But of course Marlowe’s greatest poetical achievement is the two sestiads of his unfinished Hero and Leander. This is a more perfect work than any of his plays, not because their poetry is always inferior to it, but because in it the poetry and the theme are at one. Here, and here only, he found matter to which his genius was entirely adequate. For Marlowe is our great master of the material imagination; he writes best about flesh, gold, gems, stone, fire, clothes, water, snow and air. It is only in such concretes that his imagination can fix itself.
C. S. LEWIS: English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (1954)
Son of a Canterbury cobbler, Marlowe worked his way up the social ladder, attending Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he took his BA in 1584 and MA in 1587. While at university he translated parts of Ovid’s Amores and wrote the celebrated poem printed below, and also perhaps Tamburlaine the Great. After Cambridge he moved to London, where he lived off his literary earnings: The Jew of Malta (c.1590), Edward II (1592) and his final, and greatest, play, Dr Faustus (1604). His non-dramatic poetry is best represented by the unfinished Hero and Leander, written in the Italianate tradition of erotic narrative. He lived a short and charmed life. He was deported to the Netherlands for attempting to forge gold coins, seems to have been involved in government service, perhaps as a spy, and was summoned before the Privy Council for alleged sedition and blasphemy. He was stabbed to death, aged twenty-nine, in a tavern brawl in London by one Ingram Frizer over a dispute about the bill – ‘le recknynge’, as the depositions have it. Touchstone refers perhaps to the skirmish when he says in As You Like It (Act III, sc. iii, 9–12): ‘When a mans verses cannot be vnderstood, nor a mans good wit seconded with the forward childe, understanding, it strikes a man more dead then a great reckoning in a little roome.’
The way in which Marlowe made blank verse a vehicle for serious dramatic expression has assured him an important place in the history of English literature. Had Shakespeare died at the age of twenty-nine, he would be little more than a footnote in literary history: Henry VI, Parts 1, 2 and 3, Richard III, Titus Andronicus, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew and The Comedy of Errors among his plays; and the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece – and all these, though probably written before Shakespeare turned thirty, were not published until 1594 at the earliest. Marlowe’s reputation rests on works that he wrote in his twenties, including ‘The passionate Sheepheard to his love’. This famous poem owes much to Polyphemus’ love song to Galatea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 13. Like Polyphemus, Marlowe’s shepherd offers the nymph material rather than spiritual wealth, and in the final stanza even hints at the benefits to be enjoyed from social advancement.
Come live with mee and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Vallies, groves, hills and fieldes,
Woods, or steepie mountaine yeeldes.
And wee will sit upon the Rocks,
Seeing the Sheepheards feede theyr flocks,
By shallow Rivers, to whose falls
Melodious byrds sing Madrigalls.
And I will make thee beds of Roses
And a thousand fragrant poesies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle2,
Imbroydered all with leaves of Mirtle.
A gowne made of the finest wooll,
Which from our pretty Lambes we pull,
Fayre lined slippers for the cold:
With buckles of the purest gold.
A belt of straw and Ivie buds
With Corall clasps and Amber studs,
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with mee, and be my love.
The Sheepheards Swaines shall daunce & sing,
For thy delight each May-morning,
If these delights thy minde may move,
Then live with mee, and be my love.
(Corkine, Moeran, O’Neill, Walton)