Marlowe: Complete Plays by Christopher Marlowe (PDF)

Description

Their texts fully restored by recent scholarship, Marlowe’s astonishing works can now be appreciated as originally written. For the first time, this edition boasts the complete plays – including two versions of Doctor Faustus.Blasphemy, perversion, defiance and transgression … in a series of compelling tragedies, Marlowe challenged every authority of heaven and earth. From the proud wrath of Tamburlaine, the tyrant of Asia, to the racked anguish of Edward II, himself in thrall to unspeakable desires; from God’s own Machiavel, the Duke of Guise, to Barabas, the Jew of Malta, curse of Christianity: all are taboo-breakers, to be broken in their turn. And in the tragedy of Doctor Faustus we perhaps read Marlowe’s own: a tale of brilliance and audacity – and of terrible, inexorable punishment.Their texts fully restored by recent scholarship, Marlowe’s astonishing works can now be appreciated as originally written. For the first time, this edition boasts the complete plays – including two versions of Doctor Faustus.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐The only objectionable play (by modern standards) was The Jew of Malta (it was a difficult read for me), but keep in mind the period in which it was written. The rest were all well written and enjoyable.

⭐So this must have come in an addition straight off the presses because this was not consistent with the edition that I had ordered–the punctuation for iambic pentameter is not exactly like the previous edition. The previous edition is what we are using in my british seminar and causes a little problem with pronunication–but if you aren’t reading these plays aloud it should be just fine

⭐I hadn’t read any Marlow previously, although his name kept getting dropped and referenced in other reading that I have done.His works, contemporary with Shakespeare, comprise seven six plays: Dido Queen of Carthage, Tamburlaine the Great, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward the Second, and The Massacre At Paris.Dido, Queen of Carthage, retells Dido’s storyline from the Aeneid. It is loaded with mythological beings and references, and features some intense and gory descriptions of the fall of Troy. In general, I found Marlowe to be creative with his use of violence in his plays, most of which feature quite the body count. Dido ends in classical tragic fashion and several deaths.Tamburlaine, which is divided into two parts, chronicles the life of the Persian conqueror. It drags in places, but contains some excellent use of monologues and some powerful verse.Doctor Faustus is a boldly surreal work with quite a bit of black comedy and some genuinely creepy elements to it, and is Marlowe’s best-known work, and my favorite in the collection.The Jew of Malta plays to all the stereotypes that one might imagine, and delves into some exceptionally nasty murders as the title character’s plots to avenge the loss of his wealth to the local government leads him into a downward spiral of violence.Edward the Second is a classic tragedy and a complex tale of political intrigue between a politically-weak king, his low-born friend, and a circle of influential and powerful barons eager to keep their own grasp on power and influence.And finally, the shortest of the works, The Massacre at Paris, is set among the shifting fortunes of the struggle between Catholics and Huguenots in France.Marlowe’s use of language is good, with moments that are exceptionally good. From my point of view, as someone who has read some Shakespeare, but is not all that familiar with Elizabethan drama, I found the plays a bit uneven in terms of their quality as stories.Reading these works was certainly a worthwhile experience, but for much of the book, I was enjoying the works more for their historical context than for the plays themselves.

⭐Shakespeare is thought to be for the general reader and is undergoing a strong cinematic revival these days…perhaps because as a screenwriter in the public domain, Will doesn’t talk back and works for free.Marlowe, apart from interest in the homoeroticism of his works, is still in the specialist’s domain. But Marlowe in many ways is loads more fun than Shakespeare, although the darkness of his vision is ultimately tiresome.If you like fustian, if you like the sound of the rant, Marlowe is your boy:”Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships /And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?””We’ll lead you to the stately tent of war/To hear the Scythian Tamburlaine/Threatening the world with high astounding terms”Marlowe is probably deliberately caricatured in Shakespeare’s Henry V as Ancient Pistol, the “braggart soldier”:”A foutra for the world, and worldlings base/I speak of Africa and golden joys.”Marlowe’s development was tragically cut short, possibly by political scheming, or possibly by what we’d now call alcoholism. Even less than Wolfang Aamadeus Mozart (who popped off the astonishing Magic Flute opera after a series of works of a genius that did not break outside the frame of the *galante* musical style) had the chance to be Beethoven, Marlowe never had a real chance to grow into the artist that Shakespeare became. We just don’t know, after hundreds of years, whether this was the Earl of Essex’s fault or that of the good old booze.To see the opposing forces between the spirit of Shakespeare and that of Marlowe, it is necessary to read the long series of three early plays of Shakespeare, Henry VI, parts 1 to 3 (these have new titles in the new Oxford Shakespeare.)Shakespeare and Marlowe collaborated in these plays and it seems to me (as a nonspecialist) that Shakespeare’s influenced waxes in the higher numbered plays of the Henry VI series…despite the fact that Wells and Taylor, the editors of the New Oxford Shakespeare, cast doubts on a simple-minded chronological sequence of authorship.As a general reader I can well imagine Marlowe and Shakespeare BOTH coming up with “hung be the heavens with black”, the first speech in Henry VI part one, working in a tavern. And my theory is that the profound ambiguity of the character of King Henry VI, who in a superficial reading is a mad weakling but on a deeper reading (in particular, that of Harold Goddard in 1954) is an almost Taoist king who sees the folly of the Wars of the Roses, can be traced to a collision between Marlowe’s pessimistic proto-Nietzchean view of the world, and Shakespeare’s kinder and gentler humanism.I prefer Shakespeare’s kinder and gentler humanism because it is ultimately, like the Tao, stronger than pessimism. And a reading of Marlowe is relevant to today’s issue of gay rights, for it shows that homoeroticism is not a matter of fauns prancing about in Arcady, innocent of the wickedness of the world of the breeders. It shows that homoeroticism has a deeply violent strain.For example, Marlowe’s play Edward II (about a mediaeval English king who was deposed because of his “favorites”, possibly mediaeval code for “it won’t do to have a homosexual king”) makes no hero of Edward II. Edward II is just as much a tyrant as his father was and his son Edward III “Longshanks” became, and this is made plain in the play’s treatment of his relationship with Isabella. The entire play, one of the worst in Marlowe’s short corpus, is one in which a bunch of nasty people hasten to their doom without benefit of character development.Read Marlowe, therefore, as a more modern man than Shakespeare. There are few enough Will Shakespeares on the streets of modern cities: those that are, are snapped up quickly by the more discriminating sorts of ladies. But the streets and taverns are crowded, today, with the spiritual descendents of Kit Marlowe, Edward II and Faust: young men in despair as a consequence of living in a closed world rather than the green and open world of Shakespeare (a world where forgiveness is possible.)One spirit of the Renaissance was power over nature, but a darker spirit was power over men by men (this was identified by C. S. Lewis.) As a direct consequence, many educated and sophisticated young fellows today live in a world foreclosed of laughter and surprise…a world that their sisters can access, with the result that over the past 20 years, men’s overall situation has been in decline.By not being able to grow past a certain point as does Lear and the always astonishing Hamlet, in Marlowe’s own words, “cut is the branch that might have grown full straight.” Read superficially, Dr Faustus is a simple morality tale: don’t sell yer silly soul to the devil. This misses the self-reflexive character of the end in which the character realizes his own inability to grow beyond a certain point. Self-knowledge is not enough.And note, that contrary to today’s excitements about “identity politics”, the same sort of personality can be found in gay bars and breeder bars. “Identity politics” has managed to obscure in the public mind the fact that quite apart from whether one is gay or straight, the old questions remain. It is of course evil to judge gay people like Dr Laura, and the most pernicious aspect of Dr Laura is the fact that if you’re fool enough to believe her, being gay means you’re damned, and you might as well party on. Marlowe does reveal the inescapability of the question and implies the existence of the green world simply by painting himself into a corner.

⭐These plays must have been reviewed so many times so I won’t add to them.

⭐The book was in good condition

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