In the annals of English literature, few figures burn as brightly and briefly as Christopher Marlowe. Born in the same year as William Shakespeare, 1564, Marlowe’s life was a meteoric flash that illuminated the Elizabethan stage before being extinguished in a tavern brawl at the age of twenty-nine. Yet, in those scant three decades, he fundamentally altered the trajectory of English drama, liberating it from the stif…
“O, thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.”
Neighbourhood:
Dramatic Poets, Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Tenderness, Wonder
Alexander Scott, born about 1525 and probably dead about 1584, occupies an intriguing place in the history of Scottish poetry: he is neither as monumental a figure as William Dunbar nor as internationally famous as Robert Burns, yet his surviving work gives him a distinctive and memorable voice among the later Scottish makars. He wrote at a moment when older medieval literary customs were being tested by religious re…
Neighbourhood:
Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Lute-Song Composers, Renaissance Poets, Scottish Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
