Christopher Marlowe was christened in the church of St. George the Martyr in Canterbury on February 26, 1564. He was the son of a shoemaker in the town. We know nothing of his childhood, but at the age of fourteen he was granted a scholarship to the King’s School in Canterbury. His education there would have been heavily classical, and he clearly emerged as a superlative Latinist—since his tenure at the school was little over a year, he must already have been very proficient when he entered. In 1581 he obtained a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he remained for seven years, earning a BA in 1584 and an MA in 1587. During this time he apparently had other employment, as an agent of the Privy Council—a government spy, providing intelligence about recusants and expatriate Roman Catholics. The conferral of his own degree was delayed because of suspicions about his loyalty and was only awarded after an assurance was obtained from the Council that he had done good service to the crown.
After his college years, we know little about his life until the end of it. He was killed in a tavern brawl—or perhaps assassinated in what was represented as a tavern brawl—in 1593, when he was not yet thirty years old. In those six years, whatever else he was doing, Marlowe revolutionized English drama and gave a new voice to Elizabethan poetry. Most of what we must use to construct a biography is gossip or invective, for the most part posthumous. In 1588 he was accused by Robert Greene of atheism, or at least of promoting atheism in Tamburlaine. After his death Thomas Kyd, who had shared lodgings with Marlowe, testified to his “rashness in attempting sudden privy injuries to men”—Marlowe had in fact been charged in connection with a street brawl in 1589 in which a man was killed. Kyd also pursued the theme of atheism, recalling his companion’s “vile heretical conceits denying the divinity of Jesus.” William Baines, a paid informer, provided much more detailed and lurid testimony to Marlowe’s dangerous opinions. Among these, according to Baines, were that Moses was a juggler and that Thomas Harriot, Sir Walter Ralegh’s servant, “can do more than he”—this has always been taken as an invidious comparison between Harriot and Moses, but it may include something even more subversive, a claim that Ralegh’s servant was a better man than Ralegh, too. Marlowe also believed, Baines said, that “the first beginning of religion was only to keep men in awe,” that Christ was a bastard, his mother a whore, his father a carpenter, and the crucifixion justified; that Catholicism was a good religion and “all Protestants are hypocritical asses”; that the woman of Samaria and her sister were whores and Christ knew them “dishonestly”; that Christ was the “bedfellow” of John the Evangelist and “used him as the sinners of Sodom”; that all those who love not tobacco and boys were fools, and that he had as much right to issue currency as the queen of England, and intended “to coin French crowns, pistolets, and English shillings.”1 This looks like a jumble, and is certainly rife with contradictory assumptions; but in its historical context the charges have a basic consistency, defining a world in which heresy, scurrility, love, sodomy, counterfeiting, and most of all social mobility and the drive toward success are all aspects of the same dangerous set of desires.
Since Baines was being paid to provide damaging testimony, it would have been in his interest to make Marlowe seem as disreputable as possible. Still, there is much in the poetry and drama to support the picture of Marlowe as a seductively persuasive radical. Did this result in the proscription of his work? Not, certainly, of his drama: both during his lifetime and long after, his plays were among the most popular in the repertory. As for the poems, his Ovid translations were called in, banned, and burned by episcopal order, six years after his death; but it is not clear in this case that the proscription was aimed at Marlowe. The book was a collection of satirical epigrams by John Davies followed by ten of Marlowe’s translations from the Amores—“Davyes Epigrams, with Marlowes Elegys” is the way the order puts it. The offensive material may well have been Davies’s, and the offense thus libel, not incitement to lechery. As the book is constituted, Marlowe is at most guilty by association: all six early editions of the Ovid translations include Davies’s epigrams, though those with the complete elegies put Marlowe first, and all are published either abroad, at Middleburgh, in Holland, or surreptiously in Scotland with a false Middleburgh imprint. If Davies was the problem, why not publish Marlowe’s Ovid by itself? Or was it the scurrilous Davies that sold the erotic Marlowe? Would a Marlowe untainted by libel not have been marketable?
ALL OVID’S ELEGIES
Marlowe’s translation of the Amores, All Ovids Elegies, was unpublished during Marlowe’s lifetime. After his death, the manuscript would have recommended itself to publishers not merely as the work of Marlowe the erotic classicist, cashing in on the success of Hero and Leander (also unpublished but circulated in manuscript), but equally as the first translation of the Amores not only into English but into any modern language. The Amores was the least well known of Ovid’s works in the Renaissance, untouched by the allegorizing and moralizing commentaries that had safely contextualized Ovid’s other work for Christian readers. Marlowe’s interest in these poems would have been as much in their urbanity of tone as in their world of erotic possibilities—the social Ovid is fully complementary to the mythological Ovid of the Metamorphoses and the Fasti. But Marlowe’s Ovidian elegies are more than translations. They undertake, with remarkable energy and ingenuity, the adaptation of a quintessentially classical mode to the uses of English poetry. In a sense, this is Marlowe’s sonnet sequence, the psychic drama of a poet-lover whose love is both his creation and his ultimate monomania, frustration, and despair. The excitement Marlowe brought to these poems is obvious, as much in the vividness and wit of the language as in the evident haste and occasional carelessness of the composition. The six early editions, and the heavy hand of the ecclesiastical censor, testify to the excitement readers got out of the work. But licentiousness is not the Elegies’ primary claim on our attention—indeed, by current standards they are barely warm. Their rhetoric, however, brings a new tone and a new range of possibilities into English verse. Donne’s elegies are full of a sense of Marlowe’s language, which looks forward, too, to Carew and Marvell, and even to Pope.
Nevertheless, All Ovid’s Elegies is a strange book. It reads like a promising first draft, occasionally felicitous but often routine, with moments of real brilliance and also moments of striking ineptitude. Time after time, the only way to understand Marlowe’s English is to use the Latin as a crib. “So, chaste Minerva, did Cassandra fall/Deflowered except, within thy temple wall” (1.7)—the Latin says that the only chastity left to Cassandra was the fact that she was raped in Minerva’s temple; it’s difficult to see how one would get this out of the English. “Hector to arms went from his wife’s embraces, /And on Andromache his helmet laces” (1.9)—only the Latin will reveal that it is Andromache who is lacing the helmet on Hector, not the other way around. “Object thou then what she may well excuse, /To stain in faith all truth, by all crimes use” (2.2)—the Latin says “accuse her only of what she can explain away; a false charge undermines the credibility of a true one”: is there any way of eliciting this from Marlowe? “Wilt thou her fault learn, she may make thee tremble; /Fear to be guilty, then thou mayst dissemble” (2.2)—even the Latin will not help to explain this. Often the gibberish is undeniably beautiful, the work of a poet with a superb ear working too fast for meaning: “What day was that which, all sad haps to bring / White birds to lovers did not always sing” (3.11)—Ovid says, this is the day when, as a permanent bad omen, love birds stopped singing; but Marlowe’s version is all connotation with no denotation.
Nevertheless, the translation is an impressive achievement, especially if, as appears to be the case, it is the work of Marlowe’s undergraduate years; and its completeness is not the least of its virtues. It remained unique in English until an anonymous translation appeared in 1683, followed by Dryden. As for its occasional impenetrability, the Elizabethans had a higher tolerance for obscurity than we have, and though there is evidence that Ben Jonson was involved in the preparation of at least one of the early surreptitious editions, his concern was obviously not with revision or clarification. What Marlowe undertook was the domestication of the erotic Ovid in the wake of the many previous generations’ mythographic Ovid. And after Marlowe’s sensational death, the combination of Ovid, Marlowe, and English would probably have been sufficient to warrant publication surreptitiously, even if John Davies’s scurrilous epigrams had not been included. But since the erotic Marlowe looms so large in the modern construction of the poet, it is worth pausing over the sexuality of All Ovid’s Elegies. How erotically transgressive is it?
Transgressive enough, certainly: it is a chronicle not merely of lechery, but of adultery, pandering, promiscuity, faithlessness, irreverence. It is even, on occasion, explicit and smutty where Ovid is merely metonymic: “The whore stands to be bought for each man’s money, /And seeks vile wealth by selling of her coney” (1.10.21–2), where the Latin specifies only “corpore,” her body. Ovid’s urbane cynicism in English, moreover, translates directly into Marlowe’s alleged atheism: “God is a name, no substance, feared in vain, /And doth the world in fond belief detain” (3.3.23–4). Reason enough to publish the book surreptitiously. Still, it is the nature of the eroticism we should pause over. Since Marlowe’s homosexual interests figure so significantly in both Baines’s and Kyd’s charges against him, and are certainly manifest in Edward II, the openings of Dido Queen of Carthage and Hero and Leander, and are especially prominent in the construction of the modern Marlowe, it is worth observing that the erotics of All Ovid’s Elegies are exclusively heterosexual—not even Cupid in Elegy 1.10 (15–17), a beautiful naked youth selling himself, without so much as a pocket to put his money in, raises Marlowe’s rhetorical eyebrow. Ovid himself observes that his sexual interests are primarily in women: he says in the Ars Amatoria that the sex he likes is the kind that gives equal pleasure to both partners, and therefore sex with boys doesn’t interest him much (2.683–4)—the “therefore” made sense to Roman readers because the boy, as the passive partner in the buggery, was supposed not to enjoy the sex, a prophylactic fiction designed to license the practice of pederasty while simultaneously preserving the youth of the realm from any suspicion of real depravity.2 If Marlowe’s erotic imagination was essentially homosexual, and sex was the point, Catullus, Martial, Horace, or even the Virgil of the Eclogues would surely have been more likely texts for domestication. Was it then something other than the sex that attracted him to the Amores?
Perhaps so: a case can be made for the young Marlowe’s translation of the Amores as part of a grand design, the first step in the creation of a poetic career consciously modeled on Ovid, an anti-Virgilian, and anti-Spenserian, model.3 This may be correct; nevertheless, the sex may well have been a factor after all: perhaps the whole question is anachronistic, the issue construed too narrowly. Perhaps, in short, homosexuality is our problem, not Marlowe’s. The first published account of the murder, Thomas Beard’s in The Theatre of God’s Iudgments, 1597, cites only “epicurism” and atheism as Marlowe’s mortal sins. In the next year, Francis Meres cites Beard, and adds the information, derived from no known source, that Marlowe “was stabbed to death by a bawdy serving man, a rival of his in his lewd love”4—is this perhaps merely an expansion of the implications of “epicurism”? Recently Charles Nicholl has elaborated the account still further by suggesting that “this serving-man was, like Marlowe, a homosexual, and that the cause of the fight, the object of their ‘lewd love,’ was another man.”5 Marlowe’s sexual preferences are not really in question, but this surely confuses the issue. To begin with, there is no reason to assume that Meres has a love triangle in mind; “rival” can mean simply “partner” (as Bernardo calls Horatio and Marcellus “the rivals of my watch” at the opening of Hamlet), and if we want Marlowe’s “lewd love” to be homosexual, its object may simply be the bawdy serving man. But it is surely to the point that the object is unspecified, the crime “epicurism,” the pursuit of pleasure. The sin is precisely the subject of the Amores, “lewd love,” illicit sexuality, of whatever kind—if homosexuality had been a worse kind of “lewd love,” Marlowe would have been guilty of it. A century later Antony à Wood elaborated Meres’s account for his age as revealingly as Nicholl has done for ours: “For so it fell out that he being deeply in love with a certain woman…had for his rival a bawdy serving-man, one rather fit to be a pimp than an ingenious amoretto as Marlowe conceived himself to be.”6
In fact, homosexuality in the charges against Marlowe is primarily an aspect of his blasphemy and atheism—Baines and Kyd do not assert that Marlowe was a sodomite, but that he said Christ and St. John were: this is apparently worse than being a sodomite oneself. The link between the love of boys and the love of tobacco is an intriguing one, but it is not part of a claim that Marlowe systematically debauched the youth of London, as it might well have been. Though his own works could easily have been used as evidence against him, the charge of sodomy appears almost marginal. Commentators have undertaken to connect tobacco to the charge of atheism, noting its source in the pagan New World, but this seems to me misguided. The point is the same one Jonson makes when, in Every Man Out of His Humour, the rustic would-be gentleman Sogliardo is discovered at a London tavern with “his villainous Ganymede…droning a tobacco pipe there ever since yesterday noon” (4.3.83–5). Sogliardo here is certainly assumed to be guilty of the abominable crime against nature, but this is not the issue. Pederasty and smoking are generic vices, not specific ones: Sogliardo practices them because they are the marks of the London sophisticate. His lust is, like Marlowe’s, all for upward mobility, for class. The more intriguing conjunction in Baines’s document is that of tobacco and Thomas Harriot. It leads us to Sir Walter Ralegh, Harriot’s patron and employer, the major advocate of tobacco in Elizabethan England, investigated in 1594 on a charge of freethinking; imprisoned, however, not for atheism but for impregnating and secretly marrying, probably in that order, one of Elizabeth’s maids of honor—for sexual offenses that were construed as treasonable. Thomas Kyd’s charges against Marlowe explicitly associate him with the Ralegh circle, which included not only Harriot but also John Dee and Henry Percy, the “Wizard Earl” of Northumberland (of whom the DNB says he was “passionately addicted to tobacco smoking”). With Ralegh we are back to atheism and sex, but with Harriot, Dee, and Northumberland we have arrived at conjuring and science, the world of Marlowe’s most famous play, Doctor Faustus.
HERO AND LEANDER
Marlowe’s greatest achievement as a poet is certainly Hero and Leander, a passionate, tragic, comic fragment of an erotic epic. The poem is an adaptation of a late classical work by Musaeus; and its divided life is exemplified in its scholarly history. The earliest printed edition came from the press of Aldus Manutius, in Venice, in 1494, which included the Greek text with a Latin translation—its printed history begins mediated through translation. The manuscript Aldus was working from identified the poem simply as the work of Musaeus, and Aldus therefore ascribed it to the legendary poet of that name, a pupil of Orpheus, and assumed it to be the most ancient classical poetry to survive—poetry, thus, in its purest, original form. And though throughout the next century there were many doubters concerning its antiquity, it was widely praised and often translated, again into Latin, and into various vernaculars (though not English). Julius Caesar Scaliger, in his early sixteenth-century Poetics, notoriously preferred it to Homer, and maintained that if Musaeus had written the Iliad and Odyssey, they would have been better poems. But after the great scholar Isaac Casaubon, late in the century, demonstrated that stylistically the poem could not, in fact, be early, but was clearly a work of the fifth century A.D. (its poet is appropriately called, in a number of other early manuscripts, not Musaeus but Musaeus the Grammarian) interest in it gradually subsided. The character of the poem thus went from radical innocence to oversophistication in a very few decades.
It is customary to praise Marlowe’s scholarly achievement in Hero and Leander by observing how accurately it captures the high rhetorical flashiness of Musaeus’s style, though the style of the original is far more artificial and literary. There is no match in Musaeus for Marlowe’s enthusiasm. Marlowe’s excitement may be the expression of his sense of the adolescence of poetry itself; but clearly this is a classic he is having a great deal of fun with, and there surely cannot have been many other young poets in Elizabethan England to whom Greek was this much fun. Certainly when, after Marlowe’s death, George Chapman undertook to complete Marlowe’s fragment, it became much more serious.
Hero and Leander is very daring, in many of the ways that Doctor Faustus is. Like Faustus, it tempts the Renaissance reader with his deepest desires—the reader is in this case surely assumed to be male. If Faustus condemns blasphemy, the play nevertheless realizes or embodies it, represents blasphemy on the stage. Hero and Leander is a secular version of that Faustian presumptuousness, and all the blasphemy is sexual. The hero and heroine are incredibly, miraculously, outrageously beautiful, constantly being compared to the most perfect things imaginable: gods and goddesses; jewels; works of art; and coming out ahead. The god Apollo courted Hero (“for her hair”); Cupid himself pined for her, and mistook her for Venus; Leander was more beautiful than Endymion or Ganymede, his hair was more wonderful than the Golden Fleece, and so forth. A whole world of allusion and poetic elaboration is invoked just to adorn these two; the poem, the style, the rhetoric impose on the lovers a dangerous case of hubris; and none of this comes from Musaeus.
One of the most striking aspects of the poem is its overt sexuality. There are Italian poems like this, but almost none in English until the seventeenth century; it is emotionally very daring. It is also very open about its sexual interests—the tradition that says that Marlowe was gay gets a good deal of support from Hero and Leander. Both lovers are described as infinitely desirable; but the praise of Leander is much more frankly sexual than that of Hero, and specifically homosexual. Gods and men pine away for Hero, but the measure of Leander’s beauty is not that women desire him, but that men do: “Jove might have sipped out nectar from his hand”—he is as desirable as Ganymede; had Hippolytus seen him he would have abandoned his chastity; “The barbarous Thracian soldier, moved with naught, / Was moved with him, and for his favor sought”—rough trade solicits him. Again, none of this comes from Musaeus, where Leander is not described—Hero is beautiful; Leander is all desire, the validation of her beauty.
Marlowe is certainly daring, though less so in a Renaissance context than he seems now—for adult men to be attracted to good-looking youths was quite conventional. Still, there is no way of arguing that it’s merely conventional, that Marlowe doesn’t really mean it, or doesn’t mean it the way it sounds. The first sestiad includes a teasing description of how beautiful Leander’s body is—
I could tell ye
How smooth his breast was, and how white his belly,
And whose immortal fingers did imprint
That heavenly path, with many a curious dint,
That runs along his back…
and the second sestiad has an extraordinary passage about Neptune making passes at Leander as he swims the Hellespont.
He clapped his plump cheeks, with his tresses played,
And smiling wantonly, his love bewrayed.
He watched his arms, and as they opened wide
At every stroke, betwixt them would he slide
And steal a kiss, and then run out and dance,
And as he turned, cast many a lustful glance,
And threw him gaudy toys to please his eye,
And dive into the water, and there pry
Upon his breast, his thighs, and every limb,
And up again, and close beside him swim,
And talk of love.
There is no indication that Marlowe feels, or expects his readers to feel, any anxiety over the enthusiastic depiction of a man making love to another man. Marlowe gets away with this partly because the subject is classical—“Greek” love—but partly, too, because sexuality in the period is simply much more undifferentiated than it is now. Neptune’s lust for Leander in this context is neither abnormal nor shocking, though it is certainly comic. Leander’s reaction—“You are deceived, I am no woman, I”—is an indication of his sexual naivete, not of his straightness.
Marlowe’s poem is the best expression of the Ovidian world view in English. It is hyperbolic in much the same way Renaissance tragedy is; its heroes are braver or more beautiful than we are, and they are capable of more suffering; more is lost when they die, and indeed, they provide us with the exemplary instances of passion against which ours are to be measured. The other side of the enthusiasm and overt sexuality is the sense of foreboding that also fills the poem, a sense that these heroes are too good for their world, that the gods are jealous, that nothing this beautiful is ever allowed to get away with it. The undercurrent of tragedy is always there, but Marlowe handles the moral issues in a characteristically subversive way. The tragedy we know is coming never qualifies the sensuality—the point is not that Hero and Leander ought not to be behaving this way. Quite the contrary: the point is that our world is simply not good enough for its heroes. Marlowe deals with the necessary tragic conclusion by omitting it, not finishing the poem. This is a work designed to be a fragment—another thing about it that is “classical.”
CHAPMAN’S CONTINUATION
The most subversive of Marlowe’s subjects is how you get away with pleasure, and omitting the conclusion, the punishment for the lovers’—and the readers’—extraordinary enjoyment is a neat way of cheating the moralists. Ironically, but also significantly, the poem was completed by the most moral and moralistic of Marlowe’s contemporaries, George Chapman: two editions of Hero and Leander appeared in 1598, the second of which included Chapman’s continuation. Chapman was an immensely learned and philosophical poet; but the kinship he felt with Marlowe was not based only on the fact that they were both classicists. In Chapman’s continuation, the lovers are perfect, but their love is unsanctified because they are unmarried; the goddess Juno, patron of marriage, has been neglected. They rectify the omission by sacrificing to Juno and formally marrying, but Venus is their true patron, not Juno, and the fates hate Venus and are jealous of the lovers’ beauty and perfection, and this time Leander crossing the Hellespont drowns, and Hero dies of grief. Chapman’s style is quite different from Marlowe’s, but his admiration for Marlowe is clear, and he has his own kind of power and pathos. At the conclusion of the poem, the lovers are metamorphosed into goldfinches:
Neptune for pity in his arms did take them,
Flung them into the air, and did awake them
Like two sweet birds…
And so most beautiful their colors show,
As none (so little) like them: her sad brow
A sable velvet feather covers quite,
Even like the forehead-cloths that in the night,
Or when they sorrow, ladies use to wear;
Their wings, blue, red, and yellow, mixed appear;
Colors that, as we construe colors, paint
Their states to life; the yellow shows their saint,
The devil Venus, left them; blue, their truth;
The red and black, ensigns of death and ruth.
And this true honor from their love-deaths sprung,
They were the first that ever poet sung.
“Their saint / The devil Venus” is a good indication of how divided Chapman’s moral imagination is here. The point is not, obviously, to blame the lovers for falling in love; it is that the distinction between saint and devil is discernable only in hindsight. When he subsequently revised the poem, Chapman had second thoughts about even this, and “the devil Venus” became “the dainty Venus”—both delicately beautiful and fastidious or reluctant; but no longer damnable. The most extraordinary thing about Chapman’s continuation is that this moralist wants to be associated with the work of Marlowe at all: when he was murdered in 1593, Marlowe was under investigation for atheism, blasphemy, counterfeiting (all that is missing is sodomy, and the charges hover dangerously close to that, too)—in short, universal subversion. But Chapman saw a different Marlowe, his life, like the poem, passionate and tragically incomplete. Similarly, when Shakespeare quotes Marlowe in As You Like It—“Dead shepherd, now I feel thy saw of might,/ Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?” (III.5.81–2; compare Hero and Leander I.176)—it is as the model of the innocent wisdom of love. Chapman’s and Shakespeare’s Marlowe is the fictitious Musaeus, the primal poet. Chapman’s continuation appears to the modern reader very different in character from Marlowe’s fragment. The seventeenth-century reader would have found the differences less striking, and there is no evidence that Chapman’s addition was ever considered either inappropriate or unworthy. Indeed, it immediately established itself as an integral part of the poem, and was invariably, until well into the twentieth century, reprinted with it.
PETOWE’S CONTINUATION
Henry Petowe (1575/6–1636?) was a London scrivener (a profession combining the functions of scribe, accountant, and legal adviser) and published a good deal of poetry. His continuation of Hero and Leander, was, as he says in his preface, his first work, and appeared, like Chapman’s, in 1598; though unlike Chapman’s, it has not entered the literary histories. It is unquestionably inept and silly, with a distinctly unearned happy ending, and has surely deserved its almost complete neglect. But it represents the alternative Elizabethan view of Marlowe’s poem, as high romance rather than philosophical tragedy, and is worth reading as a relevant cultural document.
LUCAN’S FIRST BOOK
Marlowe’s translation of Lucan is the first in English; it was published in only a single edition, in 1600—clearly it represented the bottom of the Marlowe barrel, the last bit of unpublished work of the most successful classicist of the age. The work is undeniably less engaging than All Ovid’s Elegies or Hero and Leander. The project, however, would not have been a mere academic exercise. Ben Jonson said of Lucan’s Pharsalia, or Civil War, that it was “written with an admirable height,” and that he was “never weary to transcribe” its “admirable verses.” Modern opinion has been less enthusiastic. The general critical attitude is expressed by the Oxford Classical Dictionary: “Lucan shows an excessive fondness for the purple patch. There is much exaggeration, often absurd; bizarre effects and farfetched paradoxes abound.” Tastes change. To the Renaissance poet, farfetched paradoxes were a virtue, and restraint in the use of hyperbole—as Hero and Leander amply demonstrates—was not. Style is not the least of Lucan’s attractions for Marlowe, as for Jonson.
But to the Elizabethans, this classic study of the horrors of civil war had a special relevance. The drama had inaugurated Elizabeth’s reign with a play in the Senecan style on the same theme, Gorboduc—Lucan’s concerns were the substance of modern history for anyone who had lived through the reign of Mary Tudor. The Queen of Scots, Catholic claimant to Elizabeth’s throne, was not executed until 1587, and the question of Elizabeth’s successor was not positively settled until the end of the reign. Lucan was regarded as a classic model for the treatment of recent events (evident, for example, in Drayton’s Barons’ Wars and Daniel’s Civil Wars), not merely as a literary monument to be domesticated through translation.
THE PASSIONATE SHEPHERD
TO HIS LOVE
The most famous of Marlowe’s poems, the lyric “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” was in existence by 1589, when it was paraphrased in Robert Greene’s Menaphon. It was first printed anonymously in the collection The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599, where it is untitled, and again in a version with two additional stanzas in England’s Helicon in 1600, where it is ascribed to Marlowe and given the title by which it is now known—there is no reason to assume the title is Marlowe’s. The poem is parodied in The Jew of Malta (IV.4.95–105), and Sir Hugh Evans sings a garbled version of one stanza in The Merry Wives of Windsor (III.1.17–26). Versions of the poem, sometimes with additions, appear in a number of early commonplace books, and Isaac Walton included yet another version in the second edition of The Compleat Angler (1655), where it is titled “The Milk Maid’s Song.” A musical setting appears in William Corkine’s Second Book of Airs (1612). The poem was endlessly imitated, parodied, and answered, well into the seventeenth century; some examples are included in this edition. An account of the poem’s history can be found in R. S. Forsythe, “The Passionate Shepherd and English Poetry,” PMLA 40 (September 1925), pp. 692–742.
ELEGY FOR MANWOOD
Marlowe’s only Latin poem is the elegy for Sir Roger Manwood (1525–92), an important jurist who had dealt leniently with Marlowe when he and Thomas Watson were brought up before him on a murder charge stemming from a street brawl in 1589 (they were acquitted on the grounds of self-defense). It is not known what other connection, if any, Marlowe had with Manwood.
NOTES
1. A facsimile and transcription are in A. D. Wraight, In Search of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Vanguard Press, 1965), pp. 308–9. The best biography is that of David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Henry Holt, 2005).
2. See David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 134.
3. See Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).
4. Cited in Tucker Brooke, The Works of Christopher Marlowe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910), p. 114.
5. The Reckoning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), p. 68.
6. Cited in Brooke, Marlowe, p. 114.