Marlowe's Theater of Night: Doctor Faustus and Capital

I. Marlowe and Dispossessive Authorship

The early modern stage led a double life. It was a site of representation, on which Danish princes, Scythian warriors, alchemists, Egyptian queens, fairies, whores, shoemakers, caesars, shepherdesses, coneycatchers, and gulls played out their imaginary lives. But it was, at the same time, what Karl Marx would call a means of production. When combined with other such means, including stocks of costumes, stage properties, play texts, and so forth, and when set in motion by the human labor of actors, gatherers, prompters, playwrights, and stage hands of various kinds, it produced the cultural commodity known as the performance of a play, from which tidy profits could be and were made. The sum of these theatrical means of production thus constitutes a form of capital. This essay explores the question of whether the stage's status as means of production can be brought into some meaningful relation with its status as site of dramatic representation. To put the matter more simply: what does the stage's somewhat abstract economic function have to do with what concretely transpired on it, in the production of a play? And how did play texts take cognizance of the structures necessary to their economic and artistic realization? Here I shall address one specific kind of labor associated with the early modern stage, that of playwrighting. Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus provides a particularly shrewd and penetrating commentary on the playwright's confrontation with theatrical capital, an abstraction which, for introductory purposes, will be personified by Philip Henslowe.

Henslowe, the well-known theatrical impresario, owned the Rose Theatre and served as landlord to the Lord Admiral's Men, who gave the first recorded performances of Doctor Faustus in 1594. We know nothing about Henslowe's business dealings with Marlowe, if any, and I want to explore his importance for Doctor Faustus more indirectly, by way of his relationship with the minor playwright Robert Daborne. Daborne was a competent but not brilliant professional writer who never achieved theatrical eminence. Only two of his plays have survived, and only one of these was published. He is best known to theater historians for his correspondence with Henslowe, beginning in April 1613. By this time Henslowe had moved his business from the Rose Theatre to the Fortune, and he was in the (at least occasional) practice of buying plays directly from playwrights, either as a factor for an acting company or in order to resell them.

On 17 April 1613, Daborne contracts with Henslowe to write a tragedy called Machiavel and the Devil. Daborne will receive 20 pounds, to be paid in installments, and he promises to deliver the completed play by the end of Easter term. On the same day he signs a performance bond for 20 pounds with Henslowe, from which he will be released if he finishes the play by the promised date. At about the time he signs his contract, however, Daborne also becomes entangled in a lawsuit over his estate. The legal proceedings strain Daborne's savings and delay completion of the play until well past the promised date. Most of Daborne's subsequent correspondence with Henslowe consists of pleas for additional cash advances, along with protestations of his good faith and promises to deliver the completed play soon. Typical is a letter of 10 June 1613, in which Daborne writes: "I intended no other thing, god is my judge till this be finished: the necessity of term business exacts me beyond my custom to be troublesome unto you wherefore I pray send me the other 20 s. I desired."¹ By 25 July, Daborne has still not completed the play. Upbraided by Henslowe for his tardiness, he responds with a combination of injured pride and abject submission: "[B]efore God I can have twenty-five pounds for it [that is, the play] as some of the company know, but such is my debt to you that so long...