"Accursed be he that first invented war"
About this Quote
Accursed be he that first invented war is a cry that treats war not as a natural condition but as a human contrivance, a made thing for which someone can be held responsible. By imagining an original inventor to damn, the line reframes violence as a choice and a craft, not an inevitability. It carries the cadence of a malediction, with hard stresses and almost all monosyllables that strike like blows: cursed, first, war. The bluntness is part of its force. Marlowe distills horror into a sentence that sounds like a verdict.
The phrase also exposes a Renaissance paradox that Marlowe dramatizes again and again. His stages blaze with conquerors and overreachers, men like Tamburlaine who revel in banners and blood, and yet his poetry keeps returning to the cost of that revel. By cursing the putative inventor, the speaker shifts blame onto a mythic origin while standing inside a present catastrophe. That rhetorical move is revealing. It voices sincere loathing and, at the same time, a species of evasion familiar in wartime: if someone else started it, perhaps no one here is fully accountable. The line thus marks a moment when spectacle curdles into conscience, when the clang of armor is answered by grief.
Elizabethan audiences did not have to search far for context. Europe was riven by the French Wars of Religion, the Dutch revolt, and imperial campaigns; England had just faced the Armada. Humanist writers from Erasmus to More had mocked soldierly glory, and Marlowe, steeped in that intellectual air, lets a character utter the humanist verdict in the plainest possible terms. Calling war an invention implies alternative inventions were and are available: arts, laws, commerce, theater itself. The curse is therefore not only denunciation but also a grim form of hope, a reminder that what has been made can be unmade, that the machinery of slaughter is contingent, and that a different craft might yet be praised where this one is damned.
The phrase also exposes a Renaissance paradox that Marlowe dramatizes again and again. His stages blaze with conquerors and overreachers, men like Tamburlaine who revel in banners and blood, and yet his poetry keeps returning to the cost of that revel. By cursing the putative inventor, the speaker shifts blame onto a mythic origin while standing inside a present catastrophe. That rhetorical move is revealing. It voices sincere loathing and, at the same time, a species of evasion familiar in wartime: if someone else started it, perhaps no one here is fully accountable. The line thus marks a moment when spectacle curdles into conscience, when the clang of armor is answered by grief.
Elizabethan audiences did not have to search far for context. Europe was riven by the French Wars of Religion, the Dutch revolt, and imperial campaigns; England had just faced the Armada. Humanist writers from Erasmus to More had mocked soldierly glory, and Marlowe, steeped in that intellectual air, lets a character utter the humanist verdict in the plainest possible terms. Calling war an invention implies alternative inventions were and are available: arts, laws, commerce, theater itself. The curse is therefore not only denunciation but also a grim form of hope, a reminder that what has been made can be unmade, that the machinery of slaughter is contingent, and that a different craft might yet be praised where this one is damned.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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