written in England. Marlowe followed them with 'The Tragical History of Dr.
Faustus,' a treatment of the medieval story which two hundred years later
was to serve Goethe for his masterpiece; with 'The Jew of Malta,' which was
to give Shakspere suggestions for 'The Merchant of Venice'; and with
'Edward the Second,' the first really artistic Chronicle History play.
Among the literary adventurers of the age who led wild lives in the London
taverns Marlowe is said to have attained a conspicuous reputation for
violence and irreligion. He was killed in 1593 in a reckless and foolish
brawl, before he had reached the age of thirty.

If Marlowe's life was unworthy, the fault must be laid rather at the door
of circumstances than of his own genuine nature. His plays show him to have
been an ardent idealist and a representative of many of the qualities that
made the greatness of the Renaissance. The Renaissance learning, the
apparently boundless vistas which it had opened to the human spirit, and
the consciousness of his own power, evidently intoxicated Marlowe with a
vast ambition to achieve results which in his youthful inexperience he
could scarcely even picture to himself. His spirit, cramped and outraged by
the impassable limitations of human life and by the conventions of society,
beat recklessly against them with an impatience fruitless but partly grand.
This is the underlying spirit of almost all his plays, struggling in them
for expression. The Prolog to 'Tamburlaine' makes pretentious announcement
that the author will discard the usual buffoonery of the popular stage and
will set a new standard of tragic majesty:


From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits,
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,
We'll lead you to the stately tent of war,
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine