Sheffield Hallam University Journals
Not a member yet
182 research outputs found
Sort by
Christopher Marlowe, The Massacre at Paris, ed. Mathew R. Martin (Manchester: Manchester University Press/The Revels Plays, 2021)
Full text linkA review of Mathew R. Martin's new edition of Marlowe's Massacre at Paris
The Year’s Work in Marlowe Studies: 2022
Full text linkThis piece provides an overview of scholarship related to the works of Christopher Marlowe that were published in 2022
Judaizing Emilia Lanier: Fruits of the Poisonous Tree
Full text linkIn 1973 A.L. Rowse brought Emilia Lanier (née Bassano) to much wider attention by announcing that he had identified her as the ‘Dark Lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets, though the claim was somewhat deflated when it was discovered that he had misread the word ‘brave’ in Dr Simon Forman’s Casebooks as ‘brown’. There was no evidence that she was ‘dark’ at all, though Rowse attempted to save his argument by emphasising her ‘Italianate’ lineage on Lanier’s father’s side (but ignoring her English mother). Six years later Roger Prior, an early supporter of Rowse, first made the claim that Lanier was in fact of Jewish extraction, the Bassano family having first moved to northern Italy (and adopted the name of the town where they settled) to escape persecution; and that they then moved to England, finding employment as royal musicians, but hiding their Jewish faith. For Prior this seems mainly to have bolstered the ‘Dark Lady’ thesis; the evidence for it was circumstantial at best, but he kept adding to and adjusting his claim for the next fifteen years until he and the musicologist David Lasocki brought out The Bassanos: Venetian Musicians in England, 1531-1665 (1995). With this Prior’s case became widely accepted, being repeated in the Dictionary of National Biography and elsewhere. A number of Italian scholars, including Giulio Ongaro, Alessio Ruffatti and Stefano Pio had in fact already challenged it on several grounds, most notably that it misrepresented the actual situation of Jews in Northern Italy in the early Sixteenth Century, that none of the documentation required of converted Jews in Venice had ever been associated with the Bassanos, and that the family could be traced back in the region to a time before the major migrations of Jews from (in particular) the Iberian peninsula from which Prior latterly claimed they came. But this has made little mainstream headway and the argument that Lanier either was, or could have been, of Jewish derivation is rarely challenged. And it has been made the basis of several highly questionable readings of her Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, a work of pious Protestant orthodoxy only unusual in its proto-feminist perspective. It has been the basis of increasingly extreme claims that Jewish heritage was central to Lanier’s identity (her ‘Jewish’ father died when she was only seven), that she passed on Hebrew scholarship to the likes of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, and indeed that she wrote the plays of Shakespeare. This essay is an attempt to put that genie back in the bottle
Knowledge, Love and Epistemic Uncertainty in Marlowe's Edward the Second
Full text linkIn 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.
 
Preserving Women: Hospitality, Birth, and Healing in The Winter’s Tale
Full text linkScholars have long expressed fascination with the apparent revivication of Hermione in The Winter's Tale and yet few have dwelled on the conditions that make her preservation possible. In this article, I argue that the depiction of Hermione in the final scene is part of a larger constellation of images in the play that are predicated on early modern understandings of women as preservers. In early modern England, women served as the preservers of belongings, health, food, and lineage. In The Winter’s Tale, Paulina, Hermione, Perdita, and other women participate in the tradition of preservation, and yet they are often met with resistance, disparagement, and threats. I argue that Shakespeare uses depictions of hospitality, childbearing, and nursing to encourage the audience to accept women’s natural proclivity for preservation and thus avoid the “diseased” thinking that proves harmful in the play. 
William C. Carroll, Adapting Macbeth: A Cultural History (London and New York: The Arden Shakespeare, 2022). xv + 267 pp. ISBN 978-1-3501-8139-7
Full text linkAssessing Marlowe in Context
Full text linkThis essay outlines the design and rationale of an innovative assessment used on a module dedicated to Marlowe in a UK university
Marlowe in Sheets: Teaching Christopher Marlowe's Books through Digital Materiality
Full text linkThe online resource Marlowe in Sheets, a sister project to Prof. Tara Lyons’ Shakespeare in Sheets, puts forth Marlowe’s works in a manner never offered before to students and scholars: the original printed but unfolded and uncut quartos and octavos from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, reformatted and rebuilt into custom downloadable PDFs for academic and public use. Playing with digital reproductions of Marlowe’s widely studied works in their first printed form enriches the study of pre-modern literature by enabling users to navigate and engage critically with the fields of the history of the book, bibliography, and the history of reading. A strong focus on how readers first came across and interacted with early printed texts highlights the marked differences these unassembled works possess in terms of form and appearance compared to their modern-day equivalents, which are generally heavily edited, annotated, prefaced, equipped with reading aids and guides, and, most of all, ready-made
‘How many would the peaceful city quit, / To welcome him’?: The Earl of Essex on Parade
Full text linkTo date, there has been no in-depth investigation of the many contemporary depictions of Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, on parade. This is an unfortunate omission because parades were an important part of Essex’s identity, especially his public self-presentation. The elements and implications of his parades provide insight as to how he presented himself and was understood by others, which in turn provides a more complete understanding of his impact on the collective Elizabethan imagination. Essex’s parades consistently and overtly highlighted deeply popular aspects of his public image. This public image could easily be seen as offering a comparison, often a contrast, to the queen’s progresses, the most famous Elizabethan parades. The fact that Essex offered a contrast to the queen underlines the potential problems of his presenting himself publicly in a manner that might suggest an alternative to the monarch. This aspect of his parades came into stark relief during the 1601 Essex uprising, which is instructively seen as a failed version of his previous parades
