Sheffield Hallam University Journals
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Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, ed. William H. Sherman and Chloe Preedy (London: Bloomsbury, 2021); Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, ed. Lloyd Edward Kermode (New York: Norton, 2021)
No full textA review of two editions of The Jew of Malta newly published in 2021
The Year's Work in Marlowe Studies: 2020
Get PDFA review of scholarly work on Marlowe from the year 2020
Demonic Temporality in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus
Get PDF“Demonic Temporality in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus” argues that demonic beings and their temporal experiences serve as useful ways to conceptualize human beings existing in multiple timelines in Marlowe’s play. Plotting Satan’s histories in the Bible, demonology, and the ars moriendi tradition, the essay trace how early modern authors attempted to outline precisely how demonic temporality differed from humanity’s own constricted timescapes. Marlowe’s play, however, undercuts any confidence that early modern readers might have gained from these traditions, and I show how Mephistopheles furthers Faustus’s flawed conception of time as strictly earthly. Mephistopheles, too, is bound by certain temporal demands, particularly when he is forced to arrive upon the clowns Robin and Rafe’s ludic conjurations. Ultimately, Mephistopheles manipulates Faustus’s sense of temporality altogether, and the magus only learns at the very end of the play the true import of “everlasting” and Mephistopheles’s role, his experiences, within that sense of infinitude. In staging an aborted death scene that echoes the first half of ars moriendi texts, Marlowe’s disengagement from the genre rests on differences in understanding demonic temporality. 
Powerful Looks in Tamburlaine
No full textSeveral discussions of Tamburlaine have touched on the striking visual dimension of Marlowe's bombastic play—especially with regard to the theatricality of the titular conqueror himself, who, as David Thurn puts it, “steadfastly refuses to relinquish the power of sight.” At the same time, Tamburlaine has been put forth by scholars such as Joseph Khoury as a Machiavellian figure who embodies will-to-power without much impediment. While the larger-than-life Tamburlaine may seem in such readings a force unto himself, spinning victory out of an ultimately hollow rhetorical prowess and superior will, this article argues to the contrary that all major characters in the play, including Tamburlaine himself, operate within the same framework of princely glory as power. The play suggests, in other words, that looking the part and being the part of Machiavelli’s prince are not only directly entangled, but may be one in the same. Paying attention to the language of "looks" and looking within the play, the article thus situates Tamburlaine's visual rhetoric within this larger visual framework in order to argue that the secret of his success at conquest may be found not in a superior will but in the Machiavel's superior understanding of glory and how to manipulate it
Christopher Marlowe. Il Massacro di Parigi. Con la morte del Duca di Guisa. Edited and translated by Cristiano Ragni. Perugia: Morlacchi University Press, 2017
No full textCristiano Ragni's Italian translation of The Massacre at Paris represents a precious contribution to the reception of a strongly criticised play in Italy. As the first Italian stand-alone edition of the play, Il Massacro di Parigi. Con la morte del Duca di Guisa is successful in providing Italian readers with a rigorous and thorough examination of Marlowe's life, works and criticism, as well as with a noteworthy translation that proves faithful to the Marlovian vehement and powerful diction
Marlovian Joan la Pucelle
Get PDFThe Joan episodes in 1 Henry VI have struck Shakespeareans as Marlovian from the era of the dual Victorian Fredericks, Fleay (1831-1909) and Furnivall (1825-1910), though Marlowe scholars have not reciprocated the attention with quite the same ardor. To this end, a careful reading of the scenes that the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016) attributed to the poet-playwright seems entirely in order. No matter who actually made Joan, or whether we view her as la Pucelle or de Arc, her lineage was Marlovian, even to his Ovidian core as descended from his speaker in his translation of the Amores, All Ovids Elegies, that book whose earlier edition, Certaine of Ovids Elegies, was burned at the order of Bishops Bancroft and Whitgift in 1599
The God-Haunted Atheist and the Posh Boy: Christopher Marlowe in Will and Upstart Crow
Get PDFDuring the mid-2010s, there appeared a pair of television shows featuring William Shakespeare in the title role, with Christopher Marlowe as a central supporting figure: Craig Pearce’s TNT drama Will and Ben Elton’s BBC comedy Upstart Crow. Pearce’s depiction of Marlowe as a brilliant but tortured, blaspheming homosexual corresponds very closely with what Lucas Erne calls the “mythographic image” of the playwright cultivated by Marlowe scholars and biographers. By contrast, Elton’s comic portrayal of Marlowe as a charming but unambitious “posh boy” who did not even write the plays attributed to him turns the stereotypical image of the playwright upside down. These two contrasting depictions of Christopher Marlowe himself correspond to the differing portrayals of his most famous protagonist: the tragic Doctor Faustus of the beginning and ending of that play, whose transgression of orthodox boundaries brings about his demise, and the comic Faustus of the middle scenes of the play, who squanders his considerable intellectual gifts
Devils, the Divine, and Despair in Doctor Faustus
No full textMany scholars have noted that in Marlowe’s play, Faustus’s damnation is justified by his religious despair which prevents him from seeking repentance from God. But it is my contention that Faustus experiences both a religious and an intellectual despair, and it is the latter of the two which makes his ending truly tragic. Because of his inability to reconcile spiritual mysteries with earthly knowledge, Faustus loses faith in his own penchant for mastery; thus, in the end he laments not his turn towards the demonic, but his decision to ever extend his curiosity beyond the earthly world in the first place.  
Christopher Marlowe’s Lightborne and the Chester Mystery Cycle
Get PDFWhile scholars have noted the influence of the medieval mystery cycles on the plays of Christopher Marlowe for some time, few have explored Edward II’s fictional assassin Lightborne in relation to the Chester Mystery Cycle. This essay analyzes the depiction of the Cycle’s demon Lightborne to suggest connections between the fallen angel’s role as divine punisher and the depiction of Marlowe’s fictitious murderer. A close comparison of the Chester Cycle’s Lightborne to the Marlovian murderer suggests not only the demonic characteristics of Marlowe’s Lightborne, but also reveals how the playwright subverts his audience’s understanding of divine providence