Rebels with a Cause

...Marlowe, Riggs writes, transformed the industry and "endowed this rickety start-up venture with a precious legacy of intellectual property...

...Since a public trial might expose evidence about their work as spies, their deaths were covered up as accidents or tavern brawls...

...Sophocles' work remains a sometime vehicle for subversive messages...

...A modicum of equivocation was necessary for Elizabethan writers...

...Marlowe pursued two opportunities open to men in his situation: drama and spycraft...

...Scholars "educated beyond their station" had to be ingenious, and often unscrupulous, to earn a living by their knowledge...

...Marlowe secured a university scholarship that in theory permitted social mobility through a career in the church, the law or, more rarely, at the royal court...

...The Queen's advisers employed them as long as they provided useful information, then ordered them killed before they could leak damaging secrets to the enemy...

...Riggs notes that "These new establishments had a limited purpose: Skilled actors performed makeshift dramatic entertainments for an audience of unpracticed theatergoers...

...Specialists may quibble about some of Riggs' interpretations, but that is inevitable with Marlowe...

...The political turmoil of the time saw five different monarchs on England's throne over little more than a decade...

...Surviving state records hint that Marlowe was deeply embroiled in undercover work and the Queen herself wanted him "neutralized...

...Still, Riggs has given us the most gripping account to date of Marlowe's too brief career...

...Until Marlowe arrived on the scene, scripts were cobbled together from older sources and served as vehicles for lead actors like Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn...

...Unfortunately, the daring that brought him esteem also provoked mistrust among rivals and colleagues...

...John were homosexual lovers...

...Though evidence suggested otherwise, the coroner ruled that the killer had acted in self-defense...

...Playhouses had sprung up around London and in the provinces during his boyhood...

...He wanted to convey a cryptic justification for civil disobedience, and he knew a scholarly translation of an ancient Greek classic would pass the Elizabethan censors...

...Marlowe's final play, The Massacre at Paris, blends the slaughter of Huguenots with the story of another homosexual monarch, Henri III of France, whose reign ended in civil unrest...

...Marlowe was born in 1564—supposedly Shakespeare's year of birth as well...

...As David Riggs puts it in The World of Christopher Marlowe (Holt, 432 pp., $30.00), "In the jargon of today's intelligence agencies, there was tremendous "chatter' around...

...The techniques Heaney employs are impressive, yet somehow The Burial at Thebes disappointed me...

...He has likewise sharpened some imagery...

...I'm doing what has to be done...

...The Abbey was undoubtedly also paying tribute to one of its founders, W. B. Yeats...

...Dido, Queen of Carthage, which he wrote at Cambridge with his classmate Thomas Nashe, opens with a homosexual love scene between the god Jupiter and his cupbearer, Ganymede...

...Heaney's rendition remains close to the Greek text on the whole, but he nonetheless hews to this path...

...For a while, the government hired agents provocateurs to flush out potential traitors and covert priests...

...Her Majesty's councilors suspected Marlowe's deepest sympathies lay with the homosexual king of Scotland...

...Since serious drama in our language is first and foremost associated with Shakespearean tragedy, the most widely read translations have usually paid homage to the blank verse line first introduced by Marlowe...

...On Poetry Rebels with a Cause By Phoebe Pettingell On May 30,1593—a year before the Spanish Armada attacked England—the brilliant 29-yearold poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe met with three men for dinner at the home of the widow Eleanor Bull in London...

...All four guests were connected with the Elizabethan world of espionage, and the hostess kept up associations with a number of important courtiers surrounding Queen Elizabeth I. After the meal a fight broke out, and Marlowe fell dead with a dagger thrust through his eye socket...

...Initially, they hoped to replace her with her cousin, Mary of Scotland...

...As many have pointed out, in Sophocles' text it is unclear which of the two main characters—Antigone or Creon—is the protagonist and which the antagonist...

...Done in English, the play might have incited an audience with little education to draw parallels between the queen and the tyrannous Creon—and Watson would have risked a valid charge of high treason...

...His Antigone is a rebel with a cause...

...He offered spectators a thrilling repertory of tragedies that spoke to their most urgent concerns—grinding poverty, class conflict, erotic desire, religious dissent, and the fear of hell...

...Riggs draws a detailed, chilling portrait of an age when real conspiracies were only surpassed in complexity by government sting operations hatched to expose the plotters...

...Although its plot centers on the children of Oedipus and their fate, making it the final episode in the myth's chronology, it was written about 12 years before Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and some 30 years before Oedipus at Colonus...

...His controversial comments about the Church included a remark that Christ and St...

...Marlowe, an array of signals that implicated him in covert operations and highlevel conspiracies...

...Antigone stands well on its own...

...That he was England's greatest playwright at the time of his death—a poet who revolutionized the theater and paved the way for the success of his contemporary William Shakespeare—makes his biography compelling...

...Each change brought a corresponding switch of the state religion and shifts in European alliances and rivalries...

...Had he been merely a 16th-century version of John Le Carre's Cold War spooks, his enigma-ridden story would be fascinating to historians but forgotten by the rest of us...

...after their names...

...Fate will flail them on its winnowingfloor And in due season teach them to be wise...

...Marlowe's six plays simmer with ambiguities, and their themes seem scarcely less sensational to modern audiences than when they were first written...

...In times of conflict, adapters have sympathized, as did Watson, with Antigone's defiance of her uncle's state edict...

...Lurid themes attracted the ordinary theatergoer...

...His Creon is a despicable tyrant given to angry outbursts and obsessed with ensuring that all defer to his authority...

...That climate is why Marlowe's uneasy colleague and fellow spy, Thomas Watson, produced England's first version of Sophocles' Antigone in Latin...

...they were very likely correct...

...Thus the Theban Cycle, as it is sometimes termed (from the setting), is not like Aeschylus' Oresteia, where the three plays were performed together as if each were an act in a longer drama...

...After Mary's execution, they looked to her son, James, the new Scottish monarch...

...the Elizabethan stage aimed at the sort of audiences that flock to blockbuster movies today...

...Marlowe's superior scholarship and literary skills transformed the stage from a showcase for actors to a venue for serious drama that gave the playwright's poetry precedence over stage effects and scenery...

...His characters soliloquize about their thoughts and feelings in a postShakespearean manner...

...Greek actors, wearing masks, chanted or sang their parts...

...The play was understood in the 19th century to be about family loyalty—exemplified by the heroine's commitment to bury her dead brother Polynices despite Creon's insistence that a traitor to the state be denied a funeral...

...Men with hopes of social advancement willingly risked the dangers of such work—especially if their education, as in Marlowe's case, had bred in them cynicism about religions and political loyalties and resentment of the class structure—and they frequently played both sides against each other...

...His Antigone says things like Your cover-ups sicken me...

...As Riggs observes, "Herein lay the irony of giving poor boys like John Faustus and Christopher Marlowe a classical education...

...Each has a tragic flaw, both fall victim to their own pride, and both have motives for believing themselves to be right...

...Anouilh departs substantially from Sophocles' text...

...Religion is manipulated to gain control over the credulous, and transgressive sexuality is a constant...

...The chorus commented on the action and danced...

...Thus, in the famous conclusion to the play, "Great words of prideful men are ever punished with great blows, and, in old age, teach the chastened to be wise" (R.C...

...Doctor Faustus, Marlowe's best-known play, is a dramatization of the German legend about a scholar who sells his soul to the devil...

...Yeats was a notable exception, using straightforward modern speech for all but a few of the choruses...

...During the Nazi Occupation of France, Jean Anouilh rewrote the drama and played it in modern dress...

...When Elizabeth, a Protestant, prohibited Catholic rites, a number of noble families still loyal to the old religion smuggled clergy from France, and Jesuit missionaries secretly worked to reconvert the country...

...All six works concentrate on upheavals in society, usually involving social upstarts...

...He was under surveillance but may have actually been a government spy sent to entrap subversives by appearing to be one of them...

...Until Sophocles, there were only two performers in Greek theater, the protagonist and another actor who played a variety of roles...

...His idiom wavers uneasily between often awkward "elevated" speech—"Henceforth, therefore, there lie in wait for you/ The inexorable ones, the furies who destroy"—and an equally clumsy vernacular— "Right./ All hands get a move on, here and now...

...Marlowe, however, was chiefly admired by his peers for inventing the blank verse line that later provided Shakespeare with a sonorous vehicle for his virtuosic soliloquies...

...Creating suitable diction for translations of Greek drama has always been problematic, unless the modern playwright, like Anouilh, jettisons the original altogether...

...His version of King Oedipus premiered there in 1912, was revised in 1928, and was followed by his Oedipus at Colonus in 1934...

...Of course, his deal with Mephistopheles turned sour, but, as many critics have noted, Faustus' damnation is sloughed over...

...The playwright identified with his antihero, whose demonic pact allowed him to enjoy riches, power and the love of Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the world...

...The choruses are lyrical, though phrases like "smashed into shards and smithereens" sound self-consciously poetic...

...Both were sons of tradesmen trying to scramble up the social ladder, hopeful their progeny might someday write "gent...

...Books instilled a desire for what they could never have: material wealth, social legitimacy and cultural authority...

...Translated into English by Lewis Galantiere, this version was staged on Broadway in 1946 with Katharine Cornell and Cedric Hardwicke in the lead roles and later made into a movie...

...Elizabeth's Privy Council likely suspected he had become a double agent in league with the Jesuits and the Scots, who wanted the queen assassinated...

...Elizabeth's principal secretary and spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, came to realize that the conspiracy to depose his mistress "had become vast, international and selfperpetuating...

...Antigone is a courageous but fanatic protester who knows she is right and is willing to sacrifice her personal happiness (she is engaged to Creon's son) and even her life for her cause...

...I have nothing to hide From the powers that see all...

...Marlowe's first London success, Tamburlaine the Great, tracks the bloody career of the "Scythian shepherd" who forged his own empire...

...The three other works included the sadistic Jew of Malta and Edward II—based on the life of England's homosexual king who was deposed in 1327 for ennobling one of his lowborn favorites, then brutally murdered in a manner resembling the torture in 1997 of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima by the New York City police...

...Conflicting loyalties were inevitable among the populace of England and Wales...

...But it is disappointing that Ireland's supreme living poet has not produced a fresher, more eloquent and timely perspective on Sophocles' classic...

...Shortly before his murder, Marlowe had been accused of atheism and blasphemous speech...

...The scariest aspect of his book is how easy he makes it to identify with his conflicted subject and the paranoid climate in which he lived...

...Yet had the playwright been luckier or more discreet, the reputation now accorded to Shakespeare might well belong to him, and he would be the one we refer to as "the Bard...

...Creon uses the longer Marlovian pentameter, making him sound bombastic in contrast to Antigone's punchy brevity—a technique probably even more effective on a stage...

...Politics colored most staged interpretations of Sophocles' drama throughout the 1960s and '70s, to the point of revamping the heroine as a flower child and Creon as the embodiment of the Military Industrial Complex...

...Heaney's Creon is a bullying tyrant of a kind too familiar in all eras...

...The latest reworking, Seamus Heaney's The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles Antigone (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 74 pp., $ 18.00), was commissioned to celebrate the centenary of Dublin's Abbey Theater and first performed in April of this year...

...This skulduggery makes for interesting reading on its own, but Riggs has a larger purpose...

...Woody Allen must have fulfilled many schoolchildren's fantasies with his spoof in Mighty Aphrodite, where the Olympian gods offer portentous utterances, then slip into musical comedy chorus routines...

...As a poet, Heaney has always preferred working with a shorter line...

...Heaney has significantly shortened some of the choruses, no doubt because the original text alludes to much Greek mythology that is unlikely to register with contemporary audiences...

...At the time, blasphemy, sodomy and atheism were against the law...

...The little we know about Marlowe's life is placed in the context of the violent and paranoid society he inhabited...

...authors or adapters received no credit...

...Antigone was enacted for the first time in Athens, probably sometime after 450 BCE...

...Jebb's translation) becomes Those who overbear will be brought to grief...

...They were well aware that innocuous statements might be construed as treasonous, and that regime change could turn right into wrong overnight...

...In practice, as Riggs points out, innate class conservatism closed these options to any but the upper classes...

...Catholic martyrdoms were common, provoking partisans of the old religion to plot with Rome, foreign monarchs and religious orders to assassinate Elizabeth and restore the "true" Church...

...His Creon becomes an urbane, paternalistic dictator, locked in a battle of wills with a citizen who believes that freedom and individual rights outweigh gestures toward "national security...

...Effective acting couldmask the stilted tone of these lines and hundreds more, but readers will find them distracting...