Marlowe and Shakespeare

Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, both born in 1564, were each widely regarded as exceptionally gifted playwrights during their lifetimes. Yet Marlowe’s early death (he was murdered in 1593) has contributed to a somewhat subordinate sense of his achievement; as Tennyson put it, in a rather back-handed compliment, “If Shakespeare is the dazzling sun of this mighty period, Marlowe is certainly the morning star.” In this course, we will attempt to bring Shakespeare and Marlowe into dialogue with one another—or rather try to listen to the dialogue that has always been there, for Shakespeare’s attentive ear picked up much from his ill-fated peer, from the construction of character to the echo of individual words or phrases. We will work to avoid, as one critic has put it, the “tendency to domesticate Marlowe, to cast him as a leading figure of the first phase of the Shakespearean master narrative.”

We will be supplementing these editions with others (Oxford, Cambridge, Revels) on Reserve.

Have the plays read before our discussions each week below; ideally, you will read them once over the weekend, and then re-read them during the week; good reading always entails re-reading. If it becomes clear that not all of the class is keeping up with the reading, quizzes will be given.

Participation is mandatory, since this course will be primarily discussion-based; it won’t work if all students are not participating equally. (Your writing will suffer as well if you are not engaging with your fellow students’ thoughts.) Ideally, everyone should try to contribute at least one observation to the ongoing discussion each meeting. We might experiment with different arrangements, break into small groups, or designate discussion leaders/rotating chairs in order to facilitate this general conversation.

‘A’-level participation requires consistently thoughtful comments which remain, nonetheless, considerate (dominating the discussion or failing to engage with other students’ contributions will not be helpful). More than three absences from the course (regardless of excuses) will be grounds for failure.

Close readings: Each Wednesday, two students will be asked to begin our discussion with a short passage they have selected (approximately 15-25 lines). You might be drawn to the passage on account of its uniqueness, or its representativeness, or its difficulty. In any case, you should present a thorough examination of the passage, with questions to our thoughts for discussion.

Critical surveys: Each Friday, a group of four students will present their findings from a survey of significant critical work on that week’s play. Because less work has been done on Marlowe than on Shakespeare, the Marlowe presentations should address criticism associated exclusively with his work, and the Shakespeare presentations should seek criticism which compares his plays with Marlowe’s. Each student will need to present twice, once on a Marlowe play and once on a Shakespeare play. An annotated bibliography should be distributed (to serve as future reference for the final research paper).

Papers: The first brief exercise (2 pages) requires that you select a particularly intriguing word from either part of Tamburlaine, learn about its history in the Oxford English Dictionary, then apply this knowledge to your reading of the play. The second paper (5 pages) will focus on a limited comparison between Marlowe and Shakespeare—perhaps a phrase, speech, or scene that appears in both dramatists’ works. Final papers (15 pages) are due on Monday, May 13. They should represent an intelligent synthesis of your work throughout the semester. You will be required to incorporate at least one play by both of our authors; additionally, you should engage with appropriate secondary sources as part of a critical dialogue. In the last two weeks of the semester, students will share their research-in-progress with the entire class.

Deadlines: Deadlines are firm; I do not accept late work or grant extensions. Late work causes problems for both students and teachers, and frequently results in inferior writing and evaluation.

Email: Papers may not be submitted via email; I need copies placed in my mailbox instead. I am happy to receive queries by email about your writing, but I may not be able to reply immediately.

Format: These are some simple guidelines which make grading papers more uniform:

If at any time throughout the semester you are curious about your progress in the course, you should feel free to request an evaluation of your current standing (a rough ‘grade’).

I have placed the following on reserve at the library; they are books that I think more than one student might wish to consult throughout the semester, including editions and collections of critical essays.

PR428. H66H65 1992 Summers, ed. Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment

PR658. P48 M38 1995 Maus Inwardness and theater in the English Renaissance

PR658. S46 Y33 1997 Yachnin Stage-wrights : Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton

PR2660 1973 vols. 1&2 Bowers, ed. The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe

PR2665. A2F67 1994 Forker, ed. Edward the Second / Christopher Marlowe ; edited

PR2673. C48 1996 Grantley, ed. Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance

PR2677. P6S54 1986 Shepherd Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre

822. 33 79B896 vols. 1-8 Bullough Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare

Notes toward reading an Elizabethan play

Keep in mind is that a play is not a novel. What does this distinction entail?

• English Renaissance dramatists were not as preoccupied with the modern idea of character as we might expect. Characters can fall away from the plot with relatively little notice, or appear with just as little preparation. Their ‘motivation’ is based much less on psychological or biographical consistency than on cultural expectations for the roles in which they are placed. It helps, in this respect, to think of characters not as fully developed people but rather as ‘types’—‘the wise old counsellor,’ or ‘the scorned lover.’ This is not to say that playwrights only make caricatures, but it does mean that your sense of how a ‘character’ acts needs to be somewhat flexible.

• Marlowe and Shakespeare wrote much of their drama in verse; these plays are much more like poetry than like prose. Moreover, this is a highly stylized, rhetorically-inflected verse. The culture in which Elizabethan drama emerged was extremely well trained in producing different kinds of speeches and arguments, and even a boy with only a ‘grammar school education’ would have memorized, translated, and imitated far more elaborate Latin and Greek models than all but the most advanced students do today. On account of this, much of the language appears quite ornate and presents some difficulty for us. Keep reading, keep consulting the footnotes; after a while, you will recognize more than you might expect. But don’t just read ‘for plot’; let the words trouble you, and try to approach them with the same attention and intensity as you would a poem.

• We tend to take for granted a degree of realism or naturalism in many of our prose readings today; even experimental narrative forms presume a familiarity with novelistic conventions. This is not necessarily the case with English Renaissance drama: fantastical events can happen; great lengths of time can be compressed into the short span of a few hours; and distances across the globe can be traversed between scenes. Sometimes even the characters themselves express incredulity at these almost magical developments. You need to open yourself up to the plot as it exists, and reserve judgment about the ‘believability’ of the action.

Read the play closely. The unfamiliar style, vocabulary, syntax, and stories really require a great deal of attention. If you read the play in the same amount of time required to see it performed, you’re going too fast. (Consider that the performance was not achieved in those two or three hours, but rather after a sequence of hundreds of hours of memorization, interpretation, and rehearsal.) Here are some suggestions to get you into the text:

• Good reading is re-reading; to this end, read the play at least twice. You might want to read through the entire play quickly at first, then look at the Norton introduction, and then read more slowly, with an eye for detail (note, for instance, what you have already forgotten since the first reading).

• Read the play aloud. You’ll find that you won’t be able to gloss over passages you don’t understand, and will have to stop to figure out what they mean. You’ll also get a better sense of the rhythms of the lines by getting them into your mouth—again, like poetry. For these reasons, we’ll also be reading aloud a good deal in class.

• Keep an eye out for patterns—where have you heard this kind of speech before? why does this particular image keep re-appearing? Keep track of what happens in each scene—you might even want to add a kind of descriptive subtitle to each one (‘Hamlet contemplates killing Claudius’). Make an outline of the plot; what would happen if certain scenes were rearranged? Read with a pen in hand, and make note of anything that seems important, or confusing, or surprising. Review these notes before coming to class.

Most importantly, be curious. If you don’t understand a word, look it up in the footnotes, or better yet, in the Oxford English Dictionary. If something doesn’t make sense to you, make note of it, and bring it up during discussion. Check out the books on reserve; take some time to explore the Marlowe and Shakespeare sections in MUDD; watch videos of the plays in the AV center. In your essays, begin with questions you can’t immediately answer, and see where you can go from there.

Spring 2002	Mr. Newstrom
English 336 MWF 3:30-4:20, AJLC 201	Rice 107, (440) 775-8577 Office hours: Monday & Wednesday, 11:00-12:00, and Tuesday, 9:00-11:00