Poetry

Shahzeen Jahangir
Roll no. 0011
E1802
Assignment no.2
Submitted to:
Prof.Manzoor
 Topic

 Life of Christopher Marlowe

 Sonnets/Poems

Christopher Marlowe (1564 –1593)

 Marlowe was an English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. As the foremost
Elizabethan tragedian, next to William Shakespeare, he is known for his blank verse, his
overreaching protagonists, and his mysterious death.
Plays
 Dido, Queen of Carthage (c.1586) (possibly co-written with Thomas Nashe)
 Tamburlaine, part 1 (c.1587)
 Tamburlaine, part 2 (c.1587-1588)
 The Jew of Malta (c.1589)
 Doctor Faustus (c.1589, or, c.1593)
 Edward II (c.1592)
 The Massacre at Paris (c.1593)
Poetry
 Translation of Book One of Lucan's Pharsalia (date unknown)
 Translation of Ovid's Elegies (c. 1580s?)
 The Passionate Shepherd to His Love (pre-1593)
 Hero and Leander (c. 1593, unfinished; completed by George Chapman, 1598)
Marlowe was born to a shoemaker in Canterbury named John Marlowe and his wife Catherine.
His d.o.b. is not known, but he was baptized on 26 February 1564, two months before
Shakespeare (whose d.o.b. is also not known), who was baptized on 26 April 1564 in Stratford-
upon-Avon. Marlowe attended The King's School, Canterbury (where a house is now named
after him) and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge on a scholarship and received his Bachelor
of Arts degree in 1584. In 1587 the university hesitated to award him his master's degree
because of a rumor that he had converted to Roman. Catholicism and intended to go to the
English college at Rheims to prepare forth priesthood. However, his degree was awarded when
the Privy Council intervened, commending him for his "faithful dealing" and "good service" to
the Queen. The nature of Marlowe's service was not specified by the Council, but its letter to the
Cambridge authorities has provoked much speculation, notably the theory that Marlowe was
operating as a secret agent working for Sir Francis Walsingham's intelligence service.
Spying
Marlowe is often alleged to have been a government spy and the author Charles Nicholl
suggests that he was recruited while he was at Cambridge. College records indicate he had a
series of absences from the
University that began in the academic year 1584-1585. College buttery (dining room) accounts
indicate he began spending lavishly on food and drink during the periods he was in attendance –
more than he could have afforded on his known scholarship income. In 1587 the Privy Council
 ordered Cambridge University to award Marlowe his MA, saying that he had been engaged in
unspecified "affaires" on "matters touching the benefit of his country”. In 1592 Marlowe was
arrested in the town of Flushing in the Netherlands for his alleged involvement in the
counterfeiting of coins. He was sent to the Lord Treasurer (Burghley) but no charge or
imprisonment resulted. This arrest may have disrupted another of Marlowe's spying missions:
perhaps by giving the counterfeit coinage to the Catholic cause he was to infiltrate the followers
of the active Catholic William Stanley and report back to Burghley.
Arrest and death
Early May 1593: Bills were posted about London threatening Protestant refugees from France
and the Netherlands who had settled in the city. One of these, the "Dutch church libel," written
in blank verse, contained allusions to several of Marlowe's plays and was signed,
"Tamburlaine".
11 May: The Privy Council ordered the arrest of those responsible for the libels.
12 May: Marlowe's colleague Thomas Kyd was arrested. Kyd's lodgings were searched and a
heretical tract was found. Kyd asserted that it had belonged to Marlowe, with whom he had been
writing "in one chamber" two years earlier.
18 May: Marlowe's arrest was ordered. Marlowe was staying with Thomas Walsingham, whose
father was a first cousin of the late Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's principal secretary in
the 1580s and a man deeply involved in state espionage.
20 May: Marlowe appeared before the Privy Council and was instructed to "give his daily
attendance on their Lordships, until he shall be licensed to the contrary".
30 May (Wednesday): Marlowe was killed. In 1925 the scholar, Leslie Hotson, discovered the
coroner's report of the inquest on Marlowe's death, held on Friday 1 June. Marlowe had spent
all day in a house in Deptford, owned by the widow Eleanor Bull. He was with three men:
Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley. These witnesses testified that Frizer and
Marlowe had argued over the bill (the 'Reckoning') exchanging “divers malicious words”.
Marlowe snatched Frizer's dagger and wounded him on the head. In the struggle, Marlowe was
stabbed above the right eye, killing him instantly. The jury concluded that Frizer acted in self-
defense, and he was pardoned.
1 June 1593: Marlowe was buried in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St. Nicholas,
Deptford immediately after the inquest. Marlowe's death is alleged by some to be an
assassination for the following reasons:
1. The three other men in the room were all connected to the state secret service and to the
London Underworld. Frizer and Skeres also had a long record as loan sharks and con-men.
Poley was known as a
double-agent for the government and took part in the Catholic “Babington Plot” which intended
to kill Elizabeth and put Mary Queen of Scots on the throne of England. Bull (whose house was
not a tavern, but a respectable house) also had "links to the government's spy network".
 2. It seems too much of a coincidence that Marlowe's death occurred only a few days after his
arrest.
3. Marlowe was arrested without any evidence. Some say that this was a warning to the
politicians in the “School of Night", or that it was connected with a power struggle within the
Privy Council itself.
4. Marlowe’s patron was Thomas Walsingham, Sir Francis's 2nd cousin once removed, who had
been actively involved in intelligence work. (http://sonic.net/~fredd/cousins.html).
5. Charles Nicholl (The Reckoning) argues there was more his death than emerged at the
inquest.
Atheism
Marlowe was reputed to be an atheist or a Catholic. Some modern historians consider that this
may have been a cover for his work as a government spy. Marlowe's accuser in Flushing was an
informer called Richard Baines. Following Marlowe's arrest in 1593, Baines gave the
authorities a "note containing the opinion of one Christopher Marly concerning his damnable
judgment of religion, and scorn of God's word." Another document claims that "one Marlowe is
able to show more sound reasons for Atheism than any divine in England is able to give to prove
divinity, [...] he hath read the Atheist lecture to Sir Walter Raleigh and others." Similar
examples were given by Thomas Kyd after his imprisonment and possible torture.Kyd and
Baines connect Marlowe with the mathematician Thomas Harriot and Walter Raleigh's circle.
“The School of Night” is a modern name for a group of men centered on Sir Walter Raleigh that
was referred to in1592 as the "School of Atheism." The group supposedly included poets and
scientists such as Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman and Thomas Harriot. The name "The
School of Night" derives from Act IV, sceneIII of Shakespeare's Love's Labor’s lost: (Cf. Arthur
Acheson. Shakespeare and the rival Poet (1903)).
Sexuality
Like William Shakespeare, Marlowe is sometimes described as homosexual. Some scholars
argue that reports of Marlowe's homosexuality may simply be rumors produced after his death.
Richard Baines reported Marlowe as saying: "All they that love not Tobacco and Boys are
fools". David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen describe this as unreliable: "These and other
testimonials […] having been produced under legal circumstances we would regard as a witch-
hunt". J.B. Steanes considers there to be "no evidence for Marlowe’s homosexuality at all."
Other scholars, point to homosexual themes in Marlowe's writing
Critical Analysis
Christopher Marlowe’s (1564-1593) lyric poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” is
known in several versions of varying length. C. F. Tucker Brooke’s 1962 reprint of his
1910edition of Marlowe’s works cites the six-stanza version of England’s Helicon, with variant
readings provided in the notes. Frederick S. Boas, in Christopher Marlowe: A Biographical and
Critical Study, puts the case for holding that only the first four stanzas are certainly Marlowe’s.
Fredson Bowers, in the second volume of his monumental The Complete Works of Christopher
 Marlowe (1973), offers a “reconstructed” four-stanza version of the original poem printed
alongside the six-stanza version of England’s Helicon. All versions provide a delightful and
innocuous exercise in the pastoral tradition of happy innocent shepherds sporting in a bucolic
setting. Simply put, a lover outlines for his sweetheart the beauties and pleasures she can expect
if she will live with him and be his love. Nature and the rejoicing shepherds will provide the pair
with entertainment, clothing, shelter, and all things fitting to an amorous paradise.
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
The stanza is a simple quatrain rhyming in couplets. While it is a fine example of Elizabethan
taste for decoration and is very pleasing to the ear, it presents nothing especially clever in its
prosody. A few of the couplets are fresh enough in their rhymes, such as “falls/ madrigals,”
“kirtle/ Mirtle,” and “buds/ studs,” but the rest are common enough. The alliteration falls short
of being heavy-handed, and it achieves neither clearness nor subtlety. The poem’s appeal, then,
seems to lie mostly in its evocation of young love playing against an idealized background, its
simple language and prosody forming part of its overt innocence.
Sir Walter Raleigh’s famous response, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” also published in
England’s Helicon, sets all the cynicism associated with the carpe diem poetry of a John Donne
or an Andrew Marvell against Marlowe’s pose of innocence. Raleigh’s shepherdess argues that
the world and love are too old to allow her to be seduced by “pretty pleasures.” She speaks of
aging, of the cold of winter, of the sweet appearance that hides bitterness and approaching
death. She scorns his offers of beauty, shelter, and love as things that decay and rot. Were youth,
love, and joy eternal, and old-age well provided for, then she might love. Both poems are set-
pieces and imply nothing except that both poets were makers working within established
traditions. The innocence of Marlowe’s poem argues nothing about his own personality and
much about his ability to project himself imaginatively into a character and a situation. In doing
this, he produced a gem, and that is enough.
Hero and Leander
In contrast to the simple, single-leveled “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” Hero and
Leander is a more complex, more sophisticated poem. Whatever ultimate plans Marlowe may
have had for the completed poem, the two completed sestiads are in the comic mode as they
portray the fumbling yearnings and actions of two adolescents faced with passions with which
they are totally unprepared to deal. The story of young love, then, is constantly undercut with
one sort of comedy or another.
Perhaps the easiest clues to Marlowe’s comic intention lie in his choice of epic style and heroic
couplets, both of which lend themselves to witty parody because they are traditionally used
seriously. The epic tradition allows Marlowe to pay his lovers elaborate, and obviously
exaggerated, compliments through the use of epic similes and through comparison with the
classical tales of gods and heroes. The heroic couplet allows him to emphasize the fun with
variations of the meter and with comic rhymes, generally feminine ones.
 The retelling of the famous tale of two ill-fated lovers—whose trysts require Leander to
swim across the Hellespont to visit Hero in her tower—begins soberly enough, as a mock-
epic should. By the ninth line, however, Marlowe begins a description of Hero’s garments that is
wildly ornate and exaggerated in style. Her dress, for example, is lined with purple and studded
with golden stars; the sleeves are green and are embroidered with a scene of Venus, naked,
viewing the slain and bloody Adonis; her veil reaches to the ground and is so realistically
decorated with artificial vegetation that men mistake her breath for the odor of flowers and bees
search it for honey. The picture, thus far, could pass as an example of Elizabethan taste for the
gaudy, and becomes clearly comic only in retrospect.
The twenty-fifth line, however, presents a figure that sets the anticlimactic tone in-forming the
whole piece. Hero’s necklace is described as a chain of ordinary pebbles that the beauty of her
neck makes shine as diamonds. Later on, her naked beauty causes an artificial dawn in her
bedchamber, to Leander’s delight. The improbabilities are piled on thickly: Her hands are not
subject to burning because sun and wind alike delight in them as playthings; sparrows perch in
her shell buskins; Cupid could not help mistaking her for his mother, Venus; and Nature itself
resented having been plundered of its rightful beauty by this slip of a girl. Marlowe points up the
comedy of the Cupid passage with a feminine rhyme: “But this is true, so like was one the
other,/ As he imagined Hero was his mother.” He signs the comic intent of the Nature passage
with an outrageous conceit and compliment: “Therefore in sign of her treasure suffered wrack,/
Since Hero’s time, hath half the world been black.” Throughout the two sestiads, similar tactics
are employed, including much additional use of comic feminine rhyme (Morpheus/ visit us,
cunning/ running, furious/ Prometheus, kist him/ mist him, and yv’ry skin/ lively in) and mocking
versions of the epic simile.
The French critic Michel Poirier comes nearer to Marlowe’s comedic intent in his biography
Christopher Marlowe (1951, 1968), in which he describes the poem as belonging to the genre of
Renaissance hedonism. He sees the poem as a “hymn to sensuality, tastefully done.” He too sees
the poem as erotic, but argues that it avoids equally ancient crudeness and the rough humor of
the medieval fabliaux. Philip Henderson’s essay “Christopher Marlowe” (1966) points up the
by-then-dominant view by observing that Hero and Leander is not only a parody but also a very
mischievous one, written by a poet who is so disengaged from his poem that he is able to treat it
wittily and with a certain cynicism. John Ingram in Christopher Marlowe and His Associates
(1970) harks back to an earlier view in claiming that no other Elizabethan poem equals it for
purity and beauty. He notes nothing of the ironist at work.
A. L. Rowse, an ingenious if not always convincing literary historian and critic, sees Hero
and Leander, in Christopher Marlowe: His Life and Work (1964), as a sort of rival piece
to Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. He goes so far as to suggest that Marlowe and
Shakespeare read their poems to each other in a sort of combat of wit. However that
maybe, Rowse is probably right in seeing the poem as being carefully controlled, in
contrast to the view, well-represented by Boas, that the poem is structurally a mere
jumble. Rowse sees the poem as organically unified by the careful playing off of this
mode and that technique against a variety of others.
B. In his essay “Marlowe’s Humor,” included in his most useful book Marlowe: A
Collection of Critical Essays (1964), Clifford Leech rejects earlier criticism holding that
the comic passages were the work of other writers and pits C. S. Lewis’s denial, in his
English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954), that Hero and Leander contains any
humor at all against T. S. Eliot’s assertion in Selected Essays (1950-1972) that Marlowe
was at his best when writing “savage comic humor.” Leech’s position is that the poem is
dominated by a humor at once gentle and delighting, not to say sly. He supports his
position with a shrewd analysis of the subtle effects of tone and verse form. Louis L.
Martz, in Hero and Leander: A Fascimile of the First Edition, London, 1598 (1972),
also sees Marlowe’s tone as comic and as conveyed through the couplet, and he
characterizes the poem as being carefully structured as a triptych, with the Mercury
fable, usually viewed as a digression, as the central picture, flanked by tales depicting
mortal love. He sees Marlowe’s digression as intentional and Ovidian. Martz, as a
whole, comes down firmly on the side of those who see the poem as a thoroughgoing
comedy.
Philip Henderson keeps to the comedic interpretation but also brings boldly to the fore a
factor in the story long recognized but generally treated as minor, incidental, and
otherwise unaccountable—that of homosexuality as a theme. In Christopher Marlowe
(second edition, 1974), he argues that the passage describing Leander’s body is
“rapturous,” but that the element is reduced to farce by Leander’s encounter with
Neptune as he swims the Hellespont. At the same time, Henderson firmly denies that
Rowse’s description of Marlowe as clearly homosexual has any basis in fact. On
balance, Henderson concludes that the critics’ urge to find irony and sensational
undertones obscures recognition of the beauty properly belonging to Hero and Leander,
and he notes further that the insistence upon seeing comedy throughout Marlowe’s work
is a modern one. William Keach, tracing Marlowe’s intentions in “Marlowe’s Hero as
‘Venus’ Nun” (English Literary Renaissance, Winter, 1972), argues that Marlowe is
largely indebted for the “subtleties and complexities” of his poem to hints from his fifth
century Greek source, Musaeus. Keach sees both poets as ironists and argues that
Hero’s activities as a priestess of love who is puritanically virginal are essentially silly.
John Mills, in his study “The Courtship Ritual of Hero and Leander” (English Literary
Renaissance, Winter, 1972), sees Hero at the opening as a compound of innocence and
sexuality, with all the confusions that such a compound can make, both in her own mind
and in those of men who observe her. Mills’s interest lies, however, not so much in this
condition itself as in the web of classical elements and allusions in which it is contained.
He argues, in effect, that the poem depends upon an overblown, stereotypical, and
mannered attitude toward romantic sex that he compares to Vladimir Nabokov’s theory
of “poshlust.” Mills concludes that Marlowe’s “poshlustian comedy” arises out of the
actions being played out in a physical and material world of sexuality in such terms that
Hero and Leander, and innocent readers, are persuaded that their activities are really
spiritual. In another essay, “Sexual Discovery and Renaissance Morality in
Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander’” (Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, XII, 1972),
published immediately after that of Mills, William P. Walsh argues that Marlowe is
 ironic in basing the story on love at first sight and making his characters slaves of their
irrational passion. His notion is that the lovers themselves, not sexuality, are the objects
of humorous comment with which they are not entirely out of sympathy. His development
of the theme is detailed and astute, and he points out, in discussing the invented myth of
the Destinies’ love affair with Mercury, the generally overlooked argument that Marlowe
makes for reproduction as the true object of sex, as against pleasure for its own sake.
Walsh suggests that the inability of Hero and Leander to see beyond their dream of a
sexual paradise at once positions them for the eventual tragic ending traditional to their
story, yet keeps them reduced to comic stature in Marlowe’s portion of the poem.

In writing Hero and Leander, then, Marlowe displayed ingenuity and erudition by telling
an ironically comic tale of the mutual wooing and seduction of a pair of inexperienced
but lusty young lovers. The telling is intricately and objectively organized and de-scribes
a rite of passage that is neither sentimentalized nor especially brutalized. The result is a
highly skilled tour de force in the tradition of the Elizabethan maker, cynical enough,
perhaps, but confessional or autobiographical only tangentially, if at all. Coupled with
“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” Hero and Leander establishes Marlowe’s claim
to a high place in the select company of those British poets who have produced a slender
but superior body of lyric poetry.

References
http://www.finchpark.com/ppp/marlowe/Christopher-Marlowe-handout.pdf
https://literariness.org/2020/07/21/analysis-of-christopher-marlowes-poems/

THE END