Elsewhere on this website, you can see me talking about the need for the director to understand the world of the play. The world of the play is also, of course, the world of the playwright.
A lot has been written and speculated about the short, murky life of Christopher Marlowe. Was he an agent, a spy, a projector? Did he really die in Deptford aged 29 or was it an elaborate cover up? Whatever, it is clear that the man who wrote Act 1 scene 3, had a very sophisticated understanding of negotiation, bluff and double-bluff. Working the first dialogue between Faustus and Mephistopheles with the actors who will play them, it’s like a game of poker. What Faustus asks for first, the next; what Mephistopheles offers, what he withholds.
That may reflect Marlowe’s personal world view and experience. What about the original audience’s experience and expectations. When I was researching the play, I came across the following quote from Paul Taylor, the Independent’s theatre critic, on the context in which the play was originally performed:
“a world where the plague killed off many adults in their prime. In those circumstances, 24 years of assured life might not seem such a paltry bargain. Moreover, theatres were meccas of disease and had to be closed down during epidemics. To see the original performance of Faustus in a public playhouse may well have felt rather lke seeing a play about 24 hours of indestructibility performed in a New York or San Francisco bathhouse in the mid-1980s, when the true panic of Aids had kicked in”.
