Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy
by Park Honan
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Book Summary Information
Author: Park HonanEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-01-05
ISBN: 0198186959
Number of pages: 448
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Book Reviews of Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy
Book Review: A Muse For The Royals.
Summary: 3 Stars
'The Tragic History of the Life and Death of Dr. Faustus' was perhaps Christopher Marlowe's masterpiece. The hero endeavors to save his soul and trick the devil; his devil, Methostophilis, was no match for Faust who had been tormented with 10,000 hells -- after he had seen "the face of God and tasted the eternal joys of heaven." If we find succor in hate, "neglect reconciliation," 'we shall always carry hell about with us.' Faust had boasted that "a sound magician is a mighty god."
Marlowe was no atheist as believed during his short life, but he did believe in Merlin's magic. His patron, Tom Walsingham, was a former spy who dabbled with magical spirits, (not alcohol, though he did have a brewery. 'Dido (Queen of Carthage)' was the play in which Dido's love is like Petrarch's, which Marlowe is said to have inherited. It is limitless; Marlowe portrays the intensity of her desires and playfulness, In his poetic treatise, she expressed herself with "a valid new logic" as she extolls the virtues of the winds and the seas. Marlowe, nicknamed Kit Marloe at Cambridge, was not a romantic, but a "questing realist." Personally, he was excitable, vulnerable and inconsistent.
'Tamburlaine' was written in blank verse using Marlowe's 'pathos' and much hyperbole. His views on history, society and social violence began to evolve as he showed the feelings, attitudes, motivation and behavior of humans from a religious aspect. He evokes four or five different religions in this play. In it, his hero was compared to Christ. "In dramatizing faith, desire, and our other attributes in their ambiguity, Marlowe belongs to us." For six months in 1594, the year after he was murdered, revivals of these two parts were played out before audiences as large as two thousand. Every foreign locale in his plays had a relation to England.
He had just completed 'Hero and Leander' in 1593 before he was arrested as a spy and met his untimely death. He had portrayed the "gap between his well-disciplined life of art and thought and the loose and easy exuberance of his talk." His mentor was partial to speaking Latin, which he called 'the music of the spheres.' Born in February, 1564, he was only twenty-nine when he died in May, 1593. His memory lingers on.
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