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.
“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”
*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.
Needless to say, this is a hugely influential play. For a plot summary, check out wikipedia article here .