Marlowe and Shakespeare

Abstract

9%~~ 4 tsQdeserve to be considered together. I do not believe that this is so because, as is commonly stated, Marlowe laid the foundations for Shakespeare's dramatic artistry, but rather because these two men represent diametrically opposed reactions to the complex of Elizabethan life, each in his own way forging a poetically valid vision of reality beyond the comprehension of the other. Born in the same year, both were of humble origins, springing from the merchant classes just beginning to emerge as an important element in English life, one the son of a master shoemaker of Canterbury, the other of a Warwickshire farmer and petty merchant. Both made their mark upon the public stage, the one coming with an MA. from Cambridge and the other from what still remains the source of controversy among scholars, but which may well have been a stint of teaching in the provinces.' Both confronted, as no dramatist ever had before them, the crucial issues of man's position in the universe at a time in history when old conceptions of universal harmony, order, and degree were breaking down under the pressure of an awakening and expanding world. It was a time of new social mobility reflected in the very rise from obscurity of these poets themselves. Faced with cosmic problems in an age of flux and uncertainty, Marlowe and Shakespeare developed in contrary directions, so that the plays of each man seem to mirror to a consummate degree an opposing reaction to the Renaissance world in which both lived. Marlowe begins his career upon the public stage with the most optimistic of Elizabethan plays, the first part of Tamburlaine, with its triumphant glorification of human potential, singing the thirst for power as the highest attribute of man: