Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life
When he died at the age of 29, Christopher Marlowe (1564-93) left behind numerous plays and poems as well as a tangled personal legacy of political and religious intrigue. Marlowe scholar Kuriyama offers a new biography that functions more like a reconstruction of the playwright's persona than a chronicle of his life. She contends that by focusing too much on the documents about events in Marlowe's life, previous biographies have failed to interpret these documents within the political and cultural context. In this more speculative life of Marlowe, Kuriyama provides insightful details into English education, politics, and religion during the Renaissance, but her preoccupation with challenging earlier Marlowe biographies narrows the book's appeal to the small circle of Renaissance and Marlowe scholars. Kuriyama concludes that we know so little about Marlowe from the evidence we have that we must invent our own portrait of him, but her workmanlike prose and scholarly approach does not allow for much invention. Appropriate for academic libraries only. Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PACopyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.