In the last lecture, we looked at the drama which sprang up from the streets of middling to large towns in provincial parts of England. Yet drama as it evolved, took its present shape, its most dynamic shape, in the biggest town, the biggest city in England, indeed probably the biggest in Europe, London.

In London, drama was no longer the trundling provincial wagon, but the playhouse. Now this playhouse was a large, public building. Mercantilism, that is to say, early capitalism, business, and entrepreneurship, by the end of the 16th century, had capitalized drama sufficiently for it to have an auditorium, a place of performance, as large as a town church in a place like Wakefield, as big as Wakefield's little cathedral.

The Globe, that theater most closely associated with Shakespeare, is a very meaningful name. All life was there, if you could afford the entry price, because as part of that mercantilist revolution we're talking about, you had to pay to go in. You didn't have to pay to watch the mystery plays, since they were given to you. Yet in fact, now the cash nexus intervened.

Theaters like Shakespeare's Globe, or the Rose, were palatial in their size, particularly in the eyes of the residents of London during the 16th and 17th century. They were capable of containing thousands, some seated, mostly goundlings, as they were called, who stood. There is a very interesting point that archaeologists who had been digging up the surviving parts of the Rose theater underground, have discovered innumerable nutshells on the auditorium floor. This is the early version of popcorn. We should remember the nutshells when we read playwrights like Shakespeare.

Now, literature needs institutions. We can't always see them when we read the texts as they come down to us in printed form, but we must know the institutions of literature which were there, and how their frameworks affected the artistic products. Now the great London theaters of the late 16th, early 17th centuries, are best understood in terms of the recently reconstructed Globe, the house of Shakespeare on the south bank of the Thames. It's there, you can walk into it, and watch plays there now. You stand up, as it happens.

It's large, polygonal, and has big columns which are constructed of large timber planks and plaster. There's a box office outside which is literally a box! There's a raised stage that everyone can see, called a proscenium which comes forward to the audience, allowing them the theatrical equivalent of a close-up, or with a soliloquy, a voice-over. So the actor can come right forward into the body of the audience, and talk to them almost person to person. There are flies behind for rudimentary scenery and exits front and back. Overhead there is a blue firmament, the sky with stars painted on it. There's a trap-door for ghosts and devils to pop out of, and villains to fall into.

Now Shakespeare and his contemporaries lacked the effects, props, and stage machinery of the modern age, yet what they did have was a luxurious wardrobe and the inventory survived. They were very expensive, the kind of clothes that they wore on stage, which were magnificent. Yet the richest property was, as Shakespeare's choruses imply, neither stage, nor furniture, nor actor's dress, not makeup, but language.

Now the English language was going through an explosive expansion at the time. Shakespeare's vocabulary is huge, some five times as large as that of the father of French theater, Racine. It's full of neologisms, words which never happened before in the language. Examples of those can be found in every scene with speech, but we'll actually go a few years before Shakespeare in this lecture, to look at his great precursor, even though we tend unfairly to ignore him, Christopher Marlowe.

Now it's always interesting in literary history to play the "what it" game, to indulge what are called counter-factual possibilities. Now lets get an example here. There's a mysterious scuffle in a house on the south bank of the Thames, not far from the theater and the brothel world, where in fact Shakespeare was working. A young man was stabbed to death in 1693, the victim being only 29 years old. He may have been a government spy, or double agent. There are those we say he may even have been Shakespeare. That is to say, people say that Marlowe was Shakespeare, which we'll go into a bit later.

His death was probably what in gangster fiction would be called a "hit." Yet supposing that young 29 year old victim, had dodged the dagger and lived another 20 years, that is, as long as Shakespeare lived? How different would English literature have been, if Christopher Marlowe, if it was him, were allowed those few decades?

Now that young man, Christopher "Kitt" Marlowe 1564-1593, could have lived to be an ever greater poet than the one from Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare, we'll never know. As it is, with his left hand, so to speak, Marlow tossed off in short adult life, four plays which changed literature forever. More importantly, it changed drama forever.

He bequeathed to Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, right the way through to the present day, English literature's great literary instrument, blank verse. Now we won't get into the niceties of prosody right now , but for the moment we'll just look at an outline of Marlowe's life, an excitingly short one.

Shakespeare was born the son of a glovemaker in Stratford. Marlowe, the other great tragedian of the age, was born a few years earlier, the son of a shoemaker in Kent. Both were descendants of the guild system we talked about previously. Those two facts alone tell you much about the things there were happening to literature at this period. That is to say, it's becoming a sort of property of the lower-classes, and not an exclusive property of the upper-classes.

There was quite a possibility of social mobility at the time, and unlike Shakespeare, Marlowe was university educated. However, like Shakespeare, he seems to have had an ambivalent relationship with catholicism. Now most thinking people also had this ambivalent relationship during Elizabeth's reign, yet one needs to be careful. Recusants, as they are called, those who did not accept the new protestant regime set up by Henry VIII, Elizabeth's father, were likely to be burnt at the stake oe hung, drawn, and quartered for treason. It was no light thing, the kind of religion that you followed.

In Marlowe's plays, there is a persistent hint of atheism. Now with the censorship that operated at that time, it was very dangerous, this playing the game he played. Atheists were dealt with as harshly as heretics. Religion, as we say, was a very serious business in the late 17th century.

So with politics and diplomacy, England became a world power. Probably, Marlowe served as an English spy abroad. We don't know much about this, but he does seem to have been in this very kind of murky business. A kind of James Bond, before his time. He served apparently in that capacity in France. These allegations have always sort of shrouded his reputation, and added a kind of, as it were, mystic around him. Now of course, espionage was something else for which one could find themselves dangling at the end of a rope. So it was yet another dangerous game Marlowe was playing.

There is even a third dangerous game he was playing. Marlowe supposed on very good grounds, of being gay. His play Edward II, strongly supports this proposition. He's quoted as having said, "All they that love not tobacco and boys, are fools." Quite an extraordinary remake. He also said, "St. John the evangelist was bedfellow to Christ, and leaned always in his bosom, that he used him as sinners of Sodom." St. John the Baptist and Christ were lovers. Now that too, could have got someone into court, and indeed worse, death row.

Now everything, we may say, about Marlowe was controversial and dangerous. Not least, what happened in 1593 when he was killed. For centuries, his death was supposed to be the result of a drunken brawl in a tavern, over a woman with whom he was lewdly associated, a woman of the streets. Only later has it emerged that he was probably assassinated due to some political intrigue whose details he shall know never know.

Well what then do we know? Marlowe left four great plays in a theatrical career which spanned a mere five years. A wonderful literary blaze. These four tragedies all have two things in common. They all deal with what has been called the "overreacher" theme, mans attempt to become greater than himself, vaulting ambition. Now the other shared feature of these four plays, is the mighty line, in which we'll come back to in blank verse and prosody.

Blank verse had existed before Marlowe, but he supercharged it. Yet first of all, a few words about overreaching. What in detail does that mean? Well Marlowe's first dramatic triumph was staged by the late 1580s, about 5 years before the young William Shakespeare had made his way to London. That play of Marlowe's was called Tamburlaine the Great. The hero of the play, Tamburlaine, is a semi-mythic, Asian shepherd, who by sheer force of will, becomes a mighty emperor defying almost death itself.

This is how the contemporary playbill, which was posted throughout London put it, which incidentally would be fly-posted on walls all over the place, yet also on public pissing posts, what is to say public urinals. So you'd stand there and read them! This is the description of this particular play:

"Tamburlaine the Great, who from a Scythian Shaphearde by his rare and woonderfull Conquests, became a most puissant and mightye Monarque. And (for his tyranny, and terror in Warre) was tearmed, The Scourge of God."

Now that last phrase either could mean he was God's scourge, punishing men, or atheistically. The tinge of atheism is always there in Marlowe, that he Tamburlaine, a mere man, had scourged God himself.

Now the play was a huge hit. It introduced a whole gallery of humanistic themes into drama. It also introduced a new repertoire of linguistic creativity and moral daring. Let's give just one example, the moment when royal ambition begins to stir in Tamburlaine. Remember he's a shepherd, like the Wakefield characters we were looking at, yet very different! He's been watching the Persian king, Mycetes, and asks himself you he too should not be a king? He goes on to muse:

"Why should not he ride in triumph through Persepolis? Is is not brave to be a king?"

Remember he's walked down on the march, right on front of the stage here, talking to the audience. Yet he turns around and addresses the question to his companion brigands and yes men, Techelles, Usumcasane, and Theridamas, wonderful names that roll off the tongue:

"Is it not passing brave to be a king, and ride in triumph through Persepolis?"

He's thinking of himself rising in triumph through Persepolis. Why shouldn't he do it? Seeing which way his Lord's mind is standing Techelles replies:

"O my Lord, it is sweet and full of pomp!"

A terrible yes man! The sycophantic Usumcasane adds:

"To be a king is half to be a god."

Theridamas puts in his bit as well, putting what Tamburlaine is thinking, into flattering words:

"A god is not so glorious as a king. I think the pleasure they enjoy in heaven, cannot compare with kingly joys in earth. To wear a crown and enchas'd with pearl and gold. Whose virtues carry with it life and death. To ask and have command and be obey'd, when looks breed love, with looks to gain the prize, such power attractive shines in princes' eyes."

Now this much to say is very seditious stuff. Killing kings, which is the main issue of Shakespeare's history plays, is the hottest potato in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Yet Tamburlaine is going further than that. He's saying that anyone, even an illiterate peasant like himself, unanointed by God, can usurp the powers of a king. If, that is, he has himself the power and the will, as Tamburlaines three companions prudently admit they have not. So then then serve him, as he has the will power.

Now even in this small sample, the subtleness, fluidity, and magniloquence of the mighty line, is evident. This in fact is the supercharged blank verse we were talking about. Essentially it's our old friend, the ten syllable iambic pentameter we encountered in Chaucer:

"Dee-dum, dee-dum, dee-dum, dee-dum, dee-dum."

"Is-it, not-pass, ing-brave, to-be, a-king, and-ride, in-tri, umph-through, Per-sep, o-lis?"

Yet of course one doesn't say it that way, in that rhythmic jog-trot. It sounds almost prosaic that way. What one say is:

"Is it not passing BRAVE to be a KING, and RIDE in TRIUMPH through Persepolis?"

Now blank verse is unrhymed, and that's a very good thing too, since English is poorer in rhyme endings than most European languages. How many rhyme words for love can you come up with? Glove, dove, you can't do very much with that poetically. Yet compare it for example to the Italian amore. Now John's not Italian, but does know the word cuori is heart, and onore which is honor. So you have amore, cuori, and onore, so that you could write a poem yourself with just those three words! Yet this is much more difficult in English.

Blank verse, because it's not rhymed, is able to occupy that borderland between high poetry and conversational English, which is where most writers like to be, it seems to John. They want a slightly elevated style of speech, yet not one which is cramped and formal. It's one that speaks to you, yet at the same time is more sort of noble, and you could utter yourself.

Now Tamburaline is the first performed play, and has the weakness of an opening effort. Principally it lacks plot, as it's the same thing over and over again. Tamburlaine goes onto every greater victories, stamping on more and more heads, until finally he loses and dies, with death stamping on his head. So even he has met his match. This is the simplest form of tragedy, what's called de casibus, the irresistible rise, the inevitable fall.

In his next plays,