“Threat’ning the World:” The Achievement of Subversion through Speech and Structure in Three Plays by Christopher Marlowe

How subversive are the plays of Christopher Marlowe? While the playwright\u27s biography was certainly a radical one, how radical are his works in the context of Elizabethan England? This paper examines the claim of Stephen Greenblatt that Marlowe\u27s subversive characters, such as Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, and King Edward, are ultimately reigned in by the powerful orthodoxy upon which their plays are built. However, the structure and content of these plays pose significant challenges to Renaissance conceptions of order and orthodoxy, which in turn suggests that the powers of orthodoxy and tradition are indeed radically subverted