Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience

Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience
Author: Thomas Cartelli
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2015-08-12
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1512801569

This study explores the structure of psychological, social and political exchanges that were negotiated between audiences and plays in Elizabethan public theatres in a period ostensibly dominated by Shakespeare, but strongly rooted in Marlowe.

Marlowe and Shakespeare

Marlowe and Shakespeare
Author: Robert Sawyer
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2017-08-22
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1349952273

Instead of asserting any alleged rivalry between Marlowe and Shakespeare, Sawyer examines the literary reception of the two when the writers are placed in tandem during critical discourse or artistic production. Focusing on specific examples from the last 400 years, the study begins with Robert Greene’s comments in 1592 and ends with the post-9/11 and 7/7 era. The study not only looks at literary critics and their assessments, but also at playwrights such as Aphra Behn, novelists such as Anthony Burgess, and late twentieth-century movie and theatre directors. The work concludes by showing how the most recent outbreak of Marlowe as Shakespeare’s ghostwriter accelerates due to a climate of conspiracy, including “belief echoes,” which presently permeate our cultural and critical discourse.

Shakespeare's Marlowe

Shakespeare's Marlowe
Author: Robert A. Logan
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2016-04-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317056078

Moving beyond traditional studies of sources and influence, Shakespeare's Marlowe analyzes the uncommonly powerful aesthetic bond between Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Not only does this study take into account recent ideas about intertextuality, but it also shows how the process of tracking Marlowe's influence itself prompts questions and reflections that illuminate the dramatists' connections. Further, after questioning the commonly held view of Marlowe and Shakespeare as rivals, the individual chapters suggest new possible interrelationships in the formation of Shakespeare's works. Such examination of Shakespeare's Marlovian inheritance enhances our understanding of the dramaturgical strategies of each writer and illuminates the importance of such strategies as shaping forces on their works. Robert Logan here makes plain how Shakespeare incorporated into his own work the dramaturgical and literary devices that resulted in Marlowe's artistic and commercial success. Logan shows how Shakespeare's examination of the mechanics of his fellow dramatist's artistry led him to absorb and develop three especially powerful influences: Marlowe's remarkable verbal dexterity, his imaginative flexibility in reconfiguring standard notions of dramatic genres, and his astute use of ambivalence and ambiguity. This study therefore argues that Marlowe and Shakespeare regarded one another not chiefly as writers with great themes, but as practicing dramatists and poets-which is where, Logan contends, the influence begins and ends.

Shakespeare's Literary Authorship

Shakespeare's Literary Authorship
Author: Patrick Cheney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2008-06-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0521881668

This book considers Shakespeare as a literary figure, analysing his full professional career, both poetry and plays.

The Performance of Pleasure in English Renaissance Drama

The Performance of Pleasure in English Renaissance Drama
Author: R. Huebert
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 229
Release: 2003-08-19
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230503160

Offering new and theatrically informed readings of plays by a broad range of Renaissance dramatists - including Marlowe, Jonson, Marston, Webster, Middleton and Ford - this new book addresses the question of pleasure: both erotic pleasure as represented on stage and aesthetic pleasure as experienced by readers and spectators. Some of the issues raised (the distribution of pleasure by gender, the notion of consent) intersect with feminist reinterpretations of Renaissance culture.

Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe

Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe
Author: Mathew R. Martin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2016-03-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317008383

Contending that criticism of Marlowe’s plays has been limited by humanist conceptions of tragedy, this book engages with trauma theory, especially psychoanalytic trauma theory, to offer a fresh critical perspective within which to make sense of the tension in Marlowe’s plays between the tragic and the traumatic. The author argues that tragedies are trauma narratives, narratives of wounding; however, in Marlowe’s plays, a traumatic aesthetics disrupts the closure that tragedy seeks to enact. Martin’s fresh reading of Massacre at Paris, which is often dismissed by critics as a bad tragedy, presents the play as deliberately breaking the conventions of the tragic genre in order to enact a traumatic aesthetics that pulls its audience into one of the early modern period’s most notorious collective traumatic events, the massacre of French Huguenots in Paris in 1572. The chapters on Marlowe’s six other plays similarly argue that throughout Marlowe’s drama tragedy is held in tension with-and disrupted by-the aesthetics of trauma.

The Jew of Malta: A Critical Reader

The Jew of Malta: A Critical Reader
Author: Robert A. Logan
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2013-03-28
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1408191539

Christopher Marlowe's drama, The Jew of Malta, has become an increasingly popular source for scholarly scrutiny, staged productions, and, most recently, a filmed version. The play follows the sometimes tragic, sometimes comic, often outrageous fortunes of its villainous protagonist, the Jew Barabas. In recent years the play has provoked as much interpretive controversy as any work in the Marlowe canon. This unique volume is therefore especially timely, providing fresh, varied approaches to the many enigmatic elements of the play.

Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman

Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman
Author: M.L. Stapleton
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2016-05-23
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317166450

Contributions to this volume explore the idea of Marlowe as a working artist, in keeping with John Addington Symonds' characterization of him as a "sculptor-poet." Throughout the body of his work-including not only the poems and plays, but also his forays into translation and imitation-a distinguished company of established and emerging literary scholars traces how Marlowe conceives an idea, shapes and refines it, then remakes and remodels it, only to refashion it further in his writing process. These essays necessarily overlap with one another in the categories of lives, stage, and page, which signals their interdependent nature regarding questions of authorship, theater and performance history, as well as interpretive issues within the works themselves. The contributors interpret and analyze the disputed facts of Marlowe's life, the textual difficulties that emerge from the staging of his plays, the critical investigations arising from analyses of individual works, and their relationship to those of his contemporaries. The collection engages in new ways the controversies and complexities of its subject's life and art. It reflects the flourishing state of Marlowe studies as it shapes the twenty-first century conception of the poet and playwright as master craftsman.

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Poetry

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Poetry
Author: Patrick Cheney
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages:
Release: 2007-01-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1139827464

This Companion provides a full introduction to the poetry of William Shakespeare through discussion of his freestanding narrative poems, the Sonnets, and his plays. Fourteen leading international scholars provide accessible and authoritative chapters on all relevant topics: from Shakespeare's seminal role in the development of English poetry, the wide-ranging practice of his poetic form, and his enigmatic place in print and manuscript culture, to his immersion in English Renaissance politics, religion, classicism, and gender dynamics. With individual chapters on Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Passionate Pilgrim, 'The Phoenix and the Turtle', the Sonnets, and A Lover's Complaint, the Companion also includes chapters on the presence of poetry in the dramatic works, on the relation between poetry and performance, and on the reception and influence of the poems. The volume includes a chronology of Shakespeare's life, a note on reference works, and a reading list for each chapter.