There’s a new biography of Christopher Marlowe out – by David Riggs – and here’s a review of it by Daniel Swift (thanks, E-verse newsletter!).
The review opens with:
Christopher Marlowe’s life was short, sharp and irresistible. His fame rests not only on six violently glittering plays written in his 20s but also on the tantalizing story that may be considered his masterpiece, for Marlowe inhabited his time like a player strutting upon an invisible stage. His life was his most remarkable piece of theater.
Everyone imitated Marlowe. His first play, Tamburlaine, was staged when he was 23, and its success can most readily be gauged by its imitators. As David Riggs notes in his new biography, The World of Christopher Marlowe, within the next couple of years three new plays were staged that were more or less direct copies of Marlowe’s original, while Shakespeare wrote his early Henry VI plays under the influence of Marlowe’s style. A decade later, as the church authorities burned copies of Marlowe’s semipornographic love poems in the streets, Shakespeare again returned to imitating his predecessor in As You Like It. Marlowe’s contemporaries regarded him with a mixture of awe and fear; as his friend Thomas Nashe wrote, “No leaf he wrote on but was like a burning glass to set on fire all his readers.”
I’m a big fan of Marlowe, so I think I’m gonna have to read this one eventually.
(I don’t think that that portrait has been confirmed, beyond a reasonable doubt, to be of Marlowe … but it seems that scholars agree that it PROBABLY is Marlowe.)
I plan on read it too. Already read The Reckoning, a brilliant book about his murder so naturally I want more.
Go Marlowe!
I’ll be looking into the new book, thanks.
Marlowe: “a burning glass to set on fire all his readers”
Quoted from Daniel Swift’s review of The World of Christopher Marlowe, this bit about Marlowe’s love letters of which I was unaware:…