Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman Lives, Stage, and Page [Hardcover]

Contributions to this volume explore the idea of Marlowe as a working artist, in keeping with John Addington Symonds' characterization of him as a sculptor-poet. Throughout the body of his work-including not only the poems and plays, but also his forays into translation and imitation-a distinguished company of established and emerging literary scholars traces how Marlowe conceives an idea, shapes and refines it, then remakes and remodels it, only to refashion it further in his writing process. These essays necessarily overlap with one another in the categories of lives, stage, and page, which signals their interdependent nature regarding questions of authorship, theater and performance history, as well as interpretive issues within the works themselves. The contributors interpret and analyze the disputed facts of Marlowe's life, the textual difficulties that emerge from the staging of his plays, the critical investigations arising from analyses of individual works, and their relationship to those of his contemporaries. The collection engages in new ways the controversies and complexities of its subject's life and art. It reflects the flourishing state of Marlowe studies as it shapes the twenty-first century conception of the poet and playwright as master craftsman.Contents: Introduction: Christopher Marlowe the craftsman: lives, stage, and page, Sarah K. Scott and M.L. Stapleton; Part I Lives: Scholarship and Biography: Marlowe scholarship and criticism: the current scene, Robert A. Logan; Marlowe thinking globally, Richard F. Hardin; Reviewing what we think we know about Christopher Marlowe, again, J.A. Downie; Was Marlowe a violent man?, Rosalind Barber. Part II Stage: Theater, Dramaturgy: Edward II and residual allegory, Alan C. Dessen; What Shakespeare did to Marlowe in private: Dido, Faustus and Bottom, Meredith Skura; The Jew of Malta and the development of city comedy: 'the mean passage of a history', Sarah K. Scott; Speaking to the audience: direct adlÍ