Charles Marlow
Marlow's name may be inspired by the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. Conrad's father was a translator of William Shakespeare who doubtless would have known of Marlowe's work as well. Some intertextual interpretations of "Heart of Darkness" have suggested that Marlowe's "The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus" may have influenced Conrad. Charles Marlow describes a character as a "papier-mache Mephistopheles", a reference to the Faust legend. Marlow's and Kurtz's journey up the Congo River in "Heart of Darkness" also has similarities to another work by Marlowe, "Dido, Queen of Carthage", in which Aeneas is stranded on the shore of Libya and meets the African queen Dido.
Kurtz (Heart of Darkness)
Conrad also expressed an admiration of Robert Louis Stevenson's Pacific Ocean writings, in particular the stories "The Beach of Falesá" and "The Ebb-Tide", as well as the non-fiction account of Tembinok' of the Gilbert Islands that appeared in "In the South Seas". All three texts contain megalomaniacs who manipulate their circumstances and remote settings to assert power over others. It is widely believed that Conrad drew influence from these characters, as well as Stevenson's plot lines, when writing "Heart of Darkness".