Marlowe, Christopher (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 scholar’s fall to damnation through lust for forbidden knowledge, power, and sensual pleasure. Never before in English literature had a writer so powerfully shown the soul’s conflict with the laws defining the place of human beings in a universal order. See Faust.
Marlowe was born in February 1564 in Canterbury and studied at Cambridge. At some time during his university years, Marlowe did secret service work for the government. The few years before Marlowe’s death on May 30, 1593, 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. This play reflects 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. The New Oxford Shakespeare (2016) lists Marlowe as co-author with William Shakespeare of the history plays Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III (about 1589-1592).
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.”
