The tragedy of Christopher Marlowe (alias Shake-peare),
forced to abandon his identity (his selfe, his name) permanently...
  
Extracts (4 pages) of George Godwin "Automachia (1607) or, the Self-conflict of a Christian. (later: Auto-Machia: or Self-Civil-War.)
| Philosophical "Complementaries", the poetic hallmark of Marlowe (Quod me nutrit me destruit) ---------------------------
At the beginning of 1607 an unknown poet George Goodwin dedicated as a 'small poetic New-yeares-Gift' to Mary Neville (Daughter of Thomas Sackville, First Earl of Dorset - 'Alia Minerva' "Another Pallas", which the poet finds as an approximate anagram of her name) a booklet „Automachia the self conflict of a Christian, which can be seen as the expression of an outstanding poet: "Both right and Wrong with me indifferent are: My Lust is Law: what I desire, I dare: ( Is there so foule a Fault, so fond a Fact, Which Follie asking, Furie dares not act?), But Art-lesse-hart-lesse in Religion's cause (To doo her Lessons, and defend her Lawes)." In his most artistic "self-reflexivity", Goodwin’s inwardness mingles prolific "Existentialist" philosophic ideas of self-becoming and freedom with real authentic suffering of his life.- There can be no doubt that the poet must have shared a deep interest in the creative fusion of philosophy and his own authenticity.- Shakespeare’s work is full of questions about the way we exist as ourselves and as beings in a society. Tragedies, such as Macbeth, Othello, Cymbeline, The Winters Tale, Coriolan, Timon of Athens, Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar etc., exhibit existentialist reading. Charlotte Keys, 2013 ) Timon’s withdrawal from society and the suicidal intensity of his declaration that ‘nothing brings me all things’ (Timon of Athens, V.ii.73) has an extraordinary existential power. Tormented by his tortured consciousness, Macbeth is a man whose mind is ‘brain-sickly of things’ (II.ii.44). Macbeth consciousness struggles to posit a fixed self, only to find that within moments that self has morphed into another. |
The self-conflict between self-experience and philosophical dilemmata of identity, (his own self, and authenticity) of Marlowes life fits perfectly with his autobiographical situation (loss of identity , his own self etc...) Again and again Marlowe alias Shakespeare challenges and rejects normative structures of identity .
Disguise is much more than a convention ; it is a necessity and, paradoxically, a form of being, both more and less than usual.
Marlowe can only be what he truly is, by not being himself!
