Clare, Janet. “Marlowe’s ‘theatre of cruelty.’” Constructing Christopher Marlowe. Eds. J.A. Downie and J.T. Parnell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 74-87.

The textual subversions, as I will discuss later, are dramaturgically, not ideologically, inspired. 75

Yet any reading of the plays in the light of biography would seem to be unreliably premised. Marlowe’s construction of the subject, with little deference to either humanist or determinist notions of psychology and agency, excludes traditional ‘character’-based criticism and, for the most part, psychoanalytical criticism. 76

The disempowering effects of brutality can be seen through an individual’s use of or loss of language. 78

In so doing, the two closed worlds of stage and auditorium became one as simulated violence spilt over into the audience and is easily enacted upon the spectator herself. The firing of loaded guns suggests the deployment of deliberate shock tactics to provoke audience response. The theatre is no longer a place where an audience can passively assimilate received biblical or moral truths, as in the still contemporaneous interludes; rather it now claims to be recognised as a place of dangerous effects and emotions. 80

Jew of Malta: there is no figure analogous to Richmond in the final scenes of Richard III to set the whole drama into some kind of relief. 81

Antonin Artaud: In several manifestos, he made it clear that by ‘cruelty’, he did not mean merciless bloodshed and ‘gratuitous pursuit of physical suffering’, but emotional and sensory violence which is a form of embodied intelligence. Theatre, he argued, must be rebuilt on extreme action pushed beyond all limits; 82

Artaud held that the true theater was not one that dealt with individual psychology, the representation of well-dissected character and feeling, but one that deal with archetypes. Members of the audience are not meant to identify with what happens on the stage.

Artaud on Shakespeare / psychological realism: “the public is no longer shown anything but a mirror of itself” 84.

Prologue to Tamburlaine: “View but his picture in this tragic glass, / And then applaud his fortunes as you please”

-It is not that Marlowe is practising a prototype of an alienation technique, but simply that by surrendering the ethical to the aesthetic spectators are expected to complete Marlowe’s text, that is to formulate their own responses. 85

What is so disconcerting about his plays is that he does not orientate the audience through the moral perspective of an innocent victim or psychologically developed character. 87