The Elizabethan playhouse gained a greater depth of characters that had a wider range of voice using blank verse for their lines instead of straight prose. By utilizing the flexibility and the range of unrhymed verse, Marlowe gained the reputation for ‘the mighty line,’ perhaps most notably by his last known play, Edward the II.The excesses of searing ambitions and the fraudulent attempts to gain absolute power within this history play were self evident in his own time period.
Staging History In Theatre
Christopher Marlowe, well versed in the Holinshed Chronicles, took Edward’s twenty year reign and compressed it into the self destruction of a man ill equipped to be king, including the dire rumors that were portrayed as facts regarding how he was killed. By choosing poor Edward, Marlowe could use the metaphor of the present easily hidden in a story that was not only notorious and well recognized by his audience, but also served up as a rollicking good play.
Consider first, the four lines of Gaveston second speech in Act I scene 1; "I must have wanton poets, pleasant wits. Musicians that with touching of a string, May draw the pliant king which way I please. Music and poetry is his delight;"
His response to a letter received from the new crowned King to return from banishment by his command, the lines also justify Gaveston’s predilections and use of them to his own ends for his old friend, now the king of England.
Creating Dialogue Within the Verse
Each line has the prescribed ten syllable requisite of blank verse for rhythm and the narrative force pushing to the next line. The words convey the intent of Gaveston without falling into the pattern de dum, de dum inflection of human speech in reciting poetry. The implication of a weak king destined, by his own blindness to the power of responsibility required, Edward II was to be murdered at the hands of his noble Lords, most foully. His voice is one of self pity and poutish defiance whilst under guard in Act 5 scene 3;
"The wren may strive against the lion’s strength But all in vain, so vainly do I strive To seek for mercy at a tyrant’s hand, Immortal powers, that knows the painful cares, That waits upon my poor distress`ed soul, O, level all your looks upon these daring men, That wrongs their liege and sovereign, England’s king. O Gaveston, it is for thee that I am wronged; For me, both thou and the Spencers died, And for your sakes a thousand wrongs I’ll take. The Spencers’ ghosts, wherever they remain, Wish well to mine. Then, tush, for them I’ll die."
Is it left for the elder Mortimer in Act 5 scene 6, being one of the designers of the King’s death to garner the self enlightenment and the greater force of knowledge prior to his own execution, that Marlowe exposes the consequences of human arrogance.
"Base Fortune, now I see that in thy wheel, There is a point to which men aspire, They tumble headlong down. That point I touched, And, seeing there was no place to mount up higher, Why should I grieve at my declining fall? Farewell, fair queen. Weep not for Mortimer, That scorns the world, and as a traveler. Goes to discover countries yet unknown."
Crafted well, Marlowe’s verse reached the rhythm and the force of his talent by this play, his last and performed after his death. Perhaps he portended, in the intrigue he left as legacy of his own death in Mortimer’s speech, echoing retribution on his own acts.
Yet, by the induction of blank verse as the prevailing style to the craft of writing plays, Kit Marlowe garnered many owing their debt to him, not only among his own contemporaries, but for the generations of writers to come.
Sources
 |
