Sarah K. Scott and M. L. Stapleton, eds., Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman
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Introduction: Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman: Lives, Stage, and Page
By Sarah K. Scott and M. L. Stapleton
Like all great craftsmen, he worked by selection and exclusion on the mass of material ready to his
hand; and his instinct in this double process is the proof of his originality.
In these words, the poet, critic, and aesthete John Addington Symonds (1840-93) showed
his admiration for Christopher Marlowe as a “sculptor-poet,” a description that resonates
into the twenty-first century.1 We follow this tradition in viewing Marlowe as artifex, a
maker of plays, poems, and mythologies that delight and move us, and contribute to the
early modern conception of subjectivity. He is a true craftsman in the ways he conceives
an idea, shapes and refines it, then remakes and remodels it, only to refashion it further in
his writing process. This is true of the lives he imagines in his plays, such as the A- and
B-texts of Doctor Faustus, the two parts of Tamburlaine, and The Jew of Malta. It is also
an accurate statement about his lyric and narrative poetical voices, especially the
translations of Lucan’s Pharsalia and Ovid’s Amores, as well as the pastoral “Come live
with me” and the fragmentary epyllion Hero and Leander. His works are indeed all of a
1
See Shakespeare’s Predecessors in the English Drama (London: Smith, Elder, 1900), 469 and 484,
respectively. He translated Cellini’s Autobiography (1887), published the landmark study, Renaissance in
Italy, in seven volumes (1875-86), and is also known for one of the first major defenses of homosexuality
in English, A Problem in Modern Ethics: Being an Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion,
Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists and Jurists (1891). His sonnet sequence, L’Amour de
l’impossible (1882), takes the same subject as a theme, as does his translation of Michelangelo’s sonnets to
Tommaso de Cavalieri (1878). His “General Introduction: On the Drama of Elizabeth and James
Considered as the Main Product of the Renaissance in England,” is included in the Marlowe volume of the
New Mermaid Series, the first, The Best Plays of the Old Dramatists: Christopher Marlowe, ed. Havelock
Ellis (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1893), vii-xxvii.
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different kind, as Charles Lamb observed.2 The controversies and facts regarding
Marlowe’s life also continue to be crafted, as our biographical and scholarly contributors
explain. Accordingly, our title, Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman: Lives, Stage, and
Page, identifies the motifs that integrate our collection so that the reader can see that
every essay herein is interrelated, giving expression to the idea of Marlowe as a working
artist.
This volume appears during a period of renewed interest in Marlowe that began
thirty years ago, one that has gathered momentum in subsequent early modern literary
and historical studies. The scant facts of the life have been reinterpreted in recent
scholarly biographies: William Urry’s Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury (1988);
Matthew Proser’s The Gift of Fire (1995); Lisa Hopkins’s traditional approach of locating
the life in the works, Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life (2000); Constance
Kuriyama’s complementary return to primary documents, Christopher Marlowe: A
Renaissance Life (2002). In the background are the landmark biographical studies
published during the Second World War, F. S. Boas’s Christopher Marlowe: A
Biographical and Critical Study (1940) and John Bakeless’s The Tragicall History of
Christopher Marlowe (1942). 3
The resurgence of interest in theater history and performance studies has informed
a number of scholarly contributions, including Simon Shepherd’s study in cultural
2
As paraphrased by F. P. Wilson, who attributes it to Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867), the chronicler of
nineteenth-century literary talent. See Marlowe and the Early Shakespeare: The Clark Lectures, Trinity
College, Cambridge, 1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 30.
3
See the Bibliography for the publishers and dates of the books mentioned in this paragraph and the three
succeeding it.
Sarah K. Scott and M. L. Stapleton, eds., Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman
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materialism, Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (1988) and Douglas Cole’s
Christopher Marlowe and the Renaissance of Tragedy (1995). John Parker’s The
Aesthetics of Antichrist: From Christian Drama to Christopher Marlowe (2007) argues
that the inherent theatricality of Christian ritual influenced and even sacralized the milieu
of the commercial theater. Important predecessors to this critical tradition of the stage are
David Bevington’s From Mankind to Marlowe (1962) and Joel Altman’s The Tudor Play
of Mind (1978).
Numerous editions of Marlowe’s plays and poetry have been produced in recent
years, representing one side of the page. The Oxford Complete Works edited by Roma
Gill et al. (1987-98) remains the most ambitious attempt to stabilize the corpus in a
multivolume old-spelling format. Several single-volume editions exist and are frequently
reprinted, such as the Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey (2003) revision of J. B.
Steane’s Penguin (1969), the Mark Thornton Burnett Dent (1999), or various twenty-first
century reprints of the E. D. Pendry Everyman (1976, rev. 1983). All owe a debt to their
predecessors: Fredson Bowers’s two-volume text (1973, 1981), the six-volume Clifford
Leech Revels (1955-78), and R. Case Methuen (1930-33) versions, and ultimately to the
first truly modern edition by C. F. Tucker Brooke (1910).
Literary analysis of the Marlovian canon has also proliferated, demonstrating a
number of traditional and poststructuralist approaches, the other side of the page. Roger
Sales’s Christopher Marlowe (1991) and Clare Harraway’s Re-Citing Marlowe (2000),
provide new historicist analysis of Elizabethan society to account for the brutal realism of
the plays; Sara Munson Deats’s Sex, Gender, and Desire in the Plays of Christopher
Marlowe (1997) combines feminism and close reading. Patrick Cheney’s Marlowe’s
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Counterfeit Profession (1997) contends that the author self-consciously followed an
Ovidian cursus rather than the Spenserian precedent of adopting a Virgilian career.
Another important contribution, Robert A. Logan’s Shakespeare’s Marlowe (2007)
reinvestigates the traditional topic of reading the two playwrights as mutually influential
and emulous of one another. Mid-twentieth-century studies that sought to interrelate the
entire Marlovian canon provided foundation for these newer works, such as Harry
Levin’s The Overreacher (1952), Cole’s Suffering and Evil in the Plays of Christopher
Marlowe (1962), and J. B. Steane’s Marlowe: A Critical Study (1964).
Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman builds upon this rich tradition of Marlowe
scholarship, including early and recent collections. In the twentieth century, Leech’s A
Collection of Critical Essays (1964) surveys the century’s contemporary scholarship and
criticism; Brian Morris (1968) furnishes essays reflecting trends in British criticism by
scholars who attended the Marlowe symposium at Langwith College, University of York;
Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill, and Constance B. Kuriyama, “A Poet and a Filthy
Play-maker” (1988), offer twenty-four pieces addressing literary reception, dramaturgy,
non-dramatic writings, and biography; Darryll Grantley and Peter Roberts (1996) present
interdisciplinary approaches emphasizing the dynamics of gender, religion, politics, and
geography as they examine relationships between the playwright’s life and plays; Emily
Bartels’s Critical Essays (1997) provides new historicist and cultural materialist readings
that interrogate early modern social, political, and religious conditions and difference;
Paul Whitfield White’s Marlowe, History, and Sexuality (1998), features essays from the
1990s that address Marlowe’s life and writings in the historical moments of the 1580s
and 1590s, governed primarily by studies of the interplay of early modern conceptions of
Sarah K. Scott and M. L. Stapleton, eds., Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman
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bodies and sexuality; Richard Wilson (1999) presents a collection offering a range of
theoretically informed readings, including those of new historicism, post-modern
Marxism, queer theory, and feminist perspectives.
Three twenty-first century collections deserve special mention. Cheney’s
Cambridge Companion (2006) features a comprehensive treatment of the biography,
cultural milieu, and writings. Deats and Logan provide two volumes: Marlowe’s Empery
(2002), which offers diverse theatrical, historical, and cultural approaches to the canon;
Placing the Plays (2008) examines Marlowe’s range and complexity as dramatist
concerning family and kinship, ethics and religion, and his relationship to Shakespeare.
Our volume observes current trends, resisting interpretive homogeneity to offer a
cohesive, interdisciplinary approach. It features excellent emerging voices as well as
some of the most respected and talented scholars and critics who specialize in the early
modern period, several of whom are making their first contributions to Marlowe studies.
Their essays provide readers with a variety of entry points that encourage the engagement
of mutually illuminating lines of inquiry. They engage in new ways the controversies and
complexities of their subject’s life and art as they demonstrate the interrelatedness of
recent theater, literature, and cultural studies of sixteenth-century English literature.
Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman reflects the enthusiastic presentation of
papers at academic conferences, the presence of Marlowe’s works on undergraduate and
graduate syllabi, and the vigorous membership in the Marlowe Society of America. As
such, this volume serves as the fifth collection of essays to be published under the
auspices of the Marlowe Society of America, an organization devoted to Marlowe studies
through its publications, conferences, and sessions at the annual convention of the
Sarah K. Scott and M. L. Stapleton, eds., Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman
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Modern Language Association of America. Our enterprise also participates in the
enthusiasm surrounding the reception of Doctor Faustus, Edward II, and Hero and
Leander, reflected in the print medium of Stanley Wells’s Shakespeare and Company
(2007) and Lisa Hopkins’s Christopher Marlowe, Renaissance Dramatist (2008), as well
as studies of Marlowe in performance—and the many recent productions of the dramatic
works.
Our contributors’ essays engage current trends in criticism as they simultaneously
complement their previous work and future projects. Our “Lives: Scholarship and
Biography” section begins, fittingly, with Robert A. Logan’s wide-ranging analysis,
“Marlowe Scholarship and Criticism: The Current Scene,” which focuses on the patterns
and tendencies of twenty-first century studies in the areas of approaches and content,
predictions about the future, and suggestions about useful directions that scholars might
pursue. Logan suggests that since ambiguity has been widely acknowledged as a major
artistic device in the canon, it is time to reengage in close reading of the texts, while
taking into account the idea of Marlowe as a professional strategist highly attuned to the
effects of his dramaturgical effects and poetics. He identifies audience reception as
another potentially fruitful area of study, as initiated by Alfred Harbage and developed
extensively by Charles Whitney and Ruth Lunney. 4 Logan also argues that newer
4
See Harbage, Annals of English Drama, 975-1700, 3rd. ed., rev. ed. Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim (London:
Routledge, 1989); Whitney, “Out of Service and in the Playhouse: Richard Norwood, Youth in Transition
and Early Response to Dr. Faustus,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 12 (2000): 166-89, and
Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Lunney,
Marlowe and the Popular Tradition: Innovation in the English Drama before 1595 (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2002).
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scholars could study further the relationships between Marlowe’s works and those of his
contemporaries as well as investigate issues pertaining to the fields of theater and stage
history. He has published many essays, book chapters, and reviews on Marlowe in
addition to his book Shakespeare’s Marlowe (2007), the most extensive treatment to date
concerning the intertextuality of the two writers, i.e., Hero and Leander and Venus and
Adonis, The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice, Edward II and Richard II,
Tamburlaine and Henry V, Faustus and Macbeth, and Dido, Queene of Carthage and
Antony and Cleopatra. Logan distinguishes between “theatrical” and “literary practices”
as part of his analysis in explaining the dramatist’s “unmistakable influence” on
Shakespeare, readily apparent from his “keen sense of emulation.”5
Three biographical essays follow, each speculating on a different aspect of
Marlowe’s life. First, Richard F. Hardin’s meditation, “Marlowe Thinking Globally,”
proceeds on the assumption that early modern England witnessed a form of globalization
that is characterized by the erosion of distance and finds that Marlowe was better
positioned than most of his contemporaries to respond to it. The playwright’s home,
Canterbury, international and polyglot as a center of international Christianity from the
time of Augustine’s settlement in the sixth century, received Protestant refugees fleeing
5
For Logan, “‘theatrical practices,’” are “the strategies that Shakespeare devised to give the production of
his plays maximum effectiveness, whether measured pragmatically, by the plays’ degree of commercial
success, or aesthetically, by such ingredients as conflict and tension, spectacles (visual and verbal), and
climactic moments. ‘Literary practices’ include the shaping of a specific intellectual and emotional content
in conjunction with the manipulation of the play’s style, structure, and characterizations.” See
Shakespeare’s Marlowe: The Influence of Christopher Marlowe on Shakespeare’s Artistry (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2007), 2 and 8.
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from the continent to avoid Spanish and French persecution on an especially large scale
beginning in the 1570s. His university, Cambridge, exhibited a similarly visible
Continental scholarly community and environment, which must have contributed further
to his developing sense of the larger world. The anti-ethnocentrism discernible in
Marlowe’s work, then, must be an effect of these early shaping influences. Hardin’s
essay thus reflects an abiding interest in the controversies arising from the subject of
religious beliefs and themes in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature. In
Civil Idolatry (1992), a study that analyzes texts that critique the cult of monarchy in light
of the general Christian injunction against idolatry, he studies the tendency of
Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton to “subvert . . . the ‘mischievous sentiment’ of religion
whereby monarchy used its sacred role to encroach upon traditional liberties,”6 one that
Marlowe also clearly demonstrates.
Next, J. A. Downie’s “Reviewing What We Think We Know about Christopher
Marlowe” contends that recent accounts of Marlowe such as Park Honan’s Christopher
Marlowe: Poet & Spy (2005) often fail to note that few facts are known about his life and
that no evidence before 1593 attributes any specific play to him. A review of the
documentary evidence is surely in order, as is the separate matter of returning to a
consideration how the plays might have been represented on an Elizabethan stage.
Downie has previously published two essays considering problems raised by fancifully
speculative biographical studies. He strongly disputes the approach favored by Charles
Nicholl’s The Reckoning (1992) in “Marlowe: Facts and Fictions” and argues against
6
See Civil Idolatry: Desacralizing and Monarchy in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (Newark DE:
University of Delaware Press, 1992), 30.
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what he calls other “Circular arguments of considerable ingenuity” in “Marlowe, May
1593, and the ‘Must Have’ Theory of Biography.”7 Third, Rosalind Barber’s “Was
Marlowe a Violent Man?” builds on arguments such as Downie’s, as well as those of
Stephen Orgel, Constance Kuriyama, and Lukas Erne, that the reception of Marlowe has
been “marred by a vicious hermeneutic circle” that reads his plays’ protagonists
biographically so that “the mythographic creature thus constructed informs the criticism
of his plays.”8 The result of such mythmaking, she argues, is that he has been completely
misconstrued as a hopelessly violent young man whose death was a kind of contrapasso,
and that this construction certainly needs interrogation.
Section II, “Stage: Theater, Dramaturgy,” features four essays engaged with
various aspects of performance germane to Marlowe studies. Alan C. Dessen’s “Residual
Allegory in Edward II” studies the concept of this literary form as it applies to the special
nature of the drama. Marlowe’s use of allegory differs sharply from the written,
“poetical” variety one finds in texts such as The Faerie Queene. In the late moral plays,
obvious abstractions named in speech prefixes become considerably less abstract when
translated into theatrical performances. Knowledge and Good Deeds must be given
literal human form by actors to be understood by an audience watching Everyman, just as
7
For the first essay, see Constructing Christopher Marlowe, eds. J. A. Downie and J.T. Parnell
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 13-29; for the second, see Review of English Studies n.s.
58 (2007): 245-67. For the quotation, see “Marlowe: Facts and Fictions,” 16.
8
See Orgel’s chapter “Tobacco and Boys” in his The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the
Early Modern Stage (New York: Routledge, 2002), 211-29; for Kuriyama, see Christopher Marlowe: A
Renaissance Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002); for Erne, see “Biography, Mythography, and
Criticism: The Life and Works of Christopher Marlowe,” Modern Philology 103 (2005): 47, 28; 28-50.
Sarah K. Scott and M. L. Stapleton, eds., Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman
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social types in Jonson’s comedies (e.g., a scolding wife, a trickster) act out their concepts
but are also individuals with peculiarly human traits. Dessen finds that Marlowe’s use of
the conventions of morality plays for ironic and even sardonic effect participates in a
dramatic milieu that included works of a kindred sensibility, such as Greene’s Friar
Bacon, Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Shakespeare’s first tetralogy, and Arden of
Faversham. He argues that Marlowe follows these patterns, avoiding the didactic while
retaining residual elements of allegorical technique, especially in his history play: the
Bishop who fetches Edward’s crown in 5.1; the mysterious Champion who appears at the
end of 5.4; and the staging of Kent’s exit from the same scene. He has analyzed the
influence of these earlier models on Elizabethan drama throughout his career: Jonson’s
Moral Comedy (1971), on Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair; and
Shakespeare and the Late Moral Plays, concerning Richard III, 1 Henry IV, and All’s
Well That Ends Well. A theme in his work is the exploration and development of the
concept of “theatrical vocabulary” to expand the sense of what playwrights, players, and
audiences shared in their collective experience in the theater. In
reading one of the early printed texts of a Shakespeare play, we enter
into the middle of a conversation—a discourse in a language we only
partly understand—between a dramatist and his actor colleagues, a
halfway stage that was completed in a performance now lost to us.
Although we will never reconstitute that performance, we may be able
to recover elements of that vocabulary and hence better understand that
conversation. To recover that lost vocabulary, however, requires a
fresh, uncompromised look at the only plentiful evidence, the extant
scripts.9
9
Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 5-6.
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The following three studies in this section concern themselves with intertextuality and
performance. Like Dessen’s essay, Meredith Skura’s “What Shakespeare Did to
Marlowe in Private: Dido, Faustus, and Bottom,” also concerns itself with a traditional
topic, “influence,” in a novel way. Here, Skura discusses new intersections between the
two playwrights, part of her larger project on Shakespeare’s sources. Marlowe’s one
known work for the private stage, The Tragedy of Dido, a play about love written for boy
actors in the mid 1580s and published in 1594, influenced its complementary successor in
the public theater, Antony and Cleopatra, as well as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, also
performed, initially, for a coterie audience. Shakespeare obviously revises Marlowe in
these instances, a tendency Skura contends that we can see in the early 1590s, since
Love’s Labour’s Lost transforms the bloody soldiers and scheming ladies of The
Massacre at Paris into lovers imbued with elegance (as well as logorrhea). It is even
possible that Doctor Faustus, also available in 1594 in a revival by Marlowe’s company,
the Admiral’s Men, informed the conception of the most vocal mechanical, Bottom.
With similar care and insight, Skura’s Shakespeare the Actor and the Purposes of Playing
(1993) studies “Shakespeare’s texts in the context of performance conditions and the
Elizabethan actor’s subculture.” It attends to textual patterns, the concept of “motivated
language” from psychoanalysis as it relates to playing to an audience, and the
reconstruction of the early modern English player’s experience by theater historians.10
Sarah K. Scott’s “The Jew of Malta and the Development of City Comedy: ‘The Mean
Passage of a History’” analyzes a much-debated work from a new perspective: that
Barabas’s exaggerated behavior and the semi-farcical plot reflect the developing dramatic
10
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), xi.
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genre of city comedy that would be so prominent on the English stage in the first three
decades of the seventeenth century. It proposes a reading that attempts to reflect the
views of the theatergoers and literary culture of early modern London, rather than those
of some twentieth-century critics who interpret the play as a prodigious travesty or an
outrage. The essay also examines in some detail the performance history of the text, its
reception by actors and directors, and the numerous asides that Barabas uses for comic
effect, as reflected in the native English dramatic tradition. The antagonistic protagonist
that Marlowe presents was in some respects nothing new, no more outrageous in the
1590’s than in the 1630’s, when The Jew of Malta was first printed in quarto, and
performed at Whitehall for the theater-loving monarchs Charles I and Henrietta Maria.11
Her essay complements and expands her earlier work on Middleton, Dekker, and
Marlowe, as well as future projects involving Marston and his milieu.12
Ruth Lunney’s “Speaking to the Audience: Direct Address in the Plays of
Marlowe and his Contemporaries” reminds us that direct address was always part of the
theatrical experience for sixteenth-century playgoers, fundamental to the ways that stories
were told and how spectators made sense of the action. In the transitional years between
11
The famous tragedy of the rich Iew of Malta As it was playd before the King and Queene, in his
Majesties theatre at White-hall, by her Majesties Servants at the Cock-pit. Written by Christopher Marlo.
(London: Printed by I[ohn] B[eale] for Nicholas Vavasour, 1633).
12
Scott analyzes city comedy as an emerging genre in “The Empress of Babylon’s ‘carbuncles and rich
stones’: The Metaphorizing of the Pox in Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon,” Early Theatre 7
(2004): 67-95 and “‘Sell[ing] your selues away’: Pathologizing and Gendering the Socio-Economic in The
Honest Whore: Part I,” Research Opportunities in Medieval and Renaissance Drama 44 (2006): 1-22.
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1585 and 1595, dramatists experimented with different modes of direct address, but none
more so than Marlowe, whose plays transformed the soliloquy and liberated the aside,
therefore offering new ways for actors to speak to the audience so that direct address
could better engage with the action on stage. This study analyzes Marlowe’s innovations
in this area and their relation to plays from the 1560s to the mid 1590s. The Jew of Malta,
Lunney argues, was revolutionary in this aspect, especially its reworking of the
conventional opening monologue of the Vice figure from the moral plays in Machiavil’s
Prologue and Barabas’s speeches in the counting house and slave market. Gaveston
deploys the same rhetorical structure in Edward II, as does Guise in The Massacre of
Paris. Surely Gloucester partakes of the same convention in his notorious opening
soliloquy in Richard III. In essence, such antagonists or alienated witnesses frame the
action for the audience, a feature of later plays such as Othello. Lunney’s essay
consciously emanates from her work in Marlowe and the Popular Tradition: Innovation
in the English Drama before 1595 (2002), which reassesses Marlowe in his contemporary
context as a corrective to Shakespeare-centered approaches. In seeking to avoid “the
treadmill of commonplaces” about the playwright, “the subverter, the conduit of
ambivalence—with occasional recourse to the orthodox moralist or Erasmian riddler,”
she examines the plays’ “engagement with—and challenge to—the theatrical inheritance
of their first audiences,” attempting to “measure the experiences they construct for their
spectators against those afforded by other ‘popular’” drama of the period.13 All four of
these essays are linked by the multifaceted idea of performance that is related to the
13
See Marlowe and the Popular Tradition, 2, 7.
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earlier work of Dessen and Lunney as well to other contributions to the field by
Bevington, Cole, and Parker.
In our third part, “Page: Texts and Interpretations,” the first subsection, “Marlowe
the Ovidian,” begins with Stephen Booth’s “On the Eventfulness of Hero and Leander,”
a spirited essay that attends closely to issues Ovidian and otherwise that engages the
formalist new critic as well as the less traditional, “deconstructive” reader of poetry. He
examines the ways that patterns of sound within a line inform, reinforce, or cut against
meaning, “intended” or otherwise. This piece follows a similar pattern in Booth’s other
work, especially in his edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, which seeks to recapture and to
identify “what a Renaissance reader would have thought as he moved from line to line,”
or “the physics by which we get” to the “sublime” as we attempt to comprehend the text
before us, because “A literary effect need not be special to be.”14 M. L. Stapleton’s
“Marlowe’s First Ovid: Certaine of Ovids Elegies” examines the fragmentary version of
the translation of the Amores that was interdicted as part of the Bishops’ Ban of 1599. He
argues that the compiler chose the ten poems carefully in order to complement the
preceding work in the text, John Davies’s Epigrammes, and that the result is a coherent
work of art. 15 Robert Darcy’s “Marston and Marlowe’s Cursus” investigates Marston’s
modeling of his literary career on Marlowe’s, especially the arrangement of his two-poem
text, The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image and Certaine Satires. He contends that the
14
Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Edited, with Analytic Commentary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977),
ix, x, xi, respectively.
15
Compare Stapleton’s “‘After that I loathe, I runne’: Shakespeare’s Sonnets 127-54 and Marlowe’s All
Ovids Elegies,” the final chapter in Harmful Eloquence: Ovid’s “Amores” from Antiquity to Shakespeare
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 133-53.
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importance of the latter genre, especially the early modern variety, has been severely
underestimated in standard literary histories; that Shakespeare has been deployed in these
accounts to neutralize the political and social character of the form; and that Marlowe’s
career and development actually served as the organizing principle for poetical satirists in
the 1590s. This essay informs two of Darcy’s major projects. One is a collection of
sixteenth-century verse satire that stresses the importance of Marlowe and Marston in this
milieu. The other is a book-length study, “Misanthropoetics,” that includes chapters on
Timon of Athens and Cartesian subjectivity; the economics of family in The Merchant of
Venice and Pericles; the paradoxes of love / hate, spirituality / secularism, friendship /
rivalry, and history / allegory in Spenser’s narrative of Timias in The Faerie Queene; the
contradiction of gender and language in Jonson’s Epicoene; and the vexed fantasy of
poetic retreat, both erotic and satirical, in Marston’s Pigmalion and Certaine Satires.16
The fourth contribution to this section of essays is Dympna Callaghan’s
“Marlowe’s Last Poem,” which speculates on an elegy of disputed authorship by arguing
that Francis Meres did not think that the sweet and witty soul of Ovid transmigrated to
the works of the eminently Latinate Marlowe, in spite of his translation of the Amores
and his composition of the Ovidian Hero and Leander. Meres instead credits honeytongued Shakespeare, who seems to have imbibed his Ovid from Arthur Golding’s
translation of the Metamorphoses (1567). Although in a later section of the Palladis
16
See also his “Shakespeare’s Empty Plot: The Epicenotaph in Timon of Athens,” Renaissance Drama n.s.
33 (2004): 159-80; “Freeing Daughters on Open Markets: The Incest Clause in The Merchant of Venice,” in
Money and the Age of Shakespeare, ed. Linda Woodbridge (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 189-200,
and “‘Under my hands . . . a double duty’: Printing and Pressing Marlowe’s Hero and Leander,” Journal
for Early Modern Cultural Studies 2.2 (2002): 26-56.
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Tamia he notes Marlowe’s use of the fifth-century Alexandrian poet Musaeus, Meres
ignores his Ovidianism entirely and devotes his energy to the gleeful disparagement of
the poet and playwright’s life. This discrepancy prompts an obvious question: how
Ovidian was Marlowe? The study, informed by recent biographical criticism, explores his
relation to Latin shapes and subtlety and, explicitly, the precise expression of his
aesthetic. It offers a fresh, innovative perspective on a much-studied issue just as she does
in previous work, including Shakespeare without Women and her companion guide to the
Sonnets. On the narrator and addressees in Shakespeare’s sequence, she says, “We could
not pick out these people from a police line-up, and yet we have intimate knowledge of
the rapture and turbulence they have provoked within the emotional and psychic life of
the poet.”17
Our final section, “Marlowe’s Reach,” concerns diverse topics such as the
geography of the psyche, the varieties of religious experience, and the nature of
collaborations, each complementing the other, and all related to the playwright. Brett
Foster’s “Hell is Discovered: The Roman Destination of Doctor Faustus” carefully
considers the complex symbolic, cultural, and geopolitical resonances of the Eternal City
and their effects on the characterization and narrative in Doctor Faustus. Foster counters
traditional critical assessments and finds that the journey, the confrontation with the
Pope, and other incidents are more than comic filler: they exemplify Mephistopheles’s
17
See Shakespeare’s Sonnets (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 4. Shakespeare without Women
(London: Routledge, 1999) explores “the specifically political dimension of the dense philosophical
problems posed by dramatic representation” (2).
Sarah K. Scott and M. L. Stapleton, eds., Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman
17
pressures on Marlowe’s protagonist and mark his damnation in a surprisingly poignant
way. The play’s reliance on the city’s many infernal connotations, garnered from the
popular Protestant imagination and religious polemic, make the city the perfect first stop
on Faustus’s doomed itinerary. Rome is not hell; instead, hell comes to Rome in the
persons of Faustus and Mephistopheles. This essay complements Foster’s recent article
on Tudor travel narratives by Robert Langton, Andrew Boorde, William Thomas, and
Thomas Hoby. It discusses their “nuanced, individualized reactions” to the very locus of
Roman Catholicism that defy the stereotype of the provincial, hostile English traveler and
contain “surprising praise” of the city, necessarily complicated by the Reformation and
its attendant nationalism.18 Carolyn Scott demonstrates that a work seemingly devoid of
Christianity is, like Faustus, fraught with such issues. In “Consuming Sorrow:
Conversion and Consumption in Tamburlaine: Part One,” she examines the Eucharistic
motifs in the play as well as its Pauline leanings to find that the drama features the
convergence of power and pity at its culmination. As the armies of Tamburlaine and the
Soldan move toward confrontation, the fates of Bajazath and Zabina become entwined
with those of Zenocrate and the virgins of Damascus. The banquet that precedes the
battle sets up a series of images of eating and consumption that illuminate the deaths that
follow. Scott contends that, like St. Paul, the hero finds on the road to Damascus an
opportunity for conversion and resolves the threat of the “banquet . . . as ominous / as
Progne’s” (4.4.23-24) and the fear “that so consumes Zenocrate” (5.2.91). Tamburlaine’s
18
See “‘The Goodliest Place in the World’: Early Tudor Reactions to Papal Rome,” in The Sacred and
Profane in English Renaissance Literature, ed. Mary A. Papazian (Newark, DE: University of Delaware
Press, 2008), 28; 27-56.
Sarah K. Scott and M. L. Stapleton, eds., Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman
18
power as a consumer is redirected, enabling him to display mercy, solemnize his
marriage, and confirm his triumph.
Finally, in “Fractional Faustus: Edward Alleyn’s Part in the Printing of the AText,” Paul Menzer analyzes the textual indeterminacy of Marlowe’s most performed and
studied drama by exploring the transition and discrepancies between manuscript and
print. Modern editing has often obscured the collaborative nature of early modern plays,
especially the scribal preparation of parts. Discrete collaborative efforts could also
produce unwittingly repetitive cues, particularly once physically divergent matter in the
“complete” script becomes materially proximate “in part.” Menzer speculates that if this
part were therefore available either to the compositors who prepared the A-text of
Faustus, or to a scribe who prepared an intermediary manuscript from which those
compositors worked, it would suggest that the long early scene between Faustus and
Mephistopheles is not in fact interrupted by a comic scene or, as the B-text seems
mistakenly to assume, a chorus. Rather, since it was materially consecutive in Edward
Alleyn’s part, it was assumed to be theatrically consecutive on stage. “Fractional
Faustus” is the first result of a study that considers the role that parts played in the
mobility of texts both among theatrical companies, especially when they disbanded and
reconfigured themselves, and between those companies and the print houses of early
modern London. It is a continuation of his interest in theater history, as evidenced, for
example, by the essay “The Tragedians of the City?,” which explores the claim made by
the title-page of the Hamlet first quarto that it was first performed in the City of
Sarah K. Scott and M. L. Stapleton, eds., Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman
19
London.19 The essays in this section react in their own way to the critical tradition, from
Levin and Steane to Altman, Cheney, and Harraway.
While organized according to our tripartite structure, these essays necessarily
overlap with one another in the categories of lives, stage, and page, signaling their
interdependent nature regarding questions of authorship, theater and performance history,
and interpretive issues within the works themselves. They inquire into the continuing
dispute regarding the facts of Marlowe’s life, the textual difficulties that emerge from the
staging of his plays, the critical investigations arising from analyses of individual works,
and their relationship to those of his contemporaries. In so doing, our contributors reflect
the flourishing state of Marlowe studies as they shape the twenty-first century conception
of the poet and playwright as craftsman.
19
“The Tragedians of the City?” Q1 Hamlet and the Settlements of the 1590’s,” Shakespeare Quarterly 57
(2006): 162-82.
Sarah K. Scott and M. L. Stapleton, eds., Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman
I. Lives: Scholarship and Biography
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