DOCTOR FAUSTUS AS A TRAGEDY OF AN OVERREACHER English literature owes a great debt to Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) for identifying a certain type of classical tragic hero in the works of Sophocles and making him intelligible in English cultural terms. Harry Levin called this type “the over-reacher” after rhetorician George Puttenham’s attempt to find a close English synonym for the Greek word ‘hyperbole’ (in The Arte of EnglishPoesie, 1589). Marlowe’s characters have an exaggerated appetite for achievement, whether it’s knowledge as power (Doctor Faustus), world conquest (Tamburlaine), or revenge and the acquisition of riches (Barabus). Marlowe’s heroes were popular then, and remain fascinating now, as portraits of English imperial ambitions dressed in the appearances of a German scholar, an Asian warlord, and a wealthy Maltese Jew. Their exotic appearances and settings gave Marlowe an opportunity to dazzle us with some of the most elaborate and extended set speeches in English drama. Marlowe was an English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. He was the foremost Elizabethantragedianof his day. He greatly influenced William Shakespeare, who was born in the same year as Marlowe and who rose to become the pre-eminent Elizabethan playwright after Marlowe's mysterious early death. Marlowe’s plays are known for the use of blank verse and their overreaching protagonists. One of the greatest achievementsof Marlowe was that he broke away from the medieval conception of tragedy. In medieval dramas, tragedy was a thing of the prince’s only dealingwith the rise and fall of kings or royal personali.ties. But it was left to Marlowe to evolve and create the real tragic hero. Almost all the heroes of Marlowe’s great tragedies Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustusor The
