Show Christopher Mcirlowe Tw Appreciation Fortune is strangely tantalizing in her treatment of many if not most of the world’s great figures The record of their achievements in war and literature and statecraft has come down to us clear and glowing with inspiration But the men themselves — all those little details of private life we long for— are scrupulously denied us Dear old Chaucer blending a shrewd grasp of practical affairs with a childlike love of nature is revealed to us through a few dry records and the personal information we can read into hir works Shakespeare is is horn married and dies and the personality in his works is that of no one man but of a multitude We long to know we have recourse to our imaginations we manufacture episodes out of whole cloth in a way that should gladden the heart of any village gossip But these always comes along some scholat grim and severe who pins us down to solid facts and disappointment What is true of Shakespeare is no less true of his strangely brilliant early contemporary Christopher Marlowe whose morning promise beams have been allowed to pale sadly in the noonday radiance of the master’s genius Two months be fore the infant Shakespeare saw the light of day in Stratford a certain shoemaker’s household in Canterbury was gladdened we trust by the arrival of a son On the 26th of February according to the regis- ter of the parish church of St George the Martyr “was christened Christofer the Sonne of John Marlowe” We know that this youngster was first educated at King’s School in his native town that in he entered Benet College Cambridge and finally with his B A went up to London to seek his fortune The next thing we know it is 1587 Marlowe is taking his M A from Cambridge and there has already been acted on the public stage that strangest of all ambitious imaginative flights Tamburlaine Then the uncertainties begin to break into the story People tell us with a suspicious old ballad as authority that the playwright was at first an actor as well and once broke his leg in the theatre They assure us that the immediate recognition of Tamburlaine by the people of London turned the author’s head in a Byronic fashion and plunged him into a round of dissipation They remind us that he was a wicked and outspoken atheist 1581 |