Marlowe's Empery: Expanding His Critical Contexts (review)

Marlowe's Empery: Expanding His Critical Contexts, edited by Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan, collects nine essays to sharpen readers measurement of Christopher Marlowe's dramatic achievement, and mostly succeeds.

Professor Logan's introduction describes the book's three parts: Marlowe and performance, Marlowe and genre, and Marlowe and early modern culture. Nine discrete essays — three per part — were culled from gatherings of the Modern Language Association and from the Marlowe Society of America.

As implied in the categories, the essays in each section hold different appeal according to the reader's tastes. For me, the first segment involving "performance" gave freshest insights. Roslyn L. Knutson's commentary "Marlowe's Reruns: Repertorial Commerce and Marlowe's Plays in Revival" alters conventional notions of "a company's repertory as responsive to a particular clientele" (26). Knutson persuasively argues that different London theater troupes simultaneously staged works featuring similar subjects, characters, and serialization structures as "an industry-wide marketing strategy by which companies used the repertory both to promote their own offerings and to capitalize on each other's successful fare" (25–26).

David Bevington provides a keenly observant essay here titled "Staging the A- and B-Texts of Doctor Faustus." His article begins by wondering how staging requirements differed between the two texts. He conjectures that by examining the production needs of each, one could isolate "materials for a kind of brief sketch of certain changes in theater design, staging methods, and audience taste and expectations during the years from 1588–89 down into the 1600s" (45). Using careful scholarship, Bevington lists the staging changes in the two texts, concluding that by the 1600s, the evolved B-Text followed the reviser's plan to "give 'em blood and guts and theatrical novelties" (58–59).

David Fuller's "Tamburlaine the Great in Performance" effectively reports on three modern productions of Marlowe's drama concerning his superhero. Fuller centers on Tyrone Guthrie's staging at the Old Vic (1951), Peter Hall's version at the Royal National (1976–77), and Terry Hands's greatly adapted incarnation for the Royal Shakespeare Company (1992–93). Photographs aid the reader here.

Part 2 regarding genre is more problematic. Maurice Charney, in "Marlowe's Hero and Leander Shows Shakespeare, in Venus and Adonis, How to Write an Ovidian Verse Epyllion," benefits from concise writing to argue "Shakespeare uses Marlowe's poem as a model for his poem" but not as his "source" (85). Regarding comparability Charney observes "Both Marlowe and Shakespeare maintain a similar detached and ironic attitude toward their subjects — what may be called an Ovidian posture" (88).

Sara Munson Deats, as author, contributes "Marlowe's Interrogative Drama: Dido, Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Edward II." After commenting on current terms pertaining to her topic, e.g., "contrariety," "complementarity," and "functional ambiguity," Professor Deats suggests an obvious duality in Marlowe's plays that sets duty against love, and personal fulfillment against public responsibility. One conclusion drawn is "the early modern period, like our postmodern one, was fascinated with ambiguity and multiplicity" (109).

Rick Bowers's "Hysterics, High Camp, and Dido Queene of Carthage" disappoints. Apparently enamored with contemporary cant, Bowers undermines ideas through excessively awkward — and opaque — writing, i.e., regarding Dido, Marlowe "produces a transgressive reinscription of that already translated, recycled, and ever-rehearsed classical story" (97).

The final section of the book features more conventional cultural studies. Karen Cunningham's "'Forsake thy king and do but join with me': Marlowe and Treason" opens with the obvious, "treason figures prominently in Marlovian dramaturgy" (133). She then emphasizes: "Throughout his plays, Marlowe dramatizes a consistent pattern of imagining the death of the king" (142). Her discussion provokes thought.

Randall Nakayama offers an interesting but contradictory survey of clothing and Elizabethan sumptuary laws in "'I know she is a courtesan by her attire': Clothing and Identity in The Jew of Malta." Georgia E. Brown, in "Tampering with the Records...