2024-09-26 12:47:26
Long before Goethe, the Englishman Christopher Marlowe wrote the play “Faust”. Now you have to share this popularity with a partner, as word analysis shows. We don’t know much about Henry Porter – only that he died just as horribly as the real Faust and like Marlowe.
In 1541 the devil made literary history. At night, there was an explosion in the restaurant “Zum Löwen” in the town of Staufen in the Black Forest. After the smoke cleared, they found the grisly body of a man who had been known for years in southern Germany as a healer, soothsayer, alchemist and black artist. His name is Johann Faust.
Maybe he just died in a chemical experiment that failed to make gold. But a contemporary chronicle reports that there were “signs” and “thoughts” that “an evil spirit, whom he only called his mother-in-law during his lifetime, had killed him.” Without these “references”, Faust would have been a famous quack who treated his patients with arsenic treatments. But he became a figure whose myth was created by great artists such as Goethe and Thomas Mann.
The first, however, is Christopher Marlowe. The Englishman and competitor Shakespeare was inspired to write a tragedy by “Historia by D. Johan Fausten,” which was first published in German in 1587 and in English a year later. German folk literature compiles the legends and horror stories that have proliferated in the four decades since Faust’s infernal death into a thick body of horror literature. Material tailor-made for the stages of Renaissance London, which has not yet shaken off its ancient belief in demons.
Marlowe’s “The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus” is considered one of the greatest works of the Elizabethan age. But after four and a half years, he now has to share this fame with another author, The Guardian reports. Statistical language comparisons have shown that Marlowe called a specialist for comic events that – representative of the stage at that time – was even in the darkest drama of the descent into hell. Perhaps the customer was not Marlowe himself, but a theater director who wanted to shed some light on a dark story and then – as in the writer’s rooms of the modern series – brought in a second writer: Henry Porter.
A tricky word
Henry – who? The man was not one of the greats of the Elizabethan theater that we still know today – like Ben Johnson, Thomas Kyd, Marlowe and Shakespeare. One of his plays has survived: the comedy “The Two Angry Women of Abington”. However, he is known to work with other writers, including Johnson, and write comic episodes for them.
If Porter’s name is finally known after centuries, it is thanks to Darren Freebury-Jones, a literature student from Shakespeare’s birthplace Stratford. He had a computer program comparing Henry Porter’s later writings with Marlowe’s work, and he related: “I was surprised how the theatrical language of ‘Dr. Faustus belongs to Porter. In “Two Angry Women,” Potter often has her characters ask “Do you hear that?” – and he also uses this phrase in “Faust” scenes. But of course that is not the only linguistic similarity.
There have been doubts about Potter’s license for some time because he and Marlowe studied together at Cambridge and at the same time worked for the impresario Philip Henslow’s theater troupe “Admiral’s Men”. Now the process is uncertain – the only evidence would be the documents from the time that identified Potter as the author – but the evidence is so strong that the history of British literature needs to be rewritten a bit.
Incidentally, both Marlowe and Potter have one thing in common with their title hero Johann Faust: all three have wild lives that end in harmony. It is not proven that Marlowe and Potter were possessed by the devil, but one was stabbed in the head during an argument in 1593, and the other died in 1599 when he was stabbed in the chest with a sword.
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