Christopher Marlowe, Literary History, and the Lyrical Style of Blank Verse

This essay contextualizes the versification of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine among sixteenth-century efforts to reform English vernacular verse on the model of Latin unrhymed quantitative meter. Literary histories of unrhymed verse in the poetic and rhetorical theory of Roger Ascham, Gabriel Harvey, and others align the disappearance of unrhymed meter with the fall of civilizations and propose a return to classical metrics as a means of transferring the cultural and political authority of ancient Rome to Tudor England. Marlowe, however, offers in Tamburlaine an alternative literary history of unrhymed poetry through the formal affordances of blank verse. As an open form, blank verse lends itself to expansive speeches that, in the mouth of Tamburlaine, can paradoxically both produce action and arrest time. The form of blank verse thus resists the imperial teleology of its origins in the classicizing projects of the Tudor humanists. [C.M.]