Note X — CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE[X]

Christopher Marlowe was born at Canterbury in February, 1564, the year of Shakespeare's birth. From the King's School he went to Cambridge, at Corpus, and took his degree in 1583. For the next ten years, he lived in London; a tavern brawl ended his career on June 1, 1593. During those ten years, when Greene and Nashe and Peele were beginning to shape the nascent drama, and Shakespeare was serving his apprenticeship, most of the young authors were living wild enough lives, and none, according to tradition, wilder than Kit Marlowe; who, nevertheless, was doing mightier work, work more pregnant with promise than any of them, and infinitely greater in achievement; for Shakespeare's tragedies were still to come. That "Tamburlaine the Great," the first play of a lad of twenty-three, should have been crude and bombastic is not surprising; that "The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus" should have been produced by an author aged probably less than twenty-five is amazing. The story is traditional; two hundred years after Marlowe, Goethe gave it its most familiar setting (see Vol. XVI, p. 362). But although some part of Marlowe's play is grotesque, there is no epithet which can fitly characterise its greatest scenes except "tremendous." What may not that tavern brawl have cost the world!