Marlowe's books: reading, writing, and early modern drama

Abstract

In our enthusiasm to depict Christopher Marlowe as an iconoclastmwho challenged restrictive sexual, religious, and political normsmwe have perhaps neglected the Marlowe who read. Unlike his direct contemporary William Shakespeare, Marlowe undertook a university education, completing both a Bachelor and Masters degree. At Cambridge, Marlowe would have built upon the rhetorical training of his grammar school and been rigorously trained in the principles of debating on either side of contentious topics. It is generally understood that around this time he put his extensive classical training to use when he translated Ovid and Lucan, and wrote the classically-inspired play Dido, Queen of Carthage.As I argue in this thesis, taking greater account of Marlowers bookish influences is not to reimagine him as somehow more conservative in his views, but rather to underline that his subversive writings are at times inspired by, and consumed with, books. His relation to books was not one of respectful emulation. He questioned the authority of the works he read, juxtaposing them with competing and opposing textsma pattern that emerges in all four plays I discuss. It is my contention that we find a slightly different version of Marlowe when we consider how he read: a man who was interested in pursuing lmerelyr intellectual concerns, like the versioning of the Dido myth or the omissions of the historical chronicles. And yet it is out of this bookish thinking that Marlowe builds storylines that question the will of God and the divine right of kings. Indeed, I suggest that we have not fully understood what the category lbookr meant to Marlowe. Rather than identifying new textual borrowings or focussing upon one particularly influential or revered writer, I suggest that he persistently draws attention to conflicts between books. Consequently, this thesis argues that books were never stable and reliable sources of eloquence and wisdom for him, but alternately contradictory, confusing, dangerous, or even ridiculous. It is this awareness of how books can change people, both intellectually and socially, and can alter perception, that energises the four plays I will be examining. By paying greater attention to how books influence, drive, or lurk behind his plays, we gain a better understanding of Marlowers bookish thought.In the first half of the thesis I will look at two plays that openly wrestle with books and incorporate them into the experience of the play. In Dido, Marlowe plays off competing textual traditions against each other, foregrounding the versioning of each character between these traditions. By refusing to assert the primacy of a single account, Marlowers imitative work bases itself in textual conflict. Unlike all of Marlowers other plays, Dido was written for a childrenrs theatre production, and he relies upon the usually richer, and possibly better-read, audiences of such productions to follow his bookish experiment. By contrast, Doctor Faustus was written for a more diverse audience that may not have been as familiar with classical literature. For this audience, books appear as physical objects on stage that are variously debated, worshipped, rejected, and stolen. Books, as much as magic itself, have the potential to transform people and their fortunes in unpredictable and sometimes unpleasant ways. In Faustus, as I show, books shape the thoughts of those who hold them, playing an uneasy role in determining someoners place in the world. In the second half of the thesis I look at two plays that reflect Marlowers reading practices more subtly. In Edward II, Marlowe juxtaposes the conflicted accounts of the chronicles, which form a largely unnoticed inspiration for the divided play that emerges. It is not necessary for the audience to have a thorough understanding of where and how the chronicles contradict one another; instead, these contradictions are embedded in the theatrical experience. The play that emerges takes a historiographical course that treats history as ultimately unknowable and beyond moralising narratives, at the same time that it critiques the omissions and silences of the chronicles. In Tamburlaine Part One, I return to one of Marlowers earliest works in order to explore in detail a facet of his writing that appears in all of his work: his tendency towards self-imitation. Nestled within a martial play, Tamburlaine adopts the language of Marlowers own lyric, lThe Passionate Shepherd to His Love,r in order to win the love of Zenocrate and the loyalty of the general Theridamas. While Marlowe imitates his own writings rather than an actual book, his irreverent reinvention fits the same pattern of the other plays. Culminating in the forced suicide of Agydas, Marlowe ties Tamburlainers alternately charismatic and brutal nature to the doubleness underlying the pastoral invitation, and of Marlowers own oeuvre.