Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession presents the first comprehensive reading of the Marlowe canon in over a generation. The occasion for Patrick Cheney's rereading is a primary discovery: Marlowe organized his canon around an 'Ovidian' career model, or cursus, which turns from amatory poetry to tragedy and epic. Ovid had advertised this cursus only in his inaugural poem, the Amores, where its purpose was to counter the Virgilian cursus of pastoral, georgic and epic. Marlowe was the first writer to the translate the Amores, and thus the first to make the Ovidian cursus literally his own.

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