Inferior Readings: The Transmigration of 'Material' in Tamburlaine the Great

Abstract

[The shaping hand of the modern tradition of editing the Tamburlaine plays suppresses the unruly materialism of the two plays in order to discipline their textual bodies y to impose upon them a pattern of meaning that, curiously for such blasphemous texts, tends towards abstraction and spirituality. The 1597 Marlowe, admittedly as much a figment of the imagination as the author who in 1590 presumably handed a manuscript to Richard Jones, might be skeptical. Marlowe's ghost — or, more precisely his 'corrupt' textual remains buried in the 1597 edition of Tamburlaine the Great — offers a spurious, fictional, and definitely erring authority to the unearthing or unleashing of the plays' materialism.]