克里斯托弗马洛【英文】

– 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
– Many bright, patriotic young men were recruited to serve
• This was an age of Catholic versus Protestant political intrigue
– Assassinations and espionage
Marlowe’s 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
– Johannes Faustus – Disreputable German astrologer (early 1500’s)
More about Doctor Faustus
• Immediate source is a German work from 1587 • Marlowe’s 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
Elements of the Play
• The play and the story itself contain elements which are holdovers from a medieval tradition, the morality play:
• Common legend caled that it was a judgment from God – Marlowe had been arrested on May 20th.
• Charged with Atheism
– Heresy – Burning at the stake
• Documents show he was a very important agent
His Death at Deptford
• May 30, 1593
– Murder said to have been committed in the private room of house in Deptford
Christopher Marlowe
AP English Shauna Rynn Waters
Bio Basics
• Born in Canterbury on February 26, 1564 • Father, John, was a cobbler
– Same artisan class as Shakespeare
– 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.
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
• Went to King’s School – Earned a Matthew Parker scholarship – Studied at Cambridge from 1580 – 1587 – Earned his MA
The Secret Agent
• Was recruited by Sir Francis Walsingham as a part-time secret service agent for Elizabeth I
• Was released with a lesser sentence
Death at Deptford (cont.)
• Marlowe was with friends and acquaintances of Walsingham • An argument erupted • Marlowe drew the dagger of Ingram Frizer
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