Prompt: What is exactly as you expected? What is surprising? What is positive or negative about these realities?
The extensive nature of the research included in the Kit Marlowe Project is exactly as thorough as I expected and simultaneously surprisingly exhaustive. What I mean is, I knew that this project was dedicated to the life of a singular person but seeing the amount of content condensed to one URL is staggering. Seeing the number of posts all filled with content and still knowing that there is always more to add, more to contribute is mind boggling. I would have thought that focusing on a person who lived a relatively short life several hundred years ago, would imply a finite source of content. Looking at the multitude of other resource websites, the works archived, the biographical information and the web of people Marlowe interacted with, I do see a limitation to what we know. We do not know when he was born but we know when he was baptized, for example. But at the same time, I have come to realize that it is not the information we find that makes the project but what we do with it. The reformatting of information to be more engaging, the building of new ideas off of old ones, is the point of studying the past. Realistically, I always knew this but engaging so thoroughly with Marlowe’s world has made that fact surprisingly clear. It is a bit inspiring to think about but the downside, for me at least, is understanding that learning through people of the past is a bit like grasping at straws. The fact of the matter is that the consciousness that made Christopher Marlowe: Christopher Marlowe, can not be duplicated, or revived. We can put the pieces of him together, have everything we know in one place but it will never be everything he knew. We have an infinite amount of subject matter to engage with so long as we keep engaging (and therefore adding) to it, but we also have a finite view of Marlowe.