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…
“Nature, that fram'd us of four elements, warring within our breasts for regiment, doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.”
Neighbourhood:
Dramatic Poets, Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Tenderness, Wonder
Edmund Spenser, born about 1552 and dead on 13 January 1599, was the most ambitious English poet of the later Elizabethan age and one of the chief architects of the English literary canon. His achievement rests above all on The Faerie Queene, the vast unfinished romance-epic through which he attempted to give Protestant England a national mythology, a moral education, and a poetic language equal to those of classical…
“The general end therefore of all the book is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”
Neighbourhood:
Elizabethan Poets, Irish Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Tenderness
