CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE - English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. As the foremost Elizabethan tragedian^[2], next to William Shakespeare, he is known for his blank verse, his overreaching protagonists, and his mysterious death. Marlowe is often alleged to have been a government spy.

DOCTOR FAUSTUS - The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, normally known simply as Doctor Faustus, is a play by Christopher Marlowe, based on the Faust story, in which a man sells his soul to the devil for power and knowledge. Doctor Faustus was first published in 1604, eleven years after Marlowe's death and at least twelve years after the first performance of the play. William Prynne records the tale that actual devils once appeared on the stage during a performance of Faustus, "to the great amazement of both the actors and spectators". Some people were allegedly driven mad, "distracted with that fearful sight". Doctor Faustus is based on an older tale; it is believed to be the first dramatization of the Faust legend. (classic German legend, the first printed source on the legend of Faust is a little chapbook bearing the title Historia von D. Johann Fausten, published in 1587.)

However, Marlowe also introduced some changes to make it more original. Here, He made three main additions in the play:

• Faustus' soliloquy in the Act 1 on the vanity of human science

• Good and Bad Angels

• substitution of Seven Deadly Sins for a pageant of Devils

Apart from these changes, he emphasized his intellectual aspirations and curiosity and minimized the vices in the character of Faustus to lend a Renaissance aura to the story.

The play is in blank verse and prose in thirteen scenes (1604) or twenty scenes (1616).

BLANK VERSE - BLANK VERSE (also called unrhymed iambic pentameter): Unrhymed lines of ten syllables each with the even-numbered syllables bearing the accents. Blank verse has been called the most "natural" verse form for dramatic works, since it supposedly is the verse form most close to natural rhythms of English speech, and it has been the primary verse form of English drama and narrative poetry since the mid-sixteenth Century. Such verse is blank in rhyme only; it usually has a definite meter. (Variations in this meter may appear occasionally.) The Earl of Surrey first used the term "blank verse" in his 1540 translation of The Aeneid of Virgil. As an example, in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus' speech to Hippolyta appears in blank verse:

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. (5.1.12-17)

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