ABSTRACT

Charles Masin ton, Christopher Marlowe's Tragic Vision: A Study in Damnation (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1972), 7; and William L. Godshalk, The Marlovian World Picture (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), 56. Weil also seems to endorse an emblematic reading when she cites another character in Elizabethan drama-Sappho in Sappho and Phao-who fondles Cupid without the deleterious effects suffered by Dido (184-85, n.39), thereby suggesting that the ironic "mother and child" tableau of a young woman holding the naughty Cupid was familiar to audiences of the period and that the allegorical implications of this stage picture might have been recognized by the majority of the spectators. Despite the hazards involved in postulating a homogeneous audience or predicting the response of any audience to any theatrical production at any time, the allegorical heritage from the medieval morality play can certainly be adduced to give credence to this emblematic reading. Commentators interpreting the deities from an illusionist perspective and thus seeing the free will of Dido as severely limited include Leech ("Marlowe's Humor," 71), Martin ("Fate, Seneca, and Marlowe's Dido," 50), and Bruce Brandt (Christopher Marlowe and the Metaphysical Problem Play, Salzburg Studies in English (Salzburg: Institut fur Anglistik and Amerikanistik, Universitat Salzburg, 1985), 16. For a view of the gods as rhetorical structures ridiculing the Christian belief in a personal deity who intervenes in history, see Dena Goldberg, "Whose God's on First? Special Providence in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe," ELH, 60 (1993): 569-87.