"Although Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus ends with the protagonist’s supposed damnation - he has sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for forbidden knowledge - the scholar-necromancer is really a hero to Marlowe, whose conquests of knowledge, like Tamburlaine’s conquests of territory in Marlowe’s other (two-part) hit play, wowed audiences in the 1590s with their picture of moral defiance. Marlowe no more expects his audience to succumb to a Christian or moral view of the world, having seen the downfall of Doctor Faustus, than the fans of 1970s rock bands would be deterred from a wild way of life by one of their idols taking an overdose or dying a violent death. The terrible end is part of the daredevil thrill."

—A.N. Wilson - The Elizabethans