ABSTRACT
This chapter draws together three diverse bodies of work in the Marlowe canon. The two plays Dido Queen of Carthage and The Massacre at Paris bookend Marlowe’s career, and have been designated ‘minor’ for very different reasons. Dido is evidently the work of a fledgling playwright and although it is of some interest (chiefly for the way in which it explores issues of gender and sexuality), it remains perhaps the least significant text. The Massacre at Paris, probably one of the last things Marlowe wrote, receives less critical attention than one might expect. The neglect is chiefly due to its textual status: it survives as a fragment of the original, and it is generally believed to be a memorial reconstruction. Although it is clearly Marlowe’s play, it is a ragged and smudged descendant, or remnant, of the ‘original’, and is consequently viewed with a large degree of circumspection. For a while, the play as a material text held a special kind of significance (despite its deeply compromised nature) because it was thought that a single manuscript leaf of the play held in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., might have been penned by Marlowe’s own hand. H.J. Oliver, writing in his introduction to the Revels edition, accepts it as ‘holograph’ (Oliver, 1968, p. lviii), and a number of other editors and scholars have followed suit, although there is no conclusive proof that the fragment was part of Marlowe’s own manuscripts. Finally, the poetry consists chiefly of some translations of two classical authors, Ovid and Lucan, the long poem Hero and Leander, and a few miscellaneous pieces including the famous short lyric ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’. Although worthy of serious attention, Marlowe’s non-dramatic work is inevitably seen as less important than his works for the stage.
