Marlovian echoes in the Admiral’s Men Repertory: Alcazar, Stukeley, Patient Grissil

Preview - Allusion can be a difficult thing to define when its object is the most widely imitated dramatic poet of the 1590s. In As You Like It, the couplet “Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might: / ‘Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’” (3.5.82–3) is clearly an allusion, or perhaps more properly a quotation, since Phoebe advertises the one hundred and seventy-sixth line of Hero and Leander as a “saw” and attributes it to the unnamed “dead shepherd.” In a looser sense, in The Alchemist Jonson alludes to Doctor Faustus in his characterization of Sir Epicure Mammon, whose promises to “purchase Deuonshire, and Cornwaile, / And make them perfect Indies” and to “fright the plague / Out o’ the kingdome, in three months” once he has the philosopher’s stone (2.1.35–6, 69–70) echo Faustus’s claims that he will make spirits “fly to India for gold,” “levy soldiers with the coin they bring / And chase the Prince of Parma from our land” (A-Text, 1.1.84, 94–5).