Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine fascinated me sufficiently that I went looking for a book about the life of Christopher Marlowe. There.s always good introductions in Penguin editions, and The Complete Plays with an introduction by J.B. Steane is no exception. It turns out Marlowe was an exact contemporary with Shakespeare (born 1564) and:

…the son of a reasonably wealthy shoemaker. He was educated at King’s School, Canterbury, and received a scholarship to Corpus Christi, Cambridge, where he obtained his B.A. in 1584. He appears to have ben involved in a secret political mission, travelling abroad as a foreign agent. The university authorities suspected him of wishing to enter the English seminary in Rheims as a Catholic convert and it was only through the intervention of the Privy Council that he was awarded his M.A. in 1587.

A spy? A Catholic in Protestant England? Cool. Penguin introductions are more an appetizer than a main course though. They didn.t have From Mankind to Marlowe at the public library (which was the first choice due to the captivating title). In fact they didn.t have very much at all. But there was a newer smart looking title on the shelves Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy by Park Honan.

It came out in 2005 published by none other than the mighty Oxford University Press. I was looking forward to the read. Since there were chapters on The Tamburlaine Phenomenon and Doctor Faustus, there.s where I started. In the chapter on Tamburlaine, Honan speculates that the geographical discrepancies in the campaigns of Tamburlaine and his associates were due to outdated maps at Cambridge. He even identifies a possible map Marlowe may have used. Very impressive. To be honest, it was difficult following the campaign trail in the play. Persia, Fez, Morocco, Argier, Turkey, Damascus, Arabia, Egypt, Natolia, Jerusalem, Trebizon, Soria, Babylon, Africa, and so on. It seemed like he conquered some places twice. And what is the difference exactly between Persian and Natolia and Turkey? It.s good to know the map.s there if I ever look into this some more. The parts on the ranging of powers between Catholics, Protestants, and Ottomans is illuminating as well. It turns out the Protestants and Ottomans had a common enemy in Catholicism at this time.

Now, when I was going to school, what they taught was that it was one of the seven deadly sins of academia to extract biographical details on the author from his works. It was a no-no. My own view of this?–well it always struck me that one should be able to tell something about the author from what he writes; what one writes is part of what he does and the author is, in a way, what he writes. Of course there are limits to how far this can go, but it.s always possible to read a book and at least extrapolate enough biographical details that you could determine whether, if you met the author, he.d be an interesting person to share a beer with.

So, speaking of the seven deadly sins, here.s Honan.s analysis of Faust.s encounter with the seven deadly sins in the play:

After so much insemination, the minx Lechery pictures copulation itself: ‘I am one that loves an inch of raw mutton better than an ell of fried stockfish.’ At that time, ‘raw mutton’ was a term for lust of prostitutes, and ‘stockfish’ (or a dried-up piece of cod) was a slang word of abuse implying sexual deficiency. A modern, rather fastidious editor advises that Lechery says, in effect, that she ‘prefers a small quantity of virility to a large extent of impotence’. There is, however, and explicit allusion to a small, active and sucking penis in Lechery’s fondness for ‘an inch of raw mutton’, and to absolute sexual failure in ‘an ell’ (45 inches) of inadequate copulating. As in his version of Ovid’s Amores, Marlowe comically heightens in this play not virility, but impotence, since this is what is most striking in Lechery’s entire speech. Was Marlowe impotent? The truth of the matter is that he was extremely interested in desire…

‘Was Marlowe impotent?’–are you kidding?!? That.s one question that would not occur to me to think of after reading that episode. Covetousness also talks about gold in that episode. Are we also to infer that Marlowe had a stash of gold hidden away? The encounter with the seven deadly sins seemed to me rather part of the spectacle of the play where Mephistophilis helps Faust kill time before the twenty-four years expires. It is beyond me how Honan extracts the question of Marlowe.s virility from Faustus’ encounter with Lechery.

There.s a bit too much of this type of conjecture in the book for me. While the two chapters on Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus were interesting, I.m returning this volume to the library and still on the lookout for a book on the life of this most extraordinary poet and playwright.