Volume 55, Number 1 · January 17, 2008
The Muses' Darling
By Charles Simic
Tamburlaine
a play by Christopher Marlowe, adapted and directed by Michael Kahn, produced by the Shakespeare Theatre Company
at the Harman Center for the Arts, Washington, D.C.,October 30, 2007–January 6, 2008
Edward II
a play by Christopher Marlowe, directed by Gale Edwards, produced by the Shakespeare Theatre Company
at the Harman Center for the Arts, Washington, D.C.,October 27, 2007–January 6, 2008
The most outrageous of the great English dramatic poets, his brilliant theater career and life came to a violent end at the age of twenty-nine. He left seven plays, among them Tamburlaine the Great, Parts I and II, The Jew of Malta, Doctor Faustus, and Edward II, five poems, and extensive translations of Ovid and Lucan. Not a single one of his works survives in manuscript, and only one was published during his lifetime. Christopher Marlowe's contribution to dramatic literature was understood early. He gave English theater a new voice by bringing blank verse with its speech rhythms to the popular stage. He introduced a cast of exotic characters never previously seen: a Scythian warrior who conquers half of Asia, a German scholar who sells his soul to the Devil, a gay English king who falls in love with one of his male courtiers, a Maltese Jew, and an African queen, all of whom must have astounded the spectators with their physical appearance and their foreign ways. Shakespeare, who was two months younger, worked for the same theater company, and knew both his plays and poems, wrote his own great plays after Marlowe's death.
Review, 4157 words
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