Chapter 5 - Marlowe’s Changing Line: Repetition, Poetry, and the Stage

Summary

What exactly did Tucker Brooke mean when he wrote that ‘the real significance of blank verse began with Tamburlaine?’ He does not specify dramatic blank verse. —Harry Morris (1964)

Basic Matters

It was not a journey that I expected to find myself on. When I first encountered Tamburlaine the Great, at age nineteen, I dismissed Marlowe's poetry as self-conscious and narcissistic. Yet here I sit, many years on, having written the DNB essay on Edward Alleyn, the actor who brought Tamburlaine to life on stage at the Rose Playhouse, and the author of many essays on Philip Henslowe, the owner of the Rose. All I can think about is how much I missed when I initially encountered Tamburlaine. Then again, it has taken many readings and re-readings, research in ancient books and manuscripts, together with the energy of live productions, to bring me to a different place. It has also taken the realization that texts don't stand still, nor do lines of poetry, whether in production or in our thinking. But then, revisionary thinking is one of the gifts of a life spent teaching and immersed in scholarly pursuit.

Few would quibble with Tucker Brooke's quotation: “the real significance of blank verse began with Tamburlaine.” But really, Morris makes the more important point: “it's dramatic blank verse,” the way poetry works on stage that matters. And this is precisely what I have come to admire about Marlowe's poetry. It is not only the way it has held up over time, but the way it holds up the plays he wrote. In retrospect, Marlowe has never received enough credit for showing his contemporaries how to make verse stage-worthy. It is a more complex issue than shortening lines and liberating them from rhyme. It is different from merely being “dramatic,” a term implying that language does its duty on stage. Fortunately, Morris widened the group of plays under consideration to demonstrate Spenser's influence. All the same, while he identified repetition as a rhetorical tool that Marlowe employs, he stopped short of examining exactly how Marlowe uses this device as part of the scaffolding for his plays, or, more specifically, how repetition creates interactions among characters that an audience will experience, both audially and viscerally.