Christopher Marlowe

The conference’s special panel on Christopher Marlowe offered a range of approaches to Marlowe’s plays, but all three highlighted themes of subjugation and violence, perhaps hinting at factors that made Marlowe’s plays so shocking and influential when first performed.

Our conference is coming up later this month, and we’re looking forward to the range and diversity of papers, conversations, and performance work that will be descending upon South West London in what we’re all confident will be a rare weekend of British Bank Holiday sun.

We are very happy to present below a guest post from Elizabeth E. Tavares (Pacific University Oregon) on genre and the Elizabethan troupe.

Give ear, I pray you, and mark it attentively, for you shall hear the tenor of a strange and tragical comedy.

Venice. Two faithful friends are pitted against a vengeful moneylender who is out for blood. In a climactic trial scene they proclaim their willingness to die for each other; the moneylender’s revenge rebounds against him when a woman outwits him, and in a further twist of the knife his daughter ends up married to a man he despises.