Christopher Marlowe-the greatest dramatist of his time

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MINISTRY OF HIGHER AND SECONDARY SPECIAL EDUCATION

OF THE REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN

ANDIZHAN STATE UNIVERSITY

COURSE PAPER

on the theme: “Christopher Marlowe-the greatest dramatist of his time”

Introduction

For over the years of independence the Republic of Uzbekistan has carried out fundamental, structural and substantive reforms that have encompassed all levels of education system and its components, which were aimed at ensuring its compliance with the long-term objectives and interests of the country, modern requirements, as well as international standards. The appropriate legal framework reforming this sector was created, which defined as a priority the growth of investment, as well as the investments in human capital, training of educated and intellectually developed generation, which is the crucial asset and a decisive force in the achievement of democratic development, modernization and renewal, ensuring stable and sustainable growth of the economy.

Today, thanks to the consistent implementation of the provisions of these laws in the country, the national model of personnel training has been formed which is based on the principle of "person - state and society - continuous education - science - production".

The current modern system of continuous education in Uzbekistan consists of preschool, general secondary, specialized secondary and vocational, higher and postgraduate education, training and retraining, as well as extra school education. In this continuous chain of links there is a fundamentally new specialized secondary and vocational education, realized in educational institutions of a new type - the academic lyceums and vocational colleges. This system provides young men and women with an opportunity to get along with general subjects on 2-3 professional skills which are in demand in labor market, as well as the study of one or several foreign languages. verse marlowe poet dramatist

So far, 1556 educational institutions of a new type, including 144 academic lyceums and 1412 vocational colleges have been established in the country, as well as 30 branches of professional colleges in remote areas of the countryside.

Attaching a great importance to continuity among different levels of educational system and taking into account the fundamental nature of general secondary education, for the successful continuation of the process of learning in the institutions of secondary special and professional education, and then in the premises of colleges and universities, the "Nationwide School Education Development Program for 2004-2009" was adopted and successfully implemented. This document provided for, in particular, a radical renewal and capital reconstruction of buildings and engineering infrastructure of secondary schools, equipping them with modern educational, laboratory and computer equipment, as well as staffing highly qualified teachers.

Qualified specialists for the sectors of the economy and the social sphere are trained in 6 areas - humanitarian, social, economics and law, production and technical sphere, agriculture and water management, healthcare and social welfare, services.

Decree of the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan dated May 20, 2011 "On measures to strengthen the material-technical base and development of higher education institutions and cardinal improvement of the training quality of highly skilled professionals” has been adopted with the purpose of radically increasing the quality of training of specialists with academic degree, who are demanded in sectors of the economy, on the basis of modernization of material-technical base for higher educational institutions, equipping them with modern educational and scientific and laboratory equipment, optimization of directions and specialties of training of highly qualified personnel, further improving learning technologies, modern curricula, textbooks and teaching aids.

At the initiative of the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan a project of the "National Network of e-education" has been realized, a network based on fiber-optic communication lines, to which was connected all universities of the country, has been set. These lines are also equipped for video conferencing. Regular video lectures, training seminars and courses of remote training of teaching and managerial personnel of higher education institutions are being organized on the basis of an electronic network. As a result of this project in 2011, 80 university facilities were connected to the network. In 2012, 84 facilities of secondary special and professional education are connected to "e-education" single corporate network. The Centre for the implementation of e-learning in educational institutions at Ministry of Higher and Secondary Special Education of the Republic of Uzbekistan is equipped with state-of-the-art technologies. It was established in accordance with the Resolution of the Cabinet of Ministers of 25 July 2012.International cooperation in the field of vocational education is actively developing, including on the basis of direct mutually beneficial contacts with foreign university partners.

Therefore, topic dedicated to Christopher Marlowe attracted me much as one of popular dramatist who influinsed English literature and enriched it as well.

1. Early life and bibliography of Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe, also known as Kit Marlowe (baptized 26 February 1564 - 30 May 1593), was an English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. Marlowe was the foremost Elizabethan tragedian of his day. He greatly influenced William Shakespeare, who was born in the same year as Marlowe and who rose to become the pre-eminent Elizabethan playwright after Marlowe's mysterious early death. Marlowe's plays are known for the use of blank verse and their overreaching protagonists.

A warrant was issued for Marlowe's arrest on 18 May 1593. No reason was given for it, though it was thought to be connected to allegations of blasphemy--a manuscript believed to have been written by Marlowe was said to contain "vile heretical conceipts". On 20 May, he was brought to the court to attend upon the Privy Council for questioning. There is no record of their having met that day, however, and he was commanded to attend upon them each day thereafter until "licensed to the contrary". Ten days later, he was stabbed to death by Ingram Frizer. Whether the stabbing was connected to his arrest has never been resolved.

Marlowe was born in Canterbury to shoemaker John Marlowe and his wife Catherine. His date of birth is not known, but he was baptised on 26 February 1564, and is likely to have been born a few days before. Thus, he was just two months older than his contemporary William Shakespeare, who was baptised on 26 April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Marlowe attended The King's School in Canterbury (where a house is now named after him) and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he studied on a scholarship and received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1584. In 1587, the university hesitated to award him his Master of Arts degree because of a rumour that he intended to go to the English college at Rheims, presumably to prepare for ordination as a Roman Catholic priest. However, his degree was awarded on schedule when the Privy Council intervened on his behalf, commending him for his "faithful dealing" and "good service" to the Queen. The nature of Marlowe's service was not specified by the Council, but its letter to the Cambridge authorities has provoked much speculation, notably the theory that Marlowe was operating as a secret agent working for Sir Francis Walsingham's intelligence service. No direct evidence supports this theory, although the Council's letter is evidence that Marlowe had served the government in some secret capacity. After 1587, Christopher Marlowe was in London, writing for the theater and probably also engaging himself occasionally in government service. What is thought to be his first play, Dido, Queen of Carthage, was not published until 1594, but it is generally thought to have been written while he was still a student at Cambridge. According to records, the play was performed by the Children of the Chapel, a company of boy actors, between 1587 and 1593.

Marlowe's second play was the two-part Tamburlaine the Great (c. 1587; published 1590). This was Marlowe's first play to be performed on the regular stage in London and is among the first English plays in blank verse. It is considered the beginning of the mature phase of the Elizabethan theater and was the last of Marlowe's plays to be published before his untimely death.

There is disagreement among Marlowe scholars regarding the order in which the plays subsequent to Tamburlaine were written. Some contend that Doctor Faustus quickly followed Tamburlaine, and that Marlowe then turned to writing Edward the Second, The Massacre at Paris, and finally The Jew of Malta. According to the Marlowe Society's chronology, the order was thus: The Jew of Malta, Doctor Faustus, Edward the Second and The Massacre at Paris, with Doctor Faustus being performed first (1604) and The Jew of Malta last (1633). What is not disputed is that he wrote only these four plays after Tamburlaine, from c. 1589 to 1592, and that they cemented his legacy and proved vastly influential.

After 1587, Christopher Marlowe was in London, writing for the theater and probably also engaging himself occasionally in government service. What is thought to be his first play, Dido, Queen of Carthage, was not published until 1594, but it is generally thought to have been written while he was still a student at Cambridge. According to records, the play was performed by the Children of the Chapel, a company of boy actors, between 1587 and 1593.

Marlowe's second play was the two-part Tamburlaine the Great (c. 1587; published 1590). This was Marlowe's first play to be performed on the regular stage in London and is among the first English plays in blank verse. It is considered the beginning of the mature phase of the Elizabethan theater and was the last of Marlowe's plays to be published before his untimely death.

There is disagreement among Marlowe scholars regarding the order in which the plays subsequent to Tamburlaine were written.

Some contend that Doctor Faustus quickly followed Tamburlaine, and that Marlowe then turned to writing Edward the Second, The Massacre at Paris, and finally The Jew of Malta. According to the Marlowe Society's chronology, the order was thus: The Jew of Malta, Doctor Faustus, Edward the Second and The Massacre at Paris, with Doctor Faustus being performed first (1604) and The Jew of Malta last (1633).

What is not disputed is that he wrote only these four plays after Tamburlaine, from c. 1589 to 1592, and that they cemented his legacy and proved vastly influential.

2. Arrest and death

Marlowe was buried in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St Nicholas, Deptford. The plaque shown here is modern.In early May 1593 several bills were posted about London threatening Protestant refugees from France and the Netherlands who had settled in the city. One of these, the "Dutch church libel" written in rhymed iambic pentameter, contained allusions to several of Marlowe's plays and was signed, "Tamburlaine". On 11 May the Privy Council ordered the arrest of those responsible for the libels. The next day, Marlowe's colleague Thomas Kyd was arrested. Kyd's lodgings were searched and a 3-page fragment of a heretical tract was found. In a letter to Sir John Puckering, Kyd asserted that it had belonged to Marlowe with whom he had been writing "in one chamber" some two years earlier. In a second letter, Kyd described Marlowe as blasphemous, disorderly, holding treasonous opinions, being an irreligious reprobate, and `intemperate & of a cruel hart'. At that time they had both been working for an aristocratic patron, probably Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange. A warrant for Marlowe's arrest was issued on 18 May, when the Privy Council apparently knew that he might be found staying with Thomas Walsingham, whose father was a first cousin of the late Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's principal secretary in the 1580s and a man more deeply involved in state espionage than any other member of the Privy Council. Marlowe duly presented himself on 20 May but, there apparently being no Privy Council meeting on that day, was instructed to "give his daily attendance on their Lordships, until he shall be licensed to the contrary". On Wednesday, 30 May, Marlowe was killed.

Various accounts of Marlowe's death were current over the next few years. In his Palladis Tamia, published in 1598, Francis Meres says Marlowe was "stabbed to death by a bawdy serving-man, a rival of his in his lewd love" as punishment for his "epicurism and atheism." In 1917, in the Dictionary of National Biography, Sir Sidney Lee wrote that Marlowe was killed in a drunken fight, and this is still often stated as fact today.

The official account came to light only in 1925 when the scholar Leslie Hotson discovered the coroner's report of the inquest on Marlowe's death, held two days later on Friday 1 June 1593, by the Coroner of the Queen's Household, William Danby. Marlowe had spent all day in a house in Deptford, owned by the widow Eleanor Bull, and together with three men: Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley. All three had been employed by one or other of the Walsinghams. Skeres and Poley had helped snare the conspirators in the Babington plot and Frizer would later describe Thomas Walsingham as his "master" at that time although his role was probably more that of a financial or business agent as he was for Walsingham's wife Audrey a few years later. These witnesses testified that Frizer and Marlowe had argued over payment of the bill (now famously known as the 'Reckoning') exchanging "divers malicious words" while Frizer was sitting at a table between the other two and Marlowe was lying behind him on a couch. Marlowe snatched Frizer's dagger and wounded him on the head. In the ensuing struggle, according to the coroner's report, Marlowe was stabbed above the right eye, killing him instantly. The jury concluded that Frizer acted in self-defence, and within a month he was pardoned. Marlowe was buried in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St. Nicholas, Deptford immediately after the inquest, on 1 June 1593.The complete text of the inquest report was published by Leslie Hotson in his book, The Death of Christopher Marlowe, in the introduction to which Prof. G. L. Kittredge said "The mystery of Marlowe's death, heretofore involved in a cloud of contradictory gossip and irresponsible guess-work, is now cleared up for good and all on the authority of public records of complete authenticity and gratifying fullness", but this confidence proved fairly short-lived.

Hotson himself had considered the possibility that the witnesses had "concocted a lying account of Marlowe's behaviour, to which they swore at the inquest, and with which they deceived the jury" but came down against that scenario. Others, however, began to suspect that this was indeed the case. Writing to the Times Literary Supplement shortly after the book's publication, Eugйnie de Kalb disputed that the struggle and outcome as described were even possible and Samuel A. Tannenbaum (a graduate of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons) insisted the following year that such a wound could not have possibly resulted in instant death, as had been claimed. Even Marlowe's biographer John Bakeless acknowledged that "some scholars have been inclined to question the truthfulness of the coroner's report. There is something queer about the whole episode" and said that Hotson's discovery "raises almost as many questions as it answers." It has also been discovered more recently that the apparent absence of a local county coroner to accompany the Coroner of the Queen's Household would, if noticed, have made the inquest null and void.

One of the main reasons for doubting the truth of the inquest concerns the reliability of Marlowe's companions as witnesses. As an agent provocateur for the late Sir Francis Walsingham, Robert Poley was a consummate liar, the "very genius of the Elizabethan underworld",and is even on record as saying "I will swear and forswear myself, rather than I will accuse myself to do me any harm." The other witness, Nicholas Skeres, had for many years acted as a confidence trickster, drawing young men into the clutches of people in the money-lending racket, including Marlowe's apparent killer, Ingram Frizer, with whom he was currently engaged in just such a swindle. In other words, despite their being referred to as "generosi" (gentlemen) in the inquest report, they were all professional liars.

Some biographers, such as Kuriyama and Downie, nevertheless take the inquest to be a true account of what occurred, but in trying to explain what really happened if the account was not true, others have come up with a variety of murder theories.Jealous of her husband Thomas's relationship with Marlowe, Audrey Walsingham arranged for the playwright to be murdered. Sir Walter Raleigh arranged the murder, fearing that under torture Marlowe might incriminate him. With Skeres the main player, the murder resulted from attempts by the Earl of Essex to use Marlowe to incriminate Sir Walter Raleigh. He was killed on the orders of father and son Lord Burghley and Sir Robert Cecil, who thought that his plays contained Catholic propaganda. He was accidentally killed while Frizer and Skeres were pressuring him to pay back money he owed them. Marlowe was murdered at the behest of several members of the Privy Council who feared that he might reveal them to be atheists.The Queen herself ordered his assassination because of his subversively atheistic behaviour.

Frizer murdered him because he envied Marlowe's close relationship with his master Thomas Walsingham and feared the effect that Marlowe's behaviour might have on Walsingham's reputation.

There is even a theory that Marlowe's death was faked to save him from trial and execution for subversive atheism. However, since there are only written documents on which to base any conclusions, and since it is probable that the most crucial information about his death was never committed to writing at all, it is unlikely that the full circumstances of Marlowe's death will ever be known.

3. Philosophy

A foul sheet from Marlowe's writing of The Massacre at Paris (1593). Reproduced from Folger Shakespeare Library Ms.J.b.8During his lifetime, Marlowe was reputed to be an atheist which, at that time, held the dangerous implication of being an enemy of God and, by association, the state. With the rise of public fears concerning The School of Night, or "School of Atheism" in the late 16th century, accusations of atheism were closely associated with disloyalty to the Protestant monarchy of England.

Some modern historians consider that Marlowe's professed atheism, as with his supposed Catholicism, may have been no more than an elaborate and sustained pretense adopted to further his work as a government spy. Contemporary evidence comes from Marlowe's accuser in Flushing, an informer called Richard Baines. The governor of Flushing had reported that each of the men had "of malice" accused the other of instigating the counterfeiting, and of intending to go over to the Catholic "enemy"; such an action was considered atheistic by the Church of England. Following Marlowe's arrest in 1593, Baines submitted to the authorities a "note containing the opinion of one Christopher Marly concerning his damnable judgment of religion, and scorn of God's word." Baines attributes to Marlowe a total of eighteen items which "scoff at the pretensions of the Old and New Testament" such as, "Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest [unchaste]", "the woman of Samaria and her sister were whores and that Christ knew them dishonestly", and, "St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom" (cf. John 13:23-25), and, "that he used him as the sinners of Sodom".He also implies that Marlowe had Catholic sympathies. Other passages are merely skeptical in tone: "he persuades men to atheism, willing them not to be afraid of bugbears and hobgoblins". The final paragraph of Baines's document reads:

These thinges, with many other shall by good & honest witnes be aproved to be his opinions and Comon Speeches, and that this Marlowe doth not only hould them himself, but almost into every Company he Cometh he persuades men to Atheism willing them not to be afeard of bugbeares and hobgoblins, and vtterly scorning both god and his ministers as I Richard Baines will Justify & approue both by mine oth and the testimony of many honest men, and almost al men with whome he hath Conversed any time will testify the same, and as I think all men in Cristianity ought to indevor that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped, he saith likewise that he hath quoted a number of Contrarieties oute of the Scripture which he hath giuen to some great men who in Convenient time shalbe named.When these thinges shalbe Called in question the witnes shalbe produced.

Similar examples of Marlowe's statements were given by Thomas Kyd after his imprisonment and possible torture (see above); both Kyd and Baines connect Marlowe with the mathematician Thomas Harriot and Walter Raleigh's circle. Another documentm claimed at around the same time that "one Marlowe is able to show more sound reasons for Atheism than any divine in England is able to give to prove divinity, and that ... he hath read the Atheist lecture to Sir Walter Raleigh and others."

Poster for WPA performance of Marlowe's Faustus, New York, circa 1935Some critics believe that Marlowe sought to disseminate these views in his work and that he identified with his rebellious and iconoclastic protagonists. However, plays had to be approved by the Master of the Revels before they could be performed, and the censorship of publications was under the control of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Presumably these authorities did not consider any of Marlowe's works to be unacceptable other than the Amores.

4. Works of Christopher Marlowe as a Dramatist

In the earliest of Marlowe's plays, the two-part Tamburlaine the Great (c. 1587; published 1590), Marlowe's characteristic “mighty line” (as Ben Jonson called it) established blank verse as the staple medium for later Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic writing. It appears that originally Marlowe intended to write only the first part, concluding with Tamburlaine's marriage to Zenocrate and his making “truce with all the world.” But the popularity of the first part encouraged Marlowe to continue the story to Tamburlaine's death. This gave him some difficulty, as he had almost exhausted his historical sources in part I; consequently the sequel has, at first glance, an appearance of padding. Yet the effort demanded in writing the continuation made the young playwright look more coldly and searchingly at the hero he had chosen, and thus part II makes explicit certain notions that were below the surface and insufficiently recognized by the dramatist in part I.

The play is based on the life and achievements of Timur (Timurlenk), the bloody 14th-century conqueror of Central Asia and India. Tamburlaine is a man avid for power and luxury and the possession of beauty: at the beginning of part I he is only an obscure Scythian shepherd, but he wins the crown of Persia by eloquence and bravery and a readiness to discard loyalty. He then conquers Bajazeth, emperor of Turkey, he puts the town of Damascus to the sword, and he conquers the sultan of Egypt; but, at the pleas of the sultan's daughter Zenocrate, the captive whom he loves, he spares him and makes truce. In part II Tamburlaine's conquests are further extended; whenever he fights a battle, he must win, even when his last illness is upon him. But Zenocrate dies, and their three sons provide a manifestly imperfect means for ensuring the preservation of his wide dominions; he kills Calyphas, one of these sons, when he refuses to follow his father into battle. Always, too, there are more battles to fight: when for a moment he has no immediate opponent on earth, he dreams of leading his army against the powers of heaven, though at other times he glories in seeing himself as “the scourge of God”; he burns the Qur?вn, for he will have no intermediary between God and himself, and there is a hint of doubt whether even God is to be granted recognition.Certainly Marlowe feels sympathy with his hero, giving him magnificent verse to speak, delighting in his dreams of power and of the possession of beauty, as seen in the following of Tamburlaine's lines:

Nature, that fram'd us of four elements

Warring within our breasts for regiment,

Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:

Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend

The wondrous architecture of the world,

And measure every wandering planet's course,

Still climbing after knowledge infinite,

And always moving as the restless spheres,

Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest,

Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,

That perfect bliss and sole felicity,

The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.

In this early play Marlowe already shows the ability to view a tragic hero from more than one angle, achieving a simultaneous vision of grandeur and impotence.

Marlowe's most famous play is The Tragicall History of Dr. Faustus but it has survived only in a corrupt form, and its date of composition has been much-disputed. It was first published in 1604, and another version appeared in 1616. Faustus takes over the dramatic framework of the morality plays in its presentation of a story of temptation, fall, and damnation and its free use of morality figures such as the good angel and the bad angel and the seven deadly sins, along with the devils Lucifer and Mephistopheles. In Faustus Marlowe tells the story of the doctor-turned-necromancer Faustus, who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power. The devil's intermediary in the play, Mephistopheles, achieves tragic grandeur in his own right as a fallen angel torn between satanic pride and dark despair. The play gives eloquent expression to this idea of damnation in the lament of Mephistopheles for a lost heaven and in Faustus' final despairing entreaties to be saved by Christ before his soul is claimed by the devil:

The stars move still, time runs, the clock

will strike,

The devil will come, and Faustus must

be damn'd.

O, I'll leap up to my God!--Who pulls

me down?--

See, see, where Christ's blood streams in

the firmament!

One drop would save my soul, half a drop:

ah, my Christ!--

Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!

Yet will I call on him: O, spare me, Lucifer!--

Where is it now? 'tis gone: and see, where God

Stretcheth out his arm, and bends his

ireful brows!

Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall

on me,

And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!

Marlowe's career as a poet and dramatist spanned a mere 6 years. Between his graduation from Cambridge in 1587 and his death in 1593 he wrote only one major poem (Hero and Leander, unfinished at his death) and six or seven plays (one play, Dido Queen of Carthage, may have been written while he was still a student). Since the dating of several plays is uncertain, it is impossible to construct a reliable history of Marlowe's intellectual and artistic development.

Tamburlaine the Great, a two-part play, was first printed in 1590 but was probably composed several years earlier. The famous prologue to the first part announces a new poetic and dramatic style: "From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits,/ And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay/ We'll lead you to the stately tent of war,/ Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine/Threat'ning the world with high astounding terms/ And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword./ View but his picture in this tragic glass,/ And then applaud his fortunes as you please." The play itself is a bold demonstration of Tamburlaine's rise to power and his singleminded, often inhumanly cruel exercise of that power. The hero provokes awe and wonder but little sympathy.

Although written sometime between 1588 and 1592, The Jew of Malta was not printed until 1633. The chief figure, the phenomenally wealthy merchant-prince Barabas, is one of the most powerful Machiavellian figures of the Elizabethan drama. Unlike Tamburlaine, who asserts his will openly and without guile, Barabas is shrewd, devious, and secretive.

Doctor Faustus, which is generally considered Marlowe's greatest work, was probably also his last. Its central figure, a scholar who feels he has exhausted all the conventional areas of human learning, attempts to gain the ultimate in knowledge and power by selling his soul to the devil

5. Christopher Marlowe's Contribution to English Literature

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 m an 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 seem s 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 vi tality 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 sec ond 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 inte nsity 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 m istakes 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 m etre 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 someon e 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 interest ing 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. Als o, 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 Fa ustus' 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 inca pable 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 Mar lowe'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 writ ten 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 cont emporaries 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, a s 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.

Conclusion

Taking everything into consideration we see that Marlowe was one of the most significant representative of the English Renaissance. Marlowe's poetry, in particular his Hero and Leander, is also defined as distinctively ground-breaking work of the English Renaissance. All his verse, including Hero and Leander, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," and his translations of Ovid and Lucan, were reputedly written during his Cambridge years, although there is no real evidence of this. It was all published during the period 1598 to 1600, with two endings penned by other writers for the unfinished Hero and Leander of 1598.

The traces we have of Marlowe's life indicate a personality of violent temperament. In 1589 he was arrested after a duel with one William Bradley, and he was put into Newgate Prison in London. In 1592, having been sent back from the Lowlands by Sir Robert Sidney, the governor of Flushing, he was bound over to keep the peace after fighting with two city constables, and in September of the same year he was accused of assaulting a Canterbury tailor. He is known to have shared a lodging with another dramatist of the age, Thomas Kyd, who was to say of Marlowe (in 1593) that he was "intemperate and of a cruel heart," possessing "monstrous opinions" and given to "attempting sudden privy injuries to men." However, Kyd was himself arrested at the time, and doubt may be thrown onto his motives for this description. Marlowe's death makes a bloody end to a colorfully interpreted life. He was killed by Ingram Friser in a brawl that ostensibly concerned a "reckoning" or bill; however, because of the shady people involved, including Friser, who was employed by Thomas Walsingham, the nephew of Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth's secretary of state, the doubt has persisted that Marlowe--an early, eloquent, and powerful user of the English language--was assassinated on the orders of a high-ranking official.

Marlowe and the Golden Age playwrights represent the full range of public and political opinion because the stage was a commercial enterprise willingly attended by the public. It was their outstanding business and writing skill coupled with their ready wit and Erasmian education though that allowed these men to be successful and create a permanent impression on the English-speaking world and beyond. It was precisely the converse, the inhibition of free capitalism and open dialogue at the end of the English Renaissance, spearheaded by religion and politics, that paralyzed the great liberal, Erasmian education, humanist ideals, and intellectual flowering that the Golden Age generation had enjoyed. Regardless of the decline of the stage that ensued, Marlowe and the Golden Age generation were successful in opening writers and Londoners up to satire and the willingness, against all suppression, to speak publicly against their leaders. As Camus said tragedy is one of the rarest of flowers. . . Each time, in the history of ideas, the individual frees himself little by little from a corpus of sacred concepts and stands face to face with the ancient world of terror and devotion.

One of the finest examples of the evolution from allusive to blatant public criticism of the Crown, and an eerie prediction, Marlowe's Pharsalia, otherwise known as De Bello Civili , a story about the `civil war' between Pompey and Julius Caesar, was relative to the many various power struggles in Elizabethan England. In fact Pharsalia's classic author Lucan himself was involved in intrigue, taking part in a conspiracy against his jealous friend, the young emperor Nero. The conspiracy was betrayed, and Lucan quite simply was ordered to die. In retrospect the allusion to the growing public discontent and eventual Civil War is obvious but could Marlowe have been working with actual knowledge and foreshadowing his own fate with Raleigh? What exactly was being said with the phrase, Ut Nectar, Ingenium, on the cover of Hero and Leander? Was it a clue to the phrase attributed to Marlowe, Quod me nutrit, me destruit (that which nourishes me, destroys me)? Or do these short three words suggest that Marlowe felt that his talent as a writer, knowledge, and innate ability sustained him, but in the end, would kill him? The phrase is puzzling. Superficially it seems obvious, considering the mythical nature of the poem, that the use of nectar here is the actual Latin word nectar, which means nectar of the gods, and ingenium, which means nature or character, Nature is the nectar of the gods. However, there are other known English translations for the Latin words nectar and ingenium. Specifically, ingenium can mean “gifted writer” and nectar could be the first person, future, passive voice of the third conjugation verb necto, nectere. When these equally legitimate translations are used, an eerie message emerges: How I the gifted writer will be imprisoned. Whatever was being said above, Marlowe certainly represented the intrigue of his day. Indeed, in moving from group to group, he sought out those of audacity, independent views, or creative enterprise: John Greenwood, the Christian who was hanged; or Watson and Roydon, who wrote poetry and served as secret couriers; or Kyd, who innovated in tragedy; or Nashe, who criticized society as a pamphleteer. Marlowe had a committed habit of studying politics and power.

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