Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)

Christopher Marlowe was born in 1564, the year of William Shakespeare's birth. He is the eldest son of a shoemaker. At 23, he went to London and became one of the most important dramatist before William Shakespeare. Marlowe worked on tragedy and he wrote four important plays developing tragedy as a dramatic form. Being an atheist, he was arrested for an unknown offense. Marlowe was killed in 1593 in a tavern fight. He and his friend argued over the bill and then he was killed by his friend with a knife. Some say that it may be an assassination. Marlowe died at the age of twenty-nine, and it is interesting that at this time Shakespeare was just beginning his dramatic career. Marlowe was the first one to use blank verse that encourage Shakespeare to try it. Marlowe was also the first to write a tragedy in English, again paving the way for Shakespeare.

          

The son of John and Catherine Marlowe, Christopher Marlowe was born in Canterbury, where his father was shoemaker, in 1564. He received some of his early education at The King's School, Canterbury, and an Archbishop Parker scholarship took him from this school to Corpus Christi College in the University of Cambridge. In 1584 he graduated as Bachelor of Arts. The terms of his scholarship allowed for a further three years' study if the holder intended to take holy orders, and Marlowe appears to have fulfilled this condition. But in 1587 the University at first refused to grant the appropriate degree of Master of Arts. The college records show that Marlowe was away from Cambridge for considerable periods during his second three years, and the university apparently had good reason to be suspicious of his whereabouts. 

          

In 1587 Christopher Marlowe, M.A., went from Cambridge to London; and for the next six years he wrote plays and associated with other writers, among them the poet Thomas Watson and the dramatist Thomas Kyd.

Religion in Marlowe’s 'Jew of Malta'

Whilst Marlowe was writing, anti-Semitism was rife across the entirety of Europe. The Renaissance period saw the rise of increasingly xenophobic, anti-Jewish fears somewhat comparable to the prejudice against Islam in the Western world today, fed on and augmented by President Trump. We only have to look at the work of the so-called Old Masters to see how widespread these anti-Semitic sentiments really were. Not only were Jesus and his followers stripped of their Jewish identity and transformed into anachronistically Christian figures, but also, on the rare occasion that Jews were actually depicted in Renaissance art, their portrayal was far from complimentary. Albrecht Durer’s Jesus Among the Doctors is a case in point: the Jew that stands to the right of Jesus is almost caricature-like with his grotesque grin and hooked nose. Given the pervasiveness of this anti-Semitism, it’s no wonder that Marlowe’s Barabas is likewise presented according to the bigoted values of the age. He is, in fact, a complete caricature of the selfish and cruel Jew. And yet, what’s interesting about Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta is that Jews are not the only group to receive criticism. Indeed, almost every religious group, Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, seem to be at the receiving end of Marlowe’s reproach. This can be said for the majority of Marlowe’s work, much of which is dedicated to the analysis and condemnation of religious doctrine and hypocrisy. So, with reference to Marlowe’s work and in particular The Jew of Malta, I intend to explore Marlowe’s views on religion as presented through his plays.

I must, of course, begin this essay with an analysis of the loathsome and Machiavellian character of Barabas. The prologue of the play, delivered by Niccolò Machiavelli himself, describes how Barabas ‘smiles to see how full his bags are crammed, / Which money was not got without my means.’ Immediately, then, he is presented as a typical machiavelle figure of Renaissance drama, characterised by the same scheming villainy encapsulated by Iago (Othello) and Edmund (King Lear) in Shakespeare’s plays. The words ‘my means’ refers to the philosophy set out by Machiavelli in his famous work Il Principe – a proto-self-help book preaching expediency over morality and the appearance over the reality of virtue. Barabas fills this role perfectly, almost all of his actions recalling Satan’s words in Book 4 of Milton’s Paradise Lost: ‘Evil be thou my Good.’ For example, he distances himself from the man with a conscience who ‘for his conscience lives in beggary.’ It is by acting without a conscience, Barabas implies, that he has acquired his huge fortune. This lack of conscience links directly to his greed and self-interestedness, obvious in the equal weight he gives to his wealth and to his daughter when he exclaims: ‘O girl! O gold!’ This levelling comparison clearly influenced Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice when he had Shylock exclaim “O my ducats, O my daughter…” Barabas’s selfishness is also evident in his asides during the conversation he has with the other Jews in Malta. He says: ‘Assure yourselves I’ll look – unto myself.’ He cares only for himself, even bringing about the murder of his daughter’s lover to get his revenge on Ferneze. But, in the words of Harry Levin, these asides also serve to show Barabas’s Machiavellian emphasis on appearance, distinguishing between ‘deeds and words.’ He hides his true intentions from the other Maltese citizens, but treats the audience as his confidantes and thus implicates us in his crimes.

Though we may have some pity for Barabas in his cruel treatment by the Maltese governor and his similarities to Job, our sympathy quickly dissipates as he develops from a simple miser to a murderous villain. As Levin points out, Barabas ‘is a man with a grievance, but his retaliation outruns the provocation.’ Though he may begin as a revenger, he very quickly turns into the villain himself. This murderousness is clear in the famous speech Barabas gives when purchasing Ithamore as a slave: ‘As for myself, I walk abroad o’ nights, / And kill sick people groaning under walls; / Sometimes I go about and poison wells…’ Whether these claims are true is uncertain. It’s possible that this speech is only made in order to entice Ithamore, whom Barabas seems to have already discerned as a villain who, like him, hates Christians. Perhaps, also, Marlowe was simply playing on and parodying the extreme hatred for Jews in Europe. Whatever the answer, it’s undeniable that Barabas fulfils these murderous claims – by the end of the play, he has poisoned and killed the whole of a nunnery (including his own daughter), caused the death of two friends, slaughtered numerous Turkish soldiers, and much more. As the play progresses, his hands grow more bloody and his heart blacker, becoming exactly what European society expected a Jew to be. So it’s clear that Marlowe is playing on these early modern prejudices to present us with the frightful image of a Jew who really only cares for himself and his revenge.

And yet, it’s not just Barabas who is presented as a loathsome figure – almost every character in the play, apart from Abigail, is selfish and unsympathetic. And though we may strongly dislike Barabas, we are watching ‘the tragedy of a Jew’ - Barabas is our tragic hero, and to an extent we see the play from his perspective, often taking his side against the play’s other characters. Our sympathy for Barabas is stirred when he has his wealth seized by Ferneze the governor, under threat of Christian conversion. During this scene, Barabas launches a succession of bitter attacks against Christianity, beginning with the words: ‘Will you then steal my goods? / Is theft the ground of your religion?’ Here, Barabas points out the hypocrisy of their actions, going against the commandment ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ When Ferneze attempts to justify the cruelty of the Christians, he explains that Jews are infidels and that they ‘stand accursèd in the sight of heaven.’ This idea, that the Jews are to blame for the death of Christ (the ‘first curse’) and are therefore born sinful, was a typical trope of the period. Though the audience of the time may also have held this belief, it’s clear that Marlowe did not, or else he would not have allowed Barabas to respond in such cogent terms, appealing as he does to our sense of justice: ‘Shall I be tried by their transgressions? / The man that dealeth righteously shall live…’ Though we know that Barabas is far from righteous, we still sympathise with his argument that men should be judged according to their actions, not according to the actions of their ancestors. This can also be read as a Marlovian argument against the Calvinistic doctrine of Original Sin which held that all humans are born sinful due to Adam’s fall. And so, in this episode it is the Christians who are presented as heartless, with ‘policy’ (trickery or duplicity) as their profession, using scripture to confirm their wrongs. Arguably, it is this unjust and hypocritical treatment that leads Barabas to ‘make bar of no policy’ and adopt the same cruel attitude as the Christians have towards him.

So when Barabas says to his daughter that ‘religion / Hides many mischiefs from suspicion’ we can’t help but agree. The Christians of Malta have used their religion to justify their cruelty against the Jew, even though that cruelty goes against the New Testament credo ‘Love thy neighbour.’ Marlowe also takes care to demonstrate the vices of churchmen themselves, with Friar Jacomo and Friar Bernardine fighting over Barabas’s wealth. They care nothing for the cleansing of his soul or for his conversion – they care only for the goods he promises them. Indeed, Jacomo is so covetous of Barabas’s wealth that he stabs Bernardine, a fellow Christian. So Marlowe, here, is mocking and criticising the greed of the church and their hypocrisy. There are numerous other instances of this throughout the play. For example, when Abigail dies, she asks Friar Bernardine to ‘witness that I die a Christian’ and he simply replies: ‘Ay, and a virgin, too, that grieves me most.’ He breaks Church law when he reveals the contents of Abigail’s dying confession, and hopes to use what she has told him as blackmail. Once this scene has taken place, we can’t help but recall Ithamore’s earlier question: ‘have not the nuns fine sport with the friars now and then?’

It’s clear, then, that Christians and the Church also come under attack in this play. Indeed, the play’s conclusion reinforces Abigail’s beautiful lament that ‘there is no love on earth, / Pity in Jews, nor piety in Turks.’ She’s certainly right that Ithamore (the main representative of the Turks in the play) and Barabas are wicked. Abigail’s mistake, though, is to think there is love, pity, or piety in the Maltese Christians, who reveal themselves to be just as sinful and scheming as Barabas himself. Barabas is only killed at the end of the play because he is out-manoeuvred by another schemer, Ferneze, who, despite his religion, shows no mercifulness whatsoever at the play’s conclusion. As Barabas calls out ‘Help, help me, Christians, help!’ and asks ‘Governor, why stand you all so pitiless?’ Ferneze explains that he has no pity for him at all, wishing to see his ‘treachery repaid.’ Again, this demonstrates his religious hypocrisy – as a Christian, he ought not only to forgive and show mercy, but also to see it as God’s role to ensure justice, not his own. Thus, Ferneze abandons his religious morality (which he seems never really to have had) and uses Barabas’s own tactics against him. We might conclude with Levin, then, that ‘Morally, all of them operate on the same level, and that is precisely what Marlowe is pointing out.’ Every religious group is shown to be vicious and hypocritical, and various Christian doctrines come under attack, notably the idea that ‘Faith is not to be held with heretics,’ which Barabas himself uses against the Christians.

What’s most interesting, though, is that, whilst Marlowe was simply following theatrical clichés and contemporary bigotry when he presented Barabas in such a negative light, such an attack on Christians and Christian doctrine was rarely seen on stage. Perhaps this goes some way to reveal Marlowe’s own religious views. Indeed, as Paul H. Kocher suggests, Marlowe was ‘one of the most highly subjective playwrights of his age.’ Thus, the outright criticism of Christianity in The Jew of Malta may be suggestive. Moreover, Christianity is repeatedly questioned in Marlowe’s other works, notably Dr Faustus. Though the play is set within an undoubtedly Christian framework, and though Faustus is inevitably damned for his transgressions, we cannot help sympathising and even admiring his revolt against religion. We too desire to know the answer to eschatological questions like ‘who made the world’ and we too appreciate human beauty. Thus, the beautiful speeches Faustus gives cannot help inspiring our approbation. Indeed, Faustus’s paean to Helen (‘Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?’) is one of Marlowe’s most powerful speeches, urging us to appreciate the strength of Faustus’s emotions when he tells the spirit: ‘thou art fairer than the evening’s air.’ W.W Greg argues that, sharing Faustus’s aesthetic appreciation, we allow ourselves to sympathise with him. Moreover, the fact that Marlowe’s verse reaches its pinnacle during a description of Helen, a symbol of pagan Greece, is surely indicative of his own feelings.

We don’t have to look far to find proof of these doubtful feelings in Marlowe’s biography. As Kocher pointed out, criticism of religion (and Christianity specifically) seems to have been ‘the most absorbing interest of his life.’ The first hint that Marlowe may have had an aversion to Christianity came when, having studied at Cambridge under an Archbishop Parker scholarship, Marlowe did not take holy orders as expected. More convincing are the allegations of atheism that Marlowe received a few years after his death: Baines, Aldrich, Cholmley and others all accused Marlowe of similar crimes, largely revolving around the preaching of atheism and the jesting at religious scripture and doctrine. Marlowe, like Machiavelli of the prologue, seems to have seen religion as no more than a ‘childish toy’.

Hence, when Faustus says that ‘hell’s a fable’ we cannot help recall Baines’s statement that Marlowe ‘perswades men to Atheism willing them not to be afeard of bugbeares and hobgoblins.’ And when Tamburlaine briefly comments ‘The God that sits in heaven, if any god,’ (my italics) it’s hard not to attribute this doubt to Marlowe himself. After all, given that Marlowe never intended to write two parts to Tamburlaine’s story, it’s odd that Tamburlaine is not punished for his crimes and his blasphemous aspirations in Part 1, and it’s doubtful whether his death in Part 2 can be seen as retributive justice rather than the natural result of mortality. Despite killing thousands of innocents, no god punishes Tamburlaine, suggesting Marlowe’s doubts as to whether there is any god at all. Moreover, when Barabas jests at Christian doctrine and blasphemes against Christ (for example, by marking his hidden jewels with a cross), it cannot escape our notice that Marlowe probably made similar jests and blasphemous remarks during his own lifetime, and thus that Marlowe is, to some extent, talking through Barabas. I hope, then, that I have shown how Marlowe’s own doubts and possible atheism are demonstrated in his work. Given the corruption of the Catholic Church in the Early Modern period (Anthony Kenny described Pope Alexander VI as ‘the most villainous man ever to have occupied the Roman See’), and given the oppressive nature of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, it’s no wonder that an intellectual like Marlowe had difficulties in accepting Christianity. Like the characters he created, he struggled to see past the hypocrisy of churchmen, the contradictions in religious doctrine, and the restraints that Christianity (or indeed any religion) placed on its followers. 

The Development of Poetic Form in Renaissance England

It was, of course, Geoffrey Chaucer who laid the foundations for the rise of a vernacular English poetry. In his Canterbury Tales, he developed the iambic pentameter and the rhyming couplet, and to that extent, he is rightly seen as the ‘father’ of English verse. And yet, this essay will argue that Renaissance writers are overlooked in the central role they played in advancing a distinctive English poetic style. We often think of Pope and Dryden as the first great English critics, ignoring the important formal developments that took place in both poetry and criticism during the Renaissance. It was, in fact, during the 16^th and 17^th centuries that poets and critics really developed an understanding of form as central to verse. This epoch took up and advanced the idea that form (mainly structure, metre, and rhyme) can be a tool of expression; that manner can be just as important as manner. Though previous writers (including Chaucer) had indeed experimented with form, it was in the Renaissance period that formal innovations were taken to new heights, laying crucial foundations the for critical and poetic works of Pope, Dryden, and others. Indeed, the writers of Renaissance England are almost entirely responsible for the way we think of poetry today.

There were a number of different factors that led to this Renaissance emphasis on form. The first, and perhaps the most important, was the prominence given to the ‘dignity’ of man. The most obvious example of this is Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’ drawing, the presentation of the ideal man in all his grandeur. Pico della Mirandola’s work De hominis dignitate reflects a similar pride in humanity. This work was so influential at the time that it is often referred to as the ‘Manifest of the Renaissance’ in that it championed this newfound sense of man’s worth and intellect. One of the central ideas behind this text is the emphasis on man’s ability to create. As he says, ‘as the free and proud shaper of your own being’, you have the ability to ‘fashion yourself in the form you may prefer.’ This work highlights throughout that man was formed in the God’s image, and thus it stressed that man has and ought to use his God-given creative faculties. This is something that Sidney picked up on in his Defence of Poesy. Though he rejected the idea of furor poeticus, he believed that man was created as a ‘maker’ and given ‘the force of divine breath’. Sidney focuses throughout on man’s God-like creative power: ‘Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done…’ Puttenham also adopted this position when he wrote – ‘A poet is as much to say as a maker… Such as (by way of resemblance and reverently) we may say of God.’ After all, the word ‘poet’, as Sidney points out, comes from the Greek ‘poiein’ which means ‘to make’.

Thus, Sidney stresses the poet’s role as creator and craftsman, and the need to employ our God-given intellect in order to give glory to God. This intellect often manifested itself in formal innovation and the attempt to show wit and skill in poetic form, also influenced by a revived interest in Classical rhetoric, which stressed the importance of ‘inventio’ in writing. But it wasn’t just in divine poetry that this need to show formal skill was important: in the court, in order to advance themselves and attract patronage, poets often found they had to differentiate themselves from their contemporaries, and this differentiation frequently expressed itself in formal ingenuity and skill. What is more, because of the high rate of Elizabethan criticism, poems of the time, as Catherine Ing argues, ‘were the products of highly conscious artists, often working to rule, always well aware of the effect they wished to produce, and deliberately choosing certain means towards their chosen ends.’ And so, Ing goes on, ‘it probably seemed to the Elizabethan critic that the truth of a poet’s inspiration must show itself in his delight and care in labour.’ The need to distinguish one’s own poetry from that of others, and likewise this new sense of man as ‘maker’ and of poet as ‘craftsman’, all combined to emphasise the importance of form in the poetry of the day.

The most obvious and clear example of this special use of form is seen in the rise of figured poems in Renaissance England, again influenced by the renewed interest in Classical poets, the originators of figured poetry. They are, perhaps, the most blatant instance of poets using form to reflect content in that the poems are shaped according to what the poet is describing. This development was also induced by the development of print culture in the 16^th century and the rise of competing printing houses. As Elizabeth Cook suggests, printers wanted ‘to demonstrate their skills in the display of uniform type in clearly contoured diagrammatic forms.’ Likewise, the rise in baroque art during this time led to an emphasis on ‘various layers of communication’ working cumulatively to achieve a collaborative intensity’ (Cook) – this is exactly what figured poems seem to do. Puttenham’s Pyramids or ‘spire’ poems show not only how poets could distinguish themselves from other through formal innovation (one of the spires must be read from bottom to top, manipulating normal reading conventions), but also how form can reflect meaning. In the first spire, we move from the earthly ‘figure’ of the spire up towards the ‘azurd skie’ to reflect the queen’s vow that she shall ‘mount on hie’ and ‘aspire / After an hier / Crown & empir’. The second poem, which we read from the top down, aptly begins with:

  ‘God

    On

    Hie

  From

 Aboue

Sends loue’.

This clearly demonstrates Puttenham’s awareness of how form can reflect and even go some way to expressing meaning. Elsewhere, he argued that the figure of the pillar, for example, can suggest ‘stay, support, rest, state, and magnificence,’ showing a manifest link between form and matter.

George Herbert’s later poem ‘Easter Wings’, partly inspired by a similar ancient Greek poem by Simmias of Rhodes, is a more interesting specimen for analysis in that it uses its form in multiple ways at once. Rather than simply writing a poem in the form of its title, Herbert directly uses that form to reflect certain semantic meanings. For example, in the first stanza we see how, as man is ‘Decaying more and more’ so the lines diminish until we get to the words ‘Most poor’ (directly reflected in the placement of the words ‘Most thin’ in the second stanza). But then, the lines grow longer and longer once man is supported by ‘thee’, God, until they return to the length of the first line, when man was created ‘in wealth and store’. Moreover, as the two final lines show, the form is mimetically reflective of Herbert’s conceit – he is literally ‘imping’ the wings of the angels which he hopes will, with Affliction, ‘advance the flight in me’. Thus, Herbert not only fits his matter into a structural mimesis, but he uses this structure to enhance the poem’s meaning, allowing it various layers of expression.

This is just one of many examples of how poets of this period used strophic or formal structure as a method of illustrating meaning. For instance, Andrew Marvell’s ‘To his Coy Mistress’ is divided into three stanzas to reflect the syllogistic nature of his argument. The stanzas begin ‘Had we… But… Now therefore…’ reflecting the typical trajectory of logical induction. By splitting his poem into three large stanzaic units, Marvell is showing off his awareness of rhetorical and argumentative finesse, whilst also purposefully undermining his own argument and demonstrating its artificiality. Though I would not agree with Eliot that this carpe-diem poem really contains much ‘serious matter’, I would agree that Marvell has used ‘structural decoration’ to elucidate the poem’s content. John Donne’s poem ‘The Good Morrow’ works in a similar way in its stanzaic divisions, though to different ends. Donne divides his poem up into three stanzas, the first of which reflects on the past (hence the emphatic placement and trochaic stress of ‘Did’ in the second line), the second on the present (opening ‘And now’) and the third, on the future, which hints at love’s eternalising qualities: ‘If our two loves be one, or, thou and I / Love so alike, that none do slacken, none can die.’

John Milton also shows an awareness of formal importance in his composition of Paradise Lost. The great epic was originally going to be written in the form of a play, a dramatic production of the Fall of Man. However, he then decided that the epic form suited the story better, perhaps because he aimed at a sense of elevation and grandeur to stress the significance ‘Of man’s first disobedience…’ This grandeur would, presumably, come from the associations of the epic form with writers like Homer (The Iliad and The Odyssey), Virgil (The Aeneid), and later on Edmund Spenser (The Faerie Queene). And yet, when the poem was first published, it contained only ten books (perhaps to associate it with Lucan’s ten-book work, Pharsalia), and it was only later that Milton settled on a twelve-book form, affirming its affinity with Virgil’s Aeneid, also comprised of twelve books. All of this, according to Ing, shows Milton’s ability ‘To recognize that certain forms may mould some subjects more happily than others may show as much imaginative perception as to feel that certain subjects flow more happily into some forms than into others.’ Thus, by choosing to write his rendition of the Fall in the form of a twelve book epic, Milton was not only adding grandeur to his work, he was also showing an awareness of form’s importance and demonstrating the connotations that certain forms can bring with them. And yet, at the start of his work, he is keen to show that he will not be dominated by these traditional connotations. Hence, as Hurley points out, he picks up on the Classical idea of Mount Helicon as the home of the Muses, but suggests that, because his muse is ‘Heav’nly’ he can ‘soar / Above th’Aonian mount.’ Here, then, we can see how writers may want to work with their chosen form, whilst also working against it, or at least working against the form’s connotations (as Milton also did in his decision to write political sonnets).

Specialised use of form also manifested itself in the choice of metres and rhyme patterns of poems during this period. One of the reasons why metre and rhyme were so important was because much of the poetry written in the early 16^th century was translation of earlier poems. This meant that poems were often indistinguishable in terms of subject-matter, all of them exploiting similar conventions and traditions. As Ing explains, Elizabethan lyrics ‘are notorious for their repetitive subject-matter… their well-worn imagery and their light intellectual weight.’ What this means, then, is that poets had to differentiate themselves mainly in their use of form, and thus our ‘enjoyment is dependent on our appreciation of that in the poem which is truly the result of the poet’s art.’ Moreover, because these poems were often translations of Italian work, English poets found they could not just replicate Italian forms, which were often unsuitable to the English language. This was for a number of reasons, but mainly because of the comparative lack of easy feminine rhymes in the English language. Thus, poets like Wyatt and Surrey adapted the hendecasyllabic metre of Italian sonneteers into the English iambic metre, and settled on rhyme-schemes which allowed for the increased difficulty of repeated rhyming in English. Hence, Wyatt introduced a final couplet into the sestet (cddc;ee) and Surrey changed the number of rhyme endings from four or five in the Petrarchan tradition to seven, also often using a final rhyming couplet. This gave the English poets the same freedom the Italians had, though it may seem otherwise. It also meant that the poems often finished with an epigrammatic clinch in the couplet, which poets often used wittily to summarise their poems. Indeed, the final couplet often became the location of the sonnet’s volta, as in Sidney’s sonnet ‘Thou blind man’s mark’, which ends with the conclusive couplet: ‘Within myself to seek my only hire, / Desiring nought but how to kill desire.’ This demonstrates how English sonneteers not only adapted the Italian sonnet, but used this formal adaption to their advantage.

This period also saw an increased awareness of how different metrical feet and rhyme schemes could have different emotional effects on the reader. As Puttenham points out, the variation of feet can play a significant emotional role in a poem: ‘for a foote by his sence natural is a member of office and function’. Thus, metres can be ‘sometimes swift, sometimes slow, sometime vnegally marching or peraduenture steddy.’ In ‘Of Proportion by Situation’, Puttenham talks about how different metres can make verse ‘either lighter or grauer, or more merry, or mournfull, and many wayes passionate to the eare and hart of the hearer…’ Thus, despite common misconception, it wasn’t Pope who first demonstrated the power of metrical variation when he wrote: ‘When Ajax strives, some Rock's vast Weight to throw, / The Line too labours, and the Words move slow…’ Indeed, the Renaissance and Elizabethan writers were already well versed in exploiting metrical expression. Hence in his poem ‘Anacreontick’ Thomas Campion uses a trochaic dimeter to speed up our reading of the poem, reflecting the swift-footedness of ‘Nimble’ Lawra and the poem’s meaning that ‘Time can conquer’. Campion shows a similar awareness of metrical power in his poem ‘Follow your Saint’, in which the first two lines begin with imperative trochaic feet (‘Follow’ and ‘Haste you’) for emphasis, but then fall into iambics towards the line ends. Perhaps, when Campion writes ‘Haste you, sad noates, fall at her flying feete’ he is commenting on the difference between the poetic feet he is using: the first two feet are trochaics (falling feet) and they are thus ‘sad noates’ which must ‘fall’, whereas the Saint’s are ‘flying feete’ and thus iambic (rising feet). Hence, it’s clear that Campion is using his metrical pattern to reflect the matter of his verse. Rhyme can be used in a similarly mimetic way: in ‘Madrigal V’, Drummond begins with high-pitched rhymes like ‘bring’ and ‘king’ but ends with the rhyming couplet: ‘Late having deckt with beauty’s rose his tomb, / Disdains to crop a weed, and will not come.’ The fall to a much lower-pitched rhyme here suggests a settling into a sorrow of acceptance at the poem’s end.

This skilled use of metrical variation was best employed by the Elizabethan playwrights, notably Marlowe and Shakespeare. For example, Faustus’s final soliloquy shows a collapse of regular iambic pentameter to reflect the character’s mind state of horror and impending doom. He exclaims: ‘Oh, I’ll leap up to my God: who pulls me down? / See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament. / One drop would save my soul, half a drop. Ah, my Christ!’ These lines contain extra syllables and the iambic rhythms seem to have completely vanished, with ‘See, see, where Christ’s blood streams’ arguably having five stresses in just six syllables. Thus, Marlowe uses variation and the collapse of metre to suggest his tragic hero’s panic in this poignant scene. As Hurley and O’Neill comment, we see Faustus in extremis, ‘the author’s manipulation of the line’ making ‘the reader feel’ and making stresses ‘obey the dictates of the voice’s urgencies.’ There is a similar breakdown in Hamlet’s ‘Oh what a rogue’ soliloquy in which he exclaims, ‘For Hecuba!’ This exclamation is set on its own line, breaking up the metre entirely. Likewise, fuelled by fury, his words break loose from their metrical restraints when he cries: ‘Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain! / O, vengeance! –’ And yet, the speech ends with a perfectly iambic rhyming couplet, to reflect Hamlet’s newfound sense of resolve: ‘The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.’

Thus, I have shown how poetic form, notably the verse’s visual presentation on the page and the use of metre and rhyme, was used in the Renaissance period not only to provide beautiful harmonies (though this was also a valid argument for these devices) but to present a proportionate whole, where various different aspects of a work come together to create and emphasize its various meanings. This awareness is evident not only in the poetry of the time, but also in the criticism, with Puttenham, Campion and Daniel all clearly concerned with how form ‘can give pleasure in itself and also, at best, deepen the meaning.’ This conjunction of manner and matter is what really creates beauty, as defined by De Re Aedificatoria: ‘the harmony and concord of all the parts achieved in such a manner that nothing could be added or taken away or altered except for the worse.’ Jonson expressed a similar sentiment when he defines a ‘strict and succinct style [as] that, where you can take away nothing without losse, and that losse to be manifest’. This is what the Renaissance and Elizabethan writers were working towards, and it was most certainly a noble aim. It was this aim that has shaped the poetics of today, and for that, if not for the great poetry they created in the process, we should be incredibly grateful.