ABSTRACT
Christopher Marlowe's career as a dramatist was very brief, but it was also very varied, and even on the basis of the seven plays we can attribute to him with certainty it is possible to trace a development not only in dramatic technique but also in philosophical scope. Marlowe approached his historical subject not with the Christian view of history as the working out of God's purposes on earth, but rather with the premises of the classical historians he had read at Cambridge. Marlowe's hero dies only because all who live must die. His conquests are undiminished; the one son incapable of following in his footsteps has been destroyed, and his two remaining sons are ready to complete their father's domination of the world. In The Jew of Malta we have the defeat of policy, but we do not have the triumph of its antithesis, for Ferneze the Christian and Calymath the Turk are each as guilty as Barabas.
