Interesting book on the life and times of Marlowe

books:

	• The World of Christopher Marlowe David Riggs Henry Holt and Co., 2005 - 432 pages average customer review:based on 8 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

great for english lit...but skim some

I agree with the reader who says the book is often abstruse. The chapter on double-agenting had my eyes rolling and I was constantly looking back pages to see who's who. Add to this the fact that these Brits (or their elite) can be referred to by a seemingly endless list of tiles each (and, then, their names, as well) and that the minor functionaries and offices of government aren't on everyone's tongue and one often feels mired in the mud. I think this could have been alleviated with chapter introductions or summaries or just a more prudent handling of the proper nouns. Anyway, when I get to that point in any book, I just try to make sure I'm getting the main point and head thru at a trot.... Life is short, and there's so much to read!

What I got that was positive from this book, and it was very positive indeed, was a sense of M's contribution to blank verse and the development of Elizabethan drama. I went to my shelves to look at some earlier stuff, and yeppir, there's Marlowe at the dividing line. This certainly gave me a whole new appreciation of him as a figure in English literature and has got me back to sampling some other Elizabethan writing, including his ,comparing and contrasting, which is a nice trip. Very interesting to see how these boy's classical education trained them to snap off large amounts of magnificent English poetry. (The last British governor of Chad remarked in the NYRB that he had zero training when assigned, but the underlying assumption of his superiors was that if you translate Latin poetry to Greek poetry ad lib you could surely run a country! I suppose history has dimmed that conceit, but as a liberal artser, I liked it anyway.)

The historical/political background was already well known to me and as far as who might have or could have done this or that, I like my speculation with the facts.

(The book is unfortunatly cheaply produced, though not more so than many, and and the illustrations are really muddy. A book can be handsomely done for $30. Check out, for instance, Who Murdered Chaucer - St. Martin's Press - for a sad contrast in book production, also a $30 dollar item.)

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A Remarkable Book

Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan poet and playwright, was one of the most talented members of his generation. He helped pioneer the use of blank verse in dramatic poetry and used it to produce five masterpieces while William Shakespeare--who was only two months younger than Marlowe--was still finding his dramatic footing. Who can say how great he might have become if he were not cut down (possibly on orders of the Queen, herself) at the age of 29.

As a man, Marlowe was the "unShakespeare". Where Shakespeare was a prudent man who invested his money wisely and was careful not to offend authority, Marlowe was a risk-taker both in his personal life and in his plays. In an age where not toeing the official ine was punishable by death, Marlowe never met a line he was not tempted to cross. If this is what got him killed, it also makes him a fascinating person to read about.

David Riggs weaves Marlowe's personal tragedy into an exciting volume that I found as hard to put down as any thriller. It is a book I can heartily recomend.

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Interesting book on the life and times of Marlowe

I enjoyed the history in this book, and not just about Marlowe's own past. Unlike other biographies I have read, this one sometimes gets off of Marlowe and looks at other factors which influence him, either directly or indirectly, and how they might have had an effect on his work as well as his life, right up to the end!

Marlowe was not a spy

Apart from some very interesting and thoughtfull exegesis of Marlowe's works, it's no surprise that readers find David Riggs's account of the poet's life "abstruse" and confusing. This is unfortunate, because of all the poets of the English Literary Renaissance, we have more real information about Marlowe than any other. Yet, sadly, a story which should be as clear as glass in its implications for all the writers of the time has been so successfully muddled, first, purposely, by the government that brought him down and then by later biographers who, for some unknown reason, have consistently chosen to believe the government's disinformation campaign rather than their own common sense. Most at fault in this is Charles Nicholl, who, while providing the most important information on Marlowe's life and death in his book The Reckoning (1992), also ensured its misinterpretation due to his refusal to see (or at least to convey) the truth of what his own research so clearly revealed.

Despite Nicholl's maunderings on how easily poets can become spies--a piece of nonsense that Riggs, who should know better, cheerfully supports--the fact is that there isn't a scintilla of evidence that Christopher Marlowe (or any great poet then or later) was ever a government spy. Was spying the only possible "service to her Majesty" that a budding poet might perform? Is there any objective evidence that Marlowe was in Flushing for purposes of spying? And why, when it comes down to a "he said--she said" on the subject of Marlowe's allegience, do the biographers choose to believe, not the great freethinking poet whose words have lived for centuries, but the reprehensible turncoat who was fingering him? Riggs may choose to throw in a question mark here and there, but the result is a colossal crazy quilt made up of scraps of truth, old lies, and centuries of misinterpretation, such that no ordinary reader could possibly sort out without help.

Despite the obfuscation, the fact remains: Marlowe's only proven relationship with the three government agents who saw to his removal was as the victim of an elaborate sting, one conjured up by Robert Cecil as his entry into his father's world of Machiavellian politics . To see this, all that's needed is to know a little about history (both the history of the period and History in general), read the four plays that we can be certain were actually written by Marlowe, and consider what governments have always done to writers who were driven to tell it like it is, writers like Ovid, Cicero, Voltaire, Solzinitzen, Vaclav Hamel. The fundamental truth about Marlowe was expressed shortly after his death by his fellow writer, Tom Nashe: "His life he contemned in comparison of the liberty of free speech"--a simple truth simply told by someone who did know what he was talking about.

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Scholarly Read about Marlowe's Era

This is a scholarly book about the life and times of playwright Christopher Marlowe. It is not an entertaining easy read. I read about 20% of the book before giving up. It's erudite, but still comprehensible. It just wasn't that interesting to me.

In the first 82 pages, I found maybe two pages worth of information about Marlowe as a person. In contrast, there are maybe 10 pages about the town he was born in and at least 40 pages about the educational system he grew up with.

I would not recommend this book for those who read biographies for just for fun. Nor would I recommend it for someone who wants to read about famous gay people. The author concludes that he probably had little contact with women, so he was either celibate or had homosexual sex.

I've read and enjoyed detailed biographies like this, when I have had a greater interest in the culture and times. For those readers, this is probably a great book.

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reviews: page 1, 2

The definitive biography: a masterly account of Marlowe's work and life and the world in which he lived

Shakespeare's contemporary, Christopher Marlowe revolutionized English drama and poetry, transforming the Elizabethan stage into a place of astonishing creativity. The outline of Marlowe's life, work, and violent death are known, but few of the details that explain why his writing and ideas made him such a provocateur in the Elizabethan era have been available until now. In this absorbing consideration of Marlowe and his times, David Riggs presents Marlowe as the language's first poetic dramatist whose desires proved his undoing.

In an age of tremendous cultural change in Europe when Cervantes wrote the first novel and Copernicus demonstrated a world subservient to other nonreligious forces, Catholics and Protestants battled for control of England and Elizabeth's crown was anything but secure. Into this whirlwind of change stepped Marlowe espousing sexual freedom and atheism. His beliefs proved too dangerous to those in power and he was condemned as a spy and later murdered. Riggs's exhaustive research digs deeply into the mystery of how and why Marlowe was killed.

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