THE MINISTRY OF HIGHER AND SECONDARY

EDUCATION
OF THE REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN

COURSE PAPER

THEME: Oriental motif in

the works by Christopher
Marlowe
Done by: Tilavova Gulyuz

Scientific adviser: Choriyeva

Iroda

Denau -2021
CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I. Christopher Marlowe, also known as Kit

Marlowe  was an English playwright, poet and translator of
the Elizabethan era.
1.1. Christopher Marlowe’s place in English literature

1.2. Early life of Christopher Marlowe

CHAPTER II. Literary career and its performance of

Christopher Marlowe
2.1 Adult life and legend of Kit Marlowe
2.2. Works of Marlowe in performance

Conclusion

THE LIST OF USED LITERATURE

 INTRODUCTION
Christopher Marlowe was an English playwright, poet, and translator, who
lived and worked in the Elizabethan era. He was born to a father who was a
shoemaker. Christopher was a contemporary of William Shakespeare, who
attributed him to be a great influence on him but became a more successful
playwright. Christopher’s master’s degree was mired in controversy, as the ‘Privy
Council’ had pushed the university management to award him a degree on behalf
of his “services” to the Queen.

This led people to believe that he was a secret government spy. He went on
forging a career as a playwright. Two of his initial plays were ‘Dido, Queen of
Carthage’ and ‘Tamburlaine the Great.’ However, he mostly wrote plays on
controversial themes. Several of his plays, such as ‘The Jew of Malta’ and ‘The
Massacre at Paris,’ dealt with themes that were not looked upon very kindly by
society. In May 1593, he was arrested and was put on trial. He was stabbed to
death by a British businessman named Ingram Frizer a few days later.

By age 14, Marlowe attended The King's School, Canterbury on

scholarship and two years later Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he also
studied on scholarship and received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1584.[8]
[11]
 Marlowe mastered Latin during his schooling; reading and translating the works
of Ovid. In 1587, the university hesitated to award his Master of Arts degree
because of a rumour that he intended to go to the English seminary at Rheims in
northern France, presumably to prepare for ordination as a Roman
Catholic priest. If true, such an action on his part would have been a direct
violation of royal edict issued by Queen Elizabeth I in 1585 criminalising any
attempt by an English citizen to be ordained in the Roman Catholic Church.

This work is relevant because with its help we can learn more about
Shakespeare’s influence not only on English literature but language.
The aim is to read the grammatical and stylistic techniques that were used
by Shakespeare.
The object of work is a process of influencing of Shakespearian language
on English literature and American English.
The subject is analysis of Shakespeare’s works.

Large-scale violence between Protestants and Catholics on the European

continent has been cited by scholars as the impetus for the Protestant English
Queen's defensive anti-Catholic laws issued from 1581 until her death in 1603.
[12]
 Despite the dire implications for Marlowe, his degree was awarded on schedule
when the Privy Council intervened on his behalf, commending him for his "faithful
dealing" and "good service" to the Queen.
The nature of Marlowe's service was not specified by the Council, but its letter
to the Cambridge authorities has provoked much speculation by modern scholars,
notably the theory that Marlowe was operating as a secret agent for Privy Council
member Sir Francis Walsingham.

 The only surviving evidence of the Privy Council's correspondence is found

in their minutes, the letter being lost. There is no mention of espionage in the
minutes, but its summation of the lost Privy Council letter is vague in meaning,
stating that "it was not Her Majesties pleasure" that persons employed as Marlowe
had been "in matters touching the benefit of his country should be defamed by
those who are ignorant in he went about." Scholars agree the vague wording was
typically used to protect government agents, but they continue to debate what the
"matters touching the benefit of his country" actually were in Marlowe's case and
how they affected the 23-year-old writer as he launched his literary career in 1587.
CHAPTER I. Christopher Marlowe, also known as Kit
Marlowe  was an English playwright, poet and translator of
the Elizabethan era.
1.1 Christopher Marlowe’s place in English literature
Outshining all these is Christopher Marlowe, who alone realized the tragic
potential inherent in the popular style, with its bombast and extravagance. His
heroes are men of towering ambition who speak blank verse of unprecedented (and
occasionally monotonous) elevation, their “high astounding terms” embodying the
challenge that they pose to the orthodox values of the societies they disrupt.
In Tamburlaine the Great (two parts, published 1590) and Edward II (c. 1591;
published 1594), traditional political orders are overwhelmed by conquerors and
politicians who ignore the boasted legitimacy of weak kings; The Jew of Malta (c.
1589; published 1633) studies the man of business whose financial acumen and
trickery give him unrestrained power; The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (c.
1593; published 1604) depicts the overthrow of a man whose learning shows scant
regard for God.

The main focus of all these plays is on the uselessness of society’s moral and
religious sanctions against pragmatic, amoral will. They patently address
themselves to the anxieties of an age being transformed by new forces in politics,
commerce, and science; indeed, the sinister, ironic prologue to The Jew of Malta is
spoken by Machiavelli. In his own time Marlowe was damned as atheist,
homosexual, and libertine, and his plays remain disturbing because his verse
makes theatrical presence into the expression of power, enlisting the spectators’
sympathies on the side of his gigantic villain-heroes. His plays thus present the
spectator with dilemmas that can be neither resolved nor ignored, and they
articulate exactly the divided consciousness of their time. There is a similar effect
in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1591) by Marlowe’s friend Thomas Kyd, an
early revenge tragedy in which the hero seeks justice for the loss of his son but, in
an unjust world, can achieve it only by taking the law into his own hands. Kyd’s
use of Senecan conventions (notably a ghost impatient for revenge) in a Christian
setting expresses a genuine conflict of values, making the hero’s success at once
triumphant and horrifying.

A famous poet, playwright, and translator of the Elizabethan era, Christopher

Marlowe holds a prominent place among the famous Elizabethan playwrights. Yet
there are aspects of his life that are still shrouded in mystery. According to some
literary biographers, he was baptized on February 26, 1564 in Canterbury,
England, but they are not certain about his date of birth. It is certain, though, that
he was born a few days prior to this date. He was thus just a few months older than
Shakespeare.

Son of John Marlowe, a cobbler, Marlowe studied in Canterbury’s King

School. Later he attended Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, after winning a
scholarship. He completed his Bachelor of Arts in 1584, and subsequently
completed his Masters. Initially, the University hesitated to award him Master of
Arts, for there were rumors that he wanted to go to the English college at Rheims,
and was preparing for ordination to become a Roman Catholic Priest.

However, Marlowe was awarded the Master of Arts when the Privy Council
intervened on his behalf, and praised Marlowe for his “good services” to the
Queen. It, however, did not clearly state the nature of his services, though it sent a
letter to the authorities of Cambridge about this connection. This led to
speculations about Marlowe being a spy working for Sir Francis Walsingham, a
famous intelligence network operator at that time. Although there was no
direct evidence available to corroborate this theory, the letter of Council is stated to
be enough evidence to prove that Marlowe served for the government in some
secret capacity.
 Marlowe was assumed an atheist, but modern historians are of the opinion
that his apparent atheism was a pretense to serve as a government spy. He is also
described as a homosexual, though some scholars report that this was a rumor
meant to paint him in a bad light.

In 1589, Francis Kett, an Anglican, was burnt alive for heretic views. This
may have left a deep impact on Marlowe and influenced his thoughts about
religious issues. Marlowe came under fire for these beliefs. He faced charges in
1592 in the Netherlands for counterfeiting coins, and was subsequently arrested.
However, this arrest did not deter him from his literary pursuits, and he was
released later.

Marlowe died at very young age of 29 in Deptford, Kent in England and

was buried in the St. Nicholas graveyard. Though no one knows the real
circumstances of his death, it is said that he was killed on account of his atheistic
views and rejection of orthodoxy.

1.3. Early life of Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe was born to Canterbury shoemaker John Marlowe
and his wife Katherine, daughter of William Arthur of Dover.]He was baptised on
26 February 1564 at St. George's Church, Canterbury. Marlowe's birth was likely
to have been a few days before, making him about two months older than William
Shakespeare, who was baptised on 26 April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon.

By age 14, Marlowe attended The King's School, Canterbury on

scholarship and two years later Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he also
studied on scholarship and received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1584.[8]
[11]
 Marlowe mastered Latin during his schooling; reading and translating the works
of Ovid. In 1587, the university hesitated to award his Master of Arts degree
because of a rumour that he intended to go to the English seminary at Rheims in
northern France, presumably to prepare for ordination as a Roman
Catholic priest. If true, such an action on his part would have been a direct
violation of royal edict issued by Queen Elizabeth I in 1585 criminalising any
attempt by an English citizen to be ordained in the Roman Catholic Church.

Large-scale violence between Protestants and Catholics on the European

continent has been cited by scholars as the impetus for the Protestant English
Queen's defensive anti-Catholic laws issued from 1581 until her death in
1603. Despite the dire implications for Marlowe, his degree was awarded on
schedule when the Privy Council intervened on his behalf, commending him for
his "faithful dealing" and "good service" to the Queen. The nature of Marlowe's
service was not specified by the Council, but its letter to the Cambridge authorities
has provoked much speculation by modern scholars, notably the theory that
Marlowe was operating as a secret agent for Privy Council member Sir Francis
Walsingham.

The only surviving evidence of the Privy Council's correspondence is found

in their minutes, the letter being lost. There is no mention of espionage in the
minutes, but its summation of the lost Privy Council letter is vague in meaning,
stating that "it was not Her Majesties pleasure" that persons employed as Marlowe
had been "in matters touching the benefit of his country should be defamed by
those who are ignorant in th'affaires he went about." Scholars agree the vague
wording was typically used to protect government agents, but they continue to
debate what the "matters touching the benefit of his country" actually were in
Marlowe's case and how they affected the 23-year-old writer as he launched his
literary career in 1587.

Christopher Marlowe was born to Canterbury shoemaker John Marlowe

and his wife Katherine, daughter of William Arthur of Dover. He was baptised on
26 February 1564 at St. George's Church, Canterbury. Marlowe's birth was likely
to have been a few days before, making him about two months older than William
Shakespeare, who was baptised on 26 April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon.
 By age 14, Marlowe attended The King's School, Canterbury on
scholarship and two years later Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he also
studied on scholarship and received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1584. Marlowe
mastered Latin during his schooling; reading and translating the works of Ovid. In
1587, the university hesitated to award his Master of Arts degree because of a
rumour that he intended to go to the English seminary at Rheims in
northern France, presumably to prepare for ordination as a Roman Catholic priest. 

If true, such an action on his part would have been a direct violation of royal
edict issued by Queen Elizabeth I in 1585 criminalising any attempt by an English
citizen to be ordained in the Roman Catholic Church.

Large-scale violence between Protestants and Catholics on the European

continent has been cited by scholars as the impetus for the Protestant English
Queen's defensive anti-Catholic laws issued from 1581 until her death in
1603. Despite the dire implications for Marlowe, his degree was awarded on
schedule when the Privy Council intervened on his behalf, commending him for
his "faithful dealing" and "good service" to the Queen.

  The nature of Marlowe's service was not specified by the Council, but its
letter to the Cambridge authorities has provoked much speculation by modern
scholars, notably the theory that Marlowe was operating as a secret agent for Privy
Council member Sir Francis Walsingham. The only surviving evidence of the
Privy Council's correspondence is found in their minutes, the letter being lost.
There is no mention of espionage in the minutes, but its summation of the lost
Privy Council letter is vague in meaning, stating that "it was not Her Majesties
pleasure" that persons employed as Marlowe had been "in matters touching the
benefit of his country should be defamed by those who are ignorant he went
about." Scholars agree the vague wording was typically used to protect government
agents, but they continue to debate what the "matters touching the benefit of his
country" actually were in Marlowe's case and how they affected the 23-year-old
writer as he launched his literary career in 1587.
CHAPTER II. Literary career and its performance of
Christopher Marlowe
2.1 Adult life and legend of Kit Marlowe
As with other Elizabethans, little is known about Marlowe's adult life. All
available evidence, other than what can be deduced from his literary works, is
found in legal records and other official documents. This has not stopped writers of
fiction and non-fiction from speculating about his professional activities, private
life and character. Marlowe has often been described as a spy, a brawler and a
heretic, as well as a "magician", "duellist", "tobacco-user", "counterfeiter" and
"rakehell". While J. A. Downie and Constance Kuriyama have argued against the
more lurid speculations, it is the usually circumspect J. B. Steane who remarked,
"it seems absurd to dismiss all of these Elizabethan rum ours and accusations as
'the Marlowe myth'".[58][59][60] To understand his brief adult life, from 1587 to
1593, much has been written, including speculation of: his involvement in royally
sanctioned espionage; his vocal declaration as an atheist; his private, and possibly
same-sex, sexual interests; and the puzzling circumstances surrounding his death.
Spying
The corner of Old Court of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where
Marlowe stayed while a Cambridge student and, possibly, during the time he was
recruited as a spy
Marlowe is alleged to have been a government spy. Park Honan and Charles
Nicholl speculate that this was the case and suggest that Marlowe's recruitment
took place when he was at Cambridge. In 1587, when the Privy Council ordered
the University of Cambridge to award Marlowe his degree as Master of Arts, it
denied rumours that he intended to go to the English Catholic college in Rheims,
saying instead that he had been engaged in unspecified "affaires" on "matters
touching the benefit of his country". Surviving college records from the period also
indicate that, in the academic year 1584–1585, Marlowe had had a series of
unusually lengthy absences from the university which violated university
regulations. Surviving college buttery accounts, which record student purchases for
personal provisions, show that Marlowe began spending lavishly on food and drink
during the periods he was in attendance; the amount was more than he could have
afforded on his known scholarship income.
Portrait of alleged "spymaster" Sir Francis Walsingham c. 1585; attributed
to John de Critz
It has been speculated that Marlowe was the "Morley" who was tutor
to Arbella Stuart in 1589. This possibility was first raised in a Times Literary
Supplement letter by E. St John Brooks in 1937; in a letter to Notes and Queries,
John Baker has added that only Marlowe could have been Arbella's tutor due to the
absence of any other known "Morley" from the period with an MA and not
otherwise occupied. If Marlowe was Arbella's tutor, it might indicate that he was
there as a spy, since Arbella, niece of Mary, Queen of Scots, and cousin of James
VI of Scotland, later James I of England, was at the time a strong candidate for
the succession to Elizabeth's throne. Frederick S. Boas dismisses the possibility of
this identification, based on surviving legal records which document Marlowe's
"residence in London between September and December 1589". Marlowe had been
party to a fatal quarrel involving his neighbours and the poet Thomas
Watson in Norton Folgate and was held in Newgate Prison for a fortnight. In fact,
the quarrel and his arrest occurred on 18 September, he was released on bail on 1
October and he had to attend court, where he was acquitted on 3 December, but
there is no record of where he was for the intervening two months.
In 1592 Marlowe was arrested in the English garrison
town of Flushing (Vlissingen) in the Netherlands, for alleged involvement in
the counterfeiting of coins, presumably related to the activities of seditious
Catholics. He was sent to the Lord Treasurer (Burghley), but no charge or
imprisonment resulted. This arrest may have disrupted another of Marlowe's
spying missions, perhaps by giving the resulting coinage to the Catholic cause. He
was to infiltrate the followers of the active Catholic plotter William Stanley and
report back to Burghley.
Philosophy
Sir Walter Raleigh, shown here in 1588, was the alleged centre of
the "School of Atheism" c. 1592.
Marlowe was reputed to be an atheist, which held the dangerous
implication of being an enemy of God and the state, by association. With the rise
of public fears concerning The School of Night, or "School of Atheism" in the late
16th century, accusations of atheism were closely associated with disloyalty to the
Protestant monarchy of England.
Some modern historians consider that Marlowe's professed atheism, as with
his supposed Catholicism, may have been no more than a sham to further his work
as a government spy. Contemporary evidence comes from Marlowe's accuser
in Flushing, an informer called Richard Baines. The governor of Flushing had
reported that each of the men had "of malice" accused the other of instigating the
counterfeiting and of intending to go over to the Catholic "enemy"; such an action
was considered atheistic by the Church of England. Following Marlowe's arrest in
1593, Baines submitted to the authorities a "note containing the opinion of one
Christopher Marly concerning his damnable judgment of religion, and scorn of
God's word". Baines attributes to Marlowe a total of eighteen items which "scoff at
the pretensions of the Old and New Testament" such as, "Christ was a bastard and
his mother dishonest [unchaste]", "the woman of Samaria and her sister were
whores and that Christ knew them dishonestly", "St John the Evangelist was
bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom" (cf. John 13:23–25) and "that
he used him as the sinners of Sodom".
 He also implied that Marlowe had Catholic sympathies. Other passages are
merely sceptical in tone: "he persuades men to atheism, willing them not to be
afraid of bugbears and hobgoblins". The final paragraph of Baines's document
reads:
 Portrait often claimed to be Thomas Harriot (1602), which hangs in Trinity
College, Oxford
These thinges, with many other shall by good & honest witnes be approved
to be his opinions and Comon Speeches, and that this Marlowe doth not only hould
them himself, but almost into every Company he Cometh he persuades men to
Atheism willing them not to be afeard of bugbeares and hobgoblins, and vtterly
scorning both god and his ministers as I Richard Baines will Justify & approue
both by mine oth and the testimony of many honest men, and almost al men with
whome he hath Conversed any time will testify the same, and as I think all men in
Cristianity ought to indevor that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be
stopped, he saith likewise that he hath quoted a number of Contrarieties oute of the
Scripture which he hath giuen to some great men who in Convenient time shalbe
named. When these thinges shalbe Called in question the witnes shalbe produced.
Similar examples of Marlowe's statements were given by Thomas Kyd after his
imprisonment and possible torture (see above); Kyd and Baines connect Marlowe
with the mathematician Thomas Harriot's and Sir Walter Raleigh's circle. Another
document claimed about that time that "one Marlowe is able to show more sound
reasons for Atheism than any divine in England is able to give to prove divinity,
and that ... he hath read the Atheist lecture to Sir Walter Raleigh and others".
Some critics believe that Marlowe sought to disseminate these views in his
work and that he identified with his rebellious and iconoclastic protagonists.
[84] Plays had to be approved by the Master of the Revels before they could be
performed and the censorship of publications was under the control of
the Archbishop of Canterbury. Presumably these authorities did not consider any
of Marlowe's works to be unacceptable other than the Amores.
Sexuality
Title page to 1598 edition of Marlowe's Hero and Leander
It has been claimed that Marlowe was homosexual. Some scholars argue that the
identification of an Elizabethan as gay or homosexual in a modern sense is
"anachronistic," claiming that for the Elizabethans the terms were more likely to
have been applied to sexual acts rather than to what we understand to be exclusive
sexual orientations and identities. Other scholars argue that the evidence is
inconclusive and that the reports of Marlowe's homosexuality may be rumours
produced after his death. Richard Baines reported Marlowe as saying: "all they that
love not Tobacco & Boies were fools". David Bevington and Eric C.
Rasmussen describe Baines's evidence as "unreliable testimony" and "These and
other testimonials need to be discounted for their exaggeration and for their having
been produced under legal circumstances we would regard as a witch-hunt".
J. B. Steane remarked that he considered there to be "no evidence for Marlowe's
homosexuality at all". Other scholars point to the frequency with which Marlowe
explores homosexual themes in his writing: in Hero and Leander, Marlowe writes
of the male youth Leander: "in his looks were all that men desire..." Edward the
Second contains the following passage enumerating homosexual relationships:
The mightiest kings have had their minions;
Great Alexander loved Hephaestion,
The conquering Hercules for Hylas wept;
And for Patroclus, stern Achilles drooped.
And not kings only, but the wisest men:
The Roman Tully loved Octavius,
Grave Socrates, wild Alcibiades.
Marlowe wrote the only play about the life of Edward II up to his time,
taking the humanist literary discussion of male sexuality much further than his
contemporaries. The play was extremely bold, dealing with a star-crossed love
story between Edward II and Piers Gaveston. Though it was a common practice at
the time to reveal characters as gay to give audiences reason to suspect them as
culprits in a crime, Christopher Marlowe's Edward II is portrayed as a sympathetic
character. The decision to start the play Dido, Queen of Carthage with a
homoerotic scene between Zeus and Ganymede that bears no connection to the
subsequent plot has long puzzled scholars.
Arrest and death
 Marlowe was buried in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St
Nicholas, Deptford. This modern plaque is on the east wall of the churchyard.
In early May 1593, several bills were posted about London threatening Protestant
refugees from France and the Netherlands who had settled in the city. One of these,
the "Dutch church libel", written in rhymed iambic pentameter, contained allusions
to several of Marlowe's plays and was signed, "Tamburlaine". On 11 May
the Privy Council ordered the arrest of those responsible for the libels. The next
day, Marlowe's colleague Thomas Kyd was arrested, his lodgings were searched
and a three-page fragment of a heretical tract was found. In a letter to Sir John
Puckering, Kyd asserted that it had belonged to Marlowe, with whom he had been
writing "in one chamber" some two years earlier. In a second letter, Kyd described
Marlowe as blasphemous, disorderly, holding treasonous opinions, being an
irreligious reprobate and "intemperate & of a cruel hart".They had both been
working for an aristocratic patron, probably Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange.
[96] A warrant for Marlowe's arrest was issued on 18 May, when the Privy Council
apparently knew that he might be found staying with Thomas Walsingham, whose
father was a first cousin of the late Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth's principal
secretary in the 1580s and a man more deeply involved in state espionage than any
other member of the Privy Council. Marlowe duly presented himself on 20 May
but there apparently being no Privy Council meeting on that day, was instructed to
"give his daily attendance on their Lordships, until he shall be licensed to the
contrary".On Wednesday, 30 May, Marlowe was killed.
Title page to the 1598 edition of Palladis Tamia by Francis Meres, which
contains one of the earliest descriptions of Marlowe's death
Various accounts of Marlowe's death were current over the next few years. In
his Palladis Tamia, published in 1598, Francis Meres says Marlowe was "stabbed
to death by a bawdy serving-man, a rival of his in his lewd love" as punishment for
his "epicurism and atheism". In 1917, in the Dictionary of National Biography,
Sir Sidney Lee wrote that Marlowe was killed in a drunken fight and this is still
often stated as fact today. The official account came to light only in 1925, when the
scholar Leslie Hotson discovered the coroner's report of the inquest on Marlowe's
death, held two days later on Friday 1 June 1593, by the Coroner of the Queen's
Household, William Danby. Marlowe had spent all day in a house in Deptford,
owned by the widow Eleanor Bull and together with three men: Ingram
Frizer, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley. All three had been employed by one or
other of the Walsinghams. Skeres and Poley had helped snare the conspirators in
the Babington plot and Frizer would later describe Thomas Walsingham as his
"master" at that time, although his role was probably more that of a financial or
business agent, as he was for Walsingham's wife Audrey a few years later.  These
witnesses testified that Frizer and Marlowe had argued over payment of the bill
(now famously known as the 'Reckoning') exchanging "divers malicious words"
while Frizer was sitting at a table between the other two and Marlowe was lying
behind him on a couch. Marlowe snatched Frizer's dagger and wounded him on the
head. In the ensuing struggle, according to the coroner's report, Marlowe was
stabbed above the right eye, killing him instantly. The jury concluded that Frizer
acted in self-defence and within a month he was pardoned. Marlowe was buried in
an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St. Nicholas, Deptford immediately after
the inquest, on 1 June 1593.
The complete text of the inquest report was published by Leslie Hotson in
his book, The Death of Christopher Marlowe, in the introduction to which
Prof. George Kittredge said "The mystery of Marlowe's death, heretofore involved
in a cloud of contradictory gossip and irresponsible guess-work, is now cleared up
for good and all on the authority of public records of complete authenticity and
gratifying fullness" but this confidence proved fairly short-lived. Hotson had
considered the possibility that the witnesses had "concocted a lying account of
Marlowe's behaviour, to which they swore at the inquest, and with which they
deceived the jury" but came down against that scenario. Others began to suspect
that this was indeed the case. Writing to the TLS shortly after the book's
publication, Eugénie de Kalb disputed that the struggle and outcome as described
were even possible and Samuel A. Tannenbaum insisted the following year that
such a wound could not have possibly resulted in instant death, as had been
claimed.[104][105] Even Marlowe's biographer John Bakeless acknowledged that
"some scholars have been inclined to question the truthfulness of the coroner's
report. There is something queer about the whole episode" and said that Hotson's
discovery "raises almost as many questions as it answers".  It has also been
discovered more recently that the apparent absence of a local county coroner to
accompany the Coroner of the Queen's Household would, if noticed, have made
the inquest null and void.
One of the main reasons for doubting the truth of the inquest concerns the
reliability of Marlowe's companions as witnesses. As an agent provocateur for the
late Sir Francis Walsingham, Robert Poley was a consummate liar, the "very
genius of the Elizabethan underworld" and is on record as saying "I will swear and
forswear myself, rather than I will accuse myself to do me any harm". The other
witness, Nicholas Skeres, had for many years acted as a confidence trickster,
drawing young men into the clutches of people in the money-lending racket,
including Marlowe's apparent killer, Ingram Frizer, with whom he was engaged in
such a swindle. Despite their being referred to as "generosi" (gentlemen) in the
inquest report, the witnesses were professional liars. Some biographers, such as
Kuriyama and Downie, take the inquest to be a true account of what occurred but
in trying to explain what really happened if the account was not true, others have
come up with a variety of murder theories.
Jealous of her husband Thomas's relationship with Marlowe, Audrey
Walsingham arranged for the playwright to be murdered.
Sir Walter Raleigh arranged the murder, fearing that under torture Marlowe
might incriminate him.
With Skeres the main player, the murder resulted from attempts by the Earl
of Essex to use Marlowe to incriminate Sir Walter Raleigh.
He was killed on the orders of father and son Lord Burghley and Sir Robert
Cecil, who thought that his plays contained Catholic propaganda.
 Since there are only written documents on which to base any conclusions
and since it is probable that the most crucial information about his death was never
committed to paper, it is unlikely that the full circumstances of Marlowe's death
will ever be known.

2.2. Works of Marlowe in performance

The first tragedian worthy of the tradition of the Greeks
was Christopher Marlowe. Of Marlowe’s tragedies, Tamburlaine (1587), Doctor
Faustus (c. 1588), The Jew of Malta (1589), and Edward II (c. 1593), the first two
are the most famous and most significant. In Tamburlaine, the material was highly
melodramatic; the historical figure’s popular image was that of the most ruthless
and bloody of conquerors. In a verse prologue, when Marlowe invites the audience
to “View but his [Tamburlaine’s] picture in this tragic glass,” he had in mind little
more, perhaps, than the trappings and tone of tragedy: “the stately tent of war,”
which is to be his scene, and “the high astounding terms,” which will be
his rhetoric. But he brought such imaginative vigour and sensitivity to bear
that melodrama is transcended, in terms reminiscent of high tragedy. Tamburlaine,
a Scythian shepherd of the 14th century, becomes the spokesman, curiously
enough, for the new world of the Renaissance—iconoclastic, independent,
stridently ambitious. Just as the Greek tragedians challenged tradition,
Tamburlaine shouts defiance at all the norms, religious and moral, that Marlowe’s
generation inherited. But Tamburlaine, although he is an iconoclast, is also a poet.
No one before him on the English stage had talked with such
magnificent lyric power as he does, whether it be on the glories of conquest or on
the beauties of Zenocrate, his beloved. When, still unconquered by any enemy, he
sickens and dies, he leaves the feeling that something great, however ruthless, has
gone. Here once again is the ambiguity that was so much a part of the Greek tragic
imagination —the combination of awe, pity, and fear that Aristotle defined.

In Doctor Faustus the sense of conflict between the tradition and the new
Renaissance individualism is much greater. The claims of revealed Christianity are
presented in the orthodox spirit of the morality and mystery plays, but Faustus’s
yearnings for power over space and time are also presented with a sympathy that
cannot be denied. Here is modern man, tragic modern man, torn between the faith
of tradition and faith in himself. Faustus takes the risk in the end and is bundled off
to hell in true mystery-play fashion. But the final scene does not convey
that justice has been done, even though Faustus admits that his fate is just. Rather,
the scene suggests that the transcendent human individual has been caught in the
consequences of a dilemma that he might have avoided but that no imaginative
man could have avoided. The sense of the interplay of fate and freedom is not
unlike that of Oedipus. The sense of tragic ambiguity is more poignant in Faustus
than in Oedipus or Tamburlaine because Faustus is far more introspective than
either of the other heroes.

The conflict is inner; the battle is for Faustus’s soul, a kind of conflict that
neither the Greeks nor Tamburlaine had to contend with. For this reason, and not
because it advocates Christian doctrine, the play has been called the first ChIn the
earliest of Marlowe’s plays, the two-part Tamburlaine the Great (c. 1587;
published 1590), Marlowe’s characteristic “mighty line” (as Ben Jonson called it)
established blank verse as the staple medium for later Elizabethan and Jacobean
dramatic writing. It appears that originally Marlowe intended to write only the first
part, concluding with Tamburlaine’s marriage to Zenocrate and his making “truce
with all the world.” But the popularity of the first part encouraged Marlowe to
continue the story to Tamburlaine’s death. This gave him some difficulty, as he
had almost exhausted his historical sources in part I; consequently the sequel has,
at first glance, an appearance of padding. Yet the effort demanded in writing the
continuation made the young playwright look more coldly and searchingly at the
hero he had chosen, and thus part II makes explicit certain notions that were below
the surface and insufficiently recognized by the dramatist in part I.

The play is based on the life and achievements of Timur (Timurlenk), the

bloody 14th-century conqueror of Central Asia and India. Tamburlaine is a
man avid for power and luxury and the possession of beauty: at the beginning of
part I he is only an obscure Scythian shepherd, but he wins the crown of Persia by
eloquence and bravery and a readiness to discard loyalty. He then conquers
Bajazeth, emperor of Turkey, he puts the town of Damascus to the sword, and he
conquers the sultan of Egypt; but, at the pleas of the sultan’s daughter Zenocrate,
the captive whom he loves, he spares him and makes truce. In part II
Tamburlaine’s conquests are further extended; whenever he fights a battle, he must
win, even when his last illness is upon him. But Zenocrate dies, and their three
sons provide a manifestly imperfect means for ensuring the preservation of his
wide dominions; he kills Calyphas, one of these sons, when he refuses to follow
his father into battle.

Always, too, there are more battles to fight: when for a moment he has no
immediate opponent on earth, he dreams of leading his army against the powers of
heaven, though at other times he glories in seeing himself as “the scourge of God”;
he burns the Qurʾān, for he will have no intermediary between God and himself,
and there is a hint of doubt whether even God is to be granted recognition.
Certainly Marlowe feels sympathy with his hero, giving him magnificent verse to
speak, delighting in his dreams of power and of the possession of beauty, as seen
in the following of Tamburlaine’s lines:

Nature, that fram’d us of four elements

Warring within our breasts for regiment,

Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:

Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend

The wondrous architecture of the world,

And measure every wandering planet’s course,

Still climbing after knowledge infinite,

And always moving as the restless spheres,

Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest,

Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,

That perfect bliss and sole felicity,

The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.

But, especially in part II, there are other strains: the hero can be absurd in
his continual striving for more demonstrations of his power; his cruelty, which is
extreme, becomes sickening; his human weakness is increasingly underlined, most
notably in the onset of his fatal illness immediately after his arrogant burning of
the Qurʾān. In this early play Marlowe already shows the ability to view a tragic
hero from more than one angle, achieving a simultaneous vision of grandeur and
impotence.

Marlowe’s most famous play is The Tragicall History of Dr. Faustus; but

it has surviv ed only in a corrupt form, and its date of composition has been much-
disputed. It was first published in 1604, and another version appeared in
1616. Faustus takes over the dramatic framework of the morality plays in its
presentation of a story of temptation, fall, and damnation and its free use
of morality figures such as the good angel and the bad angel and the seven deadly
sins, along with the devils Lucifer and Mephistopheles. In Faustus Marlowe tells
the story of the doctor-turned-necromancer Faustus, who sells his soul to the devil
in exchange for knowledge and power. The devil’s intermediary in the play,
Mephistopheles, achieves tragic grandeur in his own right as a fallen angel torn
between satanic pride and dark despair. The play gives eloquent expression to this
idea of damnation in the lament of Mephistopheles for a lost heaven and in
Faustus’ final despairing entreaties to be saved by Christ before his soul is claimed
by the devil:
The stars move still, time runs, the clock

will strike,

The devil will come, and Faustus must

be damn’d.

O, I’ll leap up to my God!—Who pulls

me down?—

See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in

the firmament!

One drop would save my soul, half a drop:

ah, my Christ!—

Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!

Yet will I call on him: O, spare me, Lucifer!—

Where is it now? ’tis gone: and see, where God

Stretcheth out his arm, and bends his

ireful brows!

Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall

on me,

And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!

Just as in Tamburlaine Marlowe had seen the cruelty and absurdity of his
hero as well as his magnificence, so here he can enter into Faustus’
grandiose intellectual ambition, simultaneously viewing those ambitions as futile,
self-destructive, and absurd. The text is problematic in the low comic scenes
spuriously introduced by later hack writers, but its more sober and consistent
moments are certainly the uncorrupted work of Marlowe.

In The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta, Marlowe portrays

another power-hungry figure in the Jew Barabas, who in the villainous society of
Christian Malta shows no scruple in self-advancement. But this figure is more
closely incorporated within his society than either Tamburlaine, the supreme
conqueror, or Faustus, the lonely adventurer against God. In the end Barabas is
overcome, not by a divine stroke but by the concerted action of his human
enemies. There is a difficulty in deciding how fully the extant text of The Jew of
Malta represents Marlowe’s original play, for it was not published until 1633.
But The Jew can be closely associated with The Massacre at Paris (1593), a
dramatic presentation of incidents from contemporary French history, including
the Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Day, and with The Troublesome Raigne and
Lamentable Death of Edward the Second (published 1594), Marlowe’s great
contribution to the Elizabethan plays on historical themes.

As The Massacre introduces in the duke of Guise a figure unscrupulously

avid for power, so in the younger Mortimer of Edward II Marlowe shows a man
developing an appetite for power and increasingly corrupted as power comes to
him. In each instance the dramatist shares in the excitement of the pursuit of glory,
but all three plays present such figures within a social framework: the notion of
social responsibility, the notion of corruption through power, and the notion of the
suffering that the exercise of power entails are all prominently the dramatist’s
concern. Apart from Tamburlaine and the minor work Dido, Queen of
Carthage (of uncertain date, published 1594 and written in collaboration
with Thomas Nashe), Edward II is the only one of Marlowe’s plays whose extant
text can be relied on as adequately representing the author’s manuscript. And
certainly Edward II is a major work, not merely one of the first Elizabethan plays
on an English historical theme. The relationships linking the king, his neglected
queen, the king’s favourite, Gaveston, and the ambitious Mortimer are studied with
detached sympathy and remarkable understanding: no character here is lightly
disposed of, and the abdication and the brutal murder of Edward show the same
dark and violent imagination as appeared in Marlowe’s presentation of Faustus’
last hour. Though this play, along with The Jew and The Massacre, shows
Marlowe’s fascinated response to the distorted Elizabethan idea of Machiavelli, it
more importantly shows Marlowe’s deeply suggestive awareness of the nature of
disaster, the power of society, and the dark extent of an individual’s suffering.

In addition to translations (Ovid’s Amores and the first book of

Lucan’s Pharsalia), Marlowe’s nondramatic work includes the poem Hero and
Leander. This work was incomplete at his death and was extended by George
Chapman: the joint work of the two poets was published in 1598.

An authoritative edition of Marlowe’s works was edited by Fredson

Bowers, The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1981).

Conclusion
A Marlowe Memorial in the form of a bronze sculpture of The Muse of
Poetry by Edward Onslow Ford was erected by subscription in Buttermarket,
Canterbury in 1891. In July 2002, a memorial window to Marlowe, a gift of the
Marlowe Society, was unveiled in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

 Controversially, a question mark was added to the generally accepted date of

death. On 25 October 2011 a letter from Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells was
published by The Times newspaper, in which they called on the Dean and Chapter
to remove the question mark on the grounds that it "flew in the face of a mass of
unimpugnable evidence".
 In 2012, they renewed this call in their e-book Shakespeare Bites Back,
adding that it "denies history" and again the following year in their
book Shakespeare Beyond Doubt.

The Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury, Kent, UK, was named after the town's

"most famous" resident in 1949. Originally housed in a former 1920s cinema on St.
Margaret's Street, the Marlowe Theatre later moved to a newly converted 1930's
era Odeon Cinema in the city.

After a 2011 reopening with a newly enhanced state-of-the-art theatre

facility, the Marlowe now enjoys some of the country's finest touring companies
including, Glyndebourne Opera, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Royal
National Theatre as well as many major West End musicals

THE LIST OF USED LITERATURE

1. ^ Kathman, David. "The Spelling and Pronunciation of Shakespeare's
Name: Pronunciation". shakespeareauthorship.com. Retrieved 14
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Christopher Marlowe on Shakespeare's artistry. Aldershot, England;
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3. ^ Logan (2007), p. 3, 231-235.
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39.^ "See especially the middle section in which the author shows how another
Cambridge graduate, Thomas Preston makes his title character express his
love in a popular play written around 1560 and compares that "clumsy"
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Retrieved 10 December 2011.
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