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CONCLUSION

The Renaissance was the name of a many-sided but yet

discovered movement of the fresh sources of art: new experiences,

new subjects, new approach, new forms of art etc. One of the main

aspects of the new learning was, as pointed out earlier, freedom

from tutelage of the ancients and arbitrary authority. It came to

mean hope and self-reliance, the motive force of knowledge and

power, and of the discovery of man and the world. The Renaissance

obviously affected the plays of Christopher Marlowe.

Christopher Marlowe (1564-93), predecessor of Shakespeare

and one of the ‘University Wits’, was an enlightened English

dramatist and poet, who established himself first as a master of

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blank verse, a creative form of dramatic expression. His

biographical sketch; his literary achievements; and unique dramatic

style and technique; containing relevant facts and impressive

information about the Renaissance period are presented in the

foregoing chapters of this thesis.

It contains studies on the valuable elements of the period

right from 14th

to 16th

century, especially Renaissance spirits

reflected in the different plays of Christopher Marlowe. Christopher

Marlowe’s original works were the two parts of Tamburlaine the

Great (1587); Doctor Faustus (1588); The Jew of Malta (1590);

and Edward the Second (1592).

The period of Marlowe’s dramatic activity comprises six

brief years, from 1587 to 1593. Yet during those six years he wrote

his splendid plays – all reflecting his essential spirit and nature, all

full of passions. Each drama centers round some overmastering

passion – wild and intemperate passion that grows and develops. He

created genuine blank verse and firmly established it as the most

appropriate medium of poetic drama. The lust for empire, the lust

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for lucre, the lust for knowledge and the lust for beauty and passion

– these form the background as well as the mainspring of his plays.

A master-idealist Marlowe is one of the foremost

representative writers of Elizabethan artistic movement who lived

for his art. Marlowe is to be remembered and valued not as a mere

impulse giver and path-finder who paved the way for the typical

English tragedy; and not merely as the wielder of blank verse as a

noble poetic instrument, but also as a master of the ‘mighty line’.

Marlowe blazed a new trial both in thought and technique –

in matter as well as manner, and in its footsteps a new perfection

treads. His familiar domain was not of men’s manners and habits,

and customs and conventions. But his concern was with needs and

necessities of human souls. Not man’s relation to man but man’s

relation to God and to the universe was the theme dear to Marlowe.

The element that is eternal in man, and the spirit that is significant

of man who have the potency of arraying themselves against the

universe if necessary, were the sole concerns of Marlowe as a

playwright.

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The following three characteristics of Marlowe’s works are

the most striking ones viz.: its pictorial quality, its ecstatic quality

and its vitalizing energy. His pictorial quality is not mere

visualizing of a dreamer’s fancy; it shows the inspiration of that

spirit of adventure which characterized the Renaissance.

Tamburlaine’s passion for conquest is similar to the passion of the

explorers and adventurers like Drake and Hawkins.

Marlowe, at first raised the subject matter of his plays to a

higher level by providing heroic subjects that readily appealed to

the imagination of the audience. For instance, we find in Marlowe’s

plays that Tamburlaine is great conqueror, that Faustus is a great

seeker of knowledge and power, that Barabas has the strongest lust

for unlimited wealth and that Edward II has great nobility mingled

with worthlessness. The insatiable spirit of adventure, the master

passions of love and hate, ideas of beauty, the greatness and

littleness of human life – these were Marlowe’s subjects. By using

his brilliant poetic imagination and passionate emotions he glorified

and vitalized and subject matter of his dramas.

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Moreover, Marlowe, by his high poetic artistry and genius,

made it respond to every note in the scale of human passion, and

gave it such naturalness, such ethereal beauty and suppleness, that it

quickly established itself as the most suitable metre for English

poetic drama.

The ecstatic quality of Marlowe’s poetry reveals his easily

excitable moods which are moved to exuberant expression by

certain appeals to the imagination such as the appeal to beauty.

Marlowe, the wistful visionary who always followed the trial of

adventure in life as well as in literature, lived in a self-wrought

world of beauty and wonder. The vitalizing energy of Marlowe’s

poetry is evident in all his four great tragedies.

It is this pervading energy in these plays that forms many an

absurdity and endows them with compelling beauty and elevating

power. Not satisfied with vague descriptions, Marlowe often

actualizes his theme as in the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins in

Doctor Faustus. Such a thing is native to Marlowe’s genius, and is

the outflowing of virile and vital imagination. It is this vitalizing

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energy that imparts to the young poets’ eloquence a vibrant music

that compels the reader’s admiration.

So, the ecstatic quality of Marlowe’s works finds its best

illustration in Faustus’s address to Helen: “Was this the face that

launched a thousand ships?” Thus, the ecstatic note is found in

Tamburlaine the Great and even in The Jew of Malta. It was his

vitalizing energy that redeemed Tamburlaine the Great from

absurdity. The same vitalizing energy lifted his Doctor Faustus to a

high level. This is seen in his characterization. Apart from that, he

used the dramatic blank verse – by infusing variety, vigour and

spontaneous flow and cadence. His successive dramas were

wonderful and almost overwhelming embodiments of the spirit of

Renaissance. All the four plays from his pen were indeed

exemplary of the tragic art in dramatic poetry.

Actually, the plays of Marlowe are so full of poetry that

while culling illustrative extracts, it is difficult to decide what to

leave out and what to include. Poetry transforms material reality of

things into a vision. He was undeniably a poet, but a glance at his

output in poetry will convince anyone that if his fame were to

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depend solely on it, he would have been counted a minor figure

among Elizabethan giants.

Marlowe took his poetic genius into the realm of drama and

infused a new life to drama. Substantial evidence can be brought

forward to show that he frittered away his gift of poetry by

‘straying’ away into drama. To his censure, it has been said that he

becomes unmindful of the dramatic situation and let himself go

when poetic conceits fire his imagination.

In Tamburlaine, Tamburlaine speaks high poetry of

unquenchable aspirations in the most melodious responding verses;

and he gives clean utterance in poetry to express Marlowe’s love of

the impossible power and glory. So also all the dramas had plenty

of descriptive passages and declamatory verses which clearly

indicate the poetic genius and excellence of Marlowe. When

Edward II is asked to surrender his crown we feel the high strain of

poetic emotion of the abdicating king who feels the acutest pain of

resigning the crown:

But stay a while, let me be King till night,

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That I may gaze upon this glittering crown;

So shall my eyes receive their last content,

My head, the latest honour due to it,1

So, the metaphorical fusion of the idea of Marlowe is quite unique.

The style of the verse is the poetic counterpart in unrealized

intention of dramatic action which is often no more than ‘a good

idea for a play’. One of the most perceptive things in Marlowe’s

writing is the dramatic perception derived from a poetic body.

In Kent’s soliloquies, there is the presentation of the usual

varieties of rhetorical embellishment and inflation:

Rain showers of vengeance on my cursed head,

Thou God, to whom in justice it belongs

To punish this unnatural revolt. 2

Marlowe made momentous and revolutionary contribution to

English drama:

i. He created genuine blank verse, and

most appropriate medium of poetic drama.

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ii. He founded English Romantic tragedy.

iii. He wrote the first great English history play.

And also, at the same time the main defects of his plays are:

imperfect characters of women, want of humour, lack of patriotism,

and gift of individuality etc. It is true that Marlowe could contribute

almost nothing to the genuinely comic side of the drama, nor to the

grace and loveliness of prose dialogue. But he gave strength, force

and vigour to the drama which once for all turned its career for both

greatness and stability. He lifted the drama into the sphere of high

literature. The English stage in his time was in great need of

intensity. Grace, sentiment, wit and fancy had been communicated

to the English drama by various talents of the age – communicated

with reckless and very often ridiculous excess, But Marlowe can

make a drama as a whole a living, pulsating expression of life. The

wits of the age, even some of his close collaborators might mock at

his ‘spacious volubility of a drumming decasyllable’ or at his

‘bragging blank verse’; serious, critical-minded dramatic talents

might find fault with his extravagant one man show, but all the

same they all had to fall in line with him to give their own

productions life and vigour.

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Character of women: Marlowe had little aptitude for

delineating women. In spite of these shortcomings, he possessed a

supreme quality which enabled him to lift drama into the sphere of

high literature. He was a great poet, a lyrical writer who carried

with his own unique conception of man and life. Marlowe’s pre-

occupation with the overmastering central character, who is always

a male, gives no scope of introduce women. Perhaps there was

something in his temperament which made him unable to study

women. The gentle grace, feminine loveliness, and the warmth of

devoted love, the softness and charm of womanly care-all these

seem to lie beyond the range of Marlowe’s limited comprehension.

Marlowe’s Zenocrate in Tamburlaine plays a shadowy part;

her beauty is celebrated by the mighty Scythian but we have no

acquaintance with her personality. So also in The Jew of Malta

Abigail remains always in the background. Only Isabella in Edward

II is something of a woman; but her womanliness is less prominent

than her part in inflicting the tragic death of her husband. Helen in

Doctor Faustus appears only as a vision. The poetry in which the

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magician turns to her is noble and sublime but there is no touch of

her character.

Humour: Marlowe’s plays are too serious; there is no comic

relief as there is even in the most serious of Shakespeare’s plays.

The comic scenes in Doctor Faustus are so inapt and incongruous

with the tragic somberness of the main theme that they shock the

sense of artistic propriety of even a sympathetic critic of Marlowe

like Wynne who is forced to remark: “Marlowe must be blamed for

the utter in cogently of so many scenes with high tragedy. The

harmony which rules the construction of Tamburlaine, giving it a

lofty coherence and consistency, is lamentably absent from Doctor

Faustus.” 3

Patriotism: Though Tamburlaine and to some extent Doctor

Faustus with their passionate declaiming sweltered the English

heart with dreams of distant conquests, illimitable power and

mastery of the world, it is remarkable to note that in none of them,

not even in the chronicle play in Edward II, Marlowe breathes any

spirit of national patriotism. Of course, there is nothing of the spirit

of the patriotism. The distinction of Marlowe’s dramatic art is the

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depiction of the conflict in the tragic hero. There is for instance, on

the eve of signing the contract with the devil, Faustus has an

internal conflict which has been externalized by Marlowe by the

medieval morality device of promptings of the Good Angel and

Evil Angel.

Gift of individuality: Marlowe was the founder of genuine

romantic tragedy, as regards both plot and character. He infused 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. It depicts that one character dominates throughout in

Marlowe’s plays. Each of the three main tragedies of Marlowe

Tamburlaine the Great, Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta and

to a great extent his chronicle play of Edward II may be spoken of

as a one-man show. The central character, the hero so much

dominates the play from beginning to end that his towering

personality overshadows everything. “With Marlowe we are in the

presence of a distinctly passionate but unbalanced genius, a man

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lacking the serenity and the calm-eyed power which gave to

Shakespeare a large part of his greatness.”

A necessary effect of this quality is that the other characters

are vividly drawn and some of them tend to be dwarfed; and that as

the masculine elements predominates the feminine characters

become mere foils to it. The ardour and passion which inspire

Marlowe’s play partly account for the absence of true humour.

Marlowe was a pioneer in those ages of experiment. It is a credit

that he gave a superb individuality to his characters – the heroes of

his tragedies. In fact, Marlowe was too much under the influence of

the Renaissance conception of greatness. On this point we can do

nothing better than quote at some length from the illuminating

observation of A. Nicoll: “we may note the influence of

Machiavelli …… Most heard of him by report, and took him as a

symbol of all that was aesthetically, immoral and corrupt. His

Prince is merely a summing up of regular Renaissance ideals of

conduct; it is the culmination of that individualism which marks off

the newly awakened Europe from the anonymity and communal

ideals of the Middle Ages. Machiavelli had made a god of Virtue,

that quality in man which drives him to find free and full expression

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of his own thought and emotions. It is this Virtue on which

Marlowe has seized, not without some tremors of conscience in

spite of his liberated mind. So he presents his heroes, Tamburlaine,

Doctor Faustus, and Barabas, over-riding the ordinary moral codes

of their times in order to fine the complete realization of their

particular ideals; in The Jew of Malta he brings Machiavelli

forward in person to speak the prologue to his tragedy.”4 One

important result of this insistence upon Virtue must be noted. Call it

what we please, Virtue, ambition will tend to overlook class, and

accordingly the dramas of Marlowe break away slightly from the

more ancient medieval plan. For the Middle Ages tragedy was a

thing of princes only; for Marlowe it was a thing of individual

heroes. Thus his Tamburlaine, king though he may be by the end of

the drama, is born a simple man. The Jew is but a Mediterranean

money-lender, and Faustus an ordinary German doctor and

alchemist. The medieval conception of the royalty of tragedy is here

supplanted by the Renaissance ideal of individual worth. This is one

of Marlowe’s most outstanding contributions to the development of

English tragedy.

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Style: It was Marlowe and no other dramatists who effected a

magic transfiguration of dramatic matter and dramatic metre;

moulded a new type of heroic and tragic character, designed

tragedies on a magnificent scale and elevated them to heights as yet

un-apprehended in his days, made the instrument of language

produce rolling thunders and whispering sighs, and draped his plays

in the purple robes of his imperial imagination.

Indubitably born a poet, he was the proud possessor of a

magnificent and matchless poetic force. He is an admirable painter

of the human passion. Really he is a man of powerful intellect and

fertile imagination, of indomitable courage and invincible

confidence, a poet of wonderful vision and voice, of peerless beauty

and lustrous intensity, and a supreme master of his own gifted mind

and of golden thought and silver speech.

One the aesthetic side, love of physical beauty mentioned

above goes in him hand in hand with love of the beauty of

harmony; the high astounding terms of his blank verse, the thrills

and echoes of his phrases, the resounding roll of his declamations,

the surfeit of mythological allusions – all these run into excess; but

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the excesses only point to the essential ambition of reacting beyond

the narrow and the limited into the infinity of achievement, which is

the noblest gift of Renaissance. The writings of Marlowe are the

most prominent embodiments of the spirit of the Renaissance.

Mode of language: The grand, monumental style of the

speeches, with their lyricism and their strong appeal to the

emotions, has found its counterpart in the stage. For instance, the

last scene of the second part of Tamburlaine is a death-bed scene, at

the end of which the protagonist himself dies. In its construction

this scene again illustrates Marlowe’s development of a

‘monumental’ style of presentation, a style which no longer leaves

the set speech in a vacuum. The few critics consider the style and

observe that Marlowe is a master of metaphor. His language style is

enthusiastic commendation. More recent criticism has been more

attentive to the variety of Marlowe’s language in the plays;

especially in Doctor Faustus, the Helen speech, as Harry Levin

notes, stands out from ‘the pithy prose, sharp dialectic, nervous

soliloquies and rhythmic variations of Marlowe’s maturing style’.5

The language of the play is at times reminiscent of Tamburlaine the

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Great, but as M.C. Bradbrook followed by many others – points

out, ‘it can also be more relaxed and colloquial’.6

In the final soliloquy, antithesis seems to be ‘a mere

rhetorical trick’ but is overlaid with reality’. By these means

Wolfgang Clemen considers that Marlowe created a new dramatic

language for the expression of spiritual conflict. 7

If we examine again, the series of important speeches at the

end of Part I of Tamburlaine solely from the point of view of the

language they employ, we cannot avoid the conclusion that here, as

in other episodes, Marlowe’s starting-point was the epic style.

However, he always succeeded in combining these forms of

expression with a dramatic setting. Indeed he created for himself a

dramatic style of presentation which was capable of absorbing a

very large proportion epic language. 8

There are six chapters in the thesis. The following is the

summary contents of these chapters.

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In Chapter I, I have dealt with how the knowledge places in

one’s hands the key to power, desires, ambitions and aspirations

and how in their fulfilment one strays from the path of

righteousness. There is the main social-background of Marlowe’s

dramas.

Chapter II depicts the Renaissance essentially as an

intellectual awakening. It was an effort of the human individual to

rise above the rigidity and narrowness of feudalism and Churchism

and find an expression of his mind and heart in various ways. For

example, the Renaissance spirit stood against self-control and

asceticism on the one hand; it expired after freedom, humanism,

beauty, versatility and such other things which granted the human

soul its utmost scope of expression on the other hand. As a result of

this new spirit of learning and thinking, God went into the

background while man came to the forefront. And also other main

characteristics of Renaissance can be recounted as:

i) Discovery.

ii) Expedition.

iii) Concurrence of the Renaissance with Reformation.

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iv) Fine Arts besides poetry, etc.

Chapter III depicts undoubtedly, the fact that all the heroes of

Marlowe are brave, boastful, ambitious, adventurous, rebellious and

thoughtful. The analytical view eventually emerged to explain

Tamburlaine’s ambivalent character. The first view stresses that

Tamburlaine is a brutal and un-Christian tyrant whose power and

ambition is reprehensible. “Tamburlaine’s rise to power is usually

at the expense of a series of legitimate rulers. Might is shown to

triumph over right.” The second main analytical view stresses,

instead, that Tamburlaine’s glory and majesty inspire the audience

to recognize the highest limits of human achievement. There is

certainly some evidence to support a reading of Tamburlaine as a

reaffirmation of its author’s supposed atheism, since almost

invariably the calls for divine intervention seem to be ignored by a

heaven indifferent to human plight. Therefore, those who have

argued that the play works within a moral and religious framework

can point to the blasphemy of burning the Moslem holy books as

evidence that Tamburlaine is punished, the sudden sickness that

finally lays him low acting as Mahomet’s revenge. For instance, in

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Tamburlaine there are elements of cruelty, tyranny, pride, atheism,

defiance to the authorities on earth as well as in heaven. In order to

fulfil his mission, Tamburlaine goes out into the world, marches

against Persia, wins over the military general of Persia, then

proceeds against all the Kingdoms of East, makes captive of the

Kings and humiliated them like a beast.

Tamburlaine’s passion for world conquest by using his

supreme military power is as strong as his passion for Zenocrate

whom he marries. These two tempestuous passions which were the

products of the Renaissance are vividly dealt with in this chapter.

Chapter IV deals with Renaissance man’s unlimited thirst for

knowledge and power, wealth, endless sensuous pleasures, atheism

and revolt against conventional religion and morality. For acquiring

the limitless power, knowledge, wealth and sensuous pleasure, he

can give away his soul to the devil.

There, however, is dealt with the theme of the universal

human conflict between good and evil. A spiritual conflict had, it is

true, been dramatized in the morality plays, for example. In contrast

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to this although to some extent he employs the same technique as

the Moralities. Thus Doctor Faustus develops into a spiritual

tragedy, in the sense that the external circumstances and events of

the play no longer have any intrinsic value but are significant only

in so far as they enable us to understand Faustus’s spiritual state

and to see what goes inside his mind.

Marlowe has depicted Faustus as fully the spirit of

Renaissance, with its rejection of the medieval, God-centered

universe, and its embrace of human possibility. Faustus also

possesses an obtuseness that becomes apparent during his

bargaining sessions with Mephistophilis. Signing a pact with the

devil is the only way to fulfil his ambitions. He imagines piling up

wealth from the four corners of the globe, and gaining access to

every scrap of knowledge about the universe. Desire and frustration

of desire, aspiration and its violent disappointment, here affect the

quality of the language itself, down to the very moment of the

sentence and the choice of diction.

Tamburlaine is ambitious of conquering the world by his

power and action while Faustus is ambitious of conquering the

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elemental forces of Nature and using these forces for his own

benefit or pleasure. Finally, he becomes once again a tragic hero, a

great man undone because his aspirations have butted up against the

law of God.

In chapter V, I have treated the aspect of the great craving for

wealth and indulgence in crimes, and also an intermixture of hatred,

jealousy, greed and criminal madness that sweep through the play,

the Jew of Malta like a storm. It is exemplified by the hurricane of

the craving for wealth rushing through the play The Jew of Malta.

This very play is a dramatic presentation of a ‘Machiavellian’

man, full of greed and cunning, which will stop at nothing to obtain

his ends. But the ambition of Barabas, The Jew of Malta, lacks the

central drive of either Tamburlaine or Faustus, and the play, though

it has some effective moments of grim irony, which is lacking in

any of Marlowe’s other plays. The idea of Barabas as a self-

consciously performed ethnic stereotype is a potentially powerful

one. We can recognize in reading and accentuate in performance

this principle of performed ethnicity that is to say, identification of

Barabas as a villainous character. At the heart of the play, in terms

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of race and ethnicity, the problem of anti-Semiticism remains to be

challenged in some way.

On the one hand, Abigail, daughter of Barabas herself is the

only character in the play that is not ruled by greed, and her

conversion represents an attempt to break free from the limitations

of the narrow and materialistic society which surrounds her. The

attempt is rendered pathetic by the fact that the religious, amongst

whom she hopes to find release, are as mercenary as the outside

world which they pretend to shun. Barabas’s sneer is substantiated

by the behaviour of the two religious caterpillars’. Lastly, Turk,

Moor, Christian and Jew are all as bad as each other, and in these

circumstances a cynical ‘policy’ is to be preferred to a hypocritical

‘profession’ which cloaks greed in a false devotion.

Chapter VI deals with Edward II as a historical play. It is the

matured product of Marlowe’s dramatic genius. This play is not

only the first historical drama in English literature but it also shows

other marks of advance in style and other qualities of dramatic arts.

Edward II is a story of human vulnerability. This historical play

presents the conflict of king with his barons over the issue of his

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friendship with Gaveston; the kings temporary victory over the

barons; the murder of Gaveston; the king’s adopting the Spensers as

his favorites in place of murdered Gaveston; the revolt of Queen

Isabella against her husband; her love-affair with the young

Mortimer; the ultimate defeat of the king by the force of Queen

Isabella and the young Mortimer and brutal murder of the king, etc.

These are all genuine elements of history making the play Edward

II, a historical tragedy.

Edward II is a play which shows close structural affinities

with the chronicle plays, in that it has a stirring plot with a rapid

flow of incident and plenty of variety, while on the other hand it has

points of contact with tragedy in its attempts to bring on heart-

rending scenes filled with passionate utterances, deep pathos, and

high tragic dignity.

In the first half Edward’s role is to a larger extent that of an

active participant in the action. In the second part he comes to the

force much more as a sensitive and suffering soul, and not the least

effective means of creating this impression is the entirely different

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language, much more intense than that of the first part, by which he

is made to reveal himself.

In about the middle of the play Edward’s awakening to

necessity of resisting the Barons and the changes in him from

apathy to activity are indicated by means of a set speech containing

the great row of vengeance that he utters on his knees; so now, after

the reversal of his fortunes, his new role as a passive sufferer is also

inaugurated by means of speeches that are given special

prominence.

I have highlighted in the plays of Marlowe how he dealt with

heroic subjects that had a stirring effect on the imagination. His

heroes were Tamburlaine, a world conqueror; Faustus, a scholar

seeking supreme knowledge; Barabas, dreaming of fabulous wealth

and Edward II, with his mingling of nobility and ignobility,

reaching the heights and touching the depths of human nature.

Thus, his subjects were the boundless spirit of adventure, the

towering passions of love and hate, the ideal of beauty, and the

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nobility and pettiness of human life. Thus, his plays are the vehicles

of the true spirit of Renaissance.

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Reference

1. Hazelton Spencer. Elizabethan Plays (London: Macmillan

and Company Ltd., 1933), p. 133.

2. Wilbur Sanders. The Dramatist and the Received Idea:

Studies in the Plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare (London:

Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 133.

3. Dr. S. Sen. Doctor Faustus: A Critical Evaluation (New

Delhi: Unique Publishers, 2004), p.34.

4. Dr. S. Sen. Doctor Faustus: A Critical Evaluation, p.30.

5. Prof. Renu Bhardwaj, Dr. Rangnath Nandyal.Readings on

British Drama (New Delhi: New Chanab Offset Printers,

2001), p.19.

6. Op. cit., p. 19.

7. Op. cit., p. 19.

8. Wolfgang Clemen. English Tragedy Before Shakespeare: The

Development of Dramatic Speech (London: Methuen & Co.

Ltd., 1961), p. 129.

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_________. Edward II, London: The New Mermaids,

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Albert, Edward. History of English Literature, Calcutta:

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Alexander, Nigel. The Performance of Christopher Marlowe’s

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Armstrong, W.A. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine: The Image and

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Barber, C.L. Creating Elizabethan Tragedy. Chicago;

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1988.

Bawcutt, N.W. Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta.

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University Press, 1978.

Bevington, David & Rasmussen, Eric (eds). Doctor Faustus Revels

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Bloom, Harold. Christopher Marlowe. New York: Chelsea

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Press, 1940.

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Bradbrook, M.C. Themes & Conventions of Elizabethan

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___________. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and the

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_________. “A Discussion of Tamburlaine” In Critics

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Cole, Douglas. Christopher Marlowe and the Renaissance

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____________. Suffering and Evil in the Plays of

Christopher Marlowe. Princeton, N.J.:

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ORIGINAL WRITINGS OF THE PIONEERS:

Erasmus, Desiderius. In Praise of Folly. Large selection from

the treatise included in Renaissance edited

by E.H. Weatherly in Laurel Masterpieces

of World Literature series, pp. 132-169.

Luther, Martin: Reformation Writing of Martin Luther

translated and annotated by Bertram Lee

Woolf (n.p., Lutterworth Press, 1952).

More, Sir Thomas. Utopia English translation by Ralph

Robinson (1566), modern reprint in

Arber’s English Reprint (Constable,

London) n.d.