An author and a bookshop: publishing Marlowe’s remains at the Black Bear
2012; University of Iowa; Volume: 91; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0031-7977
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoLET ME SEE, hath anybody in Yarmouth heard Leander and Hero, whom divine Musaeus sung, and diviner Muse than him, Kit Marlow? Two faithful lovers they were, as every apprentice in Paul's Churchyard will tell you for your love, and sell you for your money thus Thomas Nashe, in 1599, at the moment when Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander became runaway success, and Marlowe's name something brand name, with his work displayed and discussed in Paul's Churchyard, the center the English book trade. The Cathedral precinct, and the Churchyard especially, was London's most prominent news exchange, public arena whose bookshops have even been compared to the coffee shops century later, with the implication that the Habermasian public sphere may have originated in these establishments commerce, social encounter, and intellectual exchange. (1) While Shakespeare is sometimes assumed to have been regular at his townsman Richard Field's bookshop, (2) Marlowe is known to have conversd with stationers in Paules churchyard and conversed, it seems, about issues far from insignificant: in his letter to Puckering, Thomas Kyd brings up Marlowe's conversation partners because they are potential witnesses to Marlowe's atheism as well as to the fact that Kyd himself was not of that vile opinion (3) Unfortunately for us, although luckily for the stationers involved, Kyd does not seem to have thought it important to remember their names, but his brief reference is suggestive the environment where people engaged in conversation on topics that were by no means mundane, and where they established private and public, personal as well as intellectual relationships. In his death, Marlowe came to be associated with the Churchyard even more closely than in his life. In 1600, referring to the author's sudden and quite phenomenal success there, and no doubt hoping for its persistence, Thomas Thorpe wrote that he saw Marlowe's ghoast or Genius ... walke the Churchyard in (at the least) three or four sheets (4) and then added that the book he was dedicating to Edward Blount, Marlowe's translation Lucan, was itself a spirit now raised in the circle [Blount's] patronage--a circle that was drawn in the Churchyard, where Blount, one the most important literary publishers the early seventeenth century, also lived. Thorpe's often-quoted remark registers the close connection between the emergence the author and the architectural, symbolic, and social import the place from which it emerges. Through reconstructing how this location, and the networks personal and professional connections converging on this location, impacted Marlowe's oeuvre and afterlife, this essay aims to reimagine the distribution agencies behind the making Marlowe's works. Marlowe's career has been influentially discussed by Patrick Cheney as following classical, Ovidian cursus, suggesting that the shape the poetic oeuvre itself ought to be seen as the conscious poetic creation its author. (5) But the history the reproduction these texts the history that transmitted them to us so we can impose such poetic constructions upon them--alerts us to other forces, motives and agents behind Marlowe's oeuvre than Marlowe's self-creating desire for poetic immortality. (6) The recent success book history as scholarly paradigm in early modern literary studies has in part been function the theoretical decentering the author. By translating the theoretical discourse about authorship into socioeconomic terms, book history helped to put pressure on the single authority implied by the attribution the text to an author, and disperse it among the plurality agents involved in the collaborative production texts patrons, printers and publishers, censors and readers, as well as writers. (7) Recent literary and historical research has shown some interesting variations in how it understands the formative impact early modern publishers' choices and decisions on intellectual, literary, and political life. …
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