Marlowe and Shakespeare: The Critical Rivalry [Paperback]

Instead of asserting any alleged rivalry between Marlowe and Shakespeare, Sawyer examines the literary reception of the two when the writers are placed in tandem during critical discourse or artistic production. Focusing on specific examples from the last 400 years, the study begins with Robert Greenes comments in 1592 and ends with the post-9/11 and 7/7 era.

The study not only looks at literary critics and their assessments, but also at playwrights such as Aphra Behn, novelists such as Anthony Burgess, and late twentieth-century movie and theatre directors. The work concludes by showing how the most recent outbreak of Marlowe as Shakespeares ghostwriter accelerates due to a climate of conspiracy, including belief echoes, which presently permeate our cultural and critical discourse.

Chapter 1 Introduction: The Rivals of My Watch .- Chapter 2: Locating the Earliest 'Critics' .- Chapter 3: The Seventeenth Century: Collaboration, Co-Authorship and the Death of the Author(s) .- Chapter 4: The Long Eighteenth Century: Limbs Torn Asunder, Borrowing the Bones, Identifying the Corpus .- Chapter 5: The Nineteenth Century: The Space(s) of the Critical Rivalry in London .- Chapter 6: The Twentieth Century: Formalization, Polarization, and Fictionalization .- Chapter 7: The Twenty-First Century: Trauma, Drama, and Conspiracy .-Robert Sawyers Marlowe and Shakespeare: The Critical Rivalry takes the complex meaning of the term rival in the early modern period as something between competitor and partner or even collaborator to survey the way the two playwrights have been viewed in relation to one another & . The book will be very valuable to graduate students, in particular, who wish to learn the critical history of their field and to any scholar interested in the cultural history of literary criticism. (Henry S. Turner, SEL Studies in English Literature lsˆ