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Renaissance Execution and Marlovian Elocution: The Drama of Death

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Karen Cunningham
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Abstract

Interpretations of violence in Christopher Marlowe's plays have emphasized biographical, literary, and philosophical roots over social and historical conditions. If, however, we glance out Marlowe's window at contemporary rituals, we can enlarge these views of staged violence. His numerous references to official methods of persecution—from boiling to pressing, from branding to beheading—are not only projections of dramatic character but also revisions of corresponding Tudor social practices: public executions and their kin, torture. Although these entertainments provide Marlowe with ready-made elements for dramatizing tragedies of will, he uses those elements to turn theatricality against itself and to expose the fraudulent core of such exhibitions, even as he acknowledges their thematic power. Exaggerating the profound ambiguity of artifice, Marlowe undermines the moralizing that accompanies spectacles of punishment and transforms a theater of pain into a drama of subversion.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 105 , Issue 2 , March 1990 , pp. 209 - 222
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1990

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