At age seventeen, awash in hormones, I took a serious shine to the sensuous words with which, in Marlowe's play, Faustus addresses Helen of Troy.
Oh, 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.
Just a bit more polished and glorious than what I myself could devise in the way of compliment, the outer limit of which was "you're looking kinda nice."
No wonder I was impressed. Marlowe was, and still is, a young person's poet. Ageless because he was murdered at age 29, he was flamboyant, unsubtle, and hyperbolic beyond any ordinary hyperbole. And above all, musical. "Wanton Arethusa's azured arms?" "Azured" only because the unusual adjective jauntily reinforces the timbre of "Arethusa." In actual fact, even the most alluring of female arms aren't blue --unless they are bruised, which Marlowe surely did not mean to imply). "Wanton?" In the story, Arethusa was chaste and preserved herself from the approach not of the monarch of the skies, but of the minor river-god Alpheus. Marlowe could trample on visual accuracy and learned tradition. But who could grudge him when the outcome was sonic delight. Nor did it seem to matter that Helen was compared not to a female goddess (many were available) but to Jove himself. And so I toted Tucker Brooke's old-spelling edition of Marlowe's works to my 1950s summer job, hoping and pretending that the poet's escapist rhythms could put a little shine into the grim warehouse where I earned my pittance.
I've just read a new biography of Christopher Marlowe. It's Park Honan's Christopher Marlowe, Poet and Spy (Oxford, 2005). It's a good but not great book. It's a revelation how much new information has come to light in the last fifty years -- not so much about Marlowe himself as about his co-workers in the espionage business. Honan attends to Marlowe's plays, but he's clearly more interested in spying and in the Elizabethan political milieu. He repeatedly employs such formulas as "Marlowe could not help think... or "Marlowe must have felt..." in order to lace public events to the poet's putative consciousness. It's a doubtful procedure, but I suppose justified by the paucity of direct biographical evidence. Honan is diligent in accumulating information but his writing is careless and his interpretation of the plays hardly more than slapdash.
It's no secret that Christopher Marlowe, son of a mere shoemaker, wrote obsessively about men of lowly origin who achieve greatness. Faustus was (in Marlowe's version only) "base of stock," Gaveston a commoner who attends a king, and most notably Tamburlaine a simple shepherd who sets his foot on a large slice of the Asian steppe. Honan thinks that Marlowe was ashamed of his father's trade, and adduces as evidence the fact that the playwright "never uses words such as shoe, shoemaker, or sole but distances himself from his father's concerns. At the various times when he refers to leather, or boots, the allusions are oddly repulsive: 'Covetousness: begotten of an old churl in a leather bag,' 'a worm eaten leathern targets,' 'As if he had meant to clean my boots with his lips,' 'our boots which lie foul upon our hands.'" Such lines, according to Honan, "suggest hatred" of the cobbler's work.
Perhaps, but not the whole story. In Tamburlaine, when the Scythian shepherd woos Zenocrate, his seduction technique is to pile gifts at her feet. "A hundred Tartars shall attend on thee/ Mounted on steeds, swifter than Pegasus./ Thy garments shall be made of Medean silk,/ Enchast with precious jewels of mine own./ With milk-white harts upon an ivory sled,/ Thou shalt be drawn amidst the frozen pools,/ And scale the icy mountains lofty tops." And on, and on -- Marlowe, bless his enthusiastic heart, was never embarrassed by excess. No shoes in the royal dowry? But wait. There's also Marlowe's best known poem, the "passionate shepherd to his love." The Arcadian shepherd, following at the heels of the Scythian, also offers a long list of gifts to his beloved.
I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.
A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull,
Fair linèd slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold.
"Fair-lined slippers for the cold,/ With buckles of the purest gold!!" Not your ordinary, trudging-around-Canterbury-in-the-mud shoes, but footwear nevertheless. When he wrote these lines, "Marlowe could not help think" -- to use the formula of biographers -- that he had celebrated and ennobled his father's profession.
Or so I like to think. Although John Marlowe probably did very little business in the gold-buckle line.
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