by David Riggs
Edmund Spenser had staked his own claim to be the ‘Virgil of England’ by publishing his inaugural book of pastoral eclogues, The Shepherd’s Calendar (1579), and undertaking The Faerie Queene, a national epic of Virgilian proportions. Marlowe’s translation of the Amores thus cast him in the Ovidian role of Virgil’s ancient rival. All Ovid’s Elegies is the apprentice work of an Ovidian poet. It prepared Marlowe to work in the greater genres of tragedy and epic. In the closing lines of his Amores, Ovid announces that ‘Horn’d Bacchus greater fury doth distil, / A greater ground with great horse is to till’ (III.xiv.17–18). But he needed to write one more love poem before penning his first play. That, after all, is what Ovid had done. In reply to Dame Tragedy’s demand that he begin a greater work, Marlowe’s mentor asked for one last respite: ‘She gave me leave, soft loves in time make haste, / Some greater work will urge me on at last’ (III.i.69–70).
* * *
‘Come live with me and be my love’, Marlowe’s pastoral elegy, came early in his career. Marlowe repeatedly parodies the poem in his own dramatic works, including Dido, Queen of Carthage, where he refers to it three times. It is a fair surmise that the poem preceded the parodies. If Dido dates from the mid-1580s, then ‘Come live with me’ was probably written around the same time, shortly before Dido. Marlowe’s lyric derives from the Cyclops’ love song to the nymph Galatea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and from the shepherd Corydon’s invitation to the boy Alexis in Virgil’s Second Eclogue. The formula of these lyric entreaties is disarmingly simple. ‘Come live with me and be my love’, says the singer, and I will shower you with delights; the ensuing catalogue of rustic pleasures supplies the matter of his song. The beauty of this device lay in its adaptability. Marlowe and his imitators quickly recognized that the formula could be replayed in many registers.
Marlowe’s singer is more suave and urbane than his predecessors in Ovid and Virgil. He could be addressing either a woman (like Galatea) or a boy (like Alexis) – the poem does not ask and does not tell. He just promises that ‘we will all the pleasures prove / That valleys, groves, hills and fields, / Woods, or steepy mountain yields’ (2-4; italics added). Indeed, the singer could be a woman. ‘Come live with me’ appears under the title ‘The Milkmaid’s Song’ in Izaak Walton’s Complete Angler (1653) and elsewhere. It inspired many replies from men in drag – Sir Walter Raleigh and John Donne, among others – pretending to be women. The earliest manuscripts leave it untitled. The most popular lyric of the age went unnamed until the editor of the anthology The Passionate Pilgrim called it ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’ in 1599. The title stuck, but the singer’s identity remains elusive. The speaker could either be a shepherd courting a rustic sweetheart, or a courtier inviting a paramour to set out for the country, and
sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
(5–8)
The poem remains open to either interpretation.
The singer apprehends the pastoral landscape in figures of exquisite refinement:
And I will make thee beds of roses,
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle,
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.
(9–12)
The birds serenading in harmony with the falling waters evoke the primal scene of poetic inspiration. The ‘thousand posies’ could be either bouquets of flowers or lines of verse (poesies); the word had both meanings in Elizabethan English. The homely ‘kirtle’, worn by both sexes, interweaves with myrtle, the sacred plant of Venus. The singer woos the beloved with sensual commodities drawn from the distillation of nature’s bounty in the pastoral landscape: ‘A gown made of the finest wool’ and ‘buckles of the purest gold’ (13, 16). Marlowe’s lyric assertion effaces the pain that attends his sources, where unrequited desire leads to frustration and violence. There is no trace of coercion or resistance here. Like a good Epicurean philosopher, the singer pleads with the beloved to consider pleasure as a rational proposition: ‘If these delights thy mind may move, / Then live with me, and be my love’ (23–24).
6.2 The scene of pastoral poetry. Detail of woodcut from Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar, 1579.
The shepherd’s weightless assurance depends on the form of the lyric monologue. In Marlowe’s sources monologue turns into dialogue and the Passionate Shepherd becomes the protagonist in an Ovidian tragedy. After Galatea says no, the Cyclops crushes her lover Acis to death with a rock. Corydon is doomed to a life of frustration when Alexis rejects him. The Passionate Shepherd’s repressed violence will soon turn Marlowe in the direction of tragedy. When he recasts ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ in dramatic form, he does so in a context of rape, possession, prostitution and abandonment.
* * *
Midway through the Amores, Ovid remarks that ‘I did begin to sing of sceptres, and through my effort tragedy grew in favour’ – an apparent reference to his lost and admired tragedy of Medea. Since then, his Heroides, a collection of letters from abandoned women to the men who deserted them (for example, Medea to Jason, Dido to Aeneas, Hero to Leander), has enhanced his reputation for dispensing advice to the lovelorn. At the close of his Amores, Dame Tragedy herself summons Ovid to the more spacious arena of tragedy and epic: ‘’Tis time to move grave things in lofty style’, she admonishes him: ‘Long hast thou loitered; greater works compile’ (III.i.23–24). Ovid’s disciple Christopher Marlowe responded to this summons with Dido, Queen of Carthage, his Ovidian tragedy about Virgil’s Aeneid.
The first wave of university men to write for the London stage took their work to the children’s companies. The choirboys of the Chapel Royal, St George’s Chapel Windsor and St Paul’s Cathedral, had been giving performances at court throughout the sixteenth century. In 1576, when Richard Farrant, the Master of the Windsor boys, leased space in the old London monastery at Blackfriars, the children began to perform for an urban audience of paying spectators as well. After Farrant’s death four years later, the operation of the Blackfriars Theatre came under the control of William Hunnis, the Master of the Chapel Children, in partnership with Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, and John Lyly, Marlowe’s old neighbour from the Canterbury parish of St Alphege.
After taking his BA (1573) and his MA (1575) at Oxford, Lyly faced the dilemma that would confront George Peele, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe and Christopher Marlowe. He did not aspire to a career in the Church, but failed to win the college fellowship that would have let him continue at university. Lyly resolved his predicament by turning it into a best-selling novel, Euphues: Or, The Anatomy of Wit (1579). The key to Lyly’s success, first as a novelist and then as a playwright, was his prose style. Lyly wrote in rhythmic, balanced clauses linked by shared figures of speech; he was phenomenally skilful at integrating the sound and sense of his prose. Life at court, his hero discovers, is
more meet for an Atheist than for one of Athens, for Ovid than for Aristotle, for a graceless lover, than for a godly liver: more fitter for Paris than Hector, and meeter for Flora than Diana.
On the stage, Lyly’s child actors spoke with the same blend of elegant artifice and logical ingenuity. His prose style became the hallmark of wit, self-sufficiency and good manners; his works took the literary market-place by storm. Euphues and its sequel, Euphues and his England (1580), went through nine editions between 1579 and 1581. His first editor remarked that ‘All our ladies were then his scholars, and that Beauty in court which could not parley Euphuism was as little regarded as she which now [1632] there speaks not French.’ Marlowe’s generation of writers was just as impressed. Thomas Nashe recalled that ‘Euphues I read when I was a little ape in Cambridge, and then I thought it was Ipse ille’ – the thing itself.
Lyly’s patron, the Earl of Oxford, capitalized on his client’s success in order to repair his own tarnished reputation at court. Afte
r coming into his vast inheritance, Oxford travelled to Italy, where he secretly converted to Roman Catholicism. Back in England, the earl fell in with a clique of Catholic noblemen, won their confidence and then betrayed them to the queen. Oxford’s victims, Henry Howard and Charles Arundel, in turn charged the earl with pederasty, atheism and repeated attempts to murder his enemies. Many of these accusations are quite believable. The allegations of Oxford’s attempt on the life of Sir Philip Sidney were verified by Sidney’s friend Fulke Greville. Howard and Arundel cited numerous witnesses, including the prominent Catholic Sir William Cornwallis, to substantiate the claim that Oxford sodomized his page-boys. Arundel testified that Walter Raleigh and the eminent courtier Sir Henry Noel, among others, would back up his suspicions of Oxford’s ‘detestable vices’; Oxford confessed to at least one charge of atheism.
Many of Oxford’s blasphemies closely resemble the arguments for atheism that Baines would later attribute to Marlowe. Oxford’s remark that the Bible was ‘only … to hold men in obedience, and [was] man’s device’ anticipated Marlowe’s observation ‘That the first beginning of Religion was only to keep men in awe’. Where Oxford said ‘That the blessed virgin made a fault … and that Joseph was a wittol [cuckold]’, Marlowe averred that ‘Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest’. Where Oxford claimed ‘that he could make a better and more orderly Scripture in six days’, Marlowe asserted ‘That if he were put to write a new Religion, he would undertake both a more Excellent and Admirable method’. Where Oxford declared ‘that after this life we should be as we had never been and that the rest was devised but to make us afraid like babes and children of our shadows’, Marlowe persuaded ‘men to Atheism, willing them not to be afeared of bugbears and hobgoblins’. Oxford swore ‘that more plain reasons and examples may be vouched out of Scripture for defence of bawdry than out of all the books of Aretinus’, the notorious Italian pornographer; Marlowe in turn claimed ‘That St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom, that he used him as the sinners of Sodoma’. These remarks sketch out a carnal philosophy of religion. They offer a glimpse of the libertine sentiments that circulated within Oxford’s circle. Even if Marlowe did not belong to that circle, he knew people who did. Marlowe’s friend and fellow poet Thomas Watson dedicated works to Henry Howard’s nephew Philip Howard, to the Earl of Oxford and to Sir Henry Noel. Watson tutored Sir William Cornwallis’s children for several years.
Oxford patronized Lyly and the children’s companies in an attempt to win his way back into Elizabeth’s good graces. The earl was out of favour, but he knew how to entertain the queen. He was prepared to spend lavishly on elegant entertainments and could make himself heard at court. The critics George Puttenham and Francis Meres both put Oxford among ‘the best for comedy’, although none of his plays are extant. William Webbe, another contemporary critic, writes that ‘the right honourable Earl of Oxford may challenge to himself the title of most excellent’ of the poets at Elizabeth’s court. Social deference surely played a part in these evaluations. The handful of Oxford’s poems that have survived are no better than average, and not in the same league as the noble Sidney’s gorgeous sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella. Even so, the earl was well born, clever and a rich spendthrift to boot.
The rise of the children’s companies gave university men a way into the theatrical profession and a rare chance to display their gifts at court. The Children of St Paul’s Cathedral performed Lyly’s Campaspe and Sappho and Phao before the queen in the early 1580s. George Peele, who received his Oxford MA in 1579, wrote The Arraignment of Paris for the Chapel Children, and saw it ‘Presented before the Queen’s Majesty’ within a few years of taking his degree. Dido, Queen of Carthage, in the words of its original title page, was ‘Written by Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe Gent’ and ‘Played by the Children of her Majesty’s Chapel’. Over the course of 1584, the Oxford syndicate lost control of the Blackfriars property, which ceased to be a theatre, and the Chapel Children made what would be their last appearance at court for seventeen years. After Elizabeth gave Oxford a pension in 1586, the earl withdrew from the literary scene. Although Lyly and Paul’s Boys continued to perform at court until 1590, the Chapel Children went into eclipse from 1584 until the turn of the century. Stage history suggests, then, that Marlowe prepared Dido, Queen of Carthage for the Chapel Children around 1584–85, at a time when all the boys’ companies were looking to the Earl of Oxford for patronage.
Dido is a creative imitation of Books I, II and IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, with swatches of verse translated directly from the original Latin. The play falls squarely within the grammar school and university traditions of academic drama; today, it is usually revived in student productions. Thomas Nashe took part in student theatre at Cambridge and counted Marlowe among his friends. He knew the manuscript of All Ovid’s Elegies well enough to quote from it in his popular novel The Unfortunate Traveller (1594). The text of Dido, Queen of Carthage seems to be mostly Marlowe’s work. Instead of co-authoring the play, Nashe is more likely to have prepared his deceased friend’s work for the press in 1594, when Dido first appeared in print. Nashe’s future lay in satire and prose narrative; none of his later writing, including the lovely dramatic entertainment Summer’s Last Will and Testament, remotely resembles Dido, Queen of Carthage. Marlowe, on the other hand, would build on the achievement of his early play for the Chapel Children.
* * *
John Lyly gave Marlowe a model of what it meant to be a major playwright. Lyly had an immediate, transforming impact on the language of English comedy; his prose marked a qualitative leap forward from the rambling, invertebrate syntax of his predecessors. The finely crafted symmetries between the sound and the sense of Lyly’s sentences enabled the children to project complicated ideas without losing their audience. Marlowe brought about a comparable revolution in the language of verse tragedy. Where Lyly invented an English approximation of Ciceronian prose, Marlowe captured the lofty sound of Virgil’s epic verse in lines of English poetry.
The move to tragedy drew Marlowe into the contemporary controversy about the nature of English metre. Although English poetry as such did not figure in the university curriculum, the ongoing discipline of ‘double translation’ (from English to Latin to English) meant that scholars were making vernacular imitations of Ovid and Virgil from the age of thirteen onwards. Richard Holdsworth advised his Cambridge undergraduates that university-level work on poetry will ‘perfect your Latin … And also raise your fancy to a Poetic strain’. The classicists’ contempt for native poetry paradoxically raised the stakes in these exercises. Judged by the criterion of classical metre, English verse appeared to be at the beginning, rather than the end, of its evolutionary cycle. Sixteenth-century poets could no longer hear the sophisticated accentual rhythms of Middle English verse, but Ovid and Virgil had shown them a sonorous prosodic system in action.
The quantitative metres of classical poetry, which are based on the length of individual syllables (long vowels took twice as long to pronounce as short ones), were hard for native speakers of English to hear. Vowel quantities were, however, relatively easy to learn on the basis of their position in words in lines of Latin verse, and thus lent themselves to memorization and study. Accentual metres, on the other hand, are invisible until someone tags them with stress marks or similar notations such as (w) weak and (s) strong. On their own, English accentual rhythms not only sounded artless; they also looked artless. Could anything be done to rescue the sound of English verse? ‘[I]f Poesie be now an Art, and of all antiquity hath been among the Greeks and the Latins,’ argued George Puttenham, ‘and yet were none until by studious persons fashioned and reduced into a method of rules and precepts, then no doubt there may be the like with us.’
What were the right rules and precepts? Having been trained in classical prosody, Elizabethan poets had difficulty conceiving of a metrical system based on stressed and unstressed syllables. Instead, the debate produced a
spurious opposition between quantitative English metres and rhymed English lines. Marlowe’s Elegies showed him that rhymed English couplets could successfully imitate the metrical couplets that Ovid uses in his Amores; but the hexameter line of classical epic and tragedy is a freestanding metrical unit, unstructured either by rhyme or by alternating line-lengths. The problem, then, was how to achieve this effect in English.
A few translators and playwrights had experimented with unrhymed (or ‘blank’) English verse. The Earl of Surrey’s translation of Books Two and Four of the Aeneid into unrhymed verse represented a major innovation, as did Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton’s blank verse tragedy Gorboduc. But Marlowe’s predecessors had trouble sustaining a melodious poetic line. Like other Elizabethan poets writing before the 1580s, they found it difficult to employ polysyllabic words without clogging the flow of the verse. Here is Surrey on the run-up to Queen Dido’s suicide: ‘But trembling Dido eagerly now bent / Upon her stern determination.’ On the other hand, when they mainly stuck to monosyllabic words, the result was predictably monotonous, as in these verses from Gorboduc: ‘Yield not, O King, so much to weak despair. / Your sons yet live, and long I trust they shall.’
George Gascoigne’s Certain Notes of Instruction Concerning the Making of Verse or Rhyme in English (1575) confronts these problems head on. Gascoigne convincingly advocates that English poets use accentual iambic metres (‘a foot of two syllables whereof the first is depressed or made short, and the second is elevate or made long’) in a five-foot line. He therefore recommends that ‘all the words in your verse be so placed as the first syllable may sound short or be depressed, the second long or elevated, the third short, the fourth long, the fifth short, etc.’ Gascoigne had discovered iambic pentameter. He even invented the first system of visual notation for displaying stress accents.
