The Plays [antikvár]

GENERAL INTRODUCTION This chronology Usts all the known facts about Marlowe's life, and some widely-accepted and informed conjecture about his activities. Fact and fiction - both his ovm creations and those of others - are peculiarly intertwined in responses to Marlowe's work. Since his violent death in a tavern brawl in Deptford at the age of twenty-nine, the playwright has become the stuff of Hterary myth, fuelled by speculation in fiction and scholarship about this mysterious man of the EHzabethan theatre. Variously identified as a spy, a double agent, a firee-thinker, an atheist, a homosexual or all of these, Marlowe's bad-boy reputation threatens to distort oiu: reading of the plays. Even where his role is incidental, as in the recent Oscar-wiiming film Shakespeare in Love which presents him as saturnine and brilliantly, morosely creative, he is portrayed as an enigma. We have no evidence other than self-interested hearsay to confirm his dangerous reputation - no evidence, for example, that any of his plays was ever censored - but it is striking that critics have been so unwilling to let go of this powerfiil myth. The response of the more morally orthodox strain of literary criticism was to castigate the author-sirmer for what WilHam Hazlitt described as 'a lust for power in his vmtings, a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness, a glow of the imagination, unhallowed by any thing but its own energies'. Recent criticism has, wdthout significantly changing the terms of the commentary, radically revalued these qualities: 'millennial Marlowe', according to the editor of a recent collection of critical essays on the plays and poetry, 'will be canonised . . . not for pious orthodoxy but for the perversion, violence, cruelty and excess that formerly disqualified him from sainthood' (Richard Wilson, in Christopher Marlowe, Longman 1999).