Two playwrights from different periods of theater history will be examined: Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), representing Elizabethan England, and MoliFre (1622-1673), representing the French classical period. We will examine their lives and contributions to the theater of their time.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is probably the greatest dramatist of all time, and yet he owed a self-acknowledged debt to Christopher Marlowe; indeed, some think it was Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, Part I which lead Shakespeare to become a playwright. Tamburlaine continued to "serve as a model for a generation of playwrights: the admixture of titanic, episodic action with classic form, the whole expressed in powerful blank verse" (Burdick, 1974, 63).
Tamburlaine depicts the rise of a young peasant lad to transcendent power by ruthless means which have been used before and since. It typifies the Elizabethan desire for glory and advancement clothed in magnificent language. This youth tortures the Emperor and Empress until they kill themselves and he seizes the throne for himself. "Though not the first tragedy written in blank verse, it was the first written for a public theater, and was certainly a first in importance because Marlowe strained himself to prove that the form could be more effective than rhyme" (Freedley, 1951, 105).
Christopher Marlowe was well trained in classical studies at Cambridge. He is a member of what has come to be called the "university wits," a group of very well educated playwrights who turned their erudition to the public stage. Among them were Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, John Lyly, and Robert Greene. Marlowe stands out among this group as a rebel who, because of his reckless remarks about religion, though not very horrifying to modern ears, were sufficiently unorthodox to attract some animosity from the prevailing government and from some of his friends, especially Robert Greene, who particularly loathed the a...