Marlowe Today

Extract

On his four-hundredth anniversary, as at all other moments of critical judgment, it is Marlowe's peculiar destiny to be reconsidered in a Shakespearean context. His strongest claim is bound to be the fact that he did so much more than anyone else to bring that context into existence. This was the high point of A. C. Swinburne's eulogy in the Encyclopaedia Britannica: “He is the greatest discoverer, the most daring and inspired pioneer, in all our poetic literature.” Yet even Swinburne qualified his superlatives: “The place and the value of Christopher Marlowe as a leader among English poets it would be almost impossible for historical criticism to over-estimate.” The implicit qualification is underlined by our realization that the Victorian poet was far from being a historical critic. Marlowe must abide the question of history, which Shakespeare has all but outflown.