Introduction 2 Life and literary career Christopher Marlowe’s 4

Content

INTRODUCTION 2
1.Life and literary career Christopher Marlowe’s 4
2. Works of Christopher Marlowe 6
3.History of Carpe Diem Poetry 14
4.Main features of Christaphore Marlowe's Carpe Diem poetry 17
The Morning Star 19
22
Referances 24

INTRODUCTION

Christopher Marlowe, a Canterbury shoemaker's son,was born in the same year as Shakespeare, 1564, ten yearsafter John Lyly, seven after Kyd, six after Peele, four afterGreene, and three before Nash. He was at King's School,Canterbury, and at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge ; butwe know nothing of him at either place, except that he became Bachelor of Arts in 1583. In the ten years left to him of life he wrote the two parts of Tamburlaine the Great, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward the Second, The Massacre at Paris, Dido, Queen of Carthage, and may have handled and partly or largely written many other plays,True Tragedy, printed in this volume, also the first two cantos of " Hero and Leander," a lyric, and another lyric of which only a fragment survives. Probably at Cambridge, or during that period, he translated parts of Ovid and of bLucan, and immediately after leaving Cambridge he may have gone to the wars in the Low Countries where Sidney died in 1586. Certain it is that by 1587 the play of Tamburlaine had been written and performed. Of his contemporaries Lyly had already written Alexander and Campaspe, Sapho, Gallathea, Endimion. Peele's Arraignment of Paris had appeared about 1581, when he was of the same age as the Marlowe who wrote Tamburlaine. Greene's Friar Bacon has been also attributed to the year 1587, but 1 59 1 is a more probable date. The first English tragedy in blank verse and of something like the type afterwards to be established, the Gorbuduc of Norton and Sackville, had been performed as early as 1561. It lacked the new life of the Renaissance which had kindled it as much as it did the old life of the past age and the miracle plays. It was written in blank verse of a lifeless regularity and monotony that has a slight charm only occasionally, as in: —Are they exiled out of our stony breasts Never to make return ?By no exaggeration can it be called a dramatic poem at all. The Arraignment of Paris can be so called, but rather because it is a drama and is full of poetry than because it is a poem in dramatic form. The writer was bent chiefly upon his beautiful verses, many of them lyrical, with the result that a series of extracts from the play give a higher opinion of it than the whole can ever do. The blank verse is silver sweet, but it has little variety, and would be more perfect in its own kind had it received the grace of rhyme, as, for example, in this characteristic passage from a speech by Paris before the Council of the Gods :
And for the one, contentment is my wealth;
A shell of salt will serve a shepherd swain,
A slender banquet in a homely scrip,
And water running from the silver spring.
For arms, they dread no foes that sit so low;
A thorn can keep the wind from off my back,
A sheep-cote thatched a shepherd's palace hight.
Of tragic Muses shepherds con no skill:
Enough is them, if Cupid be displeased,
To sing his praise on slender oaten pipe.
The plays of Lyly that preceded Tamburlaine were all in prose : it was not until he wrote The Woman in the Moone that he used blank verse, and that was not before 1591. Tamburlaine was, in fact, the first notable English poem in blank verse that was also essentially a play. The Arraignment could never have been a popular entertainment; it could be imitated, it could be excelled, but it did now show the way to any development of the drama ; it contained no seeds of growth; in action alone it was naught. But Tamburlaine was all action; it could only reach its highest form of life with the aid of actors and a stage; and, moreover, it was written in blank verse, and for the first time proved that verse to be well suited to natural dialogue; it was pleasant to the ear and capable at once of great beauty and of as direct an appeal even to the untutored ear as prose. It was in the very year of its appearance abused as the work of one of the " idiot art masters who intrude themselves to our ears as the alchymists of eloquence, who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) think to outbrave better pens by the swelling bombast of braggart blank verse." As the persons of the play include an emperor and empress, a soldan and five kings, besides Tamburlaine himself, who drove a coach and kings, a " great and thundering speech " and " high astounding terms " were in place.