The Complete Plays

by Christopher Marlowe, J.B. Steane (Editor)

In recent years there has been a widening of opinion about Marlowe; at one extreme he is considered an atheist rebel and at the other a Christian traditionalist. There is as much divergence in Marlowe's seven plays.

Controlled and purposeful, these plays contain a poetry which enchants and lodges in the mind.

Genres: Plays, Classics, Drama, Fiction, Literature, Theatre, Poetry

608 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1593

About the author

Christopher "Kit" Marlowe (baptised 26 February 1564) was an English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. The foremost Elizabethan tragedian next to William Shakespeare, he is known for his magnificent blank verse, his overreaching protagonists, and his own mysterious and untimely death.

The author's Wikipedia page.

Reviews

[E. G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Preface
Chronology
Introduction & Notes
'The Baines Note'
Further Reading
A Note on the Texts

--Dido, Queen of Carthage

To the Gentlemen Readers and Others that take Pleasure in Reading Histories
--Tamburlaine the Great, Part One
--Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two

[The Dedicatory Epistle]
--The Jew of Malta

--Doctor Faustus [A-text]

--Edward the Second

--The Massacre at Paris

Appendix: 'The Massacre at Paris', Scene 19
Notes
Glossary
List of Mythological, Historical and Geographical Names

[Ivana Books Are Magic · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have already reviewed all of Marlowe's plays separately, so my review of this book will be mostly about this edition as such meaning about the other things it contains except of the obvious. The Complete Plays is a lovely collection of plays that also includes a bit of literary criticism and some information. I quite enjoyed the introduction to this book, despite it containing some spoilers about the plays themselves. Moreover, it was interesting to read the commentary about each and every play. The footnotes were well written and informative as well. I read the notes about the plays only after I read the plays, to avoid spoilers. I don't completely agree with everything editors said in this book, but on overall I found their arguments interesting and worth reading. It is a really lovely edition. I borrowed this copy from the library, but I'm contemplating buying it. The five star review refers to the book as a whole. As for the plays, you can see my individual grades and reviews bellow:

DR FAUSTUS 5/5
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

THE TRAGEDY OF DIDO, THE QUEEN 3/5
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

EDWARD II 3/5
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

TAMBURLANE I AND II 4/5
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

JEW OF MALTA 4/5
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

THE MASSACRE AT PARIS 3/5
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Andrei Tamaş · Rating 4 out of 5]

TRAGICA ISTORIE A DOCTORULUI FAUSTUS - 10/10

Tragica istorie a Doctorului Faustus are în centru setea de cunoaştere, dorinţa de a trece peste anumite etape ale cunoaşterii pentru a atinge cunoaşterea absolută, ceea ce atrage după sine falsificarea eticii de baza a omului. Setea de cunoaştere a stăpânit întotdeauna spiritele iniţiate, ştiinţa fiind ca un drog, iar sevrajul -ca în opera- atrage după sine "soluţia finală": pactul cu ideaticele forţe ale răului.
Redată într-un univers alegoric, opera nu fixează o acţiune anume, ci, la nivel ideatic, exprimă tragedia cunoaşterii, conceptele de moarte, veşnicie, bine sau rău cristalizate pe o bază mistico-religioasă, de factură creştină...
Prima scriere a lui Marlowe (1564-1593) m-a câştigat de partea-i. Acum, când i-am notat anii de viaţă, am realizat că a trăit doar 29 de ani. Multora le-ar fi insuficiente zece vieţi pentru a avea -chiar şi la nivel ideatic- tăria de a scrie o operă de o asemenea valoare!

"Când, iată, aripile lui de ceară,
Umflate de ştiinţă şi trufie,
S-au avântat prea mult şi s-au topit."

"Pe-atâta sunt de hotărât, mă crede,
Pe cât eşti hotărât tu să trăieşti."

EVREUL DIN MALTA 9/10

Terminând cartea, am în minte apariţia sâmburelui scepticismului (de orice natură ar fi el, dar aici e vorba de credinţa religioasă). Fiind a doua piesă scrisă de Marlowe pe care o citesc -"Doctor Faustus", la fel ca romanul omonim al lui Thomas Mann ori ca "Faustul" lui Goethe, rămânând în seria capodoperelor circumscrise orizontului lăcomiei de cunoaştere-, am simţit ochiul viclean al scriitorului. În zilele noastre, libera exprimare este literă de lege, în schimb în vremurile Evului Mediu, Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) nu avea acest drept din pricina monstruoasei Inchiziţii. În opera acestui martir, care în opinia mea este aproape egal cu Shakespeare, se disting deci nişte elemente nu ateiste, ci mai degrabă caracterizate printr-un pluriperspectivism. Tocmai acest pluriperspectivism, spre deosebire de alte opere clasice, caracterizate de un singur model etic/religios, naşte germenele scepticismului. Ei!, dacă ne gândim un strop şi raportăm opera la perioada în care a fost scrisă, putem conchide fără prea multă şovăială că ea este un catalizator în drumul libertăţii, care a fost îngreunat de acel obstacol reprezentat de instituţia Inchiziţiei.
Pe de altă parte, privită din perspectiva prezentului şi a viitorului deopotrivă, piesa spune povestea lui Barabas, un evreu bogat din Malta medievală. Pentru ideea operei în sine, semnificativ este prologul rostit de Machiavel(i). Mai precis, "Evreul din Malta" este o cale inedită de a ilustra consecinţele dezastroase ale aplicării exclusiviste a maximei machiavelice conform căreia "scopul scuză mijloacele"...

TAMERLAN CEL MARE 9/10

"Tamerlan cel Mare" este o dramă în două părţi, fiecare având câte cinci acte, o dramă în care este prezentată ascensiunea unui păstor scit care avea să ajungă să guverneze jumătate din teritoriile cunoscute lumii la acel moment, mai precis secolul al XV-lea.
Până să întru adânc în paginile cărţii, nu mi-am dat seama că Marlowe a folosit numele de Tamerlan pentru cel pe care istoria ni l-a făcut cunoscut ca Timur Lenk.
Drama seamănă mult cu cea a lui Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, însă, cu toate acestea, se pot semnala anumite aspecte ce ţin de conştiinţa individuală a unui grup compact, cei doi făcând parte din două societăţi cu mentalităţi radical diferite. Astfel, Tamerlan este animat de putere, pe când Tell este însufleţit de idealul libertăţii. De asemenea, Tell era precaut şi raţional, pe când Timur Lenk se aruncă în "acte cavalereşti" aproape fără discernământ, orice gest justificând la el acapararea puterii.
Ceea ce amuză cititorul, în ciuda atmosferei solemne a dramei, este zăpăceala scriitorului (foarte uşor condamnabil, de altfel). Astfel, acesta ajunge să pomenească Mexicul, prin limba lui Tamerlan, însă la începutul secolului al XV-lea acesta nu era cunoscut lumii vechi :)).
Oricum, drama, privită în ansamblu, e încă o cărămidă a marii piramide care stă neclintită, privindu-ne ironic şi dându-ne de înţeles că întreaga istorie nu e altceva decât o uriaşă comedie.

EDUARD AL II-lea 9/10

Tragedie istorică în cinci acte, surprinzând întreaga domnie a regelui Eduard al II-lea al Angliei. Marlowe comprimă realitatea istorică, din considerente de spaţiu. Opera merită citită, dacă nu pentru cunoaşterea romanţată a istoriei în sine, cel puţin pentru sentimentul de frustrare dobândit în urmă relevării unor caractere înzorzonate cu grade ereditare, pioase şi de o uscatime aristocratică, figuri ce conduc destinele atâtor oameni şi în numele cărora se moare fără rost.

31 martie 2017

[Kyriakos Sorokkou]

The Book
A year ago on April 27 I went to a book bazaar and bought 12 books 50c each. That is what I call a real bargain. And this book, ugly as it is and old was the last book I took, I hesitated a little bit because. . .
-Are you gonna review the book or narrate your memoirs?
- Get away Hyde; . . . it was old and I wasn't sure if I was in the mood to read it. It seems that it took me almost a year to grab it and read it. The last book I bought. The last book I read from the bazaar. Note: the penultimate book was Ulysses which I read (almost) a month ago.

The author
. . . or to be more precise the playwright. Christopher or Kit (not Harington [you know nothing Jon Snow]) was born less than two months before Shakespeare and died 29 years old (my age). He was murdered. Had he lived in his fifties like Shakespeare he would have overshadowed Shakespeare or we would had had two bards instead of one. He died with 7 plays written. Shakespeare wrote 7 plays as well with none of them being the famous ones (Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, Othello, Macbeth etc) But that's life, some people live for years, some die young.

The Plays
All his surviving plays in one volume. I wonder why Oxford World's Classics edition (Doctor Faustus and Other Plays: Tamburlaine, Parts I and II; Doctor Faustus, A & B Texts; The Jew of Malta; Edward II) excluded his 2 less known ones. They aren't that long to be excluded. And that was the reason that made me buy this edition; old and with not a very good cover but they were all here, and if I was disappointed 50c would not be such a great financial loss.

1] The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage
Taken from episodes 1,2,4 from Virgil's Aeneid. It's the story of a Queen that fell in love with Aeneas with the help of Aphrodite/Venus. An unfulfilled love. A good story but not good enough for me. 3/5

2] The First Part of Tamburlaine the Great
3] The Second Part of Tamburlaine the Great
This two part play(s) started off with good intentions but it became repetitive. Tamburlaine's enemies were crushed like butter one after the other and Tamburlaine was the indisputable conqueror of the world. And this thing went on and on without end. I felt bored and wanted it to end both plays scored 2.5/5
It also combined Greco-Roman religion with Islam and Christianity. It felt a bit anachronistic and fake to me.

4] The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
I read this play individually in 2013 and didn't quite get it. Now I understood a few things more. Even though I liked the beginning and the ending the middle part was more like a farce. So did Doctor Faustus sell his soul to the devil in order to make tricks and pranks to people? That didn't sound that serious to me hence the 4 instead of 5 stars.

5] The Jew of Malta
Finally a decent (á la Shakespeare) tragedy with plot, revenge, and malicious characters. 4 stars though since it was a bit exaggerated, like every Elizabethan play.

6] Edward the Second
This was my favourite. Even though it didn't have as many deaths as the previous one or demons like Doctor Faustus it was a well written historical play that was unravelled slowly and had a decent ending. 4.5/5

7] The Massacre at Paris
This was a pretty fragmented play. What you really read is what was found and what the actors remembered from the production(s) It's the shortest play and it shows even in its maimed condition the appalling effects of religious fanaticism. It tells in other words the story of St. Bartholomew's Massacre. 3.5/5

Overall Score 3.42

[Taka · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dazzling at times, mediocre at times (3.5)--

Out of the seven plays, I think, two are brilliant (Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta), and five are between good and mediocre. And don't get me wrong. Marlowe is great, but his plays are unevenly written so that some of the soliloquies stand out and catch you off guard with their éclat amidst a mediocre story line (such is especially the case with Tamburlaine and Edward II). And each play exercises this dark pull on the reader that is both terrifying and enthralling, making Marlowe something of an enigmatic master of tragedy from whom you turn your head away in fear or disgust but can't help looking at from the corners of your eyes.

Dido, Queen of Carthage is a good tragedy - not excellent, but good. It's a re-telling of the good old legend told by Virgil where Aeneas the epic hero welches on his promise to stay and love Dido, and peacing out of her kingdom and consequently driving the poor heartbroken queen to committing suicide. Marlowe's depiction of the gods as whimsical, irresponsible, and unconcerning is quite comical, and displaces much of blame from Aeneas the reneging hero. Overall, it's a solid play.

Tamburlaine seemed to just drag on just a weeny bit too long with two entire plays dedicated to the telling of Tamburlaine's conquest after conquest without much sustained drama. Characters come and go with basically the same attitude of "I'm going to kill Tamburlaine!" only to be butchered or enslaved and humiliated to the point where they commit suicide. And the plays are just that: Tamburlaine pretty much killing all his enemies and reveling at his own greatness and committing all kinds of sacrilege (e.g. burning the Koran, defying and challenging Jove, cursing Muhammed, etc.). Though his soliloquies are poetically powerful and exhilarating, it's not enough to carry the narrative forward; i.e., the story just gets old even with these gems of poetry.

Doctor Faustus is short and sweet, poetic (e.g. "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?") and satisfyingly tragic (you'll see if you read till the end). In short: an awesome play.

The Jew of Malta, too, is a brilliant and fun play full of nasty betrayals and villainy. Barabas, the main character, is probably one of the most liberatingly evil characters ever conceived.

Edward II, like Dido, is quite good. It centers on the conflict between the homosexual king and his nobles who resent their king's once-exiled tawdry and supercilious lover and want him exiled again or dead. The leitmotif of civil war gone bad where, like Israel and Palestine, people just keep taking revenge after revenge in a never-ending cycle of bloodbath makes a good tragedy indeed.

The Massacre at Paris was apparently assembled from the memories of actors, and at least half of what Marlowe originally wrote is missing. And the play does have a definite sense of incompleteness and feels like it was written by an amateur imitating Marlowe.

Finally, the introduction and headnotes to each play are quite useless, and you won't miss out much if you just skim them through or skip them over entirely. So all in all, Marlowe's oeuvre is fascinating in its dark power and exalting in its poetic beauty but suffers from unevenness.

[Jan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want a time machine just so I can go back to the late 16th century and listen to Christopher Marlowe talk. I want to see all his plays as they were originally staged. I want to watch his murder, and have its mystery solved.

I can't begin to discuss the drama intelligently. Let's just say that in his twenties this man created lasting works in six genres in as many years. Imagine what he might have done if he had lived into his thirties.

I think Shakespeare was a better dramatist, but he was an actor, while Marlowe was a Cambridge-educated scholar and an extraordinary poet. It was Marlowe, not Shakespeare, who first used and established blank verse as the language of Elizabethan drama. Nor was Marlowe's evocation of the natural world less gorgeous than Shakespeare's:

NURSE. No, thou shalt go with me unto my house.
I have an orchard that hath store of plums,
Brown almonds, cerises, ripe figs, and dates,
Dewberries, apples, yellow oranges,
A garden where are beehives full of honey,
Musk roses, and a thousand sort of flowers;
And in the midst doth run a silver stream,
Where thou shalt see the red-gilled fishes leap,
White swans, and many lovely waterfowl.
Now speak, Ascanius, will ye go or no?

--NURSE in Dido, Queen of Carthage, Act IV, Scene v

How different is this "from jigging veins of rhyming mother wits/and such conceits as clownage keeps in pay" (Prologue to Tamburlane the Great, Part I) of English drama up to this point! What love poetry is more gorgeously imagined than Tamburlane's courting of his future wife?

Zenocrate, lovelier than the love of Jove,
Brighter than is the silver Rhodope,
Fairer than whitest snow on Scythian hills,
Thy person is more worth to Tamburlaine
Than the possession of the Persian crown,
Which gracious stars have promis'd at my birth.
A hundred Tartars shall attend on thee,
Mounted on steeds swifter than Pegasus;
Thy garments shall be made of Median silk,
Enchas'd with precious jewels of mine own,
More rich and valurous than Zenocrate's;
With milk-white harts upon an ivory sled
Thou shalt be drawn amidst the frozen pools,
And scale the icy mountains' lofty tops,
Which with thy beauty will be soon resolv'd:
My martial prizes, with five hundred men,
Won on the fifty-headed Volga's waves,
Shall we all offer to Zenocrate,
And then myself to fair Zenocrate.

--TAMBURLANE in Tamburlane the Great, Part One Act I, Scene ii

Marlowe's heroes are all anti-heroes, but by the time we arrive at The Jew of Malta the over-the-top villainy seems almost tongue-in-cheek and made me laugh aloud:

As for myself, I walk abroad o' nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls:
Sometimes I go about and poison wells;
And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves,
I am content to lose some of my crowns,
That I may, walking in my gallery,
See 'em go pinion'd along by my door.
Being young, I studied physic, and began
To practice first upon the Italian;
There I enrich'd the priests with burials,
And always kept the sexton's arms in ure
With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells:
And, after that, was I an engineer,
And in the wars 'twixt France and Germany,
Under pretence of helping Charles the Fifth,
Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems:
Then, after that, was I an usurer,
And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,
And tricks belonging unto brokery,
I fill'd the gaols with bankrupts in a year,
And with young orphans planted hospitals;
And every moon made some or other mad,
And now and then one hang himself for grief,
Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll
How I with interest tormented him.
But mark how I am blest for plaguing them;--
I have as much coin as will buy the town.
But tell me now, how hast thou spent thy time?

-- BARABAS to ITHAMORE in The Jew of Malta, Act I, Scene iii

In Dr. Faustus the poetry is yet more beautiful:

Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.
I will be Paris, and for love of thee,
Instead of Troy, shall Wittenberg be sack'd;
And I will combat with weak Menelaus,
And wear thy colours on my plumed crest;
Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel,
And then return to Helen for a kiss.
O, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appear'd to hapless Semele;
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa's azur'd arms;
And none but thou shalt be my paramour!

--FAUSTUS, Scene xiii

For me, the most poetic moment in Edward the Second, the story of the king who threw away his crown for love of a male favorite, is this:

MORTIMER
Why should you love him, whom the world hates so?
EDWARD
Because he loves me more than all the world.

The last play in this collection, The Massacre at Paris, is thought to be a badly mangled reconstruction based on the recollections of actors who had played it, not on a manuscript from the author. Still, the power of the anaphora in the Duke of Guise's speech in the second scene lodged in the memory of some actor and comes down to us today:

GUISE. Now, Guise, begin those deep engendered thoughts
To burst abroad those never dying flames
Which cannot be extinguished but by blood.
Oft have I levell'd and at last have learned
That peril is the chiefest way to happiness,
And resolution honour's fairest aim.
What glory is there in a common good,
That hangs for every peasant to achieve?
That like I best that flies beyond my reach.
Set me to scale the high Pyramides,
And thereon set the diadem of France.
I'll either rend it with my nails to nought,
Or mount the top with my aspiring wings,
Although my downfall be the deepest hell.
For this I wake, when others think I sleep;
For this I wait, that scorns attendance else;
For this, my quenchless thirst, whereon I build,
Hath often pleaded kindred to the King.
For this, this head, this heart, this hand, and sword,
Contrives, imagines, and fully executes,
Matters of import aimed at by many,
Yet understood by none.
For this hath heaven engendered me of earth;
For this, this earth sustains my body's weight,
And with this weight I'll counterpoise a crown,
Or with seditions weary all the world.
For this, from Spain the stately Catholics
Send Indian gold to coin me French ecues;
For this have I a largess from the Pope,
A pension, and a dispensation too;
And by that privilege to work upon,
My policy hath framed religion.
Religion: O diabole!
Fie, I am ashamed, how ever that I seem,
To think a word of such a simple sound,
Of so great matter should be made the ground!

[Kerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Christopher Marlowe died in 1593 in a tavern brawl. He was only 29 years old at his death, but reputedly one of the greatest dramatists in the English language and an inspiration for his contemporary Shakespeare. In his short life he wrote some poetry and six plays.

For a long time, I've been meaning to read Marlowe, particularly Doctor Faustus. Marlowe's verse is sublime, and much easier to read than Shakespeare, in my opinion—perhaps because Shakespeare wrote more in the common vernacular than the Cambridge-educated Marlowe, though I'm certainly no expert on Elizabethan dramatists. I can tell, nevertheless, that Shakespeare's plays are more complex and perhaps probe more deeply into the human condition.

I enjoyed all of Marlowe's plays, particularly The Jew of Malta and Doctor Faustus, perhaps less so Dido, Queen of Carthage and The Massacre at Paris. The story of the ruthless conqueror in Tamburlaine (Parts I and II) was, of course, stirring; the fate of homosexual protagonist in Edward the Second, destroyed by his barons, was sad but predictable.

I am glad, finally, to have read through Doctor Faustus, which had been at the back of my mind to do for many years. Faustus is a sorcerer who makes a deal with Lucifer, through Lucifer's agent Mephistopheles, for unlimited power and knowledge for 24 years in return for his soul. At the end, of course, Faustus is dragged screaming into Hell and eternal damnation. Throughout much of the play, however, I wondered at Faustus's lack of imagination. Predictably, he satisfies his lewd appetites; extends his knowledge of some of the sciences, at least as they were known of in Marlowe's time; and finds opportunities to play mischievous tricks on some of the great people of his time. Surely, however, he could have come up with something more meaningful in his 24 years of unlimited power. Why not overcome poverty and disease, for example? But then, I suppose, he wouldn't have been doing the devil's work.

Marlowe is worth reading. Those, like me, put off of Shakespeare because of the difficulties of the language may find in Marlowe a more approachable Elizabethan dramatist.

[Lysergius · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a bit of a loss to my challenge since this volume contains Dido, Queen of Carthage, Tamburlaine the Great, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward the Second, and the Massacre at Paris. That being said these are excellent plays, full of action and characterisation. They read easily despite the changes in the language, but footnotes are provided for clarification where a word has changed its meaning in the interim. I have thoroughly enjoyed reading these over the last few months, and I am at a loss to know how to fill the gap in my daily read now I have finished.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dido, Queen of Carthage

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2714395.html

This is the first play printed in the Complete Works although it's not clear if it was the first historically performed or written, published only the year after the authors death. Mostly it's a dramatisation of the Dido story from the Æneid, which would have been been well known to the audience (quite a different situation from the other plays where the stories are more original).

But Marlowe (with input from Nashe) bulks up two elements in particular. First, he gives Dido herself lots more to do and say than Virgil did. She is his only strong female protagonist, and although she is hopelessly and irrationally in love with Æneas (who is not such an attractive character here) this is not because she is a weak woman, it is because she is being toyed with by the gods; having been set up in a difficult situation by divine caprice, she otherwise retains agency to the end.

To the core love story, Marlowe adds a number of other romances (again, unlike his other plays and unlike the original story). Most obviously, the play opens by showing us the man/boy relationship between Jupiter and Ganymede. But there are other non-standard relationships too, and I'm struck that Marlowe was not playing them for laughs but as real situations in the terms of the story.

I wasn't able to find any audio or video of Dido online. That seems a shame to me; it's not too complex and I think would be particularly good on audio. It was apparently first written (or at least first performed) by child (=teenage) actors.

Tamburlaine (both parts)

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2715075.html

This is usually discussed as a single play in two parts, and I guess I agree with that, though it is notable that the two parts are set at least twenty years apart - the first ends with Tamburlaine marrying Zenocrate, by the start of the second they have three grown-up sons. I felt it had a tremendous energy; lots of violence and horrible death, a portrait of a monstrous leader who in the end is defeated not by battle but by illness. It's deliberately over the top, I think, and Shakespeare makes fun of the line "Holla ye pampered jades of Asia!" addressed by Tamburlaine to two captive kings harnessed to his chariot (in Henry IV part 2 II.iv).

A lot of commentators try to read Marlowe's own views into Tamburlaine, in particular extrapolating his supposed atheism from the scene in Part Two where Tamburlaine burns the Koran. It seemed pretty clear to me that this scene is about Tamburlaine breaking faith with his own former religion, just as he has broken faith with the Christian rulers in the first act and with his insufficiently violent son Calyphas, and we should not mistake the views and actions of the character for those of the author. That's not to say that Marlowe was not an atheist, just that I don't find this scene convincing evidence that he was (whereas I do find the opening scene of Dido convincing evidence that he was very comfortable with man-boy love).

I'm perfectly satisfied with Tamburlaine as a new form of entertainment rather than a political statement. This was apparently the first attempt to do an epic in blank verse; there's also vast amounts of conflict and spectacle - defeated opponents killed in various gory ways, Tamburlaine himself as a dominant character and aspirant force of nature, attempting to shape the world to his own liking and ultimately defeated not by Man but by entropy. It made Edward Alleyn's reputation when first produced. (It didn't make William Shatner's reputation, though he appeared in a Broadway production in 1956 as Tamburlaine's hanger-on Usumcasane.)

I've long been fascinated by the real Timur, and hope that some day I will be able to visit his tomb in Samarkand. Needless to say, Marlowe's narrative bears only the vaguest resemblance to the real history of his subject. Unlike Dido, where I think there's a didactic point about taking the Æneid and adding to it rather than varying, the point here is invention rather than history.

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2715412.html

This is a play with a beginning, a middle and an end. The beginning and the end are very good as Faustus makes his bargain with the devil and as he faces the inevitable price that he must pay. The middle is much weaker; having been granted immense power, all Faustus wants to do with it is play a series of silly practical jokes. The first of his targets is the Pope, but there doesn't seem to be any further point to Faustus's antics other than temporary humiliation of the powerful.

I guess it's partly an indication of the demands of the stage - "Chris baby, we've got these clowns in the company, you gotta write something for them, the crowd will love it" - but I felt that Goethe found more interesting things for his Faust to do, at least in Part I (Goethe's Part II rather disappears up its own erudition). Marlowe does try to turn this around to make it an Awful Warning about the price of knowledge and diabolical deals, but surely the average audience member will feel that we end up with a character flaw on Faustus's part, in that he doesn't seem to have considered how to use his great powers, rather than a general lesson for all of us.

Still, one can forgive a lot of Acts II, III and IV for the brilliance of Act I and especially Act V. At a rough estimate 95% of the well-known quotes from the entirety of Marlowe's works come from Faustus - including, I was surprised to see, "Che sera sera", but also the better known speeches: Faustus on Helen of Troy:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

Mephistopheles, on Hell on Earth:

Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.
Think'st thou that I, who saw the face of God
And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being deprived of everlasting bliss?

As a lapsed historian of astronomy, I have to comment on one of the more obscure exchanges between Faustus and Mephistopheles, which I think Wikipedia gets wrong (and therefore others may get it wrong too):

FAUSTUS. How many heavens or spheres are there?
MEPHIST. Nine; the seven planets, the firmament, and the empyreal
heaven.
FAUSTUS. But is there not coelum igneum et crystallinum?
MEPHIST. No, Faustus, they be but fables.
FAUSTUS. Resolve me, then, in this one question; why are not
conjunctions, oppositions, aspects, eclipses, all at one time,
but in some years we have more, in some less?
MEPHIST. Per inœqualem motum respectu totius.
FAUSTUS. Well, I am answered.

This is the secret of the universe, part of the new knowledge Faustus is getting as part of his deal. The Wikipedia entry suggests that Mephistopheles' answer to the third question ("Per inœqualem motum respectu totius" - "because of the unequal motion with respect to the whole") is evasive and demonstrates that he is fundamentally untrustworthy. I disagree; it is actually Faustus' question that is a really stupid one, and Mephistopheles' answer is pithy and perfectly reasonable and accurate. Perhaps it is from this point that Faustus realises that the secret of the universe is not really as interesting as it is cracked up to be?

The Jew of Malta

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2715659.html

I just loved this. Barabbas, the Jew of the title, is screwed out of his substantial property by the Christian rulers of Malta, and exacts revenge upon his enemies - at great personal cost, in particular as regards his own beautiful daughter Abigail. I paused after reading the first act, rather hoping that Barabbas would find some way of delivering his Christian oppressors into the hands of the Turks; well, without undue spoilers, I was more than satisfied by the way it ended.

Despite the grim subject matter (large numbers of violent deaths on and off the stage) there's also a deadpan humour about it, and I felt Marlowe was satirising both the cliches of bloody revenge (which I think are accepted rather less sceptically in Tamburlaine) and the unquestioning anti-Semitism of his times - Barabbas does end up as a villain, sure, but it is very clearly the Christians who have pushed him into it through state-sanctioned theft and humiliation - and if any religious group is subjected to cliche, it is the monks and nuns who were of course a focus of fear and disgust in Marlowe's England. Machiavelli introduces the play by saying, "I count religion but a childish toy", and I don't think that Marlowe is necessarily agreeing with him but I do think he is stressing that Christians can be every bit as evil as non-Christians (Machiavelli was also of course a tremendously loaded figure in Marlowe's England).

I found Barabbas a better rounded character than Shylock, to whom he clearly is closely related. Of course the Merchant of Venice is probably better in the end - the plot is less linear and more interesting, the other characters apart from the lead better rounded out - but the dialogue between the two plays is more equal than I had realised. And Barabbas gets one of the best lines in the whole of Marlowe, brought up before a tribunal of Christian clerics and accused of all manner of sins:

FRIAR BARNARDINE. Thou hast committed--
BARABBAS. Fornication: but that was in another country;
And besides, the wench is dead.

I'd really love to see this, more perhaps than any other of Marlowe's plays. I think the resonances with our own time could be played out in a way that would make an audience of today justifiably uncomfortable.

Edward the Second

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2716447.html

I'm often a bit suspicious of today's commentators trying to project their own interests onto past writers, often scrabbling in desperation from scraps of other evidence. I don't think Marlowe was an atheist, though I do think he interrogates the role of religion in society more than some did; I don't think Faustus is a coded commentary on Calvinism, though Marlowe presumably had his views.

But I do think that Edward II is consciously intended and written as an anti-homophobic text. There is zero room for ambiguity about the nature of the relationship between Edward and Gaveston (and later between Edward and the younger Spencer). Edward and Gaveston confess their love for each other to anyone who is listening (and many who are not). The opposition of the nobles to Gaveston's presence in the court is entirely about style rather than substance; in other words, it's purely that they object to the King having a male lover, rather than any policy decisions made by the King or influenced by Gaveston (or Spencer).

King Edward, of course, is not perfect - he is besotted to distraction with Gaveston; he is clearly being used by the Spencers in the middle section of the play; the immediate cause of his downfall is carelessness and hubris. But he gets some tremendous closing speeches as he awaits death in Berkeley Castle, and the message is very clearly that he is a martyr, who did not deserve what he got for being who he was. When I explained to my son that Marlowe is unusual in his portrayal of same-sex romance for his homophobic time, he replied with a pertinent question: "Why didn't he get killed, then?"

"He did," I replied.

The Massacre at Paris

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2717244.html

(Have you noticed that the title character of every Marlowe play except this one dies horribly - I refuse to believe that Tamburlaine's death, though of natural causes, is easy - and this one, the exception is actually named after a massacre?) Unfortunately there's not really much else to say about it. The surviving text seems likely to be a reconstruction by actors or playgoers rather than Marlowe's own script, one page of which has apparently survived elsewhere. There is a sequence of bloody deaths, and hints that Henry III is rather close to his minions (which to me feels off-key and not explicit enough), and we end with Henry III murdered, giving way to the Protestant Henry IV.

It's all a bit breathless, perhaps because the events in question were so recent - the massacre which dominates the early scenes took place in 1572, Henry III was killed in 1589 and the play is thought to have been performed in 1593, when several of the characters portrayed on stage were still alive and well. Henry IV of course converted to Catholicism in July 1593, blunting the historical point, but by then Marlowe had been dead for two months so I think he can be forgiven for not writing that into the plot.

For what it's worth, I think The Massacre at Paris does locate Marlowe's religious views as not terribly exceptional for his time. The Catholics are baddies (with some ambiguity about Henry III) and the Protestants good guys. This is not the "plague on all their houses" approach of Tamburlaine or The Jew of Malta. The most effective scene for me is the one in which Ramus and two Huguenot colleagues are killed by the rampaging Catholics.

No Doctor Who fan can look at this play without comparing it to the 1966 First Doctor story, The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve. However the differences are so comprehensive that there is almost nothing useful to say. In Marlowe the massacre itself is at the start of the story; in Doctor Who at the end. Apart from the King, the Queen and the Admiral, there are no characters in common between the two - notably, the Abbot of Amboise, who is crucial to the Doctor Who story, does not appear in Marlowe (due to being completely fictional). There may be some resonance between the scholars Preslin in Doctor Who and Ramus in Marlowe, but even there the differences are more numerous: Preslin survives, Ramus is killed; Preslin is alone, Ramus has colleagues. I don't think that either John Lucarotti or Donald Tosh can have been very aware of the Marlowe play, which doesn't seem to have been revived until 1981.

Final thoughts

In summary then, after reading the entire surviving set of Marlowe plays: I regret that it took me so long to get around to reading them. I find Marlowe's style generally crystal clear and very energetic without being too florid. You know exactly what is going on, and why the characters are doing what they are doing. In particular, he's powerful at the ol' blank verse, and he loves spectacular stage effects. I would jump at the chance to see The Jew of Malta or Edward II on stage.

But in fact the ambiguity in some Shakespeare plays is what makes them more interesting. The Henry VI trilogy and a few others are inferior to most of Marlowe, but the majority of Shakespeare's works have moved on to be more complex and provocative - this becomes particularly relevant when you compare The Jew of Malta with A Merchant of Venice. And Shakespeare does more interesting stuff with his stagecraft - Marlowe characters strut around declaiming grand speeches, and then there may be a big bang and certainly someone will get killed; but there's a lot more going on with Shakespeare.

The two are clearly in dialogue with each other. I picked up a few references on my own, and I admire (and am convinced by) those who have tracked down many more tips of the hat to Marlowe in Shakespeare. And having read the Marlowe plays, I think I now have a better understanding of Shakespeare's intellectual setting and what he was trying to do - building a new vision of theatre which of course draws from many sources, but Marlowe being one of the strongest of them. However, I very much enjoyed reading Marlowe in his own right. He was only 29 when he died (as violently as one of his characters); what might he have achieved if he had lived longer?

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was the summer of 2009. The fans hummed with a tired purr, Kolkata’s air was heavy with mango and mischief, and I was knee-deep in paint-splattered props, drama queen tantrums, and a stack of stapled scripts.

Our local club had roped me into organizing a marathon mini-theatre festival—a heady three-day immersion into English Renaissance drama. And because I apparently enjoy impossible challenges, I chose to Indianize Christopher Marlowe. Yes. Marlowe. Not Shakespeare, not Jonson. Marlowe—the swaggering, shadow-drenched playwright whose characters didn’t just speak poetry, they inhaled fire. I had read The Complete Plays years ago in college, but this time I wasn’t reading as a literature student. I was reading as a theatre director with five actors, three-and-a-half sets, no budget, and a radical vision: bring Marlowe to Bengal.

Revisiting The Complete Plays during those charged weeks was like rereading a letter from an old flame—only to find the fire still burns, and hotter. Marlowe’s six surviving plays—Tamburlaine the Great (Parts I and II), Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, and The Massacre at Paris—seethed with ambition, pride, desire, and the clash of cosmic wills. They were not plays of quiet reflection. They were lightning bolts—explosive, excessive, and utterly exhilarating. In those pages, I found the spirit of theatre that never apologizes. His characters speak in thunder, stride through kingdoms, and make pacts with the devil.

As I read Doctor Faustus again, this time sprawled on the floor with a highlighter and a cutting chai, I couldn’t help but smile: this was exactly what we needed.

Indianizing Marlowe wasn’t a gimmick—it was a love letter. Bengal has always had a deep love for theatre, from Jatra to Group Theatre to absurdist experiments in black box settings. I wanted to make Marlowe’s monumental themes speak in our tongue, in our soil.

I imagined Tamburlaine not as a Tatar conqueror, but as a Mughal warlord drunk on power and Urdu couplets. I saw Faustus not in a scholar’s robe, but as a Bengali intellectual trapped between parampara and pragati, negotiating not with Mephistopheles but with a digital-age Yaksha. Our Doctor Faustus wore a panjabi and debated salvation while sipping tea from a bhar. We turned The Jew of Malta into a parable about religious conflict in pre-partition Calcutta. Edward II became a stylized kathakali-meets-courtroom-drama, its homoerotic subtext no longer subtext but centerpiece.

The text lent itself beautifully. Marlowe’s blank verse—rolling, defiant, musical—was easily rendered into high Bengali, maintaining the cadence of awe. Where Shakespeare tempers his fire with wit, Marlowe lunges headlong into existential combustion. There was no middle ground in his plays, and that absolutism mirrored Indian mythic storytelling: love that destroys, rage that consumes, pride that dooms.

What struck me most, reading Marlowe amidst rehearsal chaos and prop disasters, was how urgently modern his themes were. Tamburlaine’s rise from shepherd to emperor could be mistaken for the biography of any populist leader on the subcontinent. Faustus’s thirst for forbidden knowledge felt eerily familiar in an India on the brink of digital and AI revolutions. Edward II’s doomed love for Gaveston wasn’t just about sexuality—it was about authenticity versus performative kingship. Sound familiar in an era of Instagram politics? The Jew of Malta doesn’t pull punches. It’s messy, offensive, complicated—and that raw discomfort made it a perfect mirror to post-9/11, post-Godhra India. Marlowe doesn't offer answers. He magnifies contradictions. And Indianizing him didn’t resolve those tensions; it sharpened them.

In breaks between rehearsal sessions, I dove into the historical Marlowe—the atheist, the spy, the enigma stabbed to death at 29.

I had always found Marlowe more alluring than Shakespeare, because he was literature’s bad boy. Shakespeare asked, “To be, or not to be?” Marlowe declared, “All that philosophy can teach me, I already know.” He was done asking. He wanted the crown of the world or the fires of Hell. There was a rumour going around—half joke, half folklore—that Marlowe was Shakespeare. Or at least the shadow he could never quite shake. But staging him made it clear: Marlowe is his own beast. Shakespeare listens. Marlowe interrupts.

We performed Tamburlaine the Great: Part I only, ending not with Quran-burning (as in the original) but with the symbolic destruction of a book of laws—recasting Tamburlaine as a Raktabeej-like figure, who could not be stopped, only contained.

Doctor Faustus was the showstopper. We performed it at dusk, under a makeshift arch lit by oil lamps. The Bengali Faustus broke down during his final soliloquy—his “O lente, lente currite noctis equi” was adapted into “ধীরে চলো, ধীরে চলো, রাত্রির ঘোড়া”—and the audience fell silent. It was a moment of collective exorcism. The Mephistopheles of our production wore dark kohl and a gold-stitched sherwani. He grinned like Kali. Edward II felt like a private confession. In many ways, it was Marlowe’s most tender and tragic.

We staged it in semi-classical costume, blending Kathakali mudras with Shakespearean blocking. The image of Edward clinging to Gaveston in jail while monks chant ominously in the background still haunts me. The Jew of Malta was difficult. We rewrote parts to de-emphasize anti-Semitism and focus on religious hypocrisy. Barabas became a trader in post-Partition Calcutta, navigating Muslim-Hindu-Christian politics. The audience squirmed, and that was the point. The Massacre at Paris—the final production—was staged not as a play, but as a multimedia barrage. Projected newspaper clippings flashed across a makeshift screen, interspersed with monologues echoing India’s own bloodied partitions.

Directing Marlowe in 2009 changed something in me. It made me confront the uneasy question: what is theatre for? Is it to comfort or to provoke? Is it a mirror or a hammer? Marlowe didn’t do polite theatre. He wrote like he was running out of time—and perhaps he was. That urgency infected all of us. And beyond the political, there was something hauntingly personal. In Faustus’s desperate cry for more time, in Edward’s plea for human connection, in Barabas’s hollow revenge, I saw reflections of myself, my country, my students, my neighbours. We are all, in some way, bargaining with angels and devils, aren’t we?

Fifteen years have passed since that festival. Some of the actors now live abroad, some work in theatre full-time, some vanished from the scene. But I still have the annotated Complete Plays on my shelf, spines cracked, sticky notes fluttering like prayer flags.

Reading it now, I realize that Indianizing Marlowe wasn’t a gimmick. It was recognition. These plays weren’t foreign—they were ancient echoes in a different tongue. They spoke of rasa, of karma, of moha and mukti, even if they didn’t use those words. Marlowe taught me that the stage is not a space of resolution. It is a battlefield of meanings. His work gave me permission to be bold, heretical, ecstatic, and flawed. And in the end, that’s what great literature does—it liberates us from smallness.

The Complete Plays by Christopher Marlowe isn’t just a collection of dramas—it’s a literary Molotov cocktail. Reading it in 2009, amidst the mess and magic of theatre-making, was transformative. Marlowe taught me to embrace contradictions, to stage the sacred and the profane in the same breath, to speak in thunder when the world whispers. He’s not Shakespeare’s understudy. He’s his burning twin in a darker mirror. And if you ever want to light a fire under your mind, pick up Marlowe. He won’t ask for your soul—but he’ll definitely tempt it.

[Florence Ridley · Rating 3 out of 5]

This edition had an interesting but outdated introduction and extremely limited explanatory notes.

'Dido, Queen of Carthage': three stars, a solid play but the side-romance was extremely underdeveloped and random.

'The First Part of Tamburlaine the Great': three stars, some beautiful speeches and lovely imagery but incredibly dull. Structured so that Tamburlaine meets a rival, declares that he will beat them, then the battle happens between scenes and he has in fact beaten them and practises some kind of BDSM on them. And repeat. For five acts. Gets bonus points for being bonkers.

'The Second Part of Tamburlaine the Great': four stars, the BDSM stuff gets even weirder, there is some insane theologising going on and I'm not sure who I am supposed to be rooting for. The naked kings being gagged and whipped could be very amusing in performance. Tamburlaine is absolutely nuts and I'm here for it. Unfortunately even this couldn't stop the same structure being very boring and every character other than Tamburlaine being literally replaceable with a cardboard cutout.

'The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus': five stars, it's literally Faustus. I actually teared up when I read it for the first time last year. And he goes invisible and beats up the Pope. Love it.

'The Jew of Malta': four stars, um this one was capital P Problematic but somehow also a good time? Idk I was rooting for Barabas.

'Edward the Second': three stars. Would have been two since it is so boring but gets an extra one because it's gay.

'The Massacre at Paris': one star, I get that it's propaganda but it didn't also have to be boring.

[Carlos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aclaro que de este volumen lo que estoy calificando en esta reseña es la obra "Edward II" de Marlowe, que he leído en inglés en esta edición.

Mañana haré la reseña.

[Robert Sheard]

Many readers have suggested that had Christopher Marlowe not been killed at age 29, he would have rivaled or surpassed Shakespeare as the preeminent Elizabethan playwright. I don’t see it, at least not based on the evidence of Doctor Faustus.

It’s a simple morality play and quasi-tragedy, but I don’t see anything approaching the dramatic impact or artistic quality of Shakespeare’s works. So let’s skip the unnecessary comparisons and talk about what Doctor Faustus actually is.

The story is well-known so I’m not going to be careful about spoilers. If you want to read it without knowing the details, stop reading this here….

… Still with me? Ok, then.

Doctor John Faustus is a theology scholar at Wittenburg University in Germany (the university where Hamlet studies in Shakespeare’s play). He’s a brilliant scholar, but he’s bored with academic studies and thinks philosophy, medicine, law, and theology have little to offer him intellectually. So he invites two magicians to teach him black magic and he decides he wants to become like a god and conquer the world.

In toying with conjuring, he attracts the attention of one of Lucifer’s devils, Mephistopheles, who appears to Faustus to see if he can steal another soul. Mephistopheles entices Faustus, and the professor offers to make a bargain with Lucifer. In exchange for twenty-four years of powers and knowledge (and Mephistopheles’ help), Faustus offers Lucifer his soul.

Of course, it’s a fool’s bargain, but Faustus is so full of pride he thinks he’s more clever than Lucifer and is immune from real punishment, especially when Mephistopheles tells him that Hell isn’t an actual place. Everyplace is Hell when one is cut off from God. Faustus can live with that.

Over the following twenty-four years, Faustus doesn’t conquer anything. Instead he’s essentially reduced to traveling throughout Europe, doing party tricks. And in the end, of course, Lucifer claims his half of the bargain.

The play is very clearly about the danger of pride. In the Prologue, Marlowe makes a reference to the fall of Icarus. In the discussion before Faustus signs the bargain, Mephistopheles goes over the history of Lucifer, who was cast out of Heaven because of pride. And at several times throughout the play, Faustus is given an out by good angels and others who try to get him to repent and turn back to God before it’s too late. Faustus either rejects that path because he still believes he’s better than mere mortals, or later because he thinks he’s beyond redemption.

There are several other ideas at play as well–mercy, free will, Faustus’ flawed judgment–but ultimately pride is the Deadly Sin that does him in.

The play’s brief, just fourteen scenes in the standard edition, and reasonably easy to read. And, of course, there are other important versions of the story, too (e.g., Goethe’s Faust). But even though I don’t think this puts Marlowe in Shakespeare’s league, it’s worth a read.

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marlowe is probably better known for his 007 reputation and murder than he is for his plays. A position which would probably stunned his 16th century contemporaries as he was arguably the most popular playwright of his day. Today it is mainly his Doctor Faustus which is given attention and this is probably his strongest work. Some of the themes of his other plays were covered more famously by Shakespeare (Jew of Malta vs. Merchant of Venice for example.) and it is interesting to compare how the two handled these issues. Considering that Marlowe has long been seen as a potential Shakespeare candidate it is fascinating to compare the works of these two. I can't say that I see any great similarities in style between them. Marlowe is fond of some flourishes which today seem a little overblown, although this attitude may in part be due to the ubiquitous nature of Shakespeare within the English language; Marlowe has 'is this the face which launched a thousand ships', while Shakespeare is thought to have introduced 3000 new words and phrases to the language the majority of which are still used today. However considering the disparity in lengths of career and output this is not a surprise. If he had lived it is possible he could have created even better work, as it is what we have of his is at times brilliant, and contains some wonderful characters, it seems a shame that these works, along with those of other greats of the period have been so obscured by the genius of Shakespeare. I would certainly like to see them performed more regularly.

[Kathe Koja · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are far more than a few editions of Christopher Marlowe's collected plays - some with scholarly introductions, some with essays interspersed - but which one you read matters less in the end than that you do read, explore, lose yourself, drench yourself in the unforgettable voice of these plays.

Dido the queen who pits her wits and heart against implacable fate; Tamburlaine, the shepherd turned warrior turned god of war; Barabas, the one man in Malta who knows the worth of everything in it; Faustus, selling himself to a devil he half-believes in for knowledge infinite; Edward whose kingdom means less than nothing compared to the man he loves; and the gory black comedy of the Guise and his Paris Massacre . . . Their stories are frightening, glorious, hateful, tender, tragic: and undergirded by a fierce and fleet and measuring intellect, unsurprised by evil, unafraid to show us how far the human mind will go to satisfy itself. And the writing, the rhythm, the voice! That voice.

[Brett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed Marlowe when we read Faustus back in my days an English major, and decided the revisit his work. This book is comprised of all seven of Marlowe's plays with short introductions to each.

Marlowe famously died under mysterious circumstances (he was possibly a spy). He was also Shakespeare's contemporary and rival. These plays are of varying quality, but almost all have their moments of pathos. If Elizabethan drama is your idea of a good time, then obviously Marlowe is a must read. If you don't harbor a love of this particular sort of literature, then I doubt this will engage you.

Faustus remains the strongest of the plays in my view, though less morally compelling than I remembered. Tamburlaine and Dido were also interesting reads. My favorite thing I learned from this volume was that there was evidently a rumor or belief that performance of Faustus actually had the power to call up demons out of hell in the theater. Now there's a production I'd like to see.

[Daniel Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

When you start with Marlowe's first play about Dido, you can easily see why he is considered inferior to Shakespeare. However, it rapidly improves from there - a string of haunting anti-heroes and a ruthlessly tragic perspective on the human condition.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sparky does a compare and contrast of the A-text and B-text of Doctor Faustus:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_8Yy...

[Bill FromPA · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dido, Queen of Carthage 8/27 - Those who love destroy themselves, ambitious Aeneas survives, a favorite of the gods. Perhaps a template for Marlowe’s later protagonists.

Tamburlaine; Part 1 9/4
Tamburlaine; Part 2 9/8

The Jew of Malta 9/20 - A nasty piece of work. This Guardian review of a recent Royal Shakespeare production presents the case for the work as a satire on anti-Semitism, but I’m not buying it. It is true that, for the modern reader, the evil practiced by Barabas, the titular Jew, is so over-the-top as to be ridiculous:

As for myself, I walk abroad o' nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls:
Sometimes I go about and poison wells;
And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves,
I am content to lose some of my crowns,
That I may, walking in my gallery,
See 'em go pinion'd along by my door.
Being young, I studied physic, and began
To practice first upon the Italian;
There I enrich'd the priests with burials,
And always kept the sexton's arms in ure
With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells:
And, after that, was I an engineer,
And in the wars 'twixt France and Germany,
Under pretence of helping Charles the Fifth,
Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems:
Then, after that, was I an usurer,
And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,
And tricks belonging unto brokery,
I fill'd the gaols with bankrupts in a year,
And with young orphans planted hospitals;
And every moon made some or other mad,
And now and then one hang himself for grief,
Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll
How I with interest tormented him.
But mark how I am blest for plaguing them;—
I have as much coin as will buy the town.

Added to this catalogue soon thereafter is an act that seems the apogee of caricatured evil-doing: Barabas and his slave Ithamore poison a whole convent of nuns, among whom is the desired victim, Barabas’ apostate daughter. Though any general criticism of Christian hypocrisy is put into the mouth of Barabas or the prologue’s Machevill, the action of the play includes some digs at the supposed greed and concupiscence engendered by Catholic monasticism, a criticism that would have gone over well in Protestant England.
My own impression that the play is more-or-less a straight piece of anti-Semitic propaganda, or at least would have been received and appreciated as such by its audience, coalesced when I tried to imagine a modernization. If a modern story set in the US depicted a wealthy Muslim businessman as a clandestine participant in a terrorist cell, there is no extent of murder or sabotage that would be too extreme or elaborate but that many Americans would find it not only creditable but likely. So I imagine did Elizabethan audiences believe in the depredations of Marlowe’s Jew.

Doctor Faustus 10/7 - This is probably the most widely read Elizabethan play not attributed to Shakespeare. Setting aside Edward II, which is still in my upcoming reading, the play represents Marlowe’s poetic and dramatic height so far. The play presents lots of opportunity for stage spectacle, but even on the page the power of the poetry and archetypal appeal of the story carry one along eagerly to the scene of Faustus’ last hour, the high point of the play.
Marlowe’s Faustus seems a modern man in a medieval world, but the problem with the play, at least when one reflects on it after the heat of the actual experience has cooled, is that the play’s working assumptions are medieval as well - the actual existence of God and Satan, heaven and hell, judgment and eternal damnation, so that Faustus’ modern ideas are, within this context, wrongheaded and disastrous. In this, he reminds me of the “skeptic” character who often appears in films about alien invasion. Skepticism about alien visitation is quite appropriate in the real world, but in a cinematic construct where half the citizens are walking around like zombies with strange bulges on their backs, it’s a pretty stupid position.
Not that Faustus’ Satanic adversary seems much brighter. He agrees to a contract where he provides 24 years of services up front for payment in full at the end of the period. The problem with this is an apparent escape clause that allows Faustus to void the contract by an act of repentance literally up to the 11th hour. A more iron-clad contract would better justify the extreme agonies Faustus suffers in anticipation of his end, but Marlowe nevertheless regularly introduces opportunities for the repentance and salvation of his protagonist; possibly good moral teaching, but bad dramatic logic.
For all the poetic extravagance and scenic opportunities, one likely show-stopper is glossed over. After the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins, this exchange occurs:

FAUSTUS. O, might I see hell, and return again safe,
How happy were I then!
LUCIFER. Faustus, thou shalt; at midnight I will send for thee.

Alas, nothing more is heard in the play about this apparently round-trip infernal visit.
Of the playwrights of this period that I’ve read during this recent project, Marlowe includes the most blatant anti-Catholic propaganda. Added to the greedy and concupiscent monks of The Jew of Malta, Doctor Faustus features an extended scene of satire and slapstick at the Papal court; and then there is Faustus’ instruction to the initially hideous Mephistophilis:

Go, and return an old Franciscan friar;
That holy shape becomes a devil best.

Edward II 10/21 - Edward mismanages his monarchy, resulting in the revolt of members of the nobility. The king’s offense is nominally his indulgence of a “flatterer”, Gaveston, whose extravagance has allegedly depleted the treasury. It is obvious that Gaveston and, later, the younger Spenser are homosexual lovers of the king, but this is never cited as a cause for revolt. The objections to the king’s male lovers are their profligacy and that they are “base and obscure”, but nevertheless advanced to office and title by the king before other nobles.
Many years ago I saw a film of this play by Derek Jarman in which, as I recall, Edward was presented as a sort of gay martyr. In reading the play, I found it hard to sort out the extent to which homosexuality is a cause of Edward’s downfall. Certainly his love for Gaveston leads him into a series of bad decisions, and Gaveston himself is both ambitious and vengeful toward the nobles who seek is downfall; the evidence in the play is that Gaveston reciprocates Edward’s love and is not merely exploiting the king’s adoration. That undeserved reward and extravagance rather than homosexuality is the issue seems confirmed by this exchange between elder Mortimer and his nephew:

Elder Mortimer
Leave now to oppose thyself against the king
Thou seest by nature he is mild and calm;
And, seeing his mind so dotes on Gaveston,
Let him without controlment have his will.
The mightiest kings have had their minions;
Great Alexander lov'd Hephæstion,
The conquering Hercules for Hylas wept,
And for Patroclus stern Achilles droop'd
And not kings only, but the wisest men;
The Roman Tully lov'd Octavius,
Grave Socrates wild Alcibiades.
Then let his grace, whose youth is flexible,
And promiseth as much as we can wish,
Freely enjoy that vain light-headed earl;
For riper years will wean him from such toys.
Younger Mortimer
Uncle, his wanton humour grieves not me;
But this I scorn, that one so basely-born
Should by his sovereign's favour grow so pert,
And riot it with the treasure of the realm,
While soldiers mutiny for want of pay.
He wears a lord's revenue on his back,
And, Midas-like, he jets it in the court,
With base outlandish cullions at his heels,
Whose proud fantastic liveries make such show
As if that Proteus, god of shapes, appear'd.
I have not seen a dapper Jack so brisk:
He wears a short Italian hooded cloak,
Larded with pearl, and in his Tuscan cap
A jewel of more value than the crown.
While others walk below, the king and he,
From out a window, laugh at such as we,
And flout our train, and jest at our attire.
Uncle, 'tis this that makes me impatient.

It should be noted that young Mortimer is a type of “Machiavel”, who has ambitions for the throne, so everything he says to another character has to be considered in terms of his ambition rather than necessarily reflecting his true opinion.
The Massacre at Paris 11/7

I was disappointed in re-reading the works of Marlowe, who is often held up as Shakespeare’s equal, albeit one who died while still maturing. His poetry soars and thunders, there are a lot of great speeches, and not one of his plays lacks its moments of rhetorical brilliance; but in most cases the dramatic situations and depth of characterization are lacking which would give the speeches consequence to the rest of the drama. I exempt Edward II and much of Doctor Faustus from this general criticism.

I was also struck with Marlowe’s anti-Catholicism in this reading. Though he was notorious, at least posthumously, for his “atheistic” opinions, I thought the criticisms of religion in his plays decidedly sectarian. The one unqualified hero (and consequently dullest of all his characters) in his plays is the King of Navarre in The Massacre at Paris, a champion of Protestantism.

[David]

Once in a while I return to Marlowe. This time, it's following reading three Marlowe-based novels in the past week. It's good to go back to the source (or as much as we have of it) of all the controversy.

[Yotpseudba · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tamerlane>Doctor Faustus>The Jew of Malta>Dido Queen of Carthage>Edward II>The Massacre at Paris

[Costangeles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marlowe îmi va plăcea mereu mai mult decât Shakespeare. Teatrul lui a fost primul pe care l-am găsit acceptabil, căci până la el detestasem orice operă de teatru citită. Temele lui sunt unice și extravagante, pline de substanță și îndrăzneală pentru vremurile lui. Marlowe a fost pe cat de șarmant, pe atât de curajos în ceea ce privește alegerea subiectelor pentru teatrul său și pot să spun fără teamă că Faustul creat de el este preferatul meu din întreaga colecție a mitului faustic.

[Noam]

June 19th-21st - Doctor Faustus

wtf..

presumably this was written for an audience - particularly of the royal kind - that was at the time peeved with formal catholicism and the pope, in line with some church of england nonsense or whatever, and that's how marlowe was able to write a play in which devils go around punching and playing pranks on bishops and cardinals and popes? anyways. those scenes were certainly amusing enough, in a slapstick from a time and place you know nothing of and have no idea they're doing but you can still appreciate weird people kicking each other in the arse and stuff sort of way, and a few of the scenes had some shakespeare-level dialogue, but the rest of this was a little bit of a drag. hoping for big things from other marlowe!
2.5/5

[Kristi · Rating 3 out of 5]

The only one of these plays that I had read before was Doctor Faustus, but it definitely fits in well among the rest of them. Marlowe managed to create plays in which there were none righteous, not even one. There were a few redeeming characters here and there, but for the most part those few redeeming characters would end up turning as soon as a good opportunity arose. This collection of plays provides a great look into the absolute evil that human beings are capable of, to each other and to themselves. For those looking for compelling plays from Shakespeare's time that do not come from the Bard himself, Marlowe's plays are a great place to start.

[Charles Matthews · Rating 3 out of 5]

What would Marlowe have become if he had lived? Would he have outgrown the predilection for elaborate stage mechanics -- the trapdoor fall into the cauldron in "The Jew of Malta", the fiery sodomizing of Edward II? -- and the wooden ranting of Tamburlaine and the over-the-top villainy of Barabas? Would he have learned how to create characters and not just villains and victims? "Doctor Faustus" remains his greatest play largely because its spine is the myth of the Fall, and because Faustus and Mephistopheles are among the few characters in his dramas that give an actor something to act, rather than just bark out iambic pentameter.

[Rachel Davoren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Honestly, I started reading Marlowe because historically, he was widely considered a better playwright than Shakespeare. And yes, I did truly enjoy his work. But...it must be the theater snob in me, because I just truly prefer Shakespeare's scenes and monologues. And yes, I will ALWAYS prefer Merchant of Venice to The Jew of Malta. I don't care if Marlowe inspired Shakespeare on that one, Jew of Malta is terrifying in its anti-Semitic tone and even if Merchant was considered a comedy in its time, at least Shylock was given many opportunities to steal the audience's collective heart. (Might not have been used much in those days, but that's sure how it's played now, thank god...)

[Steve Justice · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you liked Shakespeare, you'll love Marlowe. If you didn't like Shakespeare, you might still love Marlowe. There are even conspiracy theories that Christopher Marlowe wrote some of Shakespeare's more successful plays and if you read these, you'll understand why. Dr. Faustus, in particular, is a wonderful story and incredibly enjoyable to read. The only thing that would be better is seeing the real play!

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of Marlowe's seven plays, two - The Jew of Malta and Dr. Faustus - are masterpieces, two - Taburlaine Part I and Edward II - are great, and the other three are absolute and utter junk. I wish I could give Marlowe's complete works five stars but the disparity between his best and worst works is just far to big. I recommend reading only the above mention plays - you will be blown away!

[Robyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edward II: Edward is so annoying!! I don't think there was a likable character in this play at all. The ending was really crazy and disturbing but the penguin version doesn't do it justice.

Dr. Faustus: Probably one of my favorite plays ever!! The play is so dark and deals with the dangers of hubris and trying to learn and control things that we really shouldn't mess with.

[Chris Watson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marlowe is great, he's a lot of fun; but how anyone could imagine that he was the person who wrote Shakespeare's plays (a popular theory for a while) is beyond belief. Marlowe just isn't in the same league as Shakespeare. It's like comparing Donovan and Bob Dylan. Donovan's nice, but he ain't Bob Dylan; and Marlowe ain't Shakespeare.