Marlowe Lives!
death's a great disguiser home marliad blog
George Peele John Marston Michael Drayton Thomas Thorpe Alfred, Lord Tennyson Edward Dowden
Charles Grant John Bakeless A.H. Bullen Algernon Charles Swinburne Michael Poirer William Allen Nelson
Praise for "the Muses Darling"
George Peele
Unhappy in thine end,
Marley, the Muses Darling, for thy verse
Fit to write passions for the souls below.
John Marston
Kind Kit Marlowe.
Michael Drayton
Neat Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs,
Had in him those brave translunary things that the first poets had.
His raptures were all air and fire,
which made his verses clear.
For that fine madness still he did retain,
which rightly should possess a poet's brain.
top
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 young poet who swept from the English stage the tatters of barbarism, and habited Tragedy in stately robes; who was the first to conceive 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
top