Marie Axton (1937–2014), birth name Marie Horine, was an American scholar of Elizabethan drama, who made her academic career in the United Kingdom. She married Richard Axton of Christ's College, Cambridge in 1962. In 1979 she became the first woman appointed a junior proctor by the University of Cambridge.
Publishing as Marie Axton, she innovated in the study of the succession tracts and related literature, in relation to the debate on the succession to Elizabeth I. In particular she interpreted the succession tract of Edmund Plowden, a Catholic supporter of the claims of Mary, Queen of Scots, and contributed to the discussion of Gorboduc, an early Elizabethan drama from the inns of court.
Background
She was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the daughter of Charles "Chuck" Horine (1912–1998) and his first wife Kathryn "Katie" Kunkel Horine (died 1965). Her parents had been students together at Ohio Wesleyan. Kathryn had taken lead roles in undergraduate productions of East Lynne and Liliom, in the latter with Charles. In 1931 she was a Fellow in the school of speech there. She then took a job with the British puppetmaster Shirley Braithwaite (Mayfair Marionettes), in which Charles also became involved. The couple got married.
During the 1930s Charles and Kathryn were based in Cleveland. They worked for Tatterman Marionettes, who under William Duncan Ireland and Edward Mabley were at the Century of Progress world fair in Chicago, and toured a production of Peer Gynt, and Bil Baird. From 1941 to 1945 Charles Horine worked for Westinghouse.
From 1946 Charles Horine had a successful career in New York, as a comedy writer for radio and television. He was hired by Arthur Godfrey. He also wrote as a playwright.
Life
Marie Horine was an only child, brought up in the puppeteering milieu of Depression-era touring, sometimes staying with grandparents. When the family moved to New York and began to prosper, she went to New Lincoln School. She graduated from Radcliffe College with majors in Literature and History and Phi Beta Kappa. She went for a postgraduate year at Girton College, Cambridge, and remained then in the United Kingdom. She took Part II of the Cambridge English Tripos, arranged medieval drama productions in the courtyard of The Eagle, with her future husband Richard Axton, and began research under M. C. Bradbrook.
Axton married, and completed a Ph.D. After her mother died in 1965, and her husband became a college Fellow, she concentrated on her family of two children for a period. Once they were of school age, she began to write her first book, the Queen's Two Bodies. It won the 1978 Whitfield Prize of the Royal History Society. It resulted in her election to a Research Fellowship at Newnham College, which she held to 1999. She also became a lecturer in the English Department of Cambridge University, was on the Theatres Syndicate overseeing the ADC Theatre, and involved herself with Cambridge University Opera.
Marie and Richard Axton undertook archival work for the Seigneur of Sark, resulting in a calendar of documents being published in 1992 by HMSO. Marie died on Sark having suffered for many years from Parkinson's disease, on 30 January 2014.
Works
Axton's 1977 book The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (1977) looked, in general terms, at the civic engagement of dramatists. Axton wrote in it that "Queen Elizabeth's playwrights shared Hieronymo's assumption that the action of a play could decisively alter the course of real events". It was concerned, more precisely, with the application of the legal doctrine of the king's two bodies to the succession question in England, particularly in a covert way in dramas associated with the inns of court. The concept of the body politic was, according to Kevin Sharpe, "the most familiar of all analogues for the commonweal", with classical roots; but the Renaissance saw also the "body natural" compared to the state. On the other hand, Claire McEachern credits Axton for showing that "far from being a disinterested and general cultural commonplace, the "body politic" had quite a specific polemical life".
Benedict S. Robinson wrote in The Arden Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama:
The distinction between the king's two bodies—the physical body of the monarch, and the immaterial and immortal body politic of the realm—was translated into scholarship on early modern drama
by this book. Andrew Hadfield noted that Axton treats the theory of the doctrine put forward by Plowden as contentious at the time, rather than common ground. He wrote: