We see that javascript is disabled or not supported by your browser - javascript is needed for important actions on the site. Read more

What's New - Home - Login

Member $avings: $81,581,377.41 | Books Available: 793,738 | Members Online: 222

Swap Used Books - Buy New Books at Great Prices!

How To Swap Books Sign Up Search submenu

PBS Market (New Books)

Gift Buying Guide

Book Browser Advanced Search Books Posted Today Member Book Reviews Award Winning Books NYT Best Sellers Amazon Best Sellers Most Traveled Copies Club Wish List

Discussion Forums Book Lists

Club Lists My Book Lists My Watched Lists Create a List

Blog Donations

School Donation Program In Memory of... Military Donation Program Friends of PBS

Box-O-Books Maps The Eclectic Pen Fun Stuff

20 Questions Sudoku Bookmark Creator

Top 100

Requests Posts Swappers Referrers Reviewers

Pulse of PBS Spread The Word

Invite Friends Bookmarks Facebook Page Facebook App More Ways...

Photo Gallery Recipes Club Tag Cloud Member Testimonials

Help Center submenu

How To Swap Books Browse Help Docs Ask the Librarian PBS Member Icons Live Help

Kiosk

PBS Market (New Books) Go Shopping Buy Credits Buy PBS Money Upgrade Membership Gift Certificates Transfer Credits

Need Help?

Search - Marlowe - The Tragical History Of Doctor Faustus

Marlowe The Tragical History Of Doctor Faustus
Author: Christopher Marlowe

MARLO WE THE TRAGICAL LT H Tj TSTORT OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS Edited by A. H. SLEIGHT, M. A. St Johns College Editor of Modern Languages CAMBRIDGE AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 1928 To E. L. W. PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN CONTENTS INTRODUCTION . . . page vii TEXT .... page i NOTES .... page 47 g The text adopted is Sir A. W. Wards reading of the 1604 Quarto as ... more »given in his Old English Drama Select Plays. Oxford, 1878 with his modernization of the spelling and with his reasoned minimum of emendation and omission. It is here reprinted by permission of his daughter, Mrs A. C. T. Barnes, and the Delegates of the Clarendon Press. INTRODUCTION CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE 1564-1593 was one of the four greater University Wits, his tragically short career as a dramatist concluding some three years after Shakespeares began, and covering seven crowded years, in which he made momentous and revolutionary contributions to English drama, for he gave us genuine blank verse and our first great history play, and founded romantic tragedy noble achievements for one who died at the age of twenty-nine. Marlowe was a rebel and a pioneer. His first gesture as a playwright was to raise the standard of revolt against the convention of writing plays in rhyme and against the clownage of popular comedy. He seized upon blank verse as the ideal medium for drama. Blank verse was introduced into England by the Earl of Surrey, who used it in his translation of the second and fourth books of the Aeneid c. 1540. The first to use it in tragedy was Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, whose Gorboduc 1561 was written in blank verse. These two wrote for a limited public of courtiers and scholars, and their blank verse intended perhaps as a compromise between English and classical metres was wooden and mono tonous. Marlowe popularized the newly-invented instru ment, and, thanks to high poetic artistry and the fine frenzy of real poetic genius, made it respond to every note in the scale of human passion. He gave it such naturalness, such ethereal beauty and suppleness, that it quickly established itself as the perfect metre for English poetic drama. Scorning the jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits, he at first made use of high astounding terms to compensate for the loss of rhyme, and this led him often into bombast the furious vociferation with which Ben Jonson charges him but this was on the whole a passing phase at its best viii INTRODUCTION his verse prophesies Milton, mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies, and attains sublimity. He was the founder of genuine romantic tragedy, as regards both plot and character. Before him, the char acters of plays had too often been mere lifeless puppets Marlowe informed his central characters and the whole of his dialogue with life and passion. He was an admirer of Machiavelli, whose ideal, as understood by that age, was the superman, who, having decided what his goal is to be, presses on to it regardless of scruples of conscience. Such is the hero of both parts of Tamburlaine, who seeks to conquer the world, trampling humanity mercilessly beneath him in his resistless course. Such is Faustus, whose ideal is boundless and lawless knowledge for the sake of universal power such is Barabas, in The Jew of Malta, revelling first in his prodigious wealth and then in the very ecstasy of revenge on those who had deprived him of it such are Mortimer, in Edward the Second, and the Guise, in the Massacre at Paris, both monsters of unscrupulous ambition and resolution. One character dominates the stage throughout in Marlowes plays. The task of the tragedian Edward Alleyn who created the part of Tamburlaine must have been appallingly difficult. A necessary effect of this quality in Marlowe is that the other characters, vividly drawn as some of them are, tend to be dwarfed and that, as the masculine element pre dominates, the feminine characters become mere foils to it...

ISBN-13: 9781406733860
ISBN-10: 1406733865
Publication Date: 3/15/2007
Pages: 80
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Bartlet Press
Book Type: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Back to the Top ↑

Search - Marlowe - The Tragical History Of Doctor Faustus

Loading...