Chapter 1 - Marlowe’s Lucan

Summary

Attached to the first, posthumous publication (1600) of Marlowe’s translation of the first book of Lucan’s Civil War is a preface by its publisher Thomas Thorpe, which imagines Marlowe as a ghost dressed in “sheets” of paper. While the power and wit of Thorpe’s image have long been acknowledged, this chapter proposes a re-reading of the paper-wrapped ghost as as a meditation on the possible fleetingness of poetic fame, and as a perceptive response to Marlowe’s own interest, appearing within the translation, in the fraught textual legacy of the Sibylline prophecies. Taken together, Marlowe’s Sibylline references and Thorpe’s sheeted ghost suggest that textual monuments may not always outlive their makers, offering a darker counterpoint to the triumphant vision of literary immortality promised by other early modern poets and their eulogizers.