Hamilton is a Humanities teacher at Cary Academy, an innovative private school in Cary, North Carolina. In this essay, she discusses Marlowe's use of a particular image as the structuring device that organizes the play's action.

The details of a play's descriptive lines can often seem unrelated to the story being told; they are thus all too easy to dismiss as curious but rather outdated examples of the parlance of the day. Renaissance writers like Marlowe were well versed in the themes and stories of classical writers such as Ovid, Virgil, and Homer; it is not surprising then that the names of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses appear in their literary works. For example, in Edward II, Edward speaks of his heart beating like "Cyclop's hammer" and Gaveston is likened to Phaeton, who was unable to control his father's chariot and thus serves to intimate that...