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Christopher Marlowe: William Shakespeare
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On 26 February 1564 at St George's, Canterbury, Christopher Marlowe was baptised, the same year Shakespeare was born. His father was John Marlowe, a cobbler, his mother Katherine. Though `Marlowe' is used now, the family's name had various spellings over the years. Not a lot is known of Marlowe's childhood and there is some question as to the dates and chronology of some of his works.
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Christopher Marlowe was born in Canterbury in 1564, the same year as his great rival William Shakespeare. Though his father was only a shoemaker, Marlowe was educated at King's School and awarded a scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. While at Corpus Christi he studied philosophy, history, and theology.
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The hot-blooded, wickedly sardonic rebel Marlowe... can be glimpsed only intermittently in Park Honan's new biography, "Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy." Honan, best known for his widely read "Shakespeare: A Life," has an agenda. He does not want to whitewash Marlowe (hardly possible anyway, given the evidence), but he does want to rescue his subject from the bad-boy image that makes Marlowe a figure of popular myth, and restore him to his full value as poet and dramatist. The result is a book that frustrates, and occasionally infuriates, as often as it fascinates, because at its core the myth fits the facts of Marlowe's life and art only too well, driving Honan into an apologetic swarm of digressions, speculations, half-evasions and logic-choppings. He gives a sumptuously detailed picture of Marlowe's world, but rarely brings the poet himself into focus. In its unsteady shifts from topic to topic, his work sometimes resembles one of those Renaissance miscellanies in which scholars delight: from it you can learn about Elizabethan wills, trade guilds, ecclesiastical politics, real estate deals, military maneuvers, family trees, college living conditions and every kind of courtly or legal intrigue.
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Among the critical studies that take in all of Marlowe's works are Harry Levin, The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe (1952), and J. B. Steane, Marlowe: A Critical Study (1964). An important critical study is Roy W. Battenhouse, Marlowe's Tamburlaine: A Study in Renaissance Moral Philosophy (1941). For an interesting aspect of Renaissance drama see Eugene M. Waith, The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Dryden (1962).
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Born the same year as Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe was to become the first great poet of the theatre's second great age. His life, much like the lives of his characters, would be short and violent.
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As John Blakeless regarded Marlowe (in his book, The Tragicall History of Marlowe), “the lesser poet is the forerunner of the greater” (1). Marlowe is considered by many to be the chief of the dramatic form, and creator of the “mighty line” (1). His bold figures and elaborate style have immensely contributed to the tragic style used by his successors. Marlowe held many years over Shakespeare with experience to writing. Shakespeare had barely begun to write when Marlowe was murdered at the age of twenty-nine.
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