Introduction

Christopher Marlowe’s aggression savagely defies the world of art. Marlowe’s reverence for the satanic beauty that threatens to destroy ‘learning’s golden gifts’ places literary theorists who make a religion of the text in a cruelly ironic light. To diagnose the deaths of Marlowe’s characters as suicide by their own signatures or ‘hands’, might be thought to make as much of a fetish of the scene of writing as those post-modernists who in the 1980s asserted that even fascism was an effect of words. Yet this was the implication of Jonathan Crewe’s ‘Theatre of the idols: Marlowe, William Rankins, and theatrical images’, which considered Tamburlaine the Great as itself constitutive of the anti-theatricality surrounding the writer’s demonisation and destruction. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.