SOURCE: "Marlowe and the Will to Absolute Play," in his Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, The University of Chicago Press, 1980, pp. 193-221.

In the following excerpt, Greenblatt explores the act of strenuous, aggressive self-fashioning on the part of protagoniss in Marlowe's plays. He contends that Faustus, like Tamburlaine and Edward II, wilfully reshapes himself in opposition to authority.

On 26 June 1586 a small fleet, financed by the Earl of Cumberland, set out from Gravesend for the South Seas. It sailed down the West African coast, sighting Sierra Leone in October, and at this point we may let one of those on board, the merchant John Sarracoll, tell his own story:

The fourth of November we went on shore to a town of the Negroes, … which we found to be but lately built: it was of about two hundred houses, and walled about with mighty great trees, and stakes...