Something out of nothing?

Where does literature ‘come from’? One of the requirements of the English A Level specifications is that students can:

‘Demonstrate understanding of the significance and influence of the contexts in which literary texts were written and received’ (AO4).

Signs of the times

Everything an author creates cannot help but reflect the nature of its creator and the times in which it was composed. Last week, just in time for these final weeks of revision a new web guide to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus went live at Crossref-it.info.

Dr Faustus is a play which interestingly straddles the interconnection of the Medieval and the Renaissance minds, both in terms of its subject matter, its worldview and its theatrical heritage.

So, what were the ‘times’ against which we should view the play? It is interesting to see what was going on during the life of its creator.

1564 – a significant year

For example, did you know that 1564, the year Marlowe was born, also saw:

• The arrival of Italian scientist Galileo and dramatist Shakespeare
• The death of religious reformer John Calvin and artist Michelangelo?

When Marlowe was eight (1572), poets John Donne and Ben Johnson were born, and he was twelve (1576) when the first permanent theatre was built in London by James Burbage. On the international front, explorer Francis Drake set off to sail around the world the following year (1577) returning in 1581 and the first English colony was established in Virginia by Walter Raleigh when Marlowe was twenty (1584).

Tension throughout England

Marlowe was only seventeen (1581) when he became a spy for England’s secret service at a time of high political tension. There were plots to put the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots on the English throne instead of Protestant Elizabeth I, which came to a head when Mary was tried for treason in 1586. Marlowe was just 22, writing his first play, Dido, Queen of Carthage.

Elizabeth’s execution of Mary the following year (1587) sent shock waves through Europe – it was the year that Marlowe wrote Tamburlaine the Great, aged 23, while Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy was also performed.

Catholic retaliation against Protestant England came in the shape of the mighty Spanish Armada, which attacked the coast in 1588 and was memorably defeated. Alert to the threat of invasion, with warning beacons ringing the kingdom, the possible doom of such a small country cannot have escaped influencing Marlowe as, aged 24, he produced Dr Faustus that year.

Literary developments

Within the next three years (by the end of 1591), Edmund Spenser had published the initial sections of The Faerie Queene, Philip Sidney’s petrachan sonnet sequence Astroplil and Stella appeared and Shakespeare’s early plays such as Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors and Richard III were being performed. Marlowe himself was busy, getting imprisoned for a street fight and writing The Jew of Malta, all before he was 27.

Drama and facts

To get a sense of the tumultuous times which Dr Faustus reflects, why not take time out to watch Elizabeth: The Golden Age (with Cate Blanchett). This dramatises (though with a degree of licence) the world in which Marlowe operated.

For the more accurate information which A Level teachers know you need, go to www.crossref-it.info where you will find detailed commentary on the text as well as the background. Literature never emerges ‘out of nothing’.