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“Water Droplets and the Marlowe-Shakespeare Relationship”

Clifford Ronan, Texas State University-San Marcos

Marlowe and Shakespeare were different in more ways than we can even guess—in their educational backgrounds, professional and personal lives, and speed of artistic development. Marlowe was a celebrity, a theatrical and poetic success, and someone who was somehow employed in the Queen’s business, probably spying on Catholic seminaries for future priests.¹ Though the same age as Marlowe, Shakespeare was slower to achieve fame, and more conventional in his extra-artistic goals, which seem to have prioritized raising his descendants’ financial and social position. As for their conscious relationship to one another, it would seem that Shakespeare felt he was emulating Marlowe (and other writers) more than Marlowe saw himself in competition with Shakespeare. The one time that Marlowe seems to have followed Shakespeare’s lead occurs, apparently, with Edward II, an English history play distinctive from, but inevitably imitating Shakespeare’s early successes in popularizing this sort of drama. Usually, however, Shakespeare was the imitator, creatively rather than slavishly of course, but ready to exploit identifiable foci with which Marlowe had stunned audiences.

A variant of Tamburlainean Over-Reach informs the character of Richard of Gloucester, and less than serious exaggerations of Marlovian poetic style find their way into the speeches of Hamlet’s actors and the crowd that hangs around the Boar’s Head Tavern. Shakespeare’s settings, plots, and characters’ names sometimes shamelessly recall Marlowe’s. Both dramatists tell tales of lascivious heathen scoundrels like IthaMORE and Aaron the MOOR, or wealthy villainous Mediterranean Jews with daughters chased by Christians. Shakespeare’s Richard II introduces an unhistorical sodomy charge against the protagonist in order, apparently, to manipulate reminiscences of Edward II. So too it is interesting that Shakespeare’s company should copyright Merchant of Venice with the subtitle “The Jew of Venice,” in obvious imitation of the title of Marlowe’s The Rich Jew of Malta. Then there are also the evocations each author makes in very different ways about political manipulation (Shakespeare far more subtly than Marlowe) and same-sex desire (Shakespeare’s is oftener calculated to evoke gentle sympathy for its non-fulfillment, whereas Marlowe’s is oftener to produce laughter and perhaps a mixture of sympathy and thrill.) In the soft pornography of a “Hero and Leander” there is a witty flamboyance that Shakespeare does not strive for, or at least does not achieve, in “Venus and Adonis.”  And it may not be beyond belief that Shakespeare would name the quiet, virginal, fainting ingénue in Much Ado after the sexually experienced “Hero”—a cross-gendering pun in English. 

Marlowe died at twenty-nine without ever having left a recorded remark about or quotation from Shakespeare. But not too many years after Marlowe’s being stabbed to death, Shakespeare was having characters allude rather openly to the late poet. Four consecutive lines from “Come Live with Me and Be My Love” are sung in Merry Wives (3.1.17-20).² And in As You Like It, the young masochistic Phebe reacts to a same-sex Ganymede (the name of Jove’s kidnapped love-interest in Marlowe’s Dido) with a direct quotation from the recently deceased Marlowe: “Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might, / ‘Who ever lov’d that lov’d not at first sight?’” (3.5.81-82). Another manifest allusion to Marlowe’s work is the parodic echo of Faustus’ exclamation “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,” now transferred to a Helen (“Nell”) who is more quean than queen, and never able to make anyone “immortal with a kiss.” Shakespeare employs the old words in a decidedly baser fashion, mercantile and merely sensual. He urges his fellow Trojans  not to return Helen as if she is a piece of material that has become soiled and is to be sent back to the “merchant.” Rather, keeping her will keep  keep her “worth” and “price” from depreciating and thereby undermining the “honour” and “dignities” of the entire Trojan nation and royal family:

Is she worth keeping? Why, she is a pearl [dise]:

Whose price hath launched above a thousand ships,

And turned crowned kings to merchants.     

In all these examples Shakespeare seems comfortable living with his dead rival’s accomplishments, yet heading off in different directions too numerous to list here in this essay. I shall have accomplished my purpose if I have made it a little clearer when, and with what results, Marlowe likely attracted Shakespeare especially deeply in the direction of sympathy for materialistic nihilism as embodied in references to water-droplets—a habit of thought that even finds its way into the notion of dyeing the “ocean”  “incarnadine,” a jewel-like image from the most nihilist mind of all the dramatist’s creations (Macbeth 2.2.60).

Blood is humans’ most important fluid, but fresh water is a necessity not just for us but for beast and plant alike. While salt water may involve food preparation and preservation, its more important physical use is for the evaporation from which clouds and rain proceed. The Bible insists that we humans are “dust,” enlivened (and implicitly moistened) with God’s breath, soon kneaded, but eventually to “dust...return[ed].” Hamlet’s double-edged phrase is apt: man is the “quintessence of dust.”  And to it, Koheleth adds that all our “labor” is in vain, to be exploited and repeated by other “generation[s],” while “the “earth remaineth forever.” And in a parallel way, mankind’s watery portion will head if not to heaven, at least heaven-ward, rejoining life’s paradoxically meaningful-yet-meaningless macro-cycle of evaporation and precipitation.

All the rivers go into the sea, yet the sea is not full: for the rivers go unto ye place, whence they return, and go.  All things are full of labor. (Ecclesiastes 1. 2-8, Geneva Bible) 

Water is of decided importance in the Mediterranean world, and its sources remain of immense value to metaphor as well as physical life. In John’s Gospel, Jesus promises that “whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him, shall never be more athirst; but the water that I shall give him, shall be in him a well of “water, springing up into everlasting life” (John 4:14). In England, of course, the stark contrast between drought and excessive precipitation appears less often, and the Biblical opposition of water and dust would have seemed less alarming and absolute. Thus it is not surprising to find conflicting messages about water in The Comedy of Errors, an ultimately happy play with a Mediterranean setting— but with an author and audience that are English.

In his “Themes and Structures in The Comedy of Errors," Harold F. Brooks rightly mentions the play’s concern with water and notices how it is related to a melancholy risk-taking in the pursuit of “dislocated” “identity.” He emphasizes that this melancholy is vividly expressed first by Antipholus of Syracuse’s father, by the son himself, and then by what Brooks characterizes as the brother’s excessively self-effacing wife, “sinking [her] identity in the marriage-relation” (58, italics supplied).

Early in the play, the Syracusan Antipholus sadly reflects that this is the fifth summer of looking in vain for his twin brother (not to mention their mother). The young man has become especially saddened by his lack of meaningful family unity, personal autonomy, and satisfying standing in the larger world. Arriving in Asia Minor on yet another apparently fruitless search, he sighs that “content” is “the thing I cannot get” because—

I to the world am like a drop of water,

That in the ocean seeks another drop,

Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,

(Unseen, inquisitive) confounds himself.

So I, to find a mother and a brother,

In quest of them (unhappy) lose myself. (1.2.32-40)

As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, the early modern English phrase ‘water-drops in the ocean’ was equivalent to today’s expression ‘grains of sand’: it signified something discrete and finite but unidentifiable—and of negligible size, dignity, and value. Since we are all “fellow[s]” in a vast expanse we might as well recognize our impotence and the aqueous annihilation of our identity in this dread sameness. In remarks to which I shall soon refer in detail, John Lee’s Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Controversies of Self maintains that this passage not only foreshadows the Prince of Denmark’s lonely suicidally-inclined melancholy but, more significantly, looks back to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.

Errors is like many later comedies (for instance, Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night) and begins in conflict and sorrow before turning to affirmation and joy. So too, the Syracusan’s grieving is followed, after a mere eighty lines, by his sister-in-law’s affirmation of the non-autonomous water-droplet. The occasion is her affirming her perpetual connection with her husband, whom she never wants to see divorce her because the vibrancy of her life is so involved with enhancing his. Even if he should break his marriage vows—and she hopes  he will not— she stands ready to take him back because she is as inseparable from him as one water drop is in a “breaking gulf” (the sort of phenomenon in Asia Minor alluded to in Othello 3.3.456 ff.).

That thou art then estranged from thyself?

Thyself I call it, being strange to me,

That, undividable, incorporate,

And better than thy dear self’s better part.

Ah, do not tear away thyself from me:

For know, my love, as easy mayst thou fall

A drop of water in the breaking gulf,

And take unmingled then that drop again,

Without addition or diminishing,

As take from me thyself and not me too. (2.2.119-29)

If they part, both of them will lose a valuable part of their identities, their selves. Admittedly, the Syracusan’s lament is more memorable than his sister-in-law’s affirmations. But then again, if they were more show-stopping the drama might seem to lurch or limp towards its rousing final reunions and affirmations.

A year after Brooks’s excellent piece on Errors appeared, R. A. Foakes expressed strong agreement with Brooks’s thesis and extended it to four other plays, where he also finds “images of water or melting connected with dissolution of  reality or loss of identity,” a “recur[ent motif] in Shakespeare’s work  . . . seem[ing] to spring from deep feelings” (1.2.34-38n). One dissolution image that Foakes identifies is of love’s melting away like wax (Two Gentlemen of Verona 2.4.196-98). Three other more interesting examples, and less conventional ones, he also quotes. One is of the snowman’s melting in a rival’s sun:

O, that I were a mockery king of snow,

Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke

To melt myself away in water-drops! (Richard II 4.1.260-62)

Then there is Hamlet’s fantasy of icy self-evaporation,

O that this too too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew. (Hamlet 1.2.129-30)

Too, there is Antony’s despair at having his heroic qualities turned into cloud-like parodies of heraldic icons, shifting relentlessly from dragon to bear, lion, citadel, rock, mountain, promontory, tree, or horse:

Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish,

A vapour sometime like a bear or lion,

. . .

[They] mock our eyes with air. Thou hast seen these signs;

They are black vesper’s pageants.

. . .

That which is now a horse even with a thought

The rack distains, and makes it indistinct

As water is in water

. . .

Here I am Antony,

Yet cannot hold this visible shape. (Antony and Cleopatra 4.15.2-14)

Foakes is not discussing any of these passages, but merely making a list of them in a footnote. He would admit, I imagine, that there are other Shakespearean passages involving  similar watery disintegration of the self: for instance, Hamlet’s forcing a confused and over-tactful Polonius to look at the water-vapor clouds and decide which they most  resemble: a “camel,” a “weasel,” or, Ah, a “whale” (Hamlet 3.2.345-151). Nor does Foakes mention what more than one reader and spectator have noticed: the Antonine and Faustian associations in The Tempest.

If Faustus had not grieved that Christ’s blood would not drop upon him or that he could not somehow throw off his sinful mortal coil and ascend into heaven, would Shakespeare still have been encouraged to treat Caliban’s tears in such a heart-rending fashion as he dreams of riches that Heaven’s “clouds” could shower him with but do not? The island’s music “will hum about [his] ears,”

That if I then had waked after long sleep

Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming

The clouds methought would open and show riches

Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked

I cried to dream again. (Tempest 3.2.133-38)

On the basis of verbal, situational, and thematic similarities, more than one reader has been quick to look beyond Foakes’s list and reexamine Prospero’s ordering dead souls to mounting of an externally affirmative “pageant” whose "reality" disappears like a “rack” or “cloud,” as all our lives and accomplishments will sooner or later do. Many spectators and readers have also perceived the ties between Prospero and Faustus, bookish necromancers both (and both ready to renounce their books), the more fortunate one actually abandoning his book and dismissing his spirits whereas the other one will spend an eternity with his demonic confreres, in part because he inflexibly idolizes the permanence of written contracts.

The masque scene in The Tempest is like the theatrical tableau of Helen in Faustus: both present external beauty and ideals that remain temporary, built upon unsanctified spiritual realities. Both passages use the words “pageant” and “cloud” and concern evanescent internal and external identities that can metamorphose and disintegrate, leaving not a rack behind. And both passages have much in common with Antony’s tragic confrontation of his own dissolving reputation and honor. The necromancer’s “pageant” of the externally visible is as cloud-like, evanescent, and preternaturally removable as the general’s self-confidence in the reality of the emblems of his honor, the internal images and external heraldic icons that have long symbolized himself to himself:

These our actors,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air

And as with the spirits, we and our world—

shall dissolve

And like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. (4.1.148-56) 

In his interesting background study, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Controversies of Self, John Lee refers to several parallels that Foakes mentions, especially Errors, Hamlet, and Antony, extending these  comparisons beyond Shakespeare to include Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Lee wrestles with the relevance of sea and other water imagery in these works, seeming to come to two conclusions: 1) the influence of Pico’s and Vives’ ideas (ably traced in Giamatti, 118) about the ceaseless mutability of Ocean’s son Proteus, and 2) the hint that many a human, even a hero such as Antony, has a death wish whereby he wants to “flo[w] back into the element from which he was created.” A better explanation, perhaps, would be to say that both Antony and Faustus feel attacked by the amply illustrated  vapor-like inconstancy of their very selves. Marlowe’s magician thinks he needs nothing so much as escape from hell, while Antony is less concerned with his present state than the future of his honor after death.

The Faustus scene skillfully weaves together imagery of blood and water. The tragic hero cannot bring himself to believe he can successfully beseech the saving “drop” or “halfe a drop” of “Christs blood stream[ing] in the firmament” (13.74-75) (Giamatti, 188). Faustus’ tragic plight is worse than the emptiness felt by the melancholic Antipholus of Syracuse. But the imagery and despair are shared. Because the protagonist cannot bring himself to believe that he can undo his pledges to the devil and then actually receive “one drop . . ., halfe a drop” of “Christs blood stream[ing] in the firmament,” he wants evaporation to give him both bodily death and a new heavenly life and soul: a process followed by a bizarre precipitation of vomit-filled fluid from out of the womb of the clouds. He prays to the “foggy mist”: 

Now draw up Faustus, like a foggy mist,

Into the intrails of yon labring cloude

That when you vomite foorth into the ayre,

My limbes may issue fom your smoaky mouthes

So that my soul may but ascend to heaven. (13. 87-91)

Or alternatively, he wishes to join the Koheleth-like cycle of rivers, sea, evaporation, cloud, rain, and more run-off for the rivers.

O soule, be changde into little water-drops,

And fal into the Ocean—nere be found. (13.112-13)

 The German magician is an anti-papal Christian who wants to experience Purgatory, a temporary hell. He is also a student of the pagan theologies and physics of such diverse pre-Socratics as Pythagoras and Democritus. As death and damnation approach, he yearns for a paradoxical metampsychosis that will bring both material disintegration and the nihilistic end of the anima, the soul.

Ah Pythagoras metem su cossis were that true,

This soule should flie from me, and I be changed

Unto some brutish beast: al beasts are happy, for when they die,

Their soules are soone disssolvd in elements. (13.102-04)

In yet other Shakespeare plays, there are additional appearances of watery fates, drownings, burial at the sea’s bottom, melting ice, or haunting cloud imagery. One thinks perhaps of Ariel’s taunting song for Ferdinand: visions of his father’s “suffer[ing] a sea change”—eyes into pearls, bones into coral—after his supposed drowning and disintegration in the storm and tempest (Tempest  1.2.2-5 ). Or of Clarence’s dream of falling into the billows descending to the base of the ocean among lost treasures that are now of no meaning to him, another drowned man unable to re-ascend to the equally nihilistic and meaningless surface of the ocean, with its “empty, vast, and wand’ring air” (Richard III 1.4.20ff.). Or Claudio’s frightening apprehension of “rot[ting]” and of lying as a “kneaded clod” “in cold obstruction”—

In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice;

To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,

And blown with restless violence round about

The pendent world. (Measure for Measure, 3.1.119-26)

Not all the plays’ nightmares of damp, cold, drowning and suffocating point towards human unworthiness, unimportance, and loss of connectedness. But where they do, the cloud and water-drop imagery so well used in Faustus and several other Shakespeare plays helps support the wisps of nihilism that float about passages that may not have any imagery of watery dissolution to them. For instance, Richard II’s contemplation of being a potential snowman melting away helps prepare for his more deeply upsetting vacillations much later in his cell, when he is somehow still awash, still thinking his life is eternally open to renegotiation. No words of water-drops are now present, but their earlier use gives added poignancy to the sad theme they usually represent:

Then I am kinged again, and by and by

Think that I am unkinged by Bolingbroke,

And straight am nothing. But whate’er I be,

Nor I, nor any man that but man is

With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased

With being nothing. (5.5.36-41)

Under the aegis of Marlowe’s final scene of the damnation of Faust, Shakespeare’s dramas, from Errors to The Tempest, make good use of imagery of aqueous transformations and dissolutions. Thus there are numerous good reasons for speculating on the kinship between the damnation of Faust and the many nihilistic utterances of Macbeth, including the pained vision of the “ocean” uselessly turned “incarnadine” with Duncan’s blood—a picture the obverse of Antipholus’ loss of identity as a water drop in the “ocean,” but just as nihilistic and horrifying. Critics’ attention to sources and imagery has regrettably been long diminishing, though such study can highlight the various authors’ diverse creative achievements. Shakespeare may not have had an absolute need of Marlowe. But he certainly seems to me to have helped.

Works Cited  

Bradbrook, M. C. “Shakespeare and His Contemporaries: Other Poets and Playwrights.” William Shakespeare. Ed. John F. Andrews. 1985. 331-42.

---. “Shakespeare’s Recollections of Marlowe.” Shakespeare’s Styles. Ed. Philip Edwards, et al. Cambridge UP, 1980. 191-204.

Brooks, Harold F. “Themes and Structures in The Comedy of Errors.” Early Shakespeare. Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 3. London: Arnold, 1961. 55-71.

Charney, Maurice. “Jessica’s Turquoise Ring and Abigail’s Poisoned Porridge: Shakespeare and Marlowe as Rivals and Imitators.” Renaissance Drama 10 (1979): 33-44.

---. “Marlowe’s Tamburlaine in Early Shakespeare. Comparative Drama 31 (1997-98): 213-23.

Cheney, Patrick. The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.

Erne, Lukas. “Biography, Mythography, and Criticism: The Life and Works of Christopher Marlowe.” Modern Philology 103 (2005): 28-50.

Foakes, R.A., ed. The Comedy of Errors. London: Methuen, 1962.

Giamatti, A. Bartlett. “Proteus Unbound: Some Versions of the Sea God in the Renaissance.” Exile and Change in Renaissance Literature. New Haven: Yale UP, 1984, 115-50 (118).

Lee, John. Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Controversies of Self. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.

Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus [Q 1604]. 1990. The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe. Ed. Roma Gill. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1987-[1998].

---.The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus from the Quarto of 1616. Ed. Alexander Dyce. Etext by Gary R. L. Young. Project Gutenberg Etext 711. 1997.

Muir, Kenneth. “Marlowe and Shakespeare.” “A Poet and a Filthy Play-maker.” Ed. Kenneth Friedenreich. New York: AMS, 1988.

Oxford English Dictionary. Online

Ribner, Irving. “Marlowe and Shakespeare.” Shakespeare 400. Ed. James G. McManaway. New York: Holt, 1964.  41-53.

Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: Norton, 1997.

Shapiro, James. Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare. New York: Columbia UP, 1991.