Introduction

The impulse to refigure Christopher Marlowe is motivated by two critical desires. Firstly, the desire to canonize Shakespeare as a greater poet and a greater man than his rival Marlowe. Secondly, the understandable critical longing to make sense of the mysterious events surrounding Marlowe's death. The apparently compulsive recourse of Marlowe criticism to the figure of the author, whether for biographical, psychoanalytical or historical studies, belies a paranoid anxiety about interpretative proliferation. The most recent and certainly most fascinating Marlowe biography to date must surely be Charles Nicholl's The Reckoning. The keynote in an impressive collection of essays on Marlowe, Kenneth Muir's 'Marlowe and Shakespeare' claims that Shakespeare's career was contingent upon Marlowe's death. Lashing together the lives of Marlowe and Shakespeare, Muir typically redirects critical attention from Marlowe's own achievements to those of Shakespeare. Marlowe scholarship can generally be divided into four separate approaches: factual and fictional biography, comparison with Shakespeare, psychoanalysis and historicism.