On his four-hundredth anniversary, as at all other moments of critical judgment, it is Marlowe's peculiar destiny to be reconsidered in a Shakespearean context. His strongest claim is bound to be the fact that he did so much more than anyone else to bring that context into existence. This was the high point of A. C. Swinburne's eulogy in the Encyclopaedia Britannica: “He is the greatest discoverer, the most daring and inspired pioneer, in all our poetic literature.” Yet even Swinburne qualified his superlatives: “The place and the value of Christopher Marlowe as a leader among English poets it would be almost impossible for historical criticism to over-estimate.” The implicit qualification is underlined by our realization that the Victorian poet was far from being a historical critic. Marlowe must abide the question of history, which Shakespeare has all but outflown.

When Tamburlaine was first published in 1590, it was described on its title page as “Deuided into two Tragicall Discourses”—a curious reminiscence of George Whetstone's Promos and Cassandra, which in 1578 was similarly described as “Deuided into two Comicall Discourses”—and each part of Tamburlaine was divided into five acts. The publication of 1590, however, does not command our full confidence, for Richard Jones, the printer, admitted in his prefatory address “To the Gentlemen Readers” that he had excised passages that he found “far vnmeet for the matter” which the play as a whole presented. Even so, there is a prima facie case for accepting the division into two parts, each with its characteristic Marlowe prologue, and into five acts for each part, as having authorial warrant.

In speaking of The Jew of Malta as “farce of the old English humour, the terribly serious, even savage comic humour, the humour which spent its last breath on the decadent genius of Dickens …” T. S. Eliot set the pitch for modern Marlovian criticism. We are reminded of Coleridge's remark about a critical dictum by Milton: “Speaking of poetry he says (as in a parenthesis), it is ‘simple, senuous, passionate.’ How awful is the power of words! fearful often in their consequence when merely felt, not understood….” When Eliot called Marlowe's play “farce,” he was saying what, in effect, most previous critics had said—the word can be “understood.” But when he added (as in a parenthesis) that this farce is “terribly serious” in the manner of the “decadent genius” of Dickens, the words can be “merely felt.”

The weakness of Edward II, the speaker of these lines, not only deprives him of the fascination exerted by other Marlovian heroes but affects the character of the entire play. None of the dialogue can match the glitter of the greatest speeches in Tamburlaine or Doctor Faustus or even of the remarkable opening speech of The Jew of Malta. The story of such a king inevitably lacks the magnificence radiated by one who seeks to rule the world or command the legions of hell. Yet it is a mistake to underestimate Marlowe's achievement in this play. Only Tamburlaine is more completely an artistic success. There the dramatic possibilities of what we have come to consider the typical Marlovian hero are given their logical fulfillment in a design which is both grand and neat.

The original and substantive texts of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (the Quartos of 1604 and 1616) present the play completely without the punctuation of act division or scene enumeration. This is common enough in the play-texts of the period. Indeed it is much the commonest form in plays written for the public theatres. Shakespeare's Henry V and Pericles are without divisions in their quarto texts, but we know that they were written with a five-act structure in mind—the choruses tell us that.

What is exceptional in the textual history of Doctor Faustus is not the lack of division in the original texts; it is rather the reluctance of modern editors to impose an act-structure on the modern texts. This is curious, but it seems possible to discern why the reluctance exists and a survey of the modern editions of Faustus throws some interesting light on critical attitudes to the subject matter of the play.

Doctor Faustus tends to come apart in paraphrase. It can be turned into a fable about a Modern Man who seeks to break out of Medieval limitations. On the other hand, when one retells the story in religious terms, it tends to come out as though it were Marlowe's source, The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus. The truth is that the play is irreducibly dramatic. Marlowe dramatizes blasphemy, but not with the single perspective of a religious point of view: he dramatizes blasphemy as heroic endeavor. The play is an expression of the Reformation; it is profoundly shaped by sixteenth-century religious thought and ritual. But in presenting a search for magical dominion, Marlowe makes blasphemy a Promethean enterprise, heroic and tragic, an expression of the Renaissance.

In 1963, Jerzy Grotowski's Theatre Laboratory in Opole, Poland— an industrial town of 50,000 some sixty miles from Auschwitz— produced Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Not one word was changed in the script, but the text was reordered into a “montage,” as Grotowski calls it, drawing on all the Quartos and rearranging the sequence of scenes, creating new ones and eliminating some others. We are printing the program notes to this production, including the sequence of scenes as Grotowski conceived them,. Although the play was performed in Polish, Grotowski wrote the program in French. The Theatre Laboratory is small, seating only sixty, and productions are mounted only when they are ready. For Faustus the long, low theatre room—about forty by fifteen feet—was painted black, and the set consisted of two long tables running the length of the room and one smaller table at one end of the room. In a future issue, we shall have an article about the Theatre Laboratory's work and an interview with Grotowski by Eugenia Barba, who spent some months in Poland with Grotowski's company. We would like to thank Mr. Barba for sending us the program and photographs printed below. —The Editor

Many of the critics who write on Marlowe feel compelled to pay tribute to the “mighty line,” perhaps even to rhapsodize upon it, and to note the new greatness that Marlowe brings to English blank verse; but mostly they fail to show explicitly Marlowe's achievement as a poet. There are only two essays that contribute materially to our understanding of the unrhymed iambic pentameter that alters into unshakable greatness in the hands of a cobbler's son from Canterbury: these essays were written by T. S. Eliot and C. F. Tucker Brooke. Both date from more than forty years ago, and both leave a great deal still to be said.

Eliot's statement is quite brief, and it abounds in those typical Eliotic pronouncements wherein the writer assumes, so infuriatingly, that the reader knows the exact nature of the unexpressed criteria that lie behind the given statement.

Marlowe wrote his plays before Shakespeare's masterpieces had been conceived; but we read him afterwards and in his successor's light. This causes many critical misapprehensions and theatrical mistakes. We stage Marlowe in a theatre accustomed to Shakespeare, with actors, directors, and designers who have all had experience of his plays: talents have been developed and techniques evolved for Shakespeare's dialogue in all its revolutionary subtlety, for Shakespeare's kind of dramatic action and characterization. A careful dissociation is necessary before reading and performing Marlowe for his own sake.

Marlowe had not been dead ten years before these difficulties arose. By the end of the century, Pistol in Henry IV, Part 2, was discharging his “high astounding terms,” which mocked the bragging language of Tamburlaine and other plays of that period.

Engaged as I am, at the moment of writing this article, in preparing to stage Edward II for the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, my thoughts are more immediately concerned with the problems that the texts of Marlowe's plays present to the actor than with those that they pose for the historian or the critic.

An actor wants to know from where and how he makes his entrance; where and how he is to make his exit. Confronted with the stage direction “Exeunt to the cave” or “Enter from the cave, Aeneas and Dido,” what the actor and actress want to know is where this cave is located on the stage, what sort of a cave it is, how wide the opening and how much head-room, whether it is equipped with a door or sliding panel, and so on.

Critics show more toleration than enthusiasm for Marlowe as a dramatic artist. They praise his thought, his poetry, his psychology, but they offer excuses for his stagecraft. This is a pity, for there is no need to excuse it. Marlowe handles his medium with imagination and subtlety.

The root of the difficulty lies in mistaking a drama of spectacle for a drama of character. Marlowe was writing in a period of transition, when an abstract theatre was fast becoming a narrative one, and the development entailed an important shift of emphasis. Narrative throws stress on the characters of men and the motives that lead to the actions portrayed, while the abstract world of the morality play uses the stage action as a projection of an inward and spiritual action of the soul. A drama in which action is image was changing to a drama in which action is fact.

Christopher Marlowe in a real sense belongs to the twentieth century. Not only did he reflect the doubts and uncertainties of his own time in a manner which we today can find particularly meaningful, but only in the last fifty years have either the man or his works come to be seen for what they really were. In his own day, Marlowe was slandered while he lived by his fellow dramatist Robert Greene and reviled after his death by moralists like Thomas Beard in his Theatre of God's Judgements (1597) and William Vaughan in his Golden Grove (1600) as merely another blasphemous sinner whose murder might fittingly illustrate the visitation of God's judgment upon atheists. Among the poets, Chapman, who probably had been his friend, did praise him, and Michael Drayton wrote the only appreciation of any consequence:

Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian springs,
Had in him those brave translunary things
That our first poets had: his raptures were
All air and fire, which made his verses clear:
For that fine madness still he did retain,
Which rightly should possess a poet's brain.