Preface

This book can be read consecutively: it begins with a chapter on Marlowe’s life and times, and then goes on to discuss his plays from Tamburlaine (the play with which he seems to have made his name) to Edward II (probably the last of his major dramatic works). There is then a chapter on Marlowe’s poetry, his translations, and Dido, Queen of Carthage, followed by a chapter on his literary and dramatic afterlives. However, the chapters are self-contained, so readers interested primarily in (say) Doctor Faustus should be able to begin at Chapter 3 without confusion. (I have indicated points where it might be useful to cross-refer to material in other chapters.)

There are several excellent and affordable collections of Marlowe’s plays, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Mark Thornton Burnett’s The Complete Plays (Everyman, 1998) contains all the plays, and both versions of Doctor Faustus, but is currently (2011) difficult to obtain. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen’s Doctor Faustus and Other Plays (Oxford World’s Classics, 1995) omits Dido, Queen of Carthage and The Massacre at Paris. Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey’s The Complete Plays (Penguin Classics, 2003) has all the plays, but omits the B-text of Faustus (which appears in Bevington and Rasmussen). I have elected to use Romany and Lindsey; quotations from Faustus are from their A-text, except where indicated (in which case they come from the B-text in Bevington and Rasmussen’s 1993 Revels edition of the play). References to the poems and translations follow Stephen Orgel’s 2007 Penguin Classics edition, although readers may also want to refer to Patrick Cheney and Brian J. Striar’s 2006 edition for Oxford University Press (which includes the epigrams by John Davies that were printed with Marlowe’s translations of Ovid). I have silently modernised quotations from early modern texts, although I have preserved variant spellings of names: it’s important to be aware that ‘Marlowe’ could also be ‘Marley’, ‘Morley’, or ‘Marlen’.