Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- PART I
- PART II
- 5 Anti-drama, anti-church: debating the early modern theatre
- 6 Consummatum est: Calvinist exegesis, mimesis and Doctor Faustus
- 7 Shakespeare on Golgotha: political typology in Richard II
- 8 Mimesis, resistance and iconoclasm: resituating The Revenger's Tragedy
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Consummatum est: Calvinist exegesis, mimesis and Doctor Faustus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- PART I
- PART II
- 5 Anti-drama, anti-church: debating the early modern theatre
- 6 Consummatum est: Calvinist exegesis, mimesis and Doctor Faustus
- 7 Shakespeare on Golgotha: political typology in Richard II
- 8 Mimesis, resistance and iconoclasm: resituating The Revenger's Tragedy
- Afterword
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
My God, my God, look not so fierce on me.
(Doctor Faustus)The relationship between Christopher Marlowe and the discourses of later Elizabethan Protestantism remains one of considerable complexity. One of the main reasons for this difficulty is that many traditional readings of his dramatic achievement have sought to locate his work somewhat outside this cultural mainstream. Originating with Harry Levin's influential 1952 study Christopher Marlowe: The Overreacher, a significant number of critics have drawn attention to the striving, overreaching heroic figure of Marlovian drama, in particular Faustus, Edward II or Tamburlaine. According to these critics, figures like these are heroic because they reach the boundaries of permitted thought, knowledge and action in the fields of, for example, learning, love and conquest. But rather than engaging with the limitations of these boundaries or fashioning a new subject position in relation to them, these critics commonly find that the heroic figure transcends these structures by various means. For example, Levin writes that for Faustus at the end of the play, ‘Damnation is an unlooked-for way of transcending limits and approaching infinity; it is immortality with a vengeance.’ Such an approach to Doctor Faustus (c. 1588–92), and to Marlovian drama more generally, remains implicit in much contemporary scholarship. Yet Levin's Faustus does not demonstrate, I would argue, a mode of subjectivity produced through an engagement with the discourses of late Elizabethan Protestantism but rather an identity associated with post-Enlightenment liberal humanism.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England , pp. 140 - 161Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009