Since Marlowe's four major plays are so different from each other, it is not surprising that their performance histories have been equally different. Initially, three of them at least were famous as vehicles for Edward Alleyn, the actor who created, and perhaps literally owned, the roles of Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas (Edward II was probably written for a different company). The Jew of Malta, one of the most successful plays of the 1590s, was so completely associated with him that no one else dared play Barabas until after Alleyn's death in 1626. The play was revived in 1633, and there may also have been a production of Tamburlaine the Great as late as 1641, just before the outbreak of the Civil War and the closing of the London theatres. References to Faustus, Tamburlaine, and The Jew of Malta in Civil War pamphlets suggest that performances were still part of collective memory, though the plays were no longer associated with Marlowe's name.

Completely forgotten after the Civil War, Edward II and The Jew of Malta were the first Marlowe plays to receive serious attention from an eighteenth-century editor, probably because they seemed the most stage-worthy. They appeared in Robert Dodsley’s Old English Plays in 1744 and 1780, respectively, and The Jew of Malta was revived in 1818 in an adaptation by Solomon Penley which incorporated lines from Edward II. But the Marlowe who was recreated in the nineteenth century was more like a mad Romantic genius, thanks in particular to the inaccurate belief that he had been killed by a rival ‘in his lewd love’. Well into the next century, he was admired chiefly for Faustus and Tamburlaine, plays about men with ‘aspiring minds’, which looked all the more impressive because they seemed unstageable. From the 1920s and 1930s onwards, however, the accumulation of new evidence about the circumstances of the poet’s death and its possible connections with the Elizabethan secret service gradually began to reveal a more cynical Marlowe, perhaps more interesting to the late twentieth century. As a result, The Jew of Malta once again attracted directors, while Edward II came almost to dominate the Marlowe canon.