Thesis (M.A.)--Bowling Green State University, 2006. / Document formatted into pages; contains iii, 79 p. Includes bibliographical references.

abstract: This thesis examines Christopher Marlowe's poem Hero and Leander and George Chapman's Continuation thereof through a theoretical lens that includes theories of intimacy, sexuality and touch taken from Lee Edelman, Daniel Gil, James Bromley, Katherine Rowe and others. Hands are seen as the privileged organ of touch as well as synecdoche for human agency. Because it is all too often an unexamined sense, the theory of touch is dealt with in detail. The analysis of hands and touch leads to a discussion of how Marlowe's writing creates a picture of sexual intimacy that goes against traditional institutions and resists the traditional role of the couple in society. Marlowe's poem favors an equal, companionate intimacy that does not engage in traditional structures, while Chapman's Continuation to Marlowe's work serves to reaffirm the transgressive nature of Marlowe's poem by reasserting traditional social institutions surrounding the couple. Viewing the two pieces of literature together further supports the conclusion that Marlowe's work is transgressive because of how conservative Chapman's reaction to Hero and Leander is. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. English 2012

No description available.

No description available.

Christopher Marlowe’s narrator-lover in Ovid’s Elegies increasingly embodies an epitome of conventional ideology. As I study Ovid’s Elegies and Marlowe’s poetics of subjectivity, I specifically address how the narrator’s inability to find the truth about himself, about love, and about the value of poetry reveals his gross misconceptions of his own contrived and illusory subjectivity, particularly the way in which his ill-conceived notions misrepresent love and poetry. That is, he cannot discover from his experience a personal identity and subjectivity. Without the ability to define himself, to embody feelings more substantive than his desire for sexual gratification and masculine conquest, the narrator cannot achieve self-knowledge, let alone self-mastery. In short, he lacks virtus. While Marlowe’s narrator repeatedly enters a liminal space wherein he recognizes a necessary advancement toward virtus within the symbolic order, he invariably collapses back upon his imaginary order, and he volitionally maintains a state of psychic stasis.

Habilitationsschrift--Freiburg i.B. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

This study investigated sex differences and the relationship between need for approval and liberal-conservative attitudes regarding sex. The test measures used were the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (M-C SDS) and a questionnaire measuring liberal-conservative sexual attitudes taken from a research survey published in Psychology Today.

This dissertation considers the influence that sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century mathematical thinking exerted on popular drama in the final sixteen years of Elizabeth I’s reign. It concentrates upon six plays by five dramatists, and attempts to analyse how the terms, concepts, and implications of contemporary mathematics impacted upon their vocabularies, forms, and aesthetic and dramaturgical effects and affects. Chapter 1 is an introductory chapter, which sets out the scope of the whole project. It locates the dissertation in its critical and scholarly context, and provides a history of the technical and conceptual overlap between the mathematical and literary arts, before traversing the body of intellectual-historical information necessary to situate contextually the ensuing five chapters. This includes a survey of mathematical practice and pedagogy in Elizabethan England. Chapter 2, ‘Algebra and the Art of War’, considers the role of algebra in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine plays. It explores the function of algebraic concepts in early modern military theory, and argues that Marlowe utilised the overlap he found between the two disciplines to create a unique theatrical spectacle. Marlowe’s ‘algebraic stage’, I suggest, enabled its audiences to perceive the enormous scope and aesthetic beauty of warfare within the practical and spatial limitations of the Elizabethan playhouse. Chapter 3, ‘Magic, and the Mathematic Rules’, explores the distinction between magic and mathematics presented in Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. It considers early modern debates surrounding what magic is, and how it was often confused and/or conflated with mathematical skill. It argues that Greene utilised the set of difficult, ambiguous distinctions that arose from such debates for their dramatic potential, because they lay also at the heart of similar anxieties surrounding theatrical spectacles. Chapter 4, ‘Circular Geometries’, considers the circular poetics effected in Dekker’s Old Fortunatus. It contends that Dekker found an epistemological role for drama by having Old Fortunatus acknowledge a set of geometrical affiliations which it proceeds to inscribe itself into. The circular entities which permeate its form and content are as disparate as geometric points, the Ptolemaic cosmos, and the architecture of the Elizabethan playhouses, and yet, Old Fortunatus unifies these entities to praise God and the monarchy. Chapter 5, ‘Infinities and Infinitesimals’, considers how the infinitely large and infinitely small permeate the language and structure of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It argues that the play is embroiled with the mathematical implications of Copernican cosmography and its Brunian atomistic extension, and offers a linkage between the social circles of Shakespeare and Thomas Harriot. Hamlet, it suggests, courts such ideas at the cutting-edge of contemporary science in order to complicate the ontological context within which Hamlet’s revenge act must take place. Chapter 6, ‘Quantifying Death, Calculating Revenge’, proposes that the quantification of death, and the concomitant calculation of an appropriate revenge, are made an explicit component of Chettle’s Tragedy of Hoffman. It suggests that Chettle enters two distinctly mathematical models of revenge into productive counterpoint in the play in order to interrogate the ethics of revenge, and to dramatise attempts at quantifying the parameters of equality and excess, parity and profit.

In The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice, both Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare question anti-Semitism, Christian presumption, and socially constructed gender roles. Often compared, the two plays have obvious similarities: both plots center on rich, Jewish protagonists---Barabas in The Jew of Malta and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice---who are vilified and then destroyed by a merciless Gentile society. On the surface, the protagonists' daughters---Abigail in The Jew of Malta and Jessica in The Merchant of Venice---also share many similarities. Both are the young, beautiful daughters of rich and much maligned Jews; both love Gentile men; both flee from their religion and convert to Christianity; most importantly, both are presented as "different" from their fathers---somehow less "Jewish." However, despite their similarities, they represent polarities of early modern concepts of femininity. Employing Marilyn French's concept of gender principles, as presented in Shakespeare's Division of Experience, I argue that Abigail and Jessica embody the inlaw and outlaw feminine principles respectively, and that their importance in the two plays in which they appear has been critically overlooked. As James Shapiro points out in his study of the Jewish presence in England, a sixteenth century audience would hardly be familiar with practicing Jews, although they might have encountered representations ofJews in the drama of the period. Abigail and Jessica, the only Jewish characters in the two plays besides Barabas and Shylock, provide insight into the interaction between anti-Semitism and gender politics. Moreover, these two daughters sway the audience's sympathies toward or away from their fathers inversely. If we pity Abigail, whose actions are reactions to her father's machinations, then we are gratified that Barabas gets what he deserves. If we are angry with Jessica for her betrayal and theft, then we sympathize with Shylock and see him constructed into a villain by both his society and his own daughter. In this thesis, I will explore the ways in which Marlowe and Shakespeare employ Abigail and Jessica to interrogate the traditional sixteenth century roles of women, daughters, wives, and citizens.

This thesis analyses the Machiavellian concepts of cunning, cruelty and opportunism as well as self-determination and individualism with regard to the major characters in Christopher Marlowe&#039 / s plays, The Jew of Malta, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine, Parts 1 and 2. The thesis then examines these characters&#039 / scales of achievement as individuals who challenge the established order. Finally, the thesis clarifies whether these characters are theatrical representatives of the Renaissance individual or not. Therefore, this paper primarily revolves around the analysis of the five concepts and how they give shape to the characters.