Residents of Marlowe and Byron Courts can argue which is the OG bad boy of English letters. Marlowe’s claim rests on ‘diabolicall Atheism’, Machiavellianism, homosexuality, street fighting, being arrested in the Netherlands for counterfeiting money, spying, and finally being murdered. Among the wittier of his ‘monstruous opinions’ was that ‘the sacrament […] would have bin much better being administred in a tobacco pipe’.
Of our Parkleys Poets, Marlowe is the only one whose eponymous adjective – ‘Marlovian’ – is not only listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, but characterised, ‘with reference to his sonorous language and to the extremes of violence, cruelty, and ambition depicted’. Bloom says one finds in Marlowe ‘impiety, audacity, worship of power, ambiguous sexuality, occult aspirations, defiance of moral order, and above all else a sheer exaltation of the possibilities of rhetoric, of the persuasive force of heroic poetry.’
Marlowe is also the only Parkleys Poet whose most important work is dramatic. ‘Of all non-Shakespearean plays from the early modern period, Doctor Faustus is probably the most widely read’.1 But it’s a play in blank verse – ‘Marlowe’s mighty line’ – and I’ll quote from Faustus’s last speech, which Bloom calls ‘one of the great dramatic poems in the language’:
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven […] let this hour be but A year, a month, a week, a natural day, That Faustus may repent and save his soul! […] Ugly hell, gape not! Come not, Lucifer! I’ll burn my books. Ah, Mephistopheles! (V. ii. 60–115)
Marlowe was not dragged to hell, but died from ‘a mortal wound above his right eye’, after a dinner in Deptford. The DNB records that ‘There was an argument over the bill’. Perhaps, influenced by his time in the Netherlands, Marlowe had suggested that they go Dutch.
More seriously, Thomas Nashe paid him tribute by saying ‘His lyfe he contemned in comparison of the libertie of speech.’
James N. Loehlin