Asfrophil and Stella, Sonnet I

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,

That the dear she might take some pleasure of my pain,

Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,

Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,

I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe:

Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain,

Oft turning others' leaves, to see if thence would flow

Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburned brain.

But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay;

Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows,

And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my way.

Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,

Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,

"Fool," said my Muse to me, "look in thy heart and write."

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

Christopher Marlowe (baptized Feb. 26, 1564, Canterbury — May 30, 1593, Deptford near London), was the son of a shoemaker. In 1580, he went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on a scholarship that was awarded to students preparing for priesthood. However, he did not take holy orders, but began to write plays. Moving to London, he socialized with a company of actors, the Admiral's Men.

In 1591, Marlowe lived for a time in London with the playwright Thomas Kyd, who later gave information to the Queen's Privy Council, which helped to accuse Marlowe of atheism and treason. On May 30^th, 1593, at an inn in Deptford, Marlowe was killed in a brawl.

By discovering artistic possibilities of blank verse, Marlowe helped to make it the predominant form in English drama. The English theatre had never before heard such resonant and rhetorical blank verse, excellently suited to be delivered from the stage. He wrote such important plays as Tamburlaine (ca 1587), about the 14^th century Mongol conqueror, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (ca 1588), one of the earliest stage versions of the Faust legend, the tragedy The Jew of Malta (ca 1589), and Edward II (ca 1592), one of the early successful English historical dramas. Also attributed to him are the tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage (publ. 1594), and Massacre at Paris (publ. 1600). Almost every one of his plays displays a central character destined to die because of a strong desire for power.

Marlowe's love poem, a free treatment of a classic tale about two tragic lovers Hero and Leander, was completed by George Chapman and published in 1598.

The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus

Marlowe's most famous play, The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, was first published in 1604, and its another version, in 1616. Its structure is borrowed from the morality plays, presenting a story of temptation, fall, and damnation, along with the devils Lucifer and Mephistopheles. The tragedy tells the story of the doctor-magician Faustus, who sells his soul to the devil in return for knowledge and power. Faustus' final despairing prayers are raised to Christ before his soul is claimed by the devil. Here is Faustus' final soliloquy from Scene 13, before Mephistopheles takes his soul into hell.

[The clock strikes eleven.]

FAUSTUS Ah Faustus,

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,

And then thou must be damned perpetually.

Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,

That time may cease, and midnight never come.

Fair Nature's eye, rise, rise again, and make

Perpetual day, or let this hour be but

A year, a month, a week, a natural day,

That Faustus may repent and save his soul.

0 lente, lente currite metis equi!'

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,

The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.

0, I'll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?

See, see where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!

One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah my Christ —

Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ;

Yet will I call on him — 0 spare me, Lucifer!

Where is it now? 'Tis gone: and see where God

Stretcheth out his arm, and bends his ireful brows!

Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me,

And hide me from the heavy wrath of God.

No, no?

Then will I headlong run into the earth:

Earth, gape! 0 no, it will not harbour me.

You stars that reigned at my nativity,

Whose influence hath allotted death and hell,

Now draw up Faustus like a foggy mist

Into the entrails of yon laboring cloud,

That when you vomit forth into the air,

My limbs may issue from your smoky mouths,

So that my soul may but ascend to heaven. [The clock strikes.]

Ah, half the hour is past: 'twill all be past anon.

0 God, if thou wilt not have mercy on my soul,

Yet for Christ's sake, whose blood hath ransomed me,

Impose some end to my incessant pain:

Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,

A hundred thousand, and at last be saved.

0, no end is limited to damned souls!

Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?

Or why is this immortal that thou hast?

Ah, Pythagoras' metempsychosis — were that true,

This soul should fly from me, and I be changed

Unto some brutish beast:

All beasts are happy, for when they die,

Their souls are soon dissolved in elements;

But mine must live still to be plagued in hell.

Cursed be the parents that engendered me:

No, Faustus, curse thy self, curse Lucifer,

That hath deprived thee of the joys of heaven. [The clock strikes twelve.]

0 it strikes, it strikes! Now body, turn to air,

Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell. [Thunder and lightning.]

0 soul, be changed into little water drops,

And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found.

My God, my God, look not so fierce on me!

[Enter DEVILS.]

Adders and serpents, let me breathe awhile!

Ugly hell gape not! Come not, Lucifer!

I'll burn my books — ah, Mephestopheles! 1588

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Shakespearean theatre was not so rich in scenery or props in those days. The stage could be a real stage, or a territory in Greece or Britain, a forest or a ship at sea at the same time. Shakespeare's action is swift, his scenes change rapidly. But above all the cascades of dramatic plots reigns the Word. And not only the meaning of words, but their sound, their echoing qualities and appropriateness for stage.

William Shakespeare (baptized April 26, 1564, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire — April 23, 1616, Stratford-upon-Avon), poet and playwright, is the world's favourite author. No other playwrights have had their plays produced so often and read so widely across the globe. At first Shakespeare's contemporaries approved of his long narrative poems Venus and Adonis (publ. 1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (publ. 1594). In the 17^th and 18^th centuries he was applauded for his dramas. Literary critics of the 19^th century looked up to him as the "genius of the English race." The 20^th century, with its comprehensive scientific research and film versions of Shakespeare's plays regarded him as the greatest of all writers for the stage.

Very little is known about Shakespeare's early life. His birthday is now celebrated on April 23, three days before his baptism. His father prospered in a glove-making business and was member of the town government. His mother was a daughter of a wealthy landowner. By the age of seven, Shakespeare was probably studying at the local grammar school, where he could have acquired some knowledge of Latin, but he did not enter Oxford or Cambridge.

In 1582, at 18 years of age, William married Anne Hathaway, the 26-year-old daughter of a farmer. Over the next three years the couple had a daughter and twins, a boy and a girl. Sometime before 1592, Shakespeare moved to London and engaged in the city's theatrical life. Since 1594, he was a shareholder, an actor and, perhaps, a stage director in one of London's most popular acting companies, the Lord Chamberlain's Men. By 1599, the company had built the Globe Theatre, the most famous of Elizabethan theatres.

After Queen Elizabeth's death in 1603, the Lord Chamberlain's Men were patronized by King James I and became known as the King's Men. By about this time Shakespeare appeared to have retired from acting, as after 1607 his name is no longer listed in the casts of players. Between 1608 and 1613, Shakespeare created his last five plays, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, and Henry VIII, while staying mostly in Stratford. He was revered as an important citizen and was buried in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford.

After Shakespeare's death, no collected edition of his plays had been published. Some of them had appeared in separate editions or quartos. In 1623, two members of Shakespeare's company, John Heminges and Henry Condell, and partially the poet and writer Ben Jonson, published 36 plays they thought authentic in the great collection, the First Folio.

All the Folio plays were divided into three groups: 14 comedies, 10 histories, and 12 tragedies, though in later ages some pieces were classified differently, and three new plays have been added to the Shakespeare canon. Most of the comedies are romantic fantasies; they include Love's Labor's Lost, Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and romances All's Well That Ends Well, Pericles, Two Noble Kingsmen, Measure for Measure, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest. The histories provide moral lessons to be learned from the ways and destinies of ambitious state leaders, though in some histories Shakespeare combined grave events with lively comedy. They are King John, Edward III, Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV (parts I, II), Henry V, Henry VI (parts I, II, III), Henry VIII. The tragedies explore death, morality, destruction and show that disaster strikes when moral laws are broken. Here we find Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Julius Ceasar, Anthony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens.

Most of Shakespeare's plays were performed at the Globe, a theater located in the London suburb, Southwark. Lack of scenery was compensated by beautiful descriptive speeches, and the brightly coloured costumes, be they for Macbeth, set in the 11^th century, or for Julius Caesar, in 44 BC. Women were not allowed to act, their roles were played by boy apprentices. Soliloquies and asides were other usual conventions. Shakespeare tried to make his listeners live through the drama, to directly communicate with them,

who, in broad daylight, surrounded the stage, some even sat on it. Theatre goers demanded a variety of things — action and blood, fine phrases and wit, thought and debate, subtle humour and boisterous clowning, love, song and dance. Shakespeare, unlike no one before, gives his audiences all these things.

Even if Shakespeare sacrificed his genius for the stage, he also excelled as a principal lyric poet of his age. His sonnet cycle differs from the other sequences, primarily due to its idealization of a "fair" man, rather than a "fair woman", as the object of devoted love and its portrayal of a "dark woman" as the object of sensual desire. Disregarding Petrarchan conventions, Shakespeare's moods embrace delight, pride, melancholy, shame, disgust, and fear. The biographical details of the sonnets have always aroused much speculation but very little factual support. The sonnets were written in the 1590s, though published in 1609. Although the sonnets' vocabulary is usually simple, their metaphorical sphere is very rich. The imagery resorted to a variety of sources: gardening, navigation, law, farming, business, painting, astrology, and domestic affairs.

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