Perhaps the most useful way to begin a discussion of the relationship between poststructuralist theory and postcolonial discourse is to call attention to the controversies and debates that have accompanied their rise as significant intellectual movements from the late 1960s and 1980s respectively. For one of the things these two movements have in common is that they have always generated heated questions about their political efficacy, their location within intellectual traditions informed by unequal relations of power, and their validity as theoretical categories that can provide us with useful knowledge about the cultures and literatures of previously colonized countries in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. These issues often divide scholars and critiques of formerly colonized societies into two broad groups: on one hand there are those critics who would like postcolonial theory to account for the specific conditions in which colonialism emerged and functioned and the role of decolonization as a specific narrative of liberation. For these critics, the pitfall of postcolonial theory inheres in its inability to periodize and historicize the colonial experience and to account for the role of colonized subjects as active agents in the making of culture and history. Aijaz Ahmad, for example, argues that the primary failure of postcolonial theory is to be found in its eagerness to foreground a set of questions - on historical agency, the production of colonial subjects, and even the history of modernity - or to consider “the question of cultural domination exercised by countries of advanced capital over imperialized countries” (Ahmad 1992: 2; see also Dirlik 1994; Bartolovich and Lazarus 2002). For such critics of postcolonial theory, its primary failure - its inability to account for the history and process of decolonization - arises from its close affinity to poststructural theory.

It is the fate of Marlowe's Jew of Malta to find himself forever lurking a few steps behind Shakespeare's Shylock. Barabas is Shylock's evil twin and nasty precursor - a rougher, meaner, and more starkly stereotypical stage Jew whose exorbitant antics bring into relief that glimmer of humanity that partly illuminates Shakespeare's achievement. Yet it is the task of criticism to try to encounter the play on its own terms, though ever attuned to the sequence of literary events that the play will set into motion. Readings of The Jew have approached the work from three basic angles: in relation to the formal development of English theatre and poetry (Eliot, Bevington, Cheney); as a key contribution to European representations of the Jews (Hunter, Greenblatt, Shapiro); and as an exploration of the larger Mediterranean cultural and political landscape in the English imagination (Bartels, Cartelli). This chapter takes the Jewish question as its central focus, but with an eye to the theatrical medium that displays that world for us. The play, I argue, stages different forms of fellowship - of social, religious, and economic association - that configure and reconfigure the different characters of the play in tendentious and fragile alliances.

Perhaps a failure, certainly a problem

Writing on “postmodernism” at the beginning of the twenty-first century is an uneasy business, and perhaps particularly so in relation to the visual arts. The term has undoubtedly gained a certain cultural currency, but its meaning (or meanings) and value seem in many ways more obscure than ever. The most secure usages - in dance and in architecture - seem to pick out a moment of something like style in ways that make it little more than one further moment within the general artistic logic of modernism, while the attempts to use it in ways that pick out some presumably deeper challenge to modernism over all do not seem to have succeeded in doing so. The phrase “postmodern art” seems for the most part to have run aground somewhere between these two possibilities, having secured no particularly strong style or period usage but also having failed to secure any broader or deeper generalization of postmodernism. At times it can seem that all that is actually left is a sort of gesture toward some general social or cultural fact that is taken to be peculiarly resistant to, or evasive of, the kinds of fuller parsing that accompany our usage of terms such as “modern”or “modernist.” This may sometimes function more or less successfully as a password of sorts, but it also feels like a word or phrase whose grammar has more or less mysteriously failed it. One might, of course, hope that what appears as its failure is in fact, but unrecognizably, its actual grammar.

Christopher Marlowe (1564-93) enters the twenty-first century arguably the most enigmatic genius of the English literary Renaissance. While the enigma of Marlowe's genius remains difficult to circumscribe, it conjures up that special relation his literary works have long been held to have with his life. In 1588, fellow writer Robert Greene inaugurates printed commentary by accusing Marlowe of 'daring god out of heaven with that Atheist Tamburlan' (MacLure, p. 29), an imitation of Marlowe's description of his own protagonist, whose 'looks do menace heaven and dare the gods' (1 Tamb. 1.2.157), and indicating that the Marlovian 'ghost or genius' rather slyly haunts his own historical making. Perhaps the enigma continues to fascinate today because the brilliant creator of such masterpieces in lyric and tragedy as 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Love' and Doctor Faustus was ignominiously arrested no fewer than four times - three for street-fighting and a fourth for counterfeiting - and was under house arrest for (potentially) dissident behaviour when he received a fatal knife-wound to the right temple in what proved his darkest hour. If his life was dissident, his works were iconoclastic, and both are difficult to capture. Reflecting variously on the enigma of Marlovian genius, the present Companion includes sixteen subsequent chapters by distinguished women and men from the United Kingdom and the United States spread over as many topics as such a volume can contain.

Between 1587, when he left Cambridge, and his death in 1593, Marlowe's literary career developed in three social contexts: he found patronage and employment as a government spy; he associated with some of the most heterodox intellectuals of his age; and he became one of London's first professional writers. It is through these interconnected activities - reflected in Marlowe's relationships with Thomas Watson, Thomas Harriot, and William Shakespeare - that he transformed Elizabethan literature. Watson, a 'University Wit' like Marlowe, was a model of what a scholar could achieve in a career supported by patronage, publication, and playwrighting. Harriot, a brilliant scientist whose friendship resulted in accusations of their collusion in 'Sir Walter Ralegh's school of atheism', mirrored Marlowe's intellectual audacity. And Shakespeare, Marlowe's chief rival in the public theatre, engaged him in a theatrical dialogue on the meaning of history. The Marlovian moment lasted only six years, but its achievement was to prove that popular drama could be counted among those exclusive cultural activities which Thomas Nashe called 'the endeavors of art'.

Thomas Watson was among a small group of writers now called the University Wits, who gained literary reputations in the 1580s after having studied at Cambridge or Oxford. As London’s first set of university-trained professionals, the wits – whose best writers included Watson, Marlowe, Nashe, Robert Greene, George Peele, Thomas Lodge, and John Lyly – appeared at the moment when the cultural marketplace first made having a literary career viable. Watson, who killed William Bradley in 1589 while defending Marlowe, was a writer whose reputation seemed so assured that William Covell in Polymanteia (1595) called Shakespeare ‘Watson’s heir’.

Atheist, sodomite, smoker - the image of Christopher Marlowe persisting to the present day is attributable in part to the poet himself, who apparently cultivated an anti-establishment persona for professional ends. The Prologue to the first part of Tamburlaine declares that the audience should expect something different from the second-rate 'conceits' to which lesser writers have accustomed them, and whatever the mix of artistry and commerce that governed his work, Marlowe's iconoclastic themes and eloquent speakers certainly had the effect of selling theatre tickets and, later, books. However, the scurrilous personal reputation that attracts many in our day has not always appealed, certainly not (for example) to most arbiters of Georgian and Victorian culture: we find no evidence that any play by Marlowe was performed between 1663 and 1818, when Edmund Kean revived The Jew of Malta. The twentieth century, however, rediscovered his plays and poems, re-evaluated his persona, forgave him his putative sins, and took the poet and his works to its heart. One major benefit of this resuscitation has been an increased appreciation for Marlowe's foundational role in the development of English poetry and drama.

Harriet Beecher Stowe's most famous introduction took place on or around Thanksgiving Day, 1862, when she was introduced to President Abraham Lincoln, who allegedly greeted her with these memorable words, “So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war! ” Even if we grant Lincoln's statement its obvious degree of ironic intention, he, nevertheless, makes quite a claim for the impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin on American history. One glance at virtually any of Lincoln's speeches reveals that he, like Stowe, believed that the power of words could alter the minds and hearts of individuals. Stowe's faith in the transforming capacity of language makes a great deal of sense, given that she came from a distinguished family of ministers and social activists - in an 1851 letter to Frederick Douglass, she writes, “I am a ministers daughter - a ministers wife & I have had six brothers in the ministry . . . & I certainly ought to know something of the feelings of ministers.” Stowe here refers to her father, Lyman Beecher, President of Lane Seminary, her husband, Calvin Stowe, who served at various times as Professor at Lane Seminary, Professor of the Chair of Sacred Literature at Andover Theological Seminary and Professor at Bowdoin College, and her brothers, the most famous of whom was Henry Ward Beecher, head of the prestigious Congregationalist Plymouth Church in Brooklyn and anti-slavery activist. This list, it should be noted, doesn’t even mention her influential sisters, Catharine Beecher, founder of the Hartford Female Seminary and author of many tracts, including A Treatise on Domestic Economy, and Isabelle Beecher Hooker, whose close ties to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony made Isabelle an important figure in the campaign for women’s rights. To what extent Stowe’s own words of ministration and protest catapulted the nation toward Civil War is an unanswerable question, but clearly Stowe wanted her novel to bring about great social change and Lincoln thought she had succeeded.

The temporal line in the sand drawn between us and modernism by postmodernism's prefix is generally associated with a “crisis of historicity.”The withering away of the authority and certainty of our historical sense has another side, however: namely, the reaffirmation of our spatial imagination. This “spatial turn”has been variously avowed by many of our epoch's most illustrious intellectuals. Michel Foucault, for one example, insisted that “the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time. Time probably appears to us only as one of the various distributive operations that are possible for the elements that are spread out in space.” On the face of it, this statement looks willed and arbitrary, a mere inversion of Kantian categories for the purposes of polemic. We may do well to attend to John Frow's salutary suspicion that postmodernism designates “nothing more and nothing less than a genre of theoretical writing” in which the elaboration of strong oppositions is always the foundational gesture. Yet it is at least conceivable that we postmoderns live “more spatially” than the moderns, who somehow had it in them to live “more temporally”than we. The insistence of contemporary theory on this score is, arguably, not fanciful, but a response at the level of the concept to shifts in the structure of our world. This chapter explores that possibility by way of an historical presentation of reemergence of spatial consciousness in an escalating scale of magnitude, from the body, through the textures of everyday life, our cities, and ultimately to the planetary stage we are calling “globalization”; all of which are in fact inextricable - “postmodern space” being, precisely, their compression into a single, complex plane of immanence, whose contours and elevations we are still in the process of mapping.

Given the curiously rapid rise to prominence of “postcolonial studies” as an academic field in Western metropolitan centers since the late 1980s, it is to be expected that its further development would involve efforts, like this one, to take stock of its regional expressions. Yet, while the rubric “Latin American postcolonial studies” suggests the existence of a regional body of knowledge under that name, in reality it points to a problem: there is no corpus of work on Latin America commonly recognized as “postcolonial.” This problem is magnified by the multiple and often diverging meanings attributed to the signifier “postcolonial,” by the heterogeneity of nations and peoples encompassed by the problematical term “Latin America,” by the thoughtful critiques that have questioned the relevance of postcolonial studies for Latin America, and by the diversity and richness of reflections on Latin America's colonial and postcolonial history, many of which, like most nations in this region, long predate the field of postcolonial studies as it was developed in the 1980s. How then to identify and examine a body of work that in reality does not appear to exist? How to define it without arbitrarily inventing or confining it? How to treat it as “postcolonial” without framing it in terms of the existing postcolonial canon and thus inevitably colonizing it?

In this chapter, I describe how the novels, poems, and plays that scholars and common readers have come to recognize as postcolonial relate to texts likely to be included in a Western canon. To be precise, I identify three sorts of relationships between postcolonial literature and this canon. Two of these have taken on the quality of scholarly common sense and will be familiar to non-specialists. First, postcolonial writing is held to repudiate the canon. Accordingly, readers have become well practiced in treating work from Europe's former colonies as the antithesis of canonical writing and as an instrumental component in efforts to recover oral and print traditions that imperialism threatened to obliterate. Second, postcolonial literature has been shown to revise canonical texts and concepts. Readers have learned to approach postcolonial literature as a critique of Western tradition involving the rewriting of specific works (The Tempest and Heart of Darkness, for instance) and the appropriation of entire genres (the Bildungsroman, for example, or the domestic romance).

No other American author has ever attained the international celebrity status to which the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin catapulted Harriet Beecher Stowe. A leading German literary journal of the day ranked the novel above “the whole modern romance literature of Germany, England, and France,” asserting that Stowe eclipsed such luminaries as George Sand, Charles Dickens, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton in “eloquence,” “truth to nature, ” intellectual scope, and “artistic faultlessness.” “[O]ur English fiction writers had better shut up altogether and have done with it,” agreed the prominent British reformer Harriet Martineau, who claimed Stowe had whetted a public taste for “didactic” novels that no one else could satisfy. Sales of Uncle Tom's Cabin abroad the first year - a million and a half copies in England alone - dwarfed the already astounding record of 300,000 set in the United States. Translations in twenty European languages - among them not only French, German, Spanish, and Russian, but Armenian, Finnish, Hungarian, Illyrian, and Serbian - appeared almost overnight, and more proliferated across the globe as far away as China and Japan. Stowe's international audiences also “translated” her message, reapplying her indictment of American slavery to the wrongs their own peoples endured. For example, Chinese theater-goers in 1917, seething with resentment against discrimination in the United States and imperialist domination at home, wildly applauded the play version of Uncle Tom's Cabin “because they 'knew by bitter experiences the sufferings and humiliations of an oppressed race.'” Similarly capitalizing on the versatility of Stowe's masterpiece, a Soviet stage adaptation of the 1930s eliminated the Christian preaching and recast little Eva as “something of an American forerunner to a vigorous present-day Komsomol (Young Communist) championing the cause of the downtrodden proletarian Negro.”

Postmodernism, ethics and European “success”

Postmodern ethics is often described in vague terms such as “openness,” “otherness'” and “fracture”and an “opposition to totalizing systems.” In this chapter, I aim to explain, in one way, why these terms are vague and why they have come to mean so much for postmodern thought. I also argue that postmodernism is first an ethical position before anything else.

Mary Midgley writes that

Midgley’s comment is clearly right about postmodernism: it is a “conceptual muddle” (just what does it mean?) and there is some form of “core element,” however expressed. She is also right that there is (more than) a tendency in western thought (but perhaps not a natural tendency) to reduce everything to a system. Is she also right that this tendency has failed to work and that the “sensible element” of postmodernism is the “realisation” of this failure?

From the mid-eighteenth century when interest in Doctor Faustus revived, critical attention on the play has largely focused on what may be termed its metaphysical concerns. Is Marlowe challenging conventional Christian perspectives on hell and heaven, or does his play ultimately conform with them? Is Faustus a tragic hero or a misguided sinner? Though scholarship on Doctor Faustus has increasingly complicated issues surrounding the origin and status of the play's two main versions, ideas of what may be termed high seriousness have dominated debate about its content. For both readers of a text and spectators at performances, attention is commonly concentrated on those scenes that engage most thoroughly with a tragic dimension. The scenes of farce attract much less attention. But what type of play engaged early spectators? How might Doctor Faustus have been performed in the theatres of Elizabethan England? This chapter seeks to re-examine the modern preoccupation with Faustus as metaphysical tragedy by thinking about it in the cultural milieu from which it first arose. Interestingly, many of the issues raised by the place of the stage in early modern London still seem to resonate strangely within current critical debates about Doctor Faustus.

As Marlowe has emerged in recent years as early modern England's most modern playwright, Edward II has emerged as his most modern play, not merely because it treats the life and loves, and stages the brutal debasement, of a recognizably (if not exclusively) homosexual monarch, but also because it presents a decidedly direct and demystified portrayal of power politics at work, showing political positions to be little more than transparent extensions of the personal desires and ambitions that motivate them. The passions on display in Edward II, whether they be Edward's all-consuming love for his favourite, Gaveston, or Mortimer Junior's unrestrained hostility to Edward and Gaveston alike, shape and dominate both the private and political behaviour of the play's two primary antagonists, and contribute mightily to the disordered relations in family and state that obtain throughout the play. As such, they paradoxically present themselves as fit objects of audience censure and disapprobation, and as the primary expressive channels of character formation and audience engagement alike.

Much recent scholarship on the early modern period has been devoted to a reconsideration of the viability of applying traditional theories of the relationship between the four vital bodily elements (blood, yellow bile, phlegm, and black bile) and the four “humours” (sanguine or cheerful, choleric, phlegmatic or stolid, and melancholy) to an understanding of what we late moderns tend to construe as psychological states. An excess of one or other of these elements in an individual’s body (say, of yellow or black bile) was thought to produce a humoural imbalance that would make one’s temperament chronically aggressive, on the one hand, chronically melancholy on the other.

“Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished,” Clov promises himself at the beginning of Beckett's Endgame. Surely, the first thing to be said about postmodernism, at this hour, after three decades of furious business and ringing tills, is that it must be nearly at an end. But in chess, from which Beckett's play takes its title, the endgame is not the end of the game, but the game of ending that forms part of it and may be looked towards from the beginning. Playing the game may become identical with playing the game out. There are strategies for managing the end of the game, including ways of deferring that ending, which come not after the game but in the thick of it. One is compelled to begin almost any synoptic account of postmodernism with such sunset thoughts, even as, in the very midst of one's good riddance, one senses that the sweet sorrow of taking leave of postmodernism may be prolonged for some time yet.

Postmodernism and the legacy of the enlightenment

Between the 1970s and the late 1990s, the concept of the “postmodern” was associated with a wide range of different meanings. It could designate a chronological period, a particular style found in some contemporary artworks and literary texts, a property of social structures at the end of the twentieth century, a change in the values of certain societies, or a specific way of thinking theoretically about such issues as language, knowledge, or identity. Different interpretations of these basic meanings further add to the complexity. Understood as an historical period, the postmodern could either follow a modernity defined by political, social, cultural, and economic institutions that had emerged in the late eighteenth century, or succeed the cultural and artistic modernism that had characterized the era from approximately the 1850s to World War II. Viewed as an aesthetic style, the postmodern could refer to quite different features depending on whether it was studied in an old historical art form such as architecture, which had developed a distinctive “modern” style beforehand, or a very young art form such as film, which had evolved only during the modernist period. Some of this terminological ambivalence also attaches to the relationship between science, technology, and postmodernism. On the one hand, one can designate as “postmodern” some of the latest scientific and technological achievements, particularly those that are culturally perceived as ushering in a different historical era and type of society. On the other hand, scientific knowledge and technological rationality have been seriously challenged by postmodern modes of thought that more generally question fundamental Enlightenment assumptions about human subjectivity, knowledge, and progress.

It is a critical commonplace that religion and politics were inseparably entwined in Marlowe's England. Queen Elizabeth was 'Supreme Governess' of the Church of England, and the Church of England's leading primate, Archbishop John Whitgift, wielded considerable authority as a member of her Privy Council. Since monarchical rule was divinely sanctioned with the queen herself as God's vice-regent, disobedience to her laws was not just a crime, but a sin against God; conversely, wilful dissent from the Church's official prescriptions of order and worship was not just a sin but a crime against the state. These ideas, of course, constituted the official ideology of the Elizabethan government, but English subjects (as well as foreigners) who disagreed politically with the Crown shared the notion that Church and state, religious and civil authority, sacred and secular values, are intimately and inextricably linked, whether they advocated the queen's overthrow (as Catholics loyal to Rome did after a Papal Bull excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570) or called for the routing of bishops and their hierarchical mode of ecclesiastical polity from the national church (as Puritan radicals did throughout the reign). Not surprisingly, Marlowe represents these complex intersections of religion and politics in his works, questioning many of the verities his audience took for granted about them. In the discussion of this topic which follows, my focus will be primarily on the plays with occasional reference to the poetry and translations.