The Traumas of Troy and the Elizabethan Schoolboy in Marlowe’s Dido, Queene of Carthage

Abstract Dido, Queene of Carthage is calibrated to disrupt the smooth passage of the translation of empire and studies embraced by humanist pedagogy. Taking full advantage of the theatrical affordances offered by the boy actors of the Children of her Majesty’s Chapel, the play aims to whisk its target audience, the sophisticated wits of the Inns of Court, back to their early encounters with the matter of Troy in their studies of Vergil and Ovid in grammar school. This essay focuses on the play’s first two acts to show how Marlowe deploys the materials of classical letters and rhetoric in ways that test and contest their ideological functions.