Changes And Renewal

Christopher Marlowe (1564-93) is an important playwright in the earlyrenaissance in England. His achievements mainly consist in two aspects: one is hisintroduction of blank verse into play and the other is the foundation he laid for thedevelopment of English tragedy. In his short life, he created6and half plays and5poems. Moreover, every piece of his works is classic, forever winning him asignificant place in English literature history. His plays are poetic-drama, exerting agreat influence on the authors thereafter, especially the peak of English drama,Shakespeare. Therefore, Marlowe is claimed as "the father of English tragedy and thecreator of English blank verse." Nevertheless, he is somewhat ignored by the critics.It was not until the60s and70s of the20thcentury that research of him boomed.As the earliest published works of Marlowe, Tamburlaine gained a great successwhen it was put on stage and was so much influential on Marlowe’s contemporariesand authors thereafter. But so far, the uniqueness of this two-part play has not beenfully understood, especially the carnival elements in it. In fact, between the lines liesa carnival feeling of changes and renewal, which might contribute to itsmagnificence.Therefore, this thesis purports to explore the theme of "changes and renewal"with Bakhtin’s Poetics of the Carnivalesque as the theoretical basis. The thesis iscomprised of three parts. The introductory part is mainly on a brief introduction ofMarlowe, a sufficient and detailed review of Tamburlaine’s critical reception, and theconstruction and feasibility of Bakhtin’s Poetics of the Carnivalesque as a theoreticalbasis. The second part is the body part, which falls into three chapters: Chapter Oneis to analyze the marketplace language in Tamburlaine with "the cries of Paris" as alead-in; Chapter Two concentrates on the frequent crowning and uncrowning inTamburlaine and an uncrowning anxiety in them; Chapter Three discusses thebanquet scenes and the grotesque body images, and their aesthetic basis. Finally, it concludes that carnival elements play an important role in Tamburlaine, and thecarnival spirit of changes and renewal in them is just the zeitgeist of the earlyrenaissance in England.