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Christopher Marlowe is a late sixteenth-century writer sometimes placed “close to Shakespeare in his achievement” (Ribner 212); Marlowe's pastoral poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (1599) was even initially “ascribed to Shakespeare” (Brooke 393). With a different tone than most of his dramatic work, Marlowe's poetry often includes a male and a female character in a real or imagined romantic relationship. “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” portrays a somewhat powerful male character who performs all of the action, while the female character is portrayed as passive and superficial. Like many of the metaphysical poets of the next century, Marlowe's sixteenth century male character uses rhetoric to seduce the female character (which is paradoxical since the men tend to praise and ideal chaste women), and in the case of Marlowe's Shepherd, the rhetoric he uses tends to focus on superficial promises of idealistic love and pleasure. He enforces the common theme of carpe diem suggesting that there will be immediate gratification of their sexual passions, escaping societal rules and returning to a pristine condition of happiness. Furthermore, the Shepherd is often so preoccupied with convincing his lover “to come live with” him and be his “love” (Marlowe 20), that at times he becomes forceful, sexual and aggressive by using double entendres and hidden sexual images. Thus, in “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” not only does Marlowe's poetry reinforce gender stereotypes of the male as active and the female as acted upon, Marlowe's male character goes one step further and use aggression to get what he wants from his female lover: her body.
Marlowe’s contemporary, Sir Walter Ralegh’s response titled “The Nymph’s Reply to t...

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There are times in Marlowe's poetry when it seems as if true love is desired by the male characters, but the men seem to have a false belief about what love actually is. The men in Marlowe's poetry seem to be ignorant of what women actually desire and believe that women are like animals and need to be manipulated, so when the men try to state their love for a woman, they spend all of their time describing superficial things thinking that it is what women want to hear. Thus, Marlowe's poetry portrays both women and men in a stereotypical fashion which is unrealistic, and the misogynistic representation of gender relations goes beyond merely showing males as active and females as inactive. There is an implicit belief in Marlowe's poetry is that there is nothing fundamentally wrong about males using excessive manipulation and physical force to have sex with women.

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