Marlowe's
"Mighty Line"
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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:
Now compare Preston's couplets, written in a metre called "fourteeners," with the lines in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (ca. 159293) with which Faustus greets the conjured figure of Helen of Troy:
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 languagea superb, unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank versefar 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). |