The World of Christopher Marlowe
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The definitive biography: a masterly account of Marlowe's work and life and the world in which he lived
Shakespeare's contemporary, Christopher Marlowe revolutionized English drama and poetry, transforming the Elizabethan stage into a place of astonishing creativity. The outline of Marlowe's life, work, and violent death are known, but few of the details that explain why his writing and ideas made him such a provocateur in the Elizabethan era have been available until now. In this absorbing consideration of Marlowe and his times, David Riggs presents Marlowe as the language's first poetic dramatist whose desires proved his undoing.
In an age of tremendous cultural change in Europe when Cervantes wrote the first novel and Copernicus demonstrated a world subservient to other nonreligious forces, Catholics and Protestants battled for control of England and Elizabeth's crown was anything but secure. Into this whirlwind of change stepped Marlowe espousing sexual freedom and atheism. His beliefs proved too dangerous to those in power and he was condemned as a spy and later murdered. In The World of Christopher Marlowe, Riggs's exhaustive research digs deeply into the mystery of how and why Marlowe was killed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Riggs (Ben Jonson: A Life), an English professor at Stanford University, traces the life of Elizabethan poet, playwright and spy Christopher Marlowe (1564 1593), placing him in the context of the institutions that both fostered his keen intellect and reinforced his awareness of his lowly class origins (his father was a shoemaker). Riggs suggests that Marlowe, Shakespeare's great contemporary, author of Tamburlaine and Dr. Faustus, may have sought to overcome those origins through his unusual and dangerous career path. Working in the New Historicist vein most recently mined by Stephen Greenblatt in Will in the World, Riggs evokes the pedagogical preoccupations of Marlowe's school and university education, revealing layers of intricate detail in Marlowe's formation as a literary artist: his study and translation of Ovid, his innovations in blank verse, and the substance and reception of all of his plays and poetry. While downplaying Marlowe's disputed sexuality, Riggs pays careful attention to the homoerotic and homophobic aspects of his plays, most notably Edward II, considering each in its contemporary moral and political setting. Riggs concludes with fresh insights into the mysterious circumstances of Marlowe's violent death. This study balances close literary readings with lucidly presented historical context to give us a portrait of a brilliant but volatile enigma who shunned convention in favor of risk and marginality. 50 b&w illus.
