Marlowe and the Greeks



Marlowe and the Greeks[i]

The definitive version is available at blackwell-.

Neil Rhodes

The two most obvious characteristics of Marlowe’s writing, recognised by his contemporaries as well as by modern audiences and readers, are its driving rhetorical energy (the ‘mighty line’, as Jonson termed it) and a pervasive spirit of irony and skepticism. Yet these two qualities do not cohabit very easily. The lyric violence of the first seems single-minded, the product of uncomplicated inspiration, but it is always and inevitably compromised by the doubleness implicit in the second quality. So we have a writer who appears to be both primitive and sophisticated, bardic and critical, at the same time. In a sense, we could see Marlowe as being simultaneously both ‘early’ and ‘late’. This is perhaps not quite as paradoxical as it seems, since while he has an originating role with regard to the Elizabethan theatre – something that he cultivated in the opening lines of Tamburlaine – he is clearly also the product of late humanism. His English versions of Latin poetry in the translations of Ovid, Virgil (in The Tragedy of Dido) and Lucan, the first two probably done while at Cambridge, are testament to his classicism and have frequently been discussed. But what of Marlowe’s engagement with Greek literature? There has been a tacit assumption that Greek had little impact on English writing in the late sixteenth century, though it has always been acknowledged that the same writing is steeped in Roman influence. What I want to suggest here is that the influence of Greek should not be written off so completely and, more specifically, that it may help to account for the unusual combination of the lyrical/heroic and ironic impulses in Marlowe, both his ‘early’ and ‘late’ selves.

Unlike most of his contemporaries, who allude to Marlowe’s supposed atheism, Michael Drayton, writing toward the end of his life, remembered him as follows:

Next Marlow bathed in the Thespian springs

Had in him those brave translunary things,

That the first Poets had, his raptures were,

All air and fire, which made his verses cleere,

For that fine madness still he did retaine,

Which rightly should possesse a Poets braine.[ii]

The ‘brave translunary things’ and the elements of air and fire identify Marlowe with Tamburlaine, who inspires Theridamas to declare that ‘he is grosse and like the massie earth/ That mooves not upwards’ (1 Tam 2.7.31-2),[iii] while the ‘fine madness’ references the poetic frenzy of Plato’s Phaedrus. What is particularly striking, however, is that Drayton sees him as original, bardic and inspired, ‘like the first poets’. These poets are, of course, Greek, and we might assume that Drayton has Homer and Hesiod in mind, but he is almost certainly thinking of Musaeus, who supplied the source for Hero and Leander. Musaeus in fact wrote no earlier than the 5th century CE, but in the Renaissance he was confused with the mythical ‘Mousaios’, a contemporary of Orpheus himself.[iv] This is why early modern readers saw the poem as ‘an extraordinary primal text’, as Gordon Braden has put it.[v] It is a confusion that also allows us to see the source, as well as what Marlowe made of it, as both early and late.

Marlowe’s poem is more likely to belong to 1592-3 than to his Cambridge period, but it tells us something about how he wanted to position himself as a writer. It would have been much more obvious to go to Ovid for a myth-based erotic narrative, and Marlowe’s poem is certainly Ovidian in spirit, but it must have been important to him to have a Greek rather than a Roman model. In that respect he has an affinity with the two other major English writers who come to prominence during the 1580s, Sidney and Spenser. Sidney’s Apology for Poetry is full of references to Greek literature and philosophy, especially Plato, and is designed at least in part as a response to Plato’s attack on poetry in the Republic. Lodowyck Bryskett, who was friendly with Spenser during his composition of The Faerie Queene, later recorded that he was ‘not only perfect in the Greek tongue, but also very well read in Philosophie’ and had offered to help Bryskett learn the language.[vi] One attraction of Greek to Sidney and Spenser was its association with Protestantism, since it was the Greek text of the New Testament established by Erasmus that had become the vehicle for the translation of the Bible into English.[vii] This would not in itself, perhaps, have been much of a recommendation to Marlowe, but the role of Greek as an originator and ‘pure source’ would have been, as would its role in critiquing the authority of custom and tradition.

When Marlowe arrived at Cambridge in 1580, Greek had been taught in England for less than seventy years, but by the 1540s it was firmly established in the University curriculum. Although Greek studies had initially taken root at Oxford, and this is what had attracted Erasmus there on his first visit to England in late 1499, it was at Cambridge that the subject eventually had the greater success. Erasmus did not make much progress in embedding it during the tenure of his lectureship from 1511 to 1514, but the subject was developed first by Richard Croke, from 1518, and then, spectacularly, by his successor, John Cheke, who was rewarded with the first Regius Chair of Greek in 1540. Cheke’s inspirational teaching drew audiences of over two hundred, who heard him read through the major classical authors, including Sophocles twice.[viii] He introduced an entire generation of students to Greek literature and also turned his own college, St Johns, into the premier institution for the Arts in either university. One St Johns fellow (and former pupil), Roger Ascham, who was to teach Greek to the future Queen Elizabeth, as Cheke did the future King Edward, wrote in a letter to Johns’ alumnus, John Brandesby, in 1542:

Aristotle and Plato are now read in their own language by the boys – as indeed

we have done for five years in our own college. Sophocles and Euripides are

more familiar than Plautus was when you were here. Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon are more on the lips and in the hands than Titus Livius was then.

Now you would hear of Demosthenes what once you did of Cicero. More copies of Isocrates are in the boys’ hands than were formerly of Terence.[ix]

After allowing for an element of exaggeration, we should then bear in mind that this was the generation which supplied the teachers of many of the poets and dramatists who were to emerge during the Elizabethan era. Another St Johns fellow at the time of Ascham’s letter was Thomas Ashton, who became Headmaster of Shrewsbury, where Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville learned their Greek. Richard Mulcaster, who was responsible for Spenser’s prowess in the language, and also taught Thomas Kyd, Thomas Lodge and Lancelot Andrewes, was considerably younger than Ashton, matriculating at King’s College in 1548. Since Cheke had been appointed tutor to Prince Edward in 1544, Mulcaster would not have heard his lectures, but Cheke also joined King’s in 1548 as the new Provost, and Mulcaster records that he made a gift to the college of texts of Xenophon and Euclid for the use of the students, from which he personally benefitted.[x] The academic culture that formed the most influential teacher of the Elizabethan era, as far as literature is concerned, was one in which Greek was thriving.

In understanding Cheke’s legacy, and its relevance to Marlowe, we need also to think beyond the confines of the book. We rely so completely on the evidence of the printed text in our reconstruction of literary history, and now relate this ever more closely to the history of the book, that we tend to neglect the fact that early modern culture remained strongly oral, and remarkably so in educational practice. Education obviously helped to shape the writers of this period, not least because it was grounded in language, literature and composition, but its influence will have been felt as much through what students heard as through what they read. Cheke’s students, as well as hearing much of the corpus of classical Greek literature, would also have heard translation in action. His biographer, John Strype, records that Cheke switched spontaneously between languages in his lectures: ‘[he] had also an excellent Judgement in Translation, and a notable Faculty that way; a good and useful piece of learning; to translate properly out of Greek into Latin, and Greek or Latin into our Mother Tongue’ and ‘would often English his matter upon a sudden, by looking on the Book only; without reading or construing any thing at all.’[xi] Although Cheke’s own literary work remained unpublished, his long-term legacy was to foster a culture of translation in Elizabethan England. Those who heard him lecture included Roger Ascham, who advocated Cheke’s practice of ‘double translation’; William Cecil, who had read the Greek lecture at St John’s at the age of eighteen and who acted as a patron for translation through his circle at Cecil House on the Strand; [xii] Thomas Wilson (Strype’s source), who published the first English translation of Demosthenes (1570), and Thomas Hoby, the translator of Castiglione’s Courtier (1561). Later St John’s students looked back on his achievements with awe. In his preface to Greene’s Menaphon, Thomas Nashe produced a roll-call of great modern translators: after tracing the practice of translation back to Erasmus’s Latin versions of Greek authors, he singles out Cheke for extravagant praise, calling him ‘the Exchequer of eloquence . . . supernaturally traded in all tongs’.[xiii] The metaphor turns the lecture theatre into a treasury where Cheke almost miraculously demonstrates his facility in turning one verbal currency into another. Nashe’s celebration of the culture of translation in England was addressed to a student audience, and it was through his engagement with this translation culture that Marlowe, two years ahead of him, started to fashion himself as a writer. What I want to stress here is that he did so in an academic environment that moved between Latin, Greek and English, and one that was also very much alive to the sound of the text and of the verse line itself.

As a writer, Marlowe began with Latin but ended with Greek, working his way back to the pure source. We cannot be sure if his Lucan is early or late. It is certainly very accomplished, and if late it would fit that trajectory, offering another pathway to Greek through its associations with Longinus and the sublime, as Patrick Cheney has argued.[xiv] And there are perfectly good reasons why Marlowe might have come to see Greek as a model for English. The perception that English is closer to Greek than to Latin is at least as old as Tyndale, who claimed in The Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) that English was an entirely adequate medium for the New Testament because ‘the Greek tongue agreeth more with the English than with the Latin’.[xv] This was echoed by Sir Thomas Elyot, the first Englishman on Nashe’s list of great translators and probably the first person to translate directly from Greek into English, who pointed out in the preface to his Isocrates: ‘the forme of speakyng, used of the Greekes, called in greeke, and also in latine, Phrasis, muche nere approcheth to that, which at this daie we use: than the order of the latine tunge.’[xvi] One affinity between Greek and English, which Sir Philip Sidney noted, is the tendency towards compound formulations: ‘English is particularly happy in compositions of two or three words together, near the Greek, far beyond the Latin’.[xvii] Because much Greek literature (including Musaeus) was translated into Latin before it reached the vernacular, we tend to see classical Greek as doubly remote from English. But this is not quite how it was perceived in the sixteenth century. In fact, the arrival of Greek had the effect of disrupting the traditional binary of elite Latin and common English, and it is no coincidence that Greek scholars figure so prominently in the translation culture eulogised by Nashe. Cheke himself translated the New Testament Greek of Matthew and part of Mark into ‘pure’ Anglo-Saxon English. Philhellenism in this period went hand in hand not just with Protestantism but with an agenda for the English language and for English literature.[xviii]

For Marlowe, whose apprenticeship for the stage was served through verse translation, the vital element to get right was metre, and here too Greek offered a model for English. The dialogue parts of Greek tragedy were written in iambic trimeter because this was thought to bear the closest resemblance to the rhythms of ordinary speech, and Seneca’s Latin tragedies followed the same procedure. The metre was of course quantitative, not accentual-syllabic, a fact that all young scholars were painfully aware of, having had to spend many laborious hours learning the quantities of Greek and Latin words (now quite meaningless) for the purposes of verse composition. Marlowe’s friend, Thomas Watson, would have been particularly sensitive to this, since he had published a Latin translation of Sophocles’ Antigone in 1581. The achievement of the English drama, as was recognised long ago, was to find a metre sufficiently flexible to sound both elevated and natural in its representation of speech, and this meant abandoning the attempt to reproduce quantitative metrical patterns in English. This is the story of ‘blank verse’, which begins with Surrey’s translation of Books 2 and 4 of the Aeneid, continues in its non-dramatic form in Marlowe’s Lucan, and finds triumphant expression on the stage in Marlowe’s signature style in Tamburlaine. The English term itself is first used by either Nashe or Greene. There is, however, another way to tell this story, which would focus not on the development of ‘blank verse’ in English, but of ‘iambics’. This would begin with Ascham, who argues that ‘I am sure our English tounge will receive carmen iambicum as naturally as either Greek or Latin’ and continues with William Webbe, who puts it the other way round: ‘[t]he naturall course of most English verses seemeth to run uppon the olde Iambicke stroake’.[xix] What his phrase ‘iambic stroke’ points to is the adaptability of the quantitative metre of Greek and Roman tragedy to native accentual-syllabic verse.

It is this version of the story that Joseph Hall prefers in his satirical collection Virgidemiarum (1597). Citing ‘the Turkish Tamberlaine’ in Satire 3, he ridicules the consumers of the Marlovian verse line, ‘[r]apt to the threefold loft of heavens height’, and the pretensions of the playwright, who, if he can ‘[f]aire patch me vp his pure Iambick verse/He rauishes the gazing Scaffolders’.[xx] Hall was a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, so he would have known what he was talking about when he referred to ‘pure Iambick verse’, and although writing satirically, the note of admiration is also clear. The passage ends by chiming with Drayton’s representation of Marlowe thirty years later as a theatrical poet who could produce a sense of ‘rapture’ and ‘ravishment’ in an audience through the primal energy of his verse. By describing it as ‘pure’, Hall rather takes the edge off his mockery, but it is the choice of the term ‘iambick’ that is particularly interesting. Although Ascham uses the term neutrally, and to refer to both Greek and Latin, ‘iambics’ in Elizabethan England were usually associated with Archilochus, a Greek poet whose incantatory verse had such power that it was able to drive his father-in-law to suicide, so the term was, in fact, shorthand for a particularly lethal form of metrical power.[xxi] In the following satire Hall specifically assimilates the term ‘iambics’ to blank verse when he sweepingly dismisses ‘Tragick Poesie’ in general, claiming that it is ‘[t]oo popular’ and ‘doth besides on Rimelesse numbers tread,/Vnbid Iambicks flow from careless head’. But his choice of word points to the Greek origins of English tragic metre, and the expression ‘pure iambics’ [my italics] seems to represent perfectly the effect Marlowe was trying to achieve.

The first point I want to establish, then, is that what Greek meant to Marlowe is also what it meant to other, very different sixteenth-century writers: that it was, paradoxically, both the pure source and the mediator between classical and vernacular literary form. But this is not to reactivate the question as to whether or not Elizabethans had direct access to Greek tragedy; nor do I want to try to estimate Marlowe’s debt to the Greek of Musaeus, which has already been discussed persuasively and in detail by Gordon Braden. Instead, I want to move from verse to prose, because while the modern reader will see the core of Greek literature as being represented by Homer and the three great tragedians, a sixteenth-century reader would have been more likely to be familiar with Isocrates, Plutarch, Demosthenes, Xenophon and Lucian, either in an academic context (possibly with a parallel Latin text) or through English translation. The first English writer to popularise Greek, Sir Thomas Elyot, echoed Xenophon in his dedication to The Governor (1531) and inserted English versions of Xenophon, Lucian, Plutarch and Plato in the body of the text, which went through eight editions to 1580, the year of Marlowe’s matriculation at Cambridge.[xxii] Elyot also produced a separate English translation of the pseudo-Lucianic Cynicus in 1532. At the academic end of the market, and later in the century, the most successful Greek textbook was a selection from Isocrates, Plutarch and Lucian published by Henry Bynneman in 1581, which appeared in five editions to 1599.[xxiii] In between, there were English translations of Xenophon (1532, c.1552), Isocrates (1533, 1557, 1580), Demosthenes (1570), and an extensive range of Plutarch in addition to North’s Lives (1579), but none of Greek tragedy and none of Homer until Hall’s translation from the French in 1581.[xxiv] So it is Greek prose, not the poetry and drama, that is prominent in the sixteenth century, and the two writers I want to focus on now are Xenophon and Lucian. As well as explaining their significance more generally in the period, I shall return to my opening question and argue that it is Xenophon and Lucian who can offer, at least in part, some explanation of the unusual mix of the heroic and the sceptical – or wonder and irony – that we find in Marlowe, especially in his two most popular plays, Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus.

2.

In addition to Homer and Greek tragedy, Plato would also form part of the modern reader’s idea of the central Greek authors. But though Sidney engages with Plato in the Apology, and gives him the honorary status of a poet (which is why he thinks it strange that Plato should have banished the poets from his Republic), no work of Plato’s was translated into English before 1592, when Spenser (probably) published a version of the pseudo-Platonic Axiochus.[xxv] Xenophon, on the other hand, could have been read in English from 1532 when Gentian Hervet translated the Oeconomicus, a work that went through six editions to 1573. One of the obstacles to our reconstructing an accurate history of classical influence in sixteenth-century England is a retrospective view of status. While Plato has had an enormous and continuing influence on Western thought, Xenophon is now known mainly for the Anabasis, the story of the return of the 10,000 from Babylon to the shores of the Black Sea, which has influenced some military science-fiction and fantasy novels and is recognized by the single, much-quoted exclamation, ‘the sea, the sea !’ It is less often remembered that he was also a pupil of Socrates and wrote dialogues such as the Hiero, which weighs the burdens of being an absolute ruler against the contentment of the private life. An English translation of this work, once thought to be by Queen Elizabeth, survives in Cambridge University Library.[xxvi] But it is neither the Oeconomicus nor the Hiero that accounts for the high prestige of Xenophon in the early modern period, when he was valued above all for the Cyropaideia, a work in eight books recounting the education and heroic exploits of the Persian ruler, Cyrus the Great. In addition to Latin versions, the Cyropaideia was translated into all the major European vernaculars: Italian in 1521, German in 1540, French in 1547,and Spanish in 1586. In England a translation by William Barker was published in c.1552, completed and reprinted in 1567 [xxvii] Its exemplary character placed it in the ‘mirror for princes’ tradition, though it was recognized that Xenophon’s idealization and romanticisation of his subject made it essentially a work of fiction. Some modern classical scholars even see it as the first novel.[xxviii]

The clearest statement of the importance of Xenophon’s Cyropaideia for Elizabethan literature comes from Spenser, who explained why he was adopting it as the model for The Faerie Queene in the letter to Raleigh:

For this cause is Xenophon preferred before Plato, for that the one

in the exquisite depth of his iudgement, formed a Commune welth

such as it should be, but the other in the person of Cyrus and the

Persians fashioned a gouernment such as might best be: So much

more profitable and gratious is doctrine by ensample, then by rule.[xxix]

This aspect of Spenser’s work has been very ably discussed by Jane Grogan.[xxx] One point I would add here is the importance of pedagogical tradition. The Greek text of the Cyropaideia was almost certainly the book (or books) that Cheke gifted to King’s College and which Mulcaster would have used as a student. Mulcaster was later to put it on the syllabus at Merchant Taylors, as Ashton did at Shrewsbury, which is where Philip Sidney would first have encountered the work, and Xenophon’s Cyrus is as important to Sidney’s Apology for Poetry as it is to Spenser’s prospectus for The Faerie Queene.[xxxi] Sidney mentions Xenophon’s work six times in the Apology, comparing Cyrus with Virgil’s Aeneas, citing Cicero’s approval and describing the Cyropaideia as ‘an absolute heroical poem’. It is also the first literary example he gives following his definition of ‘poets’ as writers who aim to teach and delight through the process of imitation. Here Sidney is distinguishing true poets from those who ‘deal with matters philosophical’, so what he says is a fit with Spenser’s preference for Xenophon over Plato; but the main reason why the Cyropaideia is so important to the Apology is that it provides Sidney with the principal support for his argument that poetry is superior to history. By moving Xenophon from the one to the other and referring to his hero as the ‘feigned Cyrus’, Sidney inoculates Xenophon from the charge of simply telling lies, and argues instead that this work offers both poets and readers an ideal to aspire to through the process of imitation.[xxxii]

We cannot produce quite such a neat pedagogical genealogy for Marlowe’s Greek learning as we can for Spenser and Sidney. But though Marlowe’s headmaster, John Gresshop, had studied at Oxford, not Cambridge, he could not entirely escape Cheke’s influence, since Cheke helped to write the Cambridge statutes of 1549, which were designed for both universities. Here it was stipulated that ‘[t]he professor of the Greek language shall lecture in Homer, Demosthenes, Isocrates, Euripides, or some other of the more ancient authors, and at the same time shall teach the art, together with the properties of the tongue’. The reference to the ‘art’ of the language indicates composition in Greek, and earlier the statutes specify that the Professor should offer translations of the Greek authors so this was a practical and practice-oriented regime. All students up to BA level were required to study Greek, and this requirement, along with the Professor’s duties are repeated in the Elizabethan statutes.[xxxiii] Gresshop would certainly have studied Greek as an undergraduate and his success as a scholar was sufficient to get him elected to a Studentship (ie fellowship) at Christ Church before going to Canterbury. Greek books in his library included Isocrates, Demosthenes, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Plato (though in Latin), Sophocles, Aristophanes and Thucydides. He owned two Greek New Testaments, various grammars and syntaxes, and the treatise on pronunciation that Sir Thomas Smith had worked on with Cheke, ‘De linguae graecae pronunciatione’. Volumes of particular interest for us are ‘Some of Zenophon translated into English’ and ‘Luciani dialogi aliquot’ (as well as ‘Eliottes governor’ and ‘Agrippa de vanitate Scientaris’).[xxxiv] Gressop’s library consisted of some 350 volumes, an impressive collection, and Canterbury was a good academic school. Even during play time, the statutes stipulated, the boys ‘shall never use any language but Latin or Greek’.[xxxv] How far Marlowe progressed with Greek is impossible to establish, but that he studied Greek at school must be beyond doubt.

While this article has the broader aim of bringing the acquaintance of Elizabethan writers with Greek a little more into view, one specific point I want to establish here is the likelihood of Marlowe using Xenophon’s Cyropaideia as a model for Tamburlaine.[xxxvi] The work was widely admired as a speculum principis, adopted as an example of ‘historical poesy’ by the two new English poets, Sidney and Spenser, and was easily accessible in English translation, as well as featuring on school and university curricula in Greek. It seems unlikely that when Marlowe decided to launch his dramatic career in 1587 with a play about a warrior king conquering territories from Byzantium and Egypt to the Indus, he would not have had in mind the exploits of the unstoppable Cyrus the Great. Since it is not possible to establish which text Marlowe would have read (and, anyway, if he had studied the Greek, with or without a Latin text as a help, he would almost certainly have consulted Barker’s English version as well) I shall cite a modern translation. A brief outline will indicate what it offered to Marlowe. Xenophon begins by explaining that Cyrus

was able to extend fear of himself to so much of the world that he intimidated

all, and no one attempted anything against him; and he was able to implant in

all so great a desire of gratifying him that they always thought it proper to be governed by his judgement. He attached himself to so many nations that it would be a task even to pass through them.[xxxvii]

This is why ‘this man was worthy of wonder’ and why his opponents ‘wondered at the strength of his soul’ (pp 23, 119). Most of the narrative recounts Cyrus marching from victory to victory, the armour of his troops gleaming in the sun (pp 198, 202); his actions correspond with his words (p 244) and he recognizes the importance of getting people onside (p 270). The high point is the capture of Babylon, the richest city in the world, when Cyrus declares that he ‘is desirous of establishing himself in the way he held to be fitting for a king’ (p 224). But there are also romantic interludes, notably in the story of Panthea, who commits suicide after her husband is killed, and there are reflective moments, as in Cyrus’s statement, ‘I have seen human beings who wish to seem to possess more than they have, thinking that in this way they would appear to be more free’ (p 259).

The similarities between the main storylines of Tamburlaine and the Cyropaideia are fairly obvious: both are episodic, heroic narratives which recount the triumphal progress of, quite literally, ‘larger than life’ conquerors. But Marlowe’s play also responds to other aspects of Xenophon. The suicide of Panthea, the captured wife of Abradatas, King of Susia, who Cyrus hands over to the custody of Araspas in Book 5, is echoed in the Olympia-Theridamas scenes in 2 Tamburlaine (3.4 and 4.2). Romance elements are more prominent in the Cyropaideia than they are in Tamburlaine, but they appear at significant moments in Marlowe’s work and a Xenophonic model would help to account for the most puzzling of these. The long soliloquy in 1 Tamburlaine 5.1, which is prompted by romantic reflections on Zenocrate, is a unique and completely atypical passage of introspective debate on Tamburlaine’s part. Its subject is whether the truly noble warrior should allow himself to be affected by beauty and it concludes with the verdict ‘[t]hat Vertue solely is the sum of glorie/And fashions men with true nobility’ (5.1.189-90). The question as to whether what is ((((( (noble, fine) is also (((((( (good, virtuous) is a major issue for Xenophon, as Wayne Ambler points out in the introduction to his translation of the text. But ((((( also means beautiful, and this can create difficulties for the translator. The issue is highlighted in the debate between Cyrus and Araspas in 5.1 (p 143) where Cyrus argues that the noble and the good should not allow themselves to be overcome by beauty (in this case, the beauty of Panthea). Commentators on Tamburlaine’s soliloquy have suspected textual corruption in the speech, and this may indeed be the case, but the rather confusing rotation of concepts by Marlowe may also reflect their Greek origins in the semantic field of (((((, which covers beauty, nobility and virtue. This is one of the most celebrated passages in Marlowe’s plays, but it has an extraneous feel to it, since it is a philosophical as well as a romantic interlude. What I suggest we have here is a remnant of the Socratic side of Xenophon.

When we turn to Barker’s English translation we can see immediately another feature of Xenophon’s work that would undoubtedly have appealed to Marlowe, which is its highly rhetorical character. In his preface Barker refers to those who ‘lacke the streame of eloquence, which floweth with delite to please the dainty eares and can roughly hew the matter to serve for good purpose, but yet lacke the swift violence of sweet runnynge talke, to cary away the indifferent mynd to their intented pourpose’.[xxxviii] The language of this passage is not exceptional (there are similar passages in Quintilian), but it underlines the point that, in addition to his other powers, Xenophon’s Cyrus is supremely eloquent. In Barker’s translation this is emphasized by his labeling certain set-piece speeches ‘The Oration of Cyrus’ to produce a combination of action and oratory that is quasi-dramatic. It is a combination that is mirrored in Marlowe’s play. This is not something that forms part of the treatment of Tamburlaine in Whetstone’s English Mirror, which was Marlowe’s principal source, so it may well have been English Cyrus that provided the cue for his development of Tamburlaine’s eloquence, and consequently for the ‘mighty line’ itself, with its characteristic iambic drive.[xxxix]

There is a further way in which Barker’s English Cyrus may have contributed to Marlowe’s signature verse line formulated in Tamburlaine. This is through is the play called The Wars of Cyrus, one of the earliest private theatre productions and probably written by Richard Farrant, Master of the Children of the Chapel, in the late 1570s, though not published until 1594. The play’s editor, J. P. Brawner, established that the author ‘almost certainly used the Bercker translation’, and subsequently G. K. Hunter wrote a brief note on the play which demonstrated its close stylistic affinity with Marlowe.[xl] A general impression of the style of The Wars of Cyrus can be gained from this:

O Abradates, worthy man at arms

O Panthea, chaste, virtuous, and amiable,

This office Cyrus to your wandering ghost

Reserves in store, to grace your funerals

With monuments of fatal ebony,

Of cedar, marble, jet and during brass

That future worlds and infants yet unborn,

May kiss the tombs wherein your bodies lie

And wonder at the virtues of your mind (5.3.1677-85)

Hunter then quoted a further eight instances where individual lines have unmistakeable echoes in Marlowe. The evidence for an early date for The Wars of Cyrus is quite strong, and this would need to be successfully challenged for us to avoid the conclusion that Marlowe is the imitator. Although he was unhappy at the prospect of calling Tamburlaine’s eloquence derivative, we might nowadays be less concerned about compromising the originality of genius, even if in this case it does little to validate Marlowe’s own quest for the pure source. I do not want to pursue this point here, since The Wars of Cyrus is a possible Greek model for Tamburlaine only at one remove, but Hunter’s note certainly reinforces the connections between Marlowe’s play and the figure of Cyrus and it is odd that it should have been passed over by recent editors.

There are, of course, other sources for Tamburlaine, most immediately Whetstone’s English Mirror, but recognizing the contribution of Xenophon to the play, and to Marlowe’s choice of subject in the first place, may help us to understand what he was trying to do at the outset of his writing career. Part of the key to this lies in the role of Xenophon’s Cyrus as a mirror for princes and, in particular, in the willingness of contemporary English writers, such as Sidney and Spenser, to adopt the idealized heroism of the Cyropaideia as a model for aspirant poets. Marlowe alludes to Cyrus on the first page of Tamburlaine, but the ‘mirror’ in which his own hero’s actions are displayed is a ‘tragic glass’ and his audience is drily invited to ‘applaud his fortunes as you please’. Marlowe may not have read Mulcaster’s warning that ‘I do not hold Tamerlane, or any barbarous, and bloody invasions to be meanes to true nobilitie, which come for scourges’, but that remark suggestively presents Tamburlaine as the exact antitype of the Xenophonic Cyrus, which may well have been part of Marlowe’s plan.[xli] Nor do we know whether Marlowe read Erasmus’s Education of a Christian Prince, the most famous Renaissance speculum principis, where Cyrus and other classical heroes are dismissed as [Latin] ‘great raging bandits’, but if he did he would certainly have relished Erasmus’s ironic, skeptical touch there.[xlii] What I suggest that Marlowe was trying to do with Tamburlaine was to present an alternative version of the idealized Cyrus admired by Sidney and Spenser, a version that emphasizes his debt to a very different Greek author, the 1st century rhetorician and satirist, Lucian.

3.

In the year that Marlowe went up to Cambridge, Gabriel Harvey wrote to Spenser about the current state of learning in the university:

Tully, and Demosthenes nothing so much studyed, as they were wonte:

Liuie, and Salust possiblye rather more than lesse: Lucian never so

much: Aristotle muche named, but little read: Xenophon and Plato,

reckned amongest Discoursers, and conceited Superficiall fellowes:

much verball and sophisticall iangling: little subtile and effectuall

disputing.[xliii]

As to modern literature, everybody is reading the Italians: ‘Matchiavell a great man . . . Vnico Aretino over many acquainted with’. Harvey’s letter offers a revealing snapshot of the reading culture at Cambridge at the time of Marlowe’s arrival. What he deplores, or affects to deplore, since elsewhere in his correspondence with Spenser he praises the same writers, is the vogue for iconoclasm: Lucian especially – skeptical, satirical, his name a byword for atheism – and modern Lucians such as Aretino are a bad influence on the students, making them scoff at morally serious writers like Xenophon and Plato (note the order of the names), Harvey complains. Though not as bad, republican Livy points in the same direction. Marlowe would undoubtedly have found all this highly congenial. He would almost certainly have encountered Lucian at school, since his pure Attic style and conversational idiom had established him as a primer for Greek language learning for decades, despite his dubious reputation.[xliv] We know that Gresshop had a copy of Lucian in his library at Canterbury, and Marlowe’s biographer, Park Honan even suggests that Marlowe ‘reacted to Lucian in unique, unprecedented ways, took him over, even fiercely held him close as a private treasure’.[xlv]

Reading Lucian in England in 1580 probably meant reading him in Latin. Very little had appeared in English, though thirty dialogues had been translated into French by Geofroy Tory (who had also translated Xenophon and Plutarch) in 1529 and we know that Edward VI owned a copy of Nicolo da Lonigo’s 1525 Italian translation. Nevertheless, it was the Latin translations of Erasmus and More, first published in Paris by Badius in 1506, expanded in 1514 and many times reprinted, that were most widely available.[xlvi] The first London printing was by Wynkyn de Worde in 1528, but they appeared much more frequently in continental editions. The Erasmus-More translations remained popular throughout Europe during the sixteenth century, despite Lucian himself acquiring notoriety as an atheist: after turning against Erasmus, Luther reviled him as ‘much worse than Lucian, mocking all things under the name of holiness’.[xlvii] This is a complete misrepresentation of Erasmus, of course, but it is an image of Lucian that would have appealed to Marlowe, given his skeptical treatment of different faiths in both Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta. Nor did Lucian’s reputation deter Harvey from acquiring an edition of his works. In a copy of Howleglas now in the Bodleian Library, he records in a marginal note that this, along with Scoggin, Skelton and Lazarillo de Tormes had been given to him by Spenser in a wager that he read them by I January (1579) or forfeit ‘my Lucian jn fower volumes’.[xlviii] Both the undergraduates and their tutors, it seems, were familiar with Lucian when Marlowe went up to Cambridge.

One of the first dialogues translated by Erasmus for the collaborative volume with More was Toxaris. This is an important contribution to the sixteenth-century literature of friendship. Erasmus sent it to Richard Foxe as a New Year’s gift for 1506, and the accompanying letter makes clear the very high value Erasmus placed upon friendship, not least in his relationship with More.[xlix] There is also a record of a ‘Toxaris, or the Friendship of Lucian, translated out of Greke into English. With a Dedication to his Friend A.S. from A.O.’, apparently published by Edward Sutton in 1565, but now lost, and Spenser draws on Toxaris for his View of the Present State of Ireland.[l] The dialogue is between a Greek, Mnesippus, and a Scythian, Toxaris, who explains why the Scythians attach such importance to friendship and give quasi-divine status to the most celebrated of loyal friends, even sacrificing to them. His first example is that of Orestes and Pylades, whose ‘passion’ for each other ‘was not characteristic of human beings, but of some nobler cast of mind than most men can aspire to’.[li] They are invoked at the end of the first act of 1 Tamburlaine, when Tamburlaine affirms an unbreakable bond of friendship with his first companion, Theridamas:

Thus shall my heart be still combinde with thine,

Untill our bodies turne to Elements . . .

And by the love of Pyllades and Orestes,

Whose statues we adore in Scythia,

Thy selfe and them shall never part from me.[lii] (1.2.235-6, 243-5)

Since it is the Greeks who provide the most famous examples of male friendship, Lucian’s dialogue (characteristically) goes against the grain, and this is something that seems to have fed into the representation of his Scythian hero in Tamburlaine. Another of Tamburlaine’s attributes that runs counter to the image of the Scythian as a byword for barbarousness is his eloquence, and this too Marlowe could have found in Toxaris, since after listening to Toxaris, Mnesippus concedes that the Scythians are not just ‘better warriors than others, they’re also the most persuasive speakers of all’ (p 206). If Cambridge students were immersed in Lucian in 1580, it seems likely that Marlowe would have looked at one of the best known of Erasmus’s Latin translations, finding matter not just for Tamburlaine, but also for Edward II.

Toxaris, however, does not supply the element of irony that colours Marlowe’s treament of his all-conquering Xenophonic hero, except insofar as it offers a somewhat counter-intuitive portrait of the Scythians. Erasmus himself had certainly provided a cue for an ironic treatment of Tamburlaine with his Lucianic observation that Cyrus and the like were really just ‘great raging bandits’. But the main Lucianic influence on Tamburlaine is likely to have come through another intermediary, Cornelius Agrippa. Agrippa’s Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie of Artes and Sciences, to give it the title used by James Sanford in his 1569 translation, is one of the most important Lucianic mock-declamations of the sixteenth century, and in England it leaves its mark on Nashe and Sidney, as well as on Marlowe.[liii] What Agrippa says about Cyrus is relevant to Tamburlaine, but it also takes us back to Sidney’s Apology. Sidney’s memorable assertion that the poet ‘nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth’ is a response to Plato, but more immediately it is a response to Agrippa. Agrippa deals with the Cyropaideia in his chapter on history, where he describes it as ‘a proper and trimme Historie, but without truthe’, and goes on to hold Xenophon responsible for all the romances penned by those ‘apte to lyinge by nature and industrie’, which he descibes as ‘those fained and foolishe dotages of Poets’.[liv] So Agrippa’s Xenophon has a lot to answer for, and in countering his charges against lying poets Sidney makes Xenophon equally prominent, though in exactly the opposite way. For Sidney, Xenophon’s portrayal of Cyrus shows poetry at its best because it offers a heroic ideal that readers may be inspired to emulate. In fact, Sidney was well aware that Agrippa’s treatise was meant to be ironic, but he managed to manipulate his arguments to create an exclusion zone around poetry.[lv] As for Agrippa himself, his satirical redescription of history as fiction comes directly from Lucian’s more parodic works, How to Write History, A True Story (in its Latin version, Vera Historia, his most popular work in the sixteenth century), and The Lover of Lies (translated by More as Philopseudes). It is the Vera Historia that establishes the principle of the ‘specious lie’ and, from that, the characteristic Lucianic genre which invites the reader to spot the irony.[lvi] This is certainly one aspect of Lucian’s appeal to his student readers at Cambridge in 1580 and it is probably what Harvey means when he refers to ‘verball and sophisticall jangling’.

What Marlowe seizes from this is the license to produce history as caricature, creating not a heroic exemplum, but a megalomaniac rampage which invites the audience to consider what a larger-than-life warrior might really be like, at the same time as it offers satisfyingly sensationalist entertainment. Introducing his superhero with the non-commital invitation to the audience to ‘applaud his fortunes as you please’ is partly conventional, but it also suggests a deliberate withdrawal from the kind of exemplary fiction advocated by Sidney and Spenser. Although Tamburlaine shares many of the outward features of Xenophon’s Cyrus, he is in crucial respects a precise inversion of him: where Xenophon’s hero is a paragon of moderation and justice, Marlowe’s character is driven to sadistic excess, debasing the powerful in satirically contrived postures of subjection. This is not particularly Lucianic, but it conforms with the most negative sixteenth-century images of Lucian as a demolition expert, an atheistical mocker of all established authority.

What is certainly Lucianic, however, is the ironic treatment of the Tamburlaine ideology of total war in Part Two where Tamburlaine’s non-martial son, Calyphas, sits out a battle, playing cards and talking about sex with his friend, Perdicas. As the noise of was rages furiously in the background (SD: ‘Alarme’), Calyphas comments: ‘What a coyle they keepe, I beleeve there will be some hurt done anon amongst them’ (4.1.74-5) It is a wonderfully succinct deflation of his father’s entire raison d’être. It is also in Part Two that we see the skepticism towards religion, which transfers Lucian’s ironic treatment of the truth claims of different philosophers to different faiths.[lvii] Marlowe pointedly makes the Christian king, Sigismund of Hungary, break the ‘solemn covenants’ made with the Moslem Orcanes (2.2), and then trumps this with the scene in which Tamburlaine is struck down after burning the ‘Turkish Alcoran’ (5.1). There are different ways of reading the grim irony of this ‘retribution’, but it is, of course, just about the only thing Tamburlaine does that would have met with unequivocal approval from orthodox Christians. Tamburlaine is clearly constructed from a number of different sources, not least from accounts of the historical Tamburlaine himself, but to make sense of the way in which he handles his subject we should go to the Greeks: to Xenophon’s Cyrus for the pattern of relentless conquest, but then to Lucian, and to early modern Lucianists like Agrippa, for the ironic colouring of the pattern. Greek literature provides Marlowe with a paradigm both for the ideal and its travesty.

Agrippa was notorious in the sixteenth century as a magician, through his authorship of De Occulta Philosophia, as well as a Lucianic ironist, and it is in that role that he provides one of the models for the character of Doctor Faustus. But Marlowe draws upon Agrippa’s other role too, since it is the supposed pointlessness of the arts and sciences that leads Faustus to magic in the first place. In fact, it was Lucian and Agrippa that Mulcaster cited when he warned of the dangers of rejecting learning, condeming in his literalist condemnation of writers who ‘vaunt . . . against the good in learning, as Lucian doth in most places of hole works, as Agrippa doth in his vane book of vanities in science’.[lviii] A full discussion of Lucianism and Doctor Faustus would require a separate article,[lix] so I will end with a single point about what is undoubtedly the most famous Greek moment in Marlowe:[lx]

Was this the face that Launcht a thousand ships,

And burnt the toplesse Towers of Ilium. (5.1 [1768-9])

Marlowe’s line is taken from Dialogues of the Dead, one of Erasmus’s Latin translations, where Menippus is addressing Hermes, who has showed him Helen’s skull on a tour of the underworld: ‘Was it then for this that the thousand ships were manned from all Greece, for this that so many Greeks and barbarians fell, and so many cities were devastated?’[lxi] This is appropriate enough for a Morality play, but it becomes easier to see what Marlowe is doing with Helen if we set this passage alongside one from another dialogue which he would be likely to have read, Lucian’s ‘The Judgement of the Goddesses’ from Dialogues of the Gods. Here, Aphrodite tempts Paris with the promise of the famous Grecian beauty: ‘I promise that I will give you Helen to wife . . . It is in your power to buy everything – her love, her beauty, and her hand – at the price of this apple . . . On these conditions I award you the apple: take it on these conditions’.[lxii] In this dialogue Paris’s temptation, and his cataclysmic decision to accept the offer, provides an exact parallel to Faustus’s bargain with the devil. What Marlowe does is to split the exchange, introducing Faustus’s request to Mephistophilis in 1.5, but saving the consummation of his desire in the scene with Helen until Act Five. It shows his Hellenism penetrating the most orthodox Christian moments of the play, which nevertheless moves with merciless logic to ensure that the judgement of the goddesses is superseded by the judgement of God.

Marlowe would probably have encountered the Dialogues of the Gods along with Dialogues of the Dead at school, since these are short pieces, highly suitable for elementary Greek language learning. They may well have fed into other early work, as Douglas Duncan suggests, pointing to the Lucianic quality of the Jove and Ganymede scene at the beginning of The Tragedy of Dido.[lxiii] But Marlowe’s response to Lucian is something to be measured less in terms of textual borrowing than in the development of an attitude of mind, as Honan implies when he speaks of his fierce attachment to the Greek writer. Harvey’s account of the reading culture at Cambridge in 1580 is highly significant, and it is surprising that Marlowe’s biographers have not made use of it, since it gives us a strong clue as to where he found his ironic, critical, oppositional voice. Harvey’s later observation, ‘Marlow a Lucian’, is a point of substance, not just an offhand insult.[lxiv] What happens in Tamburlaine, I have argued, is that Lucian becomes the skeptical agent that produces a more astringent reading of the warrior hero than Sidney and Spenser would have recommended, given their enthusiasm for Xenophon’s Cyrus. Marlowe also uses Cyrus as one of his models for Tamburlaine, but where Sidney takes issue with Agrippa’s contention that the poet lies, Marlowe gleefully seizes upon the same contention to legitimize an ironic reading of history as moral narrative. One of the most influential modern readings of Marlowe carried the title ‘Marlowe and the Will to Absolute Play’,[lxv] and Greek provides a context for this in the form of Xenophon’s Cyrus for the will and Lucian for the play.

There is more to Lucian than irony, as Toxaris shows, and there is more to Marlowe’s interest in Greek than Lucian, or in Xenophon read through Lucian. Ben Jonson’s lofty summary of Shakespeare’s learning (‘small Latine and lesse Greeke’) has too often been taken to mean ‘no Greek’, not just for Shakespeare, but for his contemporaries too. Marlowe would have been unlikely to have had the same level of Greek language skill as Sidney or Spenser, but he knew enough to engage with the text of Musaeus for Hero and Leander and he is likely to have used what other means he could (Latin, modern foreign language texts, English translation) to explore Greek literature more widely. It offered him a range of exciting opportunities: the authenticity of the pure source, the heroic ideal, and the spirit of irony that could cut through all of that. The characteristic mix of the lyrical and the sardonic in Marlowe may have other origins, but one of them is surely in Greek.

-----------------------

[i] I am most grateful to the British Academy for a research grant in support of the work for this article.

[ii] Michael Drayton, ‘To my Most Dearely-Loved Friend Henry Reynolds, Esquire, of Poets and Poesie’, in Works, ed. J. W. Hebel et al. (Oxford, 1931-41), 228.

[iii] References to Marlowe are to The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Fredson Bowers, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

[iv] See for example Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, rev. R. W. Maslen, 3rd edn. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 87.

[v] Gordon Braden, The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 56-7.

[vi] Lodowyck Bryskett, A Discourse of Civill Life (London, 1606), 25.

[vii] On the wider cultural associations of philhellenism and Protestantism see Victor Skretkowicz, European Erotic Romance: Philhellene Protestantism, Renaissance Translation and English Literary Politics (Manchester, 2010), especially 24-6.

[viii] Paul Strope Needham, ‘Sir John Cheke at Cambridge and at Court’, Unpublished PhD diss., Harvard University, 1971, 145.

[ix] The Whole Works of Roger Ascham, ed. J. A. Giles (London: J. R. Smith, 1864-65), 1:1, 26 (letter of 1542); translation from David McKitterick, A History of Cambridge University Press, vol. 1: Printing and the Book Trade, 1534-1698 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 43.

[x] Richard Mulcaster, Positions concerning the Training Up of Children, ed. William Barker (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 239.

[xi] John Strype, The Life of the Learned Sir John Cheke (London, 1705), 201.

[xii] The ‘Anonymous Life’ of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, ed. Alan G. R. Smith (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 44; Graham Parry, ‘Literary Patronage’, in The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, ed. David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 117-40 at 121-3.

[xiii] The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, rev. F. P. Wilson, 5 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), III, 317.

[xiv] Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Republican Authorship: Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 11-42.

[xv] William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, ed. David Daniell (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 19. Tyndale had translated Isocrates from Greek into English some time before 1522, when he presented his work to Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London, as part of his credentials for translating the Bible into English. The work is now lost.

[xvi] Thomas Elyot, The Doctrinall of Princis (London, 1533?], Aiir.

[xvii] Apology, rev. Maslen, 115.

[xviii] This argument is set out more fully in my article ‘Pure and Common Greek in Early Tudor England’, Translation and Literature, forthcoming.

[xix] Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster (1570), ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1967), 146; William Webbe, ‘A Discourse of English Poetrie’, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith, 2 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), I, 229.

[xx] The Collected Poems of Joseph Hall, ed. A. Davenport (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1949), 14.

[xxi] Nashe’s two references to iambics, for example, cite the Archilochus story (see McKerrow, I, 285; III, 369), and he does not seem to have made the connection between ‘iambics’ and ‘blank verse’. See also John Rainolds, who warns that young men may be ‘stained’ by ‘Iambicall speeches, as Aristotle termeth them’ and who compares Sir Thomas Elyot on the ‘beastly furie and extreme violence’ of football’ (Th’overthrow of stage-playes (London, 1599), 117).

[xxii] For Xenophon see Proem and Book 1, chapter 27; for Plutarch see Book 2, chapter 14 and Book 3, chapter 23; for Lucian see Book 1, chapter 20 (‘The Dancers’) and Book 3, chapter 27 (‘Slander’). For more on the Plutarch and Lucian passages see Donald W. Rude, A Critical Edition of Sir Thomas Elyot’s ‘The boke named the governour’ (New York: Garland, 1992) and David Marsh, ‘Lucian’s Slander in the Early Renaissance: The Court as locus invidiae’, Allegorica 21 (2000), 62-70.

[xxiii] On the printing of Greek language texts in England in the sixteenth century see Kirsty Milne, ‘The Forgotten Greek Books of Elizabethan England’, Literature Compass 4/3 (2007), 677-87.

[xxiv] In the case of Greek tragedy the only exceptions are Jane Lumley’s unpublished Iphigenia in Aulis and George Gascoigne and Francis Kinwelmersh’s Jocasta, translated from Dolce’s Italian version of Euripides’ Phoenissae.

[xxv] See Andrew Hadfield, ‘Spenser’s Translation of Axiochus’, unpublished paper.

[xxvi] Cambridge University Library Ms Ff.6.3; Leicester Bradner, ‘The Xenophon Translation Attributed to Queen Elizabeth 1’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964), 324-6.

[xxvii] See Jane Grogan, ‘”Many Cyruses”: Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and English Renaissance Humanism’, Hermathena 183 (2007), 163-74.

[xxviii] See for example Niklas Holzberg, The Ancient Novel, trans. Christine Jackson-Holzberg (London: Routledge, 1995). The view that Xenophon’s Cyrus is an idealised fiction is at least as old Cicero’s Letter to Quintus 1.1.23. It is repeated in sixteenth-century commentary and translation, eg. Lodovico Domenichi: ‘dicesi che discrisse Ciro Re de i Persi non quale egli era in effeto, ma quale egli havrebbe voluto che fosse stato’, Xenophonte della vita di Ciro (Vinegia, 1548), sig. A2r, and by Sidney in the Apology. Barker’s English translation is probably based on Domenichi.

[xxix] Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, 2nd edn. (Harlow: Pearson, 2001), 737.

[xxx] See Jane Grogan, Exemplary Spenser: Visual and Poetic Pedagogy in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 41-2, 46-7.

[xxxi] Mulcaster cites the Cyropaideia with approval in Positions, ed. Barker, 270, 273, 280 (and five other references) and described Cyrus as ‘the best boy for a patern to bring vp’, The First Part of the Elementarie, ed. E. T. Campagnac (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925), 17. On Ashton see Thomas Baker, History of The College of St John the Evangelist, Cambridge, ed. J. E. B. Mayor (Cambridge, 1869), 413 (also 405, 407, 409).

[xxxii] Apology, rev. Maslen, 85-93. The conclusion, that ‘for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth’ is at 103.

[xxxiii] Collections of Statutes for the University and the Colleges of Cambridge (London: William Clowes, 1840), 5-7, 290.

[xxxiv] ‘The inventory of John Gresshop’ in William Urry, Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury, ed. Andrew Butcher (London: Faber and Faber, 1988), 108-22.

[xxxv] A. F. Leach, Educational Charters and Documents 598 to 1909 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), 469.

[xxxvi] On this subject see also Jane Grogan, ‘”A warre . . . commodious”: dramatizing Islamic schism in and after Tamburlaine’, forthcoming in Texas Studies in Language and Literature. I am grateful to Dr Grogan for sharing her work with me and I have aimed to avoid significant overlap in the present article.

[xxxvii] Xenophon, The Education of Cyrus, trans. Wayne Amber (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 22-3.

[xxxviii] William Barker, The VIII. Bookes of Xenophon containing the Institution, schole, and education of Cyrus (1567), sigs. A3 r-v.

[xxxix] On ‘language [as] as form of power’ and the importance of rhetoric in the Cyropaideia, see James Tatum, Xenophon’s Imperial Fiction: On ‘The Education of Cyrus’ (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univerity Press, 1989), 192-6.

[xl] The Wars of Cyrus: An Early Classical Narrative Drama of the Child Actors, ed. James Paul Brawner (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1942), 12.

[xli] Positions, ed Barker, 218. (Most of this paragraph is concerned with Greek texts.)

[xlii] Erasmus, The Education of A Christian Prince, trans. Neil M. Cheshire and Michael J. Heath in Collected Works of Erasmus 27, ed. A. H. T. Levi (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 251.

[xliii] Edmund Spenser, Three proper, and wittie, familiar letters (London, 1580), 27.

[xliv] Lucian had been recommended as a teaching text at Oxford as early as 1516 when he is prescribed in the founding statutes of Corpus Christi College. See Arthur Tilley, ‘Greek Studies in England in the Early Sixteenth Century’, English Historical Review 53 (1938), 221-39, 438-56 at 233.

[xlv] Park Honan, Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 53.

[xlvi] For a comprehensive bibliography of editions and translations of Lucian in sixteenth-century Europe see Craig R. Thompson, ‘Lucian and Lucianism in the English Renaissance: An Introductory Study’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1937. On Lucian in Europe see Christopher Robinson, Lucian and his Influence in Europe (London: Duckworth, 1979) and in England, Douglas Duncan, Ben Jonson and the Lucianic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

[xlvii] Martin Luther, Letters, ed. and trans. Margaret A. Currie (London: Macmillan, 1908), 136.

[xlviii] Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1913), 23. This would have been the 4 volume edition of the Erasmus-More translations annotated by Cognatus (Gilbert Cousin) and Sambucus (János Zsámboky), Luciani Samosatensis opera . . . in quatuor tomos divisa (Basel, 1563).

[xlix] The Correspondence of Erasmus: Letters 142-297 (1501-14), trans. R. A. B. Mynors and D. F. S. Thomson, CWE 2 (1975), 103.

[l] William Thomas Lowndes, The Bibliographer’s Manual of English Literature (London, 1834), 1167. The reference reappears in later bibliographies but there is no trace of the work itself. On Spenser see Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wild fruit and Salvage Soyl (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 105-7.

[li] Lucian, Chattering Courtesans and Other sardonic Sketches, trans. Keith Sidwell (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 205.

[lii] Bowers reads ‘statures’, but most editions emend to ‘statues’, which is consonant with Toxaris’ point that the most illustrious friends are objects of worship. The allusion was first noticed by L. J. Mills, Modern Language Notes 52 (1937), 101-3.

[liii] On the irony of Agrippa see Eugene Korkowski, ‘Agrippa as Ironist’, Neophilologus 60 (1976), 594-607.

[liv] Cornelius Agrippa, Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie of Artes and Sciences, trans. James Sanford (1569), 16-17.

[lv] See A. C. Hamilton, ‘Sidney and Agrippa’, RES 26 (1956), 151-57.

[lvi] ‘They will find it enticing not only for the novelty of its subject, for the humour of its plan and because I tell all kinds of lies in a plausible and specious way, but also because everything in my story is a more or less comical parody of one or another of the poets, historians and philosophers of old, who have written much that smacks of fables and miracles’, Lucian, trans. A. M. Harmon, 8 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1913), I, 249-50.

[lvii] Lucian’s debunking of different philosophical schools is evident throughout his work, comically in Philosophers for Sale and more seriously in Hermotimus, which attacks Stoicism. The source of his attack on the early Christians, however, is The Death of Peregrinus. Sixteenth-century demonisations of Lucian conflate these two elements.

[lviii] Elementarie, ed. Campagnac, 50.

[lix] It is perhaps worth noting here that Lucian’s dialogue and the dialogues and internal debates of Doctor Faustus have some affinity with Thomas Fenne, Fenne’s Frutes (1590), the first part of which consists of a dialogue between Fame and the Scholar and deals with fruitful and fruitless endeavour. Fame speaks of ‘travelling in all Coastes and Kingdomes’; of ‘the unsatiable appetite of aspiring minds’; and also refers to Cyrus ‘climbing after superioritie, striving uncessantly for the kingdoms of his neighbours’, 2, 12.

[lx] For the many resonances of the line see Laurie Maguire’s brilliant Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), especially pp. 160-4.

[lxi] Lucian, trans. Harmon, 7: 23. The parallel was first noted by Frederick Tupper, Jr. in MLN 21 (1906). 76-7.

[lxii] Lucian, 3: 409.

[lxiii] Duncan, Jonson and Lucianic Tradition, 111. The comic treatment of the gods, which Duncan identifies as Lucianic, also sets the tone for Hero and Leander. Duncan’s main point about Marlowe and Lucian, however, is that the technique of kataskopos (looking down from above), particularly evident in Lucian’s Icaromenippus is echoed by Marlowe in Doctor Faustus.

[lxiv] Gabriel Harvey, A New Letter of Notable Contents (London, 1593), D1r.

[lxv] Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 193-221.

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