Penguin Classics Christopher Marlowe The Complete Plays [Paperback]

You may wonder when reading these reviews to which exact edition they relate and what the contents are.

The Penguin Christopher Marlowe complete plays contains:

Dido, Queen of Carthage
Tamburlaine the Great, Part One
Tamburlaine the Great, Part 2.
The Jew of Malta
Doctor Faustus
Edward 2
The Massacre at Paris

This is all the known Marlowe plays.

At the back of the book are notes on each play explaining meanings of various lines, in lieu of page by page annotations, an 11 page word glossary, and a 14 page list of mythological, historical and geographical names. At the front of the book you will find a 35 page introduction, and several pages of recommended further reading.

The Dr Faustus text apparently is from 1604 version aka the 'A' Text. The 1616 or 'B' text is not included. From my research the B text was substantially altered from the A text adding about 600 lines. If you want to get all the Marlowe including the poems for a modest price, I recommend you get the Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe (Illustrated) edition on Kindle which includes both versions. If you don't have Kindle you can download the app from Amazon. This also includes an apocryphal play Lust's Dominion attributed by some experts to Marlowe.

As an alterantive to Penguin, I recommend you consider Doctor Faustus and Other Plays (Oxford World's Classics) (Parts I and II). This has both versions of Faust but does not include Dido. I don't own this exact version but but I do own the two version of Faust by the same editor Bevington, whose scholarship on this subject is amazing.

If this edition included both Faust texts, I would have given it five stars.

Scholars say that Marlowe influenced Shakespeare. Certainly from my own readership of both Marlowe and Shakespeare there is a conscious intention of the writer of Shakespeare to link those plays to Marlowe. For example, a recent book I read lists over 100 parallel sayings between Hamlet and various Marlowe works.

Today reading the Arden edition of Hamlet, the scene in Act 2 where Hamlet asks the visiting player to give a speech, he quotes 70 lines from a scene in Dido. Faustus is a scholar from Wittenberg. Hamlet, the Danish prince discusses returning to University in Wittenberg. Perhaps he would stay at Dr Faust's house.

Although, some attempt to pigeonhole Marlowe, as only a great tragedian, or say that he is bombastic based on Tamburlaine, sometimes he leverages tragedy to the point of absurdity, and Edward the 2nd, for example is a remarkably sensitive play, and the opening scene of Dido is quite humorous, and Jew of Malta, is best understood as a machiavellian tragedy with irony and farcical elements. Even with Faustus, Mephistopheles is not an obvious villain, but a reluctant fallen angel.

"Bid On Kai me on farewell Faust 1.1.12;" means Bid being and nonbeing farewell.

Marlowe is an absolutely outstanding playwright and poet. His use of blank (unrhymed) verse was imitated by everyone including Shakespeare. While this edition does include all the known plays, it onlyincludes one of the two versions of Faust. The B text published in 1616 adds about 600 line interested in reading both versions I recommend Doctor Faustus

If you're like me, when you read Marlowe, you never know when you're going to be hit by an amazing line. I find inspiration in his work every day.

I think you will love it and I hope this was helpful.

The Complete Plays includes all of Marlowe's plays (well, obviously.) As a bonus it includes the rather fragmentory Massacre at Paris (which many critics theorize is a corupt, unfinished, or damaged text) in a scene division only format and both editions of Doctor Faustus.

Marlowe's plays, while not on the same level as Shakespeare's best, are far and away superior to any other Renaisance era dramatist (See also, Thomas Kyd, Ben Johnson, or Richard Wharfinger--if you can find him hehe.)

The best thing about Marlowe's plays is the level of respect for the audience. Judgement of the characters is (for the most part) left to the reader. Tamburlaine can be viewed as hero and/or villian.

And, it being Renaisance drama, there are some spectacular death scenes--Edward II's anal cruxifiction, Brabas's boiling alive, Faustus's dismemberment, and the Admiral's hanging/shooting to name a few.

One complaint, and this is really more of a preference, but the textual notes are in endnote format, rather than footnote format, and they're not numbered notes--all of which makes finding latin translations a little more time consuming.
But, for fans of the genre, this is the way to go.

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.