Reforming Marlowe seeks to analyze Marlow's reception in the nineteenth century in order to trace critical interpretations from their specific social, economic, and political origins.
The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe provides a full introduction to one of the great pioneers of both the Elizabethan stage and modern English poetry. It recalls that Marlowe was an inventor of the English history play (Edward II) and of Ovidian narrative verse (Hero and Leander), as well as being author of such masterpieces of tragedy and lyric as Doctor Faustus and 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Love'. Sixteen leading scholars provide accessible and authoritative chapters on Marlowe's life, texts, style, politics, religion, and classicism. The volume also considers his literary and patronage relationships and his representations of sexuality and gender and of geography and identity; his presence in modern film and theatre; and finally his influence on subsequent writers. The Companion includes a chronology of Marlowe's life, a note on reference works, and a reading list for each chapter.
Lunney explores Marlowe's engagement with the traditions of the popular stage in the 1580s and early 1590s and offers a new approach to his major plays in terms of staging and audience response, as well as providing a new account of English drama in these important but largely neglected years.
The definitive biography: a masterly account of Marlowe's work and life and the world in which he lived Shakespeare's contemporary, Christopher Marlowe revolutionized English drama and poetry, transforming the Elizabethan stage into a place of astonishing creativity. The outline of Marlowe's life, work, and violent death are known, but few of the details that explain why his writing and ideas made him such a provocateur in the Elizabethan era have been available until now. In this absorbing consideration of Marlowe and his times, David Riggs presents Marlowe as the language's first poetic dramatist whose desires proved his undoing. In an age of tremendous cultural change in Europe when Cervantes wrote the first novel and Copernicus demonstrated a world subservient to other nonreligious forces, Catholics and Protestants battled for control of England and Elizabeth's crown was anything but secure. Into this whirlwind of change stepped Marlowe espousing sexual freedom and atheism. His beliefs proved too dangerous to those in power and he was condemned as a spy and later murdered. In The World of Christopher Marlowe, Riggs's exhaustive research digs deeply into the mystery of how and why Marlowe was killed.
This title was first published in 2000: Re-citing the available information on Christopher Marlowe, this study seeks to illuminate the preoccupations and pitfalls of previous accounts of the dramatist's canon in an effort to discover, or to elaborate, new areas of investigation. Each chapter considers one of Marlowe's dramatic works in relation to a different critical approach or isue suggested by scholarship's prior treatment of the play. The book consequently operates on two levels: it is a review of a canon which has suffered theoretical neglect; and a blueprint for a more critically sophisticated approach to English literature.
Christopher Marlowe's drama, The Jew of Malta, has become an increasingly popular source for scholarly scrutiny, staged productions, and, most recently, a filmed version. The play follows the sometimes tragic, sometimes comic, often outrageous fortunes of its villainous protagonist, the Jew Barabas. In recent years the play has provoked as much interpretive controversy as any work in the Marlowe canon. This unique volume is therefore especially timely, providing fresh, varied approaches to the many enigmatic elements of the play.
First performed by Shakespeare’s rivals in the 1590s, Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta was a trend-setting, innovative play whose black comedy and final tragic irony illuminate the darker regions of the Elizabethan cultural imagination. Although Jews were banished from England in 1291, the Jew in the form of Barabas, the play’s protagonist, returns on the stage to embody and to challenge the dramatic and cultural anti-Semitic stereotypes out of which he is constructed. The result is a theatrically sophisticated but deeply unsettling play whose rich cultural significance extends beyond the early modern period to the present day. The introduction and historical documents in this edition provide a rich context for the world of the play’s composition and production, including materials on Jewishness and anti-Semitism, the political struggles over Malta, and Christopher Marlowe’s personal and political reputation.
Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593) emerges in most accounts of his life by biographers and critics as a mysterious and sensational action figure, a hapless pawn of circumstance, or a pseudonymous cipher. Constance Brown Kuriyama's new biography reconstructs the eventful life of a radically innovative playwright who flourished briefly and died violently more than four hundred years ago, yet persists in the romantic imagination even today. Many discoveries about Marlowe's life have emerged over the past hundred years. The author here supplements these findings with new material, placing the dramatist and poet more precisely in his historical milieu. Kuriyama interprets Marlowe's acts of violence—inexplicable though they may seem—as logical consequences of the circumstances he faced. Experience and temperament both accounted for the characteristically brash way he moved through the world. The stringent constraints of Elizabethan society, which encouraged intense political and religious conflicts, had a great influence on Marlowe's thinking, while his ambitions were stirred by the period's unprecedented opportunities for talented individuals to rise in society. The documentary evidence assembled by Kuriyama—and made available to readers—allows her to show how Marlowe was able to take advantage of Elizabethan social mobility. In the context of Elizabethan education, society, and culture, Marlowe becomes a fully human, three-dimensional figure.
Tamburlaine the Great, Part One and Part Two are the first plays that Christopher Marlowe wrote for London’s then new freestanding, open-air public playhouses. They trace the progress of Tamburlaine, a Central Asian leader, as he “scourge[s] kingdoms with his conquering sword” and rises to imperial power. The plays were a powerful beginning to Marlowe’s brief career as a public theatre dramatist: the brutally masculine and martial main character immediately captured audiences, and the plays were widely imitated and parodied. Even four hundred years later, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine remains a shocking and seductive figure. The introduction and historical appendices to this new Broadview Edition provide many avenues for readers to understand these plays, presenting other portrayals of Islam from the period, related lives of Tamburlaine from other writers, and material on Marlowe’s scandalous reputation.
Christopher Marlowe is known not only as Shakespeare's most notable contemporary playwright, but also as one of the most intriguing figures of the English Renaissance. The mystery of his death in a fray at the age of 29 has inspired writers around the world, and his fiery career is no less intriguing. This New Casebook offers a wide-ranging selection of essays on Marlowe's major plays. Articles from the last two decades by leading critics of English early modern drama provide a variety of fresh, controversial and enlightening critical perspectives on five of Marlowe's plays: Tamburlaine the Great Parts One and Two, The Jew of Malta, Doctor Faustus, and Edward II.