ROBERT A. LOGAN, Shakespeare's Marlowe.

Abstract

THIS book aims to trace what Logan sees as Shakespeare's ‘infatuation’ with Marlowe, a relationship which its author characterizes in pithily provocative terms: ‘Shakespeare initially conceived of Marlowe as the Shakespeare of his day’ (p. 231). Unusually, Logan sees Marlowe's influence on Shakespeare as beginning with plays, not poetry (p. 55), and so this is a book primarily about the two men as dramatists, offering chapters on such usual suspects as Richard II and Edward II, The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice, Tamburlaine the Great and Henry V, and Dido, Queen of Carthage and Antony and Cleopatra, and also on the rather less obvious triads of The Massacre at Paris, Richard III, and Titus Andronicus, and Doctor Faustus, Macbeth, and The Tempest. Logan does also include a chapter on Venus and Adonis and Hero and Leander, but he sees the two poems as essentially independent of each other, although he performs a very instructive compare-and-contrast on them. Also something of a departure from other recent critical work is the fact that Logan is not really interested in the possible personal relationship between the two men. In fact his avoidance of any discussion on this topic is sometimes a little too studied: though he offers interesting linguistic evidence for what ‘rival’ can mean in the period, he gives none for its being applied by any contemporary to Marlowe and Shakespeare (pp. 4–5), so that the evidence of usage he adduces is left hanging oddly in the air.