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Unfortunately, Marlowe had also the unbridled passions which mark the early, or Pagan Renaissance, as Taine calls it, and the conceit of a young man just entering the realms of knowledge. He became an actor and lived in a low-tavern atmosphere of excess and wretchedness. In 1587, when but twenty-three years old, he produced Tamburlaine, which brought him instant recognition.
The glory of the Elizabethan drama dates from his Tamburlaine , wherein the whole restless temper of the age finds expression: Nature, that framed us of four elements Warring within our breasts for regiment, Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds: Our souls whose faculties can comprehend The wondrous architecture of the world, And measure every wandering planet's course, Still climbing after knowledge infinite, And always moving as the restless spheres Will us to wear ourselves and never rest.
Then, afflicted with disease, he raves against the gods and would overthrow them as he has overthrown earthly rulers. Tamburlaine is an epic rather than a drama; but one can understand its instant success with a people only half civilized, fond of military glory, and the instant adoption of its "mighty line" as the instrument of all dramatic expression.
We refer to the allegorical personages in Sackville's "Induction to the Mirrour of Magistrates," and in Spenser's description of the "House of Pride." Mr. Collier judges that the play in blank verse first represented on the public stage was the "Tamburlaine" of Christopher Marlowe, and that it was acted before 1587, at which date Shakspere would be twenty-three.
"Yes, yes, of course why, to be sure we'll send him anywhere that thou dost say, Golden-heart: to Persia or Cathay ay, to the far side of the green-cheese moon, or to the court of Tamburlaine the Great," and he laughed a quick, dry, nervous laugh that had no laughter in it.
which might be placed side by side with Marlowe's: The frowning looks of fiery Tamburlaine That with his terrour and imperious eies, Commands the hearts of his associates.
"Thinkest thou heaven glorious thing? I tell thee, 'tis not half so fair as thou, Or any man that breathes on earth. * 'Twas made for man, therefore is man more excellent." Marlowe's faults are the faults of youth and of his time. Exaggeration and lack of restraint are shown in almost all his work. In Tamburlaine, written when he was twenty-two, he is often bombastic.
His life in the capital can hardly have begun later than in his twenty-third year, the memorable year which followed Sidney's death, which preceded the coming of the Armada, and which witnessed the production of Marlowe's "Tamburlaine." If we take the language of the Sonnets as a record of his personal feeling, his new profession as an actor stirred in him only the bitterness of self-contempt.
The one thing that he accomplished was to depict the ruin of an heroic nature through an insatiable ambition for supremacy, doomed by its own vastitude to defeat itself, supremacy of conquest and dominion with Tamburlaine, supremacy of knowledge with Dr. Faustus, supremacy of wealth with Barabas, the Jew of Malta.
Indeed the comparison must have occurred to his own age, for a historian of the day, the antiquary Stow, declares Drake to have been "as famous in Europe and America as Tamburlaine was in Asia and Africa."
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