Christopher Marlowe, famous today as an inventor of both modern English drama and modern English poetry, is considered to be Renaissance England's first great poet-playwright. This volume presents Marlowe's achievement as a poet within the context of his dramatic career. In addition to Marlowe's own extant poems, Ovid's Elegies, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, Lucan's first book, Hero and Leander, and a Latin epitaph on the jurist Sir Roger Manwood, this volume includes ancillary works by other writers such as Davies' Epigrams, versions of The Passionate Shepherd, and several response poems. By presenting Marlowe's poems in dialogue with works by other poets, editors Cheney and Striar demonstrate how Marlowe's intertextual relations constitute a visible form of his poetic signature. This volume presents Marlowe's poems not as an isolated series of works scattered through Elizabethan England's manuscript and print culture, but as a set of poems collaboratively produced in that culture that have influenced and impacted future works.
