Marlowe, Christopher

MARLOWE, CHRISTOPHER. - English playwright, active in the Elizabethan era and regarded as the greatest of Shakespeare's precursors. B. at Canterbury on 6 Feb. 1564, d. at Deptford ca. the end of May 1593. He settled in London, where he carried on his activity as a playwright.

In his biography there remain shadowy areas not yet clarified by scholars: he was several times accused of "atheism" and of "papism" (although in a 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 years of age in an apparently chance tavern brawl but perhaps provoked by an influential personage at court (M. seems also to have been a secret agent). In his major dramas M. projected the different aspects of his own boundless ambitions, embodying them in the protagonists, who therefore remain isolated in their symbolic phenomenality: 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, in Doctor Faustus (1588) the boundless ambition for knowledge and experience. Edward II (1592) is the only one of his dramas that presents 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, and he seems to have collaborated on some juvenile dramas of Shakespeare himself. Doctor Faustus is the one of his tragedies that had the greatest fortune among posterity and in particular among the Romantics, on whom M. exercised a strong fascination.

Augusto Guidi