Marlowe's "Mighty Line"
 

Nothing like Marlowe's plays had been seen or heard before. The new drama which had grown up in London after the opening of the first public theater in 1576 was still crude in many respects, especially in its language. Take, for example, this clumsy expression of passionate love by the title character in Cambyses, King of Persia, a popular play written around 1560 by another Cambridge graduate, Thomas Preston:

For Cupid he, that eyeless boy, my heart hath so enflamed
With beauty, you me to content the like cannot be named;
For since I entered in this place and on you fixed mine eyes,
Most burning fits about my heart in ample wise did rise.
The heat of them such force doth yield, my corpse they scorch, alas!
And burns the same with wasting heat as Titan doth the grass.
And sith this heat is kindled so and fresh in heart of me,
There is no way but of the same the quencher you much be.

Now compare Preston's couplets, written in a metre called "fourteeners," with the lines in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (ca. 1592–93) with which Faustus greets the conjured figure of Helen of Troy:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss:
Her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies!
Come Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena! (Scene 12, lines 81–87)

Though both passages deal with passionate love, the enormous difference between them makes clear the impact of Marlowe's writing on the British stage. Marlowe created and mastered a new theatrical language—a superb, unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse—far more expressive than anything that anyone accustomed to the likes of Preston could have imagined. This was a language capable of remarkable intensity, intellectual rigor, and emotional complexity. Ben Jonson admiringly dubbed this new kind of writing "Marlowe's mighty line" (1.1415, line 30).