MARLOWE, CHRISTOPHER.— English playwright, flourishing in the Elizabethan era and considered the greatest of Shakespeare’s precursors. Born in Canterbury on 6 Feb. 1564, died at Deptford around the end of May 1593. He settled in London where he pursued his career as a dramatist.
In his biography there remain obscure areas not yet clarified by scholars: he was repeatedly accused of “atheism” and of “popery” (though in one scene of Doctor Faustus the Papal Curia is violently attacked), two terms that were almost synonymous in the language of the time, and he was killed at only twenty-nine in a tavern brawl that seemed accidental but may have been instigated by an influential court figure (Marlowe appears also to have been a secret agent). In his major plays Marlowe projected the various aspects of his own boundless ambitions, embodying them in protagonists who remain isolated in their symbolic grandeur; and it has not been unjustly 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 immoderate ambition for knowledge and experience. Edward II (1592) is the only one of his dramas that displays a more balanced structure and a lesser disproportion between the protagonist and the other characters. Marlowe 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 some of Shakespeare’s early plays. Doctor Faustus is the one of his tragedies that met with the greatest success among posterity and especially among the Romantics, on whom Marlowe exercised a strong fascination.
AUGUSTO GUIDI