clanciai

I cannot help it, but in those dramatic lines

for centuries now published under Shakspere's name

I keep on hearing Marlowe's mighty line,

as if behind Macbeth and Hamlet, Julius Caesar and Othello

there was Tamburlaine behind them all at bottom,

buried deep but never dead

in ever resurrected unsurpassed consistent cruelty,

a theme recurrent constantly in Marlowe

in the Jew, the duke of Guise, the fate of Faustus

and poor royal Edward; buried to the triumph of the boring Puritans

obscurely atheistically and anonymously whisked away

to be replaced by Shakspere's chastized mollified modification

without controversial stuff but with the poetry triumphing

over death and vanity the more in booming verse

in straight continuation from the drama launched by Marlowe.

Well, it has been proved that Marlowe was in difficulty

seriously accused of atheism and homosexuality

and other controversial stuff most insolently published by himself,

like pamphlets against church and order and an atheistic lecture,

which would mean, if he did not abscond,

then he would certainly be executed.

Now his death appears as the most masterfully staged

of all Elizabethan plays, a well concealed intrigue performed obscurely

just to make a show of a most controversial poet's demise

for the obvious purpose to just let him be, remain alive

and go on with his work, but under cover, for security.

Thus Shakspere enters as a mediator

for the continuity of Marlowe's drama, although modified,

to let it grow in ever more astounding glory

in its mighty lines on stage

to never die, like Macbeth, Hamlet and Othello,

Julius Caesar and the mighty Tamburlaine the great,

most threatening and most immortal menace of them all.