Thomas Thorpe
That pure elemental wit, Chris. Marlowe.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
If Shakespeare is the dazzling sun of this mighty period, Marlowe is
certainly the morning star.
Edward Dowden
If Marlowe had lived longer and accomplished the work that clearly
lay before him, he would have stood beside Shakespeare.
Charles Grant
Marlowe's Doctor Faustus was the first work which bore the unmistakable
impress of that tragic power which was to find its highest embodiment
in King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet and Othello.
John Bakeless
What is not apparent to the modern reader, familiar with three
centuries of lyric verse, in which the lessons Marlowe had taught were
applied by Shakespeare, Milton and Keats, and a hundred others, is the
amazing newness and strangeness that Marlowe's contemporaries easily
discerned in his poetry.
top
A.H. Bullen
In all literature there are few figures more attractive, and few more
exalted, than this of the your poet who swept from the English stage
the tatters of barbarism, and habited Tragedy in stately robes; who was
the first to conceived largely, and exhibit souls struggling in the
bonds of circumstance.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Before him
there was no
genuine English blank verse or tragedy. After his arrival, the way was
prepared—the path made straight for Shakespeare.
Of English blank verse, one of the few highest forms of verbal harmony,
or poetic expression, Marlowe was the absolute and divine creator. By
mere dint of original and god-like instinct he discovered and called it
into life; and at his untimely and unhappy death, more lamentable to us
all than any other on record except Shelley's, he left the marvelous
instrument of his invention so nearly perfect that Shakespeare first
and afterwards Milton came to learn of him before they could vary or
improve on it. In the changes rung by them on the keys first tuned by
Marlowe we retrace a remembrance of the touches of his hand; in his own
cadences we catch not a note of any other man's.
Michael Poirer
Marlowe is one of the poets who have most nobly expressed that thirst
for the infinite which haunts the human soul.
William Allen Nelson
In the vastness and intensity of his imagination, the splendid dignity
of his verse, and the dazzling brilliance of his poetry, Marlowe
exhibited the greatest genius that had appeared in the English
as quoted in Wraight and Stern, In Search of Christopher Marlowe,
p. 328
