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Christopher Marlowe (1564 - 1593) - Coggle Diagram
Christopher Marlowe (1564 - 1593)
Life
Son of a shoemaker, he won two scholarships: first to King's School in Canterbury and then to Corpus Christi College in Cambridge
When he was studying to graduate as a Master of Arts, his right to do so was questioned b/c of a rumour that he wanted to go to Reims (where there was an English Catholic seminar whose ultimate goal was to bring England back to Catholicism) but it was never confirmed and Marlowe never went
In the last 18 months of his life, he became increasingly violent, being involved into fights, arrested for forgery in the Netherlands, and heavily referred in a xenophobic poem targeting Protestant refugees resident in London was pinned on the wall of a church
He was stabbed to death during a fight for the bill of a meal during the investigations about said poem; he had been eating (and fighting) with a notorious spy and two con-men
He was a very controversial character; atheist, homosexual and a smoker
A spy?
During his MA Marlowe started living above his possibilities and skipped long periods of uni, which makes people think that he was engaged in government business
some people consider him an "Elizabethan James Bond"!
There's a possibility that the rumour about Marlowe going to Reims was, in fact, him acting as informant to the Crown about students planning to attend the seminary (there was an interest in infiltrating such places)
His reputation as a "spy" shrouds his death in mystery
there are people convinces that his murder was a cover story and that he built himself a new life as SHAKESPEARE!
Literary career
His education, based on classical languages and literature and on the doctrine of the C of E, heavily influenced his works, among which we can count Dido, Queen of Carthage and Hero and Leander (of classical inspiration) and a translation of Ovid's Amores
His main claim to fame are Tamburlaine the Great, part One and Two, The Jew of Malta and Doctor Faustus
dating is uncertain though; we think he started writing at Cambridge but there are no sure-fire dates for his writings
his plays depict individuals who transcend the circumstances of their birth
but it's probably not due to his own origins; after all, Shakespeare and Greene had humble origins as well!
his works can be divided in 3 groups related to 3 aspects of his life
Dido and Tamburlaine: encounter of ethnically different people
Jew of Malta and Faustus: religion and faith
Edward II, Massacre at Paris, Hero and Leander: sexuality
he was very influential in establishing blank verse as predominant verse of EModEng drama ("mighty line": usually end-stopped, making every line a self-contained unit)
he heavily influenced Shakespeare, who quotes and refers to him in some of his works and probably even collaborated with him on Henry VI
however, later in time he lost appreciation; Faustus was often debased into farces and some critics argued that he didn't write Tamburlaine; his reputation will be restored by 19th century Romantics