Pagina-afbeeldingen
PDF
ePub

Steads

All sweating, tilt about the watery heauens,

With shiuering speares enforcing thunderclaps,

And from their shieldes strike flames of lightening)

All fearefull foldes his sailes, and sounds the maine (1063-1067)

Blacke is the beauty of the brightest day (2969)

Wounding the world with woonder and with loue (3050)

Though common, I do not think this alliteration a vital quality of Marlowe's verse. His most striking passages seldom exhibit it in any remarkable degree. It may be suspected that its employment was largely due to Spenser's influence.21

What seems a more native tendency in Marlowe is a love of word jingles and puns, such as indeed marked Elizabethan taste generally.22 The following are notable examples :

That knowe my wit, and can be witnesses (T 30)
commandes

Are countermanded by a greater man (217 f.)
And all his Captains bound in captiue chaines

goe charge a few of them

[blocks in formation]

(1213)

Than her owne life, or ought saue thine owne loue (2120)

Tell me, how fares my faire Zenocrate? (3009)

And scourge the Scourge of the immortall God (3048)
All brandishing their brands of quenchlesse fire

(3529)

Yet might your mighty hoste incounter all

(4372)

For hell and darknesse pitch their pitchy tentes
If not resolu'd into resolued paines (4580)

(4399)

There is no evidence that Marlowe, any more than Shakespeare

or Milton, entirely outgrew the love of such quibbles. Compare

But first in bloud must his good fortune bud (Dido 86)

No bounds but heauen shall bound his Emperie

Fare well may Dido, so Eneas stay,

I dye, if my Eneas say farewell (ib. 1515 f.)
we must performe,

(ib. 100)

The forme of Faustus fortunes good or bad
The fruitfull plot of Scholerisme grac't,

(DF 7 f.)

"Dido is particularly full of alliteration. Compare lines 62-69 and 279 for illustrations.

"Compare even King Lear, v, iii, 6: 'Myself could else outfrown false Fortune's frown.' Milton's occasional sacrifice of good taste or euphony for a quibble is equally well known.

(ib. 16 f.)

(ib. 653)

(JM 468)

That shortly he was grac't with Doctors name
Whose terminine is tearmd the worlds wide pole
And rent their hearts with tearing of my haire
The hopelesse daughter of a haplesse lew (ib. 557)
For whilst I liue, here liues my soules sole hope (ib. 668)
Vomit your venome, and inuenome her (ib. 1407)
To pinch me with intolerable pangs (ib. 2372)

Preach vpon poles for trespasse of their tongues (Edw. 118)

A brother, no, a butcher of thy friends

(ib. 1595)

Forgiue my thought, for hauing such a thought (ib. 2531)

he barely beares the name (MP 131)

And end thy endles treasons with thy death
Vaild to the ground, vailing her eie-lids close

(ib. 962)
(HL 159)

These instances indicate, however, that the poet's delight in the purely verbal quibble or jingle decreased as he grew older. It gave place to the ironic pun, which is particularly characteristic of Edward II. For examples see Tamburlaine 2507, 3638, 4226; Jew of Malta 817 f., 1834; Edward II 268 f., 314, 463, 653 f., 1532, 1584 f.

Expressing himself as he normally did in terms of the individual line, it is not surprising that in Tamburlaine Marlowe repeats particularly useful or eloquent verses with a frequency quite Homeric. In the two parts of the play there are at least seven verses 23 which appear without change from twice to five times each, and there are a half-dozen other cases 24 where a line is repeated with equally conscious purpose, but with some slight variation due to rhetorical or grammatical necessity. It is noteworthy that nearly threequarters of these repetitions occur in the second part of Tamburlaine. They perhaps mark the relative haste and poverty of thought in that work.

More significant of Marlowe's confirmed mental character and metrical habit are the very numerous cases of presumably unconscious repetition, where vivid ideas automatically reappear at considerable intervals with slight differences of wording. Of such parallels between different passages in Tamburlaine there are at least a score which strike the attention,25 and there are a great

23

23 Cf. 754, 2136, 2347, 2660, 2985, 3541, 4543. I do not include repetition which has no stylistic purpose, as in 100 f.

24 Cf. 571, 2397, 2629, 2696, 2703, 4407 f.

Cf. lines 81 and 4374; 25 and 130; 82 f. and 423; 475 f. and 2646 f.; 813 ff., 2293, and 3802; 867 and 4428; 977, 982, and 3377-3379; 1131 and

many also which link the play with the other works of the poet. The number and quality of these parallels between the different works of Marlowe offer evidence, indeed, for determining the order in which they were composed.

In the previous discussion reference has been made chiefly to the blank verse of Tamburlaine, and enough has probably been said to show that the handling of metre in that work evidences not only Marlowe's proverbial sense of melody, but also a decided understanding of varied effects. Yet Tamburlaine represents Marlowe's matured practice no more in versification than it does in dramatic structure. It is very fortunate that the only other play preserved in a form equally free from suspicion in regard to textual purity and genuineness of authorship exemplifies the close as Tamburlaine exemplifies the opening of the poet's career. A study of the verse of Edward II proves a very distinct and consistent development in the direction of greater dramatic freedom; and this development is borne out by examination of the other plays, though none of these is textually unexceptionable enough to be safely made the subject of extended metrical analysis.20

The general change in the tone of the verse which readers feel in passing from Tamburlaine to the later plays is well stated by Professor Dowden:

[ocr errors]

'In one particular a most important advance from Tamburlaine to Doctor Faustus and the later plays is discernible in versification. It was in the tirades of Tamburlaine that blank verse was first heard upon a public stage in England. But in this play the blank verse is like a gorgeous robe of brocade, stiff with golden embroidery; afterwards in his hands it becomes pliable and falls around the thought or feeling which it covers in nobly significant lines.' 27

2875; 1190, 2356, and 3415; 1207, 2638, and 4033; 1493 and 4624; 1655 and 3202; 1477, 3488, and 4394 f.; 1921 and 2943; 1930 f. and 2570 f.; 1948 and 2258; 2078 f. and 3986 f.; 2602 and 2622.

Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta survive in editions considerably subsequent to Marlowe's death, and both have been affected by alien revision. The only edition of The Massacre at Paris is peculiarly badly printed. The text of Dido is earlier and apparently purer, but it is of dubious homogeneity.

"Fortnightly Review, XII, 81.

This growing plasticity in the verse is marked by a number of distinct metrical changes. The first is the increasing tendency to subordinate the individual verse to the speech. The gorgeous separate line which rises free from its context and fixes itself independently in the memory is rarer in Doctor Faustus than in Tamburlaine, though still present; e. g.,

(138)

Tis Magicke, Magicke that hath rauisht mee
Was this the face that lancht a thousand shippes?
Ile burne my bookes, ah Mephastophilis! (1477)

(1328)

Readers of Faustus are rather more likely to remember passages in which the single lines subordinate themselves to the expression of a bold philosophy. Such in a way are indeed Tamburlaine's apostrophe on beauty and Faustus's speech to Helen, but the ascendency of the speech over the line becomes more notable in passages like the following:

or

Why this is hel, nor am I out of it:

Thinkst thou that I who saw the face of God,
And tasted the eternal ioyes of heauen,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hels,
In being depriv'd of euerlasting blisse?

(312-316)

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd
In one selfe place, for where we are is hell,
And where hell is, must we euer be:
And to conclude, when all the world dissolues,
And euery creature shalbe purified,

All places shall be hell that is not heauen.

(553-558)

In this respect as in others, however, Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine form a group together as contrasted with The Jew of Malta and Edward II. In the latter the individual line is distinctly less notable, the speeches pithier and more homogeneous. Such lines in them as do particularly emphasize themselves are usually lines of reflective rather than emotional appeal, like Barabas's

Infinite riches in a little roome (JM 72)

or Edward's

My heart is as an anuill vnto sorrow (Edw. 609)

and

But what are kings, when regiment is gone,

But perfect shadowes in a sun-shine day? (ib. 2012, 2013)

In technical matters also less emphasis is placed upon the separate line in the later plays. The tendency to break up the normal flow of the verse by a strong caesural pause increases regularly. I count nine instances of such pause in the first three hundred lines of Dido,28 fourteen in the first three hundred, and twenty-nine in the last three hundred lines of Tamburlaine, and fifty-six in the last three hundred lines of Edward II.29

The regular decasyllable line of the early plays likewise gives place to a considerable number of eleven-syllable (feminine ending) verses in Edward II. Taking the same passages of three hundred lines each, I find no feminine endings in Dido, six in the opening of Tamburlaine and eight in the closing part, and seventeen in the closing part of Edward II. This intermingling of eleven-syllable lines, which greatly alters the effect of the verse, is carried much farther yet (as Bullen has noted) in the translation of Lucan. I count forty-nine instances in the first three hundred lines of that work, and twenty-eight in the corresponding portion of Hero and Leander.

Again, the later plays show greater freedom than the earlier in the use of short lines and hemistiches. Hemistiches practically do not occur in Dido or Tamburlaine: 30 each speech begins a separate line; and the short lines, though skilfully used, are rare. The nine hundred lines from these plays which I have used for illustration contain only one line of two feet,31 one of three and one of four.32

23 Lines 301-600 of Dido, which seem more characteristic of Marlowe's style, contain twenty-nine marked caesural pauses, two feminine endings, eleven riming and twenty-four run-on lines, and fifty-three trochaic first feet.

29 The figures for Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta, for the same number of lines, are intermediate: thirty-four and forty-eight respectively. The text of these two plays is so broken up, however, that a single passage of three hundred consecutive characteristic lines can hardly be found. I have therefore based my calculations in each case upon an aggregate of three hundred lines taken from three parts of the play; viz., DF 29-159, 1255-1356, 1419-1485; JM 36-177, 640-705, 2320-2410.

For two of the very rare exceptions cf. Tamb., 1391 f., 3841 f. "1 Dido, 273. 32 Tamb. 32 and 106.

« VorigeDoorgaan »