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Marlowe and the Greeks

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Marlowe_and_the_Greeks_final.doc (106Kb)
Date
2013
Author
Rhodes, Neil
Funder
The British Academy
Grant ID
Keywords
Lucian
Marlowe
Xenephon
PR English literature
PA Classical philology
SDG 16 - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
Metadata
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Abstract
Marlowe's combination of lyric violence with a spirit of irony and scepticism has always seemed somewhat paradoxical, but we may find an explanation for it in his debt to Greek. Greek language learning developed in England from the early 1500s onwards and was particularly strong at Cambridge under Sir John Cheke in the 1540s, when many of the teachers of the future generation of Elizabethan writers were trained. In the case of Marlowe, what Joseph Hall was to label ‘pure iambics’ can be seen to have Greek origins, and the plays in which these are first deployed (the two parts of Tamburlaine) almost certainly take Xenophon's Cyrpopaiedia as one of their models. But the ironic Marlowe is also evident in Tamburlaine, and the model here is not Xenophon but Lucian, whom Gabriel Harvey records as being a vogue author with Cambridge students in 1580, the year that Marlowe matriculated. Lucian also impacts on Doctor Faustus, and this becomes more evident if we read the famous line on Helen of Troy from the Dialogues of the Dead in the context of another passage from ‘The Judgement of the Goddesses’ from Dialogues of the Gods.
Citation
Rhodes , N 2013 , ' Marlowe and the Greeks ' , Renaissance Studies , vol. 27 , no. 2 , pp. 199-218 . https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-4658.2011.00796.x
Publication
Renaissance Studies
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-4658.2011.00796.x
ISSN
0269-1213
Type
Journal article
Rights
This is the author's version of this article, deposited by permission of the publisher. © 2011 The Author. Renaissance Studies © 2011 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Blackwell Publishing Ltd. The definitive version is available from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Collections
  • English Research
  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/10023/2590

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