Scholars have long suggested that Christopher Marlowe had a collaborator for the comic scenes of his classic play Doctor Faustus, although his name alone is on the 1604 published edition. Now a largely forgotten dramatist, Henry Porter, has emerged as the likely co-author, based on comparative linguistic evidence that has been unearthed from his surviving play.
Doctor Faustus is a tragic story of vanity and greed, in which a scholar sells his soul to the devil in return for knowledge and power. The tragedy is mirrored by scenes of comic horseplay that are now thought to have been written by Porter, who was described by a contemporary as “the best for comedy amongst us”.
Porter collaborated with numerous playwrights, including Ben Jonson, but there is only one surviving play by him, The Two Angry Women of Abington, a comic farce of 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 now his authorship looks even more likely with the discovery of dramatic phraseology in his play and in Doctor Faustus.
The research has been carried out by Dr Darren Freebury-Jones, a lecturer at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-on-Avon.
He told the Guardian: “I was astonished by just how close the dramatic language of Doctor Faustus actually was to Porter. Doctor Faustus is a hugely influential play for which Marlowe has received the credit – but Porter’s contribution is now revealed.
“Recognising Porter as the most likely collaborator sheds new light on the play. He was an excellent writer of comedy and would make for an ideal co-author on this play.”
He added that, while solo authorship was then the norm, collaboration was prevalent: “Sometimes it was not necessarily down to the authors. It might very well have been down to the theatre manager.”
Between 1596 and 1599, Porter’s name appears 10 times in the diary of the theatre manager Philip Henslowe. In one entry, Henslowe noted that he paid Porter, Henry Chettle and Jonson for their play Hot Anger Soon Cold.
Part of the reason that Porter’s authorship had previously been suggested was that he was Marlowe’s contemporary at the University of Cambridge and a dramatist for Henslowe’s Admiral’s Men at the time Marlowe was writing Doctor Faustus. There was also a distinctive stylistic tic, the repetition of the phrase “Do you hear” in The Two Angry Women of Abingdon and Doctor Faustus.
The latest research involved an electronic database called Collocations and N-grams, which compared the texts of more than 500 plays from 1552-1657, indicating whether the use of certain words and phrases were rare or unique.
Freebury-Jones found several unique collocations, including the Horse-courser in Doctor Faustus, whose complaint that he is “in the middle of the pond” parallels the drunken butler in Porter’s comedy, who finds himself “Up to the middle in a pond”.
Among other examples, the Horse-courser’s declaration that he would “not be ruled” matches a speech by a clownish servant in Porter’s play, who says a man will “not be ruled”.
Freebury-Jones said: “This database provides a pretty compelling case for the authorship of large parts of this play. In fact, according to some measures, the language of Doctor Faustus is closer to Porter’s play than any other drama written by Marlowe … This is a remarkable finding given that the case for Porter has thus far relied only on circumstantial evidence and a single, albeit pronounced, stylistic trait.”
Porter has long been forgotten since his life was cut short in a duel by a fellow playwright in 1599, a few years after Marlowe was fatally stabbed in a fight over a bill.
Freebury-Jones said: “You so often find with playwrights of the period that their endings are tragic – Ben Jonson killed an actor in a duel. These writers were producing great theatre but combat was always dogging them. Had Porter survived, though, he might have gone the way of most dramatists and died in poverty.”
Freebury-Jones’s research features in his forthcoming book, Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers: How Early Modern Playwrights Shaped the World’s Greatest Writer, published by Manchester University Press on 8 October, and Oxford University Press’s academic journal, Notes & Queries.
