Locating the Earliest “Critics”

Abstract

“Locating the Earliest ‘Critics’” employs current theories of spatial production by such writers as Henri Lefebvre to examine the space of the early stage, and how this setting impacted the relationship between the playwrights and their audiences, as well as any dynamic connections among them. I borrow next from Foucault’s notion of convenientia and aemulato, as well as other important rhetorical terms of the early modern period such as exemplum and similitude. I apply his notion of “resemblance” in general to the Marlowe/Shakespeare connection, for as he reminds us, a dynamic relation between similar objects—or for my argument, similar writers—represents “a sort of natural twinship existing in things” that emulate one another. More specifically, I suggest that Marlowe and Shakespeare are critically constructed more in terms of opposites or parallels rather than with objective comparisons.