Status Updates From Dark Renaissance: The Dange...

That Shakespeare does not mention Marlowe by name is entirely in keeping with the pastoral setting of the play: As You Like It is a story of shepherds and shepherdesses int he Forest of Arden. But it also captures something of the ambivalence in Shakespeare's relationship with Marlowe, an ambivalence that may have gone back to the first time they met to work together on plays for Henslowe.

Among the many additions that Marlowe made to the play's literary source, perhaps the most startling was his depiction of a passionate relationship between the magician and the devil. If a homoerotic element is playfully half-concealed in the scene with the boy who played Helen, it is far more open in Faustus's bond with Mephistopheles. "Lo, Mephistopheles, for love of thee / I cut mine arm."