Volume Forty Five / Home / Volume Forty Seven

Volume 46:

Edward the Second (full text) by Christopher Marlowe

As Marlowe's Edward the Second begins, Edward has just ascended to the crown, and he calls his favorite, Gaveston, home from exile.

My father is deceas'd! Come, Gaveston,
And share the kingdom with thy dearest friend.

It's clear -- though never stated directly -- that Edward's father sent Gaveston into exile because of the questionable relationship between Edward and Gaveston. The gay themes in Marlowe's play are unlike anything included in the Classics so far. As Gaveston makes his way back to England, he imagines for himself and Edward a Dionysian revelry that wouldn't have been out of place in post-Stonewall Greenwich Village:

I must have wanton poets, pleasant wits,
Musicians, that with touching of a string
May draw the pliant king which way I please.
Music and poetry is his delight;
Therefore I'll have Italian masks by night,
Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows;
And in the day, when he shall walk abroad,
Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad;
My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns,
Shall with their goat-feet dance an antic hay.
Sometime a lovely boy in Dian's shape,
With hair that gilds the water as it glides,
Crownets of pearl about his naked arms,
And in his sportful hands an olive tree,
To hide those parts which men delight to see,
Shall bathe him in a spring; and there hard by,
One like Actaeon peeping through the grove
Shall by the angry goddess be transform'd,
And running in the likeness of an hart
By yelping hounds pull'd down, and seem to die;--
Such things as these best please his majesty,
My lord.

Marlowe himself was known as something of a wanton poet, but he doesn't paint an especially sympathetic picture of homosexuality. Edward's indulgences towards Gaveston -- which include giving him a series of titles and betrothing him to Edward's niece -- lead directly to their deaths. For the play's first half, Edward is portrayed as basically frivolous -- not just corrupt but unserious -- and it's this weakness that can't be abided in a king. But at the very least Marlowe recognized that Edward's downfall -- which he took in large part from history -- had the necessary dignity to rise to the level of tragedy. Early in the play, Edward agrees to send Gaveston back into exile. As they part, Marlowe allows them much of the pathos of any star-crossed lovers:

Gaveston: Is all my hope turned to this hell of grief?

Edward: Rend not my heart with thy too-piercing words:
Thou from this land, I from my self am banished.

After Gaveston is brought back to England, the tone of the play changes remarkably, as Marlowe seems to give himself over wholly to the idea of Edward as a tragic hero, banished from himself. I doubt that many other playwrights of the era -- or most other eras -- would have chosen this material or, having chosen it, would have let it become the great tragedy that Edward the Second is.

Hamlet (full text), King Lear (full text), Macbeth (full text) & The Tempest (full text) by William Shakespeare

Okay, so -- Shakespeare. The short list of writers who compare to him -- Homer, Dante, maybe Aeschylus, that's about it -- appear in the Classics in (mostly unremarkable) translations, which means that, even in a collection of the greatest literature in the history of the world, Shakespeare stands alone. If anything, reading him among all these other greats makes his achievement even more impressive. One can compare the breadth of his characterization against Chaucer's, the depth of his tragic sense against Sophocles', the music of his poetry against Milton's, etc., etc. Almost all the great dramatists and poets have one thing in particular that they do especially well -- and whatever it is, Shakespeare does it better.

But the best thing about reading these plays, which have been so carefully combed over for hundreds of years, is just being allowed to enjoy them. I've probably written half a dozen papers about Hamlet, about his lack of proleptic imagination, about his use of irony, about appearance and reality and entropy and misogyny and self-awareness. But what most strikes me when I read the play now is how clearly I can see him, how individual and real all the characters seem. Hamlet sounds like Hamlet; Polonius sounds like Polonius; Ophelia sounds like Ophelia; the snozzberries taste like snozzberries. From Hamlet's first line -- his famous aside about Claudius: A little more than kin, and less than kind -- his sly, tortured voice is unmistakable. Even a casual reader will be struck, throughout Shakespeare's great tragedies, with how many lines have entered our collectice cultural memory. But more impressive is that even in the plays' most poetic moments, it's always the character speaking, never the writer.

In this spirit of immediate enjoyment, I must admit that my favorite Shakespeare play isn't one of these high tragedies, but his farewell work, The Tempest, which may be the one play where the famously elusive playwright comes closest to revealing himself. The voice of the sorcerer Prospero is probably as near as we can get, at least within the plays, to Shakespeare's true voice. Which may be why the moment when Prospero gives up his art is so oddly moving:

I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds
And 'twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault
Set roaring war; to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire, and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-bas'd promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar; graves at my command
Have wak'd their sleepers, op'd, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art. But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have requir'd
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.

After this play, Shakespeare will break his staff and drown his book. He will retire to Stratford-upon-Avon, where/Every third thought shall be my grave. But his rough magic is still one of the great pleasures that life affords.


--CRB, November 30, 2007

The Five Foot Shelf