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Deathly Experiments
A Study of Icons and Emblems of Mortality in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays
by
Clayton MacKenzie
LC—CIP
ISBN-10: 0-404-62349-2
Set ISBN-13: 978-0-404-62349-4
Clothbound: $92.50
AMS Studies in the Renaissance, No. 49 |
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So dazzling was Marlowe’s intellect that we sometimes forget he was a hugely popular playwright, drawing rich and poor by the thousands to see his plays and managing to earn a living from the stage.
One reason for this popularity was Marlowe’s preoccupation with death. Images of the macabre abounded in the London of his time, and Marlowe’s plays tapped into this common visual reservoir. The dismembering devils of Doctor Faustus, the Mower of Edward II, the suicides in Dido, Queen of Carthage, the gruesome brutalities of The Massacre at Paris—all these reflect the popular Elizabethan conviction that death is at the very center of life, an idea also clearly present in the many printed images still with us from that time.
But Marlowe’s drama moves beyond the familiar and the understood to probe new and subversive terrain. In the first sustained examination of Marlowe’s use of emblems and icons, Clayton MacKenzie carefully analyzes the carnival of savagery in the playwright’s work to show how Marlowe manipulates his audience’s existing visual knowledge to draw them into a pointed debate about the meaning of government and power—and life itself.
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Contents
Introduction
1. Love, Death, and the Corruption of Meaning in Dido, Queen of Carthage
2. The Grisly Monster: Death in Tamburlaine, Parts One & Two
3. “Neither to fate, nor fortune but to heaven”: Barabas and the Route to Resolution in The Jew
of Malta
4. Edward II and the Rhetoricians of England’s Death-Defying Myth
5. The Massacre at Paris and the Danse Macabre
6. Faustus’s Contract and the Manipulation of Visual Resonances in Marlowe’s Doctor
Faustus
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
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