Thou, Nature, art my goddess
To thy law my
Services are bound
ENGLAND
They say that it’s easy to go into a labyrinth but quite difficult to get out of one—and I believe it. History is like that, it has many cunning passages and whispers its vanities to deceive, and none more so than the History of England from 1590 to 1610. This was the true birth of our people and the birth of our language, but beneath the veneer dark matrixes were swirling which are barely discernible. It started when that great monster Henry 8 took over and supplanted Catholicism with Protestantism---thus supplanting one lunacy with another. His son the next King was a devout Bible Reader but he was weak of body so Mary came to the throne and in the name of the Old Religion killed those of the new, and was killed in turn---lunatics slaughtering lunatics. Then Elizabeth was able to stitch together a lukewarm lunacy from the two warring parties, but lunatics of the old religion and lunatics of the new---die hard Catholics and the Puritans wanted to purge this compromise in the fires of their pristine madness. And so the torture rack came into the fold and martyrs were made. The Puritans attacked the players but the Court loved them—but censored what they could say, kept them on a short leash. And then meanwhile most dangerous to all of them were a small band of men who were the bitter enemies of all these with small minds, they called it the Raleigh Circle, or the School Of Night, those trying to convince the English to cast off this lunacy and return to the ancient thought of their people, to be rid of the shackles of these Jewish superstitions; they were at the beginning of the search and they were called Atheists because that was a convenient term--but they were not. They knew of the gods but thought that man must not abase himself before them---but vie to be immortal themselves. Of this circle many are famous---Raleigh for instance—but of their number was one who was so powerful and whose future was so incendiary that the powers that be had him killed—in a barroom over a debt they said, the famous great reckoning—but it was over the power of his idea. His name was Christopher Marlowe but to his friends he was just called Kit.
The devastation of England by a foreign superstition happened first in Canterbury. Bishop Augustine was the so called Apostle to the English. So it is one of history’s supreme ironies that when the time came it was a man from Canterbury---Marlowe—who challenged this religion. He was of the Devil’s Party they said, but that was just a convenient fiction, one which he was happy and amused to use as well. Born in 1564 to a cobbler he grew up in a city that in former times had seen wolves roams in a wide scene of greenery with forest and marshes resembling the Saxon homeland of Germany; but in his days he was born under the tolling of the bell of Canterbury Church with its high fretted stonework, and yet despite the looming presence of this monstrosity among the people the old ways persisted and the city was considered to be sublime and magical and even the churches were covered by gargoyles and spirits of fancy. It was in this City that Kit Marlow grew up, where in time past those went who longed to go on pilgrimages; but this man, this violent man, this man of wild words and of verse of high and mighty sail would go on a pilgrimage of a quite different kind; and would end only when he was about to surpasses the brimming bowl and the only recourse they had was a dagger in his eye. His successor William Shakespeare would be more mysterious and politic and coy; going so far to say that Kit had been gulled by intelligence; but nothing could be further from the truth: he was a great reckoning cut off in midstream which yielded infinite riches. He taught Shakespeare how to write for one thing; and his contemporaries how to think.
LEARNING
What flies I follow, I like best what flies beyond my reach; so said the poet; this is the credo of he who strives ever upward; what is beyond his ken appeals to him most, to learn to fly with those spirits which slip through his fingers. He had a fertile imagination and invented what he chose; he had energy, enterprise and above all audacity, and no shibboleth or stricture was going to calm his teeming brain; no hidebound rule would stop his mouth; his life he condemned, but speech he loved and if he must choose the one or the other he would choose speech, unending torrents of eloquence. He had a libidinal need to pierce the surface of life, to see beneath in the mysterious and alluring shadows; his inquisitiveness was a miracle that sprang up from his soul; and he became a rapid explorer of life and would unearth on his path all of the ceremonies and all of the ghosts.
Marlow went first to the King’s School; it was here that he came under the dizzying spell of the classics, those memories form the ancient world which were entering into the present in order to create a future; he was dazzled by this literature which seemed to come from a world of pure fantasy, a lovely world of gods and goddesses when the world was still enchanted; it is perhaps hard to grasp the depth and shock of this discovery on the poet’s soul, the thrill and the sensuousness of it as if the soul had become suddenly alive to every possibility of invention and imagination. With this miraculous advent nothing in his life was ever to be the same and no discovery he ever made, no friend he ever had, no love he ever experienced, no cause he ever served, was to have as profound effect on him as his finding the writers of ancient Greece and ancient Rome. This was a world of giants and when the time came he wanted to translate this near monstrous world on to the stage of London. Outsized heroes such as Tamburlaine and Faustus reach back to that world of Titans and show that man could once again stride over the world like Colossus, and he would put this far flung and enormous future on the stage. The ancients removed one from time, far from the mean and degraded world of the present, and up to the clouds and to the gods; he also soon found in them an oasis of sanity and rational sense which appealed to his ever searching brain; and with the aid of these artists and poets, as if allies from and old and distant world, nothing there was on earth that he could not interrogate and learn the secrets of. In this way he got the satirical and the ironical tone, learned to lampoon high pretension, and the skewering of all things supposedly sacred; he made himself the prototype of the roaring boy, the irrepressible spirit emanating from his powerful psyche, a gamesman, and a brilliant showman, a detached wit and mocker, with a sting always in the tail of every line. He learned about alluring topics and verbal techniques, and memorized vast quantities of verse by heart as the Muses came crashing through the ceiling. He was a masterful deviser of phrases as he came to make larger and ever bolder varyings from the classic model; and soon came the more powerful and original meter of his own compositions in speeches and the declamations; in effect what he got from his learning was the ability to collect verbal bullets which he soon would fire and always hit the mark. He had to write controversies and debates in dialectic, taking this side now and that side then in pure dispassion, concerned only that the rhetoric was cogent, not that the idea was accurate; to take the devil’s part if it seemed auspicious. He mastered the fine art of imitation, borrowing crafted phrases from all sorts of sources to make a compelling speech all his own. His great imagination, his versatility and his delight in paradoxes naturally led him to confound (and appall) the opinions of his day. He loved speech and he loved the freedom of thought, but as his death warns us, the powers that be will only countenance so much of this aerial view of life, the life of overpowering mastery and of the greatness of man on this earth.
THEATER
The efflorescence of the Elizabethan Theater is the high water mark of our people; Athens naturally comes to mind but its greatness was spread over a century; that of England was compressed into a fraction of that time; it was a young country with a new language or one that it made new, it created its infinitely elastic and protean shapes which allowed it to dominate the earth. Around 1575 theaters began to crop up in London and environs: The Curtain, The Red Lion, The Theater, and the Globe. If it was Shakespeare who perfected the drama, the drama we recognize today, it was Kit Marlow who created it; and long after the latter’s death the former was still exorcising the memory of his friend in order to transcend it. With Marlowe we do not get the subtle characterizations of Shakespeare nor the intricate and knotty verbal style; compared to his successor Marlowe is a caricature; but then Kit Marlowe did not have the same concerns as his rival poet; his preoccupation was not with the inward man but with the greatness of man in the universe and, as such, he is a more direct link to our concerns today; an overwhelming passion for the capacity of man to learn, and challenge, and dominate; always trespassing on boundaries and searching only that which flies from him.
It begins with what is known as the Tamburlaine Phenomenon, the depiction of a larger than life hero who is the “amazement of the world.” We can see directly from the beginning of his dramatic career that the artist who most shares the sensibility of his imagination is Breker with his titanic and promethean sculptures of Supermen. For both artists it was the power of man to shape his destiny, to overpower it by using monolithic forms, and to transcend the bounds of reality, which was always their primary concern. Along with Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy Marlowe’s play Tamburlaine was a great leap forward in terms of intellectual complexity and sophistication from early Tudor efforts; and it was among the first popular successes. This play in many way is the most important play ever written in terms of effect; since the Greek Tragedies our race had never again reached such sublime heights; but with Tamburlaine Marlowe put on “Sophocles’ shoe” as was remarked at the time, and showed the way for William Shakespeare so that our people in terms of art could again ascent to the Empyrean Heights. But most importantly Marlowe was a sign of the times: a resurgence of greatness and of man exploring the cosmos. In his high astounding terms, with the proud sail of his verse, it was he who amazed the world even as the Aryan race was beginning to again; with his tragic glass and his conquering words he was artful, free, and unfettered; with this play was re-born the awe with which the Greeks beheld the cosmos, unleashing the primal feelings of wonder, horror, terror, repulsion and prolonged reverence; by far this was the finest blank verse heard yet upon an English stage and the best in some 2000 years; with speech rhythms he gave his words lightness, flexibility and haunting power; and his hero, despite his challenging nature, is also gallant and chivalrous and full of magnanimity for a defeated foe: the best of our people.
Marlow was writing this play (1588) at the time when all across Europe the Aryan race was delving deep back into its past in order to move deep into the future. Soon Kepler and Galileo would plumb the cosmos for its secrets and Marlowe as if in presentiment echoes this beforehand.
I hold the Fates bound fast in chains
And with my hands I turn fortune’s wheel
And soon the sun will fall from its sphere
Nature that frames us doth teach us
All to have aspiring minds
Our souls and faculties can
Comprehend the wondrous
Architecture of the world
And measure every wandering
Planet’s course still climbing
After knowledge infinite
Wills us to wear ourselves and
Never rest
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all
Perfect bliss, sole felicity
The sweet fruition of our earthly crown
This is straight up cosmotheism before its time; and so in this operatic play, this play of the cosmos, Marlowe laid down the predicate of our people; he would soon be called an atheist and a heretic and would be killed for it, for the authorities knew that this spirit set free would spell their doom; he was a god appointed scourge made to pursue the elusive truth of the universe and to show men the way. He had a fearless mind and would blaze a path towards imperial vaults of heaven. His enemies like to note that his name could be spelled many ways: Marley, Merley, Merlin. But this last is the one that is the sign: a wizard, a wizard of knowledge and of questing after the bottom of the secrets. He dared the god out of heaven as befits one of a magical race.
In Doctor Faustus he bequeathed to us our modern myth, our Aryan Myth. From deep out of the history and folk imaginings of the German Nation he put forth a man who would bestride the heavens in search or our destiny. The story of Faustus was well known at Cambridge and must have fired the imaginations of the wits there as late at night they debated man’s fate on earth and of the possibilities of life; he was supposed to have been a magician in Germany earlier in the century and of course as around all such figures accrue legend as well as fact; that he could perform prodigies; that he was killed when conducting an experiment by shattered glass. His name means fortune or first; the theatrical memory of the first performance in London was that visible devils appeared on stage during it and this legend befits the fact that this play was the first one on the English stage with strong mythic qualities; the hero is the prototype of the meteoric man and dangerous seeker after the mysteries of the universe, he says that he has been ravished by analytics; and it is in this intellectual furnace of the quest for knowledge that the drama unfolds.
I search as far as doth the mind of man
A sound seer is a a mighty god
Here, Faustus try the brains to gain a deity
Be thus on earth as Jove is in the sky
Marlowe was acquainted with and had read that “mad god of the sun” Giordano Bruno, a man who saw the individual as a potential demigod; Marlowe’s protagonist gives up safety to find out what is possible in the world and sees that only danger will lead to true security; of the heavens he is of his age and he has a skeptical cosmology and was at one with Shakespeare in thinking that man must sojourn into the infinite space that was opening up before their eyes all around; his character is given aerial viewpoints as if in the theater of the mind or the mind’s eye he can sail across the Empyrean: lifted by a dragon he rides in brightness up to Olympus’ top. He is looking for hidden reality and wants the specifics of power and control and to command all the past in all of its exquisite greatness. This play is an avatar of the age of revolt, the revolt of all that was stale and outworn and a stirring, rousing and ringing exhortation to sail without fear into the future; a future where man was self-sufficient, and wrote his own destiny. The play itself is called a tragedy of knowledge but that is not true. The tragic end was but a sop to the taste of the authorities; but the real fire of the play is in the eeriness of and the audacity of the language as well as the pyrotechnics of its awesome and terrifying affects, for drummers made thunder in the tyring house and the stage managers made such artificial lighting that heaven did seem to descend and frightened the audience.
For at the inevitable crossroad of life Faust (dissatisfied with the world) makes a pact with demonic forces to achieve total knowledge (which is perceived by the world to be total madness). This tableaux has been misconstrued as sacrificing spiritual values for power and knowledge or, worse, worldly gain or pleasure. What it is of course is the interstitial space of man’s most primal desire, the primal scene where the guardians of the world will always cry guilty (hubris, overweening, inflation, grandiosity, megalomania, self-aggrandizement) when man seeks to become a god like a fanatic, and in that drama Satan will always be a two-bit player. A beautiful young woman will always get tossed in and seduced but the legend is about divine love and its frenzy—nothing else. He will have obtained a doctor of divinity which in itself is the only study there is—but in the end he will get carried away to hell. It’s one of those famous scenes a faire which the audience always expects in order to get their money’s worth, and go home suitably awed and chastened by the supposedly hallowed mystery.
When Dr. Faustus hit the London Stage Christopher (Kit) Marlowe was on top of the world; the majesty of his verse astonished all who heard it; his hyperbolic heroes strode the boards like histrionic giants with emotions as big as the sea; it was always the challenging hero that the playwright was drawn to, for whom his human skin was much too small; in Faust he found the perfect paradigm for all that he wanted to say: a striving magician who wanted to plumb the depth of knowledge in order to make himself a god.
With this play good Kit Marlowe had arrived and had made his indelible mark; he had rattled the complacency of his time, and cried further always further; but he was, as he always was, living on borrowed time
Continued at Kit (Part Two)
