Marlowe

The most striking feature of Marlowe’s dramas is the concentration of interest on an impressive central figure dominated by a single passion, the thirst for the unattainable. In “Doctor Faustus” this takes the form of universal knowledge. The aspirations of these dominant personalities are uttered in sonorous blank verse, and in a rhetoric which at times rises to the sublime, at times descends to rant. “Doctor Faustus” presents the career and fate of the hero with great power, and contains in the speech to Helen of Troy and in the dying utterance of Faustus two of the most superb passages of poetry in the English language.

The most striking feature of Marlowe’s dramas is the concentration of interest on an impressive central figure dominated by a single passion, the thirst for the unattainable. In “Doctor Faustus” this takes the fo...