Be a Member of this BLOG

Search This Blog

Dec 7, 2011

Christopher Marlowe

Have you ever wondered why so much controversy still surrounds the life, works and death of Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)? His legend has become all the more mysterious in the centuries since he lost his life in a barroom brawl. Or did he die? Perhaps, he lived on to give us the great works of Shakespeare, or perhaps some other plays. And, if these historical stories about his life are not fantastic enough, modern retellings have helped to keep our imaginations alive.

In Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life, Lisa Hopkins tries to sort fact from fiction to create a more realistic picture of this literary master: his life, his adventures, his works, and even his death. By presenting the history of the Marlowe controversy, along with more modern interpretations of his life and work, Hopkins contributes to serious discussion. She explains that writings about Christopher Marlowe have ranged "from the nonsense of the authorship conspiracy theorists to brilliant explorations of his individual works or his career as a whole." This book is an attempt to cover all of these areas, starting with an overview of his canon, moving to his early life and education, discussing the creation of his works, then touching upon the "afterlife" of his works.

Hopkins explores the depth of Marlowe's writing. Even though he only lived for a short time, the few works we have from him are innovative in form and genre. "To some extent," Hopkins says, "all of Marlowe's theatre can be seen as probing and testing what society will and will not tolerate, particularly in the specific arenas of religious dissidence, lack of conformity to the norms of heterosexuality, and unwillingness to accept constituted authority." The subject matter of his plays can't be surprising, really, especially considering the dramatic life he led outside of the theatrical realm. Historical evidence suggests that he played the part of a spy. And outside of these daring escapades, "he was associating with men who constituted risky and sometimes violent company."

The life he led was violent, so it's not a shocker that his death was far from natural. Some theorists say his death by stabbing might have related to his work as a spy, while others believe it had something to do with his religious beliefs (or unbelief). Hopkins writes, "Dying in odd circumstances, which we will perhaps never fully understand, he was buried hugger-mugger in a location we can no longer precisely identify."

With the mystery of his life, and the uncertainty of the circumstances surrounding his death, it seems fitting that we don't even know where he was buried. There's more than a little tragedy in his dying so young, and with so few works to make up his canon. Hopkins says, "With him died attitudes toward religion, sexuality and society, which we are unlikely ever to be able to reconstruct in their original complexity." The few works he did leave us are in "a hopeless muddle."

If his works were incomplete or muddled, at least we have them. We also have the legends that have been passed down to us through literature and legend. He is always a part of the Shakespeare Authorship Controversy; and what little we know of his life has become the subject for countless bits of fiction.

Perhaps most notable among the recent fictionalized Marlowe characters is his appearance in "Shakespeare in Love." As Lisa Hopkins explains, "Rupert Everett's benevolent and more successful Marlowe acts as role model to the young Shakespeare, buying him drinks and helping him to think of a better plot for his projected play... before dying in a brawl in a Deptford pub."

Of course, as with any fictionalization, the movie takes liberties with some of the facts literary scholars hold to be true. Hopkins writes, "Though the film makes no pretensions to historical accuracy, it does include some interesting pretensions to historical accuracy, it does include some interesting suggestions: "Doctor Faustus," we are told, is an early work, while Marlowe has just finished writing "The Massacre at Paris "on the day of his death."

In spite of the years that have intervened to separate us from any concrete answers to the Marlowe legend, we still look for answers. Every historical bit of paper is examined. Perhaps, we'll discover some unknown manuscript that will answer all of our questions.

Hopkins writes, "Perhaps the ultimate fascination of Marlowe... is the ways in which he defies easy assimilation into the modern world and retains his mystery."

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

All Posts

" Indian "Tomb of Sand A Fine Balance A House for Mr. Biswas Absurd Drama Achebe Across the Black Waters Addison Adiga African Ages Albee Alberuni Ambedkar American Amrita Pritam Anand Anatomy of Criticism Anglo Norman Anglo Saxon Aristotle Ariyar Arnold Ars Poetica Auden Augustan Aurobindo Ghosh Backett Bacon Badiou Bardsley Barthes Baudelaire Beckeley Bejnamin Belinda Webb Bellow Beowulf Bhabha Bharatmuni Bhatnagar Bijay Kant Dubey Blake Bloomsbury Book Bookchin Booker Prize bowen Braine British Brooks Browne Browning Buck Burke CA Duffy Camus Canada Chaos Characters Charlotte Bronte Chaucer Chaucer Age China Chomsky Coetzee Coleridge Conard Contact Cornelia Sorabji Critical Essays Critics and Books Cultural Materialism Culture Dalit Lliterature Daruwalla Darwin Dattani Death of the Author Deconstruction Deridda Derrida Desai Desani Dickens Dilip Chitre Doctorow Donne Dostoevsky Dryden Durkheim EB Browning Ecology Edmund Wilson Eliot Elizabethan Ellison Emerson Emile Emily Bronte English Epitaph essats Essays Esslin Ethics Eugene Ionesco Existentialism Ezekiel Faiz Fanon Farrel Faulkner Feminism Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness Ferber Fitzgerald Foregrounding Formalist Approach Forster Foucault Frankfurt School French Freud Frost Frye Fyre Gandhi Geetanjali Shree Gender German Germany Ghosh Gilbert Adair Golding Gordimer Greek Gulliver’s Travels Gunjar Halliday Hard Times Hardy Harindranath Chattopadhyaya Hawthorne Hazara Hemingway Heyse Hindi Literature Historical Materialism History Homer Horace Hulme Hunt Huxley Ibsen In Memoriam India Indian. Gadar Indra Sinha Interview Ireland Irish Jack London Jane Eyre Japan JM Synge Johnson Joyce Joyce on Criticism Judith Wright Jumpa Lahiri Jussawalla Kafka Kalam Kalidasa Kamla Das Karnard Keats Keki N. Daruwala Kipling Langston Hughes Language Language of Paradox Larkin Le Clezio Lenin Lessing Levine Life of PI literary Criticism Luckas Lucretius Lyrical Ballads Macaulay Magazines Mahapatra Mahima Nanda Malory Mamang Dai Mandeville Manto Manusmrti Mao Marlowe Martel Martin Amis Marx Marxism Mary Shelley Maugham McCarry Medi Media Miller Milton Moby Dick Modern Mona Loy Morrison Movies Mulk Raj Anand Mytth of Sisyphus Nabokov Nahal Naidu Naipaul Narayan Natyashastra Neo-Liberalism NET New Criticism new historicism News Nietzsche Nikita Lalwani Nissim Ezekiel Niyati Pathak Niyati Pathank Nobel Prize O Henry Of Studies Okara Ondaatje Orientalism Orwell Pakistan Pamela Paradise Lost Pater Pinter Poems Poetics Poets Pope Post Feminism Post Modern Post Structuralism post-Colonialism Poststructuralism Preface to Shakespeare Present Prize Psycho Analysis Psychology and Form Publish Pulitzer Prize Puritan PWA Radio Ramanujan Ramayana Rape of the Lock Renaissance Restoration Revival Richardson Rime of Ancient Mariner RL Stevenson Rohinton Mistry Romantic Roth Rousseau Rushdie Russia Russian Formalism Sartre Sashi Despandey Satan Sati Savitri Seamus Heaney’ Shakespeare Shaw Shelley Shiv K.Kumar Showalter Sibte Hasan Slavery Slow Man Socialism Spender Spenser Sri Lanka Stage of Development Steinbeck Stories Subaltern Sufis Surrealism Swift Syed Amanuddin Tagore Tamil Literature Ted Hughes Tennyson Tennyson. Victorian Terms Tess of the D’Urbervilles The March The Metamorphsis The Order of Discourse The Outsider The Playboy of the Western World The Politics The Satanic Verses The Scarlet Letter The Transitional Poets The Waste Land The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction The Wuthering Heights Theatre of Absurd Theory Theory of Criticism Theory of Evolution Theory of Literature Thomas McEvilley Thoreau To the Lighthouse Tolstoy Touchstone Method Tughlaq Tulsi Badrinath Twain Two Uses of Language UGC-NET Ukraine Ulysses Untouchable Urdu Victorian Vijay Tendulkar Vikram Seth Vivekananda Voltaire Voyage To Modernity Walter Tevis War Webster Wellek West Indies Wharton Williams WJ Long Woolfe Wordsworth World Wars Writers WW-I WW-II Wycliff Xingjian Yeats Zadie Smith Zaheer Zizek Zoe Haller