ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to understand how and why Christopher Marlowe's plays make entertainment of a wealth of historically and geopolitically divergent fantasies about martial law and its discontents. The mentality that promotes martial law is often ventriloquized by Marlovian soldiers playing the Ubermensch, amazing audiences by thirsting for blood and glory. The Marlowe plays engage in deeply ambiguous, sometimes subtle acts of resistance to the explicit endorsements of martial law being furnished in other public texts such as homilies and prayers, royal proclamations, poems, and especially in the contemporary military handbooks that were for sale. Klaus Theweleit's fascinating efforts to explore the imaginations of modern fascists has been instrumental to own study of the similar but not historically identical artistic expressions of autarchic fantasies in the worlds of martial law that Marlowe's soldiers work so hard to make for everyone in their orbit.
