Marlowe and the Popular Tradition

This book rejects the traditional stereotypes o f Marlowe (spy, troublemaker, homosexual, atheist, university wit) and considers him as a popular dramatist who inherited an audience with certain expectations and shared experiences. Lunney explores his engagement with the traditions of the popular stage in the 1580s and early 1590s and offers a new approach to his major plays in terms of staging and audience response, as well as providing a new account of English drama in these important but largely neglected years. Lunney also discusses Marlowes plays in relation to some thirty other playtexts, both earlier and contemporary, including Shakespeares early plays. Each chapter treats an aspect cultural, theatrical, spatial of how the popular drama told stories and constructed theatrical experience. Marlowe emerges not so much as a precursor of Shakespeare but as an innovator and catalyst of change, the playwright who exploited and transformed the traditional materials of popular drama. Undergraduate students will find this a stimulating, approachable introduction to Marlowes stagecraft, and postgraduates will find it both an authoritative reference work on the playwright and his contemporaries and an inspiration for new studies in the area.