Study Guide to Faustus and Other Works by Christopher Marlowe

BRIGHT NOTES: Faustus and Other Works

www.BrightNotes.com

No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For permissions, contact Influence Publishers http://www.influencepublishers.com

ISBN: 978-1-645420-64-4 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-645420-65-1 (eBook)

Published in accordance with the U.S. Copyright Office Orphan Works and Mass Digitization report of the register of copyrights, June 2015.

Originally published by Monarch Press.

Peter F. Mullany, 1965

2019 Edition published by Influence Publishers.

Interior design by Lapiz Digital Services. Cover Design by Thinkpen Designs.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data forthcoming.

Names: Intelligent Education

Title: BRIGHT NOTES: Faustus and Other Works

Subject: STU004000 STUDY AIDS / Book Notes

CONTENTS

1) Introduction to Christopher Marlowe

2) Doctor Faustus Detailed Summary

3) Background of the Play

4) Character Analyses

5) Critical Commentary

6) Tamburlaine the Great Textual Analysis

Part 1

Part 2

7) The Jew of Malta Detailed Summary

8) Edward the Second Detailed Summary

9) Essay Questions and Answers

10) Bibliography

INTRODUCTION TO CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

Christopher Marlowe was born in 1564, the year of Shakespeare’s birth, in the city of Canterbury. Records indicate that Marlowe was baptized on the twenty-sixth day of February. Marlowe’s family was a prosperous one, and his father was a member of the Shoemaker’s Guild. Before he was fifteen years old, Christopher Marlowe entered the King’s School, Canterbury on a scholarship, and slightly less than two years later he went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. As a recipient of an Archbishop Matthew Parker Scholarship to Cambridge, it was expected that Marlowe would take holy orders and enter the clergy.

Marlowe took his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1584 and by 1587 it was acknowledged that he had earned the Master of Arts degree; however, the university authorities refused to grant the Master’s degree. The Queen’s Privy Council intervened to deny a report that Marlowe had gone beyond the seas to Rheims, and the Council went on to state Because it was not her Majesty’s pleasure that any one employed as he had been in matters touching the benefit of his Country should be defamed by those that are ignorant in th’ affairs he went about. The University withdrew its refusal and granted the degree to Marlowe. The University’s initial refusal undoubtedly stemmed from a suspicion that Marlowe had converted to Roman Catholicism, for Rheims was at the time a center for English Catholics and for political disaffection. This suspicion may well have been heightened by Marlowe’s refusal to take orders in the Anglican Church. At any rate the interference by the government in Marlowe’s behalf in the degree matter and the Privy Council’s document clearly indicate that Marlowe was engaged on a mission of some political importance. Though the exact nature of the mission is unknown, Marlowe may at this time have had some connection with the elaborate espionage network that Elizabeth had operating abroad to maintain a close watch on Catholic activities.

LITERARY CAREER

Christopher Marlowe’s literary career spans the period 1587-1593, six years in which he was to establish himself as a major poet and dramatist. His first dramatic association seems to have been with the Lord Admiral’s Men, a dramatic company, which produced his play Tamburlaine, which brought to the English popular stage a superman hero motivated by the thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown. This play was such a popular success that Marlowe wrote a sequel titled Tamburlaine, Part II: both plays were printed together in 1590. Lord Strange’s Men produced Marlowe’s next two plays, The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris. The Jew of Malta may be dated between 1589 and 1593. Lord Pembroke’s Men produced Edward II which was probably written in 1591 or 1592. The same company probably produced Doctor Faustus which was written in late 1592 or early in 1593. Marlowe’s other works include Dido Queen of Carthage, a play based closely on Virgil’s Aeneid. Dido may have been written during Marlowe’s Cambridge days. While a student of Cambridge, Marlowe translated the Amores of Ovid and the first book of Lucan’s Pharsalia. He is also the author of a lengthy narrative poem Hero and Leander which was completed by Marlowe’s friend and fellow poet-dramatist George Chapman. Hero and Leander, together with Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and his The Rape of Lucrece, are outstanding examples of a type of erotic poetry which became fashionable in the later years of the Elizabethan period.

THE BRADLEY AFFAIR

In September 1589, Marlowe and a friend named Thomas Watson were involved in a sword-fight in which Watson killed a man named William Bradley, who was the son of an innkeeper. It seems that Bradley had cause to suspect Watson because he had asked the authorities for sureties (assurances) of the peace against Watson. The upshot of the affair was the Marlowe and Bradley were acquitted after stays of one week and five months respectively in Newgate Prison. It was the judgment of the authorities that Watson, who fatally stabbed Bradley, had acted in self-defense. The episode is important because it marks the beginning of Marlowe’s involvement with legal authorities and opens the dramatic series of events which led to his mysterious murder in a tavern brawl in 1593.

MARLOWE AND CHARGES OF ATHEISM

Biographies of Marlowe have often taken an excessively romantic view of his career by emphasizing his free-thinking spirit. A view of Marlowe as a rebellious Renaissance spirit thrusting against the shackles of accepted belief and authority is largely biographical fiction, the product of biographers with a regard for invention. Much of this view is also caused by a too close identification of Marlowe the man with the dramatic supermen who are his tragic heroes-Faustus and Tamburlaine for example. Atheism in the Renaissance meant an active hostility to God and religion; it identified many types of skeptical or naturalistic thinking. Marlowe was first charged with atheism by Robert Greene in Perimedes the Blacksmith (1588), and again in Groats-worth of Wit (1592) which was written shortly before Greene’s death. Greene, like Marlowe, was an important dramatist of the time and among his works are Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay; James the Fourth; and George a Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield. The charges of atheism against Marlowe played an important part in the final events of his turbulent life.

MARLOWE’S DEATH

On May 12, 1593 Thomas Kyd, dramatist and author of The Spanish Tragedy (1590), was arrested and charged with atheism. Kyd was suspected of being involved in political disorder. His quarters were searched and he was put to the torture. Papers of an heretical type were found in Kyd’s quarters, and Kyd claimed that the documents belonged to Marlowe, who had shared his quarters in the year 1591. After Marlowe’s death in 1593, Kyd wrote two letters to the Lord Keeper, Sir John Puckering, in which he repeated in detail his charges against Marlowe. Kyd said that Marlowe had refused holy orders in the Anglican church and had practiced atheism to such an extent as to jest at the divine scriptures, gibe at prayers, and strive in argument to frustrate and confute what has been spoken or written by prophets and such holy men. Kyd also connected Marlowe with a school of atheism or school of night, whose members included: Thomas Harriott, a mathematician; George Chapman, the dramatist and poet; Sir Walter Raleigh, an important court figure as well as a leading intellectual of the day; and the poets Matthew Roydon and William Warner.

Thomas Kyd, however, was not the only one to come forward at this time with charges of atheism against Marlowe. A certain Richard Baines, shortly before Marlowe’s death, informed the Queen’s Privy Council of a lecture that Marlowe had delivered wherein Marlowe uttered such atheistical blasphemies as: That the first beginning of Religion was only to keep men in awe, and That Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest. No matter how unreliable Baines might be, the cumulative weight of the evidence points to the fact that Marlowe had the reputation among his contemporaries of being a religious skeptic and of being unorthodox in his philosophical beliefs.

On May 18, 1593 the Queen’s Privy Council issued a warrant for Marlowe’s arrest; on May 20, 1593 Marlowe was back in London and was ordered to be in daily attendance upon the Council. Ten days later Marlowe was invited to dinner at Deptford, a short distance from London, at a tavern owned by a widow named Eleanor Bull. Ingram Frizer and Nicholas Skeres, boh swindlers, and Raymond Poley, a double-spy, were present with Marlowe at this dinner. All of these men were connected with an espionage ring run by Walsingham. After a day-long drinking bout, an argument erupted over the reckoning, or bill. When Marlowe attacked Frizer, Frizer retaliated and stabbed Marlowe above the right eye. Marlowe died instantly. This at least was the official version, for it seems that Marlowe may well have been lured to a planned assassination. Perhaps something in connection with the espionage activities of Sir Thomas Walsingham may have contributed to Marlowe’s death.

CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNTS OF HIS DEATH

Contemporary accounts of Marlowe’s death viewed it as an example of divine providence punishing a blaspheming atheist. Thomas Beard in his Theatre of God’s Judgements (1597) charged Marlowe with being an atheist, a poet of scurrility, a blasphemer whose death revealed the justice of God punishing heinous sin. Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia (1598) used the Beard account and repeated charges of epicureanism and atheism against Marlowe. Meres added that Marlowe had been killed by a serving-man who was a love-rival. William Vaughn in Golden Grove (1600) provided some factual material by mentioning Deptford and a man named Ingram. Yet this account, too, mentioned Marlowe’s atheism. One strongly suspects that the inaccuracies of these contemporary accounts could well be attributed to a deliberate plot against Marlowe. Marlowe’s murderers were all pardoned, and this further builds the suspicion that Marlowe