ABSTRACT
In this essay, I would like to open up the neglected topic of Marlowe’s “republican authorship.” The title phrase indicates my interest in sorting out the relationship in the Marlowe canon between two important topics of current scholarship: republicanism as an early modern political ideology; and authorship as an early modern literary practice. My general argument will be that during the late sixteenth century Marlowe is the pioneer author in the writing of English republicanism.1 Typically, Marlowe gets erased from our main critical narrative about the advent of English authorship. In a summarizing essay from The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1500-1600, Wendy Wall locates the advent in Spenser and then in Jonson: “When Spenser and Jonson used the book format to generate the author’s laureate status, … they produced … modern and familiar images of literary authority-classically authorized writers who serve as the origin and arbiter of a literary monument that exceeds its place in everyday cultural
This essay derives from two related papers: the first delivered at the Fourth International Marlowe Conference, Cambridge, England, 4 July 2003; the second at the international Lucan conference, Princeton, NJ, 4 October 2003. I am grateful to the conference organizers: Robert Logan, President of the Marlowe Society of America; and Nigel Smith and Denis Feeney. I am also grateful to Colin Burrow, Robert R. Edwards, and David Riggs for helpful readings, and to Letitia Montgomery for checking quotations and citations. Finally, I wish to thank the editors of this volume, Zachary Lesser and Benedict Robinson, for their scrupulous editorial eyes. The essay forms the foundation of a book under contract with Palgrave Macmillan, in the Early Modern Literature in History series edited by Cedric Brown and Andrew Hadfield, Marlowe’s Republican Authorship: Early Modern Political Representation.
