ABSTRACT
Christopher Marlowe’s rebel status had been constructed by Victorian critics to accord with a sentimental idea of the Elizabethan playhouse as a site of riot and delinquence, in resistance to the Puritan authorities. The theatre of monstrous idols to which William Rankins and Marlowe devote their concern remains both a problem and a preoccupation for their successors. Using the analogy between macro- and microcosm, Rankins equates the identity of the players with the physical theatre, and perceives them to replicate in their very physical being the unsavory stink and petty criminality of the theatrical milieu. In Rankins’s view, the theatre remains the scene of scandalous play, not of drama. While Rankins denies any power of real transformation to the imaginative metamorphoses enacted by the players, he reveals a paradoxical anxiety about the players’ tendency to forget them and become what they act, in doing so possibly communicating their self-delusion to their audiences.
