Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618)

Christopher Marlowe was born in the cathedral town of Canterbury, in the same year as Shakespeare. In 1580 he went to Cambridge University on a scholarship usually given to students preparing for the ministry. But Marlowe never entered the ministry. Instead he wrote plays, and he became the most exciting Elizabethan dramatist of the late 1580’s, before Shakespeare’s talent had begun to be fully realized. He also became a figure notorious for, among other things, spying and brawling. In 1593, before he had reached his thirtieth birthday, he was stabbed to death at an inn. Some say the stabbing occurred in an argument over the bill, but others think that Marlowe was killed because of his involvement in undercover political intrigue. Marlowe’s gifts as a poet may have exceeded his dramatic talent, for he left unfinished at his death one of the finest narrative poems of the Elizabethan Renaissance, Hero and Leander.

Sir Walter Raleigh is known to us all as a founder of Virginia and as the man who introduced tobacco into Europe. Yet his talents were enormously varied. He was a soldier, explorer, and a colonizer, but also a courtier, poet, philosopher, and historian. He had a good deal in common with Marlowe. Both were reckless, free-thinking men who eventually came to violent ends. Raleigh became a favourite of Queen Elizabeth in the 1580’s. When the queen discovered his secret marriage in 1592 to Elizabeth Throckmorton, one of her maids of honour, she had him imprisoned for a time in the Tower of London. But in a few years he won his way back into favour through his military exploits and his expeditions to South America. Raleigh’s fortunes rose to new heights. They fell drastically in 1603, however, when James I came to the throne. Convinced that Raleigh was part of a plot to bar his accession, James had him imprisoned until 1616. In that year he was released to make one last voyage to South America. The expedition failed miserably and ran afoul of the Spanish. When he returned to England, Raleigh was executed on the charges of treason for which he originally had been imprisoned. Cool and self-possessed to the end, Raleigh seems to have written one of his best poems, “The Author’s Epitaph, Made by Himself”, the night before he died. On the scaffold he is reported to have smiled as he ran his finger along the edge of the ax and said: “This is a sharp medicine, but it is physician for all diseases”.

The poems by Marlowe and Raleigh are good examples of how mistaken it is to assume that the speaker of the poem is necessarily the author. Marlowe the man is no more the “Passionate Shepherd” of the first poem than Raleigh is the “Nymph” of the second. Both poets are working here with traditional roles or voices from pastoral literature – literature that uses shepherds and an idealized rustic landscape to explore indirectly a whole range of ideas and themes. We might describe the voice of Raleigh’s nymph as “antipastoral”, but that too is part of the pastoral tradition in the larger sense. Raleigh would have been the first to appreciate the fact that the view of life expressed by his nymph is as conventional, and perhaps in its way as incomplete, as that expressed by Marlowe’s Shepherd.