Shakespeare

Marlowe was in one sense the marvellous boy of English drama. He was the same age as Shakespeare and made the journey to London at approximately the same time. It is convenient to consider Shakespeare as somehow “after” Marlowe, but it is more appropriate to see them as exact contemporaries, with Shakespeare having fewer obvious advantages.

The success of the two parts of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine , for example, was immediate and profound. It was an act of dramatic independence on his part to present a pagan protagonist without in any sense disavowing him. Since it is in large measure a drama of conquest and success, it has been suggested that there is no play of contraries to enliven the action; but the contraries exist in the relationship between author and audience. He is perhaps the first dramatist in English to assert himself in the manner of the poets. The drama of the preceding period had remained to a large extent communal or impersonal; but Marlowe changed all that. He introduced a personal voice. It is the voice of Tamburlaine, but within its register there is the unmistakable accent of Marlowe himself (I, ii, 175-8):

I hold the Fates bound fast in yron chaines,

And with my hand turne Fortunes wheel about;

And sooner shall the sun fall from his Spheare

Than Tamburlaine be slaine or overcome.

It excited the audience because it caught the burgeoning mood of ambitious purpose and spirited individualism. It was an Elizabethan voice. If Tamburlaine was guilty of hubris, then so were many other Elizabethan adventurers. It was the penalty of “aspiring minds,” to use Tamburlaine’s own phrase. The thumping rhythm of the verse, comprised of what were called “high astounding terms,” earned the rebuke of a young playwright clearly envious of Marlowe’s sudden success. In a pamphlet published the year after the productions of Tamburlaine , Robert Greene complained that he was being criticised “for that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins, every word filling the mouth like the fa-burden of Bow Bell, daring God out of heaven with that atheist Tamburlan …” 5Another Elizabethan pamphleteer, Thomas Nashe, was also caustic about Marlowe’s declamatory verse, describing it as “the spacious volubility of a drumming decasyllabon.” 6It was such a new voice that it had suddenly become disconcerting.

It was a voice that Shakespeare heard and internalised; it became one of the many voices that he could call upon at will. In such a relatively small and enclosed world, of course, influences and associations can be traced in every direction. Tamburlaine influenced the shape of Shakespeare’s history plays, and the history plays in turn seem to have affected Marlowe’s composition of Edward II . It is even possible that they collaborated on aspects of the trilogy concerning Henry VI. As has already been observed, the young Shakespeare no doubt also acted in The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris . That he was mightily impressed and influenced by Marlowe is not in doubt; it is also clear that in his earliest plays Shakespeare stole or copied some of his lines, parodied him, and generally competed with him. Marlowe was the contemporary writer who most exercised him. He was the competitor. He was the antagonist to be mastered. He haunts Shakespeare’s expression, like a figure standing by his shoulder. But Shakespeare’s muse was an envious one, ready to deflate or destroy any contestant.

It is possible, however, that the young Shakespeare kept his personal distance from Marlowe. Marlowe’s reputation always preceded him. In the language of another era, he was generally considered to be mad, bad, and dangerous to know. But there was another distinction between the two playwrights. Marlowe, like the other writers trained at university, came to the theatre from the outside. Shakespeare was the first who emerged as a writer through the ranks of a company. He came from the inside, as a fully theatrical professional. He did not consider actors to be hirelings, or servants, but as companions. It is a fundamental difference. In a later play, The Second Return to Parnassus , the actors Burbage and Kempe criticise the “university wits” for writing plays that “smell too much of that writer Ovid, and talk too much Proserpina and Jupiter.” In contrast to these allegorising and mythologising writers “our fellow Shakespeare … it’s a shrewd fellow indeed … puts them all down.” The emphasis here is upon “our fellow,” one of the actors, an integral part of the company rather than some hired hand. It is significant that at first Shakespeare surpassed his university contemporaries in stagecraft rather than in plot. His association with Kyd and Marlowe, through Lord Strange’s Men, nourished strange rivalries.

Within a few years Lord Strange’s Men had acquired an enviable reputation. This can be measured by the fact that when Leicester’s Men were disbanded, on that nobleman’s death in 1588, many of the players chose to join Strange’s Men. They had good material with which to work. Two of Shakespeare’s earliest plays were already part of the repertoire. We can trace some of their tours in this early period – Coventry in 1584, Beverley in 1585, and Coventry again in 1588-and their likely London venues are well known. In the 1580s, with Shakespeare as one of their number, they played at the Cross Keys Inn, the Theatre and the Curtain. The eclipse of the Queen’s Men after 1588 helped Lord Strange’s Men rise to eminence, and by 1590 they were sometimes acting jointly with the Admiral’s Men as the paramount companies of the period. This meant that they had also acquired the services of Edward Alleyn, the prime actor of the Admiral’s Men and already regarded as the great tragedian of the period. It was he who made such a success of Marlowe’s plays, having taken the leading parts in Tamburlaine, the Jew of Malta and Doctor Faustus . Since he acted with Shakespeare, and may have played Talbot in King Henry VI as well as the title role in Titus Andronicus , his acting style is of some interest.

He was very tall, and at a height of over 6 feet towered over contemporaries who were on average 6 inches shorter than their counterparts in the twenty-first century. As a result he was very striking, and excelled in what were known as “majesticall” parts; Ben Jonson alluded to him at a later date in Discoveries with references to “scenicall strutting and furious vociferation.” His role in Tamburlaine , for example, became a byword for “passionate” or “stalking” action – a success all the more remarkable because he was only twenty-one at the time. Nashe said of him that “not Roscius and Aesop, those tragedians admired before Christ was born, could ever perform more in action than famous Ned Allen.” 1He was in the tradition of non-naturalistic acting, grand and exaggerated. He could, in the phrase of the time, tear a cat upon the stage. It is likely that Shakespeare condemned his style in the words of Hamlet, where “it offends mee to the soule, to heare a robustious perwigpated fellowe tere a passion to totters, to very rags … it out Herods Herod” (1736-7); and indeed Alleyn was better suited to Kyd or to Marlowe. Shakespeare worked much more successfully with Richard Burbage; Burbage was a tragic actor who may have rendered character and feeling with less circumstance and, as it were, subdued himself to his parts. But it would be unwise and unhistorical to draw too broad a distinction between the two actors. Both were conventionally compared to Proteus for their ability to assume a part, and Elizabethan acting was never – and never could have been-“naturalistic” in the contemporary sense. It was always in part a rhetorical performance. The playhouses exhibited the art of speech. The twin reputations of Burbage and Alleyn also throw an interesting light on the larger conditions of the theatre. The 1570s and the 1580s had been the decades of the comic actors, Tarlton and Kempe principal among them, while the 1590s and early 1600s witnessed the rise of the tragic actor as a symbol of Elizabethan drama itself.