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In Our Time
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The big ideas which form the intellectual agenda of our age are illuminated by some of the best minds. Melvyn Bragg and three guests investigate the history of ideas and debate their application in modern life. |
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BIOGRAPHY
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| "I'm fascinated by the fact that we live in a time when so many people are doing fantastic work, and thinking in areas which it's not remotely possible for me to keep up with & and these people are prepared to talk about it. They're prepared to come on In Our Time and other programmes on Radio 4 and try and talk to the rest of us ..." |
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CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
Read audience reactions to this edition of In Our Time.
Use our research page to find out more about this subject.
In the prologue to The Jew of Malta Christopher Marlowe has Machiavel say:
"I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.
Birds of the air will tell of murders past!
I am ashamed to hear such fooleries.
Many will talk of title to a crown.
What right had Caesar to the empire?
Might first made kings, and laws were then most sure
When, like the Draco's, they were writ in blood."
By the age of 29 Marlowe was a brilliant scholar, a popular playwright, an international spy, a forger, a homosexual and was accused of atheism. His hugely ambitious characters, like Tamburlaine and Faustus, are often taken to be versions of Marlowe himself, a subversive who also counted religion as a 'childish toy'. By the age of 30 Marlowe was dead.
Was Marlowe assassinated by the Elizabethan state? How subversive was his literary work? And had he lived as long as his contemporary Shakespeare, how would he have compared?
Contributors
Katherine Duncan-Jones, Senior Research Fellow in the English Faculty of Oxford University
Jonathan Bate, Professor of English Literature at the University of Warwick
Emma Smith, Lecturer in English at Oxford University
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