Marlowe, history, and sexuality : new critical essays on Christopher Marlowe
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Marlowe, history, and sexuality : new critical essays on Christopher Marlowe
（AMS studies in the Renaissance, no. 35）
AMS Press, c1998
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 225-245) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The year 1993 marked the 400th anniversary of Marlowe's death by stabbing in a tavern brawl. It also served as a rallying point for novels, plays, a film and many scholarly events. Marlowe's life and writings, his commitments and ambivalences, his politically correct and violently anti-establishment posturings make him a man for the 1990s. This work contains 13 essays by Marlovian writers of today. The book is organized around three topics: Marlowe's intellectual life and career; the relationship of his writings to conditions in England of the 1580s and '90s; and the representation of gender and sexuality in Marlowe's work. In the first group of essays writers examine Marlowe's mutually supportive careers in the theatre and espionage, and demonstrate how "Marlowe seems to be living out the kind of tawdry convoluted fictions which he put on stage in plays like 'The Jew of Malta'" (Nicholl). In the section on political, economic and social conditions in England, the climate for Marlowe's heterodoxy is set by the Protestant Reformation and makes possible the pro-Catholic persona that Marlowe cultivated to infiltrate subversive groups as a secret British agent.
Patrick Cheney shows how Marlowe challenged Spenser as the champion of pleasure over didacticism. Marlowe's countercultural writing in "Hero and Leander" and the "Elegies" are discussed, as is the impact of Marlowe's celebration of sexual free choice on the shakey virility of England's male ruling class. "Edward II" is characterized as both subversive and supportive of the state, voicing contemporary anxieties about the state of Elizabeth's later years. In "The Jew of Malta" Marlowe reflects the contest between the older, aristocratic warrior class and the rising middle-class pursuit of detente and international commerce. Sexual themes dominate the third group of essays. While avoiding anachronistic applications of Freud and modern perceptions of sexuality, the authors tease out Elizabethan attitudes in "Dido", "Tamburlane" and "Edward II".
Table of Contents
- "Fanciful Dealing" - Christopher Marlowe and the Elizabethan Intelligence Service, Charles Nicholl
- Marlowe's Quarrel with God, David Riggs
- "Thondring Words of Theatre" - Marlowe, Spenser, and Renaissance Ideas of a Literary Career, Patrick Cheney
- "Breaking the Canon" - Marlowe's Challenge to the Literary Status Quo in "Hero and Leander", Georgia E. Brown
- "Printed Abroad and Uncastrated" - Marlowe's "Elegies" with Davies's "Epigrams", Ian Frederick Moulton
- Edward II and Elizabethan Politics, Mark Thornton Burnett
- "Thou art no Soldier, Thou art a Merchant" - the Mentalitie of War in Malta, Alan Shepard, "The Massacre at Paris" - Marlowe's Messy Consensus Narrative, Rick Bowers
- "Full Possession" - Service and Slavery in Doctor Faustus, Judith Weil
- "Writing in the Margins" - Theatrical Manuscripts and the B-Text of "Doctor Faustus", Eric Rasmmussen
- "Errant Eros" - Transgressions of Sex, Gender and Desire in "Dido, Queen of Cathage", Sara Munson Deats
- "Won with Thy Words and Conquered with Thy Looks" - Sadism, Masochism and the Masochistic Gaze in "Tamburlaine", Lisa S. Starks
- "Queer Edward II" - Postmodern Sexualities and the Early Modern Subject, Thomas Cartelli.
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