English

Renaissance
Writers

Christopher Marlowe
Christopher "Kit"
Marlowe (baptised 26
February 1564 30 May
1593) was an English
dramatist, poet and
translator of the Elizabethan
era. The foremost
Elizabethan tragedian next
to William Shakespeare, he
is known for his magnificent
blank verse, his
overreaching protagonists,
and his own mysterious and
untimely death.

Christopher Marlowe was

christened at St. George's Church,
Canterbury, on 26 February 1564.
He was born to a shoemaker in
Canterbury named John Marlowe
and his wife Katherine. Marlowe
attended The King's School,
Canterbury (where a house is now
named after him) and Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge on a
scholarship and received his
Bachelor of Arts degree in 1584.
In 1587 the university hesitated to
award him his master's degree
because of a rumour that he had
converted to Roman Catholicism
and intended to go to the English
college at Rheims to prepare for
the priesthood.

However, 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, notably the theory that Marlowe was
operating as a secret agent working for Sir Francis Walsingham's
intelligence service. No direct evidence supports this theory, although the
Council's letter is evidence that Marlowe had served the government in
some capacity.
Marlowe had a bad reputation among other writers. Government disliked
him to. Christopher was eccussed accused of atheism and spying. On may
30, Marlowe was murdered.

The Tragical History 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 have his contract
repudiated by a merciful
god at the end of the play.
Marlowe's protagonist is
instead torn apart by
demons and dragged off
screaming to hell.

Literary Career

Dido, Queen of Carthage was

Marlowe's first drama.

Marlowe's first play performed on stage

in London stage was Tamburlaine
(1587) about the conqueror Timur, who
rises from shepherd to warrior. 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 Part II. The
sequence of his plays is unknown; all
deal with controversial themes.
The Jew of Malta, about a Maltese
Jew's barbarous revenge against the
city authorities, has a prologue
delivered by a character representing
Machiavelli. The play is known for its
unsympathetic portrayal of nearly all its
characters.

Dr Faustus is a textual problem for

scholars as it was highly edited
(and possibly censored) and
rewritten after Marlowe's death.
Two versions of the play exist: the
1604 quarto, also known as the A
text, and the 1616 quarto or B text.
Many scholars believe that the A
text is more representative of
Marlowe's original because it
contains irregular character names
and idiosyncratic spelling: the
hallmarks of a text that used the
author's handwritten manuscript, or
"foul papers", as a major source.

Marlowe also wrote poetry,

including a, possibly, unfinished
minor epic, Hero and Leander
(published with a continuation by
George Chapman in 1598), the
popular lyric The Passionate
Shepherd to His Love, and
translations of Ovid's Amores and
the first book of Lucan's
Pharsalia.
The three parts of Tamburlaine
were published in 1590; all
Marlowe's other works were
published posthumously. In 1599,
his translation of Ovid was
banned and copies publicly
burned as part of Archbishop
Whitgift's crackdown on
offensive material.

Philip Sidney

Sir Philip Sidney

(November 30, 1554
October 17, 1586) became
one of the Elizabethan Age's
most prominent figures.
Famous in his day in England
as a poet, courtier and
soldier, he remains known as
the author of Astrophel and
Stella (1581, pub. 1591), The
Defence of Poetry (or An
Apology for Poetry, 1581,
pub. 1595), and The Countess
of Pembroke's Arcadia (1580,
pub. 1590).

Born at Penshurst, Kent, he was

the eldest son of Sir Henry Sidney
and Lady Mary Dudley. Philip
was educated at Shrewsbury
School and Christ Church,
Oxford. He was much travelled
and highly learned. In 1572, he
travelled to France He spent the
next several years in mainland
Europe, moving through
Germany, Italy, Poland, and
Austria. On these travels, he met a
number of prominent European
intellectuals and politicians.

Returning to England in
1575, Sidney met Penelope
Devereaux, the future
Penelope Blount; though
much younger, she would
inspire his famous sonnet
sequence of the 1580s,
Astrophel and Stella. Her
father, the Earl of Essex, is
said to have planned to
marry his daughter to
Sidney, but he died in 1576.
In England, Sidney
occupied himself with
politics and art. He
defended his father's
administration of Ireland in
a lengthy document. Sidney
was knighted in 1583.

In 1583, he married Frances,

teenage daughter of Sir Francis
Walsingham. The next year, he
met Giordano Bruno Sidney was a
keenly militant Protestant. He had
persuaded John Casimir to
consider proposals for a united
Protestant effort against the
Roman Catholic Church and
Spain. In 1585, his enthusiasm for
the Protestant struggle was given
a free rein when he was appointed
governor of Flushing in the
Netherlands. Later that year, he
joined Sir John Norris in the
Battle of Zutphen. During the
siege, he was shot in the thigh and
died twenty-six days later.
Sidney's body was returned to
London and interred in St. Paul's
Cathedral on 16 February 1587.

Already during his own

lifetime, but even more after
his death, he had become for
many English people the
very epitome of a courtier:
learned and politic, but at
the same time generous,
brave, and impulsive. Never
more than a marginal figure
in the politics of his time, he
was memorialized as the
flower of English manhood
in Edmund Spenser's
Astrophel, one of the
greatest English
Renaissance elegies. In
Zutphen, the Netherlands a
street has been named after
Sir Philip.

Works

Astrophel and Stella The first of the

famous English sonnet sequences,
Astrophil and Stella was probably
composed in the early 1580s. The sonnets
were well-circulated in manuscript before
the first (apparently pirated) edition was
printed in 1591; only in 1598 did an
authorised edition reach the press. The
sequence was a watershed in English
Renaissance poetry. In it, Sidney partially
nativised the key features of his Italian
model, Petrarch: variation of emotion from
poem to poem, with the attendant sense of
an ongoing, but partly obscure, narrative;
the philosophical trappings; the musings on
the act of poetic creation itself. His
experiments with rhyme scheme were no
less notable; they served to free the English
sonnet from the strict rhyming
requirements of the Italian form

The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia

The Arcadia, by far Sidney's most
ambitious work, was as significant in
its own way as his sonnets. This book is
delicated to Mary Sidney, his sister.
The work is a romance that combines
pastoral elements with a mood derived
from the Hellenistic model of
Heliodorus. In the work, that is, a
highly idealized version of the
shepherd's life adjoins (not always
naturally) with stories of jousts,
political treachery, kidnappings, battles,
and rapes. As published in the sixteenth
century, the narrative follows the Greek
model: stories are nested within each
other, and different story-lines are
intertwined.

The work enjoyed great popularity for

more than a century after its publication.
William Shakespeare borrowed from it for
the Gloucester subplot of King Lear; parts
of it were also dramatized by John Day
and James Shirley. According to a widelytold story, King Charles I quoted lines
from the book as he mounted the scaffold
to be executed; Samuel Richardson named
the heroine of his first novel after Sidney's
Pamela. Arcadia exists in two significantly
different versions. Sidney wrote an early
version during a stay at Mary Herbert's
house; this version is narrated in a
straightforward, sequential manner. Later,
Sidney began to revise the work on a more
ambitious plan. He completed most of the
first three books, but the project was
unfinished at the time of his death. After a
publication of the first three books (1590)
sparked interest, the extant version was
fleshed out with material from the first
version (1593).

'Defense of Poetry" (also known as

A Defence of Poesie) Sidney
wrote the Defence before 1583. It is
generally believed that he was at
least partly motivated by Stephen
Gosson, a former playwright who
dedicated his attack on the English
stage, The School of Abuse, to
Sidney in 1579, but Sidney
primarily addresses more general
objections to poetry, such as those
of Plato. In his essay, Sidney
integrates a number of classical and
Italian precepts on fiction. The
essence of his defense is that
poetry, by combining the liveliness
of history with the ethical focus of
philosophy, is more effective than
either history or philosophy in
rousing its readers to virtue. The
work also offers important
comments on Edmund Spenser and
the Elizabethan stage.

James Shirley

James Shirley (or Sherley)

(September 1596 October 1666)
was an English dramatist.
He belonged to the great period of
English dramatic literature, but, in
Lamb's words, he "claims a place
among the worthies of this period,
not so much for any transcendent
genius in himself, as that he was the
last of a great race, all of whom
spoke nearly the same language
and had a set of moral feelings and
notions in common." His career of
play writing extended from 1625 to
the suppression of stage plays by
Parliament in 1642.

George Chapman

George Chapman (c. 1559 12

May 1634) was an English
dramatist, translator, and poet. He
was a classical scholar, and his
work shows the influence of
Stoicism. Chapman has been
identified as the Rival Poet of
Shakespeare's Sonnets by William
Minto, and as an anticipator of the
Metaphysical Poets. Chapman is
best remembered for his
translations of Homer's Iliad,
Odyssey, and
Batrachomyomachia.

John Fletcher

John Fletcher (1579 1625) was a

Jacobean playwright. Following
William Shakespeare as house
playwright for the King's Men, he was
among the most prolific and influential
dramatists of his day; both during his
lifetime and in the early Restoration,
his fame rivaled Shakespeare's.
Though his reputation has been
eclipsed since, Fletcher remains an
important transitional figure between
the Elizabethan popular tradition and
the popular drama of the Restoration.

Thomas Middleton

Thomas Middleton (18 April 1580

1627) was an English Jacobean
playwright and poet. Middleton
stands with John Fletcher and Ben
Jonson as among the most
successful and prolific of
playwrights who wrote their best
plays during the Jacobean period.
He was one of the few
Renaissance dramatists to
achieve equal success in comedy
and tragedy. Also a prolific writer
of masques and pageants, he
remains one of the most
noteworthy and distinctive of
Jacobean dramatists.