Christopher Marlowe the Craftsman Lives, Stage, and Page

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 address in the plays of Marlowe and his contemporaries, Ruth Lunney. Part III Pages: Texts and Interpretations: Marlowe the Ovidian: On the eventfulness of Hero and Leander, Stephen Booth; Marlowe's first Ovid: Certaine of Ovids Elegies, M.L. Stapleton; Marlowe and Marston's Cursus, Robert Darcy; Marlowe's last poem: elegiac aesthetics and the epitaph on Sir Roger Manwood, Dympna Callaghan. Marlowe's Reach: Hell is Discovered: the Roman destination of Dr Faustus, Brett Foster; Consuming sorrow: conversion and consumption in Tamburlaine: Part One, Carolyn Scott; Fractional Faustus: Edward Alleyn's part in the printing of the A-text, Paul Menzer; Bibliography; Index.

Sarah K. Scott is Assistant Professor of English at Mount St. Mary's University, where she offers courses in early modern literature and culture. She is Assistant Editor of the New Variorum Shakespeare Julius Caesar. She has published essays on Middleton, Dekker, and Marlowe, as well as several book reviews. M.L. Stapleton is Chapman Distinguished Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne. He has published books about Ovid, Seneca, Shakespeare, and Aphra Behn. He is editor of the New Variorum Shakespeare Julius Caesar. His most recent publication is Spenser's Ovidian Poetics (2009).