This re-visioning of the Marlowe canon aims to explain the ambiguous effects that readers have long associated with Marlowe's signature. Marlovian tragedy has been inadequately theorized because Marlowe has too often been set under the giant shadow of Shakespeare. Grande, by contrast, takes Marlowe on his own terms and demonstrates how he achieves his notorious moral ambiguity through the rhetorical technique of dilation or amplification. All of Marlowe's plays end in the conventional tragic way, with death. But each play, as well as Hero and Leander, repeatedly evokes the reader's expectations of a tragic end only to defer them, dilating the moment of pleasure so that the protagonists can dally before the "law" of tragedy.

Christopher Marlowe's drama, The Jew of Malta, has become an increasingly popular source for scholarly scrutiny, staged productions, and, most recently, a filmed version. The play follows the sometimes tragic, sometimes comic, often outrageous fortunes of its villainous protagonist, the Jew Barabas. In recent years the play has provoked as much interpretive controversy as any work in the Marlowe canon. This unique volume is therefore especially timely, providing fresh, varied approaches to the many enigmatic elements of the play.

The connection between Renaissance ideas about the character of individual nations and the presentation of stage characters of various nationalities in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is examined in this volume.

This New Mermaids anthology brings together the four most popular and widely studied of Christopher Marlowe's plays: Tamburlaine, Parts 1 and 2, The Jew of Malta, Edward II and Dr Faustus. The new introduction by Brian Gibbons explores the plays in the context of early modern theatre, culture and politics, as well as examining their language, characters and themes. On-page commentary notes guide students to a better understanding and combine to make this an indispensable student edition ideal for study and classroom use from A Level upwards.

Taking a wide-ranging intertextual approach, Richard Hillman sets Early Modern English play-texts against political and cultural discourses concerning France, as these informed contemporary English consciousness. The English works explored go beyond those directly representing French affairs; the French examples include dramatic treatments of Joan of Arc and of the assassination of the Guises by Henri III. In addition to its fresh readings of some familiar plays, the book proposes, as unique to the English-French dynamic, a theoretical model relating history, discourse and subjectivity.

This study considers the various sources of Christopher Marlowe's Biblical knowledge, examines 1037 specific references to Scripture that Marlowe made, and surveys an additional 500 general ones. After classifying Marlowe's Biblical references on four levels of definiteness, Cornelius discusses the following aspects of Marlowe's stylistic use of the Bible: quotations, paraphrases, imitations of Biblical style, individual words, sensory imagery, figures of speech, reversals, and inaccuracies. The relationships of repeated Biblical themes, such as judgment and Christ parallels, to the meaning of Marlowe's works are also explored, and the matter of Marlowe's so-called «atheism» is evaluated in the light of his Biblical references. A lengthy Appendix lists his specific Biblical references alongside their possible sources and gives textual and critical annotations for significant entries. This work also contains eight illustrations, two tables, a bibliography, and an index.