptford.

  ?2 June: Baines accuses Marlowe of numerous blasphemies.

  28 June: Frizer pardoned.

  Introduction

  It is not easy to account for the power of Marlowe’s plays.* They are unevenly written, not always well constructed, and some survive only in mangled and unreliable texts. Yet an obscure, even dark, imaginative energy is released in them – in the victories of Tamburlaine, in Faustus’ encounters with the demonic, in the irreverence of Barabas and in the humiliation of Edward. At bottom, this energy is religious. Elizabethan playwrights were not allowed to handle sacred subjects, but their greatest plays often depend on the feeling of a sacred power gone dark. Marlowe’s plays of power and helplessness are filled with the energy of the sacred and its desecration.

  He was apparently destined for the Church. Born and brought up in Canterbury, the ancient spiritual capital of England, he went up to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on a scholarship designed to educate boys for the ministry. In 1587 the university authorities considered withholding his MA (he was rumoured to be about to defect to the Catholic seminary at Rheims), until the Privy Council intervened to point out that in his absences from Cambridge he had done the queen ‘good service’ – a phrase usually taken to mean spying – ‘and deserved to be rewarded for his faithful dealing’.1 He got his MA, but instead of taking holy orders began writing plays for the London theatres, disreputable places – at least in the eyes of the godly – which were under constant attack as dens of iniquity. Marlowe’s association with learning continued to be important to him: as late as 1592, when he was deported from Holland for his part in a counterfeiting scheme, he was still ‘by his profession [i.e., by his own account] a scholar’.2 But his learning was turned to distinctly heterodox ends: he translated Ovid’s Amores, erotic poems that verged on pornography in Elizabethan eyes (they were published surreptitiously as All Ovid’s Elegies, the title emphasizing the fact that they were unexpurgated); and he acquired a dangerous reputation for atheism. The sometime Cambridge don, Gabriel Harvey, called him ‘a Lucian’, associating him with the Greek satirist notorious for mocking the gods.3 His religious views were under investigation at the time of his violent death in 1593. One Richard Cholmeley claimed to have been ‘converted’ by him and alleged that ‘Marlowe is able to show more sound reasons for atheism than any divine in England is able to give to prove divinity and that Marlowe told him that he hath read the atheist lecture to Sir Walter Ralegh and others.’4

  This learned heterodoxy has obvious relevance to the plays: Dr Faustus, having ‘commenced’ (1.3) and been ‘graced’ (Prologue, 17) like a Cambridge graduate, is a scholar who punningly bids ‘Divinity, adieu!’ (1.50) and makes a pact with the devil; and Machevil, in the prologue to The Jew of Malta, has to stop himself delivering an atheist lecture to the audience. More importantly, Marlowe’s learning gets into the very fabric of his astonishing poetry. Consider his most famous lines, Faustus’ address to the shade of Helen of Troy:

  Was this the face that launched a thousand ships

  And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

  Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

  Her lips sucks forth my soul. See where it flies!

  Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.

  Here will I dwell, for heaven be in these lips,

  And all is dross that is not Helena.

  I will be Paris, and for love of thee

  Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked,

  And I will combat with weak Menelaus,

  And wear thy colours on my plumèd crest.

  Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel

  And then return to Helen for a kiss.

  O, thou art fairer than the evening air,

  Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.

  Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter

  When he appeared to hapless Semele,

  More lovely than the monarch of the sky

  In wanton Arethusa’s azured arms;

  And none but thou shalt be my paramour. (13.90–109)

  This hymn of sexual desire conceals learned ironies in its dense classical allusions. The opening questions come from Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, in which a visitor to the underworld, seeing Helen’s no-longer-recognizable skull, asks: ‘And is this what those thousand ships sailed for from all over Greece? Is this why all those Greeks and barbarians were killed? And all those cities sacked?’5 Marlowe turns this into part of an oddly humanistic sexual fantasy, the necrophiliac equivalent of the scholar’s desire to revive the classical past. Faustus has earlier produced Helen as an erotic after-dinner show for his scholars; now, to take his mind off his imminent damnation, he becomes her lover, repeatedly kissing her and crooning her name. Helen haunted Marlowe’s imagination. What fascinated him was the destructiveness of her beauty: men died and cities burned for it. And to complete the fantasy of being a modern Paris, strutting in triumph over the heroes of antiquity, Faustus includes the destruction of his own city: ‘Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked’. The later mythological allusions are similarly fraught with dangerous beauty. ‘Hapless Semele’ would admit the god’s sexual approach only if he came in all his glory; she was consumed by his lightning. Yet the ‘thousand stars’, their number matching the ships, are alight with natural beauty (starlight often ignites Marlowe’s poetry), and the eye catches the flash of sunlight on water in the otherwise unknown conjunction of the sun-god Apollo and the liquefied Arethusa. Moreover, the beauty of these heavenly bodies – uncertainly gods or planets – is male beauty, and the uncertainty in Faustus’ imagining of ravishment plays back over the speech as a whole. The initial question – was this the face? – is only half-rhetorical: this is not Helen but a boy-actor and, more darkly, a succubus (an evil spirit in female form) who ‘sucks forth [his] soul’ in ways that are indistinguishably erotic and terrifying.

  The self-destructive desire in these lines is a central preoccupation of all Marlowe’s plays. Dido, Queen of Carthage, possibly the earliest and perhaps co-written with his younger Cambridge contemporary Thomas Nashe, is an adaptation of Virgil’s narrative in the Aeneid of Dido’s tragic passion for the Trojan exile Aeneas. It was performed, its title-page tells us, b
y the boy-actors of the Chapel Children’s company. These two aspects of the play – its closeness to the most prestigious of Latin texts and its performance by boys – are in tension throughout the action. On the one hand, it is a learned play, full of direct translations of Virgil’s most famous lines: when Aeneas asks his divine mother, disguised as a huntress, ‘But what may I, fair virgin, call your name’ (1.1.188), he is translating Virgil’s ‘o quam te tnemorem virgo?’; his speeches describing the fall and burning of Troy are bravura versions of the great narrative of Aeneid II; and at key moments of Act 5, the play simply quotes Virgil’s Latin directly. On the other hand, the action is frequently mock-heroic, the Aeneid in falsetto voices. The opening scene sets the tone, beginning not with grand heterosexual passion but with the pederastie Jupiter ‘dandling GANYMEDE upon his knee’ (0.2SD). The ambivalence of the posture, an erotic game with a child, is present too in the opening line in his sexual invitation (‘Come, gentle Ganymede, and play with me’); and the Ganymede to whom the god’s bribes are offered is detectably a tarty, petulant Elizabethan page-boy. This scene is not in Virgil. It owes much to Lucian, and fits well the horrified description of the boy-actors’ repertoire in The Children of the Chapel Stripped and Whipped (1569): ‘Even in her Majesty’s chapel do these pretty upstart youths profane the Lord’s day by the lascivious writhing of their tender limbs, and gorgeous decking of their apparel, in feigning bawdy fables gathered from the idolatrous heathen poets.’6 Jupiter’s sexual wheedling – an extended version of Marlowe’s famous lyric ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’ (‘Come live with me, and be my love’)7 – is the first of many such invitations. Marlowe multiplies and complicates the love-affairs, and his characters express their desires in ways that are persistently and disturbingly linked with children. The principal changes to Virgil are in the boy-parts of Ascanius and Cupid. Venus abducts Ascanius with sticky promises of ‘sugar-almonds, sweet conserves, / A silver girdle and a golden purse’ (2.1.305–6) so that Cupid can take his place and cause Dido to fall for Aeneas. When she does, she offers (‘Conditionally that thou wilt stay with me’) to refit his ships with erotically luxurious