#doctorfaustus

ℜ𝔢𝔫𝔞𝔦𝔰𝔰𝔞𝔫𝔠𝔢 𝔉𝔯𝔞𝔫𝔨𝔢𝔫𝔰𝔱𝔢𝔦𝔫

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Christopher Marlowe: Poet, Playwright, Spy

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), or Kit Marlowe, was a poet and playwright of the English Renaissance who wrote during the Elizabethan Era (1558-1603). His mastery of the blank verse – unrhymed iambic pentameter – transformed the way plays were written for Elizabethan theatre and influenced many other dramatists, including William Shakespeare (1564-1616). Marlowe's plays were known for their overambitious and morally ambiguous protagonists, realistic portrayals of emotion, and their use of crowd-pleasing violence; his most significant works include Tamburlaine the Great (circa 1587), Doctor Faustus (circa 1592), and Edward II (circa 1592), as well as the narrative poem Hero and Leander. His personal life was as dramatic as his work – an alleged atheist and homosexual man with ties to the queen's secret service, Marlowe was killed in a mysterious tavern brawl in May 1593.

Early Life & Education

Marlowe was born in Canterbury, England, sometime in February 1564, and was baptized there on 26 February, exactly two months before Shakespeare was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon. His father, John Marlowe, had come to Canterbury in the mid-1550s in search of work. In 1561, John Marlowe married Katherine Arthur, the daughter of a peasant family from Dover. The marriage produced nine children, of whom Christopher was the second – tragically, four of these children would die before reaching adulthood, including the eldest, Mary. To compound the difficulty of these losses, the Marlowes were a poor family who constantly had to rely on welfare assistance from local charities.

At the age of 8, Marlowe entered grammar school – this was an unusual trajectory, since the sons of tradesmen often abandoned their formal educations around that age to begin apprenticeships. He attended King's School in Canterbury, where he studied Latin, classical literature, rhetoric, and oratory, as well as the hexametric verses of the ancient Roman literature by poets Ovid and Virgil. As scholar David Riggs explains, Marlowe "internalized the basic principles of Latin prosody (figures of speech, metrical resolution rules, relative stress) that underlaid his great contributions to the art of English poetry" (Cheney, 27). In 1580, 16-year-old Marlowe won a scholarship to Corpus Christi College at Cambridge – this scholarship was awarded to students of lower-class status who had proven adept at writing in verse, with the expectation that they would go on to become Anglican clergymen. Marlowe arrived on campus in December to find a student body that included a mix of "fee-paying gentlemen" and "baseborn scholars" like himself; the division between these two groups, according to Riggs, would lay "the groundwork for many scenes of social conflict that arise in Marlowe's works" (ibid).

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The Poems of Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), also known as Kit Marlowe, was one of the most influential dramatists of Elizabethan theatre. Though he is best known for his plays, his poems were very popular in their time and are still well-regarded today. These include his translation of Ovid's Elegies, his pastoral poem A Passionate Shepherd to His Love, his narrative romance Hero and Leander, his epitaph On the Death of Sir Roger Manwood, as well as excerpts from his play Doctor Faustus.

Ovid's Elegies

Scholars generally agree that Marlowe's earliest work was probably his translation of the Amores, three books of Roman literature by the poet Ovid (43 BCE to c. 17 CE) in which a male narrator addresses his mistress. The original poems, written in Latin when Ovid was still a young man, would have been viewed as rather scandalous in Marlowe's time; indeed, scholar Stanley Wells describes them as celebrating "the delights and excitements of, especially, illicit heterosexual love, of promiscuity, seduction, and adultery" (78). Marlowe's decision to translate this specific work, likely undertaken when he was still a student at Cambridge circa 1584, was therefore "a characteristically transgressive act" against "the religious and moral establishment" (ibid).

Marlowe's translation of the Amores – known in English as the Elegies – was a more groundbreaking work than it may first appear. Not only was it the first known translation of Ovid into English, but it was also the first time that the rhymed heroic couplet was used in such a long-form way in an English text. As scholar Georgia E. Brown explains, "the patterning and arrangement of words carries a lot of the argument in the couplet, which exploits balance and contrast, and lends itself to the process of comparison, juxtaposition, and apposition" (Cheney, 113). Marlowe was not merely translating an existing work, then, but building upon it, and creating something that English literature had not yet seen. One of the most famous poems from Marlowe's translation of Ovid's Elegies is the fifth elegy from Book One, in which the lust and passion of the narrator are on full display:

In summer's heat and mid-time of the day

To rest my limbs upon a bed I lay,

One window shut, the other open stood,

Which gave such light as twinkles in a wood,

Like twilight glimpse at setting of the sun

Or night being past, and yet not day begun.

Such light to shamefaced maidens must be shown,

Where they may sport, and seem to be unknown.

Then came Corinna in a long loose gown,

Her white neck hid with tresses hanging down:

Resembling fair Semiramis going to bed

Or Lais of a thousand wooers sped.

I snatched her gown, being thin, the harm was small,

Yet strived she to be covered therewithal.

And striving thus as one that would be cast,

Betrayed herself, and yielded at the last.

Stark naked as she stood before mine eye,

Not one wen in her body could I spy.

What arms and shoulders did I touch and see,

How apt her breasts were to be pressed by me?

How smooth a belly under her waist saw I?

How large a leg, and what a lusty thigh?

To leave the rest, all liked me passing well,

I clinged her naked body, down she fell,

Judge you the rest: being tired she bade me kiss,

Jove, send me more such afternoons as this.

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