Brilliant brawler

In a riveting account, a Renaissance expert paints a vivid portrait of Christopher Marlowe as a risk-taking genius.

- MAC JACKSON

In the 1998 movie Shakespeare in Love, Will listens in despair to the incompetents auditioning for the role of Romeo in his new play. Free to choose any speech by which to show off their talents, each begins, “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/ And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?” They are all quoting Faustus’s address to the conjured-up image of Helen of Troy in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Born only two months before Shakespeare in 1564, Marlowe preceded him in attaining celebrity as a playwright. But whereas Shakespeare lived until 1616, his rival’s life was violently cut short in 1593. Yet Shakespeare was emulating him even in his own last sole-authored play, The Tempest, in which Prospero is a mighty magician, while Marlowe’s Faustus had practised magic to summon the devil Mephistopheles and gain supernatural powers in exchange for his soul.

Among Marlowe’s plays it is Doctor Faustus that is most often staged nowadays. Its impact on Elizabethan audiences can be reckoned by the fact that during at least one performance it was widely believed that a real devil appeared on stage. But it was Marlowe’s earlier Tamburlaine the Great that galvanised London theatre and most spectacularly ushered in the great age of Elizabethan-Jacobean drama. That play dramatises the career of a Scythian shepherd as his band of lawless warriors expands to conquer kingdom after kingdom. He leads with supreme self-confidence and with horrifying brutality. His will to hold power is expressed in magnificent blank verse that surpasses anything heard before on the English stage. Marlowe was, as he boasted in his prologue, liberating theatre from “jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits” and pioneering a dramatic medium that Shakespeare would adapt to his own purposes.