Christopher Marlowe

Provides a critical account of the life and works of Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe is studied as a man who staged the birth of the modern author, and for his representations of sexuality and homosexuality. This text portrays a wide range of critical approaches and provides theoretical grounding.

Many of the essays take off from Marlowe's extreme dramatisations of arson, cruelty and aggression, suggesting why it is that the thinker who has been most convincingly applied to his theatre is the philosopher of punishment and pain, Michel Foucault. Others explore the exclusiveness of this all-male universe, and reveal why it remains so offensive and impenetrable to feminism. For what they all make disturbingly clear is Marlowe's violent, untamed difference from the cliches and correctness of normative society.

General Editors' Preface Acknowledgements
1. INTRODUCTION The Ruffian on the Stair The Burning Library Confessions of a Mask The Bonfire of Vanities Saint Marlowe 2. MARJORIE GARBER, 'Here's Nothing Writ': Scribe, Script and Circumscription in Marlowe's Plays 3. JONATHAN GOLDBERG, Sodomy and Society: The Case of Christopher Marlowe 4. SIMON SHEPHERD, Representing 'Women' and Males: Gender Relations in Marlowe 5. JONATHAN GOLDBERG, 'Play the Sodomites, or Worse': 'Dido Queen of Carthage' 6. JONATHAN CREWE, The Theatre of the Idols: Marlowe, Rankins, and Theatrical Images 7. ALAN SINFIELD, Legitimating Tamburlaine 8. RICHARD WILSON, Visible Bullets: 'Tamburlaine the Great' and Ivan the Terrible 9. STEPHEN GREENBLATT, Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism 10. EMILY BARTELS, Malta: 'The Jew of Malta', and the Fictions of Difference 11. THOMAS CARTELLI, King Edward's Body 12. JOHN ARCHER, Marlowe and the Observation of Men 13. JULIA BRIGGS, The Rites of Violence: Marlowe's 'Massacre at Paris' 14. JONATHAN DOLLIMORE, 'Doctor Faustus': Subversion through Transgression 15. HILARY GATTI, Bruno and Marlowe: 'Doctor Faustus'
Notes on Authors Further Reading Index