The Man Who Was Not Shakespeare Comparison Essay by CalDR

This paper looks at the life of the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. It discusses how, unlike Shakespeare ,the other main playwright of the time has plays which tend to be character-driven. The author finds that Marlowe wrote extremely rhetorical, highly poetical works with elevated language and elaborate feats of stagecraft. It analyzes how Marlowe's concern with power and society's elite is reflected not only in the language of his plays, but also in terms of his play's subject matter. This is reflected in his most famous works, such as "Dr. Faustus" and "Tamburlaine." It looks at how Marlowe is often studied as an example of a literary influence upon the early Shakespeare but because Marlowe's style is so different in tone and so divergent in subject matter, he exists more as an interesting historical curiosity in his own right, as an individual playwright of note, outside of Shakespeare's own theatrical history.