Wealth & Money Quote by Christopher Marlowe

Marlowe doesn’t frame greed as a natural human itch; he treats it as an infection bred by abundance. “Excess of wealth” is doing the heavy lifting here. Not wealth, not comfort, not security - excess. The line argues that once money stops being a means and becomes an atmosphere you live in, it starts manufacturing new hungers. Covetousness isn’t the engine of accumulation; it’s the byproduct. That reversal is the sting: the rich aren’t greedy because they’re morally defective, they’re greedy because surplus rewires desire into a constant audition for “more.”

The phrasing is blunt, almost legalistic, like a moral theorem. That’s part of its power on the Elizabethan stage, where Marlowe’s dramas often put appetite, ambition, and transgression under theatrical floodlights. Late 16th-century England is newly anxious about money as an agent of social mobility: expanding trade, early capitalism, and courtly patronage produce fortunes that feel both intoxicating and suspicious. In that climate, “excess” signals not just personal indulgence but a disruption of order - wealth unmoored from traditional hierarchies.

Subtextually, Marlowe is less interested in scolding individuals than in exposing a trap: surplus creates competition, status games, paranoia, and the need to justify having what others lack. Covetousness becomes self-protection and self-mythology. It’s a line that understands how the pursuit of more can masquerade as prudence, even virtue, while quietly hollowing out the capacity to be satisfied.