MARLOWE AND SHAKESPEARE: A STUDY OF DRAMATIC CORRESPONDENCES

As England's first major playwrights, Marlowe and Shakespeare were not only rivals but astute appreciators of one another's work. Their artistic relationship is evident in the frequent verbal, structural, and thematic correspondences within their plays. Concentrating upon the first half of Shakespeare's career, this study attempts: (1) to establish and define Shakespeare's recurrent response to the language, techniques, and issues of Marlowe's plays; and (2) to clarify, through analyzing Shakespeare's use of this source, those aspects of Shakespeare's plays that evolve, in part, from Marlowe's.;The role of Tamburlaine within I Henry VI is to emphasize the underlying theme of civil dissension, which then emerges as the main theme of Parts II and III. Shakespeare divides Marlowe's ambiguous Tamburlaine figure into two characters, embodying the heroic virtues in Talbot and the ruthlessness in Joan. That the materialistic side of Marlowe's paradoxical whole should destroy the ideal works to highlight the destructiveness of British factionalism. In II Henry VI, Shakespeare associates numerous characters with Tamburlaine's language and behavior, thus making civil discord seem inevitable. By III Henry VI, the prevailing conqueror figure, Richard, is repellent in part for his debasement of Tamburlaine's vision.;Shakespeare's Richard III shows a close and enthusiastic knowledge of specific Marlovian techniques in The Jew of Malta for making a "villain" inspire the audience's respect and perhaps even affection. Moreover, Shakespeare develops dramatic techniques even subtler than Marlowe's for his villain who operates in history rather than in a clear-cut hypothetical setting like Barabas' Malta. While historical fact independent of the play world complicates specific dramatic sequences, however, it has a contrary effect upon the play's moral vision, making Richard III finally more conservative than The Jew of Malta.; The desire to surpass not only Marlowe's dramatic but also his moral complexity is one impulse behind Shakespeare's composition of The Merchant of Venice. Even though he makes Shylock a conventional Jew and gives the Christians the romantic language that largely accounts for Barabas' glamor, Shakespeare succeeds in eliciting from the audience the kind of ambivalent attitude toward the villain that epitomizes The Jew of Malta. The play which seems to confirm prejudice in fact causes the audience to question traditional assumptions.;My procedure for establishing the effect on Shakespeare of Marlowe's literary innovations and accomplishments is to work with pairs of plays that fall within generic "lines": the conqueror play, the villain play, the history plan. I use primarily "contextual" echoes, by which I mean verbal correspondences that occur in a Shakespearean context similar to the Marlovian scene in which the passage first occurs.;In Richard II, Shakespeare reacts both to Marlowe's use of Henry VI in Edward II and to the advance Edward II makes in objectifying character and state of mind on stage. Shakespeare's reinterpretation of Marlowe's history play makes the king less at fault for the failure of his reign than Edward and thereby creates a character who is psychologically more complex. Shakespeare modifies the basis of Edward's weakness, the disposition to fictionalize. Richard does not willfully prefer the pleasures of art over the task of kingship; rather, he succumbs to the customary artfulness that accompanies the office of kingship.;In conclusion, I suggest that the singular and significant effect of Marlowe's plays does not disappear as Shakespeare matures but continues to be felt in the kinship between Hotspur and Tamburlaine, Iago and Barabas, Dido and Cleopatra, Macbeth and Faustus, Prospero and Faustus. A single study of Marlowe's presence within Shakespeare's later plays would be instructive.