Doctor Faustus | Author Biography

Born in 1564, the same year as fellow playwright William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe's great dramatic achievements appeared on London's stage a few years before Stratford's favorite son (Shakespeare wrote and worked in Stratford) came to dominate the English stage. In their day, Marlowe's plays marked a highpoint in English drama, particularly because he first successfully introduced blank verse into tragedy. Blank verse is written in poetic stanzas marked by Iambic Pentameter (each line has ten syllables with accents on every second beat); the verse is composed without rhyme. In...

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