Awards

• Winner of Cowinner of the Roma Gill Prize (Marlowe Society o.

Overview

Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) emerges in most accounts of his life by biographers and critics as a mysterious and sensational action figure, a hapless pawn of circumstance, or a pseudonymous cipher. Constance Brown Kuriyama's new biography reconstructs the eventful life of a radically innovative playwright who flourished briefly and died violently more than four hundred years ago, yet persists in the romantic imagination even today. Many discoveries about Marlowe's life have emerged over the past hundred years. The author here supplements these findings with new material, placing the dramatist and poet more precisely in his historical milieu. Kuriyama interprets Marlowe's acts of violence-inexplicable though they may seem-as logical consequences of the circumstances he faced. Experience and temperament both accounted for the characteristically brash way he moved through the world. The stringent constraints of Elizabethan society, which encouraged intense political and religious conflicts, had a great influence on Marlowe's thinking, while his ambitions were stirred by the period's unprecedented opportunities for talented individuals to rise in society. The documentary evidence assembled by Kuriyama-and made available to readers-allows her to show how Marlowe was able to take advantage of Elizabethan social mobility. In the context of Elizabethan education, society, and culture, Marlowe becomes a fully human, three-dimensional figure.

Full Product Details

9780801476884

Table of Contents

Reviews

<p> Constance Brown Kuriyama's new book on Christopher Marlowe offers a refreshing counter to some of the more speculative and conspiracy-theory oriented works of literary biography on the young playwright. In her methodological introduction she presents a candid and honest overview of the demands and pitfalls of biographical writing and illustrates some of the dangers for Marlowe scholarship of valorizing a documentary-based approach without considering the immediate context of chosen primary materials. . . . Kuriyama's book is clearly presented with chapters structured around successive stages of Marlowe's personal development. . . . as a readable introduction to the playwright's life this book offers students a highly commendable combination of both primary and secondary material. Matthew Woodcock, Sixteenth Century Journal

<p> Constance Brown Kuriyama's new book on Christopher Marlowe offers a refreshing counter to some of the more speculative and conspiracy-theory oriented works of literary biography on the young playwright. In her methodological introduction she presents a candid and honest overview of the demands and pitfalls of biographical writing and illustrates some of the dangers for Marlowe scholarship of valorizing a documentary-based approach without considering the immediate context of chosen primary materials. . . . Kuriyama's book is clearly presented with chapters structured around successive stages of Marlowe's personal development. . . . as a readable introduction to the playwright's life this book offers students a highly commendable combination of both primary and secondary material. -Matthew Woodcock, Sixteenth Century Journal

Author Information

Constance Brown Kuriyama is Professor of English at Texas Tech University. She is the author of Hammer or Anvil: Psychological Patterns in Christopher Marlowe's Plays, coeditor of A Poet and a Filthy Play-maker: New Essays on Christopher Marlowe, and translator and editor of The Intimate Charlie Chaplin.

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