Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 36.djvu/187

 equally possible that his father was able to provide for him, or he may have been one of the thirty students 'kept' at Corpus Christi College by Archbishop Parker in addition to the two for Whom he provided scholarships from the Canterbury school. Marlowe graduated B.A. in 1583 and M.A. in 1587. Among the fellows and tutors of his college was Francis Kett [q.v.], who was burnt for heresy at Norwich in 1589. Malone's theory that Marlowe derived from Kett the advanced views on religion which he subsequently developed is not justified by the extant details of the 'blasphemous heresies' for which Kett suffered. Kett was a mystic, who fully acknowledged the authenticity of the scriptures, although he gave them an original interpretation. Kett's deflection from conventional orthodoxy may have encouraged in Marlowe antinomisn tendencies, but he was in no sense Kett's disciple. While a student Marlowe mainly confined himself to the Latin classics, and probably before leaving Cambridge he translated Ovid's 'Amores' into English heroic verse. His rendering, which was not published till after his death, does full justice to the sensuous warmth of the original. He is also credited at the same period with a translation of Coluthus's 'Rape of Helen,' but this is no longer extant (Culler's MSS.) Of Marlowe's career on leaving the university no definite information is accessible. His freouent introduction of military terms in his plays has led to the suggestion that he saw some military service in the Low Countries. It is more probable that he at once settled in London and devoted himself to literary work. A ballad, purporting to have been written in his later years, entitled 'The Atheist's Tragedy,' describes him 'in his early age' as a player at the Curtain Theatre where he 'brake his leg in one lewd scene,' but the ballad is in all probability one of Mr. Collier's forgeries. At an early dale he certainly attached himself as a dramatist to one of the leading theatrical companies—that of the lord admiral (the Earl of Nottingham). By that company most of his plays were produced, und he had the advantage of securing Edward Alleyn's services in the title-roles of at least three of his chief pieces. Kyd, Nashe, Greene, Chapman, and probably Shakespeare, were at one period or another personally known to him, but besides the chief men of letters of the day, he lived in intimate relations with Thomas Walsingham of Chislehurst (first cousin of the queen's secretary, Sir Francis), and with his son, Sir Thomas, who married a daughter of the Hanwood family of Canterbury. Sir Walter Raleigh was also, it is clear, on friendly terms with Marlowe.

It was as a writer of tragedies that Marlowe's genius found its true province: and it cannot have been later than 1587 that he composed his earliest drama, 'Tamburlaine,' which worked a revolution in English dramatic art. It is only by internal evidence that either the date or Marlowe's responsibility for the piece can be established. It was licensed for publication on 14 Aug. 1590, and was published in the same year, but none of the title-pages of early editions bear an author's name. A passage which Mr. Collier printed as part of Henslowe's 'Diary' for the year 1597 (p. 71) mentions 'Marloe's Tamberlen,' but the words are clearly forged (, Dulwich M8S.) The only external contemporary testimony to Marlowe's authorship of the piece is a reference by Gabriel Harvey to Marlowe, under the pseudonym of 'Tamburlaine,' in 1598. A description of Nashe's squalid garret in the 'Black Book,' 1604, doubtfully ascribed to Middleton, speaks of spiders stalking over Nashe's head, 'as if they had been coDning of Tamburlaine' and Malone, not very rationally, found here proof that Nashe was at least a part author of the play. Nashe, at the time of the production of 'Tamburlaine' was no friend of Marlowe, although he subsequently knew and respected him, and internal evidence practically gives Marlowe sole credit for the play. The sonorous verse, the bold portrayal of the highest flight of human ambition, 'the high astounding terms' in which the characters expressed themselves, the sudden descents from sublimity into bombast, all identify the piece with the works which Marlowe openly claimed for himself later. He was conscious that in 'Tamburlaine' he was treading a new path. In the prologue he promised to lead his audience away
 * From jiggling veins of rhyming mother-wits
 * And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay

Although rhyme was chiefly favoured by earlier dramatists, blank verse had figured on the stage several times since the production of 'Gorboduc' in 1562 (cf., Jocasta, c. 1568), but Marlowe gave it a new capacity and freed it of those mechanical restraints which had obscured its poetic potentialities. In his hand the sense was not interrupted at the end of each line, the pauses and the force of the accent varied, and the metre was proved capable for the first time of responding to the varying phases of human feeling. The novelty of the metrical experiment was the first