Journal of Marlowe Studies

Online Productions of Dido, Queen of Carthage

2025-06-26T13:23:49+00:00

A review of various recent online productions of Dido, Queen of Carthage, including productions by The Show Must Go Online, Beyond Shakespeare, Sweet Tea Shakespeare and Edward's Boys.

Edward II, directed by Daniel Raggett for the RSC, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 12 March 2025

2025-06-26T13:44:04+00:00

Review of Daniel Raggett's RSC production of Edward II.

Editorial Note

2025-06-27T08:13:56+00:00

A brief editors' introduction to the issue

The Year's Work in Marlowe Studies: 2023

2025-06-26T14:00:13+00:00

A review of Marlovian scholarship from the year 2023.

Dido, Queen of Carthage and the Contradictions of Sovereignty

2024-01-05T10:51:09+00:00

This essay argues that Marlowe's portrait of monarchy in Dido, Queene of Carthage both invites but ultimately defeats an attempt to read it directly through contemporary ideological contexts. While the play was written at a time of heightened debate surrounding the powers of princes, to which Dido herself gestures in a climactic moment of the action, the chief components of its idea of monarchy are rather the erotics of the gaze and a fantasy of self-sovereignty and illimitable autonomy. The former depends on, and probably derives from, the interaction between charismatic performers and an attentive audience within a playhouse, with the play both presuming and requiring that the boy-actor playing Aeneas is especially 'lovely' to look at, and blonde. The latter, contrastingly, possibly reflects an emerging discourse of political and especially monarchical sovereignty in the period, particularly in the wake of Jean Bodin's influential Six Livres de la République (1576), but translates the ideological into the personal and psychological in such a way as to defuse much of its political content or applicability. The collapse of the play's model of eroticised sovereign self-hood is highly traumatic, suggesting that it is rather a deeply invested fantasy than an attempt at subversion. Though highly distinctive, the play's understanding of monarchy occurs in many other works traditionally attributed to Marlowe and suggests his artistic influence on their composition, even if the extent to which he wrote the actual words, in the texts' final published form, can be disputed.

“The stars move still”: Haste, Delay, and Doubt in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus

2025-01-22T10:52:17+00:00

Christopher Marlowe’s Faustus exists in a tenuous, even at times tortuous, relationship to time. This essay explores Doctor Faustus’s treatment of impatience and delay in the context of its pacing and its poetics, particularly its use of pentameter. Marlowe’s Faustus is a particularly fascinating figure for illuminating the symbolic resonances of suspension and delay in early modern English poetry given his changing relationship with time over the course of the play. He is defined by impatience at the outset, going so far as to ask the spirits he is summoning, “Quid tu moraris? [Why do you delay?]” (1.3.20). However, by the end of the play this characterization is not only subverted but inverted—and this inversion echoes Faustus’s inversion of holy rites as well as Marlowe’s own metrical inversions which accompany it. The contrapasso-like twist of the finale of the play is such that, when damnation is at hand, all Faustus can ask for is a suspension of space and time: “Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of Heaven, / That time may cease, and midnight never come” (1.14.65-66). And yet his final request is for his suffering to have a temporal limit, via metempsychosis or some other means. The most frightening thing for Faustus is, in the end, the ultimate form of suspension—eternity.

The Cauldron and the Threat of the "Other" in Shakespeare's Macbeth, Middleton's The Witch, and Marlowe's The Jew of Malta

2023-05-22T09:15:06+00:00

As a theatrical element, the cauldron is perhaps most famously associated with the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (c.1606) and Middleton’s The Witch (c.1613-1616). However, this essay proposes that the cauldron in the early modern theatre is not merely a physical signifier, or even an innate trope, of witchcraft. For example, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (c.1590) effectively utilises cauldrons for symbolic and dramatic effect, even though these cauldrons are not explicitly suggestive of witchcraft or magic. Marlowe’s cauldrons are instead the murderous tools, and ultimately the divine punishment, of Barabas – a Jew. This essay will demonstrate that the cauldron signifies the threat of the associated characters through a threefold symbolism: firstly, because the cauldron was so integral to life and sustenance as one of the primary cooking vessels in the early modern household, there was a perpetual, underlying threat if it were to be misused; secondly, the long-established iconography of the cauldron serves to emphasise the connection between the user, Hell, and the Devil, and thereby the user’s evil nature; and thirdly, the cauldron is a distinctly feminine object and is accordingly used for either emasculation or misogyny. In this way, the cauldron suggests an implicit link between Judaism and witchcraft in that both, by association with the object of the cauldron, are demonic, villainous, and dangerous to early modern Christian society.

The Bull Theatre, Bishopsgate Street and John Welles: A Creative Nexus for Marlowe, Shakespeare and the Inspiration for The Massacre at Paris?

2024-09-13T10:32:53+00:00

This paper examines the ‘topographical backdrop’ to the creation of The Massacre at Paris and potential intersections between Marlowe and Shakespeare c. 1589/93. The overall purpose is to question how Marlowe and Shakespeare might have been influenced by conversations with neighbours, acquaintances and fellow writers. This social interaction has been termed ‘chat’, a reference to the practical process but also its ephemeral nature. This study is, therefore, also partly about a John Welles, one of the many, mostly long forgotten, officials who kept the wheels of the Elizabethan state turning – one of those usually ‘who are perished as though they had never been born’. Except, unusually with Welles, it is possible to rescue this intriguing character from obscurity to reveal a Londoner, who for over a decade lived a few hundred yards from Marlowe and Shakespeare. That is, when he was not riding the roads of France.

Marlowe's Reading of Machiavelli and Anne Dowriche's The French Historie

2024-10-10T08:20:29+00:00

The history of the Massacre at Paris is well-known. Typically, the conclusions drawn by the quick and often reactionary readings of the play have been unfairly scornful. The disparaging attitude towards Marlowe’s piece is bizarre when we consider that The Massacre was the highest grossing play of the season for Lord Strange’s Men, and today it seems to be disparaged more by critics than audiences or theatre professionals, as the few performances have shown. My purpose is not to rehash these important arguments but rather to show that Marlowe has in fact thoughtfully but radically presented an important historical document that deals with what then was the most shattering event to have shaken Europe. Marlowe saw that a radical event requires a radical presentation—his play should be understood as a simulacrum of the French massacre. This is an approach to the event that I will argue is based on several elements, including his reading of an important source for the play that has only recently been acknowledged, Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie.

The Employment of Touch in Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II

2025-02-24T14:41:36+00:00

Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II demonstrates the power embodied in the sense of touch as it breaks down and reveals the transitory nature of socially-constructed boundaries such as formal behaviour, contemporary terms of sexuality, and social class. While Marlowe employs metaphor to convey the sense, his engagement remains strikingly literal. This article begins by providing a brief overview of the queer, historical, and political critical analysis of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (1594). I investigate how Marlowe details moments of male-male affective intimacy between King Edward II and his favourite, Gaveston, through physical contact which breaks with formality and which merges the men together into a composite body or complete “self”. As tension arises between the body natural and the body politic, precious objects such as the miniature temporarily substitute tactile pleasures between the men. I continue by exploring how touching and being touched between the king and his favourite vie with and surpass intimacy between the king and queen and how it additionally extends beyond desire into a demonstration of power. Negotiations are made, accepted, and rejected through corporeal contact and public displays of affection define and signal markers of social status. I then move on to establish that while private moments of intimacy between men remain unproblematic, they are shaped not only by those who create them but by those who interpret them. The elite perceive ambition of the lower-class favourite rather than desire as the driving influence behind sexual touch and their fear lies in the wider implications of a redistribution of power and of the contamination of the social classes. This essay therefore aims to demonstrate how Marlowe understands touch not as a base sense, but as a complex primal force which moves outwards from the habitual and interweaves the sexual, social, and political.

Anne Dowriche, The French Historie, ed. Joanne Paul (CRRS, 2024)

2025-06-25T17:56:08+00:00

A review of Joanne Paul's new edition of Anne Dowriche's poem, The French Historie.

Christopher Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage, The Revels Plays, ed. Ruth Lunney (Manchester University Press, 2023)

2025-06-26T08:37:43+00:00

A review of Ruth Lunney's new Revels edition of Dido, Queen of Carthage

Anthony Grafton, Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2023)

2024-05-03T17:02:29+00:00

Review of Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa by Anthony Grafton

Kit Heyam, The Reputation of Edward II, 1305–1697: A Literary Transformation of History (Amsterdam University Press, 2020)

2024-09-18T11:47:13+00:00

A review of Kit Heyam's book The Reputation of Edward II, 1305–1697, published by Amsterdam University Press in 2020.

Arata Ide, Localising Christopher Marlowe: His Life, Plays and Mythology, 1575–1593 (Boydell & Brewer, 2023)

2025-06-26T11:45:01+00:00

Review of Arate Ide's Localising Christopher Marlowe.