Marlowe wrote “Dr. Faustus” primarily in blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter. Poetry professor Vince Gotera credits Marlowe’s influence with making blank verse the chief mode of Elizabethan drama, and T. S. Eliot argues that Marlowe not only influenced his contemporaries, but also refined the form itself. Faustus’ famous greeting to Helen of Troy, the “face that launched a thousand ships,” is one example of his skillful use of blank verse to create poetry that is formally precise yet powerful.
The highly formal language, with its many scholarly allusions, may require footnotes for modern readers, but it reinforces the grand musicality of Marlowe’s poetry and affirms the main character’s intellectual aspirations as well. Occasional passages featuring rustic Scholars or a Clown speaking in colloquial prose sharply contrast with the elevated poetry of most of the play and underscore its power.
Faustus himself is one of literature’s great antiheroes. He makes a deal with the devil, in the person of Mephistopheles, a fallen angel. Mephistopheles has seen Heaven, he tells Faustus,and found it “not half so fair as thou,/Or any man that breathes on earth.” He is a tempter, leading Faustus into ruinous sin, and yet he is also a semi-tragic figure himself, beyond the reach both of Heaven and of the delights of humanity. Faustus conjures Mephistopheles in order to acquire luxuries and delights, but what he seems to relish most is control; at first, he sends away the conjured Mephistopheles as being too ugly to look at, instructing him to return as a Franciscan friar. Pride and its attendant lust for power constitute Faustus’ chief tragic flaws.
Marlowe drew on popular legends that arose around a real-life German scholar, most immediately the 1887 “Faustbuch.” The Faust legend is a humanist cautionary tale, focusing on a man who leaves the path of God to focus instead on science, mathematics and, of course, magic. Marlowe changes his source material to make Faustus a flawed antihero, rather than an evil villain. Himself an intellectual atheist, Marlowe may have felt personally invested in this vision of his protagonist, or he may simply have found a more complex morality to be more dramatically effective. For decades, poets and audiences praised Marlowe, and religious writers and moralists excoriated him, both of them heavily influenced by this great play.