The people change but the roles remain the same, and the characters are increasingly aware of traditional patternings that give shape to the action. Mortimer’s ascendancy is a familiar affair: Edward is his prisoner and he keeps control of the prince by physically abducting him from his uncle; Kent is dispatched in the usual way:

EDWARD III

My lord, he is my uncle and shall live.

MORTIMER

My lord, he is your enemy and shall die. (24.90–1)

Appropriately, Mortimer envisions his own career in the traditional, secular terms of the wheel of Fortune (26.59–63).

But there is something more eerie in the counterpointed scenes of Edward’s fall. Disguised in a monk’s habit and surrounded by other cowled figures, the king begins to contemplate his decline as an instance of the medieval genre of the Falls of Princes, his language too becoming momentarily archaic: ‘Whilom I was, powerful and full of pomp’ (20.13). A play which opened with a fantasy of Renaissance courtly shows (‘Italian masques by night’, 1.54) is becoming medieval. Its action fills with obscure atavistic menace. The mower who betrays Edward is only ‘A gloomy fellow in a mead below’ (20.29) – but he is a Reaper, a figure of death touched in to the landscape. ‘The day grows old’ (20.85) in the most ordinary sense, but the diurnal references are oddly insistent about the coming of night, and the emphasis returns when the king, plunged into darkness in the closing scenes, tries, like Faustus, to hold back the end of the day:

Stand still, you watches of the element;
All times and seasons, rest you at a stay,
That Edward may be still fair England’s king.
But day’s bright beams doth vanish fast away,
And needs I must resign my wishèd crown. (21.66–70)

His head brought low by uncrowning and unmanned by shaving, his deconsecrated body immersed in excrement and murderously violated through the anus, Edward’s torments are physically appalling symbolic degradations. They suggest the torments of the damned, and his murderer is a kind of devil. ‘Lightborne’ is a version of ‘Lucifer’, and he shares the name with a fallen angel in the Chester Mystery plays. The closing scenes of this least providential of history-plays are full of a hellish fear that is made the worse by being so resolutely unreligious.

Modern criticism, concentrating on Marlowe’s ‘subversiveness’, sometimes makes him sound like Joe Orton in doublet and hose. To some Elizabethans, he was something more dangerous. Richard Baines’s testimony against Marlowe includes the pious wish that ‘all men in Christianity ought to endeavour that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped’. Speculation continues that, when Marlowe was killed in Deptford in May 1593, that is exactly what happened.23

Notes

1. Quoted by Frederick S. Boas, Christopher Marlowe, A Biographical and Critical Study (Oxford, 1940), p. 22.

2. R. B. Wernham, ‘Christopher Marlowe at Flushing’, English Historical Review 91 (1976), pp. 344–5.

3. Gabriel Harvey, A New Letter of Notable Contents (1593), sig. Dr.

4. British Library MS Harley 6848 fols. 190–91.

5. Lucian, Selected Works, tr. Bryan P. Reardon (Indianapolis, 1965), p.34.

6. Quoted by Thomas Warton, History of English Poetry (1774–81), ed. W. C. Hazlitt (1871), IV, 217. The original is now lost, and it is possible that this is a forgery, but the sentiment was commonplace.

7. Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Poems and Translations, ed. Stephen Orgel (Harmondsworth, 1971), p. 211.

8. Louis Le Roy, Of the Interchangeable Course, or Variety of Things, tr.