Compare and contrast the lives of Christopher Marlowe and Dr. Faustus

Introduction

The most brilliant of the early Elizabethan playwrights, Christopher Marlowe, was born at Canterbury to a family of humble origins. A life of pure brilliance, espionage, and limitless potential is the only way to describe the life of legendary Renaissance author Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe was baptized on February 26, 1564 in the town his birth, Canterbury. This paper has significant and comprehensive comparison and contrast of Marlowe's real life and his life as Dr. Faustus.

Thesis

The play becomes even more intriguing by examining the parallels between Marlowe the author and his character Faustus. Both Marlowe and his fictional alter ego, dr. John Faustus are similar in their education, their lifestyle, and, ultimately, their wasted potential.

Discussion

In 1579 Marlowe received a scholarship as a Queen's scholar to the King's School—a school with a reputation for producing and performing plays. The following year he entered Cambridge and matriculated at Corpus Christi College as a candidate for the Anglican priesthood. He received his B.A. in 1584. That same year, Marlowe apparently became a spy in the service of the Star Chamber of Lord Burghley, and although he was enrolled in college as a master's candidate, he was often absent on secret government business. The following year (1585) began his recorded period of literary activity with his translations of Ovid's Amores and Lucan's epic Pharsalia on the subject of the war between Pompey and Caesar. In 1586, perhaps in collaboration with Thomas Nashe, Marlowe wrote his first drama, Dido, Queen of Carthage, and he began his pair of historical dramas tracing the career of the 14th-century Turkic conqueror, Tamerlane, who led an army of nomadic Mongols in wars of conquest against Transoxania, Persia, northern India, the Ottomans, the Mamluks, and, unsuccessfully, the Chinese. The Lord Admiral's Company acted the first of these dramas, Tamburlaine the Great, Part I, in 1587 (Downie, p.56-65).

Christopher Marlowe in Doctor Faustus, one of the earliest and the most famous non-Shakespearean Elizabethan tragedies, manages not only to bridge the gap between the medieval morality plays and the secular, classically influenced dramas of the Renaissance but to produce one of the core myths of Western civilization. Like Oedipus, Faustus, who exchanges damnation for knowledge and power, has become a resonating tragic archetype, epitomizing the doomed but daring overreacher whose rebellion and defeat enact a struggle for transcendence against the gravitational pull of the human condition. Faustus's bargain with the devil, his ambitious rise and terrifying fall, encapsulate and typify the dilemma of the modem tragic hero. As critic T. Marlowe was apparently a friend of another of the three most notable playwrights of his era, Thomas Kyd. The two shared a study in 1590. They were both also thought to share dangerous, possibly atheistic points of view. In was perhaps during this period of working in close proximity to Kyd that Marlowe turned his attention to British history as the source for his next drama, Edward II, which was performed in ...