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Article: Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy.(Book review)
- Article from:
- The Modern Language Review
- Article date:
- October 1, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 Modern Humanities Research Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy. By PARK HONAN. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005. xvi + 421 pp. 16.22 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 978-0-19-818695-3.
The central tension of Christopher Marlowe's life is captured by Robert Lowell in a sonnet from History (London: Faber & Faber, 1973):
I died sweating, stabbed with friends who knew me--was
it the bar-check? ... Tragedy is to die ...
for that vacant parsonage, Posterity;
my plays are stamped in bronze, my life in tabloid.
(Lowell, Collected Poems (London: Faber & Faber, 2003), p. 462)
Whether expressed in Lowell's demotic idiom ('Was it the bar-check?') or the bilingual terms of ...