Shakespeare's Salieri
Jan. 23rd, 2011 05:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselJun 2010
The Plays - Christopher Marlowe - Wordsworth Classics, 2000
* *
Imagine, if you would, a play by Shakespeare written when he was having a very off day. There is drama, certainly, and a supple use of iambic pentameter that blows Milton's Paradise Lost out of the water, but the humanity, psychological depth and richly imaginative imagery that characterise his best work are missing.
This is what reading a play by Christopher Marlowe is like. Regardless of the intrinsic merits of his work (and there are some), you are constantly thinking of his genius contemporary. Comparisons are always unfair, but there it is. Marlowe is Salieri to Shakespeare's Mozart.
His choice of subjects doesn't help matters. To write one play about Tamburlaine, a brutal warlord whose only redeeming feature is his humble origins as a shepherd, was bad enough, but to do a sequel was even worse. Presumably the groundlings liked the endless parade of colourful costumes and gruesome deaths as Tamberlaine's enemies try one by one to bring him down. Edward II at least has the interest of a gay relationship though the treatment is hardly sympathetic despite Marlowe's own supposed sexual orientation. The Jew of Malta is an unpleasant black farce (I don't think you can really call it a tragedy) which is only saved from anti-semitism by the fact that all the characters are equally morally murky. Barabas is just a bit more energetic and direct than the rest.
The two best plays for me were Doctor Faustus for the language and Dido Queen of Carthage for its protagonist as she challenges the gods to keep the man with whom she has fallen in love. But even these are undermined by some dismally unfunny clown scenes (even worse than Shakespeare's) and a fundamental lack of sympathy for the characters (Aeneas makes clear in his final speech that he is leaving Dido because she is too clingy). And that is the fatal flaw in all of Marlowe's plays. There isn't a single truly likable character in his entire opus and I suspect this reflects Marlowe's own view of humanity, shaped as it was by the brutal intrigues of the late Elizabethan court for which he allegedly worked as a spy. Can a person who fundamentally dislikes and distrusts people ever be a good artist? Maybe, but certainly not a great one.
The Plays - Christopher Marlowe - Wordsworth Classics, 2000
* *
Imagine, if you would, a play by Shakespeare written when he was having a very off day. There is drama, certainly, and a supple use of iambic pentameter that blows Milton's Paradise Lost out of the water, but the humanity, psychological depth and richly imaginative imagery that characterise his best work are missing.
This is what reading a play by Christopher Marlowe is like. Regardless of the intrinsic merits of his work (and there are some), you are constantly thinking of his genius contemporary. Comparisons are always unfair, but there it is. Marlowe is Salieri to Shakespeare's Mozart.
His choice of subjects doesn't help matters. To write one play about Tamburlaine, a brutal warlord whose only redeeming feature is his humble origins as a shepherd, was bad enough, but to do a sequel was even worse. Presumably the groundlings liked the endless parade of colourful costumes and gruesome deaths as Tamberlaine's enemies try one by one to bring him down. Edward II at least has the interest of a gay relationship though the treatment is hardly sympathetic despite Marlowe's own supposed sexual orientation. The Jew of Malta is an unpleasant black farce (I don't think you can really call it a tragedy) which is only saved from anti-semitism by the fact that all the characters are equally morally murky. Barabas is just a bit more energetic and direct than the rest.
The two best plays for me were Doctor Faustus for the language and Dido Queen of Carthage for its protagonist as she challenges the gods to keep the man with whom she has fallen in love. But even these are undermined by some dismally unfunny clown scenes (even worse than Shakespeare's) and a fundamental lack of sympathy for the characters (Aeneas makes clear in his final speech that he is leaving Dido because she is too clingy). And that is the fatal flaw in all of Marlowe's plays. There isn't a single truly likable character in his entire opus and I suspect this reflects Marlowe's own view of humanity, shaped as it was by the brutal intrigues of the late Elizabethan court for which he allegedly worked as a spy. Can a person who fundamentally dislikes and distrusts people ever be a good artist? Maybe, but certainly not a great one.