Christopher Marlowe: Texts, Contexts, Meanings

The subtitle of this issue – Texts, Contexts, Meanings – aims to declare from its very onset the collection’s intention to follow in the footsteps of such scholarship. “We are used”, as Emily Bartels and Emma Smith have acknowledged, “to an idea of Marlowe as socially, dramatically, poetically, and sexually subversive, but this [...] is a construct in need of fresh assessment” (2013: 2). In this sense, the contributions in the collection rediscuss most of Marlowe’s texts, with the explicit aim of stressing the importance of the author’s own words, which instead have often risked being sidelined in wider ideological debates having little or nothing to do with them. The insightful close readings that these essays offer allow the various contributors to explore and re-assess the manifold contexts that made it possible for Marlowe to be(come) the playwright and poet that he was. In so doing, the six essays which will be discussed in greater detail in the sections below help shed new light on the meanings of Marlowe’s dramatic and poetic works, and try to unravel the mystery of his shadowy genius.