‘Here’s Nothing Writ’: Scribe, Script, and Circumscription in Marlowe’s Plays*

Abstract

In America in the 1980s New Historicism was a critical movement to restore texts to historical contexts, but as products of prior discourses, rather than works of individual authors. Patterns of intertextual reference, texts ‘deconstructing’ or undoing other texts, and authors asserting competing authority recur throughout Christopher Marlowe’s plays. This drama of the word is played out in Tamburlaine with special reference to the Koran and the conqueror’s map of the world; in Doctor Faustus , with reference to the Eucharistic testament and the sorcerer’s ‘deed of gift’ to Lucifer. Tamburlaine’s sword is his pen – but Marlowe’s pen is Tamburlaine’s sword. There is a copy of the Koran in the library of Marlowe’s College at Cambridge, Corpus Christi, but it was acquired after the playwright’s death, during the time of the Commonwealth. The Koran was considered an appropriate and valuable library resource in the period and copies were accessible in England during Marlowe’s life.

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