I love your blog. I'm a student studying Hamlet and Faustus and I was wondering what you thought about Christopher Marlowe and his influences on Shakespeare.
Thank you very much! I’m glad you like the blog; much obliged.
Marlowe’s influence on Shakespeare is a pretty broad question, so I don’t have any particular thought on the subject as a whole. I mean, it’s clear that Shakespeare was influenced by Marlowe, especially given that he quotes him at times. The two most often noted are Evans’ song in Act 3, scene 1 of The Merry Wives of Windsor, which is a quotation of Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, and Phoebe’s ‘Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might: / Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?’ (3.5.82-83) in As You Like It is an acknowledged quotation from Hero and Leander (‘dead shepherd’ referring, of course, to Marlowe). I also think that Richard II’s ‘Is this the face which faced so many follies / That was at last outfaced by Bolingbroke?’ (4.1.285-86; the 4th Quarto has ‘Was’ instead of ‘Is’) might be a reference to Marlowe’s ‘Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, / And burnt the topless towers of Illium?’ (Dr Faustus, B-text, 5.1.93-94).
But even though we know that Marlowe must have influenced Shakespeare, the extent of this influence is extremely difficult to determine. No doubt Shakespeare borrowed or was inspired by his contemporary playwrights’ poetic elements, storytelling methods, characterisation and so on, but how does one judge? And is Marlowe’s influence limited to the time they were both actively writing for the London stages, or does it continue after he dies? In the case of this latter question, it seems to me (judging by themes and quotations) that Marlowe’s influence is stronger on Shakespeare’s earlier plays, but do continue in some ways to his later plays.
But I suppose that you’re more particularly interested in the connection between Dr Faustus and Hamlet. Well, if you look at the two plays in isolation, there are a lot of elements that chime with one another: there’s the intelligent protagonist that feels trapped in his world, there are the religious themes of the Reformation and the afterlife, the idea of sexual attraction and making a change in the world and so on. But when you look at all of these themes with a wider view of early modern culture you get the sense that Hamlet isn’t so much a direct response to Dr Faustus as that the two plays are both responding to similar issues and belong to a similar tradition, even though both plays happen to be particularly outstanding in the way they use and transform these elements. And while it’s possible to surmise that Shakespeare may have been partly inspired to write this kind of play based on his experience of Marlowe’s box office hit, there are many more plays in the revenge tragedy genre before and after Marlowe’s play that deal with similar questions, so it’s impossible to attribute it to Marlowe alone. Take for instance the figure of the disenchanted intellectual – the character was so common in early modern writing that it even has a name, the malcontent.
What’s most important, I think, is that Marlowe and Shakespeare were living, experiencing, and responding to the time in which they lived in similar ways, both thematically and poetically. They’re both interested in questions of politics and authority, in cruelty and bloodshed, and in questions of faith, human freedom and individuality (among other issues), and both of them deal with these questions similarly at times, distinctly at others. Sometimes they diverge. For instance, Shakespeare is more interested in capitalism than Marlowe, and Marlowe is more interested in atheism than Shakespeare. They’re also writing in the golden age of British playwriting, and are, along with several others, creating and transforming the very field of dramatic writing as they write. So they’re not only influencing one another but working at the same time on similar materials for similar audiences, creating the very categories by which they would come to be judged in the future.
