Works

Christopher Marlowe was the first English author to achieve substantial importance as both a poet and a playwright.¹ His creative period spanned about five years, during which, according to current knowledge, he wrote at least thirteen works of various genres, although no one can say exactly when he did so. An exact dating is impossible, as almost everything went into print after Marlowe’s death. The orders presented in the research are entirely arbitrary. Dido, Queen of Carthage is often placed at the beginning of the dramas because there are no reliable performance dates in the Elizabethan period and the play is not particularly extensive. Doctor Faustus has long been considered the crowning achievement of a short career, while Edward II or The Massacre at Paris are now considered his last plays. Some critics have tried to avoid the problem by grouping the works according to themes, which is, of course, just as arbitrary as the rankings according to the assumed time of composition or the following list.

• • 1587-1588: Amores (Ovid’s Elegies)
  • 1587-1588: Pharsalia (Lucan’s First Book)
  • 1587-1588: Dido, Queen of Carthage
  • 1587-1588: Tamburlaine, Part 1
  • 1587-1588: Tamburlaine, Part 2
  • 1588-1591: Doctor Faustus
  • 1591-1592: The Jew of Malta
  • 1592: The Massacre at Paris
  • 1592: Edward II
  • Sept.-Nov. 1592: Dedication of Watson’s Amyntae Gaudia to Mary Herbert

• • Dez. 1592: Epitaph for Sir Roger Manwood

• • 1593: Hero and Leander

• ?: The Passionate Shepherd to his Love

This list has been more or less agreed upon over the years. Sometimes one drama is questioned and another is attributed. The authorship of Hero and Leander and The Passionate Shepherd to his Love is certain.

In Shakespeare in Love, when the "producer" points at Shakespeare and asksPhilip Henslowe who that man is, he gets the answer: "Nobody. The Author."² While this film is by no means suitable as a theatre-historical reference, on this point it is doubly right. In contemporary theatre, the author doesn’t count for much because he is usually seen by the director as an obstacle to his own self-realisation. In the Elizabethan theatre business, the playwright was a kind of employee of the acting companies. The works he delivered did not belong to him, but to the company that paid him for them and wanted to make as much profit as possible with them.³ We must quickly abandon the idea that Marlowe (and almost all his contemporaries) actually wrote every single word in "their" works – and not only because there are two very different versions of Doctor Faustus alone, or because the version that exists of The Massacre at Paris is clearly corrupted.⁴ As early as the 1970s, G. E. Bentley assumed that about a third of the dramas mentioned in the Henslowe Diary had been written by more than one author.⁵ Intellectual property, individualism, integrity of the work of art – all this was not only insignificant for the Elizabethan playwright, he did not even know it. Jeffrey Masten has summarised some points that demonstrate well how different the approach of the Elizabethans was and why we struggle with it today.⁶

• Imitation (especially of the classics) had a higher educational value than originality.
• There existed a rhetorical grammar for the reproduction and dissemination of a style that ideally should not be individual.
• The practice of handwriting aimed at a unified typeface that allowed for differentiations only with difficulty.
• Within certain identifications of class, nationality or race, similarity and continuity were emphasised over individuality in the contemporary sense.
• A handling of what we call "source material" in which our notion of intellectual property played no role.
• A theatre business where continuous revising, shortening and adding of drama texts either by the "original" writer or others was everyday practice.

The sources tell us that Marlowe’s dramas were a good investment financially and very popular. He was probably the most important playwright of his time. But when Marlowe died suddenly, there was apparently no outcry, no collective mourning in the theatre world, no dramatic obituary, no moving biography – why should there be?

"Denn Marlowe ist nichts Besonderes. Dramen gelten als Alltagsunterhaltung, vergleichbar mit unseren Fernseh-Serien. (Nennen Sie mal den Drehbuchautor der 273. "Tatort"-Folge. Na eben… Und die elisabethanischen Engländer hätten über solche Notwendigen, die aber doch Unbekannte sind, Biografien schreiben sollen?)"⁷

Tamburlaine, Faustus and Barabas were associated with Edward Alleyn. Hardly anyone outside the theatre probably knew who had created these characters.⁸ The way they were viewed from the outside was how the playwrights viewed themselves. Writing dramas was a bread and butter job, not an art. Literary recognition was in poetry. Therefore, the attribution of these works is much easier. For Christopher Marlowe, the lyricist was very much mourned by the literary world.⁹

"Constructing Christopher Marlowe"¹⁰ is not only true of the biography. We are also dealing, at least in the case of the dramas, with a "constructed" body of text, of which no one can clearly prove where Marlowe ends and another author begins. Therefore, when I admire Marlowe’s genius today because of a passage or a scene, I do so in the knowledge that this particular passage could not have been written by him. The interpretation of Marlowe’s works is just as much a construct. One and the same text seems to allow completely contradictory interpretations. A brilliant example of this is the death scene of Edward II.. This ambiguity,¹¹ found not only in Marlowe’s work but in that of many of his contemporaries, may have been a result of the censorship laws of the 1590s. Subversive themes flowed into the works via indirect routes, which could be received differently by a diverse audience.¹²