Online Library of Liberty: The Works of Christopher Marlowe vol. 1 Portable Library of Liberty

Anhalt (in the English tract, Anholt) who becomes in the play the Duke of Vanholt.
Professor Ward thinks that the “oddity is best to be reconciled with the other
circumstances of the case by the supposition that the German Faustbuch was brought
over to England in one of its early editions (before that of 1590) by some person or
persons who had travelled both in Germany and in the Netherlands; that through them
it came into Marlowe's hands in the shape of a MS. English translation; and that the
MS. translation was very probably used by ' P. R.' or whoever was the 'gentleman'
who wrote the English History.” He proceeds to state that the English actors who had
been performing in Germany would naturally pass through the Netherlands on their
return to England. The theory is ingenious, but it is hardly safe to build on such
slender foundations.
Marlowe's tragedy speedily became popular not only in England but abroad. From a
recently published work of great interest by Herr Johannes Meissner, Die Englischen
comædiantenzur zeit Shakespeares in Oesterreich, we learn that Faustus and the Jew
of Malta, with nine other English plays, were acted (in German versions) by an
English company in 1608, during the Carnival, at Graetz.
1
Throughout the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Faustus remained a favourite at Vienna. A
Hanswurst or Clown was introduced; the Jesuits, disliking Faustus' scepticism,
converted him into a sort of Don Juan; and the two aspects of his character were
afterwards combined by Goethe. Among the plays performed by an English company
at the Dresden court in 1626 was a Tragadia von Dr Faust?
2
which was certainly
Marlowe's; on the same list is found a Harrabas, which was no less certainly a
version of the Jew of Malta.
Although the popularity of Faustus in England is attested by the number of editions
through which it passed, few early allusions to the play are discoverable. When
Shakespeare wrote of Helen in Troilus and Cressida,
“ Why, she is a pearl
Whose price hath launched above a thousand ships“
he must surely have had in his mind the line of Marlowe—
“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships? “
It was pointed out by Wagner that the scene in Bar-nabe Barnes' Devil's Charter,
1607, where Pope Alexander VI. signs a contract with a devil disguised as a
pronotary, is modelled on scene v. of faustus. In Tim^s Whistle, by “R. C. Gent,” a
collection of satires written between 1614 and 1616, there is a passage which Mr. J.
Online Library of Liberty: The Works of Christopher Marlowe vol. 1
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M. Cowper (who edited the satires for the Early English Text Society) takes to refer
“to the story of the play of Faustus, although it may be said the story was common
enough for 'R. C.' to have got it elsewhere.” From Samuel Rowlands' Knave of Clubs
we learn that the part of Faustus was originally sustained by Edward Alleyn:—
“The gull gets on a surplis,
With a crosse upon his brest,
Like Allen playing Faustus,
In that manner was he drest.”
In this Theatrum Poetarum (1675) Phillips observes quaintly “Of all that Marlowe
hath written to the stage, his Dr. Faustus hath made the greatest noise, with its devils
and such like tragical sport.”
Dr. Faustus is a work which once read can never be forgotten. It must be allowed that
Marlowe did not perceive the full capabilities afforded by the legend he adopted; that
crudeness of treatment is shown in making Faustus abandon the pursuit of
supernatural knowledge, and turn to trivial uses the power that he had purchased at
the price of his soul This and more may be granted; but criticism is silenced when we
reflect on the agony of Faustus' final soliloquy and the fervid splendour of his raptures
over Helen's beauty. Dr. Faustus is rather a series of dramatic scenes than a complete
drama. Many of these scenes were the work of another hand and may be expunged
with advantage. But what remains is singularly precious. The subtler treatment of a
later age can never efface from our minds the appalling realism of the catastrophe in
Marlowe's play : still our sense is pierced by that last despairing cry of shrill
anguish—
“Ugly Hell, gape not! come not, Lucifer!
I'll burn my books! Ah, Mephistophihs!”
Goethe's English biographer speaks slightingly of Marlowe's play; but Goethe