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The World of Christopher Marlowe
By David Riggs
£25
411 pages
Faber and Faber
Dateline: 19th May, 2004
When he set out to write a book about the playwright born within two
months of Shakespeare to whom the authorship of some of Shakespeare's
plays is sometimes attributed, David Riggs knew that he had a problem.
There is almost nothing known about Marlowe's life and therefore writing
a biography is nigh on impossible. The solution that Riggs comes up
with is that of the true academic.
He pieced together the available information and then buried himself
in libraries to recreate the world in which Marlowe ought to have lived.
From there, it is a relatively logical step to put his man into that
world.
The early chapters deal with life in Canterbury in the 1560s and 1570s
and then, in considerable detail, the academic life of students at Cambridge
University. Because university life was so rigid, the assumption that
Marlowe would have attended a particular lecture on a particular day
or read a number of books is by no means fanciful.
While this is the case - and Professor Riggs does a wonderful job in
his research - there can be something missing. He does his best to relate
passages from the playwright and poet's works to his research, but it
is hardly surprising that, while one can understand the milieu
in which Marlowe moved and how he might have been influenced, there
is no real feeling for what the young man, who sadly, never grew old,
was.
Putting together some of the conclusions that the professor reaches,
it seems that Kit Marlowe could have been a kind of latter-day Kim Philby,
a homosexual Cambridge spy who paid for his college education by trading
secrets with the Catholic enemy. This was a time of very political religious
conflict. Just after Marlowe left university, the Spanish Armada took
place. In England, he was witness to the struggle for power between
Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots and the religions that they represented.
Christopher Marlowe was "the founder of English tragedy",
a man who changed the nature of theatre by inventing and popularising
the English blank verse play. He was a character of myth from within
a few days of his death. To many, he was a Faustus who sold his educated
soul to the devil and all too soon paid the ultimate price for toying
with atheism.
He had a battle on his hands because writers were generally held in
low esteem unless they were members of the aristocracy. This makes Marlowe's
success all the more commendable as his work developed from the consciously
literary, Ovidian style of Dido, Queen of Carthage to the more
populist but still well written Doctor Faustus and Edward
II.
Marlowe may only have lived 29 years but he packed a lot in. He wrote
half a dozen plays that live on almost half a millennium later. He also
found himself in trouble with the law, accused of murder, producing
counterfeit money, atheism (a crime punishable by execution) and was
known as a streetfighter and violent man. That was also how he met his
premature death. He was definitely killed in a bar brawl. The professor
hints that in fact he was murdered on the orders of Queen Elizabeth!
While the author has done a diligent job of historical digging and
then related his findings to the little that is known about the playwright,
there is a least a reasonable possibility that much of what he surmises
would be proved untrue if a time traveller could jet back 400 or so
years and see the hero in action.
To his credit, Riggs real strength is in his analyses of Marlowe's
writings and what underlies them. These contain great detail and he
has carried out immense research to understand the sources and motivations
behind the plays and poems.
This book will prove a must for the bookshelves of academics and theatre
professionals trying to get under Marlowe's elusive skin and understand
his plague- and intrigue-ridden world. The general reader may well find
it harder going.
Philip Fisher
You
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World of Christopher Marlowe from our Bookshop for £17.50
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