Elegiac Ethopoeia in Marlowe's Dido Queene of Carthage and Doctor Faustus

abstract:This article examines the influence of Ovid's Heroides and ethopoeia on characterization in Christopher Marlowe's plays. In the sixteenth century, students often performed exercises in ethopoeia, "character making." In such an exercise, the schoolmaster placed a character from literature or history within a rhetorical situation, and students wrote speeches that reflected that character's emotions and social background. Ovid's Heroides, which features figures like Dido lamenting Aeneas's perfidy or Hero Leander's absence, exemplified this practice, and authors like Christopher Marlowe frequently employed characterization techniques learned from the Heroides as a model for ethopoeia. This article traces the development of his tragic characters from Dido Queene of Carthage (c.1586) to Doctor Faustus (c.1592), arguing that Marlowe uses techniques including ethopoeia's tria tempora structure and Ovid's speakers torn between the "voice of the self" and "the voice of the culture" to fashion a unique brand of "interiority" that invites empathic identification with his tragic protagonists. These protagonists consciously struggle against the narrative structures in which they are trapped by ethopoetically lamenting their frustrated desires and even repressing memories, and Marlowe invites his audience to sympathize regardless of the character's ethical decisions.