Marlowe: Doctor Faustus (1592)

A mysterious spy who wrote about the most captivatingly infamous intellectual of the time, Christopher Marlowe is among the most accomplished and enigmatic of the Elizabethan playwrights. Joining us today is Dr. Robert Sawyer, professor in the department of literature and language at East Tennessee State University. Professor Sawyer’s is the author of Shakespeare Between the World Wars, and Marlowe and Shakespeare: The Critical Rivalry.

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Doctor Faustus

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Transcript

A mysterious spy who wrote about the most captivatingly infamous intellectual of the time, Christopher Marlowe is among the most successful and enigmatic of the Elizabethan playwrights. Joining us today is Dr. Robert Sawyer, professor in the department of literature and language at East Tennessee State University. Professor Sawyer’s specialty is on Marlowe and Shakespeare. He is the author of Shakespeare Between the World Wars, and Marlowe and Shakespeare: The Critical Rivalry. 

C: Welcome Robert and how is your Summer going?

R: Hi, Claire. Thanks for the invitation to talk about two of my favorite playwrights. The summer has been busy. I'm currently teaching a summer Shakespeare course right now while we're talking. After returning from Barcelona earlier in the summer, where I was invited to present a paper actually on Marlowe's death, and we'll we will discuss more about that as we go along.

Let's start with the context. Marlowe’s spy identity is always the highlight among the Elizabethan playwrights. He was allegedly a spy working for the Elizabethan government at the time, but other scholars point out he was also possibly a double spy. What can we learn from this mysterious identity in relation to the political and religious climate of the time?

First some background: During his time working on his MA at Cambridge, he began to absent himself from the university for long periods of time, particularly in 1584 and 1585. And he also began to spend much more money in the “buttery,” where students would buy food and drink. When we combine the absences, with the increase in his funds on hand, and later was close to losing his scholarship and delay his graduation, Queen Elizabeth’s Privy Council (her most senior advisors), sent a letter to the Cambridge authorities stating that Marlowe “should be awarded his degree at the next commencement,” because he had “done her Majesty good service” during his absences that “benefited his country.” He was probably sent by the Queen to the English Catholic seminary in Rheims, France, where we know the students there were being trained young men for the priesthood, and preparing them to return to England in secret with the ultimate aim of converting England back to Catholicism.  

As most scholars agree, this was very dangerous work, since if discovered they would be tortured and then killed. This is just one instance of the larger historical context in England during Marlowe’s lifetime. As Stephan Greenblatt succinctly puts it “In the space of a single lifetime, England had gone officially from Roman Catholicism, to Catholicism under the supreme headship of the English King (the Anglican church) to a guarded Protestantism, to a renewed and aggressive Roman Catholicism (when Bloody Mary briefly took the throne), and finally to Protestantism again,” when Elizabeth was named Queen. One would have to be “extremely agile,” in Greenblatt’s words to survive the shifting religious winds. Marlowe was just one of many talented young men, who probably played both sides (pretending to want to convert to Catholicism, but actually reporting what he had seen and heard at the seminary to the Queen’s Privy council) and made good money doing so, along with the Queen’s favor. However, he seems to have enemies on both sides of the religious debate, and his personal temperament was often described as hot-headed and even violent.   

Among these conjectures of Marlowe’s death you just listed, what is your own take on the real reason for his death? And how Marlowe’s death affected the critical views of him as a playwright?

At 10 am on 30 May, 1593, Christopher Marlowe, Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres, and Robert Poley met at Eleanor Bull’s house in Deptford Strand, on the outskirts of London. The questions surrounding the meeting, which lasted over eight hours, include who decided to convene the meeting, why these four particular individuals were there, and why Dame Bull’s house was chosen as the locale. What we know for sure is that by the end of the meeting, Marlowe was dead, and the other three individuals claimed that he was killed by Frizer in an act of self-defense during an argument over the final hospitality bill (the reckoning) at the end of the day. While Marlowe was a violent man, I am not convinced he tried to stab Frizer, for he had not even brought a weapon to the meeting, although Frizer had. In addition, all of the other three men worked in some manner for Queen Elizabeth’s most trusted “spymaster” Sir Francis Walsingham. My personal view is that the Queen and her Privy Council decided that Marlowe knew too much about the plots and counterplots of the Monarch, and since he was reckless on many occasions, including one murder and one counterfeiting charge, they set him up for a false meeting in order to do away with a man who might reveal compromising information while under investigation. The murder also occurred in a space close enough to the Queen’s residence that William Danby, Coroner to the Royal Household would perform the autopsy, and shape the “official” account of the encounter. In any case, Marlowe was quickly buried close by, probably to keep the body from being dug up and reexamined, and within a month all charges against Frizer were dropped.  

The widely circulated accounts of his death began to occur about 5 years later by writers such as Francis Meres who reported that Marlowe was “stabbed to death by a bawdy  serving man, a rival of his lewd love” in 1598.  Although two years later William Vaughan got much closer to the truth when he wrote that the murder occurred in Deptford (outside London) where he met a group of three men, all with connections to the shadowy underworld of Elizabeth’s spy network.  Vaughn claimed that Marlowe tried to “stab Ingram but missed,” and Ingram, drawing out his dagger in self-defense, stabbed Marlowe into the eye “in such sort that his brains came out at the dagger’s point, and shortly after he died,” according to this account because he had denied God and the Trinity. As I note in my book, although a number of works after Marlowe’s death praised him, the scenario set up by Meres and then Vaughan, that Marlowe’s death was “poetic justice for the ungodly became the norm.” 

 I believe that this attempt to vilify Marlowe marked in some ways the opposite of boundaries of the two most successful boundaries of Elizabethan dramatic writers: one witty, intellectual and Multifaceted, the other fevered, emotive and especially bombastic, the contrast between “gentle Will Shakespeare” and blasphemous “Kit Marlowe,” a dichotomy begun even in their own lifetimes between sympathy for Shakespeare and antipathy for Marlowe which lasted well into the 19th century.

I read from your book Marlowe and Shakespeare: The Critical Rivalry that it was not uncommon for Elizabethan playwrights to collaborate with each other. And often, their rhetorics can be found closely resembling each other, like some of Shakespeare’s plays allegedly cross-referenced Marlowe’s plays or are the direct influence of Marlowe. As modern scholars still look for evidence of collaborations between Marlowe and other writers, in 2016. One publisher was the first to endorse the scholarly claim of a collaboration between Marlowe and Shakespeare:  Henry VI by William Shakespeare is now credited as a collaboration with Marlowe in the New Oxford Shakespeare series, published in 2016. Marlowe appears as co-author of the three Henry VI plays, though some scholars doubt any actual collaboration. Now some of these intertextual references have even gone further and bolder: an argument has arisen about the idea that Marlowe even faked his death and then continued to write under the assumed name of William Shakespeare while academic consensus also rejects alternative candidates for authorship of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, including Marlowe. Then we also have other critics viewing Marlowe and Shakespeare’s relationship as one of a rivalry. How would you define their relationship? I read from your book Marlowe and Shakespeare: The Critical Rivalry that it was not uncommon for Elizabethan playwrights to collaborate with each other. And often, their rhetorics can be found closely resembling each other, like some of Shakespeare’s plays allegedly cross-referenced Marlowe’s plays or are the direct influence of Marlowe. As modern scholars still look for evidence How popular were Marlowe’s plays at the time? Could you shed some light on the knowledge about audience composition and theater goers at the time? 

First, there is little doubt now that the two knew of each other, even if they never met. For example in Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, Marlowe is the “dead shepherd” Phoebe mourns over, specifically when she speaks the line “who ever loved that loved not at first sight,” a line taken directly from Marlowe’s poem “Hero and Leander.” Moreover, when Touchstone the clown in Act 3 claims that “when a man’s verses cannot be understood . . . it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room (3.3.10-13), the lines are almost certainly a reference to Marlowe’s murder, which occurred as we noted earlier in Elenor Bull’s boarding house in Deptford, over the “reckoning” of the bar tab at the end of the meeting. 

These intertextual allusions between Marlowe and Shakespeare suggests a veiled dramatic dialogue between the two in their plays, and the superb Marlovian critic Robert Logan believes that “Shakespeare performed an “intellectual adaptation” of many of Marlowe’s themes in his own plays. One only need to think of the ambitious overreacher Doctor Faustus and compare him to Shakespeare’s Macbeth to see parallels between their works.  

To return to the New Oxford Shakespeare published in 2016: 

When the inventive collection of Shakespeare’s plays called the New Oxford Shakespeare (ed. Taylor, et al ) burst on the scene (2016-17), it drew numerous reviewers, both in the UK and abroad, and many led their essays with clickbait headlines such as the following one in the New York Times: “Shakespeare may have had a little more help than previously suspected.” It went on to detail that the New Oxford collection “lists Christopher Marlowe as Shakespeare’s co-author on the three Henry VI plays, parts 1, 2 and 3,” the correspondent emphasizing that “It’s the first time that a major edition of Shakespeare’s works has listed Shakespeare’s colleague and rival as a co-author on these works” (Shea NYT, online).  

 The more important point is that the names of both authors — Marlowe and Shakespeare — are printed on the title page of all three parts of Henry VI. In the same Time article, the volume’s general editor, Gary Taylor, admitted that it was “perfectly reasonable” not to include Marlowe’s name on the plays in earlier editions of the play, even though speculation has long suggested that the Henry VI plays were a collaborative effort; numerous other contemporary dramatists, such as Robert Greene, George Peele, and Thomas Nashe were often mentioned, along with Marlowe. The only reason Marlowe’s name can now be definitively added, according to Taylor, was because “Shakespeare has entered the world of big data,” and no editors before have “had the confidence” to put Marlowe’s “name actually on the title page” (Shea, NYT online). Taylor’s team of two dozen researchers used numerous textual analyses to conclude that Marlowe wrote “most of Henry VI, part 1 while Shakespeare wrote the largest share of Part 3” (Shea NYT online). The “[l]ead authorship on Part 2,” Taylor confessed, is “harder to identify” (Shea NYT online). In short, their findings make Marlowe, at the very least, a confirmed contributing author of the three parts of Henry VI.  

 In the New Oxford’s “Introduction” to The Third Part of Henry the Sixth, for example, Taylor elaborates more specifically on Marlowe’s output vis-à-vis the team’s textual analysis. Although Marlowe’s name was often invoked when discussing his involvement with any of the Henry VI plays, Taylor rightly reminds us that Marlowe was often used as a “scapegoat” who was “responsible” for sections of the plays that editors “considered unworthy of Shakespeare” (New Oxford Shakespeare, 333). Now, however, Taylor reversed this notion by praising Marlowe’s contributions, such as the opening of the Third Part, where the team realized that Marlowe’s reputation for “breathtakingly powerful, original beginnings” seems most obvious, specifically the way the writer “dramatically dissects the polarized, entrenched extremism that makes civil war unavoidable” (333). Taylor was also quick to note that “Shakespeare’s later scenes” in the play, add “poetry and pity,” along with “lyrical depictions of the English countryside” in this semi-historical treatment of the drama (333).   

Are there any concerns with this new attribution / designation?

Heather Hirschfeld warns that “we should not be blind” to the appeal “of big-data analysis within the academic community,” particularly in this time of an assault on the humanities. She concludes by pointing out that it is “an irony worth noting that these explicitly ‘humanist’ scholars are now enabled by what seem like the de-humanizing, mechanizing, and economizing work of computerized number crunching that turns style into machine-readable coordinates” (Hirschfeld 2016: 24). 

 Even proponents of Digital Humanities (DH) admit, however, and this seems key, that “the research interest changes from solving a traditional humanist research problem,” such as who was the author of a specific literary work, “to an algorithmic problem” deciding which “algorithm is most effective in establishing the author of a new text,” and then into a mathematics problem, answering the questions of “why it is that the most effective algorithm performs so well, word etymologies, metaphors and metaphrends, imagery [and] other rhetorical figures” they could then be used in conjunction with computational analysis so that one could find a “best-fit attribution algorithm” (2018: 16). 

 How popular were Marlowe’s plays? 

His two part play Tamburlaine Parts 1 and 2 were the production that, according to Tom Rutter, were the “plays that gave Marlowe an immediate and lasting notoriety and they were commented on by not only other contemporary playwrights, such as Robert Greene and George Peele who attempted to imitate it in their plays, and from 1594 onwards it was a staple at the Rose Theatre just a short distance from the Globe theatre. Setting the play far from England also allowed Marlowe to avoid any charge of political or religious complaints or censure ship. 

It was so well known that even Shakespeare mimicked some of the lines from the play in the mouths of at least one character: In the second part of Henry IV, for example, the character Pistol bungles the first lines of Marlowe’s play, describing, “the hollow pampered jades of Asia / Which cannot go but thirty miles a day,” knowing full well his audience—composed of a virtual cross section of the society, including apprentices, lawyers, soldiers and even aristocratic families--would catch the verbal echo from Marlowe’s work. These early “spectator critics,” as I call them in my book shaped the types of plays performed with the pennies they used to attend the performances. Some critics panned the main character, since he was a lowly Shepherd at the start, but over the course of the play became a mighty conqueror, who, to this day, is considered a heroic figure who is still revered in that part of the world. For evidence, we only need to look at one of the terrorists of the Boston Marathon bombings in 2013, where the older brother was named Tamerian Tsarnaev.         

As you just mentioned that these playwrights need to provide enough fare to satisfy the growing demand of the public playhouses. Because of this high demand of the theater-goers, group-writing and even ghost-writing had occurred. As a matter of fact, ghost-writing marks a prominent feature of the theatrical production of the Renaissance plays. Could you show us what the process of making a play through collaboration was like, and how ghost-writing reflects the Elizabethan intelligentsia in particular, as well as the personal, political, social, and even religious turmoil at the time?

According to most critics to increase productivity and add to the variety of plays, which were performed 6 days a week, almost every single playwright working in the period from 1580-1625 contributed to multi-authored texts, but it is hard to generalize about the exact method they used, maybe in pairs, trios, or quartets certainly in the case of the Admiral’s Men, who performed Marlowe’s plays. But because each author had different habits and different ambitions for their plays, any single scenario would be mistaken, in part because Henslowe’s stable of writers, for example, came from sometimes drastically dissimilar backgrounds—the sons of gentlemen, livery company Freeman, tradesmen, and even law students, and those varied backgrounds affected their method of composition as well as their ideas about the “profession” and their professional status within it.    

Overall, I would say that the way playwrights worked together would be more like a group of screenwriters today, although often there would be a “plot” writer and then others might fill in individual characters and their speeches. And they would even revise the plays after they had been performed. As we just noted, Marlowe often set his plays far from the London political scene, and, lest we forget Doctor Faustus begins and ends in Wittenberg, Germany, where the Protestant reformation began with Martin Luther leading the way. But they all had in common was an “awareness of the norms of the market” and the “boundaries of a profession profession develop out of conflict—conflict between producers and consumers […] and between groups of producers, according to Ed Gieskes and Kurt Melnikoff.   

In the Hackett edition of the doctor Faustus’s text by David Wootton, the editor presented us three extant versions: A-text, B-text and a direct translation from the German account of a biography of Johann Fausten, also known as “the English Faust Book.” What can we learn from these different versions? 

Both the A and B versions of the text depict an ambitious overreacher, who like Tamburlaine and Marlowe himself, came from a working class population (his father was a cobbler who made shoes), who rose to prominence by their determination, the former in the art of war, the latter as a famous Scholar, who had mastered all the intellectual pursuits possible to him, from his M.A. in the humanities and sciences (more on that to come) to his degree in Law, to his M.D. in religion (it is noted in the play that he had, even before the play begins) saved “whole cities from the plague”; however, that was not enough, for he wanted God-like powers where he could command servants of Lucifer, such as Mephistopheles, to do his bidding. The B-Text, which was probably partly composed by Samuel Rowley and William Bird and in 1602, long after Marlowe’s death, seems to be more anti-catholic than the A-text. For example in the B-text, the scene of Faustus taunting the Popes and cardinals on a visit to Rome is extended and even new characters are introduced, specifically to make fun of Catholicim in general, and the Pope in particular. One might even say that Faustus’s death in the B-text, where he is torn to pieces is a more physical, and perhaps more Catholic punishment than  his death in the A-text, where he is merely pulled down into hell (through the stage door). Nonetheless, the epilogue, spoken by the chorus after Faustus’s death, is exactly the same in both versions; warnings not to be like the protagonist: “Regard his hellish fall,” and never “practice more than heavenly power permits.” 

The “Faust Books” seem to be based on a real historical figure who dabbled in the black scientific arts, including necromancy and astrology, while Marlowe’s is based more on a mythological compilation of characters who chose to “practice” devilish deeds. While many of the plot details are the same, I think the single most important difference with the Faust book is that in Marlowe’s versions of the “deal with the Devil” and the contract he signs allowing him 4 years of unbridled power, is actually drawn up by Faustus in Marlowe’s version, a major departure from the Faust Book, where the contract is produced by the Satanic beings. It seems to me that Marlowe was placing even more responsibility on his protagonist by drawing up the terms of his own contract for life. In any event, as Matthew Martin succinctly concludes, although the protagonists of each version may “possess the same name, the Faustbook’s Faustus and Doctor Faustus Faustus are not the same character” (22).        

How to read Doctor Faustus meaningfully and effectively? What are the major themes and modes of reading of the play? 

While there are too many major themes to list them all, including focusing on theology (I often have students write essays on “When” Faustus is damned: when he signs the contract the first time, or when he puts his signature on it the second time, or toward the end of the play, when he has a long passionate kiss, with the Helen of Troy succubus in Act 5. 

I also think a post-humanist reading would be the most au corrant reading today as I point out in a recent article on how “actants,” living throbbing matter, can challenge our own human agency.   Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus focuses on a Wittenberg graduate who has tired of all the traditional training he learned in multiple disciplines, including rhetoric, jurisprudence, and even the field of medicine, which allowed him to save whole cities from dangerous outbreaks of disease. But these accomplishments are not enough to satisfy him, so like Shakespeare’s Prospero, he begins to study “magic,” which he claims has ravished him; however, unlike Prospero, Faustus engages in more dangerous pursuits, such as his attempts to raise the dead, and in exchange for this god-like power, he offers his soul to Satan.   

In Act 1, Scene 3 of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, the protagonist rehearses his conjuring mantra by speaking aloud the following words: “Lines, circles, signs, letters, and characters / Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires” (A-text, 53-54). Recent literary critics such as David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen suggest that letters allude to those in Jehovah’s name, which will be written “Forward and backward” and “the characters seem to be cabbalistic signs or emblems such as astrological symbols for the planets” (n. 53. 114). While they agree with most interpretations that the lines in Faustus’s speech are probably the ones Faustus traces around his body, they further remind us that lines were “also used in geomancy,” which is “the art of divination through signs derived from the earth”; according to this interpretation, the standard “method was to jot down lines and dots at random and then interpret them” (114). 

Although we might scoff at such power in dots and lines to form mystic signs, we should recall that early computer displays also employed “lines” and “dots,” especially when using a dot matrix printer to display a computer’s data collection. By employing closely-spaced dots, this computer printing also miraculously freed the machine from being limited to a single set of letters and numbers, such as on a typewriter. Often paired with a daisy wheel in the shape of a circle, these printers and could not only print line by line, but also left to right and then right to left—“forward and backward”— in other words, just like the order and reverse order of Faustus’s speech. By accelerating the transfer of informational signs, usually using input from a technical expert, these printers occasioned a hybrid meeting of man and machine which produced on the printed page what N. Katherine Hayles refers to as a “material-semiotic object” (Writing Machines, 2002: 15).     This type of “material,” meaning objects and “semiotic” meaning concepts, also allows for connections between literary and scientific investigations urging us to read anew relations between objects, animals, and humans by granting all three some agency.  For digital scholars today, “lines” have morphed into strings of XML code, “circles” are produced by Computer Aided Design (CAD) programs, “signs” have become Unicode symbols, and “characters” seem omnipresent in digitized texts. Even though we designate such esoteric “objects” as having no connection between Faustus’s recitation and today’s algorithmic processes, the correlation between them is quite close.

While neither Faustus, nor Marlowe or Shakespeare for that matter, would have used a computer of any kind, in both moments of conception, a “command” is made — by a pen in Marlowe’s or Shakespeare’s hand, by a voice in Faustus’s and Prospero’s case, or by a keyboard or a touch screen today—to initiate the process. Moreover, posthumanism, as we will see, suggests that the humans in this network of “characters,” “signs,” “circles,” and “letters” may possess only as much agency as the objects, or “actants,” they are allegedly commanding. The term “actant” also, as Latour adds, allows literary critics to look more seriously at the “agency of a magic wand, a dwarf [or] the thoughts of a fairy’s mind,” or in Marlowe’s play the agency of demons and semi-human characters. As Latour concludes, “novels, plays, and films from classical tragedy to comics produce a vast playground to rehearse accounts of what makes us act” (2005: 54-55).