Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) emerges in most accounts of his life by biographers and critics as a mysterious and sensational action figure, a hapless pawn of circumstance, or a pseudonymous cipher. Constance Brown Kuriyama's new biography reconstructs the eventful life of a radically innovative playwright who flourished briefly and died violently more than four hundred years ago, yet persists in the romantic imagination even today. Many discoveries about Marlowe?s life have emerged over the past hundred years. The author here supplements these findings with new material, placing the dramatist and poet more precisely in his historical milieu. Kuriyama interprets Marlowe's acts of violence-inexplicable though they may seem-as logical consequences of the circumstances he faced. Experience and temperament both accounted for the characteristically brash way he moved through the world. The stringent constraints of Elizabethan society, which encouraged intense political and religious conflicts, had a great influence on Marlowe's thinking, while his ambitions were stirred by the period's unprecedented opportunities for talented individuals to rise in society. The documentary evidence assembled by Kuriyama-and made available to readers-allows her to show how Marlowe was able to take advantage of Elizabethan social mobility. In the context of Elizabethan education, society, and culture, Marlowe becomes a fully human, three-dimensional figure.

Publishers Weekly

When he died at the age of 29, Christopher Marlowe (1564-93) left behind numerous plays and poems as well as a tangled personal legacy of political and religious intrigue. Marlowe scholar Kuriyama offers a new biography that functions more like a reconstruction of the playwright's persona than a chronicle of his life. She contends that by focusing too much on the documents about events in Marlowe's life, previous biographies have failed to interpret these documents within the political and cultural context. In this more speculative life of Marlowe, Kuriyama provides insightful details into English education, politics, and religion during the Renaissance, but her preoccupation with challenging earlier Marlowe biographies narrows the book's appeal to the small circle of Renaissance and Marlowe scholars. Kuriyama concludes that we know so little about Marlowe from the evidence we have that we must invent our own portrait of him, but her workmanlike prose and scholarly approach does not allow for much invention. Appropriate for academic libraries only. Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.