Christopher Marlowe
As you probably know, Marlowe was the most famous dramatist in Shakespeare’s day, and died young, a few years before Shakespeare’s rise to fame. You need to know about Marlowe because he’s a GRE favorite.
**“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”
~ see also Sir Walter Ralegh’s “The Nymph: Reply to the Shephard”
~ This poem has been sited by Donne, Herrick, Ralegh and C. Day Lewis.
“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods or steepy mountain yields.
And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.
And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;
A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of th purest gold;
A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my love.
The shepherds’ swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.
**Tamburlaine the Great
Be able to pick out the relevant names for Tamburlaine, but don’t worry too much about the plot.
In 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.
The play opens in Persepolis. The Persian emperor, Mycetes, dispatches troops to dispose of Tamburlaine, a Scythian shepherd and at that point a nomadic bandit. In the same scene, Mycetes’ brother Cosroe plots to overthrow Mycetes and assume the throne.
The scene shifts to Scythia, where Tamburlaine is shown wooing, capturing, and winning Zenocrate, the daughter of the Egyptian king. Confronted by Mycetes’ soldiers, he persuades first the soldiers and then Cosroe to join him in a fight against Mycetes. Although he promises Cosroe the Persian throne, Tamburlaine reneges on this promise and, after defeating Mycetes, takes personal control of the Persian Empire.
Suddenly a powerful figure, Tamburlaine decides to pursue further conquests. A campaign against Turkey yields him the Turkish king Bajazeth and his wife Zabina as captives; he keeps them in a cage and at one point uses Bajazeth as a footstool.
After conquering Africa and naming himself emperor of that continent, Tamburlaine sets his eyes on Damascus; this target places the Egyptian Sultan, his father-in-law, directly in his path. Zenocrate pleads with her husband to spare her father. He complies, instead making the Sultan a tributary king. The play ends with the wedding of Zenocrate and Tamburlaine, and the crowning of the former as Empress of Persia.
In Part 2, Tamburlaine grooms his sons to be conquerors in his wake as he continues to conquer his neighbouring kingdoms. One of his sons, Calyphas, preferring to stay by his mother’s side and not risk death, incurs Tamburlaine’s wrath. Seeing this son as a coward, Tamburlaine kills him in anger after a battle in which he refuses to fight. During this time, Bajazeth’s son, Callapine, plans to avenge his father’s death. Finally, while attacking an Islamic nation, he scornfully burns a copy of the Qur’an and claims to be greater than God. Suddenly, Tamburlaine is struck ill and dies, giving his power to his remaining sons, but still aspiring to greatness as he departs life.
“Hero and Leander”
The poem tells the celebrated story of the love between the hero, Leander, and Hero, a priestess of Venus. The two live in different cities, Abydos and Sestos, which are separated from each other by the gulf known as the Hellespont. Leander swims across for a night of passion, but in so doing he attracts the attention of the sea-god Neptune, who makes advances to him which Leander, not really understanding what is going on, rejects. He breaks safely away, reaches Hero, and the two make love—and there the story breaks off. Its original publisher printed at this point the words “ desunt nonnulla “, meaning “something is missing”, and many subsequent readers have been inclined to agree with him that Marlowe had originally intended to carry the narrative to its traditional conclusion—the drowning of Leander—and was prevented, presumably by death. Others, however, have argued that Marlowe, who was after all no respecter of traditions, had simply decided to let the poem end, as does the first part of Tamburlaine , on an unexpected note of triumph and success, challenging contemporary attitudes by refusing to endorse the idea that daring and transgression must always be punished by loss and retribution. He had certainly already deviated from the norm in the introduction of Neptune’s desire for Leander—an innovation which would have been instantly registered as such, since the story was so popular that, said a contemporary, “Hero and Leander is in every man’s mouth”. At the same time, though, that episode also seems to foreshadow an ultimately tragic ending by giving the rejected Neptune a strong motive to drown Leander, and indeed the opening line “On Hellespont, guilty of true love’s blood” similarly presages disaster. It does therefore seem likely that Marlowe would have continued the poem had he lived, and his friend George Chapman, who seems to have regarded himself as Marlowe’s literary executor, certainly thought so, since he himself supplied a conclusion for the poem.
“Doctor Faustus”
The play is in blank verse and prose in thirteen scenes (1604) or twenty scenes (1616). Blank verse is largely reserved for the main scenes while prose is used in the comic scenes.
*Note that Doctor Faustus has a character named Benvolio, like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Don’t get confused on the test if this name comes up; it may be a trick.
Vade Mecum 