Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus provides lessons for COVID19 compensation
Christopher Marlowe was just 29 when he died in 1593 but his most famous play, The Tragicall History of Dr. Faustus, made its debut in the early 1600’s. Born in the same year as Shakespeare, the final version of Dr. Faustus was published in the year of Shakespeare’s death in 1616. The plague that hit two centuries earlier had permeated the imagination of 16th century Britain especially as this was an age that had little idea of what a vaccine might be or how one would work. “Are not thy bills hung up as monuments, Whereby whole cities have escap’d the plague, And thousand desperate maladies been cur’d?”[1] Indeed, both Marlowe and Shakespeare were fortunate to have lived a long generation before the resurgence of the plague in London in…