Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe (1564—1593), was the first great Eliza­bethan writer of tragedy. His most famous work, «The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus» (about 1588), is an imaginative view of a legendary scholars fall to damnation through lust for forbidden knowledge, power, and sensual pleasure. Never before in English literature had a writer so powerfully shown the souls conflict with the laws defining the place of human beings in a universal order.

Marlowe was born in Canterbury and studied at Cambridge. Evidently at some time during his university years, he did secret service work for the government. The few years before his death in a tavern fight have left evidence of his duels and reports of his unconventional, skeptical political and religious thought.

Marlowe established his theatrical reputation with «Tamburlaine the Great» (about 1587). In «high astounding» poetry and spec­tacle, Marlowe wrote about an awe-inspiring conqueror, Tamburlaine. These plays reficct the widespread fascination in Marlowe's time with the reach and limits of the human will's de­sire for dominion. In «Tamburlaine», Marlowe influenced later drama with his concentration on a heroic figure and his develop­ment of blank verse (unrhymed poetry) into a flexible poetic form for tragedy. His later plays focus on what were considered the dan­gerous and subversive elements in Renaissance culture, such as atheism, witchcraft,.and homosexuality. These plays are «The Jew of Malta» (c. 1589), «Edward II» (c. 1592), and «Doctor Faustus» Marlowe's nondramatic poetry includes the unfinished «Hero and Leander», which became an immediate classic; translations from the Roman poets Ovid and Lucan, and the pastoral lyric «The Pas­sionate Shepherd to His Love».