SOURCE: "Marlowe's Myth" and "Source, Design, Genre," in his Doctor Faustus: Divine in Show, Twayne Publishers, 1994, pp. 8-11, 23-31.

In the following excerpt, McAlindon explores Marlowe's reshaping of traditional elements of the Faustus myth

Of the six surviving plays written by Marlowe, Doctor Faustus is by far the most famous, yet it is by no means the most finished and satisfactory. It is indeed depressingly uneven, so that scholars have long surmised that much of it (and not just the additions paid for by Philip Henslowe in 1602) was written by a collaborator or collaborators of greatly inferior capacities. Yet, the overall conception of the tragedy is superb, and those parts of it that are unquestionably by Marlowe show him at his greatest as a poetic dramatist. Nowhere else does he communicate so much with such economy; nowhere else is his emotional intensity or his dramatic irony so piercing...