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.
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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
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
