Schedule / Horaire
Friday 25 April 2014, 9h-10h30.
Room: L106.
Leader / Organisatrice
Lisa Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University (UK)
Participants
- Chloe Preedy, University of Exeter (UK)
Fortune’s Breath: Rewriting the Classical Storm in Marlowe and Shakespeare - Paul Frazer, Northumbria University (UK)
Marlowe and Shakespeare Restaged: Influence, Appropriation, and ‘Mobility’ in Thomas Dekker’s Drama - Roy Eriksen, University of Agder (Norway)
Working with Marlowe: Shakespeare’s Early Engagement with Marlowe’s Poetics
Abstracts / Résumés
1. Chloe Preedy, University of Exeter (UK)
Fortune’s Breath: Rewriting the Classical Storm in Marlowe and Shakespeare
The shared prominence of the storm in Dido, Antony and Cleopatra and The Tempest is often realted to the Aeneid, and interpreted through a framework of empire-building and colonial discourse. However, the prophetic and literary antecedents of the Virgilian tempest hint at an alternative interpretation, raising questions about the nature of theatrical authorship, the authority of professional dramatists, and literary fame. I also consider the plays’ related representation of flight and aerial command, analysing the extent to which mastery of the theatrical air becomes linked to a more enduring and powerful vision of authorship.
2. Paul Frazer, Northumbria University (UK)
Marlowe and Shakespeare Restaged: Influence, Appropriation, and ‘Mobility’ in Thomas Dekker’s Drama
Scholarly attention to appropriations of both Marlowe and Shakespeare has flourished in recent years, yet their immediate influence over early modern theatrical culture has been relatively neglected. The early extant (sole-authored) plays of Dekker show intimate intertextual borrowings from both Marlowe and Shakespeare; I explore these, probing moments of arrogation, homage and dramatic hybridity and considering in particular the resonant connection between literary appropriation and ‘movement’. When Dekker apes Marlowe and Shakespeare, he often does so in ways that reflect the mobile propensities of actor, acting troupe, and play-text, at a time of heightened English interest in the passage of bodies and texts.
3. Roy Eriksen, University of Agder (Norway)
Working with Marlowe: Shakespeare’s Early Engagement with Marlowe’s Poetics
Among Elizabethan and Jacobean dramtic poets, Shakespeare alone fully grasped the implications and potential of Marlowe’s poetic practice. Marlowe had used the rhetorical term ‘one Poem’s period’ to refer to a finished poetic composition, and Shakespeare followed him in the sustained use of verbally patterned speeches. But although Shakespeare was the dramatist who most consistently adopted the ‘mighty line’, or as Touchstone put it, ‘his saw of might’, he also distanced himself from and felt free to parody his contemporary’s neo-platonising poetics and some of its magniloquent results, not least in Tamburlaine the Great.