Christopher Marlowe"s Edward II - History, Self-knowledge, and Contingencies

Christopher Marlowe"s Edward II

  This study traces the individual action of characters in Christopher Marlowe"s English history drama, Edward Ⅱ. The main focus is that the conflicting relationship between characters"s private pursuits and the communal meaning of their actions in Edward Ⅱ shows how the relationship continually produces paradox. Characters in the play also reveal a variety of self-creations as they act, because they tend to yield up their subjectivities to the demands of contingent circumstances. And also this study shows that individual consciousnesses and actions are a central recurrent animating issue that draws Renaissance audiences to the public theatre by creating fictions of a mutable reality. As a result, this serious discussion of individual actions could bring students under EFL to the better understanding of british Renaissance cultural condition and imagination.