Please Let There Be an Arras!

Before Shakespeare, there was Christopher Marlowe. The always-correct Wikipedia says (at least it said it last week) that Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy were the first popular plays (ca. 1582) on the London public stage, both showing the power and suitability of blank verse for drama.

I can see why Tamburlaine had such an immediate and fateful effect. Marlowe’s pair of plays, about the fourteenth-century founder of the Asian Timurid Empire, flows in straightforward meter with a strong simplicity of vocabulary that I found very easy to understand even today. You don’t get any of Shakespeare’s neologisms or extended metaphors, but you do get powerful drama. Part I (i.e. the first play) tells of Tamburlaine’s rise as he conquers kingdom after kingdom, sometimes through military superiority, sometimes through stratagem, and sometimes merely by presenting himself to his opponents, who apparently all agreed on his almost superhuman beauty and dignity. Part II, a better drama with a dash of poetic flare along with all the clear expository dialog, tells of the mighty emperor’s downfall. Why does success seem like such an imcomplete story? Whatever the explanation, Part I’s meteoric rise would offer little satisfaction without the tragic descent of Part II.

I also just read Marlowe’s Edward II. This weak English king seems despicable at first and then pathetic. But my sympathies turned toward him about the same time as his brother Edmund’s did in the play. Edward’s horrible death isn’t explained in the dialog; I think the audience was assumed to know it. (Edward was burned from the inside out with a red-hot poker.) Apparently, if I correctly understood the stage directions, or lack thereof, this death takes place on stage with screaming from the dying king. Gruesome. I would hope that the action was hidden behind an arras as thick as the one that hides Polonius.

Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy is next. Time to quit writing and start reading!