The Plays: Edward II / Dr Faustus (A Text and B Text) / The Jew of Malta / Tamburlaine the Great - I and II / The Massacre at Paris / Dido Queen of Carthage (Wordsworth Classics of World Literature)

Rating:
Summary: No one can save this Tamburlaine
Review: Marlowe will never equal Shakespeare. That's absolutely banal to say so. In this double play dealing with the historically asserted conqueror, Emperor and tyrant, Timur Lenk (1336-1405), a descendant of Gengis Khan, the character could give us a great play. A lot of battles against very different worlds and peoples from Asia to Africa and Europe. All kinds of religions mixing in these countries : christians, moslems, pagans, etc. An area that was at the time the center of philosophy, poetry and science. The bloodthirsty tyrant Marlowe depicts is a caricature of what he must have been. You do not conquer vast worlds without understanding their cultures and integrating them in you. You do not conquer vast worlds by destroying all their cities and exterminating their populations. You have to put them on your side if you want to get something out of it : it is the work of simple people that creates all riches, and to last long (two generations in this case) you definitely must bring them something that entices them into some acceptance. Marlowe only depicts the bloody tyrant and at times it becomes laughable in its excess. Even his love for his « conquered » queen is made rather trite and his queen does not have any deep pangs of conscience when her own father, the King of Egypt, is brought into slavery. His killing one of his three sons because this son refuses to be a warrior is treated as if it were a trite little event. Marlowe is, in other words, superficial, and his language has no poetry. He is the B series of Shakespeare's time.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Rating:
Summary: No dramatic art in this Massacre of Paris
Review: The situation considered in the play is great and promising. The shift from one king to a third via a second. The civil strife of some nobles against the kings in order to reinstate a noble line, the Bourbons, back on the throne with the Italian Queen Mother as an accomplice or manipulator of ill repute. The religious background of the war between the Catholics and the Huguenots, a war that is grossly excessive and absurd and that brought extreme horror in the hands of the Catholics. All that could have made a good plot and a good play. Unluckily it is as schematic as a journalese report on the situation in a people publication. There never is any depth in these men and Marlowe takes great pleasure in exhibiting all the crimes, murders, assassinations on the stage. Marlowe is the ancestor and creator of horror films. He is the model that will entrance and inspire so many in literature and the cinema. He was a success in his days because of his gross approach but he does not stand in the subsequent centuries for the same reason : the plays are shallow, the plots are simplistic, the language is bland and tasteless.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Rating:
Summary: Edward II: how to snuff a candle under a table
Review: This historical play is better than some other plays by Marlowe because the events it is based on are, by themselves, well built and full of suspense. But Marlowe insists on the negative side of things. He sees Edward as a perverted King who only revels in carnal pleasure with his minions. He wastes the money of the crown and irritates all the Barons and the Queen. This leads to his death. Marlowe then shows Mortimer, the Queen's lover, as a tyrant, a dictator, a criminal, an unpolitical figure, and that leads him to his fatal end. Marlowe likes gross events and bloody acts. He has all his « victims » executed on the stage and even Edward is killed in full sight of the audience in a most disgustful way in a dungeon that is the receptacle of all the rejects of Berkeley Castle, particularly from its toilets and its water closets. The only moment of epiphany is the sudden revelation of Edward III as a King of justice. But here again this new teenage King goes to some extremes and has his mother sent to the Tower of London, though, we know, she will survive thirty one years. Marlowe probably invented Elizabethan drama, but he could not - and did not have enough time to do so - bring it to the level it will reach only with Shakespeare. His language definitely is the « blank verse beast » that Bernard Shaw rejected. It flows marvellously and fluently but it has none of the poetry, beauty and embroidery that Shakespeare's will master and illustrate.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU