KNOWLEDGE AND POWER IN RENAISSANCE DRAMA: MARLOWE AND SHAKESPEARE
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.37547/Keywords:
Renaissance drama, knowledge and power, Doctor Faustus, The Tempest, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, New Historicism, humanism, colonialism, transgression.Abstract
This article examines the interplay of knowledge and power in Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (c. 1592) and William Shakespeare's The Tempest (1611). Drawing on New Historicist and Foucauldian frameworks, it argues that both playwrights construct knowledge not merely as intellectual achievement but as a contested site of political authority, social control, and transgression. Faustus's pursuit of forbidden knowledge reflects Elizabethan anxieties about humanism and damnation, while Prospero's mastery of learning consolidates colonial and patriarchal dominion. The analysis reveals how Renaissance drama encodes the ideological tensions of its era.
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