Christopher Marlowe's Works
Christopher Marlowe created a relatively small, yet extremely powerful body of work. It is thought that, "...the fiery stylist, the brilliant, powerful craftsman, the most finished technician of the decade was still groping for a firm hold on his art when the assassin's dagger ended everything in that mysterious stabbing affray at Deptford," (Bakeless, 3). Additionally, his, “career as a spy accounts, in part, for his comparatively small literary output (he wrote seven plays, an unfinished narrative poem, some translations and a handful of lyrics). At the same time it provides the dark and violent world of plays such as the Jew of Malta and more specifically the detailed knowledge of recent French political history revealed in The Massacre at Paris," (Salgado, 107). This quote provides a basis of understanding for his plays in relation to his life. Rowse continues the topic of the subject matter of Marlowe’s plays and states, "No writer was ever more autobiographical than he was--it was a serious limitation upon him, especially for a dramatist. His creations are very much projections of himself--Tamburlaine, Dr. Faustus, the Jew of Malta," (32). The following information on the page provides links to Marlowe’s work as well as some helpful quotes describing his work.
"Parts of the play are almost word-for-word renderings of passages from the first, second and fourth books of Virgil's epic but else where Marlowe adapts his source material with the greatest freedom, which is one of the reasons for thinking that the play as we have it is the work of different periods of Marlowe's career," (Salgado, 116).
"...It is his prentice-work for the drama. As such, it is in style close to Tamburlaine; though in blank verse, it has a fair amount of rhyme and even more alliteration. Its general tone is more lyrical, with much more sentiment than is usual for Marlowe," (Rowse,43-44).
"It is not known whether Dido was ever performed, though when it was published in the year after Marlowe's death the title page said, 'played by the Children of her Majesty's Chapel,'" (44).
"The first play to effect the fusion between new poetry and the drama, and to cleave a way for all coming after," (Rowse, 54).
Discussing the appeal Tamburlaine had to the Elizabethan audience, Rowse states, "There was the appeal to the war-atmosphere, when time itself stood on tiptoe...There was the contemporary value set upon individual, heroic achievements...the belief in energy and initiative in man carving out his way for himself and expecting to enjoy his reward. Without any doubt, members of the Elizabethan audience saw themselves in the part of Tamburlaine, as its creator did. In addition, there was pageantry, there was colour...above all there was the fury of torrential speech, the glory of language released at this molten, brazen moment into poetry that was never to be forgotten," (67).
"Tamburlaine's physical conquests are of course an emblem of the spiritual discoveries, the 'thirst for the infinite' of Renaissance man," (Salgado, 120).
"If the first part of Tamburlaine the Great is a celebration of Renaissance individualism, the second is something like a lament for its limitations," (122).
"When, in his play The Jew of Malta, Marlowe has the Prologue spoken by Machiavelli in person, he not only puts into the mouth nearly all the common places associated with Machiavelli in the common mind, but creates a character, the intriguer whose whole existence is based on never revealing his real character or motives to anyone but the audience, whose descendants are legion in the drama of the next few decades, and who include Shakespeare's Richard III, Edmund and Iago. The Machiavellian world of double dealing and real politick also provides the characters and atmosphere of Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris," (Salgado, 105).
"The Jew of Malta is largely based upon the same reading as had gone into Tamburlaine, while it develops into a main theme of the new play the subject of oath-breaking, or not keeping faith with persons of a different religion, which had been a subordinate theme in the previous play," (Rowse, 81).
"No judgment, however charitable, can set down The Massacre at Paris as anything but one of Marlowe's failures. It is, if anything, a worse play than Dido, which at least foreshadows Marlowe's greatest works, still to come, and has many passages that are genuinely fine in themselves," (Bakeless, 69).
Additionally on The Massacre at Paris, Bakeless states, "Although fairly successful on the stage, the published play seems to have been a failure," (91).
"In a sense, The Massacre at Paris is typically Elizabethan. It is crude, violent, gory, relieved by vivid and sometimes poetic interludes between assassinations. It has no unity except such as is given by the them of religious conflict and the characterization of the Duke of Guise--a typically Marlowe hero, a violently ambitious superman, reaching eagerly for unattainable heights and falling in the end as Faustus fell, and Barabas, and Tamburlaine," (97)."Marlowe wrote four great tragedies: The Massacre at Paris is not one of them. As it stands it is undoubtedly his worst play," (Salgado, 117).
"In Edward the Second Marlowe made his only known attempt--except, very doubtfully, as a collaborator with others--to base a play upon English history. Yet the influence of this solitary endeavor appears unmistakably in one after another of Shakespeare's earlier historical plays--most notably of all in Richard II," (Bakeless, 4).
"In Edward the Second one figure, Young Mortimer, is made masterfully dominating, and another, the week King Edward, is made humanly appealing. They clash, and to their clash everything else in the play is related," (4).
"Of the six surviving plays written by Marlowe, Doctor Faustus is by far the most famous, yet it is by no means the most finished and satisfactory," (McAlindon, 8).
"Doctor Faustus is a remarkable and fascinating play for a number of other reasons. In the first place, it is the only major play on a religious them produced for the stage in that profoundly religious epoch; perhaps only a "proud, audacious" genius such as Marlowe would undertake such a theme at a time when religion was so dangerously sensitive an issue. That Marlowe, the notorious scorner of established religious beliefs, should not only undertake to dramatize the story but also forcefully equate Faustus's revolt with blind folly and foreground eternal damnation as an inescapable reality is a most intriguing paradox," (8-9).
"What makes the play most remarkable is the fact that in composing it Marlowe so elicited the latent meanings of the devil compact--a type of story that had been familiar in the West for centuries--that he gave it the force and status of a myth...The Faust figure became the archetype of all human striving to reach beyond the human; more particularly, he has become the personification of that post-medieval phenomenon we call individualism," (9).
"Doctor Faustus was a great theatrical success in England from the time of its first performance until the closing of the theatres in 1642," (12).
"In the course of turning out many hundreds of rhymed couplets in translating Ovid, he laid the foundation for that mastery of the form that makes Hero and Leander, though unfinished, the most perfect and classic of Elizabethan poems," (Rowse, 37).
"Marlowe's finest achievement outside the drama is the long narrative poem Hero and Leander, left uncompleted at his death and continued, although in a very different mode, by his friend George Chapman," (Salgado, 113). "The story tells how Leander, a young man of Abydos, falls in love with Hero of Sestos whom he meets in the temple of Venus during the festival of Adonis. She invites him to visit her at night in her tower by the sea. Leander spends the night with Hero and returns to Abydos, but tormented by his separation from her, swims the Hellespont to Sestos. On the ways he is carried down to the sea bed by Neptune, who mistakes him for Jupiter's page, Ganymede. Leander escapes, returns to Sestos and makes love to Hero; the lovers wake to another dawn. With in the main narrative is inserted an exemplary tale above Jove, Mercury and Cupid to explain the poverty of scholars and the Fates' hostility towards true lovers," (Salgado, 113-114).
"It is an elegant and cheerful rendering of the age-old pastoral theme of the shepherd inviting his sweetheart to share his life. The apparent naivety of the verse is deceptive, pastoral being one of the most sophisticated of literary forms and the product of highly developed urban cultures. Not only the landscape but the costume is elegant and highly mannered, far removed from true pastoral simplicity (if such a thing exists): "A gowne made of the finest wooll,/ Which from our pretty Lambes we pull,/ Fayre lined slippers for the cold,/ With buckles of the purest gold," [lines 13-16], (Salgado, 112).
"One of the most beautiful lyrics in English literature, and one which has exercised a powerful influence upon three centuries of English verse," (Bakeless, 149).
"Marlowe's translation of the first book of Lucan's Pharsalia offers an entire contrast: here is a theme more congenial to him, nearer to the marrow of his genius--the conflict for power between Pompey and Caesar, the restless, aspiring spirit of Caesar, possessed by a certain Machiavellianism, ambition, war, the clash of armies. The poem is an epic, to which the translation into blank verse is appropriate," (Rowse, 40).
Ovid's Elegies "...may not in itself be a great translation, but there is enough in it to remind us that it belongs to an age of translations, but also that it is the work of a great and original poet," (Salgado, 113).
The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe: An Electronic Edition (all above links to works are from this site)
A Site with a Great Summary of Marlowe's Life and Work
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