MSA at MLA
EVERY YEAR, THE MARLOWE SOCIETY OF AMERICA SPONSORS A PANEL AT THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION (MLA) CONVENTION. BELOW YOU WILL FIND INFORMATION ABOUT RECENT PANELS.
MLA 2022
WASHINGTON DC
105V. Intersectional Marlowe
Thursday, January 6, 2022, 7:00 to 8:15 p.m. EST on Zoom
Presiding: Lucy Munro, King’s College London, with Elisa Oh (Howard University) as respondent
1. “Marlowe’s Edward II: Penetrating Politics, Nation Building, and the Possibility of Queer Utopia,” Anita Raychawdhuri, University of California Santa Barbara
Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II explores how queer desire participate in the simultaneous creation and challenging of England’s national identity. Due to desire for empire abroad as well as anxiety over local populations in England, a national identity was articulated through a fantastical allegedly legible whiteness. Working from Kim F. Hall’s work on race and empire, Ian Smith’s linkeage of race and queerness in early modernity, and Alan Bray articulation of sodomy in the early modern period, I suggest that Marlowe uses queer desire to work through burgeoning nationhood in England, burgeoning in the sense that the importance of legible whiteness was becoming more centered and defined in this moment of global expansion and interaction. My argument has multiple parts, the first is how Marlowe presents homoeroticism in Edward II, the second explores links of foreignness and colonial expansion to queer desire, the third is how these links articulate ideas of Englishness and whiteness, and finally how the play utilizes metaphors about oceans and cultivatable land to theorize desire and its potential to reify or undermine the calcification of a national identity.
2. “‘Servile Spirits’: Race, Sexuality, and Choreographies of Service in Marlowe,” Emily MacLeod, George Washington University
Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta feature characters who perform different types of service, from Mephistopheles’ metamorphic powers to Ithamore’s villainous apprenticeship. I argue that the servitude performed in these two plays constitutes a specific skill set of theatrical labor on the part of the actor that ties into other racialized performances in the early modern repertory. Medieval blackened devils have been noted as precursors to performances of racial difference, and reading Mephistopheles alongside Ithamore here offers potential for an intertheatrical definition of racialized performance. Repertory becomes a medium to be seen through that contributes to the work of early modern racecraft through repetitive spectacular displays of actor skill, movement, and stage properties that tie into other performances of gender, sexuality, class, and ability.
3. “Ovidian Drag: Deconstructing Gender and Class in Marlowe’s Edward II,” Daniel G. Lauby, University of New Hampshire
What might drag performance look like in Edward II, and how it might prove a useful lens of analysis for examining the intersection of gender, class, and desire. This conference paper builds upon the argument that class rather than same-sex desire lies at the center of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II. However, I complicate that argument by attending to the intersectionality of class and gender in relation to same-sex desire. Using drag theory, I attend to axes of identity within drag performance in which gender drag also entails class drag, focusing primarily on moments of slippage between cross-dressing and drag in Gaveston’s imagined staging of the Diana-Actaeon myth. Within this drag performance, Gaveston reveals the mutual construction of class and gender as well as the consequences of queering those constructions. Through this revelation, Marlowe challenges a hegemony dependent upon the regulation of identity in a continuation of an anti-nationalist project that centers libertas and amor as the proper loci of power.
MLA 2021
VIRTUAL
665. Playing Marlowe
Sunday, January 10, 2021, 3:30 to 4:45 p.m. on Zoom
Presiding: Misha Teramura, University of Toronto
1. “The ‘Marlovian’ and Other Drugs: Blank Verse, Big Parts, and the Blockbuster,” Elizabeth Tavares, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
2. “Restoring Marlowe,” John Kuhn, SUNY-Binghamton
3. “Playing (with) Edward: Acting and Adapting Queer History,” Misha Teramura, University of Toronto
MLA 2019
CHICAGO IL
561. Marlowe and Ecology
Saturday, January 5, 2019, 3:30 to 4:45 p.m., Randolph 3, Hyatt Regency
Respondent: Jennifer Monroe, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
1. “Ecology and Gender in Dido Queen of Carthage,” Karen Raber, University of Mississippi
Following the apparent wreck of most of his ships, and driven to the woods by his son’s “fainting” hunger, Aeneas and his surviving company in Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage find themselves marveling at the Libyan coast’s “ayre most pleasant and the soyle most fit / for Cities and societies supports.” The language and encounters of Act I root my argument in this essay that Marlowe’s play interrogates the political and ecological consequences involved in the triumph of a (gendered) model of destructive resource-extraction over generatively cooperative ecological practices.
2. “Bringing Out Tambur-Lame: Marlowe's Eco-Teratology,” Steven Swarbrick, Baruch College
Reading Marlowe’s Tamburlaine in relation to its source material, the historical “Timur-the-Lame,” I argue that the play’s desire to bring out Tamburlaine as “other”—monstrous, disabled—creates queer manifolds in the epic time of the play, suggesting not only alternatives to the epistemology of the closet that informs normative reading practices but also cartographic and relational imaginaries at odds with English expansionism. Consequently, what we “see” via Tamburlaine’s “disability” is not so much the truth of premodern disability but rather the nomadic assemblage of affects, materials, and ecologies that form and deform queer/dis/abled existence in Marlowe’s history.
3. “Marlowe's Ecology of War,” Benjamin Bertram, University of Southern Maine
As one of the four “warring” elements in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays, water is perceived as a chaotic force beyond human control, an obstacle to military success, and “standing reserve” for commercial and military exploitation. Humans’ ability to alter their physical surroundings during war can be seen in both the massive destruction of ecosystems like Limnasphaltis Lake and in the more carefully managed construction of dams and other forms of hydraulic power. I will argue that a historicist approach to the element of water in Marlowe, one that focuses in particular on the Anglo-Spanish war, is not incompatible with a presentist approach that finds forms of catastrophic damage to lakes, rivers, and oceans in his plays that are very similar to what we are witnessing on a local and global scale in the 21st century.
4. “‘Cut the arctic line': Marlowe in Gruntland,” Lowell Duckert, University of Delaware
At the start of Tamburlaine, Part 2 (ca. 1587), Orcanes recalls the “[g]iants as big as hugy Polypheme” who inhabit “[v]ast Gruntland [Greenland].” Despite their size, the king continues, “[o]ur Turkey blades shall glide through all their throats.” Classical and contemporary descriptions of the far north tended to populate the arctic with pygmies, however – not giants. Comparing accounts and images from Swedish historian Olaus Magnus (1490-1557), German geographer Dithmar Blefken (fl. 1563), and Icelandic historian Arngrim Jonas (fl. 1609) – amongst others – this paper lingers over Marlowe’s aggrandizement of Greenlandic indigenous peoples, hoping to identify in the playwright’s scalar shift either a full-throated encouragement for eco-imperialism; a tacit check to English north-western and eastern expansion; or a combination of the two.
5. “‘Ever grene & flourishing’: ‘Discoloured Jasper’ and Marlowe’s ecotone in Hero and Leander,” Tiffany Jo Werth, UC Davis
In “Hero and Leander” the narrator describes the “discoloured Jasper stone” of the fair church wherein Leander will become enamored of Hero. The church that boasts images of Proteus and the gods in “sundrie shapes” contains a riot of green vines interspersed with forms of bronze, crystal, and iron. Comparing accounts from Revelation and contemporary poets like Edmund Spenser, this paper asks how the poetic negotiation between organic and inorganic analogues, what we might think of as two poetic biomes, demands a reformulation of the act of making—and arousing human desire.
6. “Saving Marlowe in the Anthropocene,” Joshua Calhoun, University of Wisconsin, Madison
From book-burning in Doctor Faustus to accusations that Marlowe himself believed in the existence of written records that predated Adam to the scant survival of Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Amores, Marlowe’s life and work draw attention to destructibility of ideas recorded on objects made from the natural world. This short presentation thinks with Marlowe about the ecologies of book survival and destruction, about biodeterioration and loss, but also about the costs of book preservation in climate-controlled vaults in the present.
MLA 2018
NEW YORK NY
472. Rethinking Marlowe and the Aesthetic
Saturday, January 6, 2018, 8:30 to 9:45 a.m., Sugar Hill, Sheraton
Presiding: Joel M. Dodson, Southern Connecticut State University
1. “Materialism and Aesthetics in Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage, Rachel Eisendrath, Barnard College
2. “Marlowe in Chains: Renaissance Figures of Literary Transmission,” Jenny C. Mann, Cornell University
3. “Marlowe’s Proof of Pleasure,” Christopher Warley, University of Toronto
MLA 2017
PHILADELPHIA PA
308. Marlowe and the Book
Friday, January 6, 2017, 1:45 to 3:00 p.m., 112B, Pennsylvania Convention Center
Presiding: Claire M. L. Bourne, Pennsylvania State University
1. "Marketing Marlowe: Manuscript Transmission and the Making of Authors," Aaron T. Pratt, Trinity University
In 1590, Richard Jones published the Tamburlaine plays without an attribution to Marlowe. No edition of them that followed in the next fifteen years carried one, either. But three other playbooks that emerged in or right around 1594 did: Dido, Queen of Carthage; Edward II; and Massacre at Paris. They all name Marlowe prominently. The most obvious difference between them and Tamburlaine, of course, is that they hit the press after Marlowe died in the spring of 1593. Were the manuscripts that made their way to stationers ones in Marlowe’s possession when he died? Even if not, was the publicity surrounding his death enough to ensure that his name stayed firmly attached to the documents that suddenly became available? In this talk, I will argue that the case of Marlowe’s playbooks raises broader questions about the circumstances that led to printed playbooks being “authored” and that, ultimately, attending to Marlowe helps to upend the narrative we tell about the rise of dramatic authorship in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.
2. "Posthumous Marlowe," Adam G. Hooks, University of Iowa
The best thing that ever happened to Christopher Marlowe was getting stabbed in a tavern in Deptford. This shocking incident made Marlowe famous, as he was praised for his poetic ability and denounced for his depravity. The death of the author seems to have been the necessary precondition for his resurrection in print, as the early modern book trade turned “Christopher Marlowe” into a successful poet and playwright. Marlowe should be the primary exemplar for the ways in which print defines and shapes an authorial reputation. But the manner of Marlowe’s death was also the worst thing that ever happened to Marlowe studies. Biographies continue to imitate the initial puritanical reactions to Marlowe’s demise by creating sensational stories about his life, while studies of the plays often seek to find a Marlovian aesthetic inevitably inflected by those very biographical stories. By focusing only on the documentary records of his life, Marlowe biography has been exhausted. We need to move from theorizing about Marlowe’s life to analyzing and historicizing his afterlife in print—that is, we need to practice a posthumous criticism that can construct a Marlovian bio-bibliography. This paper will reassess the shifting canon and reputation of Marlowe in print by arguing for the importance of what happened after Marlowe but before Marlowe studies.
3. "'marked thus †': The Jew of Malta (1633) and the Typography of Irony," Claire M. L. Bourne, Pennsylvania State University
This paper will focus on a typographic anomaly in Nicholas Vavasour’s 1633 edition of The Jew of Malta — the appearance of a single dagger glyph (†) in the speech where Barabas explains to his daughter Abigail where to find his buried money: “The boord is marked thus † that couers it” (sig. D1r). An unusual amount of care has been taken typographically to account for the complex logistics of Barabas’ speech: lines addressed to the friars who have “converted” Abigail to Christianity are printed in Roman type, while lines delivered as asides to Abigail are printed in Italic type. The † accounts for the gesture that the actor playing Barabas presumably made in performance to accompany his deictic “thus.” But it also recalls the long textual history of using the cross pattée (@) in both scribal and printed liturgical texts as a prompt to make the sign of the cross. I will contextualize the † within the textual history of the @ in order to suggest that Barabas’s “making the sign of the cross” in performance, and its textual correlative, were designed to register ironically. The friars would not have heard Barabas’s verbal asides to Abigail, but they would have seen this gesture, which Barabas purposely uses as a pretence to veil his collusion with Abigail, and as such, makes it signify to spectators and readers the opposite of what it would have meant to the friars. In short, this coincidence of word and action so carefully recorded in the text can be read as a micro-moment of Marlovian ambiguity. I will also consider whether the attention paid to the typographical arrangement of this particular speech reflects a fidelity to scribal playhouse copy or a concerted effort on the part of the quarto’s stationers to render performance dynamics legible to its readers.
4. "Documenting Marlowe: Affordances and Opportunities of Digital First Editions in the Classroom," Meaghan Brown & Elizabeth Williamson, Folger Shakespeare Library
In 2016, the Folger’s Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama began its first phase of documentary editing by creating a complete set of the first editions of Christopher Marlowe. In June, the Digital Anthology invited a select group of scholars to the Folger to explore these texts and their application in the undergraduate classroom in “Beyond Access: Early Modern Digital Texts in the Classroom,” an NEH-funded workshop. In this paper, the editors of the Digital Anthology will consider the role of digital editing in understanding and teaching Marlowe and Marlowe’s distinctive attractions as an author, particularly for creating a digital corpus of early modern plays. In addition to presenting the editorial theory behind the creation of a reliable, flexible, and reusable Marlowe corpus, we would address the pedagogical benefit of introducing undergraduate students to first editions of early modern plays through digital editions, including opportunities for analyzing the history of printing and problematizing performance by examining early modern stage directions. We will detail current opportunities for encountering and editing Marlowe digitally and explore the analytical approaches possible when an author’s entire corpus is available in reliable transcription and consistent encoding.
MLA 2016
AUSTIN TX
389. Edward II on Place and in Time
Friday, January 8, 2016
Presiding: Kirk Melnikoff, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
1. "'Find a Dusty Old Play and Violate It': Edward II in Performance," Andrea Stevens, University of Illinois, Urbana
2. "'Over-peered' or '(Un)Equal at Last'? Conforming Transgression and Rank in Edward II," James R. Siemon, Boston Univerisity
3. "Alarums: Edward II and the Staging of History," Lucy Munro, King's College London
MLA 2015
VANCOUVER BC
276. Marlowe's Queer Futurity
Friday, January 9, 2015
Presiding: Paul Menzer, Mary Baldwin College
1. “Marlowe's Queer Jew,” Judith D. Haber, Tufts University
2. “Edward's Futures,” Jeffrey Masten, Northwestern University
3. “First Thing We Do, Let's Kill All the Children,” Stephen Guy-Bray, University of British Columbia
MLA 2014
CHICAGO IL
364. Christopher Marlowe and Vulnerable Times
Friday, January 10, 2014
1. “Players and Playbooks on the Move in Vulnerable Times,” Roslyn L. Knutson, University of Arkansas, Little Rock
2. “The 1580s and Vulnerability,” Mary Hill Cole, Mary Baldwin College
3. “The Representation of Vulnerability in Marlowe's Edward II,” William Casey Caldwell, Northwestern University
MLA 2013
BOSTON MA
615. Marlowe and His Others
Saturday, January 5, 2013
Presiding: Paul Menzer, Mary Baldwin College
1. “Sensing Massacre’s Others,” Patricia Cahill, Emory University
2. “Stranger to Profit: The Anti-Capitalist Jew of Malta," James J. Marino, Cleveland State University
3. “Dr. Faustus' Leg,” Genevieve Love, Colorado College