The Complete Plays: 4

This is a generally good and easily available, inexpensive edition of Marlowe's plays. My only reservation about it is Steane's edition of Dr. Faustus. He makes the worst of both major texts, taking the general outline from the 1616 text but throwing in a lot of corrupt scraps from the 1604 edition for the clown scenes. I would advise anyone who wants to read Dr. Faustus to look elsewhere. I'm convinced that the 1604 version is on the whole a corrupt and truncated version of the play, but if you prefer it you might look into the Folger Library edition. If on the other hand you would rather read the play more or less as I think Marlowe wrote it, try the Signet edition edited by Sylvan Barnet.The other plays present no major textual problems (except for The Massacre at Paris, which is pretty hopeless) and this is a fine place to meet them.

This book is a treat. Very reasonably priced, and it's all there. The plays sweep you along (I always envision darkening Puccini-like chords in the background) images and crackling dialogue abounds. My problem is: 1) I have never seen the plays produced. This is *such* a handicap. I actually yawned through Shakepeare's "Tempest" until I saw a fine production. Now it is hands-down my favorite play and 2)I have to get in the swing of reading Elizabethan English for every reading. Therefore, I do not recommend reading in short snippets if you are also dialect challenged.Do keep in mind Marlowe (as Shakespeare) was trying to make a living, not write for the ages. He's trying to entice you to buy a ticket and be charmed. He succeeds admirably. There is something for everyone: action, derring do, comedy, and sharp insights.Marlowe is your mysterious, wild, sometimes trecherous friend; brilliant, but can you trust him? Probably not. If he was a vintage southern American, he might say "I didn't take you to raise." Would he lie to you? mislead you? Of course. But in everything I have read of Marlowe's I hear his voice; he is *there.* With Shakespeare, I do not have that certainty. Recommend reading "The Reckoning" by Charles Nicholl for an excellent biography on Marlowe. It reads like an excellent mystery, which he was.

Shakespeare is thought to be for the general reader and is undergoing a strong cinematic revival these days...perhaps because as a screenwriter in the public domain, Will doesn't talk back and works for free.Marlowe, apart from interest in the homoeroticism of his works, is still in the specialist's domain. But Marlowe in many ways is loads more fun than Shakespeare, although the darkness of his vision is ultimately tiresome.If you like fustian, if you like the sound of the rant, Marlowe is your boy:"Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships /And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?""We'll lead you to the stately tent of war/To hear the Scythian Tamburlaine/Threatening the world with high astounding terms"Marlowe is probably deliberately caricatured in Shakespeare's Henry V as Ancient Pistol, the "braggart soldier":"A foutra for the world, and worldlings base/I speak of Africa and golden joys."Marlowe's development was tragically cut short, possibly by political scheming, or possibly by what we'd now call alcoholism. Even less than Wolfang Aamadeus Mozart (who popped off the astonishing Magic Flute opera after a series of works of a genius that did not break outside the frame of the *galante* musical style) had the chance to be Beethoven, Marlowe never had a real chance to grow into the artist that Shakespeare became. We just don't know, after hundreds of years, whether this was the Earl of Essex's fault or that of the good old booze.To see the opposing forces between the spirit of Shakespeare and that of Marlowe, it is necessary to read the long series of three early plays of Shakespeare, Henry VI, parts 1 to 3 (these have new titles in the new Oxford Shakespeare.) Shakespeare and Marlowe collaborated in these plays and it seems to me (as a nonspecialist) that Shakespeare's influenced waxes in the higher numbered plays of the Henry VI series...despite the fact that Wells and Taylor, the editors of the New Oxford Shakespeare, cast doubts on a simple-minded chronological sequence of authorship.As a general reader I can well imagine Marlowe and Shakespeare BOTH coming up with "hung be the heavens with black", the first speech in Henry VI part one, working in a tavern. And my theory is that the profound ambiguity of the character of King Henry VI, who in a superficial reading is a mad weakling but on a deeper reading (in particular, that of Harold Goddard in 1954) is an almost Taoist king who sees the folly of the Wars of the Roses, can be traced to a collision between Marlowe's pessimistic proto-Nietzchean view of the world, and Shakespeare's kinder and gentler humanism.I prefer Shakespeare's kinder and gentler humanism because it is ultimately, like the Tao, stronger than pessimism. And a reading of Marlowe is relevant to today's issue of gay rights, for it shows that homoeroticism is not a matter of fauns prancing about in Arcady, innocent of the wickedness of the world of the breeders. It shows

...this edition contains both the 1604 and 1616 editions of Dr. Faustus. In all honestly, though, I don't entirely buy the notion that the former should automatically take precedence over the latter. It's entirely possible that the additions made to it were in fact Marlowe's own ideas that were merely added by others. And in any case, I would have to say that, as a whole, the 1616 version is more coherent, with a lot of the threads left hanging in the 1604 cleared up. More is done with the clowns, and the character on whom Faustus inflicts horns goes from an anonymous "knight" to an actual character. The 1604 does have some things to be said for it (the bit about Christ's blood streaming in the firmament has been inexcusably edited out of the 1616, f'rinstance, and there's a brief scene at the end with the scholars that seems superfluous), but as a whole I'd go with it rather than the 1604. If I was going to put on a production of the play, I'd combine the two as I saw fit. Okay then.