The Marlowe Society of America is delighted to be sponsoring a panel called ‘Rereading Marlowe’ at the 2024 MLA Convention in Philadelphia. Our four speakers will examine questions around speech, silence, reading, text, presence, and absence in the work of Marlowe and his contemporaries.
Please join us on Sunday, January 7 from 10:15 to 11:30 a.m. at the Loews Philadelphia (Tubman Room, 3rd Floor) if you are attending MLA! More information about the venue can be found in the MLA program. Titles and abstracts appear below.
Acts of Reading, the Lives of Magic Books, and the Limits of the University in Greene and Marlowe
Brandi K. Adams (Arizona State University)
In this paper, I suggest that Christopher Marlowe and Robert Greene present two separate visions for humanism and the early modern English university through an exploration of scholarly reading of secular and magic books. They transform this type of reading beyond the rational limits of humanism into something I identify as thaumaturgical—that which artfully combines humanism, magic, and empirical scientific practice. In Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, Greene advocates that scholars use this kind of reading to act as political and social counselors for the health of England, its monarchy, and its universities, in a kind of nationalist project, as Bacon constructs (and rationalizes the use of) the Brazen head. I then read Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus as a criticism of or failed experiment of thaumaturgical reading—one that results in a renowned scholar’s disconnection and potential harm to his university community and larger political and social structures.
Desunt Nonulla: Writing Marlowe’s Missing Words
Adam Zucker (University of Massachusetts)
This paper is inspired by the words Desunt nonnulla, which appear at the conclusion of the 1598 printing of Hero and Leander that contained Marlowe’s writing without Chapman’s. The phrase, used by medieval scribes and early modern printers and authors to mean “something is missing”, indicates that someone, somewhere along the chain of transmission that took place between Marlowe’s death and the publication of the poem, believed that the manuscript of Hero and Leander was unfinished, or, at least, that it ended before the familiar story of the two lovers was entirely told. The latter belief is surely true. The former is less so, and has been the subject of a good deal discussion over the past 40 years or so. This paper explores a few other early modern deployments of the term, and uses the ambiguous aura of ‘unfinishedness’ attached to Marlowe’s poem to reflect on the unfinished nature of philological and editorial practice more generally.
Machiavels and Silent Women
Laura Kolb (Baruch College, City University of New York)
“Be cunning, Abigail”; “Be close, my girl.” With these injunctions, Barabas initiates his daughter into his project of machiavellian dissembling. Crucially, he also urges Abigail to “be silent,” encouraging her to turn her ordinary identity—that of an obedient young woman—into a cloak for iniquity. Taking the combination of cunning, closeness, and silence as its starting point, this paper analyzes instances of feminine dissimulation onstage and off. Situating The Jew of Malta and Tamburlaine, part 2, alongside period prescriptive texts for women, it argues that Marlowe’s plays offer early instances of an overlooked stage trope: the ingenue initiated into dissimulation under duress, whose subsequent silences operate as cover for her own secret ends. Silent women, I argue, are relatives of the stage Machiavel: characters formally organized around a gap between being and seeming, and dramatic embodiments of the potential split between social identity (including gender identity) and strategic role.
The Extra Devil Revisited
Christine Varnado (SUNY-Buffalo)
There's an almost 420-year-old rumor about the Elizabethan theatre, repeated by its lovers (Thomas Middleton), haters (William Prynne), and historians (Aubrey, Chambers, Syme) alike, about the time—or times—that the players and audience at a performance of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus freaked out at the appearance of one too many devils onstage. This story has been productively explicated by scholars in terms of what it says about the period's ideas of magic, demonology, and the efficacy of language both onstage and off. However, this paper asks: Towards what other modes and ends of literary criticism, besides the historicist, might this story be productively read? What does it have to teach us about the erotic and psychic structures of spectating; or those of theatre itself? What can it show us as a fable about perception, interpretation, fantasy, materiality, and the question of what it means for something to appear / be seen / manifest?