Question- Write a note on Marlowe as a dramatist or playwright.

Or
What are the chief characteristics of Marlowe as a dramatist?

Answer -

Marlowe is well-known for his four dramas which are regarded as masterpieces. These are Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, Doctor Faustus and Edward II. He wrote two more plays, namely The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage and The Massacre of Paris. Arthur Compton- Rickett gives the best defence and also criticism of Marlowe as a dramatist, and he at the same time points out in what various ways Marlowe contributed to the development of the Elizabethan drama and paved the path for Shakespeare who was the greatest dramatist of the Elizabethan age.

Marlowe raised the subject matter of the drama to a higher level. He provided big heroic subjects that appealed to the imagination. Tamburlaine - A World Conqueror, Faust in pursuit of universal knowledge; Barabas with Fabulous dreams of wealth; Edward II with his mingling nobility and worthlessness, sounding the heights and depths of human nature. The insatiable spirit of adventure; the master passions of love and hate; ideals of beauty; the greatness and littleness of human life; these were his subjects. That he had the knowledge and power to deal with them adequately, could not be said, but it is sufficient that he interested his fellowmen in them, and recalling mereoric, and unhappy life, it is marvellous, not that he made so many mistakes, but that his achievements were so high.

He gave life and reality to his characters. They were no longer puppets pulled by a string; but living and breathing realities. You can feel the fierce exaltation of the conqueror. Tamburlaine, the vibrant passion and rapturous longing of his Faust, the fierce selfishness of his Barabas. He took the blank verse of the classical school, hard and unflinching as a nock, and struck it with his rod till the waters of human emotion gushed forth. The old rhyming lines of romantic drama he put aside; blank verse had little grip, when he took it in hand, but he fathomed its immense possibilities, and saw how it could be made the expression of the finest wit or the most delicate fancy. Its infinite variety was beyond his power to express; that remained for his successors to show; but its colour and energy he revealed. He taught successors to play upon its hundred stops if he could not play upon them himself. He found blank verse consisting of lines, each ending with an accounted monosyllable, each line standing by itself; a thing of nerveless monotone. He varied the rhythmic- pauses; altered the accents, made the metre to suit the subject, in stead of fitting the subject to the metre; and bade farewell to the jigging veins of rhying mother wits; and such conceits as clownage keeps in pay.

He gave a unity to the drama, hitherto lacking. Plays before had been formless; a succession of isolated scenes often with no proper connecting link. And although compared with Shakespeare, the work of Marlowe seems often turgid and unweildy, yet it shows quite sufficient promise to show us the extent of Shakespeare's indebtedness. Marlow saw clearly enough that the romantic drama was suited to the needs of the nation, and that therefore, no other form of drama could express so well its abundant, concrete life; But he saw also that for the Romantic drama to be a thing of beauty as well as a force, the medium of blank verse must be chosen. Marlowe's work has three marked characteristic its pictorial quality, its ecstatic quality and its vitalising energy. He had, of course its ecstatic quality the defects of the temperament of his age, a frequent over-luxuriance of imagination, a lack of restraint, an extravagance bordering on the ridiculous. But no criticism can obscure the greatness of his genius. He found the drama crude and chaotic; he left it a great force in English literature.

J. A. Symonds remarks, Marlowe's actual achievement may be judge imperfect, unequal, immature, and limited. Yet nothing lower than the highest rank can be claimed for one who did so much, in a space of time, so short and under conditions so unfavourable. About him there is nothing small or trivial. His verse is mighty; his passion is intense; the outlines of his plot large; his characters are Titanic; his fancy is extravagant in richness insolence and prompt. Marlowe could rough how like cyclops, though he was far from being able to finish with the sublety and smoothness of a praxiteles. We may compare his noblest studies of character with marbles blocked out by Michael Angelo, not with the polished perfection of 'La Notte' in San Lorenzo. It is this vastness of design and scale, this simplicity of certainty of purpose, which strikes us first in Marlowe. He is the sculptor poet of colossi, aiming at such effects alone as are attitude in figure of a superhuman size, and careless of fine distinctions or delicate gradations in their execution. His characters are not so much human beings, with the complexity of human attributes combined in living personality, as types of humanity, the animated moulds of human lusts and passions which include each one of them the possibility of many individuals.

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