Christopher Marlowe, The Massacre at Paris

Lisa Hopkins (Sheffield Hallam University)
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Many of Marlowe’s plays have suffered from problems in transmission leading to debased and corrupted texts, but none more obviously so than

The Massacre at Paris

. The text as it has come down to us is simply too short to make a full-length play, leading to the inescapable conclusion that there must once have been substantially more of it. (In particular, there must surely have been a more typically Marlovian exuberant central character, now so loosely sketched in the Guise.) What more might possibly have been is tantalisingly hinted at by the “Collier Leaf”, a loose page bearing, in an apparently Elizabethan hand, a far fuller version than we now have of a speech from the play. Unfortunately, the person who was supposed to have made this remarkable discovery was John Payne Collier,…

693 words

Citation: Hopkins, Lisa. "The Massacre at Paris". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 January 2001; last revised 01 March 2021. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3688, accessed 14 December 2024.]

3688 The Massacre at Paris 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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