Fortune’s Breath: Rewriting the Classical Storm in the Drama of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare

This is the author accepted manuscriptCritics often identify Marlowe and Nashe’s play *Dido Queene of Carthage* as a significant precursor for Shakespeare’s *Antony and Cleopatra*, as well as his more explicitly Virgilian drama *The Tempest*. These three plays are regularly associated with the *Aeneid*, and interpreted within the context of early modern colonial discourse. While the theme of empire-building is of central importance in these dramas, however, the emphasis in all three plays on the staging of Virgilian storms suggest that the *Aeneid*’s prophetic and literary antecedents may be equally significant. Thus Marlowe and Shakespeare’s fictional tempests raise and pursue questions about the nature of theatrical authorship, the concept of a discrete imaginative sphere, and the charged issue of literary legacy or fama. Storms in these plays thus provide a medium through which to engage with and dispute standards of dramatic authority within the context of the purpose-dedicated playhouses, as Marlowe and Shakespeare respond in their drama to contemporary debates about the nature, value and purpose of the theatre