This study locates Marlowe's career, both as a dramatist and a spy, within the stage play world of Elizabethan society. It reconstructs the cultural mentality of the Elizabethan spectator through an analysis of the spectacles that were staged by the authorities to both display and maintain their power. It shows how religious and political hostility towards the Elizabethan public theatres was conditioned by a fear that they provided an alternative, or competing, space for spectacle. Marlowe's major plays indicate that this fear was well-founded since they offered a provocative critique of theatricalized as well as written propaganda. They encouraged their audiences to question the theatrical forms, or spectacles, associated with orthodox ideological positions.