英美文学选读学习笔记 Christopher Marlowe

Born in 1564, Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) was the son of a Canterbury shoemaker.  Scholarships took him first to the King's School, and then Cambridge. During his stay at Cambridge, his career as a man of letters got started. His play, Tarnburlaine, written before he left Cambridge, turned out to be a sweeping success on the stage. When he came to London in 1584, his soul was surging with the ideals of the Renaissance, which later found exssion in Dr. Faustus. Marlowe had also the unbridled passion and the conceit of a young man who had just entered the realms of knowledge. He became an actor and led a tempestuous life in the following six years since his first great success. On May 30, 1593, Marlowe was killed in a quarrel over a tavern bill in Deptford.

As the most gifted of the "University Wits," Marlowe composed six plays within his short lifetime. Among them the most important are: Tamburlaine, Parts I & II (1587-1588), Dr. Faustus (1589？), The Jew of Malta (1590?) and Edward II (1592-1593). Marlowe's non-dramatic poetry includes Hero and Leander," the Passionate Shepherd to His Love," and a verse translation of Ovid's Amores.

Tamburlaine is a play about an ambitious and pitiless Tartar conqueror in the fourteenth century who rose from a shepherd to an overpowering king. By flouting the given order and trampling on despairing princes, Tamburlaine displayed a high-aspiring mind that was self-created and carried by love and dreams beyond the limits of moral existence. His victories were a triumph of immense natural energy and of ruthlessness over equally cruel but weak and decadent civilizations. By depicting a great hero with high ambition and sheer brutal force in conquering one enemy after another, Marlowe voiced the sume desire of the man of the Renaissance for infinite power and authority. In fact, Tamburlaine is a product of Marlowe's characteristically Renaissance imagination, fascinated by the earthly magnificence available to men of imaginative power who have the energy of their convictions.

Dr. Faustus is a play based on the German legend of a magician aspiring for knowledge and finally meeting his tragic end as a result of selling his soul to the Devil. The play's dominant moral is human rather than religious. It celebrates the human passion for knowledge, power and happiness; it also reveals man's frustration in realizing the high aspirations in a hostile moral order. And the confinement to time is the cruelest fact of man's condition.

Marlowe's greatest achievement lies in that he perfected the blank verse and made it the principal medium of English drama. Previous writers like Saekville and Norton had adopted the blank verse, which, under their pens, was rather inflexible and could produce merely exotic effects. It is Marlowe who brought vitality and grandeur into the blank verse with his "mighty lines," which carry strong emotions. To achieve this, Marlowe employed hyperbole as his major figure of speech, which, instead of referring to the exaggeration of the language, indicates the poetic energy and intensity conveyed through the verse.

Marlowe's second achievement is his creation of the Renaissance hero for English drama. Such a hero is always inspanidualistic and full of ambition, facing bravely' the challenge from both gods and men. He embodies Marlowe's humanistic ideal of human dignity and capacity. Different from the tragic hero in medieval plays, who seeks the way to heaven through salvation and God's will, he is against conventional morality and contrives to obtain heaven on earth through his own efforts. With the endless aspiration for power, knowledge, and glory, the hero interts the true Renaissance spirit. Both Tamburlaine and Faustus are typical in possessing such a spirit. They seek power and knowledge respectively. Tamburlaine, being a cruel conqueror, finds consummate happiness in subduing other kingdoms. No enemy, except Death, can defeat him. His death ends in glory although he finally admits his limitations of achievements, and even his limitations as a human being.  In portraying Faustus, a more introspective and philosophical figure, Marlowe praises his soaring aspiration for knowledge while warning against the sin of pride since Faustus's downfall was caused by his despair in God and trust in Devil.

Though Marlowe is masterful in handling blank verse and creating dramatic effects, he is not so strong in dramatic construction, and compared with Shakespeare, his women characters are rather pale. But his brilliant achievement as a whole raised him to an eminence as the pioneer of English drama.