St. George's Lane, Canterbury
Welcome to the first World Wide Web edition of the complete works of Christopher Marlowe. This site provides an edition of Marlowe's works that begins to transcend the limits of print publication and exploit the flexibility of an electronic medium. We are committed to reaching as broad an audience as possible and so offer this site at no cost to users. Included here are all of Marlowe's plays, his two known poetic works, Hero and Leander and The Passionate Shepheard to His Love, his translations of Ovid and Lucan, and the short miscellaneous works attributed to Marlowe, a dedicatory epistle to Mary, the Countess of Pembroke and the epitaph on Sir Roger Manwood. You may access these texts through the site's index of Marlowe's works. Our edition of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus provides a particularly interesting case study of some of the editorial possibilities opened up in the shift from print to the electronic medium.
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St. George's Lane, Canterbury |
Viewing the Electronic Page(return to top)
1. Drama
Once you reach the index, if you select a dramatic text, you will automatically link to the Table of Contents for whichever play you select, allowing you to choose the act and scene you would like to view. (For an example of a Table of Contents page, click here. Then hit "Back" button to return to this site introduction.) You will then find that the text of the play is color-coded according to the following schema: regular text is black, stage directions are red, textual variants (see Textual Variation and Multiple Versions below for explanation) are light blue, and links are usually cobalt blue, depending on individual browser settings. (For an example of such a page, click here.) You will find navigational links that will take you to a previous or subsequent "page," which actually represents a single scene, or back to the Table of Contents. To the right of the dramatic text, under the heading "Variants from current texts," you will find linked abbreviations to different versions of the same play. These are listed in the "Version" pop-up menu at the top of the screen as well. Go to Textual Variation and Multiple Versions below for an explanation of these multiple versions.
2. Poetry
Marlowe's poem The Passionate Shepherd To His Love is coded according to the same principles as the drama, with textual variants marked in light blue and including links on the right side of the screen to variant versions of the poem.
Our single edition of Marlowe's Hero and Leander begins with a dedicatory letter from the poem's publisher, Edward Blount, to Sir Thomas Walsingham. The poem is then segmented according to the visual breaks in form, marked in the printed version by paragraph or stanzaic indentations. At the top of each electronic page the number in bold following the poem's title, such as "1.183," indicates the Sestyad (the first or second half of the poem) and line number with which a particular page begins.
3. Translations
Marlowe's translation of The First Book of Lucan's Pharsalia begins with the dedicatory letter from this edition's publisher, Sir Thomas Thorpe, to Edward Blount, who may have had some claim to Marlowe's literary remains. Like Marlowe's poetry, his translations are divided into electronic pages based on the stanzaic or paragraph indentations from the printed page. In the case of the Pharsalia, the number at the top of each page following the title indicates the line number where that particular page begins.
In the case of Marlowe's translation of Ovid's Elegies, the electronic pages are divided according to the breaks between elegies. Several variant versions of this translation are available through the pop-up menu at the top of each elegy or page.
4. Miscellaneous
The dedicatory epistle to Mary, the Countess of Pembroke and the epitaph on Sir Roger Manwood that have been attributed to Marlowe are included in several different forms, including original Latin and English translation. The original Latin version of the epistle to Mary, Countess of Pembroke may be viewed in the form in which it was prefixed to Amintae Gaudia Authore Thoma Watsono (1592) or in the only slightly different edition by Fredson Bowers (1973). Each of these versions is also available with morphological links to Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary.
The epitaph on the Kentishman Sir Roger Manwood is available in its original Latin, with and without morphological links to Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary, and also in English translation.
Textual Variation and Multiple Versions (return to top)
Most works are currently available for viewing in several different versions, from two to twenty in some cases. These include the extant, original, sixteenth century versions, such as the 1590 Octavo of Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1. In addition, you may select one of the many later historical collations, such as, in the case mentioned above, Robinson's 1826 edition. In order to view the versions available and to select one to view, first choose one of Marlowe's works from the index page. In the case of the plays, once you have selected an act and scene from the Table of Contents, you will find a pop-up menu at the top of the screen that includes a list of the different editions of each text. (For an example of such a page, click here. Then hit "Back" button to return to this site introduction.) To change from one version to another, select from this menu and then hit the button to the right of this menu that says "Change now." Textual variants, aspects of the text's spelling, punctuation, lineation, speaker attribution that differ in different versions of the text, appear in light blue. These are available in each version of every dramatic work (with the exception of the special case of Doctor Faustus that warrants additional explanation, see below) and in several nondramatic works as well.
This electronic edition also displays in a column to the right of the dramatic text, and specifically adjacent to the textual variants, the names of the version(s) of a particular text that differ(s) from the selected (visible) text. In this column, entitled "Variants from current text," the names of the variant texts (the versions that differ) are presented in an abbreviated form (such as "O2" for second Octavo). To view the full name of the variant text, click into the pop-up menu where abbreviation and full name are included together. Furthermore, these abbreviations of the names of variant versions in the right hand column of the screen serve as links to these variant versions. As what may be a preliminary step toward collating the variant texts ourselves, we have based our variant editions on Fredson Bowers's 1973 historical collations.
Original and Modernized Spelling and Punctuation (return to top)
All texts are presented here with original spelling and punctuation. While our rationale for not modernizing the texts has been to preserve the original versions as closely as possible, the original spelling and punctuation in Marlowe also seemed to us sufficiently accessible even for a first-time reader. Our edition of Doctor Faustus does, however, include both original and modernized spelling and punctuation (see below).
The Special Case of Doctor Faustus (return to top)
Our edition of Doctor Faustus provides even more varied display options, although it does not include the extensive multiple versioning based on textual variations in historical collations provided for the other plays. It does, however, afford the viewer the opportunity to compare the two oldest versions of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus known as the A- and the B-texts, published in 1604 and 1616 respectively and each significantly different from the other. This mini-site includes not only these two editions of the play but a major source-text for this play, The English Faust Book (EFB). Any of these three texts are available for viewing in their entirety or alongside either of the other texts. For instance, one can view the A- and B-texts in a side-by-side version, or choose to view either of these alongside the EFB. In each of these cases, the editor has created links between the texts, essentially developing a new text -- one with links established. It is worth underscoring here that these links are editorial interventions, subject to debate and change, and by no means obvious or necessary. The links in the side-by-side edition of the A- and B-texts are loosely based on those developed by W. W. Greg in his 1950 parallel-texts edition of Doctor Faustus. To view this mini-site and the instructions for using it, click into "To View Doctor Faustus or The English Faustbook" below. For more on what these versions provide, select from the links that follow this one.
Building this Site (return to top)
This site was produced/edited by Hilary Binda with the full support of the Perseus Project, as part of its growing database of English Renaissance texts. Perseus is a non-profit enterprise, located in the
Department of the Classics at Tufts University.
Each work in the Marlowe site was encoded in SGML (Standard Generalized Mark-up Language). We followed TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) guidelines for tagging drama and poetry wherever possible, although editing complex early modern texts forced us to expand on these standardized tags in numerous places. In tagging these texts, we concentrated on capturing information we felt would be useful for readers of early modern literature; among the many things we tagged were speaker prefixes, poetry and prose, line breaks, line numbers, place names, character titles, italics, and stage directions.
Additional Related Projects (return to top)