Tag: Christopher Marlowe

Review 2513: Classics Club Spin Result! Hero and Leander: Not!

~ whatmeread ~ 15 Comments

I made a mistake when I put Hero and Leander on my Classics Club list. I wanted to add a play by Marlowe, and I picked it out from a list of his works without realizing it was a long poem. Why I didn’t pick one of his plays from a volume of four that I already had, I don’t know. What I know is that long poems and I don’t get along, especially ones laden with classical illusions.

But I tried. Leander, a beautiful virginal youth, sees Hero, a nymph who has vowed to Venus to keep her virginity. They fall in love. He woos her but she is reluctant. She finally gives in. He leaves but decides to marry her.

The poem is divided into six “sestiads.” I got about halfway through the fourth one—about halfway through the poem—when I realized I had stopped knowing what was going on. I tried several times but Marlowe just seemed to be babbling on about various deities. I finally stopped.

Reading this made me remember a college paper I wrote about whether Shakespeare really wrote Shakespeare. The assumption made by people who thought he didn’t was the classist idea that he wasn’t educated enough to have such a vocabulary, but this idea reflected a lack of knowledge of Elizabethan society. He was the son of the mayor of Stratford, which didn’t put him in the first ranks of society but made his family provincial but important. True, he had no university education, but he was clearly an autodidact who was fascinated with words. And he was educated enough to be a tutor when young to a prominent family. There are contemporary references to him, and he suffered some flak for not having been at Eton or Oxford.

But just reading the various contenders’ work (of which Marlowe was one despite having died well before the end of Shakespeare’s career) told me that there was no resemblance between his style and others’. His was much more sophisticated and flowing. It’s that iambic pentameter and that word play. And all I have to say is, Roland Emmerich may know a lot about film, but he knows nothing about literature.

My apologies if I made any mistakes. This is all from my memory.

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Review 1656: Edward II

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I haven’t read any Christopher Marlowe plays since college, so when I made up my Classics Club list, I picked Edward II, because I didn’t remember reading it. And it’s true, it didn’t ring any bells except through reading fiction about his reign until I got to the part about the line in Latin that could be read in two ways.

The play begins with the return, after Edward’s accession, of his favorite Gaveston, who had been banished to France. Edward has summoned him with a love letter, and Gaveston tells us straight out that he’s going to use Edward’s homosexuality to manipulate him. And he does. Almost the first thing Edward does is throw the Bishop of Coventry into jail and give all his possessions to Gaveston. Although Mortimer, in particular, is bothered by how “basely born” Gaveston is, the main complaint is his greed: “While soldiers mutiny for want of pay/He wears a lord’s revenue on his back.” Basically, he’s bankrupting the kingdom.

Further, Edward is slighting his queen, Isabella of France, who seems at first an innocent victim. But things are going to get a lot more interesting.

In Marlowe’s plays, government is usually corrupt. He’s not very interested in appeasing power. Usually, this corruption is a result of greed or sex—in this case both.

I have always found Shakespeare to be a great deal more poetic than Marlowe, but Marlowe’s plays have their power. This one also has the benefit of being a great deal more true to the actual events than most of Shakespeare’s history plays are, but of course Shakespeare was interested in appeasing power.

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Day 931: Horses of the Night

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Cover for Horses of the NightHorses of the Night seemed like a good choice for me, because it’s about Christopher Marlowe, and I do enjoy novels about literary figures. I just never developed much interest in this novel, however, and gave it up after 100 pages or so.

The novel concentrates on Marlowe’s spying career, involving him right away in the Babington Plot. Although Marlowe is alleged to have been a spy, nothing is known of his activities. At least as Aggeler depicts it, Marlowe seems to have little role in the case, sent in at the end of the plot with only a few lessons in how to be a Catholic. He is involved long enough, however, to become sympathetic with one of the alleged plotters, Margaret Copley.

link to NetgalleyAggeler appears to be previously an academic writer. For this novel, he has adopted a pseudo-Elizabethan writing style throughout, even for descriptive passages. This is an interesting approach, and it is not inherently irritating, but I found the writing overblown at times.

I also felt as if I was seeing a Marlowe who was not the actual person I would expect from my admittedly limited reading, a man more conventionally likable than Marlowe probably was.

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Day 635: The Secret Life of William Shakespeare

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Cover for The Secret Life of William ShakespeareAs I am interested in Shakespeare and recently enjoyed a Regency romance by Jude Morgan, I wanted to enjoy this novel a lot more than I did. There is of course a risk in making a historical figure a main character in a novel, and that is that no author truly knows the mind of the real person. The truly successful novel of this type bravely forges a persona. Morgan’s solution, however, is to make Shakespeare, about whom little is known, truly amorphous in character.

The novel centers mostly on the relationship between Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway, an interesting choice, since we know they lived apart for much of their marriage. Morgan explains the marriage between Shakespeare and his bride, almost ten years older, as a love match, which is perhaps more unlikely than many different explanations for it (although of course not impossible). He has Anne reluctantly agree to Will’s eventual decision to join a group of players only on the condition that he is never unfaithful to her. Anne does not understand Will’s fascination with the theatre and views it with jealousy.

To go along with the amorphous nature of Will’s character, the details of his London life are murky. Morgan hardly ever shows him at his work or refers to any of the events of his life. Instead, he has him in conversation with various players and writers, particularly Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson. The introduction of Jonson into the novel is particularly confusing, as often we side track to examine his life and career as a playwright. In fact, he is a much more definite character than Shakespeare is.

It felt to me as though, in being perhaps reluctant to misinterpret Shakespeare’s personality, Morgan just doesn’t interpret it at all. Wife and friends find him equally unknowable. I had a hard time reconciling my knowledge of the plays with this reticent character. In particular, it seemed as though a man who was so fascinated with language would play with it more in his speech, as he does in Anthony Burgess’s much more adventuresome book Nothing Like the Sun. I did not buy Morgan’s idea of Shakespeare’s personality at all.