Marlowe designed his plays as striking reversals which heap disaster upon the protagonists they have seemed to celebrate. His heroes endure exacting retributions which are carefully matched with their particular failings. The catastrophes adjust plot to character, trapping protagonists within a rigorously moral form. Their appropriateness may invite critics to read the plays backwards, discovering anticipations of these last judgements. John Russell Brown, for example, has argued that a play by Marlowe ‘is always more significant than any of its characters can realize: the hero is viewed ironically or relatively’. This argument depends, I think, on the privilege of hindsight. It fails to explain why an audience might experience a final disaster with great surprise and shock.

Guided by the morality of Marlowe's catastrophes, the audience does ultimately discover that a protagonist's fate has always been implicit in the strong desires which move him. Douglas Cole has shown that Marlowe's plots seem to provide rationalizations of an Augustinian moral psychology: ‘The soul is weighed in the balance by what delights her, as St Augustine put it, which is another way of saying that what a man loves tells most about what that man is.’ By creating disasters which fulfil mistaken desires and identify the characters with their loves, Marlowe casts brilliant light on basic spiritual perversions. Surely a process so intelligible in retrospect cannot be all that puzzling when experienced scene by scene.