Examines Christopher Marlowe and his work in the overlapping contexts of the professional theatre and the book trade.

This collection reveals the valuable work that women achieved in publishing, printing, writing and reading early modern English books, from those who worked in the book trade to those who composed, selected, collected and annotated books. Women gathered rags for paper production, invested in books and oversaw the presses that printed them. Their writing and reading had an impact on their contemporaries and the developing literary canon. A focus on women's work enables these essays to recognize the various forms of labour -- textual and social as well as material and commercial -- that women of different social classes engaged in. Those considered include the very poor, the middling sort who were active in the book trade, and the elite women authors and readers who participated in literary communities. Taken together, these essays convey the impressive work that women accomplished and their frequent collaborations with others in the making, marking, and marketing of early modern English books.

Arden Early Modern Drama Guides offer students and academics practical and accessible introductions to the critical and performance contexts of key Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. Essays from leading international scholars give invaluable insight into the text by presenting a range of critical perspectives, making the books ideal companions for study and research. Key features include: Essays on the plays' critical and performance history A keynote essay on current research and thinking about the play A selection of new essays by leading scholars A survey of resources to direct students' further reading about the play in print and online The blockbuster Tamburlaine plays (1587) instantly established Marlowe's reputation for experimenting with subversive, outrageous and immoral material. The plays follow the meteoric rise of a Scythian shepherd-turned-warlord, whose conquests of eastern emperors soon sees him established as the most powerful man in the world. The visual tableaux featured in the plays are iconic. He uses his enemy Bajazeth as a footstool, and has other emperors pull his chariot like horses. He burns the Qur'an on stage. The plays were memorable, too, for how they sounded: they showcased the power and variability of iambic pentameter, the meter that Shakespeare would go on to perfect. No history of Shakespeare's theatre is complete without understanding the influence and significance of Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays. Tamburlaine: A Critical Reader offers the definitive introduction to these plays and new perspectives on these seminal works. It provides an overview of their reception on stage and by critics, and offers fresh insights into the teaching of these plays in the classroom.

This study punctures the stereotyped portrayals of Marlowe, first created by his rival Robert Greene, and, yet, which still colour our view. In doing so, Ide reveals the social and cultural discourses out of which such myths emerged.We know next to nothing about the life of the playwright Christopher Marlowe (b.1564 - d. 1593). Few documents survive other than his birth record in the parish register, a handful of legal cases in court records, Privy Council mandates and reports to the Council, the coroner's examination of his death, and a few hearsay accounts of his atheism. With such a limited collection of biographical documents available, it is impossible to retrieve from history a complete sense of Marlowe. However, this does not mean that biography cannot play a significant role in Marlowe studies. By observing the details of the specific places and communities to which Marlowe belonged, this book highlights the collective experiences and concerns of the social groups and communities with which we know he was personally and financially involved. Specifically, Localizing Christopher Marlowe reveals the political and cultural dynamics in the community of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, into which Marlowe was deeply integrated and through which he became affiliated with the circle of Sir Francis Walsingham, mapping these influences in both his life and works.e was personally and financially involved. Specifically, Localizing Christopher Marlowe reveals the political and cultural dynamics in the community of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, into which Marlowe was deeply integrated and through which he became affiliated with the circle of Sir Francis Walsingham, mapping these influences in both his life and works.e was personally and financially involved. Specifically, Localizing Christopher Marlowe reveals the political and cultural dynamics in the community of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, into which Marlowe was deeply integrated and through which he became affiliated with the circle of Sir Francis Walsingham, mapping these influences in both his life and works.e was personally and financially involved. Specifically, Localizing Christopher Marlowe reveals the political and cultural dynamics in the community of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, into which Marlowe was deeply integrated and through which he became affiliated with the circle of Sir Francis Walsingham, mapping these influences in both his life and works.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Rethinking Theatrical Documents brings together fifteen major scholars to analyse and theorise the documents, lost and found, that produced a play in Shakespeare's England. Showing how the playhouse frantically generated paratexts, it explores a rich variety of entangled documents, some known and some unknown: from before the play (drafts, casting lists, actors' parts); during the play (prologues, epilogues, title-boards); and after the play (playbooks, commonplace snippets, ballads) – though 'before', 'during' and 'after' intertwine in fascinating ways. By using collective intervention to rethink both theatre history and book history, it provides new ways of understanding plays critically, interpretatively, editorially, practically and textually.

The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy offers critical and contemporary resources for studying Shakespeare's comic enterprises. It engages with perennial, yet still urgent questions raised by the comedies and looks at them from a range of new perspectives that represent the most recent methodological approaches to Shakespeare, genre, and early modern drama. Several chapters take up firmly established topics of inquiry such Shakespeare's source materials, gender and sexuality, hetero- and homoerotic desire, race, and religion, and they reformulate these topics in the materialist, formalist, phenomenological, or revisionist terms of current scholarship and critical debate. Others explore subjects that have only relatively recently become pressing concerns for sustained scholarly interrogation, such as ecology, cross-species interaction, and humoral theory. Some contributions, informed by increasingly sophisticated approaches to the material conditions and embodied experience of theatrical practice, speak to a resurgence of interest in performance, from Shakespeare's period through the first decades of the twenty-first century. Others still investigate distinct sets of plays from unexpected and often polemical angles, noting connections between the comedies under inventive, unpredicted banners such as the theology of adultery, early modern pedagogy, global exploration, or monarchical rule. The Handbook situates these approaches against the long history of criticism and provides a valuable overview of the most up-to-date work in the field.

Having a conscience distinguishes humans from the most advanced A.I. systems. Acting in good conscience, consulting one’s conscience, and being conscience-wracked are all aspects of human intelligence that involve reckoning (deriving general laws from particular inputs and vice versa), and judgement (contemplating the relationship of the reckoning system to the world). While A.I. developers have mastered reckoning, they are still working towards the creation of judgement. This book sheds light on the reckoning and judgement of conscience by demonstrating how these concepts are explored in Everyman, Doctor Faustus, The Merchant of Venice, and Hamlet. Academic, student, or general-interest readers discover the complexity and multiplicity of the early modern concept of conscience, which is informed by the scholastic intellectual tradition, juridical procedures of the court of Chancery, the practical advice of Protestant casuistry, and Reformation theology. The aims are to examine the rubrics for thinking through, regulating, and judging actions that define the various consciences of Shakespeare’s day, to use these rubrics to interpret questions of truth and action in early modern plays, and to offer insights into what it is about conscience that developers want to grasp to eliminate the difference between human and non-human intelligences, and achieve true A.I.

Offers a new, interdisciplinary account of early modern drama through the lens of playing and playgoing.

Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England is an annual volume committed to the publication of essays and reviews related to drama and theatre history to 1642. Volume 30, an anniversary issue, contains eight essays, three review essays, and 12 briefer reviews of important books in the field.

The Pursuit of Style in Early Modern Drama examines how early modern plays celebrated the power of different styles of talk to create dynamic forms of public address. Across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, London expanded into an uncomfortably public city where everyone was a stranger to everyone else. The relentless anonymity of urban life spurred dreams of its opposite: of being a somebody rather than a nobody, of being the object of public attention rather than its subject. Drama gave life to this fantasy. Presented by strangers and to strangers, early modern plays codified different styles of talk as different forms of public sociability. Then, as now, to speak of style was to speak of a fantasy of public address. Offering fresh insight for scholars of literature and drama, Matthew Hunter reveals how this fantasy – which still holds us in its thrall – played out on the early modern stage.