Born in Canterbury in 1564, the
same year as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe was an actor,
poet, and playwright during the reign of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth
I (ruled 1558–1603).
Marlowe attended Corpus Christi College at Cambridge University
and received degrees in 1584 and 1587.
Traditionally, the education that he received would have prepared
him to become a clergyman, but Marlowe chose not to join the ministry.
For a time, Cambridge even wanted to withhold his degree, apparently
suspecting him of having converted to Catholicism, a forbidden faith
in late-sixteenth-century England, where Protestantism was the state-supported
religion. Queen Elizabeth’s Privy Council intervened on his behalf, saying
that Marlowe had “done her majesty good service” in “matters touching
the benefit of the country.” This odd sequence of events has led
some to theorize that Marlowe worked as a spy for the crown, possibly
by infiltrating Catholic communities in France.
After leaving Cambridge, Marlowe moved to London, where
he became a playwright and led a turbulent, scandal-plagued life.
He produced seven plays, all of which were immensely popular. Among the
most well known of his plays are Tamburlaine, The
Jew of Malta, and Doctor Faustus. In his
writing, he pioneered the use of blank verse—nonrhyming lines of
iambic pentameter—which many of his contemporaries, including William
Shakespeare, later adopted. In 1593,
however, Marlowe’s career was cut short. After being accused of
heresy (maintaining beliefs contrary to those of an approved religion),
he was arrested and put on a sort of probation. On May 30, 1593,
shortly after being released, Marlowe became involved in a tavern
brawl and was killed when one of the combatants stabbed him in the
head. After his death, rumors were spread accusing him of treason,
atheism, and homosexuality, and some people speculated that the
tavern brawl might have been the work of government agents. Little
evidence to support these allegations has come to light, however.
Doctor Faustus was probably written
in 1592, although
the exact date of its composition is uncertain, since it was not
published until a decade later. The idea of an individual selling
his or her soul to the devil for knowledge is an old motif in Christian
folklore, one that had become attached to the historical persona
of Johannes Faustus, a disreputable astrologer who lived in Germany
sometime in the early 1500s.
The immediate source of Marlowe’s play seems to be the anonymous
German work Historia von D. Iohan Fausten of 1587,
which was translated into English in 1592,
and from which Marlowe lifted the bulk of the plot for his drama.
Although there had been literary representations of Faust prior
to Marlowe’s play, Doctor Faustus is the first
famous version of the story. Later versions include the long and
famous poem Faust by the nineteenth-century Romantic writer Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe, as well as operas by Charles Gounod and Arrigo
Boito and a symphony by Hector Berlioz. Meanwhile, the phrase “Faustian
bargain” has entered the English lexicon, referring to any deal
made for a short-term gain with great costs in the long run.
