Marlowe, Christopher 1564-93
English dramatist

He was born in Canterbury, Kent, a shoemaker's son, and educated at King's School and Benet (Corpus Christi) College, Cambridge. His Tamburlaine the Great, in two parts, was first printed in 1590, and probably produced in 1587. In spite of its bombast and violence it was infinitely superior to any tragedy that had yet appeared on the English stage. Earlier dramatists had used blank verse, but Marlowe was the first to discover its strength and variety. The Tragical History of Dr Faustus was probably produced soon after Tamburlaine; the earliest edition is dated 1604. Faustus is rather a series of detached scenes than a finished drama and some of the scenes are evidently not by Marlowe. The Jew of Malta, produced after 1588 and first published in 1633, is very uneven. Edward II, produced about 1590, is the most mature of his plays. It does not have the impressive poetry of Faustus and the first two acts of The Jew of Malta, but it is planned and executed with more firmness and solidity. The Massacre at Paris, his weakest play, survives in a mutilated state. It was written after the assassination of Henri III of France (1589) and was probably one of the latest plays. The Tragedy of Dido (1594), left probably in a fragmentary state by Marlowe and finished by Thomas Nashe, is of slight value. Marlowe doubtless contributed to the three parts of Shakespeare's Henry VI, and probably to Titus Andronicus. A wild, shapeless tragedy, Lust's Dominion (1657) may have been adapted from one of Marlowe's lost plays. The unfinished poem, Hero and Leander, composed in heroic couplets, was first published in 1598; a second edition, with Chapman's continuation, followed the same year. Marlowe's translations of Ovid's Amores and of the first book of Lucan's Pharsalia add nothing to his fame. The pastoral ditty, 'Come, live with me and be my love', to which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote an Answer, was imitated, but not equalled, by Robert Herrick, John Donne and others. It was first printed in The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), without the fourth and sixth stanzas. Another anthology, Allot's England's Parnassus (1600), preserves a fragment by Marlowe, beginning 'I walked along a stream for pureness rare'. He led an irregular life, kept dubious company, and was on the point of being arrested when he was fatally stabbed in a tavern brawl. In tragedy he prepared the way for Shakespeare, on whose early work his influence is evident.

Bibliography: H Levin, The Over-Reacher (1954); F S Boas, Christopher Marlowe (1940)