ABSTRACT
As a secret agent, Christopher Marlowe had penetrated the terrorist Catholic League, and it was his undercover operations which supplied him with a justification for slaughtering Protestants: as a purification ritual. Marlowe, faced with the apparently endless cycle of retaliation that characterized the French civil wars, like many of his contemporaries, must have come to doubt whether ‘one more act of violence could cure a world whose malady was aimless violence’. The Elizabethan audience may have reacted to the violence with excitement, as if they were watching real events, witnessing an execution or participating in a lynching, so that they laughed with the murderers, freeing themselves of responsibility and compassion, as the religious rioters themselves seem to have done. The scenes of the massacre may be viewed either as a subtle, perhaps even a humane, analysis of contemporary crowd violence and religious hatred, or as black comedy that paradoxically invites its audience to laugh at helpless Protestant victims.
