The impact of the Marlovian music in later English drama

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE The Tambulaine music:

TAMBURLAINE: What is beauty, saith my sufferings, then?
If all the pens that ever poet held
Had fed the feelings of their masters’ thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspir’d their hearts
Their minds, and muses on admired themes:
If all the heavenly quintessence they still*
From their immortal flowers of poesy,
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit;
If these had made one poem’s period
And all combin’d in beauty’s worthiness,
Yet should** there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least
Which into words no virtue can digest.
But how unseemly is it for my sex,
My discipline of arms and chivalry,
My nature, and the terror of my name
To harbour thoughts effeminate and faint!
Save only that in Beauty’s just applause,
With whose instinct the soul of man is touched
And every warrior that is rapt with love
Of fame, of valour, and of victory,
Must needs have beauty beat on his conceits#:
I thus conceiving, and subduing both,
That which hath stoop’d the chiefest of the gods+
Even from the fiery-spangled veil of heaven,
To feel the lovely warmth of shepherds’ flames
And march in cottages of strowed reeds,
Shall give the world to note, for all my birth,
That virtue solely is the sum of glory,
And fashions men with true nobility. –
*distill
**there would still
#impinge on his imagination
+ subdued Zeus himself


Nature, that fram'd us of four elements
Warring within our souls for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet's course, .
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Will us to wear ourselves and never rest
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.

The ‘premiss’ begins in line one (the subject) and remains held in suspending clauses expanding itself through line after line until the predicate with its final “fruition”. The impression is of unleashed energy in the verse. The effect upon the listener, is of excited expectation, delayed while increasing, through one opened up vista after another, until the bold climactic closure. It is the opposite of the ‘end-stopped’ syntax of THE SPANISH TRAGEDY

A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC
Act I iii pp. 103 Faustus contemplating calling on Mephistophilis:

Now that the gloomy shadow of the earth
Longing to view Orion's drizzling look
Leaps from th'Antarctic world unto the sky
And dims the welkin with her pitchy breath,
Faustus, begin thy incantations.

Recollected, I think, in Macbeth's night-soliloquy on a similar occasion.

Now o'er the one half world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtained sleep. Witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate's offerings

Both men, Faustus and Macbeth, are here on the brink of bartering their souls and giving themselves to damnation.

HAMLET, contemplating his revenge in, III ii., where he will come upon the praying Claudius:

HAMLET: Tis now the very witching time of night
When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes
out
Contagion to the world. Now could I drink hot blood
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look upon...


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