Marlowe's Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada

This title was first published in 2002: In the topsy-turvy 1580s and 1590s, as the episodic Anglo-Spanish war became the greatest threat to "English" security since circa 1066, Marlowe rose up in the London theatres like some Phaeton of the entertainment industry, taking war itself as a central subject of his art. This book reads his plays - especially "Tamburlaine", "Edward II", "The Massacre at Paris", and "Doctor Faustus" - as part of a bright new conversation then taking place in London about the nature of state security and martial law, the decorum of playing "the soldier" on stage, the rhetoric of warfever, and the necessity for draconian prescriptions about English manhood.