Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) and the Machiavellian Principle

The best known of the so-called University Wits,

Christopher Marlowe, born a few weeks before
Shakespeare, often viewed as Shakespeare’s
biggest contemporary rival, was not meant to have
a career as long as Shakespeare’s: he was stabbed
to death, with a dagger that went straight through
his eye, in a tavern brawl, before he could reach
the age of 30. Some speculate that he was involved
in the business of spying, but his rough end is a
reminder of the harshness of the realities of the age
in which these playwrights created.
Regardless of how much these realities influenced
Marlowe’s works, in the character of his Massacre
at Paris, who is called Duke of Guise, as Burgess
puts it, we find an instance of “a curious dramatic
motif, which is to fascinate many Elizabethan
playwrights – intrigue and evil almost for their
own sakes, a complete lack of any kind of morality
1 Marlowe, By Unknown - – what is sometimes called the ‘Machiavellian
http://factoidz.com/images/user/42777.jpg, Public Principle’.
Domain,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2401
The term derives from the name of a well-known
36
and much abused Italian, Niccolo Machiavelli, the
author of the Prince (in Serbian, Владалац), a treatise whose argument was ‘bring about a united
Italy, regardless of the means
necessary’. Even if the means to
achieve this noble goal included
treachery or cruelty. A version of the
‘the aim justifies the means’ saying.
This is the ‘principle’ permeating
Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great:
it represents Tamburlaine’s rise
form a shepherd to conqueror of the
world, with a plethora of
exaggerated violence that does not
seem to have much logic of any kind
to it: he has all the girls of Damascus
slaughtered, uses Soldan of Turkey 2 Title page of Machiavelli’s The Prince, taken from
as a footstool and bangs his head https://www.flickr.com/photos/italianembassy/10843539995
against his cage bars, burns the town in which his mistress dies, kills his own son for cowardice,
harnesses kings to pull his chariot, has the Governor of Babylon pierced with arrows (Burgess adds
that during a performance, these arrows accidentally killed a boy in the audience) and drowns all
inhabitants in a lake.
The Machiavellian principle is also present in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, but, more importantly, it
was also used by other dramatists of the time, including Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s Richard III
is clearly influenced by the principle, as is his Iago, from Othello (in fact, Edmund from King Lear,
and Claudius from Hamlet, even Hamlet himself, are also partly Machiavellian.

Bare bone summary

• Massacre at Paris, Duke of • Tamburlaine: all the girls of

Guise, example of Machiavellian
Principle
• Niccolo Machiavelli, Prince
• Version of the ‘the aim justifies
the means’ saying
Damascus, Soldan as a footstool,
killing his own son…
• Jew of Malta, Richard III,
Othello, even Edmund and
Claudius
New age and the technique of exaggeration in Marlowe's Faustus

Renaissance goes hand in hand with Humanism – the idea that puts man and humanity first. We
think of Middle Ages as seeing all worldly beauties and man’s individual achievements as the
ultimate beauties and achievements of God – after all, man is but an image of God, and, when we
admire a beautiful woman, we admire the reflected majesty of God. This is, presumably, one of
the reasons why many names of medieval authors are unknown – because they did not matter as
individuals. With Renaissance, Man is put to the fore: individual achievement, individual learning
and knowledge became important. It proved to be the age of geniuses, great individuals, like
Leonardo da Vinci, Newton, Bacon, Galileo, Copernicus, Shakespeare, to name but a few.
Marlow was one of the literary pioneers of the newfound faith in Man and his abilities: Marlow
sums up the new age, says Burgess (89) and quotes Swinburne’s lines “the star that Marlowe sang
into our skies / With mouth of gold, and morning in his eyes”.
What we find in Marlowe is the “spirit of human freedom, of limitless human power and
enterprise”, as Burgess puts it (89). Renaissance is the age of discovery not only in terms of
science, but also in terms of conquest: America is being found and conquered, and the very
conquistadoresque aspect of human power is exhibited in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine a conqueror of
gigantic proportions, magnified in the extreme.
But, it is not just about Tamburlaine: it is about the
concept of building a character that is so grand, so
central, that it overshadows, completely, all other
characters. This is the case with the other great plays by
Marlowe, Jew of Malta, the prototypical ruthless
financial magnate and tycoon of our times, and of
course, Faustus, the epitome of the benefits and dangers
of the power of knowledge. So grand are these
individuals, that Marlowe’s plays have been called “one-
man plays”.
It is, of course, Faustus that is the most relevant of
Marlowe’s plays when it comes to the topic of the new
age, with its story of a learned man ever craving more
knowledge and experience, ready to give up his soul in
exchange for more: more knowledge, more experience,
more freedom, more enjoyment, more of everything, in
fact. 3 By Iohn Wright - en:Image:Faustus-
tragedy.gif, Public Domain,
Of course, we should also bear in mind that Marlowe’s https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?
curid=2864717
Faustus, unlike the Goethe’s, gets himself carried away
into Hell. In other words, Marlowe gives us the story of
the grandeur and magnificence of human greatness and ambition, but also warns against unnatural
‘overreaching’: “cut is the branch that might have grown full straight”, says he of his protagonist.
And, this is not just to nuance Marlowe’s play, but also to nuance our understanding of the
nuanced, slow process of cultural change, which can all
too easily be dismissed with words such as ‘the new age’.
Wherever there is a neatness, simplicity, shortness, there
is space for doubt, and for a quest for a more balanced,
richer, and therefore truer understanding. And not just of
works of literature or products of culture. This is why
time-limiting, reducing-to-essential approaches will never
do justice to its subjects, especially in the realm of instant
gratification media, such as TV, Tweeter, Video Games
and such.
Marlowe’s technique of exaggeration should be partly
obvious from the above: to be able to make his
protagonists as grand as he wanted them to be, Marlow
had to exaggerate them, to make them “larger than life”,
as they say. The previous chapter covered some of the
exaggerated violence that we know ultimately originates
from Italian Senecan plays.
But, Marlowe’s exaggeration also has a peculiar twist,
putting it into communication with the comic and the
horrific. Parts of Faustus are comic and may well have
been penned down not by Marlowe, but by some 4Public Domain,
comediographer of the time. In, Jew of Malta, the title https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?
curid=1872676
character exaggerates his actions in such a way as to make
them almost caricature-like. Burgess (92) quotes the wonderful lines of the Jew of Malta, from the
cauldron of boiling oil:

And had I but escap'd this stratagem,

I would have brought confusion on you all,
Damn'd Christian dogs, and Turkish infidels!
But now begins the extremity of heat
To pinch me with intolerable pangs:
Die, life! fly, soul! tongue, curse thy fill, and die!

This, of course, is declamatory, in the Senecan sense of ‘speaking emotions out loud’ that we have
mentioned in this book before. Burgess (92-93) agrees with T. S. Eliot that these lines also produce
a horrific, nightmarish effect, quite remote from the effects of regular caricature. A way to
understand this scene would be to think of Hollywood horror movies in which the monster / villain
will not die, or dies and returns for a final scare, before dying with a terrible threat and a promise
of return.
 Bare bone summary

• Humanism, man, individual, • Limitations: “tragedy of

genius overreaching”
• Marlow: Power to know and to • Senecan influence in the violence
conquer and declamation
• Tamburlaine: Marlow’s “one- • Exaggeration communicating
man play” with the comic and horrific