Christopher Marlowe, the Man in His Time
by
[Morrow, $3.75]
MR. JOHN BAKELESS, in Christopher Marlowe, the Man in His Time, has written a lively account of his subject. He has spent eighteen years in research and investigation, and he now gives us a full account of Marlowe’s life; the background of his boyhood in Canterbury, his seven years at Cambridge, his brief and flaming career as poet and dramatist, his violent death. Mr. Bakeless has used to advantage the recent discoveries of Hotson and Eccles about various events in Marlowe’s life, and he has added some minor discoveries, about Marlowe’s Cambridge period, of his own.
The result is the fullest account we possess of Marlowe’s external career, seen against the background of the external events of his age. In addition we have some discussion of his plays, of their sources and their history on the stage. Altogether Mr. Bakeless has written an interesting volume, one that can be enjoyed, on certain levels, by the general reader as well as by the specialist.
But for a reader who had expected a really serious and thorough treatment of Marlowe, this book will be a considerable disappointment. What matter are not the minor mistakes: Mr. Bakeless’s apparent belief that Lucian was a poet, that the eighteenth century came three hundred years after the sixteenth, that Kyd wrote both The Spanish Tragedy and Jeronimo — slips like these can be made by anybody. Nor is it merely Mr. Bakeless’s journalistic style, his too easy adjectives (‘the spacious days of Elizabeth,’ ‘those bad dark days’), his heightening of his subject by various pseudo-jaunty devices — such things are perhaps pardonable when a man is trying to recreate a remote period, and in the hands of a mature writer they can be successful.
The trouble goes deeper than that. For Mr. Bakeless shows only the most superficial sense of literary values. It is an indication, in little, of his point of view that he should call Dr. Hotson’s discovery of the true facts about Marlowe’s death ‘one of the literary discoveries of all time,’ when actually that discovery, interesting and even exciting as it was, had nothing whatever to do with literature. As far as literature is concerned, it does n’t matter in the least how Marlowe died; the facts are of biographical importance only.
What does matter, for literature, for a true understanding of ‘the man in his time,’ is an account, not only of Marlowe’s life, his plots, his sources, the stage history of his plays, but of his craftsmanship in relation to contemporary tradition, his achievement in character creation, the relation of Marlowe’s thought to the thought of his age. Mr. Bakeless touches on these things, but he never analyzes them.
The fascinating intellectual and emotional background against which Marlowe wrote, the profound and complicated welter of new and old views of man and of literature, the true nature of Marlowe’s influence on Shakespeare — these and other essential matters Mr. Bakeless hardly mentions. His attitude towards his subject, is external and superficial, and though we may be grateful for what he has given us, it is still true that a complete and satisfactory study of Marlowe remains to he written.
THEODORE SPENCER