Biography, Mythography, and Criticism: The Life and Works of Christopher Marlowe

The reception of Marlowe has often been marred by a vicious hermeneutic circle within which the play's protagonists are read into Marlowe's biography and the mythographic creature thus constructed informs the criticism of his plays. The documents about Marlowe's life and death that have come down to us are generally read as suggesting an unorthodox personality, allegedly atheistic, allegedly homosexual. These documents, in turn, are often thought to be reflected in the unorthodox protagonists of Marlowe's plays, in Tamburlaine's and Faustus's defiant challenges to God and in King Edward's love for his minions. The contention of this article is that these biographical and critical fallacies hide a more complex truth