Biog. Marlowe as prosperous shoemaker's son to Cambridge on a scholarship to prepare for Holy Orders (Anglican priesthood); Granted B.A. And at behest of government M. A. Left orders to become playwright and spy.
A spy for Queen Elizabeth to infiltrate and expose Catholic groups in England and abroad. Involved in clandestine politics and in May 1593 warrant for his arrest from Queen's Privy Council on charge of blasphemy offered by Thomas Kyd, a fellow playwright. He had made scurrilous comments on character and divinity of Christ. Drinking with three government spies while waiting for a hearing got into a brawl and was killed. Three days later a former spy accused him before the Privy Council of atheism, treason, and the opinion that "they who love not tobacco and boys were fools." May have been false, but circles Marlowe traveled in had skepticism in matters of religion and indifference to social mores that would have made them considered dangerous. Some scholars think government ordered him eliminated. Cf. "Shakespeare in love."

Culture and history of period
The Elizabethan stage at the height of its popularity and sophistication.
Greenblatt's conception of theatricality is a sophisticated one. This is salutary amid the prevalent reluctance to recognize the centrality of theatre and theatricality for Elizabethan drama, a reluctance which reflects the dominance of print-culture perspectives on drama and more recent attempts to conceive history as a form of textuality. Roy Battenhouse offers the most sustained attempt to reinscribe Tamburlaine in a moral scheme, but this reading has to work against the grain of Marlowe's more ambivalent moral and theological implications.

Philosophy and Religion Doctor Faustus, Marlowe's final play, is undoubtedly his masterpiece. Doctor Faustus was the first English interpretation of the German legend of Faust, a man who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for wisdom. The play explores the nature of free will, sin and redemption- thoughts that must have lain heavy on Marlowe's mind in the last years of his life. Comedic scenes fit perfectly within the context of the greater plot, for they serve to display Faustus' decline into crude decadence. A.L. Rowse observes that "In the end, the subject of Dr. Faustus is the progress of a man's soul to perdition. It is a Pilgrim's Progress in reverse" (160). It is fitting, then, that Faustus be gradually reduced, by the contrasts in the play's structure, from a lofty philosopher to the most base and hedonistic of fools.
Faustus' decision to bargain with Lucifer stems, at first, from a belief that he has reached the limits of mortal wisdom. First, speaking of philosophy, he asks: Is 'to dispute well/ logic's chiefest end'? /Affords this art no/ greater miracle?/ Then read no : thou/ hast attained that end./ A greater subject fitteth/ Faustus' wit. (Faustus, 1.1.9-11) Faustus goes on to ask similar questions of medicine, physics and theology, but in the end he concludes that his desire for knowledge can only be sated by the supernatural. The seeds of his downfall, however, are already evident. Though he gleefully anticipates that a pact with the devil will "resolve [him] of all ambiguities" (Faustus, 1.1.79), he is concerned with earthly delights as well.
I'll have them fly to/ India for gold/ Ransack the ocean for/ orient pearl, And search all corners of/ the new- found world/ For pleasant fruits and princely delicates. (Faustus, 1.1.81-84).
This mortal greed is the fatal flaw in Faustus' character, and it will eventually lead him to his downfall.
By Act Three, Faustus has ceased to focus his powers on the acquisition of knowledge. Instead, he entertains himself with malicious pranks on a grand scale. Escorted by Mephistophilis, he travels to Rome; though he is ostensibly there for the political purpose of freeing Bruno, a servant of the German emperor, Faustus spends the bulk of his time in the city playing pranks on the Pope. With the aid of Mephistophilis, Faustus becomes invisible and snatches the Pope's wine and meat off his plate, causing great consternation among the cardinals.
Faustus sinks even lower in Act Four, as he is summoned to the courts of various nobles for the purpose of entertaining them with parlor tricks. The man who once commanded spirits to bring him vast knowledge now uses his might to fetch out-of-season fruit for the Duchess of Anhalt (Faustus, 4.7.14-23). As W.W. Greg describes it in his essay "The Damnation of Faustus," this scene serves to illustrate "the progressive fatuity of Faustus' career, which in the clowning and conjuring tricks at Anhalt sinks to the depths of buffoonery" (Leech 100).
It is the opening and closing acts of Doctor Faustus which draw our immediate attention, for they contain Marlowe's masterful language and complex themes of sin and salvation. Though the other acts of the play do not at first seem to live up to the standards Acts One and Five set, they are in fact vastly important, for they illustrate Faustus' progression from the mighty scholar of the first act to the damned sinner of the final. To write them off as mere comedy is to do Marlowe's carefully plotted script a great disservice.
Humanism: Selling His Soul to Make a Point In Dr. Faustus, Christopher Marlowe has vividly drawn up the character of an intelligent, learned man tragically seduced by the lure of power greater than he was mortally meant to have. The character of Dr. Faustus is, in conception, an ideal of humanism, but Marlowe has taken him and shown him to be damned nonetheless, thus satirizing the ideals of Renaissance Humanism.
M. H. Abram's A Glossary of Literary Terms defines Renaissance Humanism, stating that some of the key concepts of the philosophy centered around "the dignity and central position of human beings in the universe" as reasoning creatures, as well as down playing the "animal' passions" of the individual. The mode of the thought also "stressed the need for a rounded development of and individual's diverse powers... as opposed to merely technical or specialized training." Finally, all of this was synthesized into and perhaps defined by their tendency to minimize the prevalent Christian (Calvinist?) ideal of innate corruption and withdrawal from the present, flawed world in anticipation of heaven. (p. 83)
Humanist morality The character of Faustus is reasoning and very aware of the moral (or immoral) status of what he is undertaking. His opening speech is devoted to working out logically why he is willing to sacrifice both the road to honest knowledge and his soul in favor of more power. (I, 1-63) He exhibits, in his search for power, anything but animal passion; he indeed exhibits a chilling logic as he talks himself out of the possible delights of heaven. Not only is he intelligent, he also demonstrates a broad base of learning, another quality admired and upheld by humanists.
In several sections of the play, Faustus goes into beautifully vivid descriptions of the wonders he will accomplish with his power. (I, 78-97;III, 104-111) This seems an ironic parody of what Philip Sydney (a well-known humanist) described in his Defense of Poesy as the poet's prerogative of describing a reality better than that which may actually be attained. Faustus is rarely more humanist than when he describes what he will do with his hell bought power.
Marlowe's attack on humanism is subtle. He demonstrates an admirable complexity of narration as he weaves these grand-seeming gestures of the power of the individual in with the essential damnation that walks hand-in hand with man. There is little or nothing which Faustus does which is not unto itself humanistic. His downfall is woven into the fact that he is and will always be human, thus, flawed. Marlowe creates a character who is intelligent, broad-based in his education, logical, and poetic... And still damned. Despite his humanism, he is unequivocally corrupt, a quality which Renaissance Humanism as a philosophy tended to gloss over.
When Faustus achieves his power, he time and again fails to take advantage of it for any but the silliest operations. From the viewing of the Seven Deadly Sins (V, 277-322) to enchanting an offensive knight with horns (X,52-80), the man's professed intentions of greatness are shown for the hopeless dreams they really are-- they contain neither truth nor purpose, in the end, despite what Sydney stated.
Marlowe points out again and again in conversation with the wise (if evil) demons and devils the nature of hell. He states it quite simply that "All places be hell that is not heaven." (V, 125) Of earth, Mephastophilis asserts that "this is hell, nor am I out of it." (III, 76) Both these spite the humanistic love of the world, or as Abram's Glossary puts it: ...[Renaissance humanists] tended to emphasize the values achievable by human beings in this world, and to minimize the earlier Christian emphasis on innate corruption and on the ideals of asceticism and of withdrawal from this world in a preoccupation with the world hereafter. (p. 83) Christopher Marlowe was not a Humanist, as evidenced by how clearly the tragedy that was Dr. Faustus exemplified the downfall of a humanist and reinforced themes which conflicted with the basic tenets presented by Renaissance Humanism. If this reading is to be believed, the man was in fact violently and intelligently opposed to it. It is difficult to imagine a more effective and thorough attack on the mentality and methodology of the humanist than Dr. Faustus.
Learning At the play's outset it is clear that for Faustus, as for many at the time, knowledge was found in books, and in the play's first scene Faustus chafes against the limitations this has imposed. He has mastered--and now wishes to discard--the works of Aristotle, Galen, Justinian, and finally, Jerome's Bible. He wishes instead to have magic books, books that seem to contain forbidden knowledge, recalling at once the story of Eden, but also keeping to the notion that all knowledge which humanity was capable of, was that which God allowed to be revealed. (Students are informed of the scholastic tradition, and the work of explicators of Greek texts.) To do the work of a scientist, to investigate the natural world, was to attempt to read the book of nature. The ethical question up to this time revolved around whether, in failing, one was simply a poor reader, or if the text was intentionally hidden, and one had inquired too far. So for Faustus it seems knowledge still comes from books, but they are unauthorized texts, secret papers full of information somehow pirated by the devil:

Meph.Here, take this book and peruse it well./The iterating of these lines brings gold:/The framing of this circle on the ground/Brings thunder, whirlwinds, storm, and lightning;/Pronounce this thrice devoutly to thyself,/And men in harness shall appear to thee,/Ready to execute what thou command'st.
Faust. Thanks Mephostophilis for this sweet book./This I will keep as chary as my life. (2.1.161-69)
But there is a significant break with this traditional view of knowledge and its sources in the play, and it concerns astronomy. Faustus puts to Mephostophilis a series of questions in Act II about the nature of the universe, receiving standard Ptolemaic replies to all. The audience would recognize instantly the rejection of the Copernican theory, which was well known in a casual way to so many in England (in no small part due to ThomasDigges). It is likely better for Marlowe that he not distract from his drama by inserting a controversial opinion, but this matter continues offstage.The chorus tells us,
Learn*d Faustus,/To find the secrets of astronomy/Graven in the book of Jove's high firmament,/Did mount him up to scale Olympus' top:/ Where... He views the clouds, the planets, and the stars,/The tropics, zones and quarters of the sky/From the bright circle of the horn*d moon/even to the height of primum mobile: (3.1-10)So even as Marlowe uses the metaphor of the book, he presents us with a Faustus who is still unsatisfied with the authority of books and of Mephostophilis, and who conducts empirical research. When the chorus speaks at the beginning of the fourth act, we find that Faustus has returned home to Wittenberg where he is questioned about
... what befell/Touching his journey through the world and air They put forth questions of astrology /Which Faustus answered with such learn'd skill/As they admired and wondered at his wit. (7-11)
Faustus lectures on astronomy in the place where the Copernican theory was first taught. Yet all of this action has occurred out of sight, and therefore, though it is interesting in light of past work on the play to find and instance where Marlowe seems to say one thing, and yet believe another, of more significance in the context of this course is this moment when knowledge does not seem to come from books, when authority of tradition is rejected in favor of gathering new data for evaluation.

Hist: There is a topical allusion in the play to the death of Dr. Roderigo Lopez, the ill-starred physician to Queen Elizabeth who was executed in 1594. Marlowe as exemplar of "Elizabethan optimism"? Shakespeare's comedies as Elizabethan vs his tragedies as Jacobean? Belief in devils was "almost universal." Elizabethans believed in a literal hell.
1. Critical attention has often been drawn to Christopher Marlowe's choices of exotic, far-flung locations for the adventures of his heroes, and also to the ways in which Marlowe's fictional world intersects with actual Renaissance geographical discoveries and attitudes. Doctor Faustus pointedly alludes to) that typical Renaissance act, colonisation.[1] I want to focus on elements of Marlowe's depiction of what it is like to travel "in another country"--the reversal of the processes normally inherent in the possessing colonialist gaze--to make it clear that the alien object at which we think we stare in fact reflects us back to ourselves, and illuminates the stranger within us.
Marlowe's own involvement with Elizabethan intelligence-gathering networks, whatever its actual nature may have been, would also have placed him at the forefront of attempts to implement Elizabethan foreign policy, so much of which hinged on relations with the archetypal colonialist power, Spain, which laid claim to large tracts of the New World. Closer to home, Spain was also running various Italian duchies as puppet states, and- as Doctor Faustus reminds us, and as Marlowe's own time in Flushing would have brought home to him--forcibly occupying the Netherlands. The main thrust of English foreign policy was to frustrate Spanish attempts to overrun or politically subjugate England. 6. That Marlowe was interested in the questions of colonialism, foreignness, and the relation of different nationalities to one another is suggested by the first of the heresies reported against him by Richard Baines: that "the Indians and many authors of antiquity have assuredly written above 16 thousand years agone, whereas Adam is proved to have lived within 6 thousand years."[13] Such an interest is also apparent throughout his work. All of his plays except one, Edward II, are set abroad--two, Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine, in more than one country; and many of them also involve heroes, or other characters, who are foreign visitors or residents.
Running through all of these works is an concern with alienness, with the viability of normative perspectives, and with the problematics of the relationship between personal and national identities. And equally strongly running through all of them is a refusal to maintain the demarcation between the self and the other, the foreign and the domestic. As Emily Bartels argues, "what makes Marlowe's plays stand out . . . is that their foreign worlds are not only 'Englished'; they make a point of that Englishing."[14]
English adventurers apparently saw themselves as moving from the civilised to the savage, enlightening the natives as they went. The language used to describe Tamburlaine here may make him briefly reminiscent of a wandering Englishman, but his epic journeys have a reversed teleology, for not only could the advance of a Scythian be read as a self evident triumph of barbarism, but he also originates in the East
At an early point in his career, he directly compares himself with a previous invader of Britain when he says "My camp is like to Julius Caesar's host" (III.iii.152). Mention of Julius Caesar recurs in Doctor Faustus, where the beauties of Rome in fact turn out to depend in part at least on the conquered spoils "Which Julius Caesar brought from Africa" (III.i.43).
Doctor Faustus is a text which is saturated, paradoxically, in both the language of colonialism and the language of resistance to it. Faustus' initial desire for power is characterised precisely as a desire for physical dominion--"All things that move between the quiet poles / Shall be at my command"[19]--and he wants to "fly to India for gold" (I.ii.84), reminding us of the fabled wealth of the Indies which both fueled and motivated Spain's colonial expansion. Spanish aggression in the Low Countries, of which Marlowe's time in Flushing would have given him direct personal experience, bulks large in the play: Faustus resolves to expel Emperor Charles V's general, the Prince of Parma, from the Low Countries (I.ii.95), and the Emperor even makes a personal appearance, but when Faustus summons up for him the ghost of Alexander the Great our principal sense is of the ephemerality of conquest. This is radically multiplied in the B-text when Alexander is seen defeating the previously victorious Darius, just as we learn that Faustus means to expel Parma not from patriotism, but because he himself plans to "reign sole king of all our provinces" (I.ii.96), and to possess "the seigniory of Emden" (II.i.23). Faustus will become that which he seeks to defeat, an idea which is repeated in Valdes' enticements to him that he will be treated "As Indian Moors obey their Spanish lords" (I.ii.123). Faustus, like Tamburlaine, dreams of mastering the map as he fantasises that "I'll join the hills that bind the Afric shore / And make that land continent to Spain" (I.iii.109-110).
But in another inversion, Faustus is himself the unwitting victim of an act of such colonisation, as the boundaries of the world-map are redrawn indeed and, at the head of his invading army, Mephistopheles can proclaim "Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it" (I.iii.78), and explain that Lucifer also seeks to "Enlarge his kingdom" (II.i.40). Once again, as hell and earth dissolve and blur, as human motivation is revealed to be the same as diabolical, and as Faustus moves from opposition to the Spanish forces to the performance of conjuring tricks for the Emperor, the most pronounced sense is of a failure to maintain oppositions of difference, and of an inversion of the structuring polarities of civilisation and savagery.

Lit. Hist. Play seems to have as a source the very popular German Historia von Dr. Johann Fausten translated and amplified 1592.
Gospel of "libertine naturalism) condemned by Sidney and Spencer was set for with sympathy by Marlowe and Donne. Marlowe sympathetic to Ovidian (Capellanian?) descriptions of love found in Shakespeare, Cowley, Jonson. Marlowe's heroes have "boundless energy and ambition, a desire for absolute power, and bloody cruelty. Heroes "strive to get beyond the conventional boundareis established to contain the human will." Faustus' quest is not for riches or an earthly crown but for knowledge as a source of "voluptuous pleasure and power".

Plays had dazzling characters, exotic settings, and controversial subjects. They revolutionized English Drama. Some have suggested that had he lived, Marlowe would have surpassed Shakespeare. He wrote in a very energetic blank verse.

Limitations on Marlowe from history and culture:
Some parts of play as originally written were censored for blasphemy during the Jacobean period (James I). In censored folio of 1616, the scene of Faustus' attempt at repentance (Scene 5) and his last soliloquy (Sc. 13) are removed. Limitations: Marlowe's opportunities to make of his histories an example of God's punishing of sin were definitely limited. Elizabethan histories attributed to certain rascals a long life of unobscured glory - a career which looked like a blasphemous challenge to the Puritan dogma of Providence. [22]

analogous limits to artists today
Its tragedy speaks to pessimism of today. Unlike Macbeth Faustus, despite his repentance is allowed no hope of salvation and this despite religious hope for death-bed conversion. In our scientific world, many people do not believe in life-after-death, so there is no ultimate punishment for evil acts nor reward for good ones.

Response of Marlowe to other writers
Lit. Hist. Play seems to have as a source the very popular German Historia von Dr. Johann Fausten translated and amplified 1592.
Gospel of "libertine naturalism) condemned by Sidney and Spencer was set for with sympathy by Marlowe and Donne. Marlowe sympathetic to Ovidian (Capellanian?) descriptions of love found in Shakespeare, Cowley, Jonson. Marlowe's heroes have "boundless energy and ambition, a desire for absolute power, and bloody cruelty. Heroes "strive to get beyond the conventional boundareis established to contain the human will." Faustus' quest is not for riches or an earthly crown but for knowledge as a source of "voluptuous pleasure and power".

Plays had dazzling characters, exotic settings, and controversial subjects. They revolutionized English Drama. Some have suggested that had he lived, Marlowe would have surpassed Shakespeare. He wrote in a very energetic blank verse.
Shakespeare: Marlowe as commercial and artistic rival