Marlowe’s ’Doctor Faustus’ May Have Been Co-Written by a Forgotten Playwright

Scholars have long speculated that Christopher Marlowe had a collaborator on the comic scenes of his classic play Doctor Faustus, although the 1604 edition only credits him. Now, based on comparative linguistic evidence found in the surviving play, the nearly forgotten playwright Henry Porter has emerged as a likely collaborator.

Doctor Faustus is a tragic tale of vanity and greed, in which a scholar sells his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and power. The tragedy is reflected in the comic play scenes, now believed to have been written by Porter, who was called by a contemporary “the best comedian among us.”

Porter collaborated with many playwrights, including Ben Jonson, but only one of his plays survives: The Two Angry Women of Abington, a comic farce from 1599 that is thought to have been a hit, as a second part was commissioned.

His possible involvement with Doctor Faustus was first suggested in 1993, but his authorship now looks even more likely thanks to the discovery of dramatic phraseology in his play and in Doctor Faustus.

The research was carried out by Dr Darren Freebury-Jones, a lecturer at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon. He told the Guardian: “I was struck by how close the dramatic language of Doctor Faustus was to Porter’s. Doctor Faustus is a hugely influential play for which Marlowe has received much credit, but now Porter’s contribution has been revealed. Porter being identified as the most likely collaborator sheds new light on the play. He was a wonderful writer of comedy and would have been an ideal collaborator on this play.”

He added that while solo writing was the norm at the time, collaboration was common: “Sometimes it wasn’t necessarily down to the writers. It could well have been down to the theatre manager.”

Porter’s name appears 10 times in the diary of theatre manager Philip Henslowe between 1596 and 1599. In one entry, Henslowe noted that he had paid Porter, Henry Chettle, and Jonson for their play Hot Wrath Will Soon Be Cool.

Porter’s authorship has been suggested in part because he was a contemporary of Marlowe’s at Cambridge University and a playwright at Henslowe’s Admiral’s Men at the time Marlowe was writing Doctor Faustus. Also, The Two Angry Women of Abingdon and Doctor Faustus share a characteristic stylistic device: the repetition of the phrase "You hear."

The latest study used the online database Collocations and N-grams to compare the texts of more than 500 plays from 1552 to 1657, indicating whether the use of certain words and phrases was rare or unique.

Freebury-Jones found several unique collocations, including the Horse Cadet in Doctor Faustus, whose complaint about being "in the middle of a pond" parallels the drunken butler in Porter’s comedy, who finds himself "in the middle of a pond." Other examples include the Horse Thief’s statement that he "will not be ruled," which parallels the speech of the clown servant in Porter’s play, who says that man "will not be ruled."

Freebury-Jones said: “This database makes a fairly compelling case for the authorship of a large part of the play. Indeed, by some measures, the language of Doctor Faustus is closer to Porter’s play than to any other play written by Marlowe… This is a remarkable conclusion, given that the case for Porter has so far been based on circumstantial evidence and one, albeit striking, stylistic feature.”

Porter has long been forgotten, his life cut short in a duel with a fellow playwright in 1599, a few years after Marlowe was fatally stabbed in a fight over a bill.

Freebury-Jones said: "The dramatists of that period so often had tragic endings - Ben Jonson killed an actor in a duel. These writers created great theatres, but strife dogged them. But if Porter had survived, he might have gone the way of most dramatists and died a pauper."