Marlovian tragedy

by Troni Y. Grande

This re-visioning of the Marlowe canon aims to explain the ambiguous effects that readers have long associated with Marlowe's signature. Marlovian tragedy has been inadequately theorized because Marlowe has too often been set under the giant shadow of Shakespeare. Grande, by contrast, takes Marlowe on his own terms and demonstrates how he achieves his notorious moral ambiguity through the rhetorical technique of dilation or amplification. All of Marlowe's plays end in the conventional tragic way, with death. But each play, as well as Hero and Leander, repeatedly evokes the reader's expectations of a tragic end only to defer them, dilating the moment of pleasure so that the protagonists can dally before the "law" of tragedy.