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Updated: June 22, 2025
Dyce could not "resist the conviction" that Marlowe's impiety was "confirmed and daring." His extreme Freethought is also noticed by Mr. Bullen and Mr. Havelock Ellis. There is, indeed, no room for a rational doubt on this point. Marlowe was an Atheist.
There is in him no trace of either the cruel, icy-cold malignity of the fiend of Goethe, or the awful grandeur of Milton's Tempter. It cannot be said that Marlowe's Devil seduces Faustus. He is almost on the verge of repentance himself; of the two, he is decidedly the better Christian. The proposition of the compact comes from Faustus himself, and Mephistopheles only accepts it.
What that change is we may see if we compare the vision by which Swedenborg was "called," as he thought, to his work, with the ghost which called Hamlet, or the spells of Marlowe's Faust with those of Goethe's.
They are generally thought of as philosophy, but all who have even partially understood them will feel their poetic spell. Or if we take our greatest poems, to mention only some of those most familiar to us: Paradise Lost, Goethe's Faust or Marlowe's, Tennyson's In Memoriam, Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat all of these might be just as well classed under philosophy as under poetry.
In the most famous of the poems about Marlowe, The Death of Marlowe, R. H. Horne takes a hopeful view of the world's depravity, for he makes Marlowe's innocence of evil so touching that it moves a prostitute to reform. Other poets, however, have painted Marlowe's associates as villains of far deeper dye.
Another possibility I thought of was that you knew of something that was by way of justifying or excusing Marlowe's act. Or I thought you might have a simple horror, quite apart from humanitarian scruples, of appearing publicly in connection with a murder trial. Many important witnesses in such cases have to be practically forced into giving their evidence.
He could never forget that his first suspicion of Marlowe's motive in the crime had been roused by the fact that his escape was made through the lady's room. At that time, when he had not yet seen her, he had been ready enough to entertain the idea of her equal guilt and her coöperation.
And in Marlowe's Faust there is a scene that is worth the whole of the second part of the Faust of Goethe. Faust says to Helen: "Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss" and he kisses her Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies! Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again. Here will I dwell, for Helen is in these lips, And all is dross that is not Helena.
I will crave leave to put down a few lines of old Christopher Marlowe's; I take them from his tragedy, "The Jew of Malta." The scene is betwixt Barabas, the Jew, and Ithamore, a Turkish captive exposed to sale for a slave.
Compared with Marlowe's Jew, Shylock is a terrible man beside a dreary monster, and, as far as logic and the lex talionis go, has the best of the argument. It is the strength of human nature itself that makes crime strong. Wickedness could have no power of itself: it lives by the perverted powers of good.
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