Plays were given an official licence if they were deemed suitable, but playwrights could be censored, arrested or even imprisoned. Marlow was forced to make a number of revisions to Doctor Faustus. The audio recording of an extract from the play, which starts with the line 'Was this the face that launched a thousand ships', is read by actor Michael Sheen.
Can't play the file above? Listen to the audio clip here. By using this site, you agree we can set and use cookies. Marlowe's second play was the two-part Tamburlaine the Great c. This was Marlowe's first play to be performed on the regular stage in London and is among the first English plays in blank verse.
It is considered the beginning of the mature phase of the Elizabethan theater and was the last of Marlowe's plays to be published before his untimely death. There is disagreement among Marlowe scholars regarding the order in which the plays subsequent to Tamburlaine were written. What is not disputed is that he wrote only these four plays after Tamburlaine , from c. His wealth is seized, however, and he fights the government to regain it until his death at the hands of Maltese soldiers.
The play swirls with religious conflict, intrigue and revenge, and is considered to have been a major influence on Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. The title character, Barabas, is seen as the main inspiration for Shakespeare's Shylock character in Merchant. The play is also considered the first successful Black comedy, or tragicomedy. Barabas is a complex character who has provoked mixed reactions in audiences, and there has been extensive debate about the play's portrayal of Jews as with Shakespeare's Merchant.
Filled with unseemly characters, the play also ridicules oversexed Christian monks and nuns, and portrays a pair of greedy friars vying for Barabas' wealth. The Jew of Malta in this way is a fine example of what Marlowe's final four works are in part known for: controversial themes. It is the only Marlowe plays whose text can be reliably said to represent the author's manuscript, as all of Marlowe's other plays were heavily edited or simply transcribed from performances, and the original texts were lost to the ages.
The Massacre at Paris is a short and lurid work, the only extant text of which was likely a reconstruction from memory, or "reported text," of the original performance.
Because of its origin, the play is approximately half the length of Edward the Second , The Jew of Malta and each part of Tamburlaine , and comprises mostly bloody action with little depth of characterization or quality verse.
For these reasons, the play has been the most neglected of Marlowe's oeuvre. Massacre portrays the events of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre of , in which French royalty and Catholic nobles instigated the murder and execution of thousands of protestant Huguenots.
In London, agitators seized on its theme to advocate the murders of refugees, an event that the play eerily warns the queen of in its last scene. Interestingly, the warning comes from a character referred to as "English Agent," a character who has been thought to be Marlowe himself, representing his work with the queen's secret service.
Marlowe's most famous play is The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus , but, as is the case with most of his plays, it has survived only in a corrupt form, and when Marlowe actually wrote it has been a topic of debate. Based on the German Faustbuch , Doctor Faustus is acknowledged as the first dramatized version of the Faust legend, in which a man sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power. The same words from the same character in the Faust Book , however, give rise to this explanation by the narrator: 'In this perplexitie lay this miserable Doctor Faustus There can be no room for misunderstanding when dealing with a subject as important as the Devil and damnation.
Mimicking the fable form of the Faust Book , Marlowe encloses his play with a prologue and epilogue, emphatically marking the boundaries between play and reality. There is an uneasiness in the closing lines which echoes back through the whole work: 'To practise more than heavenly power permits' might suggest not a just and loving God but an unreasonable omnipotent tyrant shrouded in anonymity.
The original title page for Marlowe's play describes it as The tragicall historie of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus. Marlowe places Faustus in the role of tragic protagonist and in doing so transforms the 'evil' of the Faust Book into a classic. Faustus himself is highly conscious of his status as a character, referring obsessively to himself in the third person.
From the outset he is intent on creating a spectacle, a drama worthy of the tragic hero he believes himself to be. Marlowe's most celebrated contemporary is Shakespeare and though Shakespeare never wrote a play explicitly on the Faust legend, there are parallel figures strewn through his plays.
Shakespeare's last play, The Tempest , and the central character, Prospero, have some startling parallels with Doctor Faustus. Not only are both plays concerned with magic and conjuring but - perhaps not coincidentally - both works have central characters deeply concerned with spectacle. Prospero and Faustus both want to control people like puppets. In fact, the Faust legend was actually used extensively, after Marlowe, for material for puppet shows - akin to Punch and Judy - as Romany and Lindsey point out in their introduction to the play: 'The story told in Marlowe's play, in fact, is well on the way to its 'degeneration' in the next two centuries into the popular media of ballads, farces and puppet shows' Complete Plays, p.
Shakespeare's play opens with a storm the tempest of the title whipped up by Prospero himself, and he can make himself invisible at will. All hail great master! I come To answer thy best pleasure. Be't to fly, To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride On the curled clouds, to thy strong bidding task Ariel and all his quality.
Act 1, Scene 2, The biggest difference between the two powerful enchanters is that at no point in The Tempest is there any explicit suggestion that the source of Prospero's powers is evil, whereas Faustus' powers unequivocally spring from his relationship with the Devil. Prospero is never called upon to repent nor has he had to sacrifice something as vital as his soul to acquire them - he does, however, have to give them up at the end of the play in order to return to the world of ordinary humans.
This renunciation allows Prospero a happy ending, while neither Marlowe nor Faustus can avoid their final tragedy. The connection between this play and Shakespeare is fascinating and there are often sharp ambiguities. Do you think that any of the devilish quality of Faustus' magic can be found in The Tempest? In a very different way, Macbeth is a descendant of Faustus, who works with evil forces for his own gain. Do you think Shakespeare is rethinking Marlowe's play as he portrays that character?
Lizzie Davis suggests that we can take Faustus 'at his word' when he says he repents. Do you agree?
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