At bottom, this energy is religious. Elizabethan playwrights were not allowed to handle sacred subjects, but their greatest plays often depend on the feeling of a sacred power gone dark. Marlowe’s plays of power and helplessness are filled with the energy of the sacred and its desecration.

He was apparently destined for the Church. Born and brought up in Canterbury, the ancient spiritual capital of England, he went up to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on a scholarship designed to educate boys for the ministry. In 1587 the university authorities considered withholding his MA (he was rumoured to be about to defect to the Catholic seminary at Rheims), until the Privy Council intervened to point out that in his absences from Cambridge he had done the queen ‘good service’ – a phrase usually taken to mean spying – ‘and deserved to be rewarded for his faithful dealing’.1 He got his MA, but instead of taking holy orders began writing plays for the London theatres, disreputable places – at least in the eyes of the godly – which were under constant attack as dens of iniquity. Marlowe’s association with learning continued to be important to him: as late as 1592, when he was deported from Holland for his part in a counterfeiting scheme, he was still ‘by his profession [i.e., by his own account] a scholar’.2 But his learning was turned to distinctly heterodox ends: he translated Ovid’s Amores, erotic poems that verged on pornography in Elizabethan eyes (they were published surreptitiously as All Ovid’s Elegies, the title emphasizing the fact that they were unexpurgated); and he acquired a dangerous reputation for atheism. The sometime Cambridge don, Gabriel Harvey, called him ‘a Lucian’, associating him with the Greek satirist notorious for mocking the gods.3 His religious views were under investigation at the time of his violent death in 1593. One Richard Cholmeley claimed to have been ‘converted’ by him and alleged that ‘Marlowe is able to show more sound reasons for atheism than any divine in England is able to give to prove divinity and that Marlowe told him that he hath read the atheist lecture to Sir Walter Ralegh and others.’4

This learned heterodoxy has obvious relevance to the plays: Dr Faustus, having ‘commenced’ (1.3) and been ‘graced’ (Prologue, 17) like a Cambridge graduate, is a scholar who punningly bids ‘Divinity, adieu!’ (1.50) and makes a pact with the devil; and Machevil, in the prologue to The Jew of Malta, has to stop himself delivering an atheist lecture to the audience. More importantly, Marlowe’s learning gets into the very fabric of his astonishing poetry. Consider his most famous lines, Faustus’ address to the shade of Helen of Troy:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips sucks forth my soul. See where it flies!
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven be in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.
I will be Paris, and for love of thee
Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked,
And I will combat with weak Menelaus,
And wear thy colours on my plumèd crest.
Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel
And then return to Helen for a kiss.
O, thou art fairer than the evening air,
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appeared to hapless Semele,
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa’s azured arms;
And none but thou shalt be my paramour. (13.90–109)

This hymn of sexual desire conceals learned ironies in its dense classical allusions. The opening questions come from Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, in which a visitor to the underworld, seeing Helen’s no-longer-recognizable skull, asks: ‘And is this what those thousand ships sailed for from all over Greece? Is this why all those Greeks and barbarians were killed? And all those cities sacked?’5 Marlowe turns this into part of an oddly humanistic sexual fantasy, the necrophiliac equivalent of the scholar’s desire to revive the classical past. Faustus has earlier produced Helen as an erotic after-dinner show for his scholars; now, to take his mind off his imminent damnation, he becomes her lover, repeatedly kissing her and crooning her name. Helen haunted Marlowe’s imagination. What fascinated him was the destructiveness of her beauty: men died and cities burned for it. And to complete the fantasy of being a modern Paris, strutting in triumph over the heroes of antiquity, Faustus includes the destruction of his own city: ‘Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked’. The later mythological allusions are similarly fraught with dangerous beauty. ‘Hapless Semele’ would admit the god’s sexual approach only if he came in all his glory; she was consumed by his lightning. Yet the ‘thousand stars’, their number matching the ships, are alight with natural beauty (starlight often ignites Marlowe’s poetry), and the eye catches the flash of sunlight on water in the otherwise unknown conjunction of the sun-god Apollo and the liquefied Arethusa. Moreover, the beauty of these heavenly bodies – uncertainly gods or planets – is male beauty, and the uncertainty in Faustus’ imagining of ravishment plays back over the speech as a whole. The initial question – was this the face? – is only half-rhetorical: this is not Helen but a boy-actor and, more darkly, a succubus (an evil spirit in female form) who ‘sucks forth [his] soul’ in ways that are indistinguishably erotic and terrifying.

The self-destructive desire in these lines is a central preoccupation of all Marlowe’s plays. Dido, Queen of Carthage, possibly the earliest and perhaps co-written with his younger Cambridge contemporary Thomas Nashe, is an adaptation of Virgil’s narrative in the Aeneid of Dido’s tragic passion for the Trojan exile Aeneas. It was performed, its title-page tells us, by the boy-actors of the Chapel Children’s company. These two aspects of the play – its closeness to the most prestigious of Latin texts and its performance by boys – are in tension throughout the action. On the one hand, it is a learned play, full of direct translations of Virgil’s most famous lines: when Aeneas asks his divine mother, disguised as a huntress, ‘But what may I, fair virgin, call your name’ (1.1.188), he is translating Virgil’s ‘o quam te tnemorem virgo?’; his speeches describing the fall and burning of Troy are bravura versions of the great narrative of Aeneid II; and at key moments of Act 5, the play simply quotes Virgil’s Latin directly. On the other hand, the action is frequently mock-heroic, the Aeneid in falsetto voices. The opening scene sets the tone, beginning not with grand heterosexual passion but with the pederastie Jupiter ‘dandling GANYMEDE upon his knee’ (0.2SD). The ambivalence of the posture, an erotic game with a child, is present too in the opening line in his sexual invitation (‘Come, gentle Ganymede, and play with me’); and the Ganymede to whom the god’s bribes are offered is detectably a tarty, petulant Elizabethan page-boy. This scene is not in Virgil.