Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)

Major works: Tamburlaine (1587, Part II 1590), Hero and Leander (1592-1593), The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage (1594), The Jew of Malta (1633 [1592?]), Edward II (1594 [1592]), Dr. Faustus (1604 [1593?]).

Biographical notes: Christopher Marlowe, like Sir Thomas Malory, led a fairly exciting and romantic life in many respects. Marlowe was the son of a Canterbury shoemaker, and he was fortunate to receive a quality education, including six years of study in Corpus Christi College at Cambridge, schooling usually intended for the clergy. The evidence is inconclusive, but some believe Marlowe was recruited into the Queen's secret service while at Cambridge and later worked as a British spy in Europe. He is believed to have had a "violent and at times criminal temperament" (Drabble 620). He was jailed for a street brawl in 1589 in which one man was murdered; he was deported from Holland for passing forged gold coins; he was formally charged with blasphemy, atheism, and treason; and at age 29 Marlowe was killed in an argument over his tab at a tavern.

Marlowe began writing plays while at Cambridge, sometimes in collaboration with others, and his entire literary output was the work of only six years. Although Marlowe fell nearly out of remembrance for more than two centuries, until the British Romantics "revived" him in the early 1800s, his influence upon his contemporary fellow playwright William Shakespeare was considerable, and he is often seen as the first true master of "blank verse," the unrhymed iambic pentameter Ben Jonson admired as "Marlowe's mighty line." Blank verse would become a standard feature in the works of Shakespeare and Milton, among many others.

The Didactic: Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is a clearly didactic work, meaning that while it entertains, it also aims to "instruct" the audience morally and to influence or make the audience reconsider and possibly amend its own behavior.  The moral preaching is sugar-coated through "story."  Marlowe's play has obvious roots in the medieval "morality play," dramatic productions popular from the 14th through the 16th centuries in which allegorical characters portray the struggle of the human soul towards salvation. Morality plays typically have characters whose names pointedly represent abstract qualities which compete for the eternal soul of the main character. The names of characters in morality plays are clear in their representations: Mercy, Good Deeds, Conscience, Vice, Shame, Lust, etc. The most famous morality play is the early 16th-century Everyman, in which the title character, obviously, represents all humanity. In this play, Everyman is summoned by Death, and only in his last hour of life does he realize that he cannot take his friends, Kindred, Goods, and Fellowship, with him, and that Good Deeds, whom he has neglected, will accompany him to "meet his maker."

While Doctor Faustus is not a "morality play" proper, the influence of the morality play is clearly seen in the presence of the devil as a character, the personification of the seven deadly sins in Scene 5, and especially the characters of the "Good Angel" and "Evil Angel." Doctor Faustus departs from the typical expectations of the morality play in that the outcome is tragic—though the title of play clearly identifies the "tragedy," familiarity with the usually positive outcome of the morality play certainly heightened the dramatic tension for Marlowe's contemporaries: Faustus time and again thinks of doing the "right thing," repenting and pleading for mercy, receiving grace from God as typically happens in the morality play, but Faustus is never quite able to heed the counsel of the Good Angel, the Old Man in Scene 12, or the voice of his own conscience.

The "moral" in Marlowe's didactic message is clear: Faustus serves as a warning to the audience to avoid the sin of pride, for above all, Faustus wants to transcend the normal limitations of humanity to become godlike in his power. (Significantly, as the Norton editors indicate, the theme of ambition or lust for power also features prominently in other of Marlowe's plays as well: the title character strives for absolute power through military conquest in Tamburlane, for example, and the main character in The Jew of Malta seeks power through riches [458].) Through the bargain he makes with Lucifer, Faustus does indeed become omnipotent and essentially omniscient for a twenty-four-year period via the agency of his trusty devil Mephastophilis, who can transport Faustus anywhere in the world, answer all of his questions, make him invisible, bring likenesses of the dead to life, and basically do whatever Faustus commands. Of course, the price is eternal damnation, and Marlowe's portrayal of Faustus's anguish as he faces his last hour is dramatic and intense.

Secondary or tributary "morals to the story" include the notion that power corrupts and also that humanity's understanding of nature is intended to have its limitations. It is knowledge which Faustus so greatly desires and for which he sells his soul. He becomes a "magician," the master of forbidden "dark secrets," through reading books given him by Mephastophilis and also Lucifer. Clearly, the idea is that some knowledge is "unholy." In Scene 5, when Mephastophilis gives Faustus books revealing the secrets of "all characters and planets of the heavens," and also of "all plants, herbs, and trees that grow upon the earth," Faustus is dismayed and cries, "When I behold the heavens, then I repent, / And curse thee, wicked Mephastophilis, / Because thou hast deprived me of those joys" (5.168-74, 178-80). Faustus can no longer find joy in the beauty of the heavens—or in heaven—once he knows the "secrets" of the planets and stars. The ultimate moral to the story is stated point-blank in the final chorus (the epilogue), much as the moral is stated explicitly in a fable.

As our Norton editors point out, Marlowe's play is based directly on the German legend of a "Faust" who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for unlimited power during his lifetime. What's most notable about Marlowe's alteration of the original story, though, is that whereas in the German version printed in 1587 Faust uses his power primarily for "swinish" sensual purposes such as those the "clowns" in Marlowe's play intend, but Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is pointedly more intellectualized: he seeks answers to questions—i.e. knowledge. We see Marlowe suggesting the power corrupts, too, in the difference between Faustus's original intent to do good with the knowledge he achieves and what he does with his power once he has made his bargain with Lucifer.

Serious comic relief: With Doctor Faustus we move from the realm of epic and chivalric romance into Elizabethan drama, and we see the influence of the newly popular genre in Marlowe's inclusion of scenes of fairly low-brow humor to cater to the Elizabethan audience's delight in such "clown" characters as Robin and Rafe, the ostlers (men who tended to horses at stables and public inns). These low-brow comic characters were the especial delight of Elizabethan audiences in both purely comic and more serious plays as well. We will see Shakespeare use this same technique in Henry V of alternating scenes of highly dramatic content and seemingly purely comedic matter also. If you read carefully, in both Marlowe's and Shakespeare's plays, you'll notice that the comedic "low-brow" scenes often echo or reinforce many of the same themes or events portrayed in the more serious scenes with which they alternate. For instance, notice how after Faustus gains Mephastophilis as his servant in Scene 3, Wagner gains the Clown as his own servant in Scene 4. Or note how in Scene 5 Faustus commands Mephastophilis to fetch him "the fairest maid in Germany, for [he is] wanton and lascivious," and then in Scene 6 the ostler Robin, reading one of Faustus's books, says he has plans to use magic to "make all the maidens in our parish dance at my pleasure stark naked before me" (5.140-41, 6.3-4). Be on the lookout for other parallels between the alternating serious and comic scenes as you read as well.