Christopher Marlowe
(1564-1593)

Internet Public Library: Online Literary Criticism

Sources: British Writers “Christopher Marlowe" by Philip Henderson
Critical Survey of Drama “Christopher Marlowe" by Robert F. Wilson, Jr.

Biographical notes of interest

Much is known about Marlowe because his name appears frequently in academic, secret service, and police records. Marlowe lived a dangerous life and could not help making enemies. Here's what contemporaries and critics have to say about him:

• T. S. Eliot says that Marlowe is “the most thoughtful, the most blasphemous (and, therefore, probably the most Christian) of his contemporaries.”
• Robert Greene (a fellow playwright) called Marlowe an “epicure, an atheist, and a Machiavellian.”
• Algernon Swinburne calls him “the most daring and inspired pioneer in all our poetic literature, the first English poet whose powers may be called sublime.”
• Puritans hailed his death in a pamphlet as an example of God’s judgment upon “a filthy playmaker,” an atheist and a blasphemer.

Baptized two months before Shakespeare. Both poets were part of the growing middle class. Marlowe took his degree from Cambridge, likely worked as a spy, imprisoned several times for fighting, summoned before the Privy Council for “denying the deity of Jesus Christ,” stabbed to death in a tavern twelve days before his appearance. His career spanned about six years.

Much speculation over Marlowe’s death. Some say he wasn’t even killed, but lived on in exile and wrote all of the plays and poems attributed to Shakespeare. No established facts to support this theory.

What kind of things did Marlowe say that so angered people?

• He said “that Christ deserved better to die than Barabbas.”
• “that if the Jews among whom He was born did crucify Him they best knew Him and whence He came”
• He supported a rationalistic criticism of the Scriptures (now called Higher Criticism.)
• He said “the first beginning of religion was only to keep men in awe.”
• He claimed that “almost into every company he cometh he persuadeth men to atheism, willing them not be afeard of bugbears and hobgoblins.”
• He criticized the poor literary style of the New Testament (that he could have written it much better).
• He claimed that Moses made the Jews travel for forty years in the wilderness, “a journey which might have been done in less than one year,” in order that those “who were privy to his subtleties might perish, and so an everlasting superstition remain in the hearts of the people.”
• Marlowe made a plea for homosexuality and smoking--“that all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools.”

Some argue that Marlowe was not an atheist--at least as the term is currently defined. His play Dr. Faustus shows the anguish of a man who has struggled with faith and faithlessness. In all likelihood he was a deist--a belief that God exists and created the world, but assumes no control or intervention into the events of the world or man.

His Plays in General

• Only one play (Tamburlaine the Great) was published in his lifetime, but his plays were popular on the stage right into the middle of the next century when the Puritans closed the theaters. He strongly influenced other dramatists, including Shakespeare.
• Special effects drew the audience in (the Elizabethan stage had to compete with bear-baiting and bull-baiting rings as well as public executions). Doctor Faustus had thunder and lightning, hellfire, and shaggy-haired devils.
• Critics used to say that his work lacked a sense of humor, but current scholars see comic touches everywhere in his work.
• Marlowe did not possess a patriotic spirit--his heroes are not like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal.
• Marlowe’s skill for writing powerful yet musical blank verse led critics to refer to his verse as: “Marlowe’s mighty line.”
• The heroes of the plays have been called “overreachers” and “apostates.” Perhaps these figures reveal as much about Marlowe’s own defiance and cynicism. His main characters come across as larger than life and very controversial.
• Marlowe fused classical elements with native morality plays: a man torn between good and evil.
• Marlowe’s characters embody a psychological complexity.
• His vision was satiric and narrow, and the themes and characters he chose to write about often lacked widespread appeal.

Doctor Faustus

• The tragedy bears some resemblance to English morality plays, but this play portrays a story of damnation alone. It's almost as if Marlowe is presenting an object lesson to sinners. But Marlowe seems to be more interested in exploring the tortured state of mind of a man who had enormous intellectual curiosity and who longed to break the bonds of human knowledge and experience. Critic Irving Ribner says that the play could not be a Christian morality play “because it contains no affirmation of the goodness or justice of the religious system it portrays.”
• The main character, Doctor Faustus, falls from a position of social and spiritual prominence, seen in the opening of the play. His defiance almost immediately transforms him into a fool. There is not an optimistic vision. The play warns about the dangers and limitations of the human imagination.
• In the opening of the play, Faustus rejects the orthodox or conventional disciplines and hungers for the status of a magician.
• Notice the comedic mirroring of the main plot all through the play. How does this serve to mock Faustus's designs? For example, notice how the clown reads his master’s book and plans to become invisible and visit the tavern and drink all they wish without paying. References to not paying the bill echo with the predicament of the hero who must pay the bill with his life. This combination of “heavenly verse” and flat, colorless, frequently foolish writing troubles many first-time readers of the play. But these scenes of foolery underscore the main theme of the play: all that Faustus gets in his bargain with the devil is a bunch of tricks. Faustus exchanges knowledge for shadows. His power turns out to be illusory. The whole point is that Faustus is tricked. The flat, prose-like lines mock the heavenly verse. Mephostophilis tells Faustus nothing that he doesn't already know.
• Notice how often the hero is surrounded by his friends who show concern and compassion.
• Notice how the servants control their masters and not vice versa. You can see this in the main plot with Faustus and Mephostophilis and in the subplot with Wagner and the clown.
• Notice how Faustus wavers throughout the play on his bargain. When is it too late to repent? He is continually attempting to repent in the second half of the play. The final scene is one long agonized repentance. Notice how Faustus in the end desperately pleads to be far less than a man, to turn to air, to be turned into an animal, to be sucked up like a mist into the clouds, to be changed to little water drops and fall into the ocean and never be found.
• Notice the moving scene in prose (the earliest example in English drama of tragic prose) that begins with the lines, “Ah my sweet chamber-fellows, had I lived with thee, then had I lived still but now must die eternally...and must remain in hell forever.”
• Notice how Mephostophilis offers diversions and illusions in response to Faustus's requests. For example, in response to Faustus’s question about the creation of man and the world, Mephostophilis offers the procession of the Seven Deadly Sins.
• When Faustus strikes the pope and plays tricks on the cardinals, Marlow is certainly appealing to anti-Catholic feelings in the audience. Many of the tricks, however, end up showing Faustus as a second-rate showman rather than the powerful figure he had hoped to become. The trick where the horse-courser pulls off Faustus's leg foreshadows the hero’s final dismemberment at the end of the play. This device is similar to what we have seen in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, where the burlesque of the subplot provides a more informal context for understanding and appreciating the themes of the main plot.
• Twenty four years pass as quickly as twenty four hours.