Marlowe's Republican Authorship

"Marlowe's Republican Authorship: Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime is the first attempt to situate Marlowe's iconoclastic dissidence within the context of Elizabethan republican thought. Recent studies locate Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Jonson within this context, but not Marlowe. The primary rationale for filling the gap comes from Marlowe's translation of Book 1 of Lucan's Pharsalia, the central poem of the republican imagination. Not simply does Marlowe build the Lucanian battle between Republic and Empire into his plays, but in each he foregrounds Lucan's achievement: out of the imperial narrative of defeated liberty, he invents a poetics of the sublime. Marlowe's commitment to liberty and the sublime has long been understood as the apex of his achievement, but Cheney's book is the first to contextualize both in terms of Lucan's haunting republican poem. The book demonstrates that Marlowe is the literary pioneer of a Lucanian republican authorship in English. Like Lucan, Marlowe makes the freedom-seeking author of the sublime the imagined leader of a new republican art."--BOOK JACKET.