FEATURED ESSAYS 1. Dr. Faustus 2. Marlowe Cut Short 3. The Of Marlowes Excessive Drin 4. The British Renaissance Produced... 5. The British Renaissance Produced ... 6. Dr Faustus 7. Sonnet 130 8. The Works And Influence Of Christ... 9. Sonnet 130 Vs. The Passionate 10. Dr. Faustus 11. Dr Faustus 12. Love In The Renaissance 13. Free-will And Repentance In Dr 14. Faustus

Christopher Marlowe

 Christopher Marlowe: what did he contribute to English literature and
how is his writing reflective of the style of the times?

Christopher Marlowe contributed greatly to English literature. He
developed a new metre which has become one of the most popular in English
literary history, and he revitalised a dying form of English drama. His
short life was apparently violent and the man himself was supposedly of a
volatile temperament, yet he managed to write some of the most delicate
and beautiful works on record. His writing is representative of the spirit
of the Elizabethan literature in his attitude towards religion, his choice
of writing style and in the metre that he used.

Christopher Marlowe was born in 1564 the son of a Canterbury shoemaker and
was an exact contemporary of Shakespeare. He was educated at the King's
School, Canterbury, and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He became a BA
in 1584 and a MA in 1587. He seems to have been of a violent nature and
was often in trouble with the law. He made many trips to the continent
during his short lifetime and it has been suggested that these visits were
related to espionage. In 1589 he was involved in a street brawl which
resulted in a man's death. An injunction was brought against him three
years later by the constable of Shoreditch in relation to that death. In
1592 he was deported from the Netherlands after attempting to issue forged
gold coins. On the 30th of May 1593 he was killed by Ingram Frizer in a
Deptford tavern after a quarrel over the bill. He was only 29 years old.

During the middle ages, culture and government were influenced greatly by
the Church of Rome. The Reformation of Henry VIII (1529-39), and the break
of ties with that church meant that the monarch was now supreme governor.
This altered the whole balance of political and religious life, and,
consequently, was the balance of literature, art and thought. The
literature of Elizabethan England was based on the crown. This period of
literature (1558-1625) is outstanding because of its range of interests
and vitality of language. Drama was the chief form of Elizabethan art
because there was an influx of writers trying to emulate speech in their
writing, and because of the suddenly expanded vocabulary writers were
using (most of these new words came from foreign languages).

Marlowe's plays comprise The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage (possibly
with some collaboration from Nashe), Tamburlaine parts one and two, The
Jew of Malta, Edward II, Dr. Faustus and The Massacre at Paris. Up to the
time of Tamburlaine, written in 15 87-8, there had been a few so-called
tragedies. Of these, the best known is Gorboduc, first played in 1561, and
apparently popular enough to justify its printing a few years later,
although the play was "a lifeless performance, with no character of enough
vitality to stand out from the ruck of the rest of the pasteboards." With
Tamburlaine, Marlowe swept the Elizabethan audiences off their feet.

The Jew of Malta, written after Tamburlaine, begins very strongly, with
the main character a commanding figure of the same calibre as Tamburlaine,
and the characterisation is better rounded than Tamburlaine's. Sadly the
play comes to pieces after the second act, and it has been speculated that
another less talented author revised the ending.

Edward II is unexpected in that the main character is a neurotic weakling,
instead of a dominant figure like Henry V. Even though the
characterisation is clumsy, it is yet a dramatist's treatment, and one can
see that Marlowe has moved towards creating a more developed character.
Marlowe thus breathed new life into English tragedy, and paved the way for
the greatest English dramatist, Shakespeare. It is quite possible that
without Marlowe's contribution to English tragedy, Shakespeare would
never have at tempted such an unpopular style and he would not be
canonised as he is today.

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus is surely the pinnacle of Marlowe's
achievement. The subject no doubt appealed to Marlowe. In no other play of
his, nor in the majority of English literature, is there a scene to match
the passionate and tragic intensity of Faustus' last hour on earth.

Faustus used to be placed as the play immediately following Tamburlaine,
yet a discovery by Dr. F. S. Boas led to the conclusion that the play
cannot be dated before 1592. This was because the English translation of
the German Faustbuch was not published until 1592, and though it is
possible that Marlowe saw the manuscript before publication, the evidence
suggests that Dr. Faustus was written after Edward II. This would mean
that instead of making a massive jump in quality from Tamburlaine and The
Jew of

Malta to Dr. Faustus, and then reverting back to Edward II, Marlowe wrote
Tamburlaine and The Jew and felt that he had not really set his genius and
so casts back to the type of these earlier plays and far surpasses them in
dramatic poetry.

Faustus tells of a man who sells his soul to Satan in return for twenty-
four years of knowledge and power. The protagonist, Dr. John Faustus,
instead of sharing his gift with others, fritters his years away until the
in last scene he realises the grave mistakes he has made. The scenes where
Faustus uses his power for practical jokes are in stark contrast to those
where something meaningful happens to him. There are three places in the
play where Marlowe's genius can be seen illuminated by perfection of
metre and rhetoric; the scene where Faustus conjures up Mephistopheles,
the scene in which he speaks to Helen of Troy and Faustus' last hour on
Earth. It has been suggested by some that Marlowe only wrote these three
scenes and the rest was added by someone else. However these are probably
the same people who think Marlowe and Shakespeare are the same man. Even
so, these scenes were unmatched in their word play and metre until
Shakespeare. This play is timeless because its subject matter is still
interesting today and because the force of Marlowe's conviction cannot
help but invoke emotions in even the most soulless of critics.

Possibly Marlowe's greatest gift to English literature was his metre.
Marlowe was the real creator of the most famous, most versatile and
noblest of English measure, the unrhymed decasyllabic (ten syllables) line
called blank verse. Blank verse or iambic pentameter as it is known was
first used twenty or so years before Marlowe, however it was intolerably
monotonous. The metre comes from the Greek Iambic trimeter, which was a
twelve-syllable line with six feet. The experimenters were perceptive
enough to see that the more slowly moving English language would require
five feet instead of six. The result was such lifeless pieces as this from
Gorboduc:

	Your lasting age shall be their longer stay,
	For cares of kings, that rule as you have ruled,
	For public wealth and not for private joy,
	Do waste man's life, and hasten crooked age,
	With furrowed face and with enfeebled limbs,
	To draw on creeping death a swifter pace.
	They two yet young shall bear the parted reign
	With greater ease, than one, now old, alone,
	Can wield the whole, for whom much harder is
	With lessened strength the double weight to bear.

This piece is unbelievably tedious, and without a sensitive ear like
Marlowe's, blank verse would never have been the great measure that it is.


 What Marlowe did was to revise the internal structure of the single line.
In some lines he substituted an iamb (- / ) for a spondee (- - ), a
tribrach (/ / / ) or a dactyl (- / / ) in certain feet, which made each
line more interesting and versatile. Also, while having a few lines
strictly conform to the norm, he created lines with four, three even two
groups of sounds. By using these devices, Marlowe transformed blank verse
from a stiff and monotonous to a varied and flexible metre, as can be seen
in Faustus' invocation to Helen:

     Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships?
	And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?-
     Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.-

The first line is regular, with five feet and five stresses. The second
has the same number of stresses, but the grouping of the words is
irregular. Whereas the third is completely irregular. It is Marlowe's
greatest gift to English literature that he ma naged to  develop a metre
which gave the author more creative freedom than any other before or since.


Marlowe's writing is reflective of the spirit of the Elizabethan age in a
number of ways. His subject matter and characters in his plays often
question the validity of the church. He has been criticised for being an
atheist, for example he was accused of blasphemy in his portrayal of Helen
in Dr. Faustus She is seen as a goddess who has the power to cleanse
Faustus' soul, even though God cannot. She is more powerful than the
virgin Mary, and the fact that Marlowe presents the proposition that God
is incapable of redeeming Faustus' soul farther aggravated the church.
This new thinking about the church is part of the spirit of the
Elizabethan age due to King Henry VIII's reformation.

In many Elizabethan plays, the main character is a merchant of some sort,
due to the rise in power of these middle class businessmen. This can be
seen in many plays of Shakespeare, as well as Marlowe's The Rich Jew of
Malta. Also the protagonists in Marlowe's plays are often similar to
Everyman, particularly Dr. Faustus, except that these characters are
individuals, and not mankind in general, in that the character learns
something which is important to the audience as well. The Everyman plays
were written shortly before Marlowe's birth, and again this re-
characterisation by Marlowe is a reflection of the spirit of the times in
his works.

Lastly, the fact that Marlowe used iambic pentameter, as well as having
drama as his writing style is representative of the Elizabethan age.
Although these were contributions to English literature, Marlowe really
set the trend for this age, and many contemporaries of his used these
techniques. In that sense, one of Marlowe's contributions to English
literature was that he defined a lot of the aspects of Elizabethan
literature. Marlowe's revolutionary use of literature is both
representative of the age, as well as a contribution to English literature.


Marlowe contributed greatly to English literature. His works are excellent
on their own; though he also revitalised the tragedy as well as developing
blank verse, one of the most beautiful, flexible and versatile of metres.
His work is representative of the spirit of the Elizabethan age in that
Marlowe used drama as his chief form of writing, his subject matters were
demonstrative of this age, for example the loss of belief in the church,
and he wrote in iambic pentameter which became very popular before the
end of this age.

Word Count: 1875