Edward II. Marlowe's Plays (Paperback)

~ Christopher Marlowe (Author)

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Product Description

Christopher Marlowe was a 16th century English playwright. He was the leading Elizabethan tragedian before Shakespeare. His works are known for their overreaching protagonists and his use of blank verse. Little is known about Marlowe's life, but there is much speculation about his possibly being a spy, homosexual, a heretic, magician and atheist. Edward the Second is an English history play about the deposition of the homosexual King Edward II by his barons and the Queen of France. The play begins with the recall of his lover, Piers Gaveston, from exile, and ending with his son Edward III's execution of Mortimer Junior for the king's murder

Product Details

• Paperback: 108 pages
• Publisher: Book Jungle (July 4, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1605978191
• ISBN-13: 978-1605978192
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,090,225 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Brawling Genius, September 13, 2008

By	Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Shakespeare has given the world a magnificent set of plausible villains - Iago, Richard III, Lady MacBeth, for instance - as well as a more complex set of morally flawed heroes - Othello, Lear, Coriolanus, Henry V, Hamlet. No one, however, has delivered a judgment of immorality against Shakespeare merely on the premise that to understand a rogue, he must have been one. Perhaps it helps that almost nothing of Shakespeare's personal behavior, virtuous or vicious, has been reported.

Christopher Marlowe was a tempestuous, unstable fellow - a spy and a brawler, who was eventually killed in a tavern brawl. Too little is known, really, to brand him as a rogue, but the signs are clear. In the play Edward II, his best and his closest to Shakespeare in dramatic impact, Marlowe has given us a cast all of whom are morally compromised if not purely evil. Hey, the bad guys whack the bad guys and the audience loves it! Sounds like cable TV! Marlowe understood violence and cruelty at least as well as Shakespeare, and we have no reason to suppose that it wasn't first-hand knowledge. Of Shakespeare's peers, only John Webster had as profound an understanding of "wickedness."

Hollywood, heads up! A film about Marlowe in the process of writing and rehearsing Edward II would be a smash! I'm available to write the screen play.

Meanwhile, readers, if your only experience of Marlowe was Doctor Faustus in high school, I think you'll be surprised at the intensity and word-craft of Edward II.