William Shakespeare s Doctor Faustus And Tamburlaine

Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine were both written in the late fifteen hundreds, in the midst of a paradigm shift between medieval and renaissance thinking. The period of uncertainty that provides the context to the two texts ensures that both plays have a mixture of medieval morality play conventions and modern renaissance features. Both Marlowe’s central protagonists are Renaissance heroes, one in Christian setting and one in Muslim setting. The instability of the time is reflected in Marlowe’s heroes who raise important questions about man’s place in Elizabethan society and the world, which naturally opens up questions of the Religious doctrines that held society together. Helen Hackett focuses on a description of the ‘archetypal Renaissance man’ being: ‘as described by the fifteenth-century Florentine neo-Platonist Pico della Mirandola: A certain sacred striving should seize the soul so that, not content with the indifferent and middling, we may pant after the highest and so (for we can if we want to) force our way up to it with all our might. Let us despise the terrestrial, be unafraid of the heavenly, and then, neglecting the things of the world, fly towards that court beyond the world nearest to God the most high. ’ Marlowe’s Faustus and Tamburlaine’s characters fit with this description, they both take on a ‘sacred striving’. The prologue to Doctor Faustus is rife with language of swelling, ‘excelling’ and ‘mount(ing)’ and theShow MoreRelatedThe Life and Works of Christopher Marlowe Essay1316 Words   |  6 Pagesmineral, corrode the heart† (O’Neill 17). William Hazlitt writes this critique on Christopher Marlowe as a playwright in his Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth and honestly he could not have said it any better. Christopher Marlowe was a brilliant man who excelled in school. He was a gifted individual and with the help of schooling became a famous playwright in the 16th century. He was roughly two months older than William Shakespeare and has been identified as the most importantRead MoreEssay on Did William Shakespeare Write the Plays and Sonnets or Not?1488 Words   |  6 PagesIt disputes whe ther Shakespeare himself wrote the plays and sonnets or if it was someone else writing under a pseudonym. There are countless theories of who the writer might actually be but the main suspects are Shakespeare himself, Edward de Vere, Sir Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, William Stanley, Roger Manners, Sir Walter Raleigh and Mary Sidney Herbert (Pressley). The first to be presumed the writer is Shakespeare himself. Many theorists believe it wasn’t Shakespeare due to the fact that