| dc.description.abstract | During Christopher Marlowe’s lifetime (1564-1593), the proliferation of radical Protestant doctrines gave rise to intense inter-confessional conflict in England. In this period the Elizabethan Church found itself increasingly under attack from Puritans, who challenged the institution’s teachings, polity and practices. Consequently, the single, authorised version of religious ‘truth’ espoused by the English Church was shattered into multiple individual interpretations. This fragmentation of the Protestant confession caused significant instability, confusion and anxiety in society. Leaders of the Church and state considered the impact of Puritanism, and its ongoing threat to religious unity, to be particularly dangerous at a time when King Philip II of Spain was threatening to invade England, and Catholic armies were fighting against Queen Elizabeth I’s Protestant allies in France and the Low Countries. This study reveals the ways in which Marlowe reflects this contemporary crisis within Protestantism in his commercial drama. Marlowe’s audiences witness the potentially terrifying consequences of the influential levelling beliefs of many Puritans on a medieval English monarch, Church and state in Edward II. They are also confronted with the divisions within English Protestantism through the depiction of civil war in France in The Massacre at Paris. Moreover, England’s vulnerabilities are alluded to in Tamburlaine, particularly in the parallels Marlowe appears to draw with the conflict in the Netherlands between disunited Dutch Protestants and Spanish forces, and in the challenges to the protagonist’s military code of honour from the consciences of members of his family. The power of conscience is also key to Abigail’s significance in The Jew of Malta. Marlowe demonstrates that her conscience impels her to reject her father, traverse the categories of carnal and spiritual Judaism that were central to contemporary religious debates, and finally fulfil the predictions of Protestant historiography while simultaneously undermining it. Similarly, religious confusion is a theme in Doctor Faustus, as traditionally opposing theological ideas are shown to blur with each other or are even upturned. Like Zenocrate and Abigail, Faustus uses the popular casuistical method to make sense of his chaotic and ambiguous environment. Thus, in his plays written for the London stage, Marlowe reflects how his contemporaries tried to navigate through the spiritual fog of the non-unitary Reformation, and he explores the profound repercussions of Protestant disunity for England’s stability and security. | en_GB |
