It is important to note that playwriting was a young man’s occupation — Kyd and Marlowe being no more than twenty-three or twenty-four (and perhaps even younger) when they began their work. “My first acquaintance with this Marlowe,” Kyd later wrote in an exculpatory letter, “rose upon his bearing name to serve my Lord [Strange] although his Lordship never knewe his service, but in writing for his plaiers.”4 This immediately raises an intriguing possibility. If Shakespeare joined Lord Strange’s Men in 1586, then he would very soon have become acquainted with Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe; he would, as it were, be part of the same affinity of writers. He acted in their plays. He may even have collaborated with them. It has often been observed how, in his earliest dramas, Shakespeare seems alternately to imitate and parody both dramatists. What could be more natural in a junior member of this confraternity than to copy those whom he was ambitious to succeed? It was the time, after all, of their maximum effectiveness and success. The Spanish Tragedy was so popular that it propagated a number of imitations and was revised in 1602, after the playwright’s death, with additions by Ben Jonson. So for almost twenty years it remained part of the staple fare of theatrical entertainment. What else would the young Shakespeare do but copy it?
There was one other association between Kyd and Shakespeare. Neither had been to university. As products of the grammar school only, they were both criticised by the “university wits” for their lack of learning. They were condemned by Nashe, Greene and other graduates as ex-scriveners or ex-schoolmasters, in terms that make it very difficult to know which of the two is being addressed. So there was a connection.
It was a small and intense world. These young dramatists stole lines and characters from one another. They criticised one another. Their plays were put on in competition, one with another, like the works of the Greek tragedians. The success of The Spanish Tragedy in 1586 seems to have inspired, or provoked, Marlowe into writing another play of bombastic eloquence. The two parts of Tamburlaine were acted at the end of the following year, but the speed of production and performance suggests that Marlowe had already written the plays in outline. They did constitute a revolution in English drama, however, but like other young artists Marlowe quickly acquired notoriety for his life as much as for his art. He was generally regarded as an atheist, a blasphemer and a pederast. He had become, after his first success upon the stage, a notorious renegade.
He was the son of a Canterbury shoemaker who was first shaped by the same kind of grammar-school training that Shakespeare experienced at Stratford; but, unlike Shakespeare, he moved on to university. Even before he attained his degree, however, he was involved in some kind of clandestine government activity. Like the salamander he seemed to live and thrive in fire. His comments, repeated at second hand, were themselves incendiary. He is supposed to have said that “all protestantes are Hypocritical asses” and “all they love not Tobacco and Boies were fooles.” He has been associated with the “school of night,” as we have observed, and is reported to have remarked that “Moyses was but a Jugler & that one Heriots being Sir W Raleighs man Can do more than he.” Heriot and Raleigh were members of that esoteric society. Marlowe was also engaged in various forms of surveillance activity, particularly in regard to Catholics, but it is not at all clear whether he was a government agent, a double agent, or both. He was not in any case someone to be trusted. In 1589 he and another “university wit,” Thomas Watson, were assailed by the son of an innkeeper; Watson stabbed the man to death, with the result that Watson and Marlowe were consigned to prison. Both Watson and Marlowe lived and worked in the theatre district of Shoreditch, which is perhaps where the young Shakespeare encountered them.
Marlowe was in one sense the marvellous boy of English drama. He was the same age as Shakespeare and made the journey to London at approximately the same time. It is convenient to consider Shakespeare as somehow “after” Marlowe, but it is more appropriate to see them as exact contemporaries, with Shakespeare having fewer obvious advantages.
The success of the two parts of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, for example, was immediate and profound. It was an act of dramatic independence on his part to present a pagan protagonist without in any sense disavowing him. Since it is in large measure a drama of conquest and success, it has been suggested that there is no play of contraries to enliven the action; but the contraries exist in the relationship between author and audience. He is perhaps the first dramatist in English to assert himself in the manner of the poets. The drama of the preceding period had remained to a large extent communal or impersonal; but Marlowe changed all that. He introduced a personal voice. It is the voice of Tamburlaine, but within its register there is the unmistakable accent of Marlowe himself (I, ii, 175-8):
I hold the Fates bound fast in yron chaines,
And with my hand turne Fortunes wheel about;
And sooner shall the sun fall from his Spheare
Than Tamburlaine be slaine or overcome.
It excited the audience because it caught the burgeoning mood of ambitious purpose and spirited individualism. It was an Elizabethan voice. If Tamburlaine was guilty of hubris, then so were many other Elizabethan adventurers. It was the penalty of “aspiring minds,” to use Tamburlaine’s own phrase. The thumping rhythm of the verse, comprised of what were called “high astounding terms,” earned the rebuke of a young playwright clearly envious of Marlowe’s sudden success. In a pamphlet published the year after the productions of Tamburlaine, Robert Greene complained that he was being criticised “for that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins, every word filling the mouth like the fa-burden of Bow Bell, daring God out of heaven with that atheist Tamburlan …”5 Another Elizabethan pamphleteer, Thomas Nashe, was also caustic about Marlowe’s declamatory verse, describing it as “the spacious volubility of a drumming decasyllabon.”6 It was such a new voice that it had suddenly become disconcerting.
It was a voice that Shakespeare heard and internalised; it became one of the many voices that he could call upon at will. In such a relatively small and enclosed world, of course, influences and associations can be traced in every direction. Tamburlaine influenced the shape of Shakespeare’s history plays, and the history plays in turn seem to have affected Marlowe’s composition of Edward II. It is even possible that they collaborated on aspects of the trilogy concerning Henry VI. As has already been observed, the young Shakespeare no doubt also acted in The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris. That he was mightily impressed and influenced by Marlowe is not in doubt; it is also clear that in his earliest plays Shakespeare stole or copied some of his lines, parodied him, and generally competed with him. Marlowe was the contemporary writer who most exercised him. He was the competitor. He was the antagonist to be mastered. He haunts Shakespeare’s expression, like a figure standing by his shoulder. But Shakespeare’s muse was an envious one, ready to deflate or destroy any contestant.