Christopher Marlowe

1
Christopher Marlowe

• AP English
• Shauna Rynn Waters

2
Bio Basics

• Born in Canterbury on February 26, 1564
• Father, John, was a cobbler
• Same artisan class as Shakespeare
• Went to Kings School
• Earned a Matthew Parker scholarship
• Studied at Cambridge from 1580 1587
• Earned his MA

3
The Secret Agent

• Was recruited by Sir Francis Walsingham as a
  part-time secret service agent for Elizabeth I
• Many bright, patriotic young men were recruited
  to serve
• This was an age of Catholic versus Protestant
  political intrigue
• Assassinations and espionage
• Documents show he was a very important agent

4
His Death at Deptford

• May 30, 1593
• Murder said to have been committed in the private
  room of house in Deptford
• Common legend calls it a tavern
• Puritans gloated that it was a judgment from God
• Marlowe had been arrested on May 20th.
• Charged with Atheism
• Heresy
• Burning at the stake
• Was released with a lesser sentence

5
Death at Deptford (cont.)

• Marlowe was with friends and acquaintances of
  Walsingham
• An argument erupted
• Marlowe drew the dagger of Ingram Frizer
• tried to stab Frizer
• Instead, received fatal stab wound over his right
  eye
• Some speculate his death to be a government plot
• Frizer was released without trial within 28 days
  of the brawl

6
Marlowes Works

• Heroic themes
• A great personality who is destroyed by his own
  passion and ambition
• Never merely sensational
• Strongly influenced Shakespeare
• Greatest English dramatist before Shakespeare
• 1587 Tamburlaine the Great
• 1588 Doctor Faustus
• 1589 The Jew of Malta

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Works, cont.

• Marlowe was a true original
• Created and mastered the theatrical language of
  blank verse
• Unrhymed iambic pentameter
• Capable of portraying emotion without the
  restrictions of earlier more rigid forms

8
Doctor Faustus

• Probably written in 1592
• Reinvention of an old motif
• Individual who sells his or her soul to the devil
  for knowledge
• Based on a real person
• Johannes Faustus
• Disreputable German astrologer (early 1500s)

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More about Doctor Faustus

• Immediate source is a German work from 1587
• Marlowes Faustus is the first famous version of
  the story
• Later, Romantic writers would revisit it
• Goethe
• Faustian bargain any deal made for short-term
  gain with great costs in the long run

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Elements of the Play

• The play and the story itself contain elements
  which are holdovers from a medieval tradition,
  the morality play
• psychomachia, the battle over the spirit, here
  waged by a Good Angel and a Bad Angel
• the parade of the Seven Deadly Sins
• the potential for salvation, which exists until
  he finally succumbs to despair and gives up all
  hope of being able to repent.