The people's fancy willingly follows
the bold poet. In the short space of three hours he makes his
'Faust' [15] live through four-and-twenty years, in order 'to conquer,
with sweet pleasure, despair.' The earth becomes too small for this
dramatist. Heaven and Hell, God and the Devil, have to respond to
his inquiries. Like some of his colleagues, Marlowe is a sceptic:
he calls Moses a 'conjurer and seducer of the people,' and boasts
that, if he were to try, he would succeed in establishing a
better religion than the one he sees around himself. The apostle of
these high thoughts, not yet thirty years old, breathed his last,
in consequence of a duel in a house of evil repute.
Another hopeful disciple of lyric and dramatic poetry and prose-writer,
Robert Greene, once full of similar free-thinking ideas, lay on his
deathbed at the age of thirty-two, after a life of dissipation.
Thence he writes to his forsaken wife:--
'All my wrongs muster themselves about me; every evill at once plagues
me. For my contempt of God, I am contemned of men; for my swearing and
forswearing, no man will believe me; for my gluttony, I suffer hunger;
for my drunkenesse, thirst; for my adulterie, ulcerous sores. Thus God
has cast me downe, that I might be humbled; and punished me, for
examples of others' sinne.'
Greene offers his own wretched end to his colleagues as a warning
example; admonishing them to employ their 'rare wits in more profitable
courses;' to look repentingly on the past; to leave off profane
practices, and not 'to spend their wits in making plaies.
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