The Man Who Wasn't There
by
Daniel
SwiftChristopher Marlowe's life was
short, sharp and irresistible. His fame rests not only on six violently
glittering plays written in his 20s but also on the tantalizing story that may
be considered his masterpiece, for Marlowe inhabited his time like a player
strutting upon an invisible stage. His life was his most remarkable piece of
theater.Everyone imitated Marlowe. His
first play,
Tamburlaine,
was staged when he was 23, and its success can most readily be gauged by its
imitators. As David Riggs notes in his new biography,
The World of Christopher
Marlowe, within the next couple of years three
new plays were staged that were more or less direct copies of Marlowe's
original, while Shakespeare wrote his early Henry VI plays under the influence
of Marlowe's style. A decade later, as the church authorities burned copies of
Marlowe's semipornographic love poems in the streets, Shakespeare again returned
to imitating his predecessor in As You
Like It. Marlowe's contemporaries regarded him
with a mixture of awe and fear; as his friend Thomas Nashe wrote, "No leaf he
wrote on but was like a burning glass to set on fire all his
readers."We are still Marlowe's readers
today: Riggs's biography follows Constance Brown Kuriyama's
Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance
Life, published in 2002. The early death of such
a man is written in the swagger of his life, and Marlowe's murder at the age of
29 in a bar brawl has been endlessly commemorated in the fantasies of his fans.
The movie Shakespeare in Love
imagined that Marlowe died for Shakespeare's
cowardice; Crimelibrary.com, a website devoted to "criminal
minds and methods," includes a feature on Marlowe's death among its litany of
serial killers, terrorists and outlaws. Louise Welsh's novel
Tamburlaine Must
Die is the third book in the past fifteen years
to return to the circumstances of the murder, and to spin stories around its
fantastic possibilities.
Full review at thenation.com >>>
Posted: Wed - March 9, 2005 at 09:15 AM