Conclusion

Summary

Localizing Christopher Marlowe has been intended as a humble resistance against the strong cultural impetus to mystify or demonize Marlowe based on the anti-atheist narrative that was first set out by Robert Greene and subsequently consolidated by a succession of unreliable informers and godly moralists. This defensive bulwark is rooted in the historical and literary scholarship to which I have been profoundly indebted in writing this book. It can also be traced back to some of the voices of Marlowe's associates that have appeared in print, and so narrowly escaped from being buried in obscurity.

As several scholars reasonably assume, Dido, Queen of Carthage (1594), Edward II (1594), and the Massacre at Paris (c.1594–96), all displaying Marlowe's name on their title pages, were published as a result of his shocking death, and stirred up the contemporary trend to make ‘Marlowe something of a phenomenon within the book trade’. These printed plays, which may have achieved a wide readership, obviously added fuel to the spreading flames of the hostile discourses demonizing Marlowe as an atheist playwright. The upsurge of the anti-Marlowe campaign seems to have come at the turn of the sixteenth century. Thomas Beard describes Marlowe's death as God's punishment for his ‘atheisme and impiety’ in The Theatre of Gods Judgements (1597). Francis Meres, a divinity scholar from Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, followed this line, and in Palladis Tamia, Wits Treasury (1598) he reiterates what Beard had already approved, even embellishing it with crude gossip, saying that ‘Marlow was stabd to death by a bawdy Seruingman, a riuall of his in his lewde loue’. William Vaughan, in The Golden-Groue, Moralized in Three Bookes (1600), similarly sees ‘the effects of Gods iustice’ in Marlowe's tragic death. The book market was thus invigorated by the incident and so tended to reinforce the providential framework that would come to define the event in due course. Who would have dared to struggle against this impetus and fight a losing battle except for Marlowe's few friends?

It was, in fact, over the course of this anti-Marlowe campaign that Edward Blount published Hero and Leander in 1598 as an ‘executor to the unhappily deceased author of this poem’.