An author and a bookshop: publishing Marlowe’s remains at the Black Bear (original) (raw)
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Christopher Marlowe: An insight into the Man, the Myth
The objective of this research paper is to talk about the life and adventures of Christopher Marlowe as an alleged spy and the myth they call the " Marlovian Theory". Is it really a myth or are there enough facts to prove that Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare were one and the same person ? This research paper aims to highlight the facts and beliefs in favor of the Marlovian authorship to the plays attributed to a certain William Shakespeare. I plan to present information which I believe to be accurate and well-reasoned arguments in favor of this belief.
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In his prefatory letter to the 1590 printed edition of Christopher Marlowe's wildly popular Tamburlaine 1 and 2 , the printer Robert Jones addresses the "courteous reader" and justifies excluding from this first printed version of a major Elizabethan play certain "frivolous Jestures," likely comic scenes well-known from stage performances of the play. Rather than seeing these editorial exclusions as an attempt to standardize the genres of Elizabethan tragedy and history, this essay argues that the cultural context of the recoding of Tamburlaine from stage to page reveals a social tension between Elizabeth's administration and the unruly margins of popular dissent, between the "gentlemen" readers of books and the raucous play-going "mechanics." Besides Jones's letter, Sidney's Apology for Poetry , scholarly discussions of the textual problems of Marlowe's plays, contemporary accounts of the performance of Elizabethan theater...
The Spirit of Marlowe: Creating an Ethics on the English
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write about him, we are really referring to a construct called 'Marlowe.'" 17 And, while I gleefully approve of Simon Shepherd's estimation that "Marlowe's name…means, before anything else, sex and violence," 18 this study is completely uninterested in the historical Marlowe, instead, the "construct called 'Marlowe'" that emerges within the forthcoming analyses is in essence a signifying body of the collective philosophical tendencies (the "ethics") of the plays under discussion. One might assume, considering the salaciousness of Marlowe's plays, that Marlovian criticism would be just as enticing. Sadly, it is not-save a few sensational, and acrimonious, meta-critical pieces that detail the unsatisfactory state of Marlovian criticism. 19 Most meta-critical pieces that chart the history of Marlovian criticism-and of early modern dramatic criticism as well-mark a radical turn in the mid-1970s away from New Criticism and toward a Foucauldian-inspired New Historicism. Critics such as Richard Wilson and J.T. Parnell cite the 1976 English Institute essays offered by Marjorie Garber and Stephen Greenblatt as "effectively la[ying] down parameters of Marlovian criticism" for the remainder of the 20 th century and into the 21 st ." 20 "Dedicated to the memory of W.K. Wimsatt, the godfather of (the old) New Criticism," Wilson observes, "Garber's essay also looked forward to New Historicism when it
Chapter One from my monograph, The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403-1476 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). This chapter offers an account of the professional conditions of manuscript illumination in late medieval London, based on new archival research and previously unpublished documents as well as a survey of existing research on the subject. Recent scholarship, which I address in this chapter, has elevated the scribe to a central position in the dissemination of English literature and has spotlighted the ways in which these professionals edited and organized poetry for consumption by a range of audiences. Here, I unite archival research into London’s book trade with recent developments in the study of scribes to provide a picture of the activities of manuscript illuminators. Their professional practices created a set of conditions that had an impact on how illuminators went about their labor and in turn had consequences for the images they produced. These conditions include illuminators’ anonymity and indifference to individuation, their professional versatility, and the collaborative and decentralized nature of their work. In characterizing illuminators’ practices and habits, I provide a foundation in the realities of the book trade for the larger claims made throughout the book.