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.
Heart of Darkness
Zimbabwean scholar Rino Zhuwarara broadly agreed with Achebe, though considered it important to be "sensitised to how peoples of other nations perceive Africa". In 2003, Botswanan scholar Peter Mwikisa concluded the book was "the great lost opportunity to depict dialogue between Africa and Europe". In 1983, the British academic, Cedric Watts, criticized Achebe's apparent assertion that only black people may accurately analyse and assess the novella. Stan Galloway writes, in a comparison of "Heart of Darkness" with " Jungle Tales of Tarzan", "The inhabitants [of both works], whether antagonists or compatriots, were clearly imaginary and meant to represent a particular fictive cipher and not a particular African people".