THIS POST IS THE SIXTH (AND FINAL) IN A SERIES OF DAILY CONFERENCE RE-CAPS WRITTEN BY EARLY EARLY CAREER SCHOLARS ATTENDING THIS YEAR'S CONFERENCE.

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By Kilian Schindler

Friday marked already the fourth and, alas, last day of the conference. But far from causing conference ennui, the programme persistently confronted us with the question who or what Marlowe is. My first session of the day was a roundtable on editing, featuring Peter Kirwan, Ruth Lunney, and Paul Menzer, all of whom are currently editing Marlowe plays. As editors have a habit of doing, all of them problematised the notion that we have immediate access to a pure, Marlovian essence through his texts. Common concerns shared by all three editors were questions of boundaries and continuities and an awareness that editing always involves negotiations and compromises, acts of selection and delimitation. Ruth Lunney, who is preparing the first critical single-volume edition of Dido, Queen, of Carthage for Revels Plays, probed the issue in relation to the play’s sources. Peter Kirwan, who is editing Doctor Faustus for The Routledge Anthology of Renaissance Drama, was preoccupied with the place and function of the play in the context of an anthology and the narrative which it implies. Paul Menzer, who is editing the B-text of Doctor Faustus for New Mermaids, drew attention to the constraints of the paradigm of the single-text edition, but also emphasised the value of the physical book as an object that performs its own boundaries and reveals itself as a product of processes of selection and exclusion.

THIS POST IS THE FIFTH IN A SERIES OF DAILY CONFERENCE RE-CAPS WRITTEN BY EARLY EARLY CAREER SCHOLARS ATTENDING THIS YEAR'S CONFERENCE.

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By Loren Cressler

I know that Meghan Andrews wrote yesterday about the critical conversations around authorial collaboration, and I am nevertheless compelled to write a post today thinking through the values of our ongoing scholarly relationships. Whether or not we are directly collaborating and co-authoring, we are constantly advancing one another’s work, and the relatively intimate nature of the MSA conference means that we do so in real time, collectively. Listening to panels in which the presenters have cultivated an ongoing conversation over months or years gives one the impression that our relationships yield increasing returns as we maintain them. 

THIS POST IS THE FOURTH IN A SERIES OF DAILY CONFERENCE RE-CAPS WRITTEN BY EARLY CAREER SCHOLARS ATTENDING THIS YEAR'S CONFERENCE.

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By Andrew Bozio

Conferences are, among other things, ways of taking the temperature of a profession. They allow us to glimpse emerging methodologies and questions well before those modes of inquiry register in the medium of print. On the third day of this conference, Andrew Duxfield issued a powerful challenge to Marlovians, noting that our interest in the cartographic and the cosmographic dimensions of Marlowe’s plays hasn’t been met with a similar interest in the material stuff of the environment. Indeed, ecomaterialism hasn’t made much of an impact within Marlowe studies – or, at least, such was the case until yesterday’s provocative panel on Marlovian environments. In his paper, “‘Sooner shall the sea o’erwhelm my land’: Water in Edward II,” Duxfield offered a generative and capacious reading of the symbolic economy of the sea within Marlowe’s history play, showing how it reflects and refracts the relationships between and among Gaveston, Edward, and the barons. Chloe Preedy then turned our attention to another elemental force in her paper, “Blowing on the Wind: Marlowe’s Aerial Technologies and The Jew of Malta,” offering the latest installment of what has seemed, over the course of several conferences, to be an exceptionally promising project. And Goran Stanivukovic’s suggestion that we can link ecological matter – namely, the sea – to ecologies of affect and desire offered a strong conclusion to this afternoon session.

THIS POST IS THE THIRD IN A SERIES OF DAILY CONFERENCE RE-CAPS WRITTEN BY EARLY CAREER SCHOLARS ATTENDING THIS YEAR'S CONFERENCE.

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By Meghan Andrews

Wednesday at the MSA International Conference was just as lively, intellectually stimulating, and provocative as the first day. Moreover, it felt unexpectedly yet rewardingly cohesive, as a distinct thread ran through most of the sessions I attended and helped the sessions, as well as the papers, speak to each other. It was not always the explicit topic of the panel (though sometimes it was), and the question was addressed more obliquely in some sessions than others, but what bound Wednesday together for me was the question of early modern authorial collaboration—and the productive tensions surrounding both our attempts to understand it and the rhetoric we use in so doing.

THIS POST IS THE SECOND IN A SERIES OF DAILY CONFERENCE RE-CAPS WRITTEN BY EARLY CAREER SCHOLARS ATTENDING THIS YEAR'S CONFERENCE.

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By Megan Heffernan

The Marlowe Society of America is in the midst of an experiment in historiography. The conference is meeting this year in Wittenberg, a town in the east of Germany best known as the birthplace of the Reformation. It is home of Martin Luther, Lucas Cranach, Philipp Melancthon, and of course Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus (at least in one textual tradition). Drawing participants from across the globe, the 2018 MSA has wagered that location matters: that we as scholars can learn as much from the spaces that housed history as from the textual records of the past.

This ambitious gambit has already started to pay off, and in ways I hadn’t quite anticipated before I arrived. Walking the streets where Luther and his cohort of thinkers fomented a radical break with tradition, I have been startled to encounter the ways in which the history can inform or even live on in the present, perhaps becoming most vividly felt in the moments that emphasize the distance between then and now. Beyond a literal encounter with the world of Faustus, this conference is an opportunity to rethink how we tell responsible, passionate, and timely stories about the nature of our scholarly engagement with Marlowe, as well as the bodies and books that deliver versions of his authority to us today.