Deathly Experiments : A Study of Icons and Emblems of Mortality in Christopher Marlowe's Plays

So dazzling was Marlow's intellect that we sometimes forget he was a hugely popular playwright, drawing rich and poor by the thousands to see his plays and managing to earn a living from the stage. One reason for this popularity was Marlowe's preoccupation with death. Images of the macabre abounded in the London of his time, and Marlowe's plays tapped into this common visual reservoir. The dismembering devils of ""Doctor Faustus"", the ""Mower of Edward II"", the suicides in ""Dido"", ""Queen of Carthage"", the gruesome brutalities of ""The Massacre at Paris"" - all these reflect the popular Elizabethan conviction that death is at the very center of life, an idea also clearly present in the many printed images still with us from that time. But Marlowe's drama moves beyond the familiar and the understood to probe new and subversive terrain. In the first sustained examination of Marlowe's use of emblems and icons, Clayton MacKenzie carefully analyzes the carnival of savagery in the playwright's work to show how Marlowe manipulates his audience's existing visual knowledge to draw them into a pointed debate about the meaning of government and power - and life itself.