Journal of Marlowe Studies

Massacre à Paris, directed by Jean-François Auguste's, performed at Comédie de Reims, Reims, and Oratoire du Louvre, Paris, 16–21 May 2022

2022-09-24T12:57:40+00:00

This review considers a new translation of Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris into French, which premiered onstage, rather than in print, in two separate performances directed by Jean-François Auguste in Reims and in Paris during The Marlowe Festival in May 2022.

Unreliable Allies in an Uncertain World: Warnings from History in Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris

2022-10-28T09:54:02+00:00

The Massacre at Paris.

Marlowe brought the horrors of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre onto the London stage in 1593 at a time when England was facing a threat of invasion from the expansionist powers of Europe. The Massacre at Paris demonstrates vividly what was at stake if such an invasion were to be successful: Protestantism in England would face an existential crisis, just as it had done in France in 1572. While previous critics have focused on Guise’s representation in the play, this article examines the character of Navarre because in the early 1590s Henri IV was key to England’s defence, but he was a controversial figure who divided the international Protestant alliance. As a result, many of its members refused to provide the French King with the military and financial support he required to fight the Catholic League. To reflect his divisive nature, Marlowe portrays Navarre in an ambiguous light in The Massacre at Paris and thus raises questions about whether the historical Henri IV and the Huguenot nobility had the qualities necessary to defend England and the future of Protestantism. This article will investigate how Marlowe exploited contemporary anxieties about the Huguenot leadership by highlighting their failings during the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. By raising the spectre of the Massacre, Marlowe forced his audience to confront the terrifying question of whether England’s principal ally would be strong and trustworthy enough to keep the extremist Catholics from the English coast, or whether he would leave them to be slaughtered like the Huguenots in Paris.

Rewriting History for the Stage: The Theatricality of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris (1592)

2023-04-05T09:00:59+00:00

In his 1592 play, The Massacre at Paris, Christopher Marlowe adapted his main source, François Hotman’s A true and plaine reporte of the furious outrages of France (1573), and undoubtedly gave his own version of the events of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. While representing the failure of language to solve the conflict, the playwright paradoxically created a specific sound environment and specific images to reconstitute and represent the event. This essay focuses the link between the creation of a certain vision of history on stage and the use of stage devices. The play illustrates the power of theatre to shape the collective memory of an event. Even though the dramatist cut short most of the dialogues, they are still of prime importance in the play and their brevity is significant. The paper also looks at the cacophony that emerges from Marlowe’s play and which seems to complement language when alluding to certain religious controversies. Finally, it argues that Marlowe represents the massacre as a dance of life and death in which the dancers move to the rhythm of a very precise tune and that the choreography may have reminded the audience of a hunting party where the sound of the bells stands for the sound of the horn. This created a powerful image which is still to be found in contemporary works on the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

A Massacre at Paris in French Translation: from Page to Stage

2024-03-17T12:21:56+00:00

In 2020, when we began working on plans for a special Marlowe Festival and conference to be held in Rheims and Paris that would bring together Marlowe specialists and historians of the French wars of religion on the occasion of the 450thanniversary of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, it very quickly became obvious that we wished not just to discuss Marlowe’s last play, but also to stage it. What text, though, would serve for our French staging of Massacre at Paris? What was the history of the text in translation and what were the antecedents to our own project? These questions have led us to inquire into the different French translations of the play and gain insight both into Marlowe’s French reception as well as into the octavo edition of the English text that has come down to us.

Christopher Marlowe in Slovenia

2022-10-17T14:30:06+00:00

The article provides a summary of the reception of Christopher Marlowe in the Slovenian literary system. It addresses Marlowe’s appreciation in literary history and criticism, the translation of his texts into Slovenian and the productions of Marlowe’s plays in Slovenian theatres. Is approaches the issues through the prism of Marlowe’s perceived dissidence to see how the Slovenian constructions of the author compare to his reputation in the English literary system.

“Scorning both god and his ministers”: At the Origins of Marlowe’s Atheism

2022-11-02T12:44:36+00:00

In this article, I will focus on the documents denouncing Marlowe’s subversive views on religion. In so doing, I will show how – far from being the mere result of a brilliant (if impudent) outcast, or the allegations of dubious government informers – those documents reported views, which were rooted in the theses debated in religious and political texts which circulated widely in late-16^th-century Europe, as well as in the early philosophical opposition to Christianity. At the same time, I will highlight how some of those same ‘subversive’ views can be also found between the lines of Marlowe’s plays. By focusing on The Massacre at Paris, in particular, I will thus argue that, if Marlowe may be deemed subversive, it is because in his dramas he carried out the attempt – this one truly impudent – to reveal to many one of the fundamental arcana imperii: that is, that religions had nothing to do with truth, and their only function was to keep peoples together.

Knowledge, Love and Epistemic Uncertainty in Marlowe's Dido, Faustus and Edward II

2022-10-14T13:27:08+00:00

In Disowning knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (CUP, 1987), Stanley Cavell insists on works of art being read in « the company of philosophy » - even if, he continues, such company can sometimes be « restive, difficult, occasionally impossible » (Cavell, 2). The book’s main issue is « that of the communication between philosophy and literature ». Cavell’s intuition, he says, is « that the advent of skepticism as manifested in Descartes’s Meditations is already in full existence in Shakespeare ». What is particularly striking about Cavell’s analysis is how the notion of skepticism is ultimately bound up with desire : « the issue posed is no longer, or not alone, as with earlier skepticism, how to conduct oneself best in an uncertain world. Our skepticism is a function of our now illimitable desire » (Cavell, 3). What is true of Shakespeare’s tragedies appears to be even truer of Marlowe’s works. Yet Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, or – even more surprisingly – Doctor Faustus have only too rarely been submitted to a similar epistemic or philosophical probing. With a few notable exceptions, most critical readings and interpretations of Marlowe’s drama tend to engage with politics, religion or identity, thus foregrounding the way the Marlovian protagonist – or the Marlovian text – strives to interact with the cultural and social environment they belong to, while leaving the epistemic question in the background : Patrick Cheney’s Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe (2004) is a case in point, containing as it does many references to politics, sexuality and religion but none to either knowledge or science. This is all the more surprising as (epistemic) desire and knowledge are themes which are just as prominent in Marlowe’s plays as they are in Shakespeare’s. By drawing on Stanley Cavell’s philosophy, this paper will aim at exploring how Marlowe’s plays abound in epistemic « tensions, clashes and oxymora » addressing, or perhaps springing from, the desire/knowledge nexus. It will be my contention that these tensions and clashes can be read as so many sites of a fruitful, if restive, conversation between early modern drama and philosophy – a conversation that seems to further validate the advent of skepticism within early modern philosophy and literature, while also testifying to Marlowe’s philosophical relevance and topicality.

Responding to Ruth Lunney's suggestion that more attention should be paid to such a issues as "identity, memory and place in Dido", this essay will also aim at analysing the knowledge / love nexus in light of Cavell’s twofold hypothesis that skepticism amounts to the position that the world is fundamentally unknowable and that love is often presented as one of the possible remedies to uncertainty, in so far as it constitutes what Cavell calls a “return of the world”, that is to say a possible way of acquiring at least a modicum of certainty. In Marlowe’s dramatic universe, however, love often proves to be more of a trompe-l’oeil solution than a real and solid escape out of skepticism, as the absence of certainty can only be resolved by the destruction of the loving subject.

Cut is the Branch: Faustus's C-Text

2023-08-23T09:53:20+00:00

This article, which will include some summary and explanation of textual differences between the 1631 and 1663 editions of Doctor Faustus, is primarily concerned with the paratextual differences between the editions, which help inform the play’s resurgence into print, as well as with the financial incentives behind its publication. The 1663 Restoration-era 'C-text,' which was conceived by a theatrical producer for stage production and procured by a stationer for publication, was a politico-religiously neutered version of the text which attempted to better connect with its audience by use of similarly revised paratextual materials; however, these para/textual revisions were not enough to return the play to success, either financially or socially, as the C-text was the last of the seventeenth century Faustus editions, and it has since been largely overlooked in being distinct from the B-text.

"Puzel" or "Pussel" and the Virgin Mary: 1 Henry VI and Anti-Catholic Polemic

2023-04-06T11:15:04+00:00

The collaborative nature of 1 Henry VI has long been accepted, like the identity of Christopher Marlowe as one of the play’s authors. This article does not engage with the question of authorship as such, but interrogates Marlowe’s possible involvement in the Joan Pucelle scenes. It investigates what the depiction of Joan La Pucelle as a witch and a whore owes to contemporary anti-Catholic polemic, and argues that the emphasis in the play on the figure of the Virgin Mary is distinctive and significant. It proposes to contextualize the treatment of Joan Pucelle by confronting it to Doctor Faustus and The Massacre at Paris, two plays that were performed the same year as 1 Henry VI at the Rose Theatre.

The Year’s Work in Marlowe Studies: 2022

2024-03-13T16:42:03+00:00

This piece provides an overview of scholarship related to the works of Christopher Marlowe that were published in 2022.

Introduction

2024-03-15T10:17:36+00:00

An introduction to the special issue from our guest editors.

Christopher Marlowe, The Massacre at Paris, ed. Mathew R. Martin (Manchester: Manchester University Press/The Revels Plays, 2021)

2024-03-17T14:08:38+00:00

A review of Mathew R. Martin's new edition of Marlowe's Massacre at Paris.