Helen of Troy, then, was a popular figure among classical writers, and universally renowned as the most beautiful woman in the world. The play traces the fall of an ambitious German scholar. (Euripides derived this idea from Herodotus, the historian.) Doctor Faustus is an Elizabethan tragedy by Christopher Marlowe that was first performed in 1604. Another classical text which offers a slightly different take on the whole business was Euripides’ play Helen, which has the real ‘Helen of Troy’ (really a misnomer, of course, since she was technically, and legally, Helen of Sparta) whisked off to Egypt for the duration of the Trojan war, and the ‘Greeks’ and Trojans fighting over a phantom.

It was probably written in 1592 or 1593, shortly before Marlowes death. Like Prospero in The Tempest, Faustus raises moral questions about the exploitation of magic as a means of gaining power and the links between two ‘potent. The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, commonly referred to simply as Doctor Faustus, is an Elizabethan tragedy by Christopher Marlowe, based on German stories about the title character Faust.

Its title page shows Faustus as a magician with his robes, book and staff, alongside a devilish figure. On the other hand, an audience of staunch English Protestants might have cheered Faustus’s attack on an Italian pope as a pro-English move, simply because of its opposition to. There were numerous riffs on this idea in classical literature, the most famous of which, of course, is Homer’s Iliad, often considered the founding text of Western literature. This is the 1631 edition of Christopher Marlowe ’s best-known play, Doctor Faustus. In Faustus Marlowe went farther: he broke up the line, to a gain in intensity, in the last soliloquy and he developed a new and important conversational tone in the dialogues of Faustus with the devil.Edward II. Faustus's extreme, immature assault on literal representatives of Church authority may be a way for Marlowe to ridicule his more theologically extreme contemporaries.

Christopher marlowe faustus