In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle looks at a common line associated with Helen of Troy
Who said, ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?’ Most people know it was Doctor Faustus. Or rather, Christopher Marlowe, who gives Doctor Faustus these words in his play about the magician who sold his soul to the Devil (or rather to the Devil’s messenger, Mephistopheles):
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ is Christopher Marlowe’s most widely anthologised and best-known poem (he also wrote plays, including The Jew of Malta and Dr Faustus, which would influence Shakespeare’s early plays). A classic of the pastoral tradition of English poetry, ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ deserves closer analysis because it contains so many features of pastoral verse and, in many ways, is the finest embodiment of the genre in English literature.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
1. Christopher Marlowe was a pioneer of the Elizabethan theatre.Â
He influenced Shakespeare, and Shakespeare’s biographer Jonathan Bate has even suggested that Marlowe and Shakespeare became locked in a competition, where each influenced the other. Marlowe was just two months older than Shakespeare: he was born in Canterbury in February 1564, the son of a shoemaker. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (part one of a two-parter) is thought to be one of the first English plays written in blank verse – that is, unrhymed iambic pentameter.