Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession : : Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood / / Patrick Cheney.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter University of Toronto Press eBook-Package Archive 1933-1999
• VerfasserIn: Cheney, Patrick,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2016]; ©1997
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Series: Heritage
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (368 p.)

Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession presents the first comprehensive reading of the Marlowe canon in over a generation. The occasion for Patrick Cheney's rereading is a primary discovery: Marlowe organized his canon around an "Ovidian" career model, or cursus, which turns from amatory poetry to tragedy to epic. Ovid had advertised this cursus only in his inaugural poem, the Amores, where its purpose was to counter the Virgilian cursus of pastoral, georgic, and epic. Marlowe was the first writer to translate the Amores, and thus the first to make the Ovidian cursus literally his own.Marlowe inscribes this cursus not simply to participate in the Renaissance recovery of classical authors, but in particular to contest the national authority of the 'Virgil of England,' Edmund Spenser. Using an Ovidian cursus to contest Spenser's Virgilian cursus, Marlowe enters the generational project of writing English nationhood. Unlike Spenser, however, Marlowe writes a 'counter-nationhood' - a nonpatriotic form of nationhood that subverts royal power with what Ovid calls libertas.By discovering the original project organizing an otherwise fragmentary canon, Cheney aims to change the most basic lens through which critics have viewed Marlowe: 'Shakespearean drama'. This lens cannot account for two of the most striking features of Marlowe's canon: his scholarly use of translation and his writing of epic. Cheney proposes that a theatrical, Shakespearean model has prevented critics from discovering the original context within which Marlowe produced his art: a multimedia, multi-genre Spenserian model of Ovidian counter-nationhood.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Texts and Abbreviations -- Introduction: Marlowe's Ovidian Career, Spenser, and the Writing of Counter-Nationhood -- Part I: Sea-Bank Myrtle Sprays: Amatory Poetry -- 1. Ovid's Counter-Virgilian Cursus in the Amores -- 2. Marlowe's New Renaissance Ovid: 'Area maior' in Ovid's Elegies -- 3. Career Rivalry, Counter-Nationhood, and Philomela in 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Love' -- Part II: Sceptres and High Buskins: Tragedy -- 4. Dido, Queen of Carthage and the Coining of '"Eliza"' -- 5. 'Thondring words of threate': Spenser in Tamburlaine, Parts i and 2 -- 6. Machiavelli and the Play of Policy in The Jew of Malta -- 7. 'Italian masques by night': Machiavellian Policy and Ovidian Play in Edward II -- 8. 'Actors in this massacre': The Massacre at Paris and the Orphic Guise of Metatheatre -- 9. Un-script(ur)ing Christian Tragedy: Ovidian Love, Magic, and Glory in Doctor Faustus -- Part III: Trumpets and Drums: Epic -- 10. Counter-Epic of Empire: Lucan's First Book -- 11. Marlowe, Chapman, and the Rewriting of Spenser's England in Hero and Leander -- Afterword: Counterfeiting the Profession -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index