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
Giles Fletcher the Younger, born about 1586 and dead by November 1623, occupies a distinctive, if sometimes underappreciated, place in English Renaissance poetry. He was a poet of the generation after Edmund Spenser and before John Milton: too late to belong wholly to the Elizabethan flowering, too early to participate in the Civil War’s political and religious literary struggles, yet deeply connected to both periods…
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Metaphysical Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Joy
