Language and Spectacle in Marlowe’s Dramaturgy

Abstract: Too often viewed primarily as theatrical poetry, Marlovian drama relies on action to an extent that scholars have not appreciated. As in medieval drama, spectacle is paramount. Though sometimes opposed to Catholic stress on visual devotional aids, Elizabethan piety embraced religious imagery. Ongoing cultural tension between word and image marks Dido Queene of Carthage in multiple ways. Tamburlaine’s boasting is justified by dominant visual theatricality involving mass processions, costumes, and physiognomy as concrete evidence of power. Conceived for troupes specializing in horrific violence, The Jew of Malta deploys costuming, doubling, and pyrotechnics to stage Barabas’s fall into a boiling caldron. Teeming with references to magical flight, Doctor Faustus graphically illustrates religious themes by levitating actors with flying apparatus. Edward II spectacularly enacts the king’s murder, while Massacre at Paris uses visual iconography to dramatize religious history as a danse macabre. Skeptical about rhetoric and viewing poetry as picture-painting via ekphrasis and enargeia , Christopher Marlowe encourages audiences to accept theater’s legitimacy and privilege what they see over language.