ome twelve years before
Shakespeare's great work was written.

All these things are significant, if we are to understand the Elizabethan
drama and the man who brought it to perfection. Shakespeare was not simply
a great genius; he was also a great worker, and he developed in exactly the
same way as did all his fellow craftsmen. And, contrary to the prevalent
opinion, the Elizabethan drama is not a Minerva-like creation, springing
full grown from the head of one man; it is rather an orderly though rapid
development, in which many men bore a part. All our early dramatists are
worthy of study for the part they played in the development of the drama;
but we can here consider only one, the most typical of all, whose best work
is often ranked with that of Shakespeare.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564-1593)

Marlowe is one of the most suggestive figures of the English Renaissance,
and the greatest of Shakespeare's predecessors. The glory of the
Elizabethan drama dates from his _Tamburlaine_ (1587), wherein the whole
restless temper of the age finds expression:

Nature, that framed us of four elements
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:
Our souls--whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres--
Will us to wear ourselves and never rest.
_Tamburlaine_, Pt. I, II, vii.

Life. Marlowe was born in Canterbury, only a few months before Shakespeare.
He was the son of a poor shoemaker, but through the kindness of a patron
was educated at the town grammar school and then at Cambridge. When he came
to London (_c._ 1584), his soul was surging with the ideals of the
Renaissance, which later found expression in Faustus, the scholar longing
for unlimited knowledge and for power to grasp the universe. Unfortunately,
Marlowe had also the unbridled passions which mark the early, or Pagan
Renaissance, as Taine calls it, and the conceit of a young man just
entering the realms of knowledge. He became an actor and lived in a
low-tavern atmosphere of excess and wretchedness. In 1587, when but
twenty-three years old, he produced _Tamburlaine_, which brought him
instant recognition. Thereafter, notwithstanding his wretched life, he
holds steadily to a high literary purpose. Though all his plays abound in
violence