Christopher Marlowe

This study locates Marlowe's career as dramatist and spy within the stage-play world of Elizabethan society. It also reconstructs the roles that spectators played in the choreography of power. It then shows how religious and political hostility towards the Elizabethan public theatres was based on fears that they offered competing spaces for spectacle. It is argued that Marlowe's major plays confirm such fears since they often debate official positions. This encourages spectators to enter into their own dialogues with authority. Relationships between the drama and the dramatised society are explored further through a consideration of such topics as punishment, gender, sexuality, colonisation, witchcraft and diseases.