Many of Marlowe’s plays have suffered from problems in transmission leading to debased and corrupted texts, but none more obviously so than
The Massacre at Paris. The text as it has come down to us is simply too short to make a full-length play, leading to the inescapable conclusion that there must once have been substantially more of it. (In particular, there must surely have been a more typically Marlovian exuberant central character, now so loosely sketched in the Guise.) What more might possibly have been is tantalisingly hinted at by the “Collier Leaf”, a loose page bearing, in an apparently Elizabethan hand, a far fuller version than we now have of a speech from the play. Unfortunately, the person who was supposed to have made this remarkable discovery was John Payne Collier,…
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Citation: Hopkins, Lisa. "The Massacre at Paris". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 January 2001; last revised 01 March 2021. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=3688, accessed 24 November 2024.]
