The spirit of Marlowe: creating an ethics on the English Renaissance stage

Abstract

The Spirit of Marlowe examines the ethics produced through performance in the plays of Christopher Marlowe. It contends that Marlowe’s contribution to the “Golden Age” of the English Renaissance lies in the ethics created on his stage—it is an ethics indebted to and conversant with those prominent in early modern England, but it is markedly “alien” to it; as I will elaborate throughout this dissertation, it has noticeable affinities with the philosophies of Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Deleuze. A Marlovian Ethics refuses the moralistic strictures of those contemporary ethics that prescribe modes of living; rather, in Spinozist-like fashion, value is attributed a posteriori to the affects that are produced by actions and interactions between bodies. From Dido to the Duke of Guise, Marlowe’s characters seek an ethics of abundance and excess: to become more than, or better than, oneself seems to be the foundational premise of their ethics. The objective of always becoming more than, or better than, one’s current self is indicative of the significance of how the idea of creation, of creativity, undergirds a Marlovian Ethics. As I will demonstrate in my readings of his plays, a Marlovian Ethics is established through various modes of creation: transformation; appropriation, or imitation; destruction, in Deleuzian terms of territorialization/deterritorialization; pleasure, conceptually akin to Deleuzian desire; and critique. Marlowe’s understanding of the theater as an apparatus conducive to the construction of an ethics entails a similar understanding of the creative potential of bodies and of spaces: actions build, they create—and create through destruction as well—performance. There is a momentum that characterizes his plays that demonstrates this sense of constant creation—the “ceaseless movement”—of characters and their surroundings, of plot and emotion. In sum, there are three central objectives of this dissertation: 1) to articulate the ethics immanent within Marlowe’s plays, thereby 2) depicting how Marlowe is philosophically aligned with the “bastards” of philosophy, from Lucretius to Deleuze; and finally 3) to evaluate Marlowe’s plays in order to reveal their value as a “minor literature” alongside the academic industry of Shakespeare.

Ph. D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Marcie Bianco