Marlowe and the Greeksi
The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com.
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 singleminded, 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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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 pseudoPlatonic 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
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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
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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
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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
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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 OlympiaTheridamas 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
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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
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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
16
17
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
17
18
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
18
19
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
19
20
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
20
21
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
21
22
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
22
23
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,
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24
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
24
25
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.
25
26
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.
26
27
Paul Strope Needham, ‘Sir John Cheke at Cambridge and at Court’, Unpublished PhD
viii
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.
Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Republican Authorship: Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime
xiv
(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.
27
28
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.
28
29
Cambridge University Library Ms Ff.6.3; Leicester Bradner, ‘The Xenophon Translation
xxvi
Attributed to Queen Elizabeth 1’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964),
324-6.
See Jane Grogan, ‘”Many Cyruses”: Xenophon’s Cyropaedia and English Renaissance
xxvii
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.
29
30
‘The inventory of John Gresshop’ in William Urry, Christopher Marlowe and
xxxiv
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
30
31
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.
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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.
On the irony of Agrippa see Eugene Korkowski, ‘Agrippa as Ironist’, Neophilologus 60
liii
(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.
Lucian’s debunking of different philosophical schools is evident throughout his work,
lvii
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
lix
Elementarie, ed. Campagnac, 50.
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.
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33
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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