The Marlowe Society of America is thrilled to sponsor a panel on “Marlowe and Writing” at the 2025 MLA Convention in New Orleans. Our speakers’ papers will consider questions around aesthetics, rhetorical style, and philology, and their impact on our understanding of social hierarchy, sexuality, theatre history, and subjectivity.
Please join us on Saturday 11 January from 5:15 to 6:30 p.m. at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside (Marlborough B, 2nd Floor) if you are attending MLA! More information about the venue can be found in the MLA program. Titles and abstracts appear below.
Stateliness: On Christopher Marlowe and Aesthetic Elitism
Adhaar Noor Desai (Bard College)
Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays reveal “stateliness” to be a problem shared across early modern rhetorical, political, and aesthetic theory. After explaining how stateliness became an aesthetic shibboleth for Elizabethan elite culture unifying rhetorical style, behavioral protocols, social pedigree, and educational attainment, my paper reads Tamburlaine as dramatizing both its powerful allure and its insubstantial hollowness. Studying Marlowe’s depiction of stateliness alongside contradictions within rhetorical theory’s conception of the “grand style,” the evolving conception of the early modern state between Machiavelli and Hobbes, and sociological accounts of the emergence of elite aesthetics, I argue that Marlowe neither wholly subverts nor endorses the elitism implicit in stateliness. Instead, his work decouples stateliness from existing social hierarchies by treating literary craft as synecdoche for statecraft, or poetic license as continuous with both the responsibility and the self-assured decisiveness required of princes.
Queering Dido: Virgilian Echoes in Marlowe’s Edward II
Bailey Sincox (Princeton University)
This paper focuses on Edward’s pejorative question to Mortimer et al. in Act 5 of Edward II: “Inhumaine creatures, nurst with Tigers milke, / Why gape you for your soueraigne’s ouerthrow?” Observing that this conceit distills Edward II’s de casibus plot and its gender politics, the essay approaches the tiger nurse via “queer philology.” Because this figure also appears in Marlowe and Nashe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage––in lines surprisingly faithful to Virgil’s Aeneid 4––the paper demonstrates that Edward inhabits Dido’s position of feminine complaint. Furthermore, it argues that this Virgilian echo’s figuration of nonnormative reproduction is suggestive for considerations of authorship and “influence.” Turning to a related tiger trope in The True Tragedie of Richard, Duke of York, the paper brackets Marlovian attribution to consider echoes of Marlowe’s Virgil as a repertory phenomenon, the product of (to quote Jeffrey Masten out of context) “a queerer and more plural generation, labor, and dissemination.” Supporting this account are linguistic affinities in a third Pembroke’s play, Titus Andronicus, totaling three of the company’s four or five known plays. This new reading of Edward II suggests that queering Dido played a vital role not only in Marlowe’s writing, but also in the development of the history play and the remediation of classical epic on the English stage.
Marlowe and Writing ‘Methinks’
Heather Hirschfeld (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)
I address in this paper Marlowe’s use of an obsolete term, the impersonal verb ‘methinks’. Drawing on recent philological approaches to the period’s literature, I consider the ways in which the term’s grammatical structure embeds complex approaches to the subject and object of mental experience. I look first at how ‘methinks’ condenses––‘in a little room’, as it were––negotiations of intention, perception, and attitude. I then turn to Marlowe’s use of the term in key moments of Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, and Edward II, where it organizes the plays’ broader concerns with political judgment and religious identity. I conclude by considering the way this form invites us to consider the “impersonality” of Marlowe’s characters as they cast themselves as subjects and objects of thinking.
