In this essay, I employ Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation to read The Woman of Colour as a fictional archive, which brings Dido, the enslaved maid of protagonist Olivia Fairfield, to ...the forefront of the novel. Critical fabulation requires listening for both the silences of the novel and the moments when Dido speaks out. Dido’s insistence on claiming her presence within a variety of spaces—a ship, a London household, a large English estate—represents an ontological alternative to traditional notions of agency inherited from the European Enlightenment. Recognizing that our present moment exists within the time of slavery, Hartman’s critical fabulation invites us to consider what radical ways of being are contained within Dido’s words as well as the gaps and opacities of The Woman of Colour.
Erne focuses on the text of Christopher Marlowe's play "Tamburlaine the Great." Marlowe's two-part play Tamburlaine the Great was first printed in London in 1590. What the prefatory address suggests ...is that Tamburlaine in its original state was longer and generically more mixed than the text that has come down to us, and contained material that Jones decided to omit, notably fond and friuolous Iestures, in modern spelling gestures, perhaps with a hint at jests and the kind of clownage (line 2) the play's Prologue denigrates. The original text of Tamburlaine seems to have mixed serious matter with comedy, and like some of Faustus' critics, Jones preferred the play without the comedy.
Marlowe’s Literary Scepticism re-evaluates the representation of religion in Christopher Marlowe’s plays and poems, demonstrating the extent to which his literary engagement with questions of belief ...was shaped by the virulent polemical debates that raged in post-Reformation Europe. Offering new readings of under-studied works such as the poetic translations and a fresh perspective on well-known plays such as Doctor Faustus, this book focuses on Marlowe’s depiction of the religious frauds denounced by his contemporaries. It identifies Marlowe as one of the earliest writers to acknowledge the practical value of religious hypocrisy, and a pivotal figure in the history of scepticism.
Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors - whose setting in Ephesus suggests the relevance of Paul's epistle to the Ephesians (as traditionally ascribed) - contains some odd but significant allusions to ...Marlowe's Edward II and Doctor Faustus ultimately relatable to issues of masculine control in post-Reformation culture. Harold F. Brooks was the first to notice allusions to Edward II in the comic business involving Doctor Pinch's attempted exorcism of Antipholus of Ephesus. The allusions begin with Antipholus's initially frightened, verbatim echo of Marlowe's Edward at the beginning of the exorcism, 'What, will you murder me?'. As Brooks notices, the allusions continue in Shakespeare, but with the actual inversion of the humiliation of beard-shaving and washing with puddle water, where the victims of the initial abuse, Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus, are now allowed - having broken free from their bonds - suddenly to triumph, with righteous and manly indignation, over the false power of the presumptuous Pinch.
Unediting the Renaissance is a path-breaking and timely look at the issues of the textual editing of Renaissance works. Both erudite and accessible, it will be a fascinating and provocative read for ...any Renaissance student or scholar. Leah Marcus argues that `bad' versions of Renaissance texts such as Shakespeare's First Folio should not be viewed as mutilated copies of originals, but rather reputable alternatives encoding differences in ideology, cultural meaning and other elements of performance. Marcus focuses on key Renaissance works- Dr Faustus, The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet and poems by Milton, Donne and Herrick - to re-exmaine how editorial intervention shapes the texts which are widely accepted as `definitive'. Examining the cultural attitudes, fears and influences which influence textual editors, from the seveteenth century to the present day, Marcus sheds new light on a previously unexamined aspect of Renaissance studies. A lively critique of current theoretical practices, Unediting the Renaissance will shift the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries are edited and read.
...as with other stylistic aspects of the production, it did so at the expense of the spiritual meditations that function as counterpoint. ...what Jennifer Edwards, Research Coordinator at the Globe, ...describes in the program as the play's "flirtation with theological danger" translated instead into an elaborate, highly secular affair with illusory, and very much temporal, forms of power. The production's cross-gendered representation of Faustus and Mephistopheles reflected artistic director Michelle Terry's well-publicized commitment to race- and gender-blind casting. Assistant director Grace Joseph acknowledged in the program that the choice to cast a woman of color in the central role was part of a broad attempt at "challenging patriarchal power structures."
Paravano examines The Great Duke of Florence by Philip Massinger. The Great Duke of Florence is a lively tragicomedy licensed for performance in 1627. Its title situates the play among the works ...related to or featuring members of the Medici family through the reference to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, a title which was bestowed on Cosimo I by Pope Pius V in 1569. This corpus of plays, delineated by T. S. R. Boase and Lisa Hopkins, includes several dramatic texts, ranging from Christopher Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris (1593) to John Ford's The Fancies, Chaste and Noble (1636), which closes the cycle of Medici-inspired plays.
Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine is based upon the historical Timur the Lame, a fourteenth-century warrior whose name made disability partially constitutive of his identity. And yet Marlowe’s plays ...offer no evidence of Timur’s impairment, reveling instead in the physical prowess and the rhetorical feats of their title character. To understand why Timur’s impairment is absent from the early modern stage, one might turn to the archive that Marlowe inherits, but, as this essay demonstrates, traces of Timur’s impairment do appear within that archive, repeating rather than resolving the question of the relationship between Timur’s lameness and his identity. Rather than locating an answer within the archive, the essay contends that the discrepancy between Timur’s disability and Tamburlaine’s hyperability is rooted in an idea of form. Marlowe’s plays rely upon a displacement of disability to posit the extraordinary ability of their title character, one that was furthered by Edward Alleyn’s way of embodying the role on the early modern stage. That influence reveals the need for a theory of theatrical form.
Ragni examines English playwright Christopher Marlowe's approach to his Latin sources and, particularly, highlights how his choice to translate Lucan had much to do with the connection between the ...main theme of the Latin epos--civil war--and the civil war par excellence of the second half of the 15th century: the French wars of religion. These were a troubling issue, after all, that resonate within the whole Marlovian canon and were also the focus of the most heated debates in the late Elizabethan Age. Focused either on the stylistic features of Marlowe's Lucan's First Book or on the author's supposed Republican sympathies, the existing studies have instead largely overlooked the French wars as the possible and main intertext for Marlowe's translation: an intertext which creates a subtle, but unmistakable, link also between the translation and The Massacre at Paris.
This book offers a lively introduction to all of the plays of Christopher Marlowe and to the central concerns of his age, many of which are still important to us—religious uncertainty, the clash ...between Islam and Christianity, ideas of sexuality, and the role of the marginalised inidividual in society.
