Shakespeare's Anxious Epistemology: Love's Labor's Lost and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

James Shapiro has described the relationship between Shakespeare and Marlowe as one in which "Shakespeare seems to be very much aware of what Marlowe is up to and chooses to chart a parallel course" (103).¹ Such comparative trends have helped to redress a longstanding stratification of the two playwrights, evinced by (among others) Harold Bloom in his Anxiety of Influence,where Shakespeare is largely omitted since his "prime precursor was Marlowe, a poet very much smaller than his inheritor" (11).² Other critics have broadly cross-examined such plays as The Merchant of Veniceand The Jew of Malta,and some have detected Marlovian influence in Titus Andronicus,The Merry Wives of Windsor,Macbeth,and Hamlet.³ Between Hero and Leanderand Shakespeare's narrative poems there is a clear Ovidian and generic correspondence. There is, too, the supposed reference to Marlowe's fatal brawl in As You Like It—"a great reckoning in a little room" (3.3.15)—and a brief commendation: "Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might, / 'Who ever lov'd that lov'd not at first sight?'" (3.5.81-82).⁴ And Shakespeare paraphrases Marlowe's most famous lines from Doctor Faustus,on Helen of Troy ("Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?"), in Troilus and Cressida:"Why, she is a pearl, / Whose price hath launch'd above a thousand ships, / And turn'd crown'd kings to merchants" (2.2.81-83).⁵ However, despite these various parallels and homages, little critical attention has been paid to perhaps Shakespeare's most topical play, Love's Labor's Lost,and its significant connections to Marlowe's Doctor Faustus.⁶ While the two share immediate thematic concerns—the often ironic quest for knowledge, the frustrations and distractions of love, the imminence of death—Shakespeare's work also inverts a great many of Marlowe's constructions, a pageant of Nine Worthies, for instance, rather than Seven Deadly Sins.⁷ In a play notable for its emphasis on reversals, indeed one that self-consciously reverses its own comic trajectory by interrupting and deferring a wedded completion, Shakespeare similarly responds to Marlowe with a play aimed at reversing and superseding his predecessor's.⁸ The play's probable swipes at other contemporary writers, as well as the epistemological considerations of its academicians, both dislocate and overturn established authorities; Love's Labor's Lostperforms a similar exorcism upon Doctor Faustus,enacting between plays Shakespeare's larger project of reversal within the play.

While numerous critics have read Love's Labor's Lost as parodic—Frances Yates suggests that all "the various literary crazes of the day" come under fire: "euphuism, arcadianism, Gongorism, Guevarism, Petrarchism and the sonneteering fashion, the mania for proverbs and for strange Latinate words" (11)—none has implicated Marlowe in the play's agenda. ⁹ This is somewhat surprising for two reasons. First, it has become a critical commonplace that Love's Labor's Lost to some extent satirizes Sir Walter Raleigh's coterie of intellectuals—particularly mathematicians, astronomers, and writers—who may have comprised "the school of night" mentioned in the play (4.3.251). ¹⁰ Marlowe was prominent in this same circle. ¹¹ Indeed, Doctor Faustus in particular has an affinity for many of the tenets supported by Raleigh's group. ¹² Second, current dating of Shakespeare's plays has Love's Labor's Lost being written during the time that Doctor Faustus was frequently performed by the Admiral's Men. (Philip Henslowe lists some twenty-five performances of Faustus between September 1594 and October 1597; meanwhile, though not published until 1598, and notoriously difficult to date with certainty, Love's Labor's Lost was likely composed 1594-95 and revised as late as 1597 [24-60].) I do not find...