“And shall I die, and this unconquered?”: Marlowe’s Inverted Colonialism
Hopkins, Lisa
Early Modern Literary Studies 2.2 (August 1996): Contents
Abstract
Critical attention has often been drawn to Christopher Marlowe’s choices of exotic, far-flung locations for the adventures of his heroes, and also to the ways in which Marlowe’s fictional world intersects with actual Renaissance geographical discoveries and attitudes. Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta and Dido, Queen of Carthage are not only set abroad; they all dramatise (or, in the case of Doctor Faustus, pointedly allude to) that typical Renaissance act, colonisation. In this essay, I want to focus on two linked, and richly suggestive, elements of Marlowe’s depiction of what it is like to travel “in another country”–the first is the plays’ emphasis on female as well as male experiences and values and, the second, their reversal of the processes normally inherent in the possessing colonialist gaze–to make it clear that the alien object at which we think we stare in fact reflects us back to ourselves, and illuminates the stranger within us.
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