Robert A. Logan. Shakespeare’s Marlowe: The Influence of Christopher Marlowe on Shakespeare’s Artistry. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. viii+252pp. ISBN 9780754657637.
Tom
Rutter
Sheffield Hallam University
t.rutter@shu.ac.uk
Tom Rutter. “Review of Robert A. Logan, Shakespeare’s Marlowe: The Influence of Christopher Marlowe on Shakespeare’s Artistry." Early Modern Literary Studies 15.2 (2010-11): 12.1-7 <URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/15-2/revloga.htm>
- While
the title of this book seems to presuppose ‘the influence of Christopher
Marlowe on Shakespeare’s artistry’, a repeated contention of its author is that
critics have been too willing to see influence or allusion where none exists,
as with those who would read Touchstone’s line, ‘it strikes a man more dead
than a great reckoning in a little room’ (As You Like It, 3.3.12-13) as
a reference to The Jew of Malta and/or to Marlowe’s death after an
argument over a bill. Robert A. Logan is also dubious about other persistent
assumptions, like those of a rivalry between Shakespeare and Marlowe and of a
creative anxiety on Shakespeare’s part. Throughout his book, he tries to
distinguish between the probable, the possible, and the uncertain, and to
maintain a difference in terminology between tangible ‘sources’ and more
speculative ‘influences’ (12).
- As a
result, any readers expecting the first chapter proper, about ‘Influence and
Characterization in The Massacre at Paris, Titus Andronicus, and Richard
III’, to be about the influence of the Massacre on the other two
plays will be disappointed: not only is the chronological sequence of the three
plays uncertain, the two Shakespeare plays ‘lack verbal echoes’ of the Massacre
(35), and similarities of characterisation are superficial. Rather than Marlowe’s
Duke of Guise lying behind the villainous Aaron and Richard, Logan identifies
other Marlovian antecedents in the form of Tamburlaine (whose rhetoric
influences Aaron’s opening speech) and Faustus (whose final agonies anticipate
Richard the night before Bosworth). Both in this chapter and the one that
follows (on Hero and Leander and Venus and Adonis, which again ‘show
no influence from one another’ (56)) Logan is less concerned with influence
than with the way the search for influence stimulates comparison and contrast.
He finds in Marlowe a degree of political and intellectual cynicism absent from
Shakespeare, and in Shakespeare the ability to infuse Marlowe’s rhetorical
pyrotechnics with psychological insight.
- The next
two chapters are about pairs of plays – Edward II and Richard II,
The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice – whose order of
composition is more certain, and to some extent Logan accepts that this puts
discussion of influence on firmer ground. Having said that, while he identifies
‘similarities in the psychologies and situations of the two weak kings and in
their unhappy political consequences’, he does not accept that Edward II
is a source for Richard II in respect of ‘characterization, plot, and
language’ (83-4). Rather, he sees Shakespeare both in Richard II and in The
Merchant of Venice as deliberately seeking to ‘invite comparison’ (103)
between his and Marlowe’s plays, essentially as a selling point. This
exemplifies one appealing feature of Logan’s approach, namely, his insistence
on seeing Marlowe and Shakespeare not as Great Writers but as professionals and
pragmatists: ‘Shakespeare shows himself primarily interested in the theatrical
and literary techniques of Marlowe that made him a successful commercial playwright’
(120). Such similarities as Shylock has to Barabas – and for Logan, these are
fairly limited – derive not so much from the playwrights’ ethical interest in
xenophobia and the experience of minorities as from ‘the possibilities such
figures offer for generating conflict and tension, and neither writer
eliminates opportunities for complications by absolving the Christians of
wrongdoing’ (136).
- Logan's
chapter on Tamburlaine and Henry V follows a similar pattern in that rather
than seeing Marlowe's influence in Shakespeare's use of the Chorus or his
depiction of a conquest against massive odds (both of which he regards as
commonplaces), he suggests that it lies in something more nebulous. This is the
'Marlovian aesthetic principle of avoiding easy categorization and the [...]
concentration on the protagonist's and others' linguistic strategies' (150). At
the same time, Shakespeare's willingness to (for example) develop the comic
potential of Tamburlaine's rhetoric into the figure of Pistol is a sign of
Shakespeare's growing maturity.
- The
Shakespeare plays Logan discusses in the final chapters – Antony and
Cleopatra, Macbeth and The Tempest – were all written over a
decade after Marlowe’s death, so the pairings he sets up between them and Dido,
Queen of Carthage and Doctor Faustus are not quite so critically
well-worn as, say, those between The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of
Venice. Perhaps for this reason, these chapters feel a bit more relaxed, as
Logan does not have to devote so much energy to distinguishing himself from
those who have gone before. In particular, the suggestion that Antony and
Cleopatra is more ‘Marlovian’ than Dido in its privileging of
individualism and sensuality over conformism and duty is fresh and provocative.
- Having
said that, I did wonder whether Logan is occasionally guilty here of
identifying links of the kind that, in the work of other critics, he regards as
tenuous. He compares ‘Fair is foul’ in the first scene of Macbeth (and
elsewhere in the play) with Tamburlaine’s ‘Fair is too foul an epithet for thee’
(Part One, 5.1.136) (205); while it’s not implausible to see this as a
recollection of Marlowe, given the commonplace nature of this particular
opposition it’s not clear what sets it apart from ‘forced links’ (117) such as
Geoffrey Bullough’s note that the word ‘sufferance’ is used by both Barabas and
Shylock (137n3).[1]
Logan’s earlier observation that the word ‘packed’ appears with a similar
meaning in both Antony and Cleopatra and Dido, Queen of Carthage
(170) again does not feel so very different from what he criticises in
Bullough.
- Such criticisms, however, may to some extent be missing the point. Close verbal resemblances are not really what Logan is interested in, and readers who are looking for them might better be directed to, say, Charles Forker’s edition of Edward II.[2] Logan is concerned not so much in similarities of outcome as in similarities of approach: not so much how two characters are like each other (for example) as how they derive from similar techniques of characterisation. To this extent, while I would say that he is sometimes overly insistent in rejecting the identifications that earlier critics have suggested, his book opens up new ways of thinking about the creative relationship between these two dramatists.
