Remember who thou art: Human identity in Marlowe's 'The Tragedy of Dido', 'Tamburlaine' I and II, and 'Doctor Faustus', and, Peer evaluation in the composition classroom

Part I. Beginning his dramatic career with a reworking of Virgil's Roman epic, Christopher Marlowe portrays the landing at Carthage of Aeneas--a fallen Trojan warrior, weary and unkempt. Queen Dido not only receives the prince, but also dismisses the apology that he makes for his lowly state, commanding, "Remember who thou art." With this mandate, Dido marks two themes that appear throughout Marlowe's drama: the constitution of the "self" and the implications of human identity.;First Aeneas, then Tamburlaine, and finally Faustus--all three of these characters probe the constitution, agency, and boundaries of the "self." Aeneas refuses to relinquish his identity and ignore his destiny in order to remain with his loving Dido in Carthage. Yet Tamburlaine readily rejects his birth as a shepherd to become, instead, the monarch of Asia and the East. Faustus finds himself paralyzed between two competing visions, derived from Reformation theology, of predestined human identity: the "self" as elect and the "self" as reprobate. Unsure of his desire and agency to recreate himself, Faustus despairs and resolves upon damnation.;Marlowe, pushing against the boundaries of the self, portrays both essential, unchanging identity shaped by destiny and also fluid, dynamic identity enabled by agency. While his characters both affirm and deny the identity and agency of the "self," Marlowe reserves judgment: his complex view of the "self" remains ambivalent. The implications and effects of human identity, however, are never ambiguous, but powerfully traced out in the dialogue and action of the plays.;Part II. Student-centered evaluation can be an instructive and reliable method in composition courses which focus on the purposes or aims of writing. In one such method, teachers train students to identify certain primary traits of a particular discourse and then charge them to evaluate their peers' essays. The advantages of this assessment method include the formation of a multiple audience for student writing and the development of critical thinking skills as students apply criteria as a means of evaluating writing.;The present study demonstrates the reliability of peer group evaluations by comparing them to instructor evaluations. For this study, two-hundred composition students were trained by four instructors to identify primary traits in argumentative and explanatory writing. Students submitted argumentative and explanatory essays which were read, discussed, commented on, and then evaluated--using a rating scale of seven levels--by trained peer groups in other composition sections. From the four-hundred student essays which were evaluated by peer groups, eighty were randomly selected and blindly evaluated by the four instructors in order to determine an inter-rater reliability. The study demonstrates that the correspondence, within one rating level, between peer group and instructor evaluations is 76%; the correspondence within two rating levels is 93%.;At the conclusion of the study, the two-hundred participating students completed an anonymous survey in which 70% responded that peer evaluation of their essays accurately reflected a just evaluation. Furthermore, 80% were satisfied with the peer evaluation method. The most revealing result, however, is that 90% of the students said that writing for peers rather than for instructors positively affected their attitude toward and motivation for writing.