ABSTRACT
This is not a Marlowe ‘allusion-book’, though it begins with allusions and some non-literary documents. These, however well-known from frequent reproduction, are necessary to establish the sources of the Marlowe stereotype upon which so much of the critical comment depends, down to the beginning of our own century, and beyond that. The general pattern of the Marlowe tradition is clear: a mixed bag of contemporary and early seventeenth-century references to a powerful personality, a short and brilliant literary career, and a melodramatic death; then, after the Restoration, a virtual eclipse both of facts and opinions about him; the gradual recovery of the texts of his work and the nature of his milieu by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century bibliographers and antiquaries; the enthusiasm of some Romantic critics and their followers; the extensive editorial and critical tributes of many Victorian men of letters and their successors; finally, by a collaboration of twentieth-century scholarship and the development of fresh critical assumptions, the emergence in the learned journals of what can only be called the Marlowe industry.
