Carp diem poetry

Life and and literary career

Christopher Marlowe (baptised 26 February 1564 – 30 May 1593) was an English playwright, poet and translator of theElizabethan era. Marlowe was the foremost Elizabethan tragedian of his day. He greatly influenced William Shakespeare, who was born in the same year as Marlowe and who rose to become the pre-eminent Elizabethan playwright after Marlowe’s mysterious early death. Marlowe’s plays are known for the use of blank verse and their overreaching protagonists.

A warrant was issued for Marlowe’s arrest on 18 May 1593. No reason was given for it, though it was thought to be connected to allegations of blasphemy—a manuscript believed to have been written by Marlowe was said to contain “vile heretical conceipts.” On 20 May he was brought to the court to attend upon the Privy Council for questioning. There is no record of their having met that day, however, and he was commanded to attend upon them each day thereafter until “licensed to the contrary.” Ten days later, he was stabbed to death by Ingram Frizer. Whether the stabbing was connected to his arrest has never been resolved. Literary career Of the dramas attributed to Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage is believed to have been his first. It was performed by the Children of the Chapel, a company of boy actors, between 1587 and 1593.
The play was first published in 1594; the title page attributes the play to Marlowe and Thomas Nashe.Marlowe’s first play performed on the regular stage in London, in 1587, was Tamburlaine the Great, about the conqueror Tamburlaine, who rises from shepherd to war-lord. It is among the first English plays in blank verse, and, with Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, generally is considered the beginning of the mature phase of the Elizabethan theatre. Tamburlaine was a success, and was followed with Tamburlaine the Great,The two parts of Tamburlaine were published in 1590; all Marlowe’s other works were published posthumously. The sequence of the writing of his other four plays is unknown; all deal with controversial themes.The Jew of Malta (first published as The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta), about a Maltese Jew’s barbarous revenge against the city authorities, has a prologue delivered by a character representing Machiavelli. It was probably written in 1589 or 1590, and was first performed in 1592. It was a success, and remained popular for the next fifty years.
Edward the Second is an English history play about the deposition of King Edward II by his barons and the Queen, who resent the undue influence the king’s favourites have in court and state affairs.The Massacre at Paris is a short and luridly written work, the only surviving text of which was probably a reconstruction from memory of the original performance text, portraying the events of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, which English Protestants invoked as the blackest example of Catholic treachery. It features the silent “English Agent”, whom subsequent tradition has identified with Marlowe himself and his connections to the secret service. The Massacre at Paris is considered his most dangerous play, as agitators in London seized on its theme to advocate the murders of refugees from the low countries and, indeed, it warns Elizabeth I of this possibility in its last scene.
Doctor Faustus (or The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus), based on the German Faustbuch, was the first dramatised version of the Faust legend of a scholar’s dealing with the devil. While versions of “The Devil’s Pact” can be traced back to the 4th century, Marlowe deviates significantly by having his hero unable to “burn his books” or repent to a merciful God in order to have his contract annulled at the end of the play. Marlowe’s protagonist is instead carried off by demons, and in the 1616 quarto his mangled corpse is found by several scholars. Doctor Faustus is a textual problem for scholars as two versions of the play exist: the 1604 quarto, also known as the A text, and the 1616 quarto or B text. Both were published after Marlowe’s death. 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 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.



History of writing Carpe Diem Poetry
Had Spenser and Sidney been more nearly contemporary with Marlowe, it is hardly credible but that even they would have written plays as the author of Venus 0and Adonis afterwards did, for it was now clear that a man might be an exuberant poet and a playwright at once ; — not merely a lofty poet as was Sophocles ; for there was no kind of poetry which need be excluded from drama of this kind. It was Marlowe, in short, who made it certain that the English drama was to be of that gorgeous texturewhich we now see it to be.
With this great good went some harm, and chiefly the awful example of putting any matter whatsoever into verse, his prose being, so far as. can be seen, introduced not as appropriate but as necessary to break the monotony; and of making dialogue falsely poetical by putting, for example, into the mouth of Tamburlaine such a comparison as Like to an almond tree y-mounted high. Marlowe chose Tamburlaine and the kings as he chose words and images and cadences, because they were magnificent, and because their violent passions and prodigious acts satisfied his need of agnificence. But the life and death of Tamburlaine was far from being an adequate theme.
The two plays were a freak of the infinite crude ambition of this young man of Kent in the marvelous company of young countrymen, wild, poor, laborious, who loved so well the small comprehensible England of this day. The plays were a tour de force. Marlowe cared nothing for emperors except for their clothes and cavalcades and for the pinnacle from which they would fall. We see him pouring out his poetry almost regardless of his characters. That the author of " Come live with me and be my love " was a great lyric poet there can be no doubt, but his lyric gift was so well satisfied with its opportunities in the plays that this poem is the only complete and separate lyric of his which we possess.
The poetry was the thing. It would out; and with all respect for Tamburlaine, no one can read it without wishing that Marlowe had been able to give up one of the two parts for a narrative. In a life so brief and full and fiery as Marlowe's there are certain to be many losses which it is only mortal to imagine and then regret, and the greatest regret is not that he did not complete The Jew of Malta as he began it, but that he attempted only one narrative poem and left that half untold.
Our iterature is not poor in narrative poetry on a large scale. In the first rank we have Chaucer, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and the author of Tristram of Lyonesse; in the second, Dryden, Byron, Crabbe, Scott, and Morris—to mention a few. But " Hero and Leander " is the half of a poem that would have been unsurpassed, and equalled by " Lamia"—and by how few others! The versification is superb in its massiveness, delicacy, and diversity. For a peer in pictorial effect it had to wait over two hundred years, and it passes from picture to action and dialogue with perfect fitness and ease. It combines a classic clearness with the rapture of romance, as if a Grecian statue had breathed to speak its welcome to the Renaissance, or were about to do so; but Marlowe died and Chapman knew not the incantation.
In the legend of Doctor Faustus the poet had a perfect subject—the student " born of parents base of stock," who hoped by magic to encompass A world of profit and delight, Of power, of honour and omnipotence — to gain pearls and gold and "pleasant fruits and princely delicates," " strange philosophy," and the secrets and armies of kings. Into this subject Marlowe could without hesitation or obstacle put the whole of himself, his intellectual subtlety and experience, his love of beauty, of power, and of luxury. He used the legend with only just so much of the paraphernalia of the supernatural as was easily and almost universally credible in his day; and he made Faustus a human, individual student of that age, with a shade of rusticity—one can imagine him with an accent as probably Marlowe had the accent of Kent—which adds to the intense reality of the whole, to the beauty and dalliance of the central part, the kissing of Helen, the snatching of the pope's ish, and to the terrible splendor of the end.
His mighty line—mighty in its ovement as in its content—was at its proper task in expressing those " brave ranslunary things." Excluding the prose buffoonery which is unlikely to have been his, the play has the simplicity of a lyric. It is small wonder that Goethe should say how greatly it was all planned, and that Mr. Swinburne should call its author the first great English poet, seeing with what fitness the exquisite parts are subordinate to a noble whole.
If in Tamburlaine the young Marlowe expressed his nature, so ardent, so luxurious, so volatile, against odds, and in Faustus with a perfect harmony between the subject and what we may surmise of himself, in Edward the Second the same nature found an outlet while at the same time creating a world outside itself. Edward the Second is not Marlowe as Tamburlaine was and as Faustus was, yet we have in his speeches not solely the tragic pleasure of watching him enjoying, struggling, sinking, to the end, but also that other pleasure of feeling that the maker of this vivid world is Marlowe himself, and that it is, therefore, what it is and not another world. Here as in Faustus, the soaring vein of the poet plunges with equal speed to agony. That a king spoke Marlowe's words in Tamburlaine was no advantage ; but in Edward the Second the king adds a precious colour to the canvas—a king in whom he shows that the woe of the Renaissance equalled its joy.
In the character of Edward he anticipates all Shakespeare's sense of the tragedy of princes, a sense which must have been quickened in Shakespeare if he really corroborated with Marlowe in The True Tragedy. Here Marlowe's almost hectic love of loveliness—his characteristic word is "lovely," I think — is most finely expressed; here, too, his love of luxury, as in Music and poetry are his delight;
Therefore I'll have Italian masks by night,
Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows;
And in the day, when he shall walk abroad,
Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad;
My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns,
Shall with their goat- feet dance the antic hay.
Sometimes a lovely boy in Dian's shape,
With hair that gilds the water as it glides. . . .
Here his fancy is put to its apt dramatic use as in that, speech of the mournful Edward—
My heart is as an anvil unto sorrow, Which beats upon it like the Cyclops' hammers. And with the noise turns up my giddy brain,And makes me frantic for my Gaveston. Here his tenderness and sense of fate are most powerful,whether in the great passages or in the lesser, as when the Queen says at a touch of courage in her child Ah, boy! this towardness makes thy mother fear Thou art not marked to many days on earth. Here is his sumptuous diction at its height as when he puts into young Mortimer's mouth the simple statement —This tottered ensign of my ancestors Which swept the desert shore by that dead sea.
Whereof we got the name of Mortimer Will I advance upon this castle's walls. Here his blank verse, though almost uncontrollably sweet and swift, has gained in force and variety and, always delightful in itself, is yet equal to all the occasions of a tragedy. In none of the other plays have all of Marlowe's powers combined so happily to one great end.
He was hurried, as in the later part of The Jew of Malta ; he was handling only a contemporary subject, and that more or less in the manner of a chronicle play, as in The Massacre at Paris ; or he had an intractable subject, as in Dido, Queen of Carthage. But in all he brought an intense poetic nature to bear upon human action and character, and, especially in Dido, enjoyed to the full the many opportunities of expressing luxury and barbaric simplicity of love and hate. No other poet would have made Eneas say, when he fears the farewell to his queen — Her silver arms will coil me round about And tears of pearl cry: " Stay, Eneas, stay." No other would have made the queen say, when she suspects the Trojans of stealing away —
I would have given Achates store of gold
And Ilioneus gum and Libyan spice;
The common soldiers rich embroidered coats,
And silver whistles to control the winds,
Which Circe sent Sichaeus when he lived
or have made her beg her sister to mount neas on her jennet that he might ride as her husband through the streets while she goes up into a turret from which to gaze on him.Of the many plays doubtfully or in part attributed to Marlowe The True Tragedy is printed here. It is thought by some that Shakespeare, Greene, and Peele had also a hand in it, and that Shakespeare used only his own share in the third part of King Henry VI., into which it developed. Miss Elizabeth Lee, on the other hand, thinks that Marlowe and Greene, aided perhaps by Peele, wrote.

Main characters and plot
Marlowe was born in Canterbury in 1564 of a family that originated in Ospringe, today part of Faversham. His father, John, was a cobbler. Christopher went to King’s School, and was awarded a Matthew Parker scholarship which enabled him to study at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, from late 1580 until 1587, when he was awarded his MA.
Like other brilliant students and writers he was recruited by Sir Francis Walsingham as a part-time secret service agent. His literary career, spent, as far as we know, mainly in London, lasted for only six years from 1587 to 1593. As far as his contemporaries knew he simply disappeared in May 1593, though rumours began to circulate of his death.
We now know that he had been arrested by the Privy Council in May 1593 and released on bail. It was not until 1925 when Dr. Leslie Hotson discovered in the Public Record Office details of an inquest conducted at Deptford by the Queen’s Coroner, William Danby, concerning an affray in which Marlowe is said to have lost his life, on 30th May 1593, that an explanation was offered about his death.
Use the image links (right) to read more about Marlowe’s life and times. Marlowe has left us from his short, but brilliant, career seven plays, and in several of them he was a pioneer in that particular genre. Of these Tamburlaine Parts 1 and 2 caused the greatest excitement among his contemporaries. The heroic nature of its theme, coupled with the splendour of the blank verse and the colour and scale of its pageantry led to its constant revival, with the great actor Edward Alleyn taking the part of Tamburlaine.Alleyn was to take the lead in other Marlowe plays, and to share in their triumph, notably The Jew of Malta and Dr. Faustus. The Jew of Malta may be termed the first successful black comedy or tragi-comedy, and provided Shakespeare with his inspiration for Shylock. Dr. Faustus, though a moral drama brought about by the overreaching of the human spirit and of free thinking in a superstitious age, is a delightful blend of tragic verse and comedy.
Edward II is probably the earliest successful history play, and paved the way for Shakespeare’s more mature histories such as Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V. It too is a moving tragedy, and contains fine verse, and an impelling characterisation of a weak and flawed monarch. Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage is an early work derived in part from Virgil’s Aeneid, which, though rarely performed, contains much fine and moving verse. The Massacre at Paris was much admired by the Elizabethans, with its near-contemporary depiction of the murders and scandals instigated by the French Court. Sadly only a severely mutilated version has survived.
Hero and Leander is the greatest poem of Marlowe’s that has come down to us, though much of his love poetry apart from the well-known Come Live With Me, and Be My Love has been lost. George Chapman completed the unfinished Hero and Leander, and it was published finally in 1598.
Shortly afterwards the memorable verse translations of Ovid’s Elegies, the Amores, and of Lucan’s First Book of the Civil War, called Pharsalia appeared in quick succession. The translation of Amores was a massive task, and all forty-eight of Ovid’s poems were turned into elegiac couplets. Much of the verse is exceedingly beautiful, though the quality is sometimes uneven. No one has ever attempted the task since. The blank verse of the Lucan translation is at times very powerful, and it is thought this work dates from Marlowe’s university days.
The Muses’ Darling Christopher Marlowe’s friends and contemporaries were quick to honour him, with the dramatist George Peele referring to him as “the Muses’ Darling”1 in a tribute printed less than a month after the events at Deptford. Thomas Nashe moved quickly to organise a Quarto edition of Dido, Queen of Carthage which was published in 1594, perhaps a little cheekily attributing himself as co-author, but writing an elegy to Marlowe inserted in some copies which is sadly no longer extant. The colourful dramatist, pamphleteer and prose writer Robert Greene who died in 1592 had seemingly been critical of Marlowe’s atheism, but had recognised “Thou famous gracer of Tragedians”.
The printer Thomas Thorpe, best known for his dedication of Shakespeare’s Sonnets to Mr. W.H., also praised Marlowe as “that pure Elemental wit … whose ghost or Genius is to be seen walk[ing] the [St Paul’s] Churchyard in (at the least) three or four sheets”2. Henry Petowe was inspired to pen a continuation of Hero and Leander (as was George Chapman) by “Marlo admir ‘d, whose honey-flowing vaine No English writer can as yet attaine”3. Francis Meres thought Marlowe, along with Shakespeare, was “one of our best for Tragedie”4, Thomas Heywood noted him “renown’d for his rare art and wit,” whilst Michael Drayton was perhaps most eloquent concerning
Marlow, bathed in Thespian springs Had in him those brave translunary things,,That the first Poets had, his raptures were
All air, and fire, which made his verses clear
For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.
The Morning Star
Critics and scholars through the centuries have lavished praise on the dramatic brilliance and poetic genius of one, who like Shakespeare, began life in humble circumstances, but who achieved undying fame in a very few years. Perhaps most memorably, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote of Marlowe in the nineteenth century: “If Shakespeare is the dazzling sun of this mighty period, Marlowe is certainly the morning star”6. Critic and scholar Edward Dowden similarly opined that “if Marlowe had lived longer and accomplished the work that lay clearly before him, he would have stood beside Shakespeare.”
Marlowe has been honoured among poets and playwrights as the real founder of English drama, and the perfecter of dramatic blank verse. Poet and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne thought Marlowe without compare here. “Of English blank verse, one of the few highest forms of verbal harmony, or poetic expression, Marlowe was the absolute and divine creator.”.
Marlowe was loved and honoured by his contemporaries for his love poetry, and his translations of Lucan and Ovid. Without Marlowe as guide and leader, Shakespeare and the other Elizabethan poets and dramatists would certainly not have achieved the reputation they enjoy today.
Read more about the life and times of Christopher Marlowe, and his work. Also find out about the contemporary portrait found at Cambridge and believed to be of Marlowe, and the eventful history of his Memorial in Canterbury.