MARLOWE, CHRISTOPHER. — English dramatist, active in the Elizabethan age and regarded as the greatest of Shakespeare’s precursors. Born in Canterbury on 6 February 1564, died at Deptford around the end of May 1593. He settled in London, where he pursued his activity as a dramatist.
In his biography, there remain areas of darkness not yet clarified by scholars: he was accused on several occasions of “atheism” and “papism” (although in one scene of Doctor Faustus the papal Curia is violently attacked), two terms that sounded almost synonymous in the language of the time; and he was killed at only twenty-nine in an apparently chance tavern brawl, though perhaps one provoked by an influential figure at court (M. seems also to have been a secret agent). In his major dramas, M. projected the various aspects of his own boundless ambitions, embodying them in the protagonists, who consequently remain isolated in their symbolic phenomenal existence: and it was not wrongly asserted that the essence of his tragedies is lyricism. Thus, in The Jew of Malta (1589), the passion for money is embodied; in Tamburlaine the Great (1588), the thirst for power; and in Doctor Faustus (1588), the boundless ambition for knowledge and experience. Edward II (1592) is the only one of his dramas to present a more balanced structure and a lesser disproportion between the protagonist and the other characters. M. was also a lyric poet and composed a refined and voluptuous mythological poem, Hero and Leander, whose date of composition remains uncertain; he also seems to have collaborated on several of Shakespeare’s early dramas. Doctor Faustus is the tragedy of his that achieved the greatest success among later generations, and particularly among the Romantics, over whom M. exercised a powerful fascination.