ABSTRACT
We call attention to this episode at the outset of our paper because we think it provides a convenient paradigm for some of the things we want to say about our reaction to Marlowe's plays. Unlike Ovid's Pygmalion, invoked in the speech we've omitted, Aeneas cannot give his statue life; unlike Shakespeare's Leontes, Aeneas cannot 'awake his faith' and have it rewarded by the redemption of past time. In Marlowe, the mind is at odds with the facts, while the heart oscillates baffled between two kinds of knowledge:
Yet thinks my mind that this is Priam us; And when my grieved heart sighs and says no, Then would it leap out to give Priam life. (II.i.25-7)
In a very 'modern' way, lVIarlowe invites us to share Aeneas' psychology, and see the stone Priam made flesh, yet with another side of our consciousness we are equally sure of what we might call a more detached, 'objective' view: that the supposed Priam remains stone. We call this a paradigm because it is only one of many instances in Marlowe in which contradictory views of experience are brought together and left unresolved: the ideal and the common sense; the hint of a comprehensive order and the rejection of all order; the socially concerned and the individualist; the moral and the libertine; metaphor and fact. Such conjunctions as these have been the source of most of the critical disputes centring on Marlowe's plays. Our contention is that, to use Raymond Williams' phrase, the 'structure of feeling'1 in Marlowe is one that requires such opposites, and involves a genuine ambivalence (not an ambiguity) of feeling. Ultimately, we will argue, his work provides models of an absurd universe. Camus might have been speaking of Marlowe when he wrote:
These perpetual oscillations between the natural and the extraordinary, the individual and the universal, the tragic and the everyday, the absurd and the logical, are found throughout his work and give it both its resonance and its meaning. These are the paradoxes that must be enumerated, the contradictions that must be strengthened, in order to understand the absurd work.2
