Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe

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PLACING THE PLAYS OF CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

To Matthew N. Proser, an eminent Marlovian whose dedication, support, and friendship have ever been magnanimous. Nature doth strive with Fortune and his stars To make him famous in accomplished worth. (1 Tamburlaine, 2.1.33-2.1.34)

Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe Fresh Cultural Contexts

Edited by SARA MUNSON DEATS University of South Florida, USA and ROBERT A. LOGAN University of Hartford, USA

© Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Placing the plays of Christopher Marlowe : cultural contexts of his plays 1. Marlowe, Christopher, 1564-1593 – Criticism and interpretation 2. Marlowe, Christopher, 1564-1593 – Influence 3. Dramatists, English – Early modern, 1500-1700 4. England –Intellectual life – 16th century I. Deats, Sara Munson II. Logan, Robert A., 1935822.3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Placing the plays of Christopher Marlowe : cultural contexts of his plays / edited by Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-6204-4 (alk. paper) 1. Marlowe, Christopher, 1564–1593—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Marlowe, Christopher, 1564–1593—Influence. 3. Dramatists, English—Early modern, 1500–1700. 4. England—Intellectual life—16th century. I. Deats, Sara Munson. II. Logan, Robert A., 1935– PR2674.P56 2008 822’.3—dc22 2007038065 ISBN: 978-0-7546-6204-4 Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall.

Contents Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction

Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe: Fresh Cultural Contexts Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan

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1

Part 1 Marlowe and the Theater 1

“Mark this show”: Magic and Theater in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus Sara Munson Deats

13

2

Marlowe’s Edward II and the Early Playhouse Audience Ruth Lunney

25

3

Edmund Kean, Anti-Semitism, and The Jew of Malta Stephanie Moss

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Part 2 Marlowe And The Family 4

5

6

The Hopeless Daughter of a Hapless Jew: Father and Daughter in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta Lagretta Tallent Lenker

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A Study in Ambivalence: Mothers and Their Sons in Christopher Marlowe Joyce Karpay

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Masculinity, Performance, and Identity: Father/Son Dyads in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays Merry G. Perry

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Part 3 Marlowe, Ethics, and Religion 7

Almost Famous, Always Iterable: Doctor Faustus as Meme of Academic Performativity Rick Bowers

113

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8

Misbelief, False Profession, and The Jew of Malta William M. Hamlin

9

Doctor Faustus and the Early Modern Language of Addiction Deborah Willis

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Rhetorical Strategies for a locus terribilis: Senses, Signs, Symbols, and Theological Allusion in Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris Christine McCall Probes

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10

11

Barabas and Charles I John Parker

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Part 4 Marlowe and Shakespeare 12

Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Theoretically Irrelevant Author Constance Brown Kuriyama

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“Glutted with Conceit”: Imprints of Doctor Faustus on The Tempest Robert A. Logan

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Christopher Marlowe: The Late Years David Bevington

Comprehensive Bibliography Index

185

193 209

223 245

Notes on Contributors David Bevington is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many books, including From “Mankind” to Marlowe (1962), Tudor Drama and Politics (1968), and Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture (1984). He has edited The Complete Works of Shakespeare for Bantam (1988, currently being reedited) and for Longman (5th edition, 2003), and is editor of Medieval Drama (1975) and The Macro Plays (1972). He is also senior editor of the Norton Anthology of English Renaissance Drama (2002) and the Student Revels Editions, co-author of Shakespeare: Script, Stage, Screen (2006), and one of the senior editors of the Complete Works of Ben Jonson (forthcoming in 2007). He has also published numerous journal articles and book chapters on Marlowe and Shakespeare and has twice served as President of the Shakespeare Association of America. Rick Bowers is Professor of English at the University of Alberta. His scholarly work has appeared in such journals as Theatre Survey, Notes and Queries, English Studies in Canada, and The Huntington Library Quarterly. He is author of John Lowin and “Conclusions Upon Dances” (1998) and Thomas Phaer and “The Boke of the Chyldren” (1999). He has also contributed book chapters to several anthologies, including Marlowe, History, and Sexuality (1998), The Drama of John Marston: Critical Re-Visions (2000), Marlowe’s Empery (2002), and Teaching Shakespeare and Early Modern Dramatists (2007). Sara Munson Deats currently holds the title of Distinguished University Professor at the University of South Florida. During her tenure at USF, she has served as Chair of the English Department and Associate Dean of the Colleges of Arts and Letters and the Graduate School. She is also former President of the Marlowe Society of America. She has published over two dozen articles on Marlowe and Shakespeare, as well as authoring a major feminist study of Marlowe’s plays, Sex, Gender, and Desire in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (1997), for which she received the Roma Gill Prize for Marlowe Scholarship. She has also edited with Robert Logan a collection of essays on Marlowe entitled, Marlowe’s Empery: Expanding His Critical Contexts (2002), and co-edited with Lagretta Lenker five books relating literature to social issues. Her most recent book, her eighth, is Antony and Cleopatra: New Critical Essays, edited for Routledge Press in 2005. William M. Hamlin is Professor of English and Director of English Graduate Studies at Washington State University. His books include The Image of America in Montaigne, Spenser, and Shakespeare (1995) and, more recently, Tragedy and Skepticism in Shakespeare’s England (2005). The recipient of research fellowships from the British Academy, the Renaissance Society of America, and the National

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Endowment for the Humanities, he has also published essays in such journals as English Literary Renaissance, Studies in English Literature, Renaissance Quarterly, Shakespeare Studies, Comparative Drama, Montaigne Studies, and the Journal of the History of Ideas. At present, he is working on a study of the genesis and influence of John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays. Joyce Y. Karpay is Assistant to the Chair and Instructor in the English Department at the University of South Florida, where she teaches courses in Shakespeare, Critical Theory, Women Writers, Modern British Literature, and American Literature. She has published a book chapter on feminist criticism in Reading and Writing about Literature and has read papers on Christopher Marlowe, Virginia Woolf, Nadine Gordimer, and Elizabeth Bower at a number of conferences, including the international Marlowe Conference, the Shakespeare Association of America, and the Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. She is currently working on a book examining the influence of Woolf on contemporary British women writers. Constance Brown Kuriyama is a Professor of English at Texas Tech University. She is the author of Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life (2002), for which she was awarded the Roma Gill Prize for Marlowe Scholarship, and of Hammer or Anvil: Psychological Patterns in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays (1980). She has also published a number of journal articles and book chapters on Marlowe, Shakespeare, and film, and co-edited “A Poet and a Filthy Play-Maker:” New Essays on Christopher Marlowe (1988). She served as Vice-President of the Marlowe Society of American from 1985–90 and as President from 1990–95. Her current research centers on problems of life writing and on issues of authorship and appropriation in drama and film. Lagretta Tallent Lenker is Director of Metropolitan Initiatives and Co-Director of the Center of Applied Humanities and the Florida Center for Writers at the University of South Florida. She is author of Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare and Shaw (2000). She is also co-editor, with Joseph Moxley of The Politics and Processes of Scholarship (1995) and with Sara Munson Deats, of five volumes: Youth Suicide Prevention: Lessons from Literature (1989); The Aching Hearth: Family Violence in Life and Literature (1991); Gender and Academe: Feminist Pedagogy and Politics (1994); Aging and Identity: A Humanities Perspective (1999); and War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare (2005). She has served as co-editor of the Journal of Aging and Identity and has published numerous book chapters and articles on Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Shaw. Robert A. Logan teaches at the University of Hartford, where, for ten years, he also acted as Chairman of the English Department. In 1998, he was appointed Director of the University’s Humanities Center and from 2000–2004 held the office of President of the Marlowe Society of America. Professor Logan regularly makes presentations on Marlowe and Shakespeare at conferences and gives lectures on Renaissance drama and poetry. He has written articles and book chapters on Marlowe and Shakespeare, served as guest editor, published several reviews, and, in 2002, co-edited with

Notes on Contributors

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Sara Munson Deats a collection of essays on Marlowe entitled Marlowe’s Empery: Expanding His Critical Contexts. In 2007, he published a critical work entitled Marlowe’s Shakespeare: The Influence of Christopher Marlowe on Shakespeare’s Artistry. Ruth Lunney is Conjoint Lecturer/Honorary Associate at the School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle, Australia. She is author of Marlowe and the Popular Tradition: Innovation in the English Drama before 1595 (2002), for which she received the Roma Gill Prize for Marlowe Scholarship. She also won the 1996 Calvin and Rose G. Hoffman Prize with an essay on dramatic character in Marlowe and Shakespeare. Her publications include several articles, book reviews, and theater reviews on Marlowe. She is also co-author, with her husband, Bill Lunney of Forgotten Fleet 2 (2004), the definitive history of the U.S. Army Small Ships Section in New Guinea, 1942–45. A long-term member of the Marlowe Society of America, her special interests include non-Shakespearean plays, verbal and visual rhetoric, audiences, theatrical space, and the fortunes of Marlowe Downunder. Stephanie Moss teaches Shakespeare and Literature and the Occult at the University of South Florida. She has published articles, book chapters, and reviews on early modern medicine, magic, and performance, and co-edited with Kaara L. Petersom a collection of essays entitled Disease, Diagnosis, and Cure on the Early Modern Stage (2004). The 2004 collection includes her own essay on Othello and perceptions of the early modern body. Her most recent project is the essay on performance in this collection. In addition to heading the Honors Division of the International Conference on Fantasy in the Arts, she is working on Jews and mythology in Romania. Joh n Parker joined Macalester College as an Associate Professor of English in the fall of 2006 after several years of teaching at Harvard and a year spent in Berlin as a Federal Chancellor Scholar of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He is author of The Aesthetic of Antichrist from Christian Drama to Christopher Marlowe and has an essay forthcoming in Cultural Reformations: from Lollardy to the English Civil War. His earlier work has appeared in Christianity and Literature, Shakespeare Studies, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. The essay included here revises a portion of his dissertation, “God Among Thieves: Marx’s Christological Theory of Value and the Literature of the English Reformation,” which won the Diane Hunter Prize for the best dissertation submitted in English at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999. erry .GP M erry , Assistant Professor of English and Co-Director of the Composition Program at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, teaches writing and literature courses from a feminist cultural studies perspective. Her publications include two co-edited collections, The Gender Reader (2000), and War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare (2004), as well as book chapters, journal articles, and book reviews. She serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of The Journal of American Culture; as Associate Book Review Editor of College Literature; and as the ACA Masculinities Area Chair for the National PCA/ACA (Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association) Conference.

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Christine McCall Probes is currently Associate Professor at the University of South Florida, where she has served as Associate Chair and Interim Chair of the Department of World Languages. Her research and teaching take her regularly to France where her work has been supported by the French government, several French universities, and by awards from USF. She serves on the Executive Councils of two international societies in her field of specialization, and on the MLA’s Executive Committee on 17th Century French Studies. She has published articles on the early modern period in numerous referred books and journals, is co-editor of the volume La Femme à l’ấge classique (2003), and is a longstanding contributing editor to over thirty volumes of the annual MLA-sponsored critical biography French 17. Her most recent study, “Becoming Global in the Early Modern: A Case of Modernity in French Emblematics,” is currently in press. Deborah Willis is Associate Professor of English at the University of California at Riverside, where she teaches Shakespeare, Renaissance Drama, and Cultural Studies. At UCR, she has served as Director of the Hewlett Program in General Education, Director of Graduate Recruitment for the English Department, and Coordinator of the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium. She is the author of Malevolent Nurture: Witch-Hunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England (1995) as well as articles and book chapters on Shakespeare, Marlowe, early modern magic and witchcraft, and contemporary film and performance.

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, we want to thank the studious artisans whose innovative essays comprise this collection. We believe that these essays open up fresh cultural contexts within which the plays of Christopher Marlowe can be read, viewed, analyzed, and enjoyed, and that the new insights they offer will both profit and delight all admirers of this original and influential playwright. The cover design reflects two significant features of the collection: it indicates that the Marlovian play most discussed by the contributors is Doctor Faustus, and it suggests that a fresh perspective, even on a longstanding iconic figure, is always possible.We are especially grateful to John Wright for both the creation and execution of the design. Next, we would like to recognize the two chairs of our departments, Alma Bryant of the University of South Florida and Mark Blackwell of the University of Hartford, who magnanimously provided their continual support for this endeavor and who thoroughly understood why an undertaking of this nature could take three years of sustained editorial labor. We would also like to express our appreciation to our many colleagues in the Marlowe Society of America who have offered friendship and inspiration to both of us for over 20 years. Without the Society’s encouragement and its opportunities to air the exciting scholarly endeavors of the young and seasoned alike, this collection would never have been attempted or completed. Our deep appreciation also goes to our editor, Erika Gaffney, whose beneficial aid and advice throughout this endeavor have been crucial to the success of this volume. A special thanks also goes to our super-conscientious and organized research assistant, Robin Rogers, for her invaluable help in bringing this project to completion. Finally, most of all, we thank our partners, Gordon Deats and John Wright. Throughout the experience, they have shown a loving patience and support that would have awed Tamburlaine and been the envy of Dido. Sara Munson Deats Robert A. Logan

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Introduction

Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe: Fresh Cultural Contexts Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan

What kind of man was Christopher Marlowe and what is his “place” in the development of the English drama? Do reflections of cultural contexts and attitudes in his plays provide us with intelligence that brings us closer to answers than we have come before? Today, controversy still envelops the figure of Christopher Marlowe, even as it did in his own time. After centuries of neglect, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have rehabilitated this flamboyant and controversial playwright, making him the subject of several recent biographies, historical novels, and even radio plays.1 In these scholarly and fictional accounts, Marlowe has been romanticized as a spy, or even a double agent; maligned as a counterfeiter, blasphemer, and brawler; admired as a freethinker, agnostic, or defiant atheist; and even celebrated as a martyr to his iconoclastic beliefs. Indeed, among readers and critics alike, the enigmatic persona of Marlowe has threatened to overshadow his innovative, influential plays. However, the chapters in this collection will focus not upon Marlowe, the man, but upon Marlowe, the playwright, and will seek to place Marlowe’s dramas

1 William Urry, Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury, ed. and intro. Andrew Butcher (London: Faber and Faber, 1988); Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (1992; London: Jonathan Cape; London: Pan [Picador edition], 1993); Matthew N. Proser, The Gift of Fire: Aggression and the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Peter Lang, 1995); Lisa Hopkins, Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life (New York: Palgrave, 2000); Constance Brown Kuriyama, Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002); Roy Kendall, Christopher Marlowe and Richard Baines: Journeys through the Elizabethan Underground (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2003); David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (London: Faber and Faber, 2004); and Park Honan, Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy (Oxford UP, 2005). Of the many historical novels about Marlowe, one from the last decade is George Garrett’s Entered From the Sun (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990) and one from this decade, Louise Welsh’s Tamburlaine Must Die (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2004). In addition, Roy Kendall has completed two parts of an intended trilogy of radio plays about Marlowe: Marlowe’s Diaries and Ink & Gunpowder, the first play commissioned by the BBC to commemorate the 400th Anniversary of Marlowe’s death and the winner of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain’s Macallan Award for Best Original Radio Play.

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within the dramaturgical, ethical, and sociopolitical matrices of his own historical era and to examine their participation in some of the most heated controversies of the early modern period: the antitheatrical debate, the relationships between parents and children, Machiavelli’s ideology, the legitimacy of sectarian violence, and the discourse of addiction, to mention only a few. These chapters will also explore Marlowe’s polysemous influence on the theater of his time and of later periods and, most centrally, upon his more famous contemporary poet/playwright, William Shakespeare. If since the late 1980s, biographical scholarship on Marlowe has tended to steal the spotlight, the present volume offers a forceful counterpoise to this tendency, revealing a strong desire to deepen and complicate our understanding of the playwright’s dramas. In representing the innovative methodologies of current scholars, the following collection makes it clear that we need to encompass the complexities of cultural contexts if we wish to advance to a more comprehensive understanding of the playwright and his works. Marlovian criticism of the twentyfirst century reveals a steady movement back to an inductive engagement with the texts of the plays and an increased concern with the pragmatic aspects of dramaturgy and production offered by theater historians. Both of these tendencies help to enlarge and complicate our understanding of the cultural contexts of Marlowe’s dramas. Moreover, explorations of Marlowe’s connections with Shakespeare add another dimension to this complexity, for they illuminate our awareness of Marlowe’s impact on the literary developments of English drama, on the affirmation of familiar theatrical traditions and the formation of new ones, and on the emergence of a potent source of commercialism. Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe represents the fourth volume of essays to be published under the aegis of the Marlowe Society of America,2 a scholarly organization founded in 1974 and dedicated to the study of Marlowe’s plays and poems and to the evaluation of his dramatic and poetic achievements. In addition to publishing collections of critical essays on Marlowe, the Society annually hosts two sessions at the MLA Convention and every five years sponsors an international conference. The majority of the essays included in this collection derive from the Fifth International Marlowe Conference held in 2003 in Cambridge, England, at Corpus Christi College, Marlowe’s own alma mater, although two of the essays were originally presented at other forums, the Shakespeare Association of America seminar on “Marlowe as Maker” (Bermuda, 2005) and the session on “Constructing Marlowe” at the MLA convention (Washington, DC, 2005). This volume is divided into four parts. The first part of the collection, “Marlowe and the Theater,” employs performance criticism, theater history, and reception theory to locate Marlowe’s drama within the theatrical context of his own day and that of later centuries. As any survey of Marlovian criticism over the past one 2 Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill, and Constance B. Kuriyama, eds., “A Poet and a Filthy Play-maker”: New Essays on Christopher Marlowe (New York: AMS, 1988); Paul Whitfield White, ed., Marlowe, History, and Sexuality: New Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe (New York: AMS, 1998); Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan, eds., Marlowe’s Empery: Expanding His Critical Contexts (Newark, DE: U of Delaware P, 2002).

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hundred years would reveal, theatrical approaches to the plays have increased in fullness and variety. Thanks to the growing number of theater historians, scholarship has advanced beyond the well-worn debate of whether Marlowe was more poet than dramatist—as if the two categories were ever mutually exclusive. As the present collection demonstrates, scholars have discovered that a combination of theatrical approaches, even if more complex, is more fertile than a single methodology. Hence, we find blended elements of the following theatrical approaches in the present collection: cultural and historical contexts, including literary and non-literary influences; theoretical considerations such as performance and reception theory; new historicism; metadramatic links; and technical aspects of dramaturgy. The initial chapter in the section on “Marlowe and Theater,” a study entitled “‘Mark this show’: Magic and Theater in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus,” adopts a new historicist, metadramatic methodology to explore the famous ambiguity of Marlowe’s most popular play. In this chapter, Sara Munson Deats posits that the ambiguity inscribed in the play relates not only to topical disputations about religion and the occult but also to one of the most vehemently contested controversies of the period, the debate concerning the elevating or degrading influence of the theater on society. After reviewing this protheatrical/antitheatrical controversy, Deats demonstrates that both the A and B versions of Doctor Faustus—like the society of the time—equate the occult with the stage and the magician or wizard with the playwright; ultimately, in return for his soul, Faustus is granted not the power of a God but only the power of the dramatist. Deats concludes by suggesting that the notorious contrariety of the play derives not only from Marlowe’s ambivalence toward magic but, more centrally, from his divided response toward his own medium, the drama. Whereas the first chapter in Part I attempts to demonstrate Marlowe’s ambivalence toward his own medium, the second chapter traces his indelible influence upon that same medium. In “Marlowe’s Edward II and the Early Playhouse Audiences,” theater historian Ruth Lunney argues that, by leading audiences to observe stage action differently and to interpret it individually, the play Edward II revolutionized late sixteenth-century theatrical experience. Lunney’s chapter begins by analyzing the narrative expectations of early modern audiences, especially as these relate to the exemplum, a culturally significant technique in which a particular instance illustrates some general truth. Lunney contends that, although much of Edward’s action conforms to these expectations, the final scenes of the play challenge the relevance of cautionary tales, disturbing expectations not because they stage horror but because they direct attention to individual, non-representative experience, releasing theatrical experience from moralizing generalities. Lunney concludes that by detaching the spectacle of suffering from the impulse to judgment, Edward II makes possible a new kind of tragic understanding. Moving from the early modern period to the nineteenth century, Stephanie Moss, in her chapter on “Edmund Kean, Anti-Semitism, and The Jew of Malta,” employs reception theory to discuss Edmund Kean’s 1818 production of The Jew of Malta. Moss explains that, although Kean’s reputation as an actor rested on his ability to humanize characters such as Richard III, Shylock, and other theatrical villains by radically changing the entrenched acting style of his time, his modernized, more “realistic” acting failed to make his Barabas sympathetic. Even Kean’s addition of

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a new Prologue, which anticipates modern critical readings of the play as an ironic exposure of religious hypocrisy in general, failed to register on audiences of the period. Examining the gaps in the romantic era’s embrace of democratic values, Moss identifies the tension between the fragile and over-determined romantic projection of philo-Semitism and the period’s suppression of deeply embedded antiSemitism as a possible cause for the closing of Kean’s The Jew of Malta after eleven performances. The second part of this volume, “Marlowe and the Family,” explores a lesstraveled critical terrain: the attitude toward the early modern family as reflected in Marlowe’s plays. Relatively little has been written on this topic. Several biographers have discussed Marlowe’s own family but they, and other critics, have less frequently addressed the subject as it appears in his plays, embedded in various cultural contexts. Constance Brown Kuriyama and Sara Munson Deats have briefly examined the portrayals of the family in Marlowe’s plays, and Lisa Hopkins has afforded the subject a somewhat fuller treatment.3 But, as the present selections make clear, this is a way of placing Marlowe that has not yet been given its due. Lagretta Lenker’s chapter, “The Hopeless Daughter of a Hapless Jew,” introduces the discussion of “Marlowe and the Family.” In her chapter, Lenker first surveys the scholarly controversy over the role of the daughter in the early modern patriarchal family before focusing her study on The Jew of Malta, Marlowe’s one play with a dominant father/daughter relationship. Lenker posits that in this drama, Marlowe presents a blockbuster example of the dyad—one of the most merciless, mercenary, and heart-wrenching father/daughter scenarios in dramatic literature. Through the Machiavellian Barabas and the compliant Abigail, Marlowe constructs a pattern of daughter sacrifice so horrible that it is, on the one hand, the ultimate combination of paternal cruelty and betrayal and, on the other, an effective stage convention run amuck. Lenker’s chapter considers how Marlowe achieves this tour de force of cruelty and why he chose the father/daughter bond to create it. Lenker’s chapter on the father-daughter relationship in The Jew of Malta is followed by Joyce Karpay’s “A Study in Ambivalence: Mothers and Their Sons in Christopher Marlowe.” In this chapter, Karpay observes that few commentators have recognized and probed the significance of mothers in the drama of the early modern period, particularly the importance of the mother/son dyad, a neglect that she seeks to remedy through her examination of the dominant presence of mothers in Marlowe’s plays. Karpay further comments that although far fewer in number than Shakespeare’s plays, Marlowe’s dramas offer a greater abundance of rich and diverse portrayals of mothers. Noting that mothers or mother figures command center stage in four of Marlowe’s seven plays—Dido, Queen of Carthage; The Second Part of 3 Sara Munson Deats, Sex, Gender, and Desire in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1997); Constance Brown Kuriyama, Hammer or Anvil: Psychological Patterns in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1980) and Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2002); and Lisa Hopkins, “Fissured Families: A Motif in Marlowe’s Families,” Papers on Language and Literature 33.2 (1997): 198–212 and Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life (New York: Palgrave, 2000).

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Tamburlaine the Great; Edward II; and The Massacre at Paris—Karpay maintains that mothers are ubiquitous and often dominant figures in the plays of Marlowe and are presented with greater ambivalence as well as greater diversity than we find in Shakespeare. Merry Perry’s chapter, “Masculinity, Performance, and Identity: Father/Son Dyads in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays,” completes the study of “Marlowe and the Family.” In this final chapter, Perry supports Lenker and Karpay by affirming the interactions between parents and children as central to Marlowe’s drama, while focusing particularly on the relationship between fathers and sons as they perform the lessons of masculinity. Perry draws on contemporary theoretical work in masculinity studies and men’s studies to analyze the father/son dyads in Marlowe’s plays from a new critical perspective, arguing that Marlowe deliberately problematizes notions of traditional masculinity in regard to the father/son relationship in his plays, thereby crafting a trenchant critique of traditional notions of patriarchy, power differentials, masculinity training, and the politics of gender subjectivity. In her comprehensive study, Perry considers masculinity and the father/son dyads in all of Marlowe’s plays while highlighting Tamburlaine, which she adduces as Marlowe’s most salient critique of early modern conventions of masculinity. The third section of this collection, “Marlowe, Ethics, and Religion,” situates Marlowe’s plays within ethical and religious controversies of the period. Traditionally, this has been a very popular topic; the criticism is, of course, extensive. There are many good reasons for such a marked interest in this topic. One prominent source of curiosity centers on the debate that lingers in the minds of audiences, readers, and scholars: the extent to which Marlowe’s works represent the actual ethical and religious sentiments of the writer himself. Are such sentiments purely artistic constructs, sometimes subversive, often ambiguous, meant to engage audiences but not necessarily to reflect the views of the playwright; or are they both? The chapters in this grouping boldly articulate the recent tendency to treat ethical and religious conflicts transhistorically while, at the same time, sharply clarifying their links with their origins, identifying their historical individuality. These chapters thus help to place Marlowe within specific historical cultural contexts but also to demonstrate why ethical and religious conflicts are timeless. Rick Bowers’s chapter, “Almost Famous, Always Iterable: Doctor Faustus as Meme of Academic Performativity,” centers Marlowe’s popular drama squarely within the roiling ideological debates of the period. In this chapter, Bowers asserts that Doctor Faustus simultaneously parodies an old academic world of faithful belief, an emerging academic world of discovered knowledge, and a new academic world of multiple ironies, insisting that all three worlds collide and combine within the title character, making him a postmodern cultural meme, a self-replicating cultural concept, in this case, propagating the very term “Faustian.” Bowers borrows the conceptual term “meme” from sociobiologist Richard Dawkins, who identifies memes as analogous to genes; however, whereas genes replicate physical life through DNA, memes replicate cultural life through powerful ideas, fashions, and images, such as an overwhelming desire for academic fame. Bowers interprets Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus as related to human inquiry and academic professionalism in a complex

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cultural parody in which information supplants knowledge, celebrity replaces fame, and performativity overrules reputation. Continuing the analysis of the ways in which Marlowe’s plays participate in the ideological disputes of the period, William M. Hamlin, in his chapter, “Misbelief, False Profession, and The Jew of Malta,” examines Marlowe’s satiric revenge comedy from the perspective of early modern discussions of ideology. Hamlin argues that although like the Stage-Machiavel and other figures from the early modern drama who emerge as modern skeptics, Barabas represents himself as distanced from the structures of conventional religious and moral belief, yet close scrutiny of his language, and particularly of Marlowe’s deployment of the unusual word “misbelief,” suggests that Barabas is marked to a substantial degree by the same ideological hypocrisy that he routinely condemns in others. According to Hamlin, however, this need not remove Barabas entirely from our sympathies, and indeed the humane consideration extended by the French essayist Michel de Montaigne to such ideological positioning offers one possible way in which early modern audiences might have perceived a character such as Barabas. The final three chapters in this section investigate the ways in which Marlowe’s plays delve into the religious as well as political discourses of the period. In her essay, “Doctor Faustus and the Early Modern Language of Addiction,” Deborah Willis seeks to fill a gap in our understanding of addiction’s complex history through a close examination of the B-Text of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. In the B-Text of Marlowe’s play, the Old Man tells Faustus, “Yet, yet, thou hast an amiable soul / If sin by custom grow not into nature” (5.1.40–41), and these lines invite modern readers to view Faustus’s attachment to magic as a form of addiction or, as one critic has put it, “a bad habit which is gradually being engrained” through repetition of acts which, over time, produce a loss of agency. An exploration of the play and its contexts provides insight into the historically distinctive features of the early modern idea of addiction, before it was conceptualized as a medical problem or closely associated with substance abuse, revealing its embedment in classical discourse about habit, virtue, and vice; religious discourse about sin and bondage of the will; and demonological discourse about possession and the demonic pact. Moving from addiction to another topical issue, the legitimacy of religious violence, Christine McCall Probes treats the most neglected play in the Marlowe canon. In her chapter entitled “Rhetorical Strategies for a locus terribilis: Senses, Signs, Symbols, and Theological Allusion in Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris,” Probes seeks to redress the critical disregard of this work and to contribute to the play’s reevaluation as she analyzes four rhetorical strategies employed by Marlowe to dramatize a crucial locus terribilis and to paint an indelible dramatic portrait of the horror of sectarian violence. Her systematic examination of Marlowe’s evocation of the senses, his employment of signs and symbols, and his use of biblical and theological allusion illumines his dramatization of religious terrorism as it was enacted in 17 years of French history—from the St. Bartholomew Day Massacre on August 23, 1572 to the assassination of Henry III by the Friar on August 23, 1589. The dramatic strategies that she explores accentuate this dark world of murder and hatred, while simultaneously revealing the desires and motivations of Marlowe’s characters’ and highlighting the play’s irony.

Introduction: Fresh Cultural Contexts

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Finally, moving forward four decades, John Parker, in his chapter, “Barabas and Charles I,” demonstrates the way in which Marlowe’s ideologically freighted satire, The Jew of Malta, continued to participate in the political and religious struggles of early modern society even into the mid-seventeenth century. Noting that the first printing of the play occurred in 1633, 40 years after Marlowe’s death, Parker queries, “Why would a Caroline audience have found this old play, penned by a notorious scoffer at religion, sufficiently interesting to see it revived?” In answer to this intriguing question, Parker postulates that the printing may have been an attempt to use explicitly dated material as a means of contesting publicly—yet somehow invisibly, as well—the increasingly Catholic appearance of Charles’s regime. Parker’s chapter first examines the play’s conformity with the conventions of Elizabethan anti-Catholicism, and then shows how these conventions were, at the time of the printing, radically at odds with the court of Charles I. Parker further argues that reviving the play’s attacks on monasticism and on religious hypocrisy gave cover for a clever form of politico-religious dissent. The fourth part of this volume, “Marlowe and Shakespeare,” explores elements in the much-debated relationship between the two greatest playwrights of the sixteenth century—Marlowe and Shakespeare. As criticism reveals, there has never been a consensus about the nature of the professional relationship between the two writers, especially in the matter of influence. At the beginning of the debate and for almost all of the twentieth century, the two figures were seen exclusively as rivals.4 The mythology that grew from this supposition was first modified when Maurice Charney proposed that Marlowe was something of a model for Shakespeare rather than a rival.5 More recently, Robert A. Logan has questioned the evidence for assuming that the two men were rivals at all.6 Concluding that none exists and, in fact, that there is evidence to the contrary, he depicts the writers as comrades-in-arms, working at one time together at the Rose Theater where their plays were in repertory on successive nights.7 This view helps to refocus the debate on the question of influence, for it suggests that we need to rethink what we mean by influence—the means by which we detect it and how, ultimately, it differs from source studies of the past. 4 The bibliography is extensive but those who have viewed Marlowe and Shakespeare as rivals includes Nicholas Brooke, “Marlowe As Provocative Agent in Shakespeare’s Early Plays,” Shakespeare Survey 14 (1961): 33–44; James Shapiro, Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (New York: Columbia UP, 1991); Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford UP, 1997); Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare (New York: Oxford UP, 1998); and James P. Bednarz, “Marlowe and the English Literary Scene,” The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2004) 90–105. 5 Maurice Charney, “Marlowe’s Edward II as Model for Shakespeare’s Richard II,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 33 (1994): 31–41. 6 Robert A. Logan, Shakespeare’s Marlowe: The Influence of Christopher Marlowe on Shakespeare’s Artistry (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007). 7 Philip Henslowe in his Diary reports that The Jew of Malta and Henry VI were played in succession on 10 and 11 March, 4 and 5 April, 4 and 5 May, and 19 and 20 May in 1592. See Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2002) 16–18.

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Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe

The present collection offers views that support both sides of the controversy about the relationship between the two playwrights and illuminates the ways in which we think intertextually about influence. It also proves that placing Marlowe in relation to Shakespeare can be as rewarding as it can be frustrating. Constance Brown Kuriyama initiates the comparison between Marlowe and Shakespeare. In her chapter, “Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Theoretically Irrelevant Author,” Kuriyama refutes claims by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault that specific authorship is immaterial, mainly by pointing out obvious differences between Marlowe and Shakespeare that she sees as central to their work and its significance. At the same time, she takes exception to a number of Harold Bloom’s generalizations in the revised edition of The Anxiety of Influence, particularly those that compare Marlowe unfavorably to Shakespeare. Kuriyama contends that Kyd and Marlowe anticipated Shakespeare by investing characters with a rich internal life; however, it was primarily the difference between Marlowe’s impish lack of commitment and Shakespeare’s comparative orthodoxy that goaded Shakespeare into echoing and responding to Marlowe repeatedly—far longer than Bloom acknowledges. According to Kuriyama, as late as The Tempest, 18 years after Marlowe’s death, Shakespeare was still quarreling with his great predecessor. Shakespeare’s final quarrel—or cooperation—with his fellow dramatist also inspires the second comparative analysis of the plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare, Robert A. Logan’s “‘Glutted With Conceit’: Imprints of Doctor Faustus on The Tempest.” In this chapter, Logan considers the possibilities of the influence of Marlowe’s drama on Shakespeare’s, including metadramatic connections between the two plays. Acknowledging the differences between the plays, especially in their contexts, Logan focuses on the similarities of the two magicians as they become “glutted with conceit.” The chapter further analyzes the manifestations of magic as they come to represent the results of a free play of the protagonists’ imagination and shows how each magus has momentary opportunities to play God the Creator in a world in which time acts as an indomitable, hostile force. Logan concludes by demonstrating that both magicians ultimately provide commentary on the two playwrights’ views of the imagination and its place in their artistic endeavors. The final chapter in the section on “Marlowe and Shakespeare” analyzes the contributions made by both of these playwrights to the development of the English history play. In “Christopher Marlowe: The Late Years,” David Bevington examines Edward II not only as a late play in the dramatist’s canon but also as an indication of what Marlowe might have achieved had he not suffered an untimely death. In this chapter, Bevington contends that, as rivals promoting advancements in the genre of the English history play, Marlowe and Shakespeare redirected the course of the dramatization of history, making it more serious in focus and freer in experimentations with character, plot, and historical fact. At the same time, according to Bevington, the two playwrights invested the genre with a dramatic unity, especially in the portrayal of the ambiguity of political conflict. Thus, these characteristics not only constitute the new direction of the English history play but, given the tendency that the genre took in Shakespeare’s plays, indicate the path that Marlowe would also have taken, had he lived.

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In summary, the editors of this collection would like to pose the following question: what makes “placing” Marlowe so important? For centuries, theatergoers and readers have been trying to type Marlowe the man and categorize the works of Marlowe the playwright. Is Marlowe a card-carrying atheist? A homosexual? A spy for the crown? Is Tamburlaine being exalted or condemned? Is Faustus a villain or a hero? Is Edward tragic or pathetic? Is The Jew of Malta an accurate reflection of cultural alienation in the late sixteenth century or a satire on Christian hypocrisy? What precisely is Shakespeare’s debt to Marlowe? The difficulty of discovering certainties in evaluating Marlowe and his drama continues to fascinate readers, audiences, and critics alike. In addition, the exercise of “placing” Marlowe within the political, social, cultural, and literary controversies of his age, and occasionally within those of later periods, makes us aware of the degree to which the ideological debates that so intrigued Marlowe continue to be relevant to our own troubled times. For example, although the protheatrical and antitheatrical polemicists have traded their pens and pamphlets for the red pencils of the professor or the computers of the scholar, the dispute over the constructive or deleterious effects of the drama on the development of the human personality—particularly in its dominant twenty-first century manifestation as television and cinema—remains a hot button issue today; unfortunately, anti-Semitism is not an anachronism in our society; and the problems of religious hypocrisy, Machiavellian policy, the degrading effects of addiction, and the horror of religious terrorism have never been more topical. Moreover, the familial relationships so perceptively probed by Marlowe in his dramas—the abuse of daughters by fathers, the ambivalent attitudes of both men and women toward their mothers, and the pressures on young men to “perform” masculinity—continue to spark best selling books, furnish topics for TV talk shows, and inspire leading articles in popular magazines like Time and Newsweek. Finally, the relationship between Marlowe and his great fellow playwright/rival/comrade-in-arms, William Shakespeare, in its speculative possibilities provides a subject whose interest never seems to wane. Thus, the exercise of “placing” Marlowe reveals new contexts for his work and consequently new ways of thinking about this enigmatic playwright/poet as a figure not only for his own time, but also very much for our own.

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PART 1 Marlowe and the Theater

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Chapter 1

“Mark this show”: Magic and Theater in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus Sara Munson Deats University of South Florida

I. At the end of the sixteenth century, in the heyday of the English Renaissance, two menacing figures loomed as the bêtes noires of the Puritan moralists, figures credited with the threatening power to lure vulnerable humanity from the strait and narrow road of righteousness onto the primrose path of sin and damnation. These two composite personae—the necromancer/magician and the poet/player1—are embodied in the character of the archetypical apostate, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Doctor Faustus, perhaps more than any other drama by Marlowe, has traditionally invited multiple responses. Indeed, few works of literature have evoked such violent critical controversy as the play Doctor Faustus. In this essay, I suggest that the ambiguity inscribed in the tragedy is related not only to topical disputations about religion and the occult but also to one of the most heated controversies of the period, the debate concerning the elevating or degrading influence of the theater on society. I shall further seek to demonstrate that throughout the play the occult is equated with the stage and that the notorious contrariety in the play results not only from Marlowe’s ambivalence toward magic but also from his divided response toward his own medium, the drama. As James L. Calderwood asserts in reference to William Shakespeare’s plays, “dramatic art itself—its materials, its media of language and theater, its generic forms and conventions, its relationship to truth and social order—is a dominant Shakespearean theme, perhaps his most abiding subject.”2 Furthermore, Jonas Barish demonstrates the deep ambivalence that many playwrights of the period felt toward their own medium, focusing particularly on the tension between fascination and

1 I use the term “poet” here for playwright, since at this period, as Stephen Greenblatt observes, dramatists were consistently referred to as “poets.” See Will in the World (New York: Norton, 2004) 199. 2 Shakespeare’s Metadrama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971) 5.

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disapproval in the plays of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson.3 In this essay, I argue that Marlowe shared with Shakespeare and Jonson equivocal feelings toward the theater, and that his plays, like those of his contemporaries, self-reflexively probe, censure, and celebrate dramatic art. Although a number of contemporary critics—Alvin B. Kernan, Joel B. Altman, Barbara Howard Traister, John Mebane, Darryll Grantley, Patrick Cheney, Huston Diehl, and Ian McAdam, to mention only a few4—have commented on the metadramatic nuances of Doctor Faustus, none of these scholars has attempted to embed the play within the contemporaneous controversy surrounding the theater. My essay develops their excellent work by situating Doctor Faustus within the pro and antitheatrical debates of the time. First, I shall demonstrate the equation of magic with the theater implicit in this controversy; second, I shall show how this equation also resonates throughout the imagery and action of Marlowe’s tragedy; third, I shall attempt a tentative conclusion concerning Marlowe’s own attitude toward magic and theater as inscribed in this most problematic of all his plays. Salient similarities bind magic and the drama at this period. First, and most important, dramatists, like magicians, conjure imaginative visions with words often learned from books. Mebane explicates the similarity as follows: “Poets, like magicians, were at times accused of irrationality and excessive passion, of creating and/or being deceived by illusions. Moreover, both poets and magicians use language as a medium through which the artist’s vision, whether genuine or deceptive, is created.”5 The defenders of magic assert that these mystic visions could reveal a higher truth; the defamers warn that these intoxicating delusions could lead to damnation. Similarly, whereas advocates of the theater insist upon the edifying value of dramatic illusion, attackers reject these delusions as lies that deceive audiences while also transforming actors into hypocrites and Machiavellians. Thus, as Barish explains, players were considered evil because they substituted a self of their own contriving for the one given them by God; plays were censured as wicked because they substituted “notorious lying fables” for the truth of God.6 Indeed, according 3 The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981) 127–54. 4 Kernan, The Playwright as Magician: Shakespeare’s Image of the Poet in the English Public Theater (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) 157; Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) 321–88; Traister, Heavenly Necromancers: The Magician in English Renaissance Drama (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984) 89–107; Mebane, Renaissance Magic and the Return of the Golden Age (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989) 113–36; Grantley, “‘What meanes this shew?’: Theatricalism, Camp, and Subversion in Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta,” Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture, ed. Darryll Grantley and Peter Roberts (Aldershot, UK.: Scolar, 1996) 224–38; Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1997) 190–220; Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theatre in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) 67–81; McAdam, The Irony of Identity: Self and Imagination in the Drama of Christopher Marlowe (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999) 112–45. 5 Renaissance Magic 132. 6 The Antitheatrical Prejudice 93.

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to the antitheatrical pamphleteer Anthony Munday, “To invent countries that never existed, to people them with the coinages of one’s own brain, ... was to place oneself in blasphemous rivalry with one’s maker.”7 In this case, the antitheatrical polemicists would not have been mollified by Sir Philip Sidney’s view that creative abilities were a sign of celestial origins or that by feigning the poet produced a golden world to replace nature’s brazen one, since to make this claim was, in their eyes, to present the poet as a competitor of God and thus guilty of heinous blasphemy.8 This was, of course, exactly the kind of hubris for which magicians were also denounced, and the kind of apostasy that Faustus commits. A second similarity is the protean potency attributed to both arts. Both apologists and assailers of the occult accept the efficacy of magic to transform the individual. Devotees of white magic—like Cornelius Agrippa, John Dee, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola—distinguish between natural or beneficial magic and black magic, embracing the occult aspiration that through natural magic, such as the study of Hermetic science and Christian Cabalism, the individual might achieve godlike wisdom and stature, while rejecting black magic as a perversion of nature and thus deleterious.9 These occultists extol the magus, or white magician, as the “great chameleon” and praise protean malleability as one of humanity’s most glorious attributes. Conversely, demonologists, who reduce all occult practices to witchcraft and tar all magic as black, argue that this practice invariably results in servitude to the Devil, degrading human beings to the level of beasts, a psychological degeneration reflected in the ability of witches and wizards to assume animal form. Thus, these enemies of the occult denigrate human changeability as a sign of the Fall. Recalling the belief that black magic has the power to transform physical as well as psychological form, in Doctor Faustus Marlowe inserts a “how to” guide on shape-shifting as one of Lucifer’s first gifts to Faustus. Depending upon one’s persuasion, therefore, magic during this period was seen as a protean force that could either catapult the individual up to the angels or plunge the human being down to the beasts. Although the theater was rarely awarded such stunning puissance as magic either to elevate or to degrade, both its supporters and its detractors concur that drama also possesses the power to mold human personality, for either good or ill. In their polemical pamphlets, antitheatrical critics condemn the “feigning” and “hypocrisy” that they locate at the core of dramatic art, defaming the theaters as “houses of

7 Munday, A Second and Third Blast of the Retrait from Plaies and the Theater (1580; New York: Garland, 1973), quoted in Barish 93. 8 See “The Defense of Poesy,” Sir Philip Sidney: Selected Prose and Poetry, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969) 108–9. 9 On the distinctions made at the time between natural (or white) magic and black magic, see William Blackburn, “‘Heavenly Words’: Marlowe’s Faustus as a Renaissance Magician,” English Studies in Canada 4.1 (Spring 1978): 1–14; Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge, 1979) 61–71; Traister 2–21; Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession 197; and David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Henry Holt, 2004) 176–81.

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Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe

Proteus”10 and actors as chameleons, while deploring the force that the drama exerts over changeable human beings. Thus, Munday disparages players and “stagers,” questioning, “are they not commonly such kind of men in their conversation, as they are in their profession? Are they not variable in heart, as they are in their part?” In a marginal note, Munday adds, “Players cannot better be compared than to the Chameleon.”11 Conversely, Pico rhapsodizes on the potentiality of protean humanity: To him it is granted to have whatever he chooses, to be whatever he wills. ... Who would not admire this our chameleon? Or who could more greatly admire aught else whatever? It is man who Asclepius of Athens, arguing from his mutability of character and from his self-transforming nature, on just grounds says was symbolized by Proteus in the mysteries.12

Significantly, the image of the chameleon, which for Munday is a slur, for Pico is a term of praise. Moreover, attackers of the stage denigrate the drama because it not only inflames the passions of spectators but also encourages the audience to imitate the vices of the evil characters, much as today’s television is often blamed for inciting “copycat” murders and other atrocities. F. Clement warns against “common plays,” which have the power to “metamorphosize, transfigure, deform, pervert and alter the hearts of their haunters.”13 Munday also cautions that “the gesturing of a player ... is of force to move, and prepare a man to that which is ill.”14 Another vehement critic of the theater, Philip Stubbes, goes even further, implying that the pernicious effects of transvestitism in society or in the theater might lead not only to a change in personality but even to an alteration in gender: Our apparel was given us as a sign distinctive to discern between sex and sex, and therefore for one to wear the apparel of another sex, is to participate with the same, and to adulterate the virtue of his own kind. Wherefore, these women may not improperly be called Hermaphrodite, that is, monsters of both kinds, half women, half men.15

10 See Barish’s comprehensive discussion of the ubiquitous association of actors with Proteus in the antitheatrical tracts of the period (The Antitheatrical Prejudice 99–106). Stephen Gosson also excoriates the sin of “counterfeiting” that he finds endemic to fiction and drama; see Playes Confuted in Five Actions (1582; New York: Garland, 1972) D4–4v, 188, and E3, 195. 11 A Second and Third Blast 111–12. I have retained the original titles of all quoted works, but have modernized the spelling within all quotations. 12 “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” trans. Elizabeth L. Forbes, The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1948) 225–6. 13 Petie Schole, translated at the end of The Summe of the Conference (1584), Sig. Xx2v, qtd. in William Ringler, Stephen Gosson: A Biographical and Critical Study (New York: Octagon, 1972) 70. 14 A Second and Third Blast 95. 15 The Anatomie of Abuses (1583; New York: De Capo, 1972) F5v. Although Stubbes is here specifically castigating presumptuous women who dared to usurp the attire of men, in the

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Laura Levine identifies this “‘magical’ idea that representations in general can alter the things that they are only supposed to represent” as a link between the stage and all forms of the occult. For example, demonologists claimed that by thrusting pins into wax effigies, a witch could actually harm the person represented. Similarly, the antitheatrical tracts of the time betray the irrational fear that the costumes of the transvestite boy actors could actually change the gender of their wearers. According to Levine, therefore, the assumption that magic is a kind of theater is embedded in the consciousness of the time and the fear of the power of representation, on the stage or in the witches’ Sabbath, was a source of considerable anxiety during the early modern period.16 In response, defenders of the theater counter that the drama has the potency to ameliorate rather than debase. Thomas Heyward, for one, insists on the instructional value of the theater both to incite the individual to noble actions and to deter him or her from vice: Is thy mind Noble: and wouldst thou be further stirred up to magnanimity? Behold, upon the stage thou mayst see Hercules, Achilles, Alexander, Caesar, Alcibiades, Lysander, Sertorius, Hanibal, ... with infinite others in their own persons, qualities, & shapes, animating thee with courage, deterring thee from cowardice. ... Art thou inclined to lust? Behold the falls of the Tarquins, the rape of Lucrece: the guerdon of luxury in the death of Sardanapalus; Appius destroyed in the ravishing of Virginia, and the destruction of Troy in the lust of Helena. Art thou proud? Our Scene presents thee with the fall of Phaeton, Narcissus pining in love of his shadow, ambitious Hamon, now calling himself a God, and by and by thrust headlong among the Devils. We [actors] present men with the ugliness of their vices, to make thee the more abhor them.17

Therefore, both arts were alternately praised as sources of delusion or enlightenment, degradation or elevation, but the metamorphosizing power of both magic and the theater was widely accepted. Although I have not found an explicit verbal linking of the dramatic and occult arts, in one of his many splenetic sneers at his rival dramatists, Robert Greene derides the “mad and scoffing poets that have poetical spirits as bred of Merlin’s race.” Here, Greene not only associates his fellow poets with the occult, but also appears specifically to link Marlowe (generally known at Cambridge as Marlin) with the archetypical magician Merlin.18 Moreover, often the nexus between the theater and magic seems simply to be assumed since the language used by antitheatrical polemicists to describe these two pursuits was remarkably similar. Thus, in numerous virulent pamphlets, attackers of the theater—like Stubbes, Munday, context of the work as a whole, this passage can also be read as a denunciation of both male and female cross-dressing in the theater as well as in society. 16 Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing: Antitheatricality and Effeminization, 1579–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 4–5, 108. 17 An Apology for Actors (1610; New York: Garland, 1973) G. 18 Perimedes the Blacksmith, qtd. in John Bakeless, Christopher Marlowe: The Man in His Time (New York: Washington Square, 1937) 170. Bakeless explains that, “in the English of that day, ‘Merlin’ was pronounced ‘Marlin.’ Greene had known Marlowe at Cambridge where his name is usually given as ‘Marlin,’” 170.

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Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe

Stephen Gosson, and William Prynne—explicitly associate the theater with the Devil, and actors, like witches and magicians, with Satanic worship. Munday, for example, defames the theater as the “chapel of Satan” and “shows and pomps” as “the works of the Devil.”19 Stubbes excoriates plays as the “feasts of the Devil” and players as “quite contrary to the Word of grace, and sucked out of the Devil’s teats,” an accusation frequently leveled at witches.20 In addition, Stubbes implicitly connects witchcraft and play-going: just as witches pay their abasements to Satan, so theaters are “Venus’s palaces where the fallen go to worship Devils.”21 Moreover, Gosson denigrates plays, in a language similar to that used to describe witches’ Sabbaths, as “the sacrifices of the Devil, taught by himself to pull us from the service of our God.”22 It was a commonplace of the time that books of magic should be consigned to the flames, and the two most famous magicians of the early modern stage—and I refer, of course, to Faustus and Prospero—vow either to burn or drown their books. However, again linking magic with the drama, Prynne insists that not only tomes of magic but amorous books and plays should be burnt, with the Roman playwright Terence particularly singled out for incineration.23 Thus, over and over, antitheatrical polemicists employ the vitriol of the witch trials to link plays and players with the most notorious of society’s heretics—witches and wizards. II. I shall now to turn to Marlowe’s play and examine the strategies whereby the tragedy accentuates the nexus between drama and magic. The most salient tactic is a device frequently associated with Shakespeare: the use of the interior director/playwright. Mephistopheles, the initial, and Lucifer, the second interior director/playwright, both employ theatrical devices to entice Faustus into demonology. In his first action as director/playwright, Mephistopheles offers Faustus crowns and rich apparel, ostensibly to “delight his mind” but actually to distract him from repentance, even as, according to the antitheatrical pamphleteers, plays and players employed spectacle to distract their audiences from heavenly matters and seduce them into sin. During the signing of the fatal contract, Faustus’s blood congeals and stigmatic script appears on his arm warning, “Homo, fuge!” or “man flee” (2.1.81).24 Understandably, Faustus 19 A Second and Third Blast 6, 13. 20 Anatomie of Abuses LB4, LB3. 21 Anatomie of Abuses LB6. 22 Plays Confuted in Five Actions B8v. 23 Histriomastix (1633; New York: Garland, 1974) 916. Although Histriomastix was published many years after the composition of Doctor Faustus, I would argue that as a compendium of antitheatrical diatribes published during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it is very relevant to my discussion. 24 All quotations from Doctor Faustus are taken from Doctor Faustus: A and B Texts (1604, 1616), ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, The Revels Plays (Manchester, UK.: Manchester University Press, 1993). All citations from Doctor Faustus will be included in the text of this essay. Since current scholarly opinion favors the A-text over the B, I have quoted from the A-text unless otherwise designated. Nevertheless, as a number of scholars

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hesitates to put his name on the dotted line; however, his infernal familiar diverts him from his wavering with a demonic dance and gifts of royal regalia—hollow crowns without kingdoms, robes without offices. In accepting this accouterment, Faustus identifies himself with the much-maligned actor, who frequently dressed in the raiment of his supposed “betters,” playing the roles of kings and nobles and thus assuming a sartorial position above his station. In an antitheatrical diatribe, Gosson angrily censures the presumption of actors, as well as other sartorial “social climbers,” for violating the sumptuary codes of the day: If private men be suffered to forsake their calling because they desire to walk gentlemenlike in satin and velvet, with a buckler at their heels, proportion is so broken, unity dissolved, harmony confounded, that the whole body must be dismembered, and the prince or head cannot choose but sicken.25

The repartee between the magician and his demonic familiar—Faustus’s query, “What means this show?” and Mephistopheles’s reply, “Nothing, Faustus, but to delight thy mind withal / And to show thee what magic can perform” (2.1.84–85)— accentuates the theatrical associations of the royal regalia as well as the superficiality of the gifts, but it also recalls Munday’s identification of “shows” and “pomps” as works of the Devil.26 Later, at another moment of crisis, Lucifer assumes the role of impresario, also resorting to theatrical tactics to distract Faustus from thoughts of repentance; in this case, conjuring a ribald, but not very risible morality skit, the masque of the Seven Deadly Sins. Both of these dramatic divertissements—the devils’ dance with crowns and rich apparel and the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins—remind us of Munday’s caveat, “Repentance is furthest from you, when you are nearest such maygames and shows.”27 A change occurs in act 3 when Faustus asks to participate actively in the demonic spectacles presented by the devils, requesting of Mephistopheles, “Then in this show let me an actor be, / That this proud Pope may Faustus’ cunning see” (B–3.1.75–76). The demon familiar gleefully permits Faustus to take part in the slapstick practical jokes played on the Pope, employing words that stress the histrionic nature of his magic tricks, “any villainy thou canst devise, / And I’ll perform it, Faustus” (B– 3.1.86–87). It should be noted, however, that these metadramatic lines appear only in the B-text, which might call into question their validity as evidence. Traister reminds us that literary representations of the magician traditionally present him as both an actor—like the chameleon thespian, counterfeiting other personalities through disguise and shape-shifting—and a director—“a presenter of spectacular shows for the discomfort, edification, or entertainment of spectators.”28 In the middle of the play, Faustus assumes this traditional role—although I see him have observed, neither version may be the text that Marlowe actually wrote, and the B-text, even more than the A, supports the connection between drama and magic that I find central to the play. 25 Playes Confuted in Five Actions G7v. 26 A Second and Third Blast 13. 27 A Second and Third Blast 66. 28 Heavenly Necromancers 23–4.

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more as the playwright, with Mephistopheles acting as his director, since the dialogue indicates that Faustus, unlike Prospero and other stage magicians, is never a free agent and must always perform his magic through the agency of Mephistopheles, just as the playwright must rely upon the director or stage manager to dramatize his or her imaginative visions. If the earlier pageant of Lucifer was, paradoxically, linked to orthodox morality skits, the histrionic skill of the polymath Faustus runs the gamut of the early modern dramatic repertory. His productions range from classical drama (the tableau of Alexander and his Paramour) to revenge tragedy (the skit of the horning and harassing of Benvolio) to romance (the Helen interlude) to comedy (the episode with the pregnant Duchess and the grapes) to farce (the buffoonery with the Pope and the slapstick antics with the Horse Courser and the clowns). Faustus even introduces a musical soirée, orchestrating the sweet singing of Homer with the melodious harp playing of Amphion. Throughout the play Faustus progresses from audience to playwright to, ultimately, starring actor in his own harrowing de casibus tragedy. Viewed metadramatically, the sequence of these performances traces the historical development of the English drama, beginning with the morality play, moving to the classical drama, and then branching out to include farce, comedy, romance, and tragedy, although this progression is more carefully marked in the Bthan in the A-text.29 Metadramatic language further punctuates the play’s theatrical motif. As Mebane perceptively observes, the linking of drama and magic is signaled by the explicit parallel between Faustus’s praise of “heavenly necromancy” (A–1.1.52; B–1.1.50) and the Chorus’s lauding of Marlowe’s “heavenly verse”30; I must add, again this parallel occurs only in the often-questioned B-text (B–Prologue 6). However, other examples of metadramatic diction pervade both versions of the play. The word “art” occurs twelve times in the A-text and approximately the same number in the B to describe Faustus’s necromantic skill, even as years later in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, Shakespeare will employ the term to describe both Paulina’s magical resuscitation of Hermione and Prospero’s magnificent occult powers. Moreover, the A-text twice joins the words art and perform and once the words magic, show, and perform to stress the histrionic nature of magical art. Thus, both the A- and B-texts open with a phrase rich in metadramatic nuances, “we must perform / The form of Faustus’ fortunes, good or bad” (Chorus 7; emphasis mine).31 Later, in answer to Faustus’s query concerning the devil dance and gifts of crowns and rich apparel, “What means this show?” Mephistopheles again stresses the association of these demonic divertissements with the stage, “Nothing, Faustus, but to delight thy mind withal / And to show thee what magic can perform” (2.1.83–85; emphasis mine). The chorus of act 4 similarly links magical art with acting, “What there he did in trial 29 Grantley suggests that in its juxtaposition of morality play masque—the Seven Deadly Sins interlude—and classical drama—the tableau with Alexander and his Paramour—the “play makes reference to the history of its own genre and the cultural history of the century,” “‘What meanes this shew’?” 233. 30 Renaissance Magic 132. 31 The metadramatic connotations of this phrase are noted by Cheney, Counterfeit Profession 193.

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of his art / I leave untold, your eyes shall see performed” (16–17; emphasis mine), and Faustus later pledges to the Emperor, “I am ready to accomplish your request, so far forth as by art and power of my spirit I am able to perform” (4.1.44–45; emphasis mine). In addition, the B-text adds Mephistopheles’s provocative promise that “any villainy thou canst devise, ... I’ll perform it” (B–3.1.86–87; emphasis mine). Finally, the A-text employs the polyvalent word “show” four times, the B-text, five. The first of these instances appears in both versions of Faustus’s opening soliloquy, in which Faustus pledges to “be a divine in show” (1.1.3; emphasis mine). On the one hand, he might here simply be implying that he will pretend to be a cleric while practicing other disciplines; however, metadramatically, this statement also reminds us that the actor playing Faustus mimics the role of a divine, thereby recalling the complaints of the antitheatrical tiraders against the “feigning” and “hypocrisy” of chameleon players. Later, the play thrice links demonic diversions with theatrical spectacles through the use of the word “show”: the devil dance and gifts of crowns and rich apparel, the masque of the Seven Deadly Sins, and the practical jokes played on the Pope are all identified as shows. However, the most provocative binding of actors with spirits occurs only in the B-text, thus rendering this instance problematic as evidence. In the episode in the Emperor’s court, Faustus raises spirits to present the semblances of Alexander and his Paramour. When the Emperor, carried away with enthusiasm, steps forward to embrace these simulacra Faustus warns, “My gracious lord, you do forget yourself / These are but shadows, not substantial” (4.1.103–104). The use of the term “shadows” here is extremely suggestive since, at this period, this multivalent word was frequently adopted to designate either spirits or actors. For example, Agrippa is famously credited with raising up spectral figures or “shadows,” and Faustus echoes this tradition when he boasts that he “Will be as cunning as Agrippa was, / Whose shadows made all Europe honor him” (1.1.119–20), an association also recalled by John Lyly in his reference to “Agrippa’s shadows” in his Prologue to Campaspe.32 Conversely, Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream employs the word to signify both “actors” and “spirits.” First, he links the fairies with shadows in Puck’s designation of Oberon as “king of shadows” (3.2.347).33 Later, Duke Theseus adopts this term to describe the rustic thespians, “The best in this kind [actors] are but shadows; and the worse are no worse, if imagination amend them” (5.1.210– 11). Finally, in Puck’s concluding apology to the audience, “If we shadows have offended, / Think but this and all is mended” (5.1.418–19), Shakespeare expands the term to include both the spirits of the wood and the actors playing their roles. The association of spirits with the term “shadows” is self-evident; the connection of

32 Among its many definitions of “shadow,” the Oxford English Dictionary includes “a spectral form, a phantom” (late ME). For a discussion of Agrippa and his “shadows,” see Bevington and Rassmussen n. 119–20. See also Lyly, “The Prologue at the Court,” Campaspe, ed. R. Warwick Bond. vol. 2. (1902; Oxford: Clarendon, 1967) 316. 33 All quotations from Shakespeare are taken from the edition edited by David Bevington, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). All citations will be included within the text of this essay.

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players with “shadows” probably derives ultimately from Plato, who denigrated all art, including the drama, as an imitation of an imitation, or a shadow of a shadow. Throughout the play, therefore, the theatrical terms art, show, perform, and shadow are linked with magic to accentuate the similarities between these two arts that employ fantasy and illusion as their media. III. If we accept the close association of drama and magic in the play, what then, we might ask, is the play’s final judgment of the occult and dramatic arts? This, I suggest, depends largely on one’s interpretation of the ethos of the play. As we are all aware, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus has traditionally invited multiple critical responses, ranging from those of Una Ellis-Fermor, who judges the play to be a highly subversive drama—indeed, the most Satanic tragedy that can be found—to those of Leo Kirschbaum, who interprets the play as an orthodox Christian tragedy.34 Commentators in the former camp express admiration for the magician’s aspiring mind and eloquent verse and compassion for his terrible fall; critics in the latter camp feel only contempt for Faustus’s inane tricks and generally little sympathy for his dire but chosen fate.35 Orthodox interpreters, who see magic as presented negatively in the play, have little difficulty in marshalling impressive evidence. Most obvious is the disparity between Faustus’s heroic aspirations and his limited achievements, in particular his failure to gain the control over spirits that he so desires, for although Faustus’s imagination may be the final cause of his many spectacles, it is never the efficient cause, since the magician must always work through the agency of Mephistopheles and his spirits, much as the playwright must rely on the director or stage manager and actors to bring his or her visions alive on the stage. Moreover, the play might also comment on the frustrations of the playwright at this time, who, like Faustus in his compliant response to both the Emperor and the Duchess, must go hither and thither seeking patronage, not only writing elegant classical masques but also scripting ridiculous interludes, even as Faustus (with the aid of Mephistopheles) must fetch grapes out of season for the pregnant Duchess and engage in jokes and sleight-of-hand tricks to please his audiences and win plaudits and acclaim. On a more profound level, the play might be concerned with the perils, as well as the frustrations, confronting the dramatic artist. A number of studies have traced Faustus’s descent throughout the play as an index of the degrading influence of magic on the occult artist, observing Faustus’s progressive demotion from eminent

34 Ellis-Fermor, The Frontiers of Drama (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946) 143; Kirschbaum, “Marlowe’s Faustus: A Reconsideration,” Review of English Studies 19 (1943): 229. 35 For a summary of these antithetical readings of the play, see Sara Munson Deats, “Marlowe’s Interrogative Dramas: Dido, Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus and Edward II,” Marlowe’s Empery: Expanding His Critical Contexts, ed. Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002) 117–20.

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academician to politician to court entertainer to jester to greengrocer.36 More central to my argument is Ian McAdam’s reading of the play as a haunting study of the uses and abuses of the imagination. As McAdam points out, at the beginning of his career as a magician, Faustus can distinguish between illusion and reality; he realizes that the actors in his little dramas are “shadows, not substantial.” However, gradually he becomes more and more seduced by his own fantasies, until ultimately he accepts the succubus masquerading as Helen as the fabled temptress herself.37 I would add that this retreat from reality is accompanied by increased participation in his own dramas, as he becomes less and less the objective presenter and more and more an actor submerged in his own spectacles.38 Ultimately, Faustus not only stars as the hero of his own romance with Helen, but the farcical interludes that he scripts are frequently enacted upon the stage of his own body, as he is dismembered in “show,” perhaps foreshadowing his actual dismemberment in the play’s horrific dénouement. Thus, on one level at least, Faustus’s tragedy might represent the catastrophe of the playwright for whom art has become the ultimate reality. Yet, I do not think that the play’s final judgment of dramatic art is entirely negative. I suggest that, from one perspective at least, the play can be seen as celebrating drama as a mode of radical subversion whereby the playwright/player, like the magician, can at least appear to invert all geographical, political, and social hierarchies, as Faustus aspires to do in one of his most soaring soliloquies: I’ll have them wall all Germany with brass And make swift Rhine circle fair Wittenberg. I’ll have them fill the public schools with silk, Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad. I’ll levy soldiers with the coin they bring And chase the Prince of Parma from our land, And reign sole king of all our provinces; ... (1.1.90–96)

As creator of his own world, the playwright can reformulate the geography of Europe (as Faustus seeks to do and as Shakespeare succeeds in doing in The Winter’s Tale); and as fashioner of another personality, the actor can assume the habiliments—and, temporarily, the power—of the king (as Faustus again aspires to do and as the actor playing Tamburlaine succeeds in doing in his eponymous play). In addition, the actor, by sporting the silks and satins of the aristocrats and nobles, turns topsyturvy all of the sumptuary laws of the period (as Faustus wishes to do by clothing the public school students in silks, and as many actors succeeded in doing at every 36 G. K. Hunter (“Five Act Structure in Doctor Faustus,” Tulane Drama Review 8.4 [1964]: 84–99) offers the most detailed analysis of Faustus’s descent down the ladder of the Renaissance professions from divine/philosopher/ physician/ lawyer to cosmographer to statesman to entertainer to errand boy, although the term “greengrocer” was coined by Helen Gardner (“Milton’s Satan and the Theme of Damnation in Elizabethan Tragedy,” English Studies [1948]: 46–66). 37 Irony and Identity 139. 38 Deats and Lisa Starks identify a parallel trajectory in The Jew of Malta; see “‘So neatly plotted, and so well perform’d’: Villain as Playwright in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta,” Theatre Journal 44 (1992): 385.

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performance at the Rose or Swan). Moreover, although Faustus never fulfills most of these aspirations, from first to last, he revels in his magical powers. Initially, contemplating the “world of profit and delight” promised to the studious artisan of the occult, Faustus gloats, “How am glutted with conceit of this!” (1.1.80). Later, even in the valley of the shadow of death and damnation, Faustus glories in his spectacles, boasting, “And what wonders I have done, all Germany can witness, yea, all the world” (5. 2.21–22), and, throughout the play, his fans—ranging from Emperor to Duke to students—laud his learning and his skill. Nevertheless, facing a terrifying death and perhaps an eternity of torture, immediately after boasting of his magical/theatrical prowess, Faustus condemns as deleterious these powers “for which Faustus hath lost both Germany and the world, yea, heaven itself” (5.2.22–23). Later, confronting the yawning abyss of hell, Faustus desperately rejects his theatrical magic, pledging to burn his books (5.2.123). What is the meaning of this phrase, one wonders? Is it an acceptance of the potential danger of both necromantic books and play scripts? Or is it a protest against an envious God—or an envious establishment—that demands that books of magic, or dramatic texts, be cast into the flames? Significantly, Envy, a character in the masque of the Seven Deadly Sins, cannot read and, like the dog in the manger, thus calls for all books to be burnt (2.3.133–34). Prospero manifests an ambivalence toward his theatrical magic very similar to that revealed by Faustus. Like Faustus, immediately after extolling his supernatural or theatrical feats, Prospero rejects his art, vowing to break his staff and drown (rather than burn) his book (Tempest, 5.1.33–57). Thus, at the end of both plays, the two magicians become disillusioned with their occult texts, the sources of much of their magical power. All of these factors—Faustus’s agonized promise to burn his magical texts, the limitation of his power, his descent through the professions, and his horrendous end seem to suggest Marlowe’s profound skepticism concerning the efficacy of his art and his premonition that the established forces of his society might finally eradicate the rebellious playwright even as the authoritarian theological powers destroy the mutinous magician in the play. Ultimately, I submit, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus evokes ambivalent responses to both magic and the theater, and, in so doing, deeply probes two of the central controversies of the age: the society’s conflicted attitude toward the occult and its love/hate relationship with the stage. In its judgment of dramatic art, therefore, as in its verdict on magic, Doctor Faustus remains Marlowe’s most interrogative drama.

Chapter 2

Marlowe’s Edward II and the Early Playhouse Audiences Ruth Lunney University of Newcastle

There was a revolution in the London playhouses in the late 1580s and early 1590s, and central to it were the early performances of Marlowe’s plays. The key to understanding that revolution lies less in what we notice when we read the play texts—the “mighty line,” the notorious and notable characters, the subversive possibilities of the ideas—than in what the early audiences noticed when they saw and attempted to make sense of the action on stage. Marlowe’s real innovation—his real subversion, if you will—was the empowering of his contemporary audience. This essay will focus on how this happened at the early performances of Edward II. What can we know of that contemporary audience and its experiences in the playhouse? Or, for that matter, how these experiences may have changed in the late 1580s and early 1590s? Theorists of drama recognize the audience as essential to performance, but defining the nature, responses, and theatrical experience of any specific audience—especially at a distance of more than 400 years—has always proven elusive.1 Studies of the audiences contemporary with Marlowe have sought answers in social composition, psychology, and theatrical tastes. Andrew Gurr suggests that these audiences were socially diverse, responsive to a late 1580s “increase in the emotional immediacy of the play’s subject matter” and preoccupied with questions of power, justice, and religious doubt.2 Thomas Cartelli argues that they possessed a “psychic disposition” towards arrogance, violence, irreverence, and the pursuit of

1 On the “centrality” of the audience see, for example, Stanton B. Garner, The Absent Voice: Narrative Comprehension in the Theater (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1989) 176 n. 20. Most theorists of drama, such as Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1997), focus on modern audiences. Two recent studies of early modern audiences with some relevance to Marlowe are Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Jeremy Lopez, Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 2 Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 132; 135–53.

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novelty.3 Explanations of audience response in the playhouses have focused on either theatrical pleasure and/or ambivalence. For Cartelli, this pleasure derives from the fulfillment of transgressive fantasies as well as the “clash” between these fantasies and the satisfactions of orthodox ideas and feelings.4 Other studies suggest more diversity in audience experience. Theatrical pleasure, according to Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin, is not limited to fantasizing: it starts with “sight and sound,” and includes constructing meanings, enlisting passions, and an awareness of the metatheatrical.5 Jeremy Lopez stresses the collective enjoyment of audiences: of theater-going as a social experience; of plays for their variety, self-reflexivity, and multi-level complexity; and, above all, of “responding, visibly, audibly, and physically.”6 Ambivalence—of emotion, attitude, and thought—is commonly assumed to be a feature of response to Marlowe’s plays, for spectators as well as readers. This ambivalence may result, as Cartelli suggests, from “transgressive or heterodox material in the plays themselves and in the conditions of their performance.”7 Or it may arise from conflicting modes of action, as J. R. Mulryne and Stephen Fender suggest of Tamburlaine and Edward II: realistic action contradicts emblematic action, evoking an audience response that is “balanced in uncertainty between opposing attitudes.” 8 Sara Munson Deats explores the contradictory readings that are possible for Marlowe’s “dialogic dramas,” with their “anamorphic portraits,” their “contradictory images [which] balance without reconciliation,” their “deeply conflicted attitudes toward the imagination,” and notes the “agonized ambivalence … inscribed throughout the entire play” of Edward II. 9 There are two difficulties, however, with the emphasis on ambivalence, especially when this feature is used to explain the revolutionary difference of Marlowe’s plays. The first is simply that ambivalent responses are evoked by most plays contemporary with those of Marlowe. A collection of heterogeneous material and a medley of styles and/or modes were entirely consistent with theatrical tastes and tradition. The second is that in explaining ambivalent responses, many studies view the audience as essentially passive, ready to be acted upon by elements in the play text, or in the play text as performed. But audiences are also active participants, and their responses are not necessarily determined or limited by what is presented on stage. In

3 Thomas Cartelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991) 44–64. 4 Cartelli 27; 9-37. Cartelli models theatrical experience on Freudian lines as an “economy” of “engagement” and “resistance.” 5 Dawson and Yachnin 7. 6 Lopez 33–4. 7 Cartelli xiv. 8 J. R. Mulryne and Stephen Fender, “Marlowe and the Comic Distance,” Christopher Marlowe, ed. Brian Morris (London: Ernest Benn, 1968) 64. 9 Sara Munson Deats, “Marlowe’s Interrogative Drama: Dido, Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, and Edward II,” Marlowe’s Empery: Expanding His Critical Contexts, ed. Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002) 113, 117, 120, 124.

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particular, they bring with them into the theater certain expectations based upon their experience, theatrical and everyday. 10 Exploring the expectations of the “active” audience offers a useful approach to analyzing response and assessing change in theatrical experience. As Raymond Williams comments, “An audience is always the most decisive inheritance, in any art. It is the way in which people have learned to see and respond that creates the first essential condition for drama.”11 A significant element in these expectations is genre, and most studies of audience expectations have centered on this. G. K. Hunter adopts genre as a useful framework for surveying “fashions and practices” in the English drama from 1586 to 1642: “the presence of Comedy, History, and Tragedy as Elizabethan stage conventions shows the relevance for an audience not only of formal distinctions but also of the different qualities of vision they promote.” 12 These “different qualities of vision” underlie Georgia Brown’s recent discussion of how “the combination of lyric and narrative modes in Marlowe’s play [Edward II] resists the ideological implications of the [Holinshed’s] Chronicles” on the nature of “Englishness.”13 Identifying theatrical conventions also helps us to recognize the expectations of early audiences, with instances ranging from dramatic construction to character to staging discussed in such classic studies as those by Muriel C. Bradbrook, Alan Dessen, and Richard Southern.14 In a more recent study, Lopez explores “moments, habits, and conventions in the drama that are so pervasive that they all but demand to be taken for granted,” including genre but also sexual puns and wordplay, expository speeches and asides.15 To fully understand the role of audience expectations, however, we need to go beyond genre and stage conventions to something more fundamental. The first impulse of an audience is to make sense of what is seen, to construct narratives and impose meaning. As Stanton B. Garner comments, “From a performance’s opening moments, spectators engage in the process of scanning the stage and its activities, looking for material from which they can elaborate a narrative framework, corroborating this data

10 On the audience as both active and passive, see Marco De Marinis, “Dramaturgy of the Spectator,” trans. Paul Dwyer, The Drama Review 31.2 (Summer 1987): 100–114. 11 Raymond Williams, Drama in Performance, rev. ed. (London: Watts, 1968) 178. 12 G. K. Hunter, English Drama 1586–1642: The Age of Shakespeare, Oxford History of English Literature, vol. 6 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997) 5. On the significance of genre, see also Roslyn Knutson, “Marlowe Reruns: Repertorial Commerce and Marlowe’s Plays in Revival,” Marlowe’s Empery: Expanding His Critical Contexts, ed. Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002) 25–42. 13 Georgia E. Brown, “Tampering with the Records: Engendering the Political Community and Marlowe’s Appropriation of the Past in Edward II,” Marlowe’s Empery: Expanding His Critical Contexts, ed. Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002) 165. 14 Muriel C. Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Alan C. Dessen, “Shakespeare and the Theatrical Conventions of His Time,” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Richard Southern, The Staging of Plays before Shakespeare (London: Faber & Faber, 1973). 15 Lopez 4.

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with their expectations and what they have already formulated.”16 Marlowe’s audiences arrived at the playhouse with a headful of expectations—based on their cultural experiences generally as well as their viewing of plays—that stories incorporating their preoccupations or fantasies would be told in particular ways and draw upon particular patterns of response. This essay will explore these “narrative expectations” and their implications for contemporary theatrical experience. Edward II fulfilled but also profoundly challenged the expectations of its early 1590s audiences. It established a relationship between the audience and the action on stage that was both like and quite unlike that constructed by other plays these audiences may have seen. Many of these other plays, as Dessen points out, were late moralities: “We may read Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, but they saw plays like The Trial of Treasure, The Tide Tarrieth No Man, and Apius and Virginia.”17 By the early 1590s, audiences had also seen Tamburlaine and its imitations, as well as Shakespeare’s first comedies and the earliest English history plays: dramas such as The Famous Victories of Henry V, The Troublesome Reign of King John (in two Parts), and the three Parts of Shakespeare’s Henry VI. The similarities between Edward II and these other plays need to be emphasized, since many critical accounts overlook what was traditional, conventional, or distinctive for the play’s first audiences. Like other earlier and contemporary plays, Edward presented an imperfect world of ambiguous signs and deceptive appearances, cultivated ironic contrasts, and displayed a certain cynicism about politics and those in power. None of these features is new to Marlowe’s plays or, for that matter, to Shakespeare’s. They can all be found in many plays that survive from the 1580s and early 1590s, from the late morality The Three Ladies of London (early 1580s) to Lodge and Greene’s A Looking Glass for London and England (c. 1590) to Shakespeare’s Richard III. The morality tradition of social criticism outlasted the morality-style narrative and is especially notable in plays before 1595.18 Where Edward II was most radically unlike those other plays was in its dramatic rhetoric,19 and specifically in its use of the exemplum. This was a distinctive, conventional technique: an example with a point to it, a particular instance that the ordinary reader or spectator could see as illustrating some general “truth.” In literary and other discourse the exemplum took a variety of forms. In sixteenth-century usage, it could be a fable, proverb, parable, or even a narrative used in the interests of copia to

16 Garner 9. See also Bernard Beckerman, “Theatrical Perception,” Theatre Research International n.s. 4 (1979): 167; Marvin Carlson, Theatre Semiotics: Signs of Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) 7. 17 Alan C. Dessen, Shakespeare and the Late Moral Plays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987) 163. 18 On earlier plays, see Simon Shepherd, Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester, 1986); Margot Heinemann, “Political Drama,” The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 173–7. 19 For additional discussion of “dramatic rhetoric,” see Ruth Lunney, Marlowe and the Popular Tradition: Innovation in the English Drama before 1595 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002) 15–25.

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develop a theme.20 In writings on rhetoric, the exemplum was highly valued as a method of persuasion, as a way of pre-packaging (it was hoped) interpretation and emotional response. George Puttenham recites commonplace views of history, morality, and exempla when he comments about “historicall Poesie” that “no kinde of argument in all the Oratorie craft, doth better perswade and more universally satisfie then example … to behold as it were in a glasse the lively image of our deare forefathers, their noble and vertuous maner of life.”21 Exemplary rhetoric was indeed of wide cultural significance. It was a familiar, even habitual, way of guiding the approach to events and decisions, real or fictional, in schoolrooms, congregations, and everyday life. Stephen Greenblatt refers to the “culturally dominant” view that “recurrent patterns exist in the history of individuals or nations in order to inculcate crucial moral values,” with literature taking its place as “part of a vast, interlocking system of repetitions, embracing homilies and hangings, royal progresses and rote learning.”22 History, in particular, taught lessons: that was its point. As David Riggs comments, “The working assumption is that any historical narrative will yield ‘lessons’ of all sorts.”23 As Joel B. Altman shows, educational practice followed Cicero in stressing the need to relate the individual instance to some general principle, and the general to the specific. Much of the study of classical texts in the schools, dramatic texts included, involved finding notable passages and citing them—often quite detached from their contexts—as illustrations of ideas worth remembering. These exempla then provided material for the commonplace book that every student was expected to compile. The process was one that relied upon the recognition of conventional wisdom, with exempla identified and sorted according to conventional “topics.”24 Our consideration of exempla in the drama, nevertheless, needs to go beyond recognizing instances of them and beyond their use to inculcate moral lessons or conventional values. This essay will direct attention to the rhetorical possibilities of exempla in the theater, in particular to the impact of these exempla on the expectations of Marlowe’s early audiences. In the playhouse, the exemplum might take the form of an anecdote or a description of a character, a ceremony or passage of action, even a visual sign. Its significance might be announced by a Prologue or Chorus, or developed by commentary and motto. Until late in the sixteenth century, the exemplum was the key to organizing theatrical experience, to shaping interpretation and response. In the moralities, which 20 For useful general surveys of the concept, forms, and uses of the exemplum, see James I. Wimsatt, Allegory and Mirror: Tradition and Structure in Middle English Literature (New York: Pegasus, 1970); Marjorie Donker and George M. Muldrow, Dictionary of LiteraryRhetorical Conventions of the English Renaissance (London: Greenwood, 1982); John D. Lyons, introduction, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, c. 1989). 21 George Puttenham, The Arte Of English Poesie, 1589, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker, 1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) 39. 22 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) 201. 23 David Riggs, Shakespeare’s Heroical Histories: Henry VI and Its Literary Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971) 97; see also 40–51. 24 Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) 130–34.

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were structured typically as thesis and demonstration, exempla were the building blocks of dramatic construction. These plays commonly employed a series of scenes proving one thing or another: Like Will to Like, for example, presents a series of comic demonstrations that the wicked will end up in each other’s company. The same accumulative pattern is not uncommon in the history plays of the 1590s.25 As well as organizing experience, exempla provided the building blocks of thought. When sixteenth-century playgoers entered the playhouse, they expected to make sense of the action by identifying the exempla and then reading through them to some received or conventional wisdom. In performance, the exempla provided the spectators with structures of interpretation: specific ways for them to make sense of what they saw. They could be read through to reveal eternal “truths” about the universe, or about social experience or political behavior or human nature. In this way, the exemplum drew upon a shared understanding of the “obvious”: what is “good”; what is “important”; or how someone “ought” to behave. Truths such as these were relevant to the theatrical moment, without necessarily becoming the principal “message” of the play. Exempla might, as with Puttenham’s “deare forefathers,” offer a positive lesson; more often, perhaps, they provided cautionary tales. In this, they followed the tradition of “mirror” literature, establishing an image of the ideal, of “what should be,” or providing a warning or caution.26 William Baldwin’s “Dedication” to The Mirror for Magistrates (1559) typifies the point of view: “For here as in a loking glas, you shall see (if any vice be in you) howe the like hath bene punished in other heretofore, whereby admonished, I trust it will be a good occasion to move you to the soner amendement.”27 The early play Cambises, which may have been familiar to many in Marlowe’s audience from reprintings in the 1580s, is a collection of such cautionary tales.28 When the corrupt judge Sisamnes is flayed alive and his skin used as a seat-cover, it is not just an exercise in regal cruelty but also a salutary lesson to future judges. The incident exemplifies proper justice, and even Sisamnes’s own son agrees: “O King, to me this is a glasse, with greef in it I view: / Example that unto your grace, I doo not prove untrue” (469–70). When Cambises shoots the son of Praxapes through the heart, or has Murder and Crueltie kill his own brother, the incidents exemplify tyranny. The moralizing comments may be brief but, on each occasion, the spectators are left in no doubt of the lessons to be drawn. The exemplary element is still strong in the popular drama between 1585 and 1595, as

25 On the structure of thesis and demonstration, see Dessen, Late Moral Plays 135. Altman identifies two basic structures: “demonstrative” and “exploratory,” in which different views of a situation were tested. 26 “Mirror” was also used to refer to a comprehensive collection of material or stories. See Wimsatt 137–63. 27 The Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell (1938; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1960) 65–6. 28 Thomas Preston, A Critical Edition of Thomas Preston’s Cambises, ed. Robert Carl Johnson (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1975). Cambises was written in the 1560s, perhaps for court performance; but “Cambyses vein” was familiar enough to a playhouse audience to be alluded to in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV in the late 1590s.

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seen in Lodge and Greene’s A Looking Glass for London and England.29 In this version of the biblical story, the wickedness of Nineveh—demonstrated in plenty of sensational detail—and the repentance of its inhabitants are used to provide a warning for the sinful city of London, place of “[c]orruption, whordome, drunkennesse, and pride.” The play ends with the prophet Jonas proclaiming its exemplary message: “London awake, for feare the Lord do frowne, / I set a looking Glasse before thine eyes. / O turne, O turne, with weeping to the Lord” (232). Sixteenth-century audiences were familiar with cautionary tales, familiar too with the rhetorical strategies employed by their narrators. One notable non-theatrical example of the cautionary tale is the account of Marlowe’s death by Thomas Beard, first published in The Theatre of Gods Judgements in 1597. In this, Beard rehearses his version of Marlowe’s scandalous career and sensational death, offering his readers a particular interpretive narrative: the death, he claims, is “a manifest signe of Gods judgement”: The manner of his death being so terrible (for hee even cursed and blasphemed to his last gaspe, and togither with his breath an oth flew out of his mouth) that it was not only a manifest signe of Gods judgement, but also an horrible and fearefull terrour to all that beheld him. But herein did the justice of God most notably appeare, in that hee compelled his owne hand which had written those blasphemies to be the instrument to punish him, and that in his braine, which had devised the same.

The lesson is plain: all atheists should learn “from the remembrance and consideration of this example” to mend their ways or expect a similar fate.30 Edward’s death by poker is, potentially, another such cautionary tale.31 It contains many of the same rhetorical elements as Beard’s version of Marlowe’s death: the precisely visualized horror; the strong emotion; the suggestions of supernatural intervention and poetic justice. And yet the impact of Edward’s death is quite unlike that of other deserved deaths in sixteenth-century plays. No one grieves for Cambises or Richard III or Barabas. In performance especially, the death of Edward is more disturbing and challenging than any of these. While this difference in impact has suggested to some that Marlowe rejects the cautionary tale, he by no means abandons the exemplary method. Instead, he redirects its rhetoric to serve different theatrical 29 Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene, A Looking Glasse for London and England by Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene: A Critical Edition, ed. George Alan Clugston (New York: Garland Publishing, 1980). 30 Thomas Beard, The Theatre of Gods Judgements: Or, A Collection of Histories out of Sacred, Ecclesiasticall, and prophane Authours, concerning the admirable Judgements of God upon the transgressours of his commandements (n.p.: n.p., 1597) 147–8. Revised and expanded editions appeared 1612, 1631, and (posthumously) 1647. 31 Charles R. Forker comments: “the sensational method of Edward’s death was notorious, and Elizabethan audiences, who were anything but squeamish, would have expected to see it represented even if ... the actual penetration was shielded from full view” (Edward the Second, ed. Charles R. Forker, Revels Plays [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994] 306–7, n. 5.5.30). For a contrary view (Edward was pressed to death), see Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) 47–9.

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purposes. A new relationship is established between the audience and the action on stage, with individuals now able, if they choose, to construct their own non-conventional interpretive narratives. This revolution in theatrical experience, with its empowering of the audience, emerges most clearly in the final scenes: in Edward’s murder and the action which follows. Before then, however, the exemplary rhetoric of the play offers the spectators something more consistent with their expectations and experience. The exempla before Edward’s death suggest that the play is yet another exemplary history and that the spectators are to interpret the action in terms of some stable set of traditional values. As with other history plays of the time, the action is much concerned with issues that were the commonplaces of contemporary historical discussion. Edward’s kingdom is shown as suffering from the disruptive forces of lust, ambition, and pride (like the kingdom of Henry VI). Edward’s failings as king are attributed to the standard causes, such as the influence of evil counselors and flatterers (much the same is urged against Richard II). At various times the characters rehearse the standard justifications for and arguments against rebellion—appealing to heaven, to justice, to tradition, to the good of the realm, and even to the successful use of armed force. As the 1598 title page suggests, the careers of Edward, Gaveston, and Mortimer serve to illustrate different versions of de casibus tragedy, with its conventional warnings against setting too high a value upon earthly glory: “The troublesome raigne and lamentable death of Edward the second, King of England: with the tragicall fall of proud Mortimer: And also the life and death of Peirs Gaveston, the great Earle of Cornewall, and mighty favorite of king Edward the second.” Edward’s “fall” (4.7) is accompanied by a whole series of choric commentaries on the reversal of fortune: by Edward himself, Leicester, the Abbot, and Edward’s friends. “My heart with pity earns to see this sight,” mourns the Abbot, “A king to bear these words and proud commands” (Edward 4.7.70–71). Other instances invoke traditional values even as they exemplify political disorder: when Edward shares his throne with Gaveston (1.4.8–34), the barons respond with assorted allusions to other reversals of order (“Quam male conveniunt”; “ignoble vassal, that like Phaethon …”; “Can kingly lions fawn on creeping ants?”). The confrontation is conducted in terms that call the audience’s attention to the ideal hierarchical order that is being breached. King and barons may disagree, but the exemplum directs attention to traditional values as the standard by which their actions are to be judged. 32 This exemplary action is reflected in a conventional visual language, which provides an extended series of references to traditional values, thereby meeting the expectations

32 Though the terms of the confrontation suggest traditional values, the actual political stances of Edward and his opponents could well represent something more radical. The vocabulary of political arguments shifts during the play, with confrontations conducted in the language of rank and hierarchy in the first half; then, from the scene of Gaveston’s capture (2.5), the important terms become “honour” (associated ironically with breaches of trust), “right,” and “justice” (the latter two are not used before 2.5, nor after Edward’s abdication). “Right” is used in legitimizing claims to power, as are “God”/”god” and “Nature.” For a variety of views on the political stance of the play, see, for example, Brown; Michael Hattaway, Elizabethan Popular Theatre (London: Routledge, 1982); Claude J. Summers, Christopher Marlowe and the Politics of Power (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1974).

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of early audiences.33 In considering how early audiences may have responded, we need to take into account the many moments of ritualized action, even (or especially) incidents in which order is disturbed or ceremony is disrupted.34 David Bevington and James Shapiro note the significance, for example, of Edward’s “visual transformation” after his arrest: “For an Elizabethan audience, the image of a king reduced to appalling physical indignity is at once a shocking affront to proper ceremonial form and a reminder of the impermanence of all worldly prosperity.”35 Edward II does offer images of conventional order. Martha Hester Fleischer points out that early performances drew upon the visual vocabulary of royal power common to plays of the period: the king enthroned, the rituals of court, triumph, and coronation.36 The play’s “image of perfectly functioning government”37 occurs in the fourth scene when Edward is reconciled with the nobles, and the reconciliation is sealed by their kneeling to the king, as one by one they are assigned a special place in the restored “order” (1.4.336–66). Queen Isabella calls upon the audience to recognize the conventional message of the scene: “Now is the king of England rich and strong, / Having the love of his renowned peers” (1.4.365–66). Except for the scenes of capture (4.7) and abdication (5.1), such emblematic moments in Edward are brief, but in this it differs little from a play such as 3 Henry VI with its brawling between royal factions. Indeed the sense of “truth” in these ceremonial moments may well be amplified by the way in which most of them are set apart from the narrative, almost detachable like the exempla of a school text. Isabella’s choric comment above, for instance, relates specifically to what is seen on stage at that moment, with little relevance either to the preceding action or, for that matter, to her own opinion. The play’s early audiences could read through these exempla of political order and disorder in the traditional manner, placing them within a conventional narrative framework and interpreting them as referring to a system of providential and hierarchical

33 The visual language of Edward II is not, however, only or always conventional. Indeed, the play’s revolutionary use of theatrical space provides the audience with an additional dimension of response. See Lunney 177–9. 34 On the “emotionalism” of the playhouse drama generally, see Gurr 132–7. 35 Modern productions, on the other hand, have emphasized the personal and sexual at the expense of the ceremonial, substituting, in effect, other rituals of behavior. For the stage history from the 1590s to 1992, see Forker, introduction, Edward the Second 99–116; also (to 1986) George L. Geckle, Tamburlaine and Edward II: Text and Performance (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Hum. P. Intl., 1988). 36 David Bevington and James Shapiro, “‘What are kings, when regiment is gone?’ The Decay of Ceremony in Edward II,” “A Poet and a filthy Play-maker”: New Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill, and Constance B. Kuriyama (New York: AMS, 1988) 275. 37 Martha Hester Fleischer, The Iconography of the English History Play (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1974). For the play’s emblematic dimension, see also Bevington and Shapiro; W. Moelwyn Merchant, introduction, Edward the Second, ed. W. Moelwyn Merchant, New Mermaids (London: Ernest Benn, 1967); Mulryne and Fender 57–64; David Hard Zucker, Stage and Image in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg, 1972).

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values. The instances may be mostly negative, but this is not at all unusual in the history plays of the late 1580s and early 1590s. Nor are disputes over the meaning of exempla, which are common in plays contemporary with Edward II. Many of these plays have an episodic narrative structure, with periodic pauses to debate the exempla that arise in the narrative. In the anonymous play The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England (staged late 1580s, printed 1591), “five moons appear” at the moment of John’s crowning; they are interpreted by characters first as ominous, then as auspicious, but always with patent political bias (2 Troublesome Reign, 1665–1717).38 Other notable instances are found in the early history plays of Shakespeare, with their disputes in gardens and council chambers and battlefields about the meanings of particular events and actions. For all this, however, the spectators are left in little doubt where the “truth” lies. Another feature Edward II shares with its contemporaries is its emotionalism. Appealing to the emotions of an audience, notifying them how to feel, was an intrinsic part of exemplary rhetoric. This was especially true of the playhouse drama of the late 1580s and early 1590s, in which exemplary incidents exhibit a notable lack of restraint in either visual or verbal rhetoric.39 A glimpse of the possible audience response (allowing perhaps for some rhetorical amplification) is to be found in the often-cited comments by Thomas Nashe on the death of Talbot in 1 Henry VI, a popular play at the Rose in the early 1590s: “How would it have joyed brave Talbot (the terror of the French) to thinke that … hee should triumphe againe on the Stage, and have his bones newe embalmed with the teares of ten thousand spectators at least.”40 Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays have few rational discussions but plenty of harrowing death scenes, complete with exemplary messages. There are numerous instances: one especially horrific death in a chain of killings is the ritual stabbing on stage of the young Prince, heir to Henry VI, by the three vengeful sons of York (King Edward, Richard of Gloucester, and George of Clarence). The pathos of Queen Margaret’s lament is evident in its opening words: “O Ned, sweet Ned, speak to thy mother, boy! / Canst thou not speak? O traitors! murderers!” (3 Henry VI 5.5.49–50).41 But this is ironically (of course) the same Queen Margaret who has incited the ritual murder of York, not long after he described her as having a “tiger’s heart wrapp’d in a woman’s hide” (1.4.137) for her part in the death of another child, his youngest son Rutland—the victim of another piece of on-stage butchery. As moments like these indicate, exemplary incidents in these plays—and for that matter in other contemporary plays like the anonymous Arden of Faversham or Troublesome Reign—exploit the Senecan rhetoric of Kyd and the “mighty line” of Tamburlaine to persuade audiences to experience intensely, even as they see and feel appropriately.

38 Fleischer 33. 39 Anonymous, The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England, Six Early Plays. ed. E. B. Everitt and R. L. Armstrong, Anglistica 14 (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde, 1965). 40 Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse, His Supplication to the Divell (1592; Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1924) 87. 41 William Shakespeare, The Third Part of King Henry VI, ed. Andrew S. Cairncross, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1964).

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The same stirring of conventional passions can be seen in Edward II, most notably in the sequence from the king’s capture to his ritual shaving. These scenes emphasize Edward’s fall from high estate and the acute suffering that ensues—largely irrespective of any earlier exempla showing the king’s foolish or willful or even resolute behavior. As in other contemporary plays, words and action show little restraint. Exaggerated gestures—“Here, man, rip up this panting breast of mine” (4.7.66)—are accompanied by highly emotional outbursts, as when Edward describes his mind as filled “with strange despairing thoughts, / Which thoughts are martyrèd with endless torments” (79–80). Alternatively, characters resort to the frankly platitudinous: “but of this I am assured, / That death ends all, and I can die but once” (5.1.152–53). There is little indeed in the “fall” sequence to challenge conventional sentiments. After all this vigorous but quite ordinary lamentation, after all the exempla of order and disorder, Edward’s death scene might seem at first to function simply as one of a series, fulfilling for the audience the patterns of expectation and response that earlier exempla have encouraged. From this perspective, the death by poker presents an extreme version of the fall from high estate, as well as suggesting another traditional notion for the audience to recognize: that sins are, or should be, punished appropriately. As Merchant comments, “That suffering and death should bear an appropriate relation to sins committed is a commonplace of mediaeval thought, theological, literary or aesthetic.”42 Some such lesson is supported by what a number of writers identify as symmetries of structure: inversions and parallels that link action near the end of the play with that occurring earlier.43 The weight of the play’s action—its ironies of structure, the values implicit in its exempla—could well suggest that an audience should accept Edward’s death as a “manifest sign.” And probably many of its early spectators did so, reading Edward’s death as an instance of poetic justice. Indeed the deaths that follow Edward’s—Lightborn’s in response to the riddling message he carries (“Pereat iste”), Mortimer’s from betrayal by his own instrument, “false Gurney”—continue to suggest to the audience some kind of providential intervention. The cruelty of Edward’s death, however, despite the protestations of many modern critics, was not necessarily a challenge to any orthodox views or expectations.44 In 42 Merchant xxi. The nature of these sins is still controversial: are they political or personal or sexual? Holinshed’s view is that Edward lacked the judgment to choose “sage and discreet councellors” (Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland 2:587–8; rpt. Raphael Holinshed, The Third Volume of Chronicles [1586; London: n.p., 1807; New York: AMS, 1965]). Modern commentators tend to see the “poetic justice” in sexual terms. Productions of the play since the late 1960s have featured the homosexual element; see Forker, introduction 107–16; Robertson interview in Geckle 96–7. 43 See, for example, Sara Munson Deats, “Marlowe’s Fearful Symmetry in Edward II,” “A Poet and a filthy Play-maker”: New Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill, and Constance B. Kuriyama (New York: AMS, 1988) 241–62; Bevington and Shapiro 273–6. 44 Greenblatt contends that Marlowe uses “the emblematic method of admonitory drama … to such devastating effect that the audience recoils from it in disgust” (203). Many critics argue for a double response (poetic justice, but abhorrent), including Janet Clare, “Marlowe’s ‘theatre of cruelty,’” Constructing Christopher Marlowe, ed. J. A. Downie and J. T. Parnell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 81; Douglas Cole, Suffering and Evil in the

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such cautionary tales, the horror of the event is also its implicit authentication; and the stronger the emotional response, the more cogent the moral lesson. Indeed, reacting with horror was an appropriate and quite conventional response to cautionary tales. It had both aesthetic and didactic satisfactions: the audience was called on to indulge in the pleasures of participating in the sensational, as well as the pleasures of selfrighteousness. These were the excitements of the playhouse—which the audience had paid to see—not only those in Marlowe’s Edward II but in many other plays of the time (The Spanish Tragedy, for example, or Titus Andronicus, or Henry VI). The regular playgoer would have seen any number of bloody murders and bloody dismemberments, complete with bladders of blood or vinegar, dripping swords, scaffolds, and appropriate sound effects.45 It is not the horror of Edward’s death that disrupts audience expectations; rather, how the scene changes the way that spectators might see (observe and interpret) the action. Their theatrical experience is cast adrift from the old moralizing generalities. In the closing scenes of Edward II, Marlowe challenges the tradition of exemplary rhetoric in two significant ways. The first involved calling upon the audience to observe differently. The death scene offers the audience a new kind of dramatic experience that suggests that cautionary tales are irrelevant. The death by poker is different from earlier exempla in redirecting the spectators’ attention from moral lesson to moments of experience. Instead of attending to any message, the spectators are first distracted, and then absorbed, by the spectacle of the king’s suffering. From the moment that the jailers Matrevis and Gurney enter, words and action confront the spectators with individual, rather than representative, experience. Their attention is compelled by a shift to concrete, sensuous imagery and a moment-by-moment account of sensations— the stifling “savour” of the dungeon, the “mire and puddle,” the beating drum, the loss of coherence, the physical and emotional exhaustion: GURNEY. I opened but the door to throw him meat, And I was almost stifled with the savour ... . . . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . . .. . . . . . . . EDWARD. And there in mire and puddle have I stood This ten days’ space; and lest that I should sleep, One plays continually upon a drum. (5.5.8–9, 58–60)

Edward’s anticipations of death are presented in terms of immediate physical sensations: he can “see” his death “written in thy [Lightborn’s] brows” (5.5.73). When he tries to forget his premonitions, involuntary fear makes him tremble: “Still fear I, and I know not what’s the cause, / But every joint shakes” (5.5.84–85). Disoriented from Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962) 184–6; Huston Diehl, “The Iconography of Violence in English Renaissance Tragedy,” Renaissance Drama n.s. 11 (1980): 43. Cartelli (135) argues that Marlowe in effect “encourages the audience to will Edward’s murder, to participate vicariously in the climactic act of demystification it observes.” 45 On public displays of “justice” in Renaissance England and Europe, see Karen Cunningham, “Renaissance Execution and Marlovian Elocution: The Drama of Death,” PMLA 105.2 (March 1990): 219.

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suffering, his perceptions are distorted: “So that, for want to sleep and sustenance / My mind’s distempered, and my body’s numbed, / And whether I have limbs or no I know not” (5.5.62–64). These distortions dominate his final moments, when his awareness of his surroundings (and of the intentions of Lightborn) fluctuates as he drifts between sleep and waking: But that grief keeps me waking, I should sleep; For not these ten days have these eyes’ lids clos’d. Now as I speak they fall, and yet with fear Open again. O wherefore sits thou here? (92–5)

In this state he hears a voice that “buzzeth in mine ears” (5.5.102), like the halfapprehended Angel voices of Faustus (the Bad Angel also “buzzeth”). His confusion is exacerbated by Lightborn’s “assailing” (5.5.12) of his mind: the false show of sympathy (5.5.49–50), the ambiguous promises (5.5.80–81), the pretense of consideration (5.5.91). Specific, striking detail is not unusual in exemplary rhetoric. Indeed, the persuasiveness of the cautionary tale had always depended upon the extent to which it engaged its audience. Plays contemporary with Edward II attempted to secure greater emotional impact by complicating what audiences saw, by drawing attention to more detail, especially concrete, visible (or strongly imagined) onstage detail.46 In The Spanish Tragedy, for instance, Hieronymo holds aloft “this handkercher besmear’d with blood” and points to “those wounds that yet are bleeding fresh” (Spanish Tragedy 2.5.51, 53). In these other plays, however, the detail is not detached from the message. The bloody handkerchief and wounds serve to amplify the effects of Hieronymo’s vow of certain vengeance and Isabella’s pious commonplaces: “The heavens are just, murder cannot be hid, / Time is the author both of truth and right, / And time will bring this treachery to light. (Spanish Tragedy 2.5.57–59).47 By about 1595, a few years after Edward II, contemporary experiments with emotive details culminate in scenes such as that in Shakespeare’s King John in which the virtuous Prince Arthur dissuades his keeper Hubert from putting out his eyes. Each section of this lengthy dialogue elaborates upon things seen on stage: brows, eyes, tongue, fire, iron, cords. Near the end of the scene, the iron cools and Hubert vows to “revive” it. Arthur replies: And if you do, you will but make it blush And glow with shame of your proceedings, Hubert: Nay, it perchance will sparkle in your eyes;

46 On contemporary experiments in rhetoric, see Wolfgang Clemen, “Some Aspects of Style in the Henry VI Plays,” Shakespeare’s Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir, ed. Philip Edwards, Inga-Stina Ewbank, and G. K. Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) 9–24; A. R. Braunmuller, “Early Shakespearian Tragedy and Its Contemporary Context: Cause and Emotion in Titus Andronicus, Richard III, and The Rape of Lucrece,” Shakespearian Tragedy, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer (London: Edward Arnold, 1984) 97–128. 47 Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. Philip Edwards, Revels Plays (London: Methuen, 1959).

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Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe And, like a dog that is compell’d to fight, Snatch at his master that doth tarre him on. (King John 4.1.112–16) 48

This passage derives its emotional impact from its specificity, from its calling attention—as in Edward’s death scene—to what the audience can see and anchoring this in ordinary experience. Like Edward’s death scene, this moment in King John lingers on the details of the visual signs that the spectators perceive before them. On the other hand, Arthur’s words do not invite an audience to focus on moment-bymoment, non-representative experience nor make sense of the action in any individual way. Instead, the spectators are called upon to observe and then to comprehend the message behind the signs in the familiar, traditional way. The explication is orderly and predictable, with no sense of confused perception, no disorderly overflow of detail. The visual signs, for all their particularity and their appropriateness to the childcharacter (as Hunter suggests),49 are nonetheless representative; and the lingering on them provides above all an emotional reinforcement to the lesson about “mercy” to be learnt by Hubert—and by extension, the audience. Edward II is different in what it asks the audience to do: to focus on Edward’s moment-by-moment, nonrepresentative experience; to see, in effect, the signs as those of individual experience. In this way, the death by poker elicits responses that run counter to the expectations aroused by the previous action of the play—and ultimately counter to any simple “moral” lessons. What happens on stage might look like an exemplum, but it cannot be simply deciphered to reveal some conventional “truth.” The play’s second challenge to exemplary rhetoric is that it detaches experience from judgment. The spectators, and this may be especially so for those who have retained a judgmental distance in the death scene and viewed the action as a “manifest signe,” are confronted with uncertainties about the exemplum’s significance. Some of this uncertainty arises from the absence of commentary during and after the murder, with the immediate comments limited to Matrevis’s “fear” about Edward’s cry and Lightborn’s “bravely done.” This is a cautionary tale, in effect, without the caution. The almost-dumbshow is unusual in Marlowe’s plays, especially when death elsewhere is matter for explication, the stage full of characters busily commenting on the action. Even in Edward II the other losses of the king inspire protracted lamentations. Here, language itself disintegrates. Words ultimately are inadequate to define Edward’s experience; and only the tortured cry suggests its horror. The delaying of commentary until the final scene breaks the connection between particular and general upon which exemplary rhetoric depends. The burden of interpretation shifts to individual playgoers, who must make sense of what they see in terms of their own ordinary experience. Their individual interpretive narratives may or may not include a belief in providential punishment as intrinsic to the way that things “are”; may or may not, but it is now in the individual’s power to decide. 48 William Shakespeare, King John, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1954). The parallel scene in Troublesome Reign relies much less on drawing attention to visible detail, resorting instead to cliché and declamation: “You rolling eyes ... / Send forth the terror of your Mover’s frown, / To wreak my wrong upon the murtherers / That rob me of your fair reflecting view” (1 Troublesome Reign 1495–99). 49 Hunter 225.

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And yet the choice is not easy. As the spectators watch the play’s last moments, any confidence that they might still retain in an orderly and predictable universe—or any tidy narrative framework—is tested further. The final scene challenges the certainties of the cautionary tale by showing how the meaning of exemplary events may be constructed. This was by no means an unusual demonstration for the contemporary audience, with moralities and histories alike offering instances of debatable exempla, interpreted and reinterpreted by the powerful or influential. But other plays, those of Shakespeare among them, continue to refer what happens to some agreed system of values, however clichéd, that offers the spectators a conventional way of understanding the action. Edward II, to the frustration perhaps of many early spectators (and probably more so of its critics), ultimately does not. A final “authorized version” is offered to the spectators by the young king, but it is a version that runs counter to the earlier symmetries and expectations—as well as all those comfortable political commonplaces earlier in the play. When Edward’s son assumes power and avenges his father’s death, the audience is called upon to view his actions as a victory for legitimacy and order over usurpation and disorder. In consequence, Edward’s death must be reinterpreted as undeserved, as the result of treachery rather than providential justice. This closing scene is sometimes described as showing the restoration of traditional order.50 There are certainly elements of this in the behavior of the young king, who seems an exemplar of royal virtues, conscious of his inheritance (“Traitor, in me my loving father speaks,” 5.6.40) and resolute in his royal duty. But the young king also offers the audience a redefinition of events and a realignment of perspectives. The son grieves for a “loving father,” is angry that “his kingly body was too soon interred” (32), and is concerned to exact vengeance: “Sweet father, here unto thy murdered ghost, / I offer up this wicked traitor’s head” (98–9). His tears bear witness to his “grief and innocency” (100). This redefinition is confirmed visually in the play’s final ceremony, the funeral ritual: the stage image of new king and attendant lords, contrasted with the hearse and head, suggests both renewal, in the youth of the king, and royal authority, in his crown and supporting nobles.51 It stresses the ultimate victory of Edward’s kingly power over Mortimer’s usurpation, emphasizing the sincerity and innocence of the young king and adding emotional conviction to his loss. That loss is great, and the only guilt is that of Mortimer and Isabella. From the perspective offered by the young king, Edward is a tragic victim and his suffering excessive. The play thus ends with a denial that the death by poker is an exemplum of poetic justice. At the same time, there remain several unresolved problems relating to the expectations of the early spectators and their making sense of the action. These omissions and inadequacies may well make it less certain that individual spectators will accede to the young king’s interpretation. Some deficiencies are visual. Instead of signaling a restoration of order, the final image of head and hearse suggests that “manifest signes” are to be viewed with suspicion. The spectators observe the young king to be engaged in the making of a myth, complete with emblems that he 50 See, for example, Bevington and Shapiro 274. 51 Zucker 141–2.

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constructs himself. The younger Edward may claim that placing Mortimer’s head on the hearse is a sign asserting the ultimate victory of Edward’s kingly power; but the ceremony is deceptive, and not only because his father failed in the exercise of that power. The most instructive parallel here is with Tamburlaine, another master of redefining ceremonies. But Edward’s final ceremony goes beyond what happens in other plays, in which exempla are exploited for political ends. Here, the ceremony draws attention to the increasing divergence between individual experience and political ritual. One notable omission in the final scene is any reference to heaven. Kent had petitioned heaven to “[r]ain showers of vengeance on my cursèd head, / Thou God, to whom in justice it belongs / To punish this unnatural revolt” (4.6.7–9). But heaven is surprisingly absent from the final scene; and the hell of Edward’s death has been translated into the euphemistic “spilt … blood” or “too soon interred.” Even the The Jew of Malta ends with the claim of heavenly intervention on behalf of the Knights, despite the remoteness of that play’s world from a heaven of any kind. In Edward, the possibility of some universal significance in the king’s fall is glimpsed, only for it to fade away before the end. The young king’s assertion of legitimate authority thus entails a questioning of the providential order that Edward’s death has seemed to affirm. More significant still is the failure of language. The funeral ceremony may be moving but the words of the scene do not bear the weight of the action. Language shrinks in significance as Edward’s son oversimplifies, reducing the issues in the final moments of the play to simple sets of antitheses: “sweet father” and “wicked traitor,” “innocency” and “monstrous treachery.” Political matters are reduced to questions of family relationships, with the terms “son,” “father,” and “mother” serving to explain motives and define actions. The new king may seem to act like a king, but the world he inhabits is a smaller one than that of his father. He is no longer the child exhibiting “towardness,” who compares himself with Atlas supporting the sky (3.1.76–78). His language has lost its amplification, be it heroic or royal: the lions and other royal companions have disappeared with the setting of Edward’s own sun. In the death by poker, language failed; and in the final ceremony, the silences between the speeches are telling. The young king (Hunter comments on his “evasive presence”) 52 cannot explain more without suggesting more problems for interpretation, and so enjoins the lords—and in effect the spectators—to “help me to mourn.” What is left now is not appropriate judgment but only appropriate feeling, not explication but sensation. The young king’s lament is the play’s last challenge to the cautionary tale, the final transformation of its exemplary rhetoric. The early audiences brought to a performance of Edward II experiences and expectations shaped by their lives outside the theater and by their viewing of plays. Edward II offered them empowerment, the possibility of making sense for themselves, of constructing new interpretive narratives. The “difference” of Edward II may have originated in an exploiting of traditional means—the striking detail, the emotional reinforcement of the lesson—but the play ends in something new. The individuals in the audience are called upon to feel before they think, to 52 Hunter 201.

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participate in before they consider the lessons of history. Their experiencing of a “manifest signe” as disengaged from its exemplary lesson makes possible a new kind of tragic understanding in which suffering may become more than just a “cautionary tale.” The theatrical experiences of these early audiences epitomize the revolution in the London playhouses in the late 1580s and early 1590s.

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Chapter 3

Edmund Kean, Anti-Semitism, and The Jew of Malta1 Stephanie Moss University of South Florida

I. On Passover, April 24, 1818, Edmund Kean opened The Jew of Malta at the Drury Lane Theatre. It was Kean’s sixth season and the first time he was allowed to choose the plays to be produced in the Theatre’s repertory’s schedule. The decision to open the play on Passover, which celebrates Jewish liberation from slavery, was perhaps apt, since Marlowe’s play probes the various hierarchical contexts in which slavery occurs, from Turkish domination to the struggle for power between Ithamore and Barabas. Kean’s selection of The Jew, the first production of the play since Thomas Heywood’s 1632 mounting, did not meet with resounding approval from other members of the Drury Lane’s company. Charles Bucke, one of the Theatre’s playwrights, objected strenuously to Kean’s choice. An anonymous pamphlet that was probably authored by Bucke protests that “Mr. Kean is the person who introduced that barbarous production [The Jew of Malta] to the present stage.” It was proof of “the little judgment he possesses, as to what will suit the age in which we live.”2 The age in which Kean lived was noted for its establishment of humanism and tolerance as a general, guiding ideology, although these principles were often reduced to the term “sympathy.” According to Judith Page, “sympathy” was a term “inherited from earlier writers” that emphasized “the positive moral, ethical, and transformative value of sympathetic identification.”3 In “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” 1 I would like to thank Regina Hewitt for her help with this article. 2 “A Friend to Justice, Reply to the Defense of Edmund Kean, Esq. with Observations: In Answer to the Remarks on the Tragedy of ‘The Italians’ (which is performed on Saturday night at Drury Lane)” (London: John Miller, 1819). Charles Bucke, presumably the author of this pamphlet, had motive for publicly rebuking the Jew of Malta. His own play, The Italians, had been rejected by Kean in favor of The Jew. Kean asked Bucke to write a new Prologue to Marlowe’s play, which he refused. The Prologue was eventually written by Simon Penley. 3 Judith W. Page, Imperfect Sympathies: Jews and Judaism in British Romantic Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) 3. In Imperfect Sympathies, Page analyzes Kean’s performance of another theatrical Jew, Shylock. She remarks of Kean’s radical interpretation, “Instead of playing Shylock safe as a villain, Kean dared his audience

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William Wordsworth famously employs the term to radically redefine the purpose of poetry. Unlike Neoclassical poets, Romantic poets should not “write for Poets alone, but for men ... the Poet must descend from this supposed height, and, in order to excite rational sympathy, he must express himself as other men express themselves.”4 Rejection of Kean’s production then can be superficially related to the concept of “Romantic sympathy,” since Barabas is hardly a character designed to elicit compassionate identification. Despite virtually universal disapproval of the play, however, Kean’s acting met with almost unanimous critical acclaim. European Magazine, and London Review stated that the motives activating Kean’s Barabas were “terrific,” implying that Barabas’s murderous actions were clearly the legacy of his ill treatment.5 The London Times concluded that Kean’s unique abilities gave Barabas a human face, turning the character’s extravagant actions into reactions. Kean’s Jew, accordingly, became a character whose fervent response to injustice was fully expressed in the elevated Marlovian poetry in the first half of the play. As with many of his other roles, Kean played Barabas with savagery and terror, qualities tempered by the actor’s ironic and passionate persona. As a result, as The London Times phrased it, Kean was able to “illumine and render tolerable so dark a portrait as that of Barabas.”6 Despite this critical praise for Kean’s acting, however, the play closed after only eleven performances. What caused this abrupt closure? Did the public reject Marlowe’s play regardless of their delight in Kean’s acting? Perhaps Kean’s alterations to Marlowe’s original text were a factor in the production’s rejection? Contemporaneous critical response to Kean’s modifications varies. The actor’s biographer and ardent admirer, F. W. Hawkins, maintains that departures from the original text were too small to be noticed.7 Blackwood’s Magazine, in contrast, claims that the play was “greatly injured” by the small changes.8 Linda Clare Tolman asserts that the changes were an attempt to “give the play a more tragic shape and tone,” a perception congruent with Kean’s well-recognized tendency to remake malevolent characters into tragic figures.9 Ultimately, however, the rejection of Kean’s production may have been a result of more complex issues tied to Romantic sympathy and the attitude toward Jews. In this essay, I suggest that the causes of the play’s failure resulted from Marlowe’s original text as well as the modifications. In particular, however, the hasty closure to think of Shylock as flawed but worthy of sympathy in his rage” (57). See also Page’s article “‘Hath Not Jew Eyes?’: Edmund Kean and the Sympathetic Shylock,” The Wordsworth Circle (Spring 2003): 116–19. 4 William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1967) 327; emphasis mine. 5 European Magazine, and London Review 73 (May 1818): 429–30. 6 London Times (25 April 1818): 3 column C. 7 F. W. Hawkins, The Life of Edmund Kean (1869; New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969) 74. 8 Rev. of The Jew of Malta, prod. Edmund Kean, Blackwood’s Magazine (May 1818) iii, 209–100, qtd. in Millar MacLure, ed., Marlowe: The Critical History (London: Routledge, 1979) 72. 9 Linda Clare Tolman, “Audience Response to Discontinuities in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida,” diss., Marquette University, 1933, 31.

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of The Jew of Malta after 11 performances was influenced by latent anti-Semitic feelings that were at odds with the egalitarian agenda of the Romantic period. II. By the early eighteenth century, Jewish merchants played a large part in global economics. Yet, by the middle of the eighteenth century, Jewish influence on trade was lessening, and, although mercantilism was still an economic reality, new strategies connected to national self-sufficiency discouraged long-distance importation, the cornerstone of Jewish mercantile economics.10 Jewish merchants nonetheless continued to play a vital role in the importation of raw sugar, tobacco, pepper, and spices and dominated trade in diamonds and coral, which was central to English economic relations with India.11 This situation left the Jews in control of important imported resources and may have contributed to the English perception of them as an economic threat. This perception is validated by the continuing social and cultural marginalization of Jews; laws prevented even the most wealthy of Jews from owning land, from keeping shops, from obtaining employment in the crafts or, for the most part, in the newly constructed factories, and from obtaining titles.12 However, Jewish merchants in the eighteenth century, like Barabas, were often importers of rare jewels. In the opening scene of the play, Barabas gloats: Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts, Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds, Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds, and seld-seen costly stones of so great price, As one of them, indifferently rated, And of a carat of this quantity, Many serve, in peril of great calamity, To ransom great kings from captivity This is the ware wherein consists my wealth. (1.1.25–33)

Like the Jewish merchants in the eighteenth century who monopolized trade in the diamonds and coral central to English relations with India, Barabas dominates the market in rare stones and one of his favored sources for precious metals is the mines of India: “Give me the merchants of the Indian mines, / That trade in metal of the purest mould” (1.1.19–20). Indeed, Barabas enacts many stereotypical Jewish practices that continued to resonate in Kean’s time. One of the most enduring stereotypes in European history views Jews as economic conspirators who wish to control trade and the flow of wealth. The figure of the Jewish merchant gives support to the durable fear that Jews will monopolize financial institutions and gain control over Christians through the manipulation of currency. Other enduring stereotypes represented in Marlowe’s play code the Jew as demonic, miserly, and murderous. Importantly, by using the 10 Galperin 18. 11 Israel 199. 12 Israel 295

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Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe

biblical name Barabas, Marlowe references the oldest of Jewish stereotypes—the choice to free the condemned thief and the subsequent labeling of Jews as Christkillers. These various unsavory perceptions left lingering traces in the Romantic period. By Kean’s era, the cumulative result of this legacy of fear and hatred created, as William Galperin argues in “Romanticism and/or Anti-Semitism,” a disturbing, enshrouded cultural ambivalence that can be teased out from various literary hiding places.13 The professed philo-Semitism of the period, it seems, often “languaged-up” a laudatory cover for a vague aversion to Jews, and Romantic idealism inevitably became trapped in its own discrepancies.14 Therefore, the liberalism associated with the period often collapsed into gaps created by problematic attitudes toward Jews. By temperament Kean was drawn to the depiction of socially marginalized characters as the embodiment of Romantic ideals, and the actor felt a genuine attraction toward Jewish characters. For example, in 1820 he acted in The Hebrew, adapted from Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe.15 When he selected The Jew of Malta in his sixth season at the Drury Lane, he attempted to whitewash Marlowe’s text, intending to pay homage to the disenfranchised Jew. Ineluctably, however, he recuperated the anti-Semitism that most audiences during his time believed was encoded in the play. III. Literary reception of The Jew of Malta in the early nineteenth century was far from effusive, although other Marlowe texts were generally well received. William Hazlitt, a prominent critic of Elizabethan literature at the time of Kean’s 1818 production, praised the “lust of [sic] power in [Marlowe’s] writings, a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness, a glow of the imagination, unhallowed by anything but its own energies.”16 Charles Lamb compared Marlowe’s heroes to Milton’s Satan, a heroic character that the Romantics adopted as a symbol conflating their many rebellious impulses into a single figure. Doctor Faustus and Edward II were the most warmly received of the plays in the Marlovian canon. Lamb wrote of Doctor Faustus that the character of Faustus must have “been delectable food” for Marlowe, allowing him to “wander in fields where curiosity is forbidden to go; to approach the dark gulf near enough to look in, to be busied in speculations which are the rottenest part of the core of the fruit that fell from the tree of knowledge.”17 James Broughton, writing in 13 William Galperin, “Romanticism and/or Anti-Semitism,” Between “Race” and Culture: Representations of “the Jew” in England and American Literature, ed. Bryan Cheyette (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) 18. 14 Galperin 18. 15 The Life and Theatrical Career of Edmund Kean: 1787–1833 ( London: Ifan Kyrle Fletcher, 1938) 14. 16 William Hazlitt, Complete Works vol. VI: Lectures on the English Comic Writers and Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth, ed. P. P. Howe (London: J. M. Dent 1931) 202, qtd. in MacLure 78. 17 Charles Lamb, Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the Time of Shakespeare vol. I (London: Routledge, 1808) 19–45, qtd. in MacLure 69.

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1830, was drawn more to Marlowe’s language than to the subversive aspects of his drama, finding Doctor Faustus “though defective as a whole ... certainly merit[ing] all the praise it has received. Some exquisitely poetical passages might be selected from it, especially … his last impassioned soliloquy of agony and despair, which is surpassed by nothing in the whole circle of the English Drama, and cannot fail to excite in the reader a thrill of horror, mingled with pity for the miserable sufferer.”18 Lamb lauded Edward II as surpassing Richard II, especially in the death scene, which evoked pity and terror “beyond any scene, ancient or modern, with which I [Lamb] am acquainted.”19 Despite the general admiration for Marlowe as a playwright, The London Times greeted Kean’s decision to add The Jew of Malta to the 1818 season of the Drury Lane Theatre with astonishment, calling the production “[o]ne of the most singular and hazardous experiments within our theatrical recollection.”20 Other critics were only slightly more circumspect; Broughton wrote: “This tragedy, which, after a slumber of almost two centuries, was revived at Drury Lane in 1818, possesses many beauties, but the interest depends too exclusively upon the character of the Jew; the plot is excessively wild and improbable, nor can the charms of the language compensate for the extravagance of the incidents, in contriving which the author seems to have thought it the perfection of skill to accumulate horror upon horror.”21 Blackwood’s Magazine faulted the production because the second half “flagged.”22 European Magazine, and London Review took the ending of the play to task, commenting, “the catastrophe is so forced and artificial, that we doubt whether there is another performer on the stage who could have saved it from a laugh.”23 The consensus seemed to have been that although Kean the actor was brilliant, the play lacked coherence and credibility. Absolute excoriation of the production, however, was left to an actress who lists herself simply as Miss Macauley. Miss Macauley’s comments center on what critics of the time understand as the most vexing issue in Marlowe’s play—its apparent unbridled anti-Semitism: The Jew of Malta is one of those plays that is repugnant to every feeling of humanity; what might be well suited to the taste of the age two hundred years ago is not likely to pass current now. Mr. Kean’s acting on the first night of its representation was undoubtedly very great, but it was a greatness that excited horror rather than admiration, and though it might astonish, it could not delight any virtuous mind; there was also much of cruelty in its performance; it was offering a palpable insult to a whole body of men; and that body less defensive than any other class in the British dominion. The Jew and the Christians,

18 James Broughton, “Life and Writings of Christopher Marlowe,” Gentleman’s Magazine (1830) 313–15, qtd. in MacLure 87. 19 Hazlitt observed of The Jew of Malta in 1820 that the play is not “so characteristic a specimen of this writer’s expression. . . . The author seems to have relied on the horror inspired by the subject and the national disgust excited against the principal character, to rouse the feelings of the audience”; Complete Works 211, qtd. in MacLure 80. 20 The London Times; Hawkins 39–43. 21 Broughton, qtd. in MacLure 88. 22 Blackwood’s Magazine iii (May 1818) 209–10, qtd. in MacLure 72. 23 European Magazine, and London Review 73 (May 1818) 429–30, qtd. in MacLure 73.

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Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe according to the tenets of their religion, do not meet on fair and equal terms. Suffering for the sins of the progenitors,24 the Jews are, by the vulgar and ignorant, considered as a proscribed race; and is it either policy or humanity in a theatre, the school of morality as it should be, to strengthen prejudice, and increase the darkness of vulgarity and ignorance?25

Macauley expresses here the revolutionary Romantic commitment to democratic ideals—principles that supported the underdog, the wronged, the poor, the misunderstood and that were encapsulated by the word “sympathy.” These tenets, so closely identified with the era, however, are often over-simplified by their compression into a single philosophy that etched the artists of the period as champions of all disenfranchised people. As with many reductive delineations of literary genres, the image of the Romantics as defenders of the downtrodden overlooks the oscillation and variability of their reaction to the figure of the Jew. Notice, for example, Macauley’s reference to “the sins of the progenitors,” an allusion to the religion’s vituperative inheritance as “Christ-killers” exacerbated in Marlowe’s play by the use of the name Barabas. Indeed, the long history of English Jew-baiting was coterminous with Romantic “sympathy” for the Jew. Therefore, despite numerous assertions of compassion for Jews, the Romantic perception of them was far from unanimously liberal. In fact, this perception was inescapably complicated by the legacy of anti-Semitism that Marlowe’s play encodes and that the economic and trading practices of Jews in Kean’s time continued to generate. The problematical theme of anti-Semitism in Marlowe’s play is a dilemma tackled later by twentieth century critics. In “Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe,” T. S. Eliot pioneered modern approaches to Marlowe’s play by arguing that The Jew has been misunderstood. While critics prior to Eliot could not reconcile the atmosphere of the third, fourth, and fifth acts, which seem to turn Barabas into a Jewish caricature, with the tragic mood of the first two acts, Eliot found that this seeming disjunction coalesces if the play is reclassified as a “savage satire” rather than an imperfect tragedy. In other words, Eliot deftly perceived that the tragedy of Barabas realizes itself through Marlowe’s use of farce and satire.26 From this perspective, the play is not anti-Semitic but rather, as Eric Rothstein interprets it, a parodic criticism of dominant Elizabethan values, which turns Barabas into a “negative norm” that exposes the hypocrisy and greed of others.27 Other contemporary critics follow Eliot’s lead by reading the play as an ironic commentary on religion. Thomas Cartelli focuses on Marlowe’s biting wit, noting that the various religious groups, united by their desire for gold, create a relativism that makes Ferneze’s Christian rhetoric suspect while his duplicity neutralizes Barabas’s viciousness.28 24 Emphasis mine. 25 [Elizabeth Wright] Macauley, “Theatric Revolution or Plain Truth Addressed to Common Sense” (London: Macauley, 1819). 26 T. S. Eliot, “Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe,” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1920). 27 Eric Rothstein, “Structure as Meaning in The Jew of Malta,” JEGP 25 (1966): 260–73. 28 Thomas Cartelli, “Shakespeare’s Merchant, Marlowe’s Jew: The Problem of Cultural Difference,” Shakespeare Studies 20 (1988): 255–60.

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Emily C. Bartels also deconstructs the play’s anti-Semitism, using the shifting fictions of power and powerlessness that are endemic to colonial hegemony—Turk over Ferneze and Ferneze over Jew—to show that Barabas’s greed is relative to the equally excessive greed of the other characters. Moreover, Del Bosco’s imperialist presence subverts these misrepresentations of authority, turning both Ferneze and Barabas into the Other because the Spanish hold greater power in the play’s hierarchy. These dynamics thereby destabilize the stereotype of the greedy, miserly Jew.29 Select critics of Kean’s production suggest that the actor and his adaptor, Simon Penley, may have anticipated many facets of modern critical readings. For instance, The London Times stated that in Kean’s production the characters “are impressed with no identity or reality; they are called at one moment into vigorous action, and sink the next into insignificance; they act but are seldom acted upon.”30 In a 1989 article, Michael Goldman probes Marlowe’s alienation factor, finding a fluctuation within the characters between “vigorous” agency and internal emptiness; the characters, Goldman states, lack the subtle psychological interrelationship between interiority and self-fashioning; they don’t really react but rather conjure themselves into being. Goldman terms this vacillation between action and inaction, centrality and marginality, the “masklike definition” of the characters that makes them much like “animated effigies.” They require, according to Goldman, an actor who can sustain his role through a series of oversize theatrical gestures.31 According to extant records, Kean was just such an actor. In 1818, Blackwood’s Magazine, like The London Times, again indicates that Kean’s production may have been ahead of his time, astutely observing The Jew’s subtle moral leveling: “are all unhappy,” Blackwood’s comments, “and their unhappiness is always brought about by their own guilt.”32 Lawrence Danson finds a similar moral equipoise, or rather a “disquieting incompleteness” that reduces all values while at the same time presenting a consistent and coherent moral view that satirizes religion.33 For Thomas Cartelli, this “incompleteness” translates into a lack of moral restraints that puts into question the identity of the true Machiavel in the play.34 The ironies noted by contemporary critics and a select group of early nineteenth-century critics thus significantly alter the perception of the play as an endorsement of virulent anti-Semitism, a perspective that appears to have been lost

29 Emily C. Bartels, “The Jew, and the Fictions of Difference: Colonialist Discourse in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta,” English Literary Renaissance 20 (1990): 1–16. 30 London Times. 31 Michael Goldman, “Performer and Role in Marlowe and Shakespeare,” Shakespeare and the Sense of Performance: Essays in the Tradition of Performance Criticism in Honor of Bernard Beckerman, ed. Marvin and Ruth Thompson (Newark, DE.: University of Delaware Press, 1989) 93. 32 Blackwood’s, qtd. in MacLure 71. 33 Lawrence Danson, “Christopher Marlowe: The Questioner,” English Literary Renaissance 12 (1982): 8. 34 Thomas Cartelli, “Endless Play: The False Starts of Marlowe’s Jew of Malta,” “A Poet and a filthy Play-maker:” New Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill, Constance B. Kuriyama (New York: AMS, 1988) 117–28.

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on most of those among the production’s critics who rebuked the ostensible religious racism in the play. Feelings of distaste for The Jew of Malta were further quickened by Romantic professions of philo-Semitism that, as the subtleties of Macauley’s rhetoric implies, functioned as linguistic clouds hiding a continuing distaste for Jews in general. Thus, the failure of Kean’s production and Marlowe’s play in particular is perhaps more complicated than the conclusion that critics and spectators disliked the play while both embraced Kean’s performance. What I suggest here is that Kean’s production touched something dark within the actor’s audiences, the shadow of a collectively venomous anti-Semitism that remained deeply embedded in the English psyche. IV. Like many actors both before and after him, Edmund Kean grew up in humble circumstances. He was born in 1787, just two years before the fall of the Bastille. His early struggles were in part responsible for the anger, terror, and intensity he brought to the stage. He was particularly outraged by the rigid class structure of English society. Byron greatly admired Kean and famously said of him: “By Jove, he’s a soul. Life—nature—truth, without diminution or exaggeration.” Byron thus became one of the few aristocrats whom Kean could tolerate.35 As a predictable result of Kean’s rebellious nature, he become renowned for his performances of iniquitous characters and the passion, energy, and humanity that he brought to those roles made him the quintessential Romantic actor. Although there are numerous accounts of public response to his acting, George Lewes most comprehensively articulates Kean’s innovative acting style: Kean was not only remarkable for the intensity of passionate expression, but for a peculiarity I have never seen so thoroughly realized by another, although it is one which belongs to the truth of passion, namely the expression of subsiding emotion. Although fond, far too fond of abrupt transitions—passing from vehemence to familiarity, and mingling strong lights and shadows with caravaggio force of unreality—nevertheless his instinct taught him what few actors are taught—that a strong emotion, after discharging itself in one massive current, continues for a time expressing itself in feebler currents.36

Therefore, Kean’s acting, like David Garrick’s before him, was lauded as a return to nature, and Kean’s naturalistic style struck a “hard, welcome blow at the artificial school” of the reigning actor during Kean’s youth—John Philip Kemble.37 35 Edward Robins, Twelve Great Actors (New York: Putnam’s, 1900) 99; Marilyn Gaull, English Romanticism: The Human Context (New York: Norton, 1988) 99. 36 Joseph R. Roach, The Player’s Passions: Studies in the Science of Acting (1985; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993) 187; George Henry Lewes, On Actors and the Art of Acting (Leipzig: Bernhared Tauchnitz, 1875) 20. 37 Robins 75; David Garrick, although hailed as an actor who brought nature to the stage, used on at least one occasion a mechanical gadget to convey astonishment. He had a mechanical wig constructed that made his hair stand on end at the appearance of the Ghost in Hamlet (Roach 96). Although both Kean and Garrick made use of the “point system”

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In fact, Kean radicalized the stage by humanizing poetic language, taking it down from its aristocratic perch, conversationalizing verse, and shaking poetry “out of its meter” by breaking down the iambic flow of lines into “component sentences and half sentences.”38 The sordid, tragic characters to which Kean gravitated were then animated by these radicalized techniques that produced moments of intense stimulation and turned unsavory figures into tragic heroes. Barabas was one in a line of roles that also included Iago, Shylock, and Richard III. Although Kean’s choice of The Jew of Malta met with resistance from those managing the Drury Lane, he fought hard to defend his choice.39 After securing Marlowe’s play as part of the repertory, Kean’s next problem was to remake the play and its controversial leading figure into a success that mirrored his triumphs with Shylock and Richard III. Although a prompt book containing the alterations made to Marlowe’s text written by Penley certainly existed, it was never published.40 Therefore, there are no circulating facsimiles of production details except those captured by the various critics who actually viewed the play. From their comments, it seems clear that Kean was aware of the play’s problematics and, according to biographer Hawkins, attempted to turn Barabas into a “noble alien monstrously wronged and magnificently revenged.” Hawkins also reports that much of the rancour against the Jews which sully Marlowe’s pages was expurgated; all expressions incompatible with a better sense of morality and refinement than the Elizabethan period was [sic] removed; and the quaint and obsolete phraseology with which the original abounds was corrected and modernized.41

Accordingly, the emendations Kean endorsed ameliorated The Jew’s putative anti-Semitism and attempted to redeem Barabas in a manner similar to the actor’s favorable reconstructions of other villainous characters. For example, in act 4, scene 4 of Marlowe’s play, Ithamore disparages Barabas’s cleanliness when he declares to Pilia-Borza and Bellamira that “He [Barabas] never put on a clean shirt since he was circumcised” (4.4.85). One of the characteristics associated with Jewish stereotyping was lack of proper hygiene; noting this with a degree of condescending curiosity, the late nineteenth-century surveyor of London James Peller Malcolm wrote, “Why should Jews choose to distinguish their residence by characteristic filth? ... the dealer in cast-off apparel and other articles is uniformly, and almost invariably, an upright bundle of rags, from which a head, hair, beard, and hands emerge, calculated to impress the beholder with abhorrence.” Indeed, according to David S. Katz’s excellent documentation of the history of Jews, Malcolm’s (deliberate and often traditional accents that required the actor to stand motionless in an expressive pose), Kean’s acting was closer to nature than Garrick’s. 38 John Findlay, Miscellanies (Dublin: n. p., 1835), qtd. in Peter J. Manning, “Edmund Kean and Byron’s Plays,” Keats-Shelley Journal 21–2 (1972–73) 192. 39 “A Friend of Justice,” 17. 40 Only the prompt scripts of popular productions were reproduced. I have looked for an extant copy of the prompt script for Kean’s production of The Jew of Malta and was unable to find it. 41 Hawkins 74.

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depiction of the Jewish quarter of London does not “vary in any significant degree from other accounts” of the area.42 Supporting Katz’s research, Sander Gilman argues in Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of Jews that it was difficult to integrate the monstrous and “filthy” Jew into a culture that valorized beauty.43 Kean’s costuming, however, presented a visual contradiction to Ithamore’s description and the general Jewish stereotype. Fortunately, the wellknown nineteenth-century illustrator George Cruikshank pictured Kean as Barabas in an etching that was published in the 9 May 1818 issue of The British Stage. The etching shows Kean dressed in a clean gabardine coat richly trimmed with decorative fabric and fastened by a sash sporting an impressive tassel.44 In Kean’s production, therefore, the slave’s denunciation of Barabas’s sartorial habits became an ironic comment on stereotyping. In fact, Cruikshank shows Kean’s Barabas as not only well-groomed but perhaps even elegant as, indeed, Barabas claims to be in asides to the audience.45 In the same scene between Ithamore, Pilia-Borza, and Bellamira, Ithamore also says, “The hat he [Barabas] wears, Judas left under the elder when he hanged himself” (4.4.89–90), referencing the familiar allusion to Jews as “Christkillers” that Macauley reflexively notes. However, as pictured by Cruikshank, Kean wears no hat, although he does don the accustomed false beard and nose. In this etching, Cruikshank also documents Kean’s facial expression, showing what many critics describe as Kean’s “terror” and “savagery.” The modern critic James L. Smith describes Kean in the Cruikshank portrait as both dignified and spiteful, with his eyes glaring “wildly from the corners of their sockets.” His noble profile is “loftily Arab” but his mouth shows a “malevolent grin.” 46 This savagery described by Smith is underscored by the quotation at the bottom of the etching: “Now have I such a plot for both their lives.” On the other hand, Cruikshank’s depiction of Kean’s slightly stooped back suggests a counterpoint to the caricature of the stage Jew as dangerous, suggesting rather an air of vulnerability. Other details of Kean’s production also survive. In two reviews mentioned earlier, one in European Magazine and the second in Blackwood’s Magazine, the divergence between Kean’s effect on his audiences and the critical response to Marlowe’s play crystallizes. The review in European Magazine notes the particular enjoyment spectators experienced when Kean impersonated the French Minstrel in 42 James Peller Malcolm, Loninium redivivum; or, An Ancient History and Modern Description of London vol. 3 (London: 1803–1807) 321–3, qtd. in Katz 294. 43 Sander Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of Jews (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986) 10, 119. 44 The etching described is one of two by Cruikshank. The second slightly larger depiction appeared during the same month and shows Barabas as “standing, legs apart, arms upraised, stick in right hand and Quotation ‘Out, out, thou witch, hence leave me forever.’” Description found in The Life and Theatrical Career of Edmund Kean: 1787–1833 (London: Ifan, Dyrle, Fletcher, 1938) 17. 45 Barabas responds in aside to Ithamore’s accusation that the Jew does not wear a clean shirt: “O rascal! I change myself twice a-day” (4.4.87), and in a second aside, Barabas responds to Ithamore’s taunt that the Jew wears Judas’s hat: “’Twas sent me for a present from the Great Cham” (4.4.90). 46 Smith 8–9.

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act 4 of the play. Here, the popular actor incited his fans to displays of adoration when he embellished on Marlowe’s original stage direction, which merely states that Barabas plays a lute, by adding a contemporaneous music hall song that produced enthusiastic calls for an encore. European Magazine reports that during a subsequent performance on 30 April when Kean refused to repeat the song, the audience stopped the show until a company member announced in “good humor” that Kean was too indisposed for a reprise. The play then resumed with total audience acceptance.47 Blackwood’s heatedly dissented, finding Kean’s song a “contemptible degradation,” assuming that Kean was “amus[ing] himself, or his private friends,” and that the public was being “trifled with” for a new song which was an even more deplorable addition than a period song would have been.48 Blackwood’s also objected to Penley’s addition of a “tedious” scene between Lodowick and Mathias at the very beginning of the play. Lamenting that the replacement of the “fine and characteristic commencement of the original” by a tiresome supplement showing the two lovers telling the audience of their love for Abigail was an indication “that managers of theaters seem to know less of the true purposes and bearings of the dramatic art than any given set of people whatever.”49 European Magazine differed, concluding that “the variations from the original plot [which must have included the added scene], if any, are too inconsiderable to be noticed.”50 These disparate responses expose the disposition of the two journals’ critics as well as something about Kean and his audiences. Blackwood’s belittling comments on the Minstrel scene suggest that Kean probably improvised a good bit, playfully “hamming it up,” and was encouraged to do this by his audiences. This along with the journal’s disparagement of the “managers of theatres” reveals a certain disdain for theater professionals, an attitude that harkens back to Marlowe’s day when itinerant actors were looked down upon as beggars. However, Blackwood’s erudite comments about the changes made to the play set the magazine apart from the European that didn’t seem to be familiar with Marlowe’s original text. What the European Magazine did record, however, is the audience’s response to Kean’s clowning. This suggests that while the Blackwood’s critic was knowledgeable about Marlowe and therefore offended by the production’s tampering with the original text, the European’s critic was more focused on popular response. What is of interest here, I suggest, is the rather unstable boundary between the utter pleasure generated by Kean the performer and critical rejection of both Marlowe’s text and Kean’s revision of it. As the London Times noted, “We have seldom known a more indulgent audience than yesterday evening [opening night]; with all the faults and revolting incidents of the Jew of Malta, it has been received and was given out for repetition this evening with universal approbation.” It seems that without Kean’s adoring audiences, the play might have suffered an even shorter run than eleven performances.

47 48 49 50

European Magazine, and London Review, qtd. in MacLure 75. Blackwood’s, qtd. in MacLure 73. Blackwood’s, qtd. in MacLure. European Magazine, qtd. in MacLure.

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Other changes made to Marlowe’s play that have remained in the historical record involve the famous boasting scene between Ithamore and Barabas. A verbal keystone for the play’s anti-Semitic discourse, Kean’s production retained the potentially offensive speech in which Barabas lists his misdeeds. In Kean’s hands, however, the brutally enthusiastic tenor of the passage was reconfigured by his delivery of the speech, not as a recitation of his own deeds but rather as a fabrication to test Ithamore, a reading endorsed by many contemporary critics. According to Blackwood’s, John Pitt Harley as Ithamore delivered his response with “low and savage cunning,” ending with the added line, “none shall hear of it.” This small addition, according to Blackwood’s, “hints that [Ithamore] knows and has practiced better tricks, to plague mankind, than even those his master has just spoken of” but that no one will ever catch him at it. The slave’s response was not then a boast but rather a tacit acknowledgement of his having done much worse than anything Barabas could invent. The boasting match between two braggarts in Kean’s hands thus turned Ithamore into a foil to reduce Barabas’s villainy.51 Consistent with Blackwood’s critical disdain for both theater professionals and their audiences, however, the review did not credit these nuances with artistic creativity but rather called them “lucky hits” not likely to be noticed by the audience.52 Further changes to Marlowe’s original in Kean’s production included the expurgation of much of The Jew of Malta’s religious racial rancor by adaptor Penley’s “cutting all references to poisoning the nuns,” an enduring and particularly toxic stereotype of Jews’ murderous attitudes toward Christians.53 Biographer Hawkins added more details about specific inflections of Kean’s performance: His deportment before the senate when commanded to surrender his wealth; his bitter execration on its confiscation; his directions to his daughter where his treasure lay concealed; the soliloquy descriptive of the persecution of his tribe; and the scene where the discovery of the gold and jewels enabled him to resume his former splendour and means of mischief, were treated in a manner possible only to the highest order of histrionic superiority. Nothing could have been finer than the absolute delirium of drunken joy with which he burst out, “Oh my girl,—my gold!”54

Hawkins continues, describing the critically condemned final scene, “where [Kean], having succeeded in effecting a fearful retribution on his enemies, he was himself overmatched.” Hawkins then recaps the overall effect of the actor as Barabas: his “great effort” was “replete with breadth, grandeur, and terrible intensity.”55 51 Blackwood’s, qtd. in MacLure 72; see also Sara Munson Deats and Lisa S. Starks, “‘So neatly plotted, and so well perform’d’: Villain as Playwright in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta,” Theatre Journal 44 (1992): 375–89. In this article, Deats and Starks interpret the boasting scene between Barabas and Ithamore as “an improvisation—more an audition for the role of apprentice villain than an accurate account of actual knaveries” (381). For Deats and Starks, like Kean, the atrocities that Barabas claims to have committed are not real. 52 Blackwood’s 209–19, qtd. in MacLure 72. 53 Hawkins 41; James L. Smith, “The Jew of Malta in the Theatre,” Christopher Marlowe, ed. Brian Morris (London: Ernest Benn, 1968) 7. 54 Hawkins 43; also mentioned in Blackwood’s 209–10. 55 Hawkins 43.

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V. Kean’s most significant effort to ameliorate the play’s anti-Semitism, however, was a new Prologue written by Penley to replace the speech by Marlowe’s Machiavel. The new Prologue expressly denies any intention to stigmatize the Hebrew name while accomplishing other important objectives connected to the damaging aspects of Kean’s growing reputation: The Jew of Malta, once the drama’s pride, With ALLEYN flourished,—but with ALLEYN died! He whose best days in public service spent, Rais’d o’er his grave a lasting monument. Not shrin’d in pompous domes his ashes lie, But hers’d in deeds of sainted charity.56

The comparison of Kean to Alleyn addressed some of the negative press that Kean was beginning to receive as both an actor whose ego was expanding with every glowing review and as a man whose personal life was increasingly troubled by alcoholism. The Prologue endeavors to thwart growing gossip by selling Kean as the greatest living tragedian and then by asserting that great tragedians in the mold of Edward Alleyn, the first Barabas, are humble contributors to the social good. While Marlowe’s Prologue perhaps ironically (as modern critics read it) establishes Barabas as a Machiavel, the new Prologue shifts the emphasis from Barabas to Kean, suggesting that Kean is another Edward Alleyn. If Alleyn was a public servant who eschewed “pompous domes” and if his legacy lies in his “deeds of sainted charity,” then Kean, following in Alleyn’s footsteps by playing Barabas, must partake of some of Alleyn’s greatness and goodness. Significantly, the beginning of the Prologue also promotes Marlowe as a great poet and, by extension, The Jew of Malta as a great play. The opening lines, “The Jew of Malta, once the drama’s pride, / With ALLEYN flourished,—but with ALLEYN died,” announces that although the play had not been produced for many years, it was nonetheless among the best of Elizabethan drama. This seems to be a blatant attempt to market the production by suggesting that The Jew of Malta, when first produced, was considered comparable to Shakespeare’s plays, which were enormously successful in Kean’s time. The first line of the Prologue, once unpacked, therefore implies that Barabas must be a tragic hero figure in the mold of Shakespeare’s Shylock and Richard III, roles that had built Kean’s reputation as a great actor. Kean’s revised Prologue thus functioned chorally to persuade audiences that they were about to watch a great actor in a great play. On the other hand, while Kean extols Alleyn in the rewritten Prologue, he also upstages him by proposing that none of Kean’s audiences should long for a great actor of the past as long as they had the greater genius of Kean: Such as we all with conscious pride proclaim, And point at Dulwich for our ALLEYN’s fame.

56 London Times 3.

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Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe But though his master-piece of skill has laid Neglected long in dark oblivion’s shade, We hope to show you what it once had been, Nor wish an ALLEYN whilst we boast a Kean ...57

Moreover, if the Prologue recuperates an unpopular play starring an increasingly popular but controversial actor, the Prologue must also address the thematic cornerstone of the play, anti-Semitism. It does this by announcing to the audience that although the production will not attempt to bowdlerize the text of its more unsavory elements, an immense gap separates the barbarianism of the Elizabethans from the prevailing spirit of the more civilized early nineteenth century: Nor have we vainly sought from ev’ry page, T’ expel the prejudice which mark’d the age, When persecution darken’d all our isle, And veil’d in terror true religion’s smile.58

The supposition here is that any coarse attitudes in otherwise brilliant Elizabethan plays were a result of the crudeness of their era and should be forgiven by Romantic audiences. Finally, it is interesting to note that the Prologue anticipates most modern readings of the Jew of Malta as a play that condemns not religion as such but the hypocritical members of all religions: Then far from us long be th’ invidious aim To cast opprobrium o’er the Hebrew name: On every sect pernicious passions fall, And Vice and Virtue reign alike in all.59

The philo-Semitism that Kean obviously attempted to arouse through the rewritten Prologue to The Jew of Malta was unfortunately obstructed by the fact that compassion for the Jews did not generally exist in the way proclaimed in such examples of Romantic discourse as Macauley’s ultimately ambiguous attempt to defend the Jews or Hawkins breathless commentary on Kean’s humanization of Barabas. As has been shown, the attitude to Jews was much closer to a cultural ambivalence. Judith Page explores this tension between sympathy and anxiety in Imperfect Sympathies (a title taken from Charles Lamb’s essay of the same name): “Jews were difficult to categorize and to place within certain boundaries, unlike distant, colonized Others.” Although Jews most were generally poor, some were rich; in their assimilation, they looked foreign but emulated British refinement.60 Romantic perception of Jews, therefore, was positioned in the mystifying borderland between self and Other. Page detects a partial origin of this mental conflict in her analysis of the word “sympathy” as a Romantic catchword. “Sympathy” derived from the philosophy of Adam Smith. In Theory of Modern Sentiments (1757), Smith maintains that “our senses will never 57 58 59 60

London Times 3. London Times 3. London Times 3. Page 4.

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inform us of what [our brother] suffers.” 61Although through intuition one could experience compassion for others, actually being inside another’s skin was limited by the senses and could be experienced only by extending the mind’s perception beyond the body’s sensations. For the Romantics, sympathy then must be a process of imagining what it was like to inhabit someone else’s skin. However, as Page notes, imaginative sympathy is always easier with someone recognizable as self as opposed to those who rouse disgust or resentment as Jews often did. Page continues: “both [David] Hume and Smith recognize that it is easiest to sympathize with one’s own kind.”62 Continuing to dissect Romantic “sympathy,” Page references William Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads.” Wordsworth, unlike Adam Smith, locates sameness within difference; the “accuracy with which similitude [is imagined] in dissimilitude, and dissimilitude in similitude … depend[s] on our taste and moral feelings.” Sameness thus can become the heart of difference.63 Hazlitt, Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, nonetheless, all criticized Wordsworth for expressing a sympathy that never went beyond his own egotism, and Wordsworth, most conspicuously, displays the conflict inherent in the Romantic perception of Jews in his poem, “A Jewish Family,” which “reveals [the poet’s] desire to engage with the family, to feel for their plight, and his inability to do so fully.”64 Galerpin teases out the conflict between Romantic ideation of sympathy and their attitude toward Jews in Wordsworth’s little known poem about a Jewish family. Ambivalence hides in the poet’s representational strategies; Wordsworth describes the family’s two sisters as inheritors of “a lineage once abhorred, / Nor yet redeemed from scorn.”65 This open acknowledgment of an abhorred lineage, unlike Macauley’s inadvertent reference to the “sins of the progenitors,” is what Galperin calls a disturbing “moment of consciousness” on the part of the poet that reveals his awareness of the lurking discrepancies in Romantic ideals.66 The poem opens with a reference to Raphael: GENIUS of Raphael! if thy wings Might bear thee to this glen, With faithful memory left of things To pencil dear and pen, Thou would’st forego the neighbouring Rhine, And all his majesty— A studious forehead to incline O’er this poor family.67

The invocation of Raphael connotes the painter’s many renditions of the Madonna and child, thereby alluding on the surface to the beauty of the Jewish family but 61 Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (1757) 9, qtd. in Page 4. 62 Page 5. 63 Wordsworth, Preface (1800) 1:148, qtd. in Page 7. 64 Page 9. 65 William Wordsworth, “A Jewish Family,” William Wordsworth: The Poems 2 Vols., ed. John O. Hayden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) lines 39–40. 66 Galperin 18. 67 Wordsworth, “A Jewish Family” lines 1–8.

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also suggesting that the mother and child in the poem are analogous to the Virgin Mary and Jesus. This poem, Galperin then argues, subtly suggests the conversion of Jews to Christianity and therefore “alternately recuperate[s Jews] as Christians and displace[s them] as Others.”68 Page concurs, stating that in “A Jewish Family” “Wordsworth may allude to the familiar Christian belief that the preservation of the Jews—who would ultimately be converted—was a sign of divine providence.” 69 The conversion of Jews to Christianity becomes a repeated theme in Romantic writing. In his review of The Jew of Malta, Lamb first scorns the Elizabethan masses and views the play’s anti-Semitism as a product of an earlier less civilized era, but his supposed encomium to Jews falls short of praise, creating precisely what Galperin labels as the Jew recuperated as Christian. In Lamb’s review, Jews are rescued from their heritage through assimilation: “The idea of a Jew (which our pious ancestors contemplated with such horror) has nothing in it now revolting. We have tamed the claws of the beast, and pared its nails, and now we take it to our arms, fondle it, write plays to flatter it: it is visited by princes, affects a taste, patronises the arts, and is the only liberal and gentleman-like thing in Christendom.”70 The “we” that Lamb collectivizes is Christian society. The critic thereby impregnates his defense of Jews with his discomfort with Jews, removing agency for Jewish assimilation from Jews and bestowing it on Christians. It follows that what the passage actually states is that credit for Jewish assimilation should be bestowed on Christians because they tamed the “beast.” This disturbing reference to Jews as beasts represents Galperin’s “moment of consciousness,” an instance when Lamb, like Wordsworth, admits to the continuing presence of anti-Semitic feelings. While Lamb’s identification of Jews as residually bestial is encoded in his review of Marlowe’s play, in the essay entitled, “Imperfect Sympathies” (located in Lamb’s The Essays of Elia), Lamb reveals his forthright dislike of Jews. He admits that he is “a bundle of prejudices,” and although he hopes to be seen as “a lover of [his] species,” he “cannot feel towards all equally.”71 He claims to have no abstract “disrespect for Jews” but “he should not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse with any of that nation.” He candidly confesses that he does not “relish the approximation of Jew and Christian, which has become so fashionable. The reciprocal endearments have, to [him], something hypocritical and unnatural in them.” In fact, the sight of “the Church and Synagogue kissing and congreeing in awkward postures of an affected civility” makes the “moderate Jew” into “a more confounding piece of anomaly than a wet Quaker.” “If they are converted,” he continues, “why do they not come over to us entirely?”72 For Lamb, therefore, the truly assimilated Jew is the converted Jew. The fragile tension between philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism, which rests on the fulcrum of Jewish conversion in Wordsworth’s “A Jewish Family” and in Lamb’s review of The Jew of Malta, is therefore openly delineated in The Essays of Elia. The poem, essay, and review together limn the attitudinal extremes of philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism of the period, but the solution—conversion to Christianity—was 68 Galperin 19. 69 Page 166. 70 Lamb, Specimens 19–45 (emphases mine), qtd. in MacLure 69. 71 Charles Lamb, “Imperfect Sympathies,” The Essays of Elia (1906; London: Dent, 1950) 68. 72 Lamb, “Imperfect” 74.

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not a product of the Romantic period. Indeed, conversion to Christianity was a commonplace in Marlowe’s time as can be seen in Shylock’s forced conversion in The Merchant of Venice as well as the eponymous Othello’s voluntary conversion. The conversion of all non-Christians was, in fact, a fundamental premise of the Reformation; the theme of Jewish conversion was at the heart of the vision of a New Jerusalem that could not be realized until all infidels became Christians. Indeed, Heido A. Oberman attributes one of the roots of anti-Semitism to early modern millenarianism that held as one of its tenets the idea that the “conversion of the Jews” would have to take place “before Judgment Day could arrive.”73 Although by the eighteenth century, more and more Jews accepted a secularized deism that allowed them greater assimilation, Charles Lamb and William Wordsworth transparently allude to this long-standing strategy of turning Jews into Christians. In the fragile tension between philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism in the Romantic era lays the repressed conflict between Romantic progressive humanism and a more subtle anti-Semitism that often resulted in an uncomfortable hostility. Perhaps as a consequence of this complex ambiguity, Kean’s attempt to whitewash the antiSemitism in his production of The Jew of Malta through rewrites and his gift for generating sympathy for distasteful characters did not succeed. Barabas cannot be easily reimagined and most certainly cannot be tamed. He remained for Romantics a frightening representative of the Jewish threat to commerce and a palpably uncomfortable menace to the stability of the Christian community. The “veil’d” terror that the Prologue boasts and that has been annihilated by “religion’s smile” is displaced lines later by the acknowledgment that “pernicious passions” and “Vice” may haunt all religions; Marlowe’s play, on the surface at least, most obviously suggests that these vices especially haunt Barabas. While the Prologue acknowledges Marlowe’s subtle disparagement of religion in general, that recognition was arguably lost on most of Kean’s audiences. Whether seemingly embracing Jews, as does Miss Macauley, or, more honestly, admitting hostility, as do Wordsworth in “A Jewish Family” and Lamb in “Imperfect Sympathies,” Kean’s audience apparently found Barabas’s claws too gristly to trim. Moreover, his utter, unabashed villainy spotlighted the anti-Semitism that the Romantics preferred to keep closeted. Kean’s production of the Jew of Malta, I suggest, was in some ways, both ahead of its time and very much an artifact of its time. On the one hand, it anticipated the postmodern—and post-Holocaust—reading of the play, which discovers sympathy for Barabas as a maltreated Jew and ironic deflation of his putatively Christian abusers. However, those who objected to the play could not read it ironically because of their need to assure themselves that they were not anti-Semitic. Therefore, in other ways, the production replicated the tensions of its own society, producing Galperin’s “moment of consciousness” and evoking the inevitable squeamishness that must have attended Romantic awareness of that moment. Thus, the production must have elicited discomfort in both the covertly anti-Semitic and the openly philo-Semitic members of Kean’s audience. This may explain why Kean’s The Jew of Malta closed after only 11 performances.

73 Heido A. Oberman, The Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Age of Renaissance and Reformation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981)

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PART 2 Marlowe And The Family

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Chapter 4

The Hopeless Daughter of a Hapless Jew: Father and Daughter in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta Lagretta Tallent Lenker University of South Florida

It is a disgrace to have fathered a badly brought-up son And the birth of a daughter is a loss. —Ecclesiastes 22:3

The above quotation illustrates that, as far back as the Bible, history records the apparently widespread notion that having daughters could be a serious disappointment.1 Perhaps because of this attitude, of all of the binary sets through which we routinely consider family relationships in literature, the mother-daughter and father-daughter affiliations have received the least creative and scholarly attention, a hierarchy of value that isolates the daughter as the most absent member within the discourse of the family institution. This dearth of criticism on literary daughters changed, of course, in the 1970s when feminist scholars and others seemed almost compelled to explore the plight of the female child.2 Admittedly, however, the distressing scarcity of models of benevolent fatherhood unbalances any analysis of mythic and literary father-daughter patterns.3 Perhaps this paucity of “good fathers” derives from the patriarchal rule that dominated family life as far back as Greek and Roman times and probably beyond. Yet the extent of patriarchal power is a much-debated issue and few topics have generated so much discussion among scholarly circles, especially those pertaining to literary and dramatic issues in the early modern era. My essay explores the status of the daughter in The Jew of Malta, first by examining the contextual underpinnings of the father-daughter relationship; second, by considering Marlowe’s inventive approach to this historically complex family pair, focusing on both Barabas and Abigail; and third, by exploring 1 Suzanne Hull, According to Men: The World of Tudor-Stuart Women (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, 1996) 133. 2 Lynda E. Boose and Betty Flowers, Daughters and Fathers (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) 2. 3 Boose and Flowers, Fathers and Daughters 37.

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the relationship of this troubled pair as evidence of Marlowe’s contribution to the “aesthetics of violence or cruelty” as posited by Janet Clare and others. Next, I show an often-overlooked facet of Abigail’s character: while victimized in a somewhat stereotypical manner by her father, she does become a subject, a person who acts decisively and of her own volition. Finally, I consider Barabas’s response to the death of his daughter as Marlowe’s experiment in writing beyond words, another example of a creative work by a dramatist who continually tested the limits of his art. The historical context of the work of Marlowe and his peers has occasioned much debate. How pervasive was male authority within the family? Exactly what constituted the Law of the Father? Did women have any power within family and community circles? How did the patriarchal model of social organization affect male subjectivity? These questions and many others have relevance to this essay. Three historians, representing various points of view, figure prominently in this debate, and I will present a brief summary of the arguments of each scholar. Lawrence Stone’s The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (1977) remained the definitive work on domestic life in England for many years. Stone posits that the predominant kinship group during the early modern era was the Restricted Patriarchal Nuclear Family, consisting of father, mother, and children. This model, according to Stone, replaced an extended familial group, which was more utilitarian in nature. The evolution of the Patriarchal Nuclear Family gave the father more power, resulting in his becoming a “legalized petty tyrant within the home.”4 Alan MacFarlane (1986) challenges Stone’s belief in the extensive nature of male dominance and favors the theory of the companionate marriage, effected in part by emerging Puritan concepts that acknowledged women as having more authority and responsibility within the family.5 David Cressy (1997) synthesizes the positions of Stone and MacFarlane, suggesting a “tension between patriarchal authority and individual choice” that created more freedom for women while maintaining the privilege of masculine authority.6 This newfound freedom for women presumably was extended to daughters as well as wives; however, the narratives of the period emphasize the power of the patriarch. The historian Suzanne Hull assesses relevant printed material of the early modern era—advice books, homilies, tracts, and collected letters, all written by men—and, despite the variety of interpretations on the power of the patriarchy, concludes, “Make no mistake: this was a patriarchal world. Father—or husband knew best. At least, so said the books.”7 In assessing the writing about the daughters of the early modern period, Hull summarizes:

4 Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977) 7. 5 Alan MacFarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300– 1840 (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986) 321–2. 6 David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion and Life-style in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 235. 7 Hull, According to Men 16.

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This sense of male dominance was unavoidable; all the classes taught that same message. A daughter—whether raised in a liberal-thinking family or the strictest religious setting— would learn about her so-called inferiority in the “Great Chain of Being.” She might have power beyond the norm owing to her wealth or the family she was born into, but always the ultimate control was in the hands of the males. God was a “he”; no one proposed at that time that God was anything other than male.8

Yet inscribed within patriarchal narratives is something more specific than simply a general control of women—what is specifically absent is the voice (and consequently the rights) of the daughter. Tyrannical paternity seems to mar the father-daughter text even more conspicuously than that of father and son.9 Moreover, culture’s need to impose the incest taboo to ensure an exogamous exchange of its daughters and humanity’s subsequent evolution of a ritual of husband-wife marriages, which is primarily a father-daughter separation rite, both suggest that the father-daughter relationship has no effective internal mechanisms for negotiating its dissolution.10 For after all, the daughter is the exchangeable figure in the family,11 the gold standard whereby families can increase their wealth, power, and social position. Yet what of the other female family member, the mother? Surely, even in this culture of patriarchal prerogative, mothers must figure prominently in the upbringing of daughters. This biological and cultural imperative may be operative in early modern life, but even in the pre-1970s culture of patriarchal prerogative, on stage, mothers present a problem to the father–daughter dyad—healthy or otherwise. Feminist critics, including myself elsewhere, have argued that the mother’s role in the family throughout our patriarchal past has been to intercede with the father on behalf of the children. Thus, if in theatrical portrayals the mother mitigates the father-daughter interaction, much of the dramatic impact of the most powerful member of the family group—the father—confronting, abusing, celebrating, or loving the weakest and least influential family member—the daughter—becomes lost. This father-daughter pair must interact directly if the full dramatic impact of their multiple and varied relationship is to be realized. Mothers, as Boose and Flowers note, play better with sons. Thus, for all of the complex reasons stated above and more, daughters often become the stage focus and the sacrificial victims of their fathers’ rage, ambition, lust, or pride. The history of Western culture reverberates with instances of the sacrifice of children by parents. This literal act by which a parent deliberately kills his or her child may be considered the ultimate violation of the parent-child bond and has intrigued human beings for centuries. The reasons that a parent would consider such an act are undoubtedly diverse and complex. From an anthropological perspective, the origins of the sacrifice of children are associated with the fertility rites (daughter sacrifice) and war motifs (son sacrifice) found in classical mythology. From a psychological perspective, men (fathers) sacrifice women (daughters) in an attempt to destroy the feminine side of themselves that they feel must be extirpated 8 9 10 11

Hull, According to Men 152. Boose and Flowers, Daughters and Fathers 20. Boose and Flowers, Daughters and Fathers 46. Boose and Flowers, Daughters and Fathers 19.

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before undertaking “manly” acts, such as revenge. Thus, if the child who is sacrificed is a daughter, the sacrificer, usually the father, may be motivated to seek something necessary for the survival of himself and/or his kin (the blessing of bounty for his crops), or he may be attempting to overcome something thought to be unworthy within himself (his “womanly” nature), or his motivation may be something more heinous than the ones previously mentioned. Whatever the motives, the daughter-assacrifice motif has become inscribed in Western literature as an acknowledged facet of patriarchal prerogative. Boose and Flowers identify three patterns of daughter sacrifice operative within Western literature and mythology: the “exchange” of the daughter by the father for social benefit; the destructive “salvation” of the daughter by the father to protect the child from a lecherous but socially superior male; and the retention of the daughter by the father to fulfill his own incestuous desires.12 In The Jew of Malta, Christopher Marlowe, in keeping with his inventive style, incorporates elements of all three patterns of daughter sacrifice and adds a fourth element—greed. The breakdown of the family is repeatedly stressed in Marlowe’s plays, and, indeed, three parents kill children in Marlowe’s plays.13 However, despite the recent critical attention given to fractious families, even Marlowe scholars fall victim to the avoidance of the father-daughter relationship in the plays. Frank Ardolino’s assessment of Marlowe’s utilization of family dynamics illustrates Boose and Flowers’ point about the neglect of this familial pair: The composite roles of family members play as both fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters provide Marlowe with the rich sources of complex interactions and the opportunity to portray the tensions created by the shifting roles, to limn, in short the dynamics of power as established within the microcosm of the family. 14

Ardolino’s comment begs the question, “What about fathers and daughters?” for it overlooks The Jew of Malta. Granted, The Jew of Malta prominently features three sets of fathers and sons: the Governor of Malta and his son Lodowick, the Turkish Emperor (in absentia but very much a part of things) and his son Calymath, and Barabas and his “adopted” son Ithamore. After all, The Jew of Malta is a revenge tragedy, and sons are useful, sometimes even necessary, for revenge. Yet The Jew of Malta is also Marlowe’s one play with a dominant father-daughter affiliation, wherein the playwright presents a blockbuster example of the dyad—one of the most merciless, mercenary, and heart-wrenching father-daughter scenarios in dramatic literature. Through the Machiavellian Barabas and the compliant Abigail, Marlowe constructs a pattern of daughter sacrifice so horrific that it is, on the one hand, the ultimate combination of paternal cruelty and betrayal, and, on the other, an effective stage convention run amuck.

12 Boose and Flowers, Daughters and Fathers 40; also see Lagretta Lenker, Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare and Shaw (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001). 13 Lisa Hopkins, “Fissured Families: A Motif in Marlowe’s Plays,” Papers on Language and Literature 33 (1997): 203–4. 14 Qtd. in Lisa Hopkins, Christopher Marlowe (New York: Palgrave, 2000) 25.

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Critics agree that at the beginning of the play, Barabas’s love for his daughter seems genuine enough, even if, as is frequently noted, the Jew often conflates his girl and his gold. Yet he uses her shamelessly to serve his own ends. At age 14, the virtuous and innocent Abigail becomes, in turn, a dissembler as she pretends to become a nun, a thief as she steals her father’s confiscated gold from the nunnery, a temptress as she manipulates Lodowick, and a liar as she pledges her love to the Governor’s son—all at the instruction of her father. And if this dramatized sacrifice of the daughter’s integrity and honor is not explicit enough, Marlowe creates dialogue laden with the imagery of sacrifice, both classical and biblical.15 Even before Abigail appears on stage, Barabas compares his love for her to that of Agamemnon for Iphigenia: I have no charge, nor many children, But one sole daughter, whom I hold as dear As Agamemnon did his Iphigen: And all I have is hers. (1.1.135–38)16

Marlowe loads this apparently lyrical classical allusion with dramatic irony, adducing a mythical father who sacrifices his daughter to appease the goddess Artemis (1.1.136–38). Next, Barabas evokes in soliloquy imagery of Abraham’s offering of Isaac as he implores Abigail to obey him and steal his coveted treasure from the nunnery: O thou, that with a fiery pillar leds’t The sons of Israel through the dismal shades, Light Abraham’s offspring, and direct the hand Of Abigail this night; or let the day Turn to eternal darkness after this. (2.1.14)

Finally, as Barabas begins to formulate his plot against the Governor, he taunts Lodowick with hints of a projected union with his daughter, only to reveal in an aside that he would “sacrifice her on a pile of wood” (probably another allusion to Isaac) before wedding her to Lodowick (2.3.53). Is this unmistakable pattern of daughter sacrifice a mere stage convention, or is Marlowe limning a portrait of familial, and, by extension, state corruption of the power that historically belongs to the patriarch/ruler? Or is this canny playwright playing upon both artistic convention and the cruelty of the patriarchy? To gain a clearer understanding, we must examine this question from the perspective of both father and daughter. First, Barabas—like Polonius, the father that scholars love to hate—comes under the critical microscope. As established above, Barabas clearly engages in a most virulent form of daughter sacrifice. Yet despite the relentless downward spiral of this father-daughter relationship, Barabas’s language reveals that he initially cares 15 Ian McAdam, The Irony of Identity (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1999) 152. See also Sara Munson Deats, “Biblical Parody in The Jew of Malta,” Christianity and Literature 37 (1988): 37–8. 16 Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, 1590 rpt. 1979, N. W. Bawcutt, ed. (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press). All subsequent references to The Jew of Malta will be parenthetical within the text.

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for his daughter, if at times in inappropriate ways, as he frequently conflates the role of father with that of son and Courtly Lover. When we first meet the pair, Barabas, the doting father, is eager to provide for his daughter, as he declares in soliloquy: “I have no charge, nor many children, / But one sole daughter, ... And all I have is hers” (1.1.135–38); as he tells his arch-enemy Ferneze, “You have my wealth, the labour of my life, / The comfort of mine age, my children’s hope” (1.2.151); and as he assures Abigail herself later in the same scene, “O what has made my lovely daughter sad? / What, woman, moan not for a little loss! / Thy father has enough in store for thee” (1.2.227–9). Yet the relationship soon grows more complex. According to Constance Kuriyama’s psychoanalytical reading of this Machiavellian villain, Barabas perceives his daughter as a “permanent fixture” in his life,17 apparently one who exists for his perpetual comfort and use. Early in the play, we see that he wishes to keep Abigail all to himself, not for the traditional reason of incest, but rather, according to Kuriyama, as an almost maternal figure who cares for him and brings him happiness: Yet, if Abigail’s relationship to her father indeed resembles ... that of the pregenitally loved mother to her son, this latent bond may help account for Barabas’ proprietary attitude, and consequently for his intention to kill her “seducers.” Mathias, Lodowick (by proxy for the father “Ferneze”), the lecherous Father Jacomo, who “turned” Abigail—indeed the entire male Christian world—represent, with a marked pregenital warp, the mature sexuality of the father, which threatens to rob Barabas of his devoted, nurturing mother Abigail. In the early scenes of the play, Barabas enjoys the luxury of monopolizing and controlling this dedicated maternal figure, who recognizes the wrong he has suffered and commits herself to his cause. 18

However, as he waits for Abigail outside of the nunnery that formerly was their home, Barabas’s discourse employs the language of romance; in what may be read as a parody of Courtly Love, he cries, “O Abigail, that I had thee here too, / Then my desires were fully satisfied ... Farewell, my joy, and by my fingers take / A kiss from him that sends it from his soul” (2.1.53, 59–60). Eventually, Barabas’s tone and words grow more stern as he manipulates his daughter to achieve his own ends, uttering the primal patriarchal curse, “Be ruled by me” (1.2.272), a chilling epithet that serves as the motto for their relationship. Thus, Barabas’s many mixed messages to his daughter—casting her as a maternal figure, the beloved Courtly Lady, and a patriarchal slave—place her in an emotional double bind that will be analyzed shortly. Scholars frequently consider the cause of the demise of this apparently once loving father-daughter relationship and universally place the blame on Barabas. Kuriyama suggests that the ease with which Barabas snaps in and out of his “emotional transports” concerning his daughter suggests that his feelings are insincere from the beginning of the play.19 She also avers that Barabas has learned the Marlovian, and perhaps

17 Constance Brown Kuriyama, Hammer or Anvil: Psychological Patterns in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 170. 18 Kuriyama, Hammer 159. 19 Kuriyama, Hammer 147.

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Machiavellian, lesson that “one must strike first in order to survive,”20 even if the person struck is the daughter. Jeremy Tambling might suggest that both Barabas and Abigail are doomed because of Barabas’s double status as “the Other”—considered at once “a figure of avarice and covetousness by the popular imagination; [and] as a Machiavel by Machevil ... himself” (101),21 a consummate outsider who will pay any price, even the life of his daughter, to gain revenge against those who construct him as such.22 Finally, Hopkins posits that the father-daughter relationship deteriorates beyond repair when Barabas develops political ambitions: “Even Abigail comes to grief only when her father has acquired so much wealth and power that he will soon be able to put himself forward as a serious candidate for the governorship of Malta: before his development of such ambitions, their relationship seems solid enough.”23 These “ambitions” thus comment on the destructive capacities of powerful men who desire advancement in the patriarchal system. No matter which interpretation one adopts, clearly the play deteriorates into a “theater of cruelty” when Barabas kills his daughter to protect himself. Janet Clare cautions that Marlowe’s drama should not be read from the same humanistic or psychological perspectives that may be applied to other Renaissance dramatists such as Shakespeare. Clare posits that scholars must acknowledge the idiomatic “aesthetics of violence developed by Marlowe,”24 arguing that Marlowe’s canon is replete with an idiomatic amorality and an “aesthetic of cruelty” that revolutionized the early modern theatrical experience and reflected the culture that created it. 25 Specifically, Clare views The Jew of Malta as a “savage farce” and labels Barabas as “the consummate role player, a joker gleefully acting out the audience’s sadistic fantasies ... a mixture of nastiness, humor, and irresistible panache,”26 in other words, a perfect Morality Play Vice. Similarly, Sara Munson Deats and Lisa S. Starks observe that “Barabas is a Janus-faced figure, looking back to the medieval Vice (himself often a thespian of no mean ability) and forward to the numerous Elizabethan and Jacobean scoundrels who became intoxicated with the artistry of their own villainy.”27 Perhaps this convention of spectacular cruelty relates to Catherine Belsey’s theory of emblematic and illusionist drama, for surely the dramatic convention of representing cruelty may be found in medieval drama and in Greek and Roman theater as well.28 Possibly, the dazzling violence that Marlowe incorporates into such plays as Edward II, The Jew of Malta, and Tamburlaine evolves from the emblematic legacy of the past. However, coupled 20 Kuriyama, Hammer 146. 21 Jeremy Tambling, “Abigail’s Party,” In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, ed. Dorothea Kehler and Susan Baker (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1991) 101. 22 Kuriyama, Hammer 150. 23 Christopher Marlowe 33–4. 24 Janet Clare, “Marlowe’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty,’” Constructing Christopher Marlowe, ed. J. A. Downie and J. T. Parnell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 74–5. 25 Clare, “Theatre of Cruelty” 79–80. 26 Clare, “Theatre of Cruelty” 81. 27 Sara Munson Deats and Lisa Starks, “‘So Neatly Plotted, So Well Perform’d’: Villain as Playwright in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta,” Theatre Journal 44 (1992): 375–89. 28 See Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1985).

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with Marlowe’s brilliant dialogue and creative staging, The Jew of Malta takes a step toward the more humanistic and psychological drama that has become illusionistic theater. Conversely, Clare contends that Marlowe’s dramatic perspective remains “relentlessly subversive ... What is so disconcerting about his plays is that he does not orientate the audience through a moral perspective on an innocent victim or psychologically developed character.”29 I would argue that despite the emblematic cruelty of Marlowe, which Clare presents so cogently and persuasively, in Abigail, Marlowe presents a more illusionistic character, the quintessential “innocent victim” who, despite her relatively brief appearance in the play, does offer a moral compass to serve as foil to the more emblematic character of her father. As I will posit here, drawing on the work of Kuriyama and others, Abigail may be interpreted as a subject who makes decisions, experiences pain and remorse, and loves “not wisely but too well.” So what of Abigail’s innocence? Does she in any way contribute to her own demise? Perhaps both Barabas and the culture that created this father-daughter pair share the blame. As Harry Levin notes, Abigail’s first words mark her as naïve and trusting—to a fault: “Not for myself, but ... / Father, for thee (1.2.230–31).30 Hopkins comments on Abigail’s limitless capacity to love,31 a point underscored by Abigail’s refusal to betray her father, even after he has killed Mathias. Abigail’s seemingly undeserved loyalty to her father may result from a systemic pattern found within father-daughter relationships in the early modern period. According to Boose and Flowers, “The daughter’s need for paternal approval and her residual awe of the godlike father seem to override the violent impulses of revenge or competition.”32 Yet Kuriyama sees the problem as more specific to the unselfish Abigail: “... Abigail’s sincerity and kindness paradoxically work against her and the people she loves, for the predators who surround her simply exploit her goodness ... In a context where one is either exploiter or exploited, serpent or dove, knave or fool, Abigail is a fool.”33 Few could argue with Kuriyama’s logic; however, another explanation may serve. A clue given in the Prologue suggests that Marlowe may wish us to see Abigail as merely naïve and innocent, not foolish. Machevil tells us: “I hold no sin but ignorance” (1.1.15). Abigail, like so many other women of her day, may simply be ignorant, unschooled in politics and human behavior; a trusting daughter, she knows no way but to obey. And, as Tambling notes, she has other problems as well: “Abigail is the split off Other of the constructed Other, Barabas; she exists at a double distance.” 34 Tambling identifies Abigail as a woman and a Jew; I would extend that interpretation to include “daughter,” the traditionally lowest and usually the least educated, in every sense of the word, member of the familial and societal hierarchy. Thus, the mixed messages she receives from her father about her 29 Clare, “Theatre of Cruelty” 87. 30 Harry Levin, Christopher Marlowe: The Overreacher (1954; London: Farber and Farber, 1965) 91. 31 Hopkins, Christopher Marlowe 61. 32 Boose and Flowers, Daughters and Fathers 39. 33 Kuriyama, Hammer 163. 34 Tambling, “Abigail’s Party” 102.

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filial loyalty and piety and her status as an unschooled person of low status collide in powerful forces that doom Abigail. Yet in comparatively bold moves, Abigail does take actions that identify her as a Subject, the opposite of the “Other.” First, she chooses her lover Mathias, a match known to her father but apparently not approved of by him. Also, when finally pushed to her limit, albeit too late to save herself from her father’s machinations, Abigail rejoins the convent, in an attempt both to secure her own safety and to effect revenge against her father. So, in a society where one either gets mad or goes mad, Abigail does the unthinkable: she rejects both her father and his religion, a ploy that moves her from the status of Outsider to that of Insider, on both a literal and a figurative level. Within the confines of the convent, Abigail hopes to find protection from her vengeful father, after she has divulged his dark secret of the murders of Lodowick and Mathias; and by joining the dominant religion, she loses her minority status as a Jew. In many early modern tales, these actions by the daughter would be enough to spark the father’s murderous rage. But Barabas is too far down the destructive spiral to be motivated by his daughter’s double defection alone. Yet the killing of Abigail remains one of the most grotesque, blackest scenes in early modern literature. Not content that his daughter alone should perish, Barabas fashions a murder that claims the lives of not only his daughter but all of the nuns living in the convent. Critics are often at a loss to explain why Barabas engages in this excess, and, consequently, the murder of Abigail is often read as comic. Tambling explains: “[Abigail’s] death is not even the climax of the work; instead it is a part of a half-comic crescendo of villainy. The play connives at the antifeminism that it presents; it cannot move over to take Abigail’s part.”35 Joannah Gibbs more strongly recognizes the comic intent: Murdered by Barabas who believes she has put his fatherly authority in jeopardy, Abigail dies in a scene often read ... as comic and thus complicit in the cynicism expressed about women by the male characters in the play ... [T]he scene of Abigail’s death work[s] to reveal the oppressiveness of a system in which, if women misunderstand the operations of power, they are either marginalized or eliminated. As such, Abigail’s death serves to illuminate, as much as to perpetuate, the workings of the patriarchy.36

However, discussing historical father-daughter affiliations, Boose and Flowers might say that Marlowe and the critics turn to comedy because no language or psychological system exists to describe this tortured relationship and subsequent heinous crime. Therefore, comedy, even black comedy, becomes the only way to address this unthinkable, but all too common, crime of daughter sacrifice. Yet another theatrical device may be operating in the scene in which Ithamore reports the death of Abigail and immediately thereafter when the Friars confront Barabas. Despite Barabas’s professed love for his daughter and his fatherly outrage when he learns of her double defection, he responds to Ithamore’s confirmation of her death with only two lines: 35 Tambling, “Abigail’s Party” 109. 36 Joannah Gibbs, “Marlowe’s Politic Women,” Constructing Christopher Marlowe, ed. J. A. Downing and J. T. Parnell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 164–76, 175.

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Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe ITHAMORE. Do you not sorrow for your daughter’s death? BARABAS. No, but I grieve because she lived so long; An Hebrew born, and would become a Christian! (4.3.17–19)

Equally striking is his response to Friar Jocomo’s and Friar Bernadine’s comments: BERNADINE. Thy daughter. JACOMO. Ay, thy daughter. BARABAS. O speak not of her, then I die with grief. (4.3.34–36)

Thus, acts one and two—demonstrating fatherly love, concern, and devotion, even in the flawed parenting style of Barabas—are reduced to three lines in response to the news of her death. Assuredly, this truncated, hardly comic speech facilitates Marlowe’s artistic goal in his portrayal of Barabas’s swift slide into the theatrical and psychological caldron created by his thirst for revenge. However, this abrupt reply by the play’s most garrulous character to the news of the successful completion of his most heartless, yet seminal, act in his “theater of cruelty,” may signal an attempt to employ another rhetorical technique that fascinated early modern dramatists, that of writing beyond words. For example, in Shakespeare’s Othello, a character capable of eloquent speech, devolves into staccato-like, mad ravings, as the Moor wrongly condemns Desdemona for adultery, crying, “O monstrous! Monstrous!” (3.3.441); “O, blood, blood, blood” (3.3.467); and “Damn her, lewd minx! O Damn her, damn her!” (3.3.491), in response to Iago’s temptation.37 Similarly, Frank Kermode, in his discussion of Othello, finds “rage beyond words” at the end of 3.3, when Othello confronts Desdemona about her supposed infidelity, condensing his tirade into one word, “handkerchief,” which, for this critic, signals a “rawness of passion, a conflict between innocently suicidal enquiry and a rage almost beyond words. Rage beyond words was not something the early Shakespeare would have even thought of aiming at.”38 Evidence suggests that the young Marlowe also considered such a rhetorical ploy. In discussing the plays of Christopher Marlowe, Clare notes that “Zenocrate’s profession of love for Tamburlaine [and] Isabella’s defection from Edward to Mortimer [are] abrupt with slight indication in the text of the flow of feelings”39 These passionate yet truncated speeches depend upon the delivery of the actor to convey their full emotional import. Similarly, Marlowe may expect the same passionate rawness from the actor playing Barabas. Read one way, the Jew’s abbreviated response to Abigail’s death may signal his complete degeneration into the emblematic character of the Vice. Yet an alternate reading, based upon similar experiments with this rhetorical construct, may suggest Marlowe’s attempt at writing beyond words, a tactic used to convey excessive rage, grief, love, and other powerful emotions whose expression exceeds the power of language. The success 37 William Shakespeare, Othello, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (New York: Longman, 1997) 1122–66. 38 Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000) 177. 39 Clare, “Theatre of Cruelty” 86.

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of this reading is most readily apparent on stage and undoubtedly depends upon the interpretation and the skill of both the actor and (contemporary) director. However, given Marlowe’s well-documented fascination with language and his attempts to create new modes of expression, Barabas’s response to the death of Abigail should be evaluated in light of its experimental possibilities. If these three lines are delivered in a manner that conveys the uncontrollable rage of an arch-patriarch who has been doubly betrayed by his only daughter, this passage may be understood as an attempt to extend Marlowe’s mighty line to a new level of expression and to imbue the portrayal of Barabas with a furious fervor more in keeping with the first three acts of the play. Undeniably, the play and its protagonist deteriorate when Abigail is no longer alive. When the drama lacks the leavening agent of the daughter, even a naïve one whom some critics call a fool, the patriarchal world of revenge, lust, misogyny, and deceit grows darker, soon finding Barabas, his tormentors, and his victims plunged into the literal and figurative abyss. Without Abigail, the theater of cruelty subsumes the remaining characters and plot in a manner often read as comic for lack of a more insightful exegesis. This seemingly inexplicable descent into comic cruelty may be another in Marlowe’s experiment in writing beyond words, an experiment also revealed in Tamburlaine’s inexpressible passion and ambition and in Faustus’s o’er-leaping ambition and quest for knowledge. Yet, whatever his motives, with this sharp decline into the hell of The Jew of Malta, Marlowe creates a provocative and subversive comment on the sins of the father and, by extension, the rulers in the patriarchal system so prevalent and so destructive in the early modern era.

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Chapter 5

A Study in Ambivalence: Mothers and Their Sons in Christopher Marlowe Joyce Karpay University of South Florida

Feminist critics have located a vast array of interesting, intelligent, even powerful female characters embedded in early modern drama. Portia in The Merchant of Venice, Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra, and Rosalind in As You Like It have all elicited a tremendous amount of critical attention among Shakespeare critics, and critics of Christopher Marlowe have exhibited a keen interest in Edward II’s Isabella. However, few commentators have explored the significance of mothers in this period of the drama, particularly the importance of the mother/son dyad. Those critics who have investigated the family in early modern drama have focused primarily on the absence of mothers in Shakespeare or stressed the importance of the father/son or father/daughter affiliation in Shakespeare’s works. Although far fewer in number than Shakespeare’s dramas, Marlowe’s plays offer an abundance of rich and diverse portrayals of mothers. Yet, surprisingly, critics have neglected this area in his plays. Among Marlowe scholars, only Constance Kuriyama, in her psychoanalytical examination of Marlowe’s plays; Sara Munson Deats, in her feminist treatment of Marlowe’s dramas; and Lisa Hopkins, in her more comprehensive analysis of the family in the Marlowe canon, have realized the importance of the mother/son dyad to Marlowe’s plays. However, none of these studies has focused specifically on the mother/son relationship or sought to discover a pattern in Marlowe’s treatment of this first and, arguably, most crucial of human relationships. Moreover, as far as I am aware, no Marlowe scholar has commented on the dominance of mothers in Marlowe’s plays, a dominance that contrasts sharply with the neglect of mothers in Shakespeare’s dramas. Seeking to fill this critical void, my essay will examine not only the dominant presence of mothers in Marlowe’s plays but also their power, their diversity, and the ambivalent responses they evoke in both their sons and their audiences. In order to do this, however, I must first “place” Marlowe’s dramas within the discourse of the family in the early modern period and within the theatrical traditions of the period.

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I. Early modern maternal visions As Lagretta Tallent Lenker notes in “The Hopeless Daughter of a Hapless Jew: Marlowe’s Father and Daughter in The Jew of Malta” in this collection, patriarchal rule “dominated family life as far back as Greek and Roman times and probably beyond.”1 In early modern England (and throughout western culture) the majority of women in all classes of society married and bore children.2 In fact, in early modern England, “Unless their husbands were away in battle, married women could look forward to producing a child on the average of every two years.”3 Most critics and historians agree that women, and specifically married women (the marital status of most mothers), maintained little official power in early modern England. In her 1991 study “Where are the Mothers in Shakespeare? Options for Gender Representation in the English Renaissance,” Mary Beth Rose illuminates the legal position of women. As Rose explains, when a woman married, she forfeited her legal agency and identity: she could not bring suit, and, although she kept nominal possession of any land she owned, her husband retained the rights over and profits from it; her movables also became her husband’s property, and she could not write a will without his consent. Furthermore, a mother had no legal rights over the guardianship of her children unless explicitly appointed as guardian by her husband in his will . . . in sum, the married woman did not exist. As Lawrence Stone reminds us, “By marriage, the husband and wife became one person in law—and that person was the husband.”4

Although women held little official power, Rose, along with numerous other critics, has discerned conflicting, even contradictory discourses circulating within early modern culture. Theodora A. Jankowski articulates some of these conflicts in Women in Power in the Early Modern Drama. According to Jankowski, Since the wife, of whatever class, was expected to be chaste, silent, and obedient, she had little opportunity or space within which to exercise any personal autonomy. However, women of every class did have some sphere of autonomy. All women, but especially the wives of heads of households, were responsible for running the home: obtaining and cooking food, preparing food for the winter, making clothes for the family, cleaning the home, caring for the young children, and teaching the girls the skills they would need to be wives. In addition, a noblewoman may have acted as regent while the liege lord was away, and women of the growing merchant class also had obligations in the family business.

1 Lagretta Tallent Lenker, “The Hopeless Daughter of a Hapless Jew: Father and Daughter in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta” (in this collection). 2 Valerie Fildes, ed. Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren (London: Routledge, 1990) 1. In her introduction, Fildes notes “the experience and the results of, motherhood were central to the existence of women in all classes of society.” 3 Theodora A. Jankowski, Women in Power in the Early Modern Drama (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992) 31. 4 Mary Beth Rose, “Where are the Mothers in Shakespeare? Options for Gender Representation in the English Renaissance,” Shakespeare Quarterly 4.3 (Autumn 1991): 293.

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But although all of these women were responsible for the maintenance of the home, they usually had to defer to their husbands or fathers in any major decisions.5

Feminist critics such as Rose, Jankowski, and Sara Munson Deats have also noted the inherent contradictions within the Puritan doctrine. While Puritan homilies and essays insisted on the husband and father’s authority over the rest of the family, these same tracts called for a degree of equality between a husband and wife and/ or articulated the importance of obeying one’s conscience. Deats cites the “ethical dilemma” of Puritan preachers such as William Perkins who both defended a doctrine of conscience, an ideology central to Puritan belief in which God remains the central figure of authority, and supported “the authority of the father in the patriarchal nuclear family.” In her analysis of Puritan doctrine, Deats also notes William Whatley’s The Bride-Bush as further evidence of the conflict. Deats finds that, like other Puritan ministers of the period, Whatley insists that the wife must obey the husband in all things that do not contradict conscience. But “the wife may disobey an unlawful command.”6 Jankowski cites William Gouge, another Puritan writer, who outlined the importance of equality in marriage. In Age, Estate, Condition, Piety, Gouge argues, “it is requisite that there should be some equality betwixt the parties that are married.”7 As Jankowski articulates, The majority of women were usually trapped within the web of these conflicting discourses. Only a relatively few were able to use the conflicts to their advantage and work within—or through—the contradictions inherent within the various discourses. Ultimately, however, the position of early modern women must be viewed as being located within a number of discourses which, themselves, were in a state of flux, thus leading to an interesting multiplicity of attitudes toward women, many of which were granted ideological validity.8

Several articles within the 2000 collection Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period further suggest the existence of conflicting discourses within the culture and investigate the anxiety produced by the notion of the threatening empowered mother. In the introduction to the collection, Naomi J. Miller sees a doubleness within early modern culture. Miller contends that [i]n a variety of early modern texts and images associated with female caregivers, mothers and others offer the potential for both nurture and rejection, sustenance and destruction. Maternity was associated with a doubleness of identity that only partially coincides with the doubleness commonly associated with femininity at the time. Whereas women in general might be directed to be chaste, silent, and obedient in order to counteract the

5 Jankowski 31. 6 Sara Munson Deats, “‘Truly, an obedient lady’: Desdemona, Emilia, and the Doctrine of Obedience in Othello,” Othello: New Critical Essays (New York: Routledge, 2002) 236–7. 7 Jankowski 34. Mary Beth Rose also investigates the sexual discourse of Puritan writers such as William Gouge and William Whatley in The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988) 125–6. 8 Jankowski 49.

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Further, Miller finds, The social authority of early modern women often originated in extensions of their caregiving powers from within the home to society at large. Combining the sexuality of generative wombs with the authority of generative words and roles, mothers and other female caregivers shared a potential for social influence that extended far beyond the boundaries of their immediate families, in association with emblematic power as well as actual political and cultural authority.10

In the same collection, Frances E. Dolan and Susan C. Staub investigate the cultural anxiety surrounding motherhood during this period. In “Marian Devotion and Maternal Authority in Seventeenth-Century England,” Dolan argues that both Catholics and Protestants viewed the Virgin Mary, a figure “combining service and power, nurture and eros,” as a threateningly powerful image.11 Staub, in “Early Modern Medea: Representations of Child Murder in the Street Literature of Seventeenth-Century England,” cites Lady Macbeth and argues that [t]his horrible picture of motherhood is not unique to Shakespeare or the period. Lady Macbeth’s lines participate in a pervasive cultural anxiety about motherhood. Historically, mothers have occupied an ambivalent position as both sexual object/nurturer and mistress/ servant within the family structure. But during the early modern period, the construction of the mother seems especially problematic and becomes enmeshed with other anxieties as well, anxieties about family relations, religion and economics.12

Staub’s analysis focuses on the obsession with murdering mothers in the popular press of the time maintaining that the murdering mother embodies both her society’s expectations and its anxieties about motherhood by showing motherhood to be at once empowering and destructive. That the popular press’s obsession with murdering mothers occurs at the same time that women 9 Naomi J. Miller, “Mothering Others: Caregiving as Spectrum and Spectacle in the Early Modern Period,” Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000) 6–7. 10 Miller 14. 11 Frances E. Dolan, “Marian Devotion and Maternal Authority in Seventeenth-Century England,” Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000) 288. 12 Susan C. Staub, “Early Modern Medea: Representations of Child Murder in the Street Literature of Seventeenth-Century England,” Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period, ed. Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000) 333.

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were gaining greater recognition and authority within the domestic sphere is crucial. ... Maternal power is thus partially undermined and made less threatening.13

As evidenced by the scholarship of the above critics, no monolithic description of motherhood in early modern England is possible. Women possessed very few legal rights, and married women (and by extension mothers) were virtually erased from public documents; yet, individual accounts of motherhood indicate that many women valued their roles as mothers.14 In addition, Puritan doctrine demanded, at least in theory, mutuality and some degree of equality between husbands and wives. As Rose and other critics have argued, alternative discourses concerning mothers existed. I contend that, in his plays, Marlowe offers us a diverse and complex portrayal of the mother figure, that he addresses the anxiety and ambivalence often associated with the relationship between the child and the mother while providing his stage mothers with an unusual degree of complexity, even authority. Specifically, Olympia in The Second Part of Tamburlaine the Great, Isabella in Edward II, and Catherine in The Massacre at Paris reflect the cultural anxieties regarding motherhood as well as the fear of threatening or murderous mothers. In contrast, Dido in Dido, Queen of Carthage and Zenocrate in The Second Part of Tamburlaine the Great offer us examples of the “good” mother, a figure from whom we still must separate.15 II. Stage mothers: The critical response to mothers in Shakespeare and Marlowe Just as the mother was marginalized in the early modern family, so too the mother has been neglected in traditional early modern scholarship, at least until the emergence of feminist cultural studies in the 1970s. Even in popular cultural feminist writings, the relationship between mothers and their daughters has, until recently, been explored much more thoroughly than the mother/son relationship. Feminists, with great justification, have probed into the psychological significance of the mother/daughter affiliation, so neglected in view of the historical significance attributed to the father/ son relationship. In contrast, as Andrea O’Reilly discusses in the introduction to Mothers & Sons: Feminism, Masculinity, and the Struggle to Raise Our Sons, the mother/son relationship remains a source of anxiety for many feminists and a “taboo topic” for others. O’Reilly contends that “[a] close and caring relationship between a mother and son is [still] pathologized as aberrant.” This relationship is further complicated by Judith Arcana’s assertion that mothers of sons “are inadvertently reinforcing the sexist premise that women exist to serve men.”16 Brenda O. Daly and Maureen T. Reddy highlight another predicament within feminist criticism of motherhood: the fact that “the subjectivity of mothers often disappears from even the 13 Staub 345. 14 Fildes 28. 15 The psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and Julia Kristeva all demand distinct separation from the mother as a necessary part of healthy psychic development. 16 O’Reilly’s comments as well as the comments of Judith Arcana can be found in O’Reilly’s introduction in Mothers & Sons: Feminism, Masculinity, and the Struggle to Raise Our Sons (New York: Routledge, 2001) 2, 14, 4.

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most sensitive feminist discussions of mothering,” with critics inevitably displacing motherhood and focusing instead on “the subjectivity of daughters.”17 Additionally, the current scholarly emphasis on archival investigations in early modern scholarship, such as biographical and historical studies, reflects the difficulty of analyzing the mother/son relationship since few public documents exist which serve to illuminate the public lives of women. Women’s access to the public world of professions and property ownership remained limited in the sixteenth century, and thus biographical and historical studies, which focus on the father’s economic position, class status, and professional life, often ignore the role of mothers. At a feminist roundtable at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the Shakespeare Association, Carol Thomas Neely argued that the recent emphasis on archival information in early modern studies may be both limiting and exclusionary, particularly in the study of women’s roles in culture. Historians such Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford confirm that “[c]onventional political narratives of early modern England were written on the assumption that men were the only citizens, and consequently the only true political actors, aside from four female monarchs.” In light of this difficulty, Mendelson and Crawford “developed techniques of reading against the grain, of asking where women are absent as well as present in the documents.”18 Two important exceptions to these omissions in early modern literary studies regarding mothers are Janet Adelman’s 1992 contribution, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest, which depicts mothers as the source of extreme anxiety for their sons, and Rose’s “Where are the Mothers in Shakespeare? Options for Gender Representation in the English Renaissance” (1991), mentioned earlier. Adelman focuses her study on the suffocating relationship between mothers and sons from Hamlet through Coriolanus, contending that Shakespeare’s dramas replicate the fear of the maternal embedded within his society: “mothers and sons cannot coexist in his psychic and dramatic world: and his [Shakespeare’s] solution is to split his world in two, isolating its elements—heterosexual bonds in the comedies and Romeo and Juliet, father-son bonds in the histories and Julius Caesar—from each other and from the maternal body that would be toxic to both.” Additionally, Adelman quotes the sixteenthcentury poet John Donne, who compares the mother’s womb to a winding sheet (or a burial sheet), identifying the early modern association between birth and death (“Death’s Duell,” The Sermons of John Donne). For Adelman, the identity of Shakespeare’s protagonists is “grounded in paternal absence and in the fantasy of overwhelming contamination at the site of origin—[which] becomes the tragic burden of Hamlet and the men who come after him. And they do not bear the burden

17 Brenda O. Daly and Maureen T. Reddy, eds. Narrating Mothers: Theorizing Maternal Subjectivities (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991) 1. 18 Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998) 3, 9. Lynda E. Boose also addresses the risk of women’s erasure within the practice of new historicism in “The Family in Shakespeare Studies; or Studies in the Family of Shakespeareans; or The Politics of Politics,” Renaissance Quarterly 40.4 (Winter 1987): 707–42.

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alone: again and again, it is passed on to the women, who must pay the price for the fantasies of maternal power invested in them.”19 Adelman’s interpretation of “suffocating mothers” relies on object-relations theory and its emphasis on the mother first theorized by the post-Freudian analyst Melanie Klein. According to Klein’s theory, the child’s experience with the mother (through the act of breast-feeding) creates a sense of ambivalence. The child experiences the mother (as an extension of the breast) as both “good,” because she fulfills oral gratification, and “bad,” because the breast is inevitably withdrawn and gratification is denied. Additionally, Adelman cites contemporary theorists Dorothy Dinnerstein, Nancy Chodorow, and Madelon Sprengnether as she examines the specific anxiety of the boy child in the mother/son dyad. According to Adelman, “contemporary objectrelations psychoanalysis locates differentiation from the mother as a special site of anxiety for the boy-child, who must form his specifically masculine selfhood against the matrix of her overwhelming femaleness.”20 Dinnerstein and Chodorow, and by extension Adelman, all see boys in western culture as needing a greater degree of separation from the mother than do girls, defining “themselves as more separate and distinct, with a greater sense of rigid ego boundaries and differentiation.”21 Adelman uses these theories to interpret the male protagonists of Shakespeare. In “Where are the Mothers in Shakespeare?” Rose, like Adelman, argues that Shakespeare represents a narrow view of motherhood. Rose acknowledges that the legal discourse of Renaissance England excluded married women from the public realm—a married woman had virtually no legal rights, and a too close affiliation with the private world of the mother remained a direct threat to the public personae the male child must develop. Rose notes, that “since the mother would remove one from what is conceived as the world of action—the public, socialized world—the best mother is an absent or a dead mother.”22 Rose cites the risks of childbirth (the wife was more than twice as likely as her husband to die within the first 15 years of marriage); however, Rose also refers to Protestant treatises that indicate that “mothers as well as fathers were important presences in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English life.”23 In addition, Rose points to the existence of several treatises written by mothers themselves in which women reveal “an ambivalent, often contradictory view of their own authority” and an attempt to “reconcile their self-assertion with the sacrificial constructions of the oedipal plot, in which the best mother is an absent or dead mother.”24 Rose interprets Shakespeare’s plays as overwhelmingly supporting the first, most conservative construction of motherhood—a paternal presence or father figure is often central to Shakespeare’s plays while mother figures are central in only a few works. Only in All’s Well that Ends Well does Rose see Shakespeare

19 Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York: Routledge, 1992) 10. 20 Adelman 7. 21 Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) 169. 22 Rose, “Where are the Mothers in Shakespeare?” 301. 23 Rose, “Where are the Mothers in Shakespeare?” 294. 24 Rose, “Where are the Mothers in Shakespeare?” 312.

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endorsing one of the other two constructions of motherhood, as produced within the Protestant treatises or the writings of the mothers themselves. According to Rose, the Countess in All’s Well is “the closest Shakespeare comes in the comedies and tragedies to representing a mother as a powerful protagonist of social mobility.”25 As demonstrated by the arguments of Rose and Adelman, Shakespeare more frequently depicts mothers within the dominant discourse of motherhood, while Marlowe, in fewer plays, dramatizes alternative discourses. In contrast to the absence of mothers in Shakespeare’s plays, mothers are ubiquitous and often dominant figures in the plays of Marlowe, and, I would add, they are presented with greater ambivalence as well as greater diversity than in Shakespeare’s dramas. In fact, mothers or mother figures command center stage in four of Marlowe’s seven plays—Dido, Queen of Carthage; The Second Part of Tamburlaine the Great; Edward II; and The Massacre at Paris. Katherine, mother to Mathias, appears in The Jew of Malta but is not central to the play. Only Doctor Faustus features no mothers, mother figures, or potential mothers. Looking at mothers in Marlowe, we see a very different pattern from that dominating Shakespeare’s dramas, a pattern theorized by multiple schools of psychoanalysis, including the object-relations theories discussed above: the murderous impulse that children feel toward their parents. Marlowe validates the violent emotions tied to the primary relationship with the mother by killing most of the prominent mothers in his plays: Dido experiences a fiery death in the play bearing her name; Zenocrate dies of natural causes in The Second Part of Tamburlaine; Catherine de Medici and the old Queen of Navarre both perish in The Massacre at Paris—Catherine of natural causes, the Queen of Navarre from poison; and Olympia orchestrates her own death in The Second Part of Tamburlaine. Interestingly enough, Isabella, the duplicitous mother in Edward II, is imprisoned but survives. In Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life, Constance Kuriyama maintains that the mother figures in Marlowe’s plays reflect the quality of his relationship with his own mother, Katherine. For Kuriyama, Katherine is an admirable figure who showed some favoritism for her firstborn son. Kuriyama suggests that the interval of three years between Christopher’s birth and that of Margaret (his next sibling) indicates that Katherine “may have nursed her first son longer than her other children, thus delaying her third pregnancy.”26 In fact, according to Kuriyama, “She and John [her husband] show strong mutual affection for one another in their wills, and the survival rate of her children suggests that she was a conscientious mother. There are hints, both in the representation of maternal figures in Christopher’s plays and in the birth intervals of the Marlowe children, that Katherine especially

25 Rose, “Where are the Mothers in Shakespeare?” 310. Additionally, Irene G. Dash in Wooing, Wedding and Power: Women in Shakespeare Play’s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981) argues quite convincingly that Hermione, pregnant at the beginning of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, exhibits depth, resilience, strength, and wisdom. Further, that Hermione and Paulina “take over the management of their lives” (137). 26 Constance Brown Kuriyama, Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002) 16.

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favored her firstborn son.”27 In Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life, Lisa Hopkins also argues that family issues are central in Marlowe’s works; however, according to Hopkins, these are “fractured, shattered” families. Hopkins cites Kuriyama’s argument that “Marlowe perceived his shoemaker father as aggressive yet weak, dominated by a wife of stronger character” but adds that no evidence of family difficulties in the Marlowe household exists.28 Rather, Hopkins’s study focuses on the destructive nature of patriarchal power as catalyst to the familial disintegration in Marlowe’s plays. For Hopkins, “It is primarily the question of power, and perhaps more specifically of patriarchal power, that is involved in the production of unhappy marriages and fractured families.”29 Stephen Greenblatt in Renaissance Self-Fashioning identifies within Marlowe’s plays a dissolution of the family structure: “Tamburlaine is the son of nameless ‘paltry’ Scythians, Faustus of ‘parents base of stock,’ Barabas, so far as we can tell, of no one at all. (Even in Edward II, where an emphasis on parentage would seem unavoidable, there is scant mention of Edward I).”30 Greenblatt argues that in Marlowe the family is something to be neglected, despised, or violated. Two of Marlowe’s heroes kill their children without a trace of remorse; most prefer male friendships to marriage or kinship bonds; all insist upon free choice in determining their intimate relations. Upon his father’s death, Edward immediately sends for Gaveston; Barabas adopts Ithamore in place of Abigail; Faustus cleaves to his sweet Mephistophilis. ... The effect is to dissolve the structure of sacramental and blood relations that normally determine identity in this period and to render the heroes virtually autochthonous, their names and identities given by no one but themselves. Indeed self-naming is a major enterprise in these plays, repeated over and over again as if the hero continues to exist only by virtue of constantly renewed acts of will.31

In response to Greenblatt, I would insist that within the context of Marlowe’s plays, the mother/son dyad continues to assert itself in all of its complexity. Looking specifically at the mothers in Marlowe, I found that although they die and although— as many critics, such as Hopkins, Deats, and Kuriyama, have noted—patriarchal value systems prevail, Marlowe actually constructs complex maternal figures who reflect the ambivalence felt by most individuals toward their first love object. Marlowe creates mothers who are suffocating, absent, manipulative, deceptive, or even malignant. Alternately, embedded within the violence of the Tamburlaine plays, mothers demonstrate extraordinary love and devotion to their sons. I argue that within the context of his plays, Marlowe presents an ambivalent and complex portrait of motherhood. In contrast to the anxiety that Adelman correctly associates with the mother/son relationship in Shakespeare, Marlowe dramatizes the maternal 27 Kuriyama, Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life 20. 28 Qtd. in Lisa Hopkins, Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life (New York: Palgrave, 2000) 24. 29 Hopkins 35. 30 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) 212. 31 Greenblatt 212–13.

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ambivalence, later theorized by Klein and others. In The Spectral Mother, Madelon Sprengnether suggests that “as the carnal origin of every human subject, the body of the mother represents at once the dream of plenitude and the recognition of its impossibility.”32 In her discussions of motherhood in contemporary literature, Susan Rubin Sulieman investigates the continuation of the impulse in literature (and society) to split the maternal figure into a “good” and “bad” personae—the old construct of the wicked stepmother and the fairy godmother. Sulieman argues that this split provides a fantasy of motherhood that prevents us from having to feel guilty about our ambivalent feelings toward our mothers, whom, as object-relations theorists have demonstrated, we necessarily must both hate and love. Additionally, Sulieman suggests that the child is not the only one who experiences fantasies of benevolence and destruction but that the mother herself, if she seeks any source of power or creativity, must separate from her role as mother.33 The cultural demand of benevolence for the child conflicts with the self-absorption necessary for personal development or, in the cases of Isabella and Catherine de Medici in Marlowe’s plays, for achievement through the acquisition of power. No cultural arena exists where the idealized Madonna can coexist with the mother’s pursuit of personal power. Sulieman’s critique of motherhood in literature, as well as the feminist objectrelations theories of Dinnerstein, Chodorow, and Sprengnether, can serve to enhance our reading of mothers in Marlowe’s plays.34

32 Madelon Sprengnether, The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990) 230. Sprengnether herself addresses the ambivalent emotions surrounding the mother figure in pagan goddess and fertility rituals, the Christian depiction of the Pietà, and specifically in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in “Annihilating Intimacy in Coriolanus,” Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and Historical Perspectives, ed. Mary Beth Rose (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986). Sprengnether contends that preoedipal object-relations theory “in its construction of the figure of mother complements Oedipal theory by offering a rival, though suppressed claim to authority, it also reveals the ambivalences encoded in patriarchal culture towards the figure who embodies this authority. That she should appear then in the guise of Volumnia is not surprising. That the shape of Shakespeare’s tragedies should be defined by the male hero’s responses to such a figure and the subversion of his masculinity that she represents is occasion for pity as well as terror” (107). 33 Susan Rubin Sulieman, Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), particularly pages 13–54. 34 Theresa M. Krier, Birth Passages: Maternity and Nostalgia, Antiquity to Shakespeare (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). Not all critics focus on suffocating, excessive, or ambivalent portraits of motherhood in literature. Krier uses Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicot, and Luce Irigaray to investigate the space and the potential for differentiation between mother and child in the poetry of Lucretius, Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare. According to Krier, the Song of Songs, De rerum natura, the Parlement of Foules, the Amoretti, The Faerie Queene, Love’s Labor’s Lost, and The Winter’s Tale all “acknowledge the lure of nostalgia for an archaic mother”; however, these texts also “urge alternatives to both longing for and dread of her.” Within these works, Krier locates a relationship between mother and child that resists the “pathos of nostalgia” and articulates “the endlessly varied, charged spaces between mother and child” (4, 14).

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III. Marlowe’s mother tongue: Dido, Zenocrate, Olympia, Isabella, and Catherine Marlowe offers us a diverse representation of the maternal figure. Mothers in Marlowe are presented as complex, contrary, even contradictory characters. Moreover, the responses of sons to their mothers are equally complex, conflicting, and often ambivalent. Robert Logan, in “Marlowe’s Fashioning of Shakespeare,” reminds us that both Marlowe and Shakespeare explore “the possibilities of ambiguity as a means for engaging and holding an audience’s attention. Ambiguity complicates their responses by stretching the limits of their multiconsciousness, their capacity for entertaining multiple perspectives at the same time—during the course of the play as well as later, upon reflection.”35 Further, I believe that Marlowe anticipates an ambivalent psychological response of the audience toward these maternal figures that is consistent with object-relations theory developed in the twentieth-century. Although mothers in Marlowe are often absent and ineffectual, and many die (fulfilling what we have come to expect from mothers in literature), mothers in many of Marlowe’s plays are given surprisingly prominent, even powerful roles. As both Deats and Kuriyama have indicated, Dido, Queen of Carthage is filled with mothers. At least four mother figures exist in the play—Juno, Jupiter’s wife and patron saint of women and childbirth; Venus, mother to Aeneas and Cupid; the Nurse, surrogate parent to Ascanius; and Dido, the surrogate mother to Cupid, Ascanius, and/ or Aeneas. When Ascanius tells Dido, “You shall be my mother,” she replies, “I will, sweet child” (2.1.96–97).36 Moreover, she cuddles Cupid in her lap and feeds him with sweets. Expanding her role as the bountiful mother, Dido provides Aeneas with food, clothing (she gives him robes, jewels, and a crown), rest, new ships, and love during his stay in Carthage. Although Venus instigates Dido’s protection of Aeneas, we learn that Venus is largely absent and that Aeneas yearns for her as he begs her to “Stay, gentle Venus, fly not from thy son! Too cruel” (1.1.242–43). Alternately Dido, Venus’s replacement, has been viewed quite convincingly by Kuriyama as the suffocating/emasculating Oedipal mother of Freudian psychology. Mothers can’t win—they’re either too absent or too smothering. However, Deats recovers Dido, seeing her as an androgynous queen, as “more dynamic and dominant, and thus more traditionally masculine, while portraying Aeneas as more reticent and passive, and thus more conventionally feminine.”37 Although Dido does die at the end of the play, I have always viewed her as charismatic because of her access to feminine language. Throughout the play, the language that Dido uses, the verbal pictures that she creates while professing her passion, and the images employed by other characters to describe her maintain a specifically feminine fluidity. She is certainly more appealing than her male counterpart Aeneas. She gets the best lines in the play, and circular

35 Robert A. Logan, “Marlowe’s Fashioning of Shakespeare,” 2005 Shakespeare Association of America Conference, Bermuda, March 16–19, 2005. 36 J. B. Steane, ed., Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays (Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1986). All subsequent citations of Marlowe’s plays reference this work. 37 Sara Munson Deats, Sex, Gender, and Desire in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1997) 94.

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feminine sexual imagery—hollows, bracelets, crowns, and rings—fill her feminine rhetoric. In act 3, Dido promises Cupid (disguised as Ascanius) that if Aeneas stays with her she will, “make me bracelets of his golden hair; / His glistering eyes shall be my looking-glass” (3.1.85–86). The oars Dido offers Aeneas will be “... full of holes, / Through which the water shall delight to play; / ... The masts, whereon thy swelling sails shall hang, / Hollow pyramides of silver plate; / The sails of folded lawn where shall be wrought ...” (3.1.118–25; emphases added). In a scene that concludes within the most famous of feminine symbolsthe caveDido offers Aeneas her wedding ring and bracelets (3.4.61–64). While in the cave, she covers Aeneas in her robes as she enfolds him within a feminine language. Dido’s beautiful language also surrounds her with its fluidity of water, seas, wind, and billowing sails. She speaks of “watery billows,” “The water, which our poets term a nymph,” or “The water ... an element” (4.4.138, 144, 147). In full dramatic glory, Dido proclaims, “I’ll set the casement open, that the winds / May enter in” (4.4.130–31). Finally, Dido invites her lover to “Leap in mine arms; mine arms are open wide” (5.1.180; emphases added). Also, when compared to the fathers in the play—Jupiter, who, obsessed with Ganymede, neglects his family; or Aeneas, who demonstrates paternal irresponsibility by nearly abandoning his son Ascanius—Dido’s mothering seems preferable to the parenting of the fathers. Recent psychological discourse on raising sons actually contradicts traditional misgivings about the close relationship between mothers and sons, arguing that empowering, loving mothers do not necessarily suffocate but actually engender feelings of empowerment to their sons. In Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, William Pollack argues that “far from making boys weaker, the love of a mother can and does actually make boys stronger emotionally and psychologically.”38 From this perspective, Aeneas may suffer not from the suffocating love of the surrogate mother Dido but from the neglectful Venus. And Dido may represent not our negative fear of the suffocating mother but our ambivalent feelings toward all mothers. In act 4, Aeneas admits that “beauty calls me back: / To leave her so, and not once say farewell, / Were to transgress against all laws of love,” yet, just a few lines later, she becomes a “female drudgery” that he must not endure (4.3.46–55). Like Aeneas, we are drawn to the safety and protection of Dido’s harbors, but ultimately we realize that we must leave as a sign of adult maturation and individuation. I would like now to move to Zenocrate of the Tamburlaine plays, the sensitive, benevolent mother of Calyphas, Amyras, and Celebinus. Both Deats and Hopkins have pointed out that Calyphas is the one son who adheres to a more feminine value system, who extols an inclination toward peaceful relations, and, of course, Calyphas is slain by Tamburlaine. Tamburlaine believes his legacy depends on his reputation as “The Scourge of God and terror of the world” (Part II 4.1.156), and in The First Part of Tamburlaine, the potential mother Zenocrate offers the only alternative to Tamburlaine’s martial creed: she urges him to spare the virgins of 38 William Pollack, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood (New York: Owl, 1998) 81. O’Reilly references Pollack, along with Olga Silverstein and Beth Rashbaum’s The Courage to Raise Good Men, to assert that much of men’s pain relates to an “estrangement from women” that begins with their relationship with their mothers (225).

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Damascus; she mourns the deaths of Bajazeth and Zabina; and she laments the demise of the Prince of Arabia. Nevertheless, despite her alternative perspective, she loves Tamburlaine, marries him, and accepts her role as obedient wife. In The Second Part of Tamburlaine, Zenocrate continues to advocate pacifist values and pleads with Tamburlaine to avoid the dangerous chances of wrathful war (1.4.8); nevertheless, at her death, she demonstrates the extent to which she remains a tool of the war-like Tamburlaine, as she dies, admonishing her sons to emulate their warlike father: “In death resemble me, / And in your lives your father’s excellence” (2.4.75–76). Although certainly a caring mother, Zenocrate is not willing, or not able, to stand up to Tamburlaine to defend her values or her children. As critics such as Kuriyama and Deats have pointed out, only one son fails to follow her advice. This one son, Calyphas, patterns himself after his mother; he wishes to stay with his mother and extols peaceful values. At one point Calyphas states that he has killed a man and expresses an aversion to killing. Whether Calyphas has really killed a man, as he says, we do not know, but his compassion links him to his mother. Later Calyphas defies his father, defending pleasure and peace (qualities historically gendered feminine) against the brutality of war. Although Tamburlaine considers Calyphas a coward, critics such as Deats have argued that Calyphas is the only son who has inherited Tamburlaine’s spirit and has the courage to defy his domineering father. In the end, the Governor of Babylon refers to Tamburlaine as a “Vile monster, born of some infernal hag” (5.1.110), and we have every reason to believe that after Tamburlaine’s bloody conquests (which he uses Zenocrate’s death as an excuse to conduct), along with the legacy of Tamburlaine’s sons, future generations may very well refer to Zenocrate as “some infernal hag.” As so often, the mother, even when caring and loving, will be held responsible for the destruction and violence that she is powerless to prevent. Certainly the mother who elicits the most ambivalence in the play is Olympia, the wife of the captain of Balsera, who kills her son in order to protect him from torture at the hands of Tamburlaine. Of course, within the context of The Second Part of Tamburlaine, two acts of filicide are committed; two sons are murdered by their parents eliciting a comparison between the two. Olympia murders her son in an effort to protect him from suffering torture after he begs her to let him follow his father in death. Later, Tamburlaine murders his son Calyphas for refusing to participate in his battle—for cowardice, at least as Tamburlaine conceives it. Olympia’s slaying of her son, which precedes Tamburlaine’s murder of Calyphas, generates greater surprise, anxiety, and ambivalence. Because Tamburlaine’s murder of Calyphas is the second act of filicide in the play, it is not as shocking. Moreover, of course, because at this point we are accustomed to Tamburlaine’s violent aggression, his murder of Calyphas is not quite as surprising as witnessing a mother kill her beloved son. Is Olympia (in direct contrast to Zenocrate) frighteningly quick to “protect” her son from a menacing authority figure? Or does she do the only thing that a loving mother could do? Although Olympia’s act of killing and thus protecting her son gains her the admiration of a king (Theridamas, King of Argier), the audience is left with a feeling of ambivalence rather than admiration. The power of maternal love at this point feels at once frightening and admirable; the suffocating, protective mother is transformed into the angel of death. Of course, by orchestrating her own death, by remaining true

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to her conviction to choose death, and by not being seduced by the promise of wealth and comfort, Olympia commands our respect. However, in this case the ambivalence we experience is not split but directed toward one figure: the good and bad mother as exemplified in Olympia. Probably the most famous mother in Marlowe is Isabella, wife to Edward II and mother to Edward III. With Isabella, Marlowe depicts a clear example of the duplicitous mother. As the ambitious Isabella positions herself close to the usurper Mortimer, she does not even consider the effect that Mortimer’s rise and Edward’s demise will have on her son. Whereas Olympia offers us an example of the frighteningly protective mother, Isabella is the manipulative and deceptive mother. Isabella uses her son as an excuse to go to war against her husband; always ambitious, she supports the powerful Mortimer and allows Edward’s beloved uncle Edmund to be executed, despite the boy’s pathetic pleas; and she lies to her son, defending Edmund’s execution by telling him, “Had Edmund liv’d, he would have sought thy death” (5.4.111). Finally, she not only condones but actually advocates the murder of Edward II, young Edward’s father. Even a father as flawed, neglectful, and self-involved as Edward is preferable to the deceptive dissembling Isabella. Isabella exemplifies Sulieman’s belief that benevolence toward the child exists in conflict with the self-absorption necessary for women to attain personal fulfillment—in this case Isabella’s desire for power, and possibly love. As the contemporary writer Adrienne Rich has pointed out, historically it has been assumed, at least in western culture, that the process toward individuation is essentially the child’s drama, played out against the parent or parents, but this ideology of motherhood neglects to realize that mothers too are still in a state of development.39 Thus, they are continually being asked to choose between themselves and their child. For Isabella (and perhaps even more for Catherine de Medici in The Massacre at Paris), a conflict occurs between the woman’s role as mother and her desire for power. These mothers are unable to find a space for both. We may ask, does this conflict, and the insistence that the mother’s needs remain secondary, participate in producing duplicitous and malignant mothers such as Isabella and Catherine? Ironically, even with such undesirable parents, Edward III evolves into a formidable yet restrained leader. Edward III remains loyal to his father, takes command of the state, executes his father’s murderer, and compassionately sentences Isabella to imprisonment rather than death, demonstrating his ambivalent feelings toward his mother. At the end of the play, Edward III orders, “Away with her! Her / words enforce these tears, / And I shall pity her, if she speak again” (5.6.82–84). For in Marlowe, it seems, that even the worst mothers elicit sympathy from their sons. By ending the play with the judicious young Edward III in command of the state, we are reminded that human beings can survive even the most uncaring of mothers. Only Catherine de Medici, the malignant mother, remains. Although The Massacre at Paris is certainly an incomplete version of the play performed in 1593,40 39 Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Norton, 1976). 40 For a full discussion of the problematic and incomplete nature of the surviving text of The Massacre at Paris, see Sara Munson Deats, “Dido, Queen of Carthage and The

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I would argue that the existence of the text reveals the continued prominence of the mother figure in Marlowe’s work. In addition, Marlowe’s portrayal of Catherine demonstrates his willingness to explore a powerful malignant mother on stage. In fact, one wonders whether there existed an equal to the malevolent Catherine on the early modern stage. While Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth vows that she is capable of dashing out the brains of her own baby, she remains childless and never actually commits an act of violence herself (1.7.58).41 In contrast, through Catherine, Marlowe demonstrates the disastrous effect of a domineering and ruthless mother, obsessed with power. Charles is destroyed (and France suffers). The play suggests that Charles’s mysterious death may be the result of his attempts to defy his mother, but we never really know for certain the cause of his demise. Moreover, if Catherine is viewed as a surrogate mother to the Duke of Guise, as some critics have suggested, he does not fare much better for the contact. Arguably, the scheming Guise is responsible for his own downfall; however, it is worth noting that Guise views Catherine as “the Good Mother,” who, like Dido with Aeneas, should protect him and provide for all his needs: “The Mother Queen working wonders for my sake, / And in my love entombs the hope of France, / Rifling the bowels of her treasury, / To Supply my wants and necessity” (1.2.76–79). Kuriyama contends that “in order to merely survive as individuals, the sons must defy her [Catherine]” and that Henry ultimately triumphs because he recognizes that he must rebel against his mother and kill Guise—that his manhood depends on opposing the powerful maternal force of Catherine.42 The action of Massacre certainly confirms the necessity of Oedipal rebellion in regard to the mother as well as the father, although, of course, in Massacre, in spite of that resistance, both Henry and Charles die. Without question, the malignant, manipulative Catherine is central to the play. A question even exists as to whether Catherine is responsible for the death of her son Charles. In act 2, after hearing the Cardinal of Lorraine denounce Charles as a traitor to their cause who has sworn with “the rebellious King of Navarre” to revenge the death of the Huguenots “upon us all,” Catherine assures the Cardinal: For Catherine must have her will in France. As I do live, so surely shall he die, And Henry then shall wear the diadem; And, if he grudge or cross his mother’s will, I’ll disinherit him and all the rest; For I’ll rule France, but they shall wear the crown, And, if they storm, I then may pull them down. Come, my lord, let us go. (2.2.41–48)

Massacre at Paris,” The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 193–206. 41 Macbeth, The Necessary Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (New York: Longman, 2002). 42 Constance Brown Kuriyama, Hammer or Anvil: Psychological Patterns in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980) 77–80.

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Coincidentally (or perhaps not) Charles does die two scenes later, while Catherine sheds what we suspect are crocodile tears, lamenting, “Thou kill’st thy mother’s heart” (3.1.4). In the following scene, Catherine discusses her intractable son Henry with the same Cardinal: Tush, man, let me alone with him, To work the way to bring this thing to pass; And, if he do deny what I do say, I’ll despatch him with his brother presently, And then shall Monsieur wear the diadem. Tush, all shall die unless I have my will; For, while she lives, Catherine will be queen. (3.2.61–67)

Does Catherine’s statement, “I’ll dispatch him with his brother presently,” indicate that Catherine is responsible for Charles’s death and willing to commit another act of filicide against Henry? If so, Marlowe may have created the most powerfully malignant woman on the early modern stage.43 Although Catherine attempts to gain access to patriarchal power, she ultimately fails and her power over her sons and France diminishes. Like most of Marlowe’s mothers, she dies before the play ends—presumably of grief at the Guise’s murder or frustration at her loss of power. However, even within this play, in which the mother is truly presented as toxic, malignant, almost without positive attributes, there exists a sense of ambivalence toward mothers in general. Although Navarre’s mother, the Old Queen, dies, her inclusion in the play provides a positive mother figure. And even though Margaret, Catherine’s daughter and another positive character, is not yet a mother within the context of the play, French feminists would contend that by being a woman, she is never far from the cultural representations of motherhood. In addition, Margaret is a future Queen, the mother to her country. Also, within the context of the play, references to the idealized mother, the Virgin Mary, as well as allusions to Queen Elizabeth, as the queen and mother of England, present necessary positive contrasts to Catherine. The oppositional views of motherhood leave us again, even in a play dominated by Catherine de Medici, an appropriate sense of ambiguity toward the figure of the mother. IV. Conclusion In a recent article, “‘You make me feel like (un) natural woman’: Reconsidering Murderous Mothers in English Renaissance Drama” (2003), Catherine E. Thomas cites Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton’s 1561 Gorboduc or Ferrex and Porrex and John Fletcher’s The Tragedie of Bonduca (1613) as examples of early modern culture’s unique fascination with the murderous queen. Both of these plays present the sacrificial murder of children by a queen—in Gorboduc, the mother Videna commits a murder of revenge against her son Porrex and, in Bonduca, the queen 43 Kuriyama asserts that “Even in ruins, Catherine is an extraordinarily malicious maternal figure, to a degree unparalleled in Renaissance drama” (Hammer and Anvil 77).

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defiantly facilitates her own death and the death of her daughters in a suicide pact. Thomas argues that while “most documented incidents of child murder were infanticides, usually perpetrated by lower-class, and often single women” (303–4), the early modern stage demonstrated a fascination with murderous queens.44 Thomas suggests that these plays (even the 1613 Bonduca) reflect, on stage, the anxiety felt by a patriarchal society in the uncomfortable position of being ruled by a woman. Thomas does not mention The Massacre of Paris in her thesis (although she does reference Olympia’s slaying of her son in The Second Part of Tamburlaine the Great as well as Barabas’s murder of Abigail in The Jew of Malta); however, her essay reinforces my belief that Marlowe was keenly aware of the anxiety produced by the presence of strong women, particularly mother figures, on stage. Within only four plays, Marlowe demonstrates his ability to engage divergent discourses circulating on the topic of motherhood, boldly defy traditional expectations, (as always) mesmerize us with his verbal virtuosity, confront politically sensitive issues, and expose the ambivalent nature of our relationship with our first love object. Marlowe thus displays our deepest desires, fears, and anxieties on stage for all to see.

44 Catherine E. Thomas, “‘You make me feel like (un) natural woman’: Reconsidering Murderous Mothers in English Renaissance Drama,” Women, Violence, and English Renaissance Literature: Essays Honoring Paul Jorgensen, ed. Linda Woodbridge and Sharon Beehler (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2003). In Thomas’s critique of the gap between the reality of women’s lives and stage representations, she cites Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England 1550–1700 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) and Betty S. Travitsky, “Child Murder in English Renaissance Life and Drama,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 6 (1993): 63–84.

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Chapter 6

Masculinity, Performance, and Identity: Father/Son Dyads in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays Merry G. Perry West Chester University

I. Introduction Relationships between parents and children are central to Marlowe’s work, especially the relationship between fathers and sons as they perform the lessons of masculinity. Contemporary theoretical work in masculinity studies and men’s studies offers new ways to analyze the significance of father/son relationships in Marlowe’s plays. Are these relationships merely reinscribing traditional conceptions of manhood and masculine identity, or is Marlowe cleverly subverting gender politics in his portrayal of males and paternity? Or is he offering his audience an opportunity to read both positions simultaneously? In what follows, I consider these questions and others in my attempt to answer the question, Why are father/son dyads so prominent in Marlowe’s work? Ultimately, I propose that Marlowe deliberately problematizes notions of traditional masculinity in regards to the father/son relationship in his plays, crafting a trenchant critique of traditional notions of patriarchy and its inherent power differentials and of traditional notions of masculinity training and the politics of gendered subjectivity. In this essay, I consider masculinity and the father/ son dyads in all of Marlowe’s plays, concluding my discussion with Tamburlaine, Marlowe’s strongest critique of masculinity. My analysis is inspired and influenced by the critical work of those Marlovian scholars who interrogate gender and family relationships in Marlowe’s plays, especially Sara Munson Deats’s Sex, Gender, and Desire in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe, Lisa Hopkins’s “Fissured Families: A Motif in Marlowe’s Plays,” Constance Brown Kuriyama’s Hammer or Anvil: Psychological Patterns in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays, Robert A. Logan’s “Violence, Terrorism, and War in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Plays,” and Alan Shepard’s Marlowe’s Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada.1 Furthermore, I follow Deats’s lead in 1 This essay is also inspired by other useful works that consider masculinity in the early modern period: Mark Breitenberg’s Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England

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using the work of Jonathan Dollimore and Catherine Belsey on the “deep, structural similarity between early modern discourses of the manipulable, pliant self and poststructuralist models of the divided subject and performative gender.”2 Thus my use of contemporary masculinity and men’s studies proves useful in interpreting Marlowe’s plays and the males who inhabit them. II. Masculinity studies and men’s studies Over the past decade, scholars of masculinity studies and men’s studies have generated an enormous amount of important theoretical critiques of men’s roles in society. Critics such as Robert Bly, Warren Farrell, Susan Bordo, Michael Kimmel, Michael Messner, and others contend that society’s masculine gender roles affect men in damaging ways. Some critics (such as Bly and Farrell) seem to argue for a revitalization of traditional masculinity (by foregrounding an overt display of power, renewed control, and aggression) in response to what they perceive as men’s unfair treatment at the hands of castrating “feminazis” and other strong females who attempt to disrupt “natural” hierarchies and divisions of labor. Others (such as Bordo, Kimmel, and Messner), with whom I align myself, propose a reconsideration of male socialization and offer new ways to think about what it means to be a man and hence “masculine” in our society. Literary critics have slowly been applying this important work on men and masculinity to consider how literature might both reflect and critique the gendered cultural expectations of its specific historical and social moment. Thus my analysis of Marlowe’s male characters, and specifically the father/son relationships, offers the opportunity to consider how the performance of manhood has been—and continues to be—problematic for men. I agree with those critics who contend that men suffer from gendered identities and the cultural representations that construct and reinforce them. Even today, boys and men are denied the full range of human qualities and are expected to perform as hunters/providers, warriors, and rulers/leaders. While men may have moved from the cave and the open plain into a corporate jungle characterized by competitiveness, consumerism, and ruthlessness, the stakes remain the same. Who is the strongest, smartest, and fiercest man? Who is the king of the hill? In order to become a man, a boy must learn to perfect his performance of masculinity. Because this performance is never-ending, a boy must forever seek new ways to prove what he is not: a female. As Mark Gerzon asserts, this illustrates how the performance of masculinity is negative; I am a man only because I can prove—and continue to prove—that I am not

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Coppélia Kahn’s Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Alexandra Shepard’s Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Bruce R. Smith’s Shakespeare and Masculinity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Robin Headlam Wells’s Shakespeare on Masculinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 2 Sara Munson Deats, Sex, Gender, and Desire in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997) 16.

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a woman.3 Furthermore, because masculinity is a socially constructed performance rather than a permanent attribute, it must be repeatedly enacted; therefore, every situation, location, and relationship becomes a potential stage. While traditional standards of masculinity and femininity have altered over the years, females or males who stray from these conventional patterns often are labeled as somehow deviant and abnormal. For example, females who exhibit aggressive behaviors are frequently labeled “bitches”; males who display passive and nurturing tendencies are labeled “sissies,” “wimps,” or “girlie men.” While some people may feel that times have changed and gender roles have been redefined to permit males a fuller range of human emotions and activities, dominant ideologies of masculinity continue to reinforce the following traditional characteristics for males: 1. Martial prowess. 2. Heterosexuality resulting in offspring to inherit and carry on the family name. 3. Exercise of power over those who are weaker. 4. Limited expression of emotion (anger and revenge are acceptable). 5. Reinforcement of the patriarchy—father as head of the household and superior to women and children.

As Deats reminds us, “societies since the beginning of the historic period have arbitrarily associated the masculine with active, instrumental traits—leadership, courage, resolution—while equating the feminine with passive, receptive traits— obedience, patience, compassion.”4 Furthermore, she contends that “Marlowe’s plays consistently interrogate [the] equation of manliness with martial prowess, and, in a broader sense, with violence and resolution,” reifying an ideology “deeply imbedded within early modern gender discourses ... defining the exemplary man as bloody, bold, and resolute.”5 In a patriarchal society that values and even encourages hypermasculinity, any deviation from the performance of masculine traits results in severe punishment and even death. Thus, Calyphas is destined to die because he refuses to align himself with his father Tamburlaine and his masculine ideals. While definitions of manhood and proper masculinity have varied over time and from place to place, Vern Bullough reminds us that most societies have defined it 3 Mark Gerzon, A Choice of Heroes: The Changing Faces of American Manhood (Boston: Houghton, 1982) 179. 4 Deats, Sex, Gender, and Desire 14. 5 Deats, Sex, Gender, and Desire 75. Alan Shepard, Marlowe’s Soldiers: Rhetorics of Masculinity in the Age of the Armada (Aldershot, Eng.: Ashgate, 2002), argues that the “theatrics of masculinity are central to [Marlowe’s] work” and offers readers “a tour of Marlowe’s critique of hypermilitarism,” a spectrum he describes as moving “from apparent endorsement of it” in Tamburlaine “to apparent repudiation of it” in Doctor Faustus (3, 15). In between these two extremes, Shepard reads Dido as a tragedy that depicts the “degree to which masculinity is a rhetorical function of its contexts,” The Massacre at Paris as “Marlowe’s study of the use of the rhetorics of masculinity as weapons in the French wars of religion in his own time,” and Edward II as the story of a dissident who paradoxically becomes king, and is “charged to uphold the fictions of masculinity by which England is made safe from enemies both inside and outside the realm” (16).

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“as a triad: impregnating women, protecting dependents, and serving as provider to one’s family. Failing at these tasks leads not only to challenges to one’s masculinity, but also to fear of being labeled as showing feminine weakness, however a society defines that.”6 This reinforces the stereotypical binary of masculine/feminine and male/female and, as Bullough argues, puts restrictions upon the man that, though quite different from those on the woman, are nonetheless burdensome. A woman in a sense can be encouraged to adopt “masculine” ways of thinking, even “masculine” ways of action, but any male who demonstrates any inclination toward showing a more feminine side is deprecated, as this is a sign of weakness, not strength. A woman can raise her status and role in a society by acting as a man (providing she does not show a woman’s sexuality) without any threat to society. Males who fail to perform as males have their manhood questioned. It is almost as if the “superiority of the male” has to be demonstrated continually or else it will be lost.7

In order to demonstrate manhood and male superiority, males need templates for their behavior. In A Choice of Heroes: The Changing Face of American Manhood, Gerzon describes five archetypes of manhood that continue to exist because they were once useful and promised survival and well-being. As I see it, they also offer useful “stage directions” for males to use in a patriarchal society (and for Marlowe to use in crafting his male characters). Furthermore, they have been useful in that they have “led men to protect their loved ones, to defend cherished values, and to enrich and expand their lives.”8 1. The Frontiersman is the explorer of new lands (Aeneas, Tamburlaine, and Faustus). 2. The Soldier protects and symbolizes security and comfort (Aeneas and Tamburlaine). 3. The Expert marshals new knowledge (Faustus). 4. The Breadwinner fosters “economic prosperity, both for his family and for the nation” (Aeneas and Tamburlaine). 5. The Lord, “a symbol of divinity, offer[s] salvation and immortality” (Aeneas, Edward II, Tamburlaine, and Faustus).9

Tamburlaine fashions himself into the epitome of the frontiersman, soldier, and breadwinner, and, although he requires considerable prodding, Aeneas does ultimately perform these destined roles. Conversely, Barabas is barred by his society from performing the soldier and forsakes the role of breadwinner in pursuit of his revenge. Faustus seeks to perform both the expert and the Lord, but fails in both roles because, in his attempts at performing masculinity, he defies the fiats of his heavenly father. Finally, Edward II, king of England, who because of his position in the patriarchal hierarchy should star as frontiersman, soldier, breadwinner, expert,

6 Vern L. Bullough, “On Being a Male in the Middle Ages,” Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994) 34. 7 Bullough, “On Being a Male” 34. 8 Gerzon, Choice of Heroes 4. 9 Gerzon, Choice of Heroes 4.

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and Lord, refuses to perform masculinity as defined by his culture, thus bringing catastrophe on his kingdom and himself. III. The early modern family According to Susan Dwyer Amussen, in the early modern period, “Gender order was clearly defined: women and men belonged in families governed by a benevolent pater familias who guarded their morals and directed their behaviour. Even the father in this scheme only did God’s will, and helped his subordinates to do the same. In practice, this did not always work as comfortably as it should have done.”10 However, in spite of some transgressions—by rebellious children’s secret courtships, the birth of illegitimate children, flexibility in terms of wives’ independence after marriage, marital breakdown—“the underlying assumptions were rarely challenged. Everyone agreed that men were superior to women, that husbands ought to govern their households and that the household was the basis of order.”11 Thus, the family, an economic institution, was the foundation of all social relationships and discipline, and, as head of the family, the father was responsible for his family’s social and moral behavior and economic future. As Amussen contends, the “model for relations in the family and the state was the relationship between God and man.”12 Whereas political writers chose the King as God’s representative on earth, writers of household manuals chose the father or head of the household to illustrate this analogy. Just as God ruled the King, the King ruled the state and the father ruled his family. As such, fathers were responsible for both the moral and economic health of their family members, especially their male offspring’s ability to carry on the family name and assure economic prosperity. Of course, the relationship between fathers and sons was guided by the patriarchal imperative that paternal authority and male privilege must be appropriately passed on to sons. Furthermore, strict guidelines for the performance of masculinity shaped the relationship among all men in the culture, but especially between fathers and sons. IV. Father/son dyads in Marlowe’s plays I use the phrase “Father/son dyads” in my title because a dyad is defined as “two individuals or units regarded as a pair.”13 As I see it, Marlowe constructs the relationships between fathers and sons in his plays to illustrate how sons are expected

10 Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York: Blackwell, 1988) 132–33. 11 Amussen, Ordered Society 133. 12 Amussen, Ordered Society 36. 13 “Dyad,” Dictionary.com, 7 January 2005 .

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to replicate the rhetorics14 of—and the performance of—masculinity exhibited by their fathers.15 More often than not, a son who fails to adopt the socially constructed masculine identity performed and modeled by his father, a son who exhibits the so-called “feminine” traits of excessive passion, indecision, sympathy, or passivity, is fatally doomed in Marlowe’s plays. Moreover, building on the scholarship of Kuriyama, I propose that Marlowe’s plays often portray an Oedipal-type struggle, whereby Marlowe’s sons are torn between allegiance to the law of the father or the voice of the mother. Those who align themselves with the father or the patriarchy usually survive, whereas those who choose to follow the mother or the feminine principle usually perish. V. Dido, Queene of Carthage16 In Dido, Queene of Carthage, Marlowe offers his audience three father/son relationships that all relate to or revolve around the central male character, Aeneas: 1. Aeneas and his father (whom Aeneas carried on his back to safety); 2. Aeneas and his surrogate father Jupiter; and 3. Aeneas and his son Ascanius. Aeneas, described in Virgil’s Aeneid as fleeing from the destruction of Troy with his father Anchises on his back, has traditionally offered a symbol of filial piety. In his account of his flight from Troy, Marlowe’s Aeneas briefly mentions departing from the burning city with his father on his back, his son in his arms, and his beloved wife led by his hand, but Aeneas’s relationship to his biological father is not fully developed in Marlowe’s play. Instead, Marlowe focuses on the psychomachia within Aeneas between his allegiance to his two surrogate parents, Jupiter and Dido. Jupiter, the archetypal patriarch—god, king, husband, and father—initially neglects his patriarchal role, dallying with his lover Ganymede rather than protecting and succoring his surrogate son Aeneas. Ironically, Aeneas’s mother Venus—normally associated with feminine passion rather than masculine duty—is the one who must remind the god/king of his patriarchal duty.17 Finally, aroused to his patriarchal responsibilities, Jupiter does protect Aeneas’s ships from the storms that threaten 14 I use the term “rhetorics,” instead of simply “rhetoric,” to emphasize the plurality of language guidelines and markers (both verbal and visual) that shape and influence the performance of masculinity. 15 Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity, cites the OED to remind us that in early modern English, “the word ‘masculinity’ was, indeed, primarily a biological concept, the equivalent of what we in modern English would call ‘maleness’” (10). Furthermore, he contends that after the 1620s, the word “masculinity” began “to acquire our sense of the word as describing attributes and actions seen as appropriate to the male” (11). This conflation of the terms “male” (biological) and “masculine” (social or cultural) by early modern audiences only serves to illustrate how radical a male stage character might appear to be who questioned gendered notions of maleness or masculinity. Also, it may suggest that Marlowe was using his plays to question beliefs about the biological basis of identity long before such notions became part of commonly accepted beliefs. 16 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Marlowe’s plays are from Mark Thornton Burnett, ed., Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays (London: Everyman, 2000). 17 Deats, Sex, Gender, and Desire 91.

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his life, enabling the Trojan prince to land in Carthage where he falls under the nurturing care of Dido. Later, after allowing Aeneas an appropriate respite for rest and recuperation, Jupiter sends his messenger Hermes to command the frontiersman, soldier, breadwinner, and future founder of Rome to forsake the debilitating embraces of Dido and to fulfill his destiny. In the meantime, however, Aeneas has fallen under the care of the Queen of Carthage. Indeed, in Marlowe’s adaptation of Virgil’s epic, two dynamic mother figures—Venus, his biological mother, and Dido, his surrogate mother—contend for the allegiance of Aeneas. According to Kuriyama, Dido grapples with the problem “of defining or confirming identity” and “as usual, Marlowe presents only two alternatives. One can either become a man, in the special Marlovian sense, or one can become a ‘wanton female boy,’ the passive dependent, castrated lapdog of a seductive, strong-willed mother.”18 Using the ideas of Harry Levin, J. B. Steane, and others, Kuriyama explains how Dido’s actions and language—and Aeneas’s response to them—support a reading of the play “as a representation of a characteristically Marlovian, prehomosexual, Oedipal conflict that is closely tied to a late adolescent concern over identity (both personal identity and what might be called professional identity).”19 Dido emerges as both “seductive and maternal” in several of her key encounters with Aeneas—their first meeting, the cave scene, and the banquet scene—and she attempts to control him on many levels. Similarly, Deats argues that while Venus may be Aeneas’s biological mother, “Dido parallels Venus on many levels, accepting the role of surrogate mother to Aeneas as well as to Ascanius and, unknowingly, to Cupid.”20 Similar to the traditional supportive mother, “she provides her three surrogate sons with sustenance—food, clothing, shelter—nurtures all three, and seeks to monitor their behavior by granting or withholding gifts and freedom.”21 Although Venus is Aeneas’s biological mother, the central conflict exists between his adopted mother/lover Dido and his surrogate father Jupiter. Of course, history must be fulfilled and thus the outcome is never really in doubt, but, unlike his Virgilian counterpart, Aeneas vacillates between loyalty to Dido and obedience to Jupiter. Virgil’s pious Aeneas needs no prodding but immediately obeys the dictates of Jupiter via Hermes to leave Carthage. Conversely, Marlowe’s Hermes must appear twice (in a dream in 4.3 and in person in 5.1) to goad Aeneas into departing, and in both instances Marlowe’s Aeneas experiences an agonized struggle between masculine ambition and feminine desire. In 4.3 Aeneas reports how he was commanded to “leave these unrenownèd realms, / Whereas nobility abhors to stay”; however, he is torn because “Dido casts her eyes like anchors out” and he can imagine her pleading with him: “let me link thy body to my lips” (4.3.18–19, 25, 28). Moreover, his lines, “I fain would go, yet beauty calls me back,” illustrate his struggle between duty and passion (4.3.46). When Hermes appears again in 5.1 to berate Aeneas for failing to obey Jove, Hermes accuses Aeneas of failing to perform 18 Constance Brown Kuriyama, Hammer or Anvil: Psychological Patterns in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980) 53. 19 Kuriyama, Hammer or Anvil 55. 20 Deats, Sex, Gender, and Desire 121. 21 Deats, Sex, Gender, and Desire 121.

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as both a man (“Too too forgetful of thine own affairs”) and as a father (“Why wilt thou so betray thy son’s good hap? / ... Yet think upon Ascanius’ prophecy”) (5.1.30– 31, 38). Instead of accepting responsibility for his own actions, Aeneas blames Dido for enticing him and complains that he has “no sails nor tackling” for his ships (5.1.56). Then, a solution to his problems appears: the missing Ascanius arrives and Iarbas offers to provide the necessary supplies. Even after his son has returned and his supply needs are met, Aeneas vacillates between passion and duty: “How loath I am to leave these Libyan bounds, / But that eternal Jove commands” (5.1.81–2). Ultimately, Aeneas obeys the law of the father, breaks his multiple vows to Dido, and quits Carthage to fulfill his destiny, leaving Dido to her fiery death. Thus, Aeneas obeys his father figure and prospers; Dido defies the patriarch and perishes. Yet by foregrounding Dido as the central character in the play, by giving her the mightiest lines, and by presenting the action primarily through her eyes, Marlowe allows the female voice to be heard and dramatizes the destruction wrought by unquestioning obedience to the law of the father. Whether we judge Aeneas as a model of filial piety or as a reluctantly obedient son, critics have found Marlowe’s Trojan prince to be less than ideal. In “Fissured Families,” Hopkins contends that he “is revealed as a poor parent” because, “like Jupiter and Venus before him, Aeneas proves so indifferent to the fate of his offspring that he actually proposes at one point to leave Ascanius behind with Dido.”22 Furthermore, she proposes that Aeneas’s denial, “Hath not the Carthage Queen mine only son?” (4.4.29), is problematic because it illustrates that Ascanius’s “importance to his father may be at least as much dynastic as personal.”23 Because I am focusing on how traditional notions of stoic and heroic masculinity inform the father/son relationship, I read Aeneas’s relationship with his son as more personal than dynastic. One telling example of Aeneas’s response to his son’s request for food occurs in 1.1. When Ascanius laments, “Father, I faint. Good father, give me meat,” Aeneas replies, “Alas, sweet boy, thou must be still a while” (1.1.163–64), a performance of the potentially loving, expressive, and personal father, especially when compared to Tamburlaine’s repetitive verbal lessons to Calyphas to “play the man.” At any rate, Aeneas does not desert his son Ascanius and, although his apparent willingness to leave his only son as he sneaks away from Carthage is puzzling, the play ultimately affirms that Ascanius is not expendable. Conversely, as Hopkins reminds us, Calyphas does become expendable because he is one of three sons.24 VI. The Jew of Malta The Jew of Malta presents three father/son relationships: 1. Ithamore and his fatherfigure Barabas; 2. Lodowick and his father Ferneze; and 3. Selim-Calymath and his father, the Grand Seignior.

22 Lisa Hopkins, “Fissured Families: A Motif in Marlowe’s Families,” Papers on Language and Literature 33.2 (1997): 201. 23 Hopkins, “Fissured Families” 201. 24 Ibid.

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Although the central relationship in The Jew of Malta is that of a father and a daughter, Barabas appears to “adopt” Ithamore to replace Abigail, apparently hoping that Ithamore will become the obedient surrogate son that Barabas never had. However, although Barabas publicly pledges, “O trusty Ithamore, no servant, but my friend! / I here adopt thee for mine only heir” (3.4.42–43), he privately informs the audience after Ithamore’s exit that this affiliation, like all of his relationships, is a fraud and that, in reality, he has no intention of making Ithamore his heir, as he states: “Thus every villain ambles after wealth / Although he ne’er be richer than in hope” (3.4.53–54). Nevertheless, initially Ithamore performs his role as dutiful son and obeys Barabas’s every wish, until he, like Aeneas, falls under the spell of a powerful woman, in this case the prostitute Bellamira. Although scarcely a mother figure, like Dido, Bellamira clothes and feeds Ithamore, although her goals are very different from those of the love-obsessed, nurturing queen. Of course, the entire BellamiraIthamore-Barabas triangle is a parody of what we would now term the Oedipal conflict and the traditional struggle between masculine duty and feminine passion, and, with poetic justice, this parodic rebel against a parodic patriarch dies from poison, the murder weapon that he has earlier wielded so effectively in his service to Barabas. Like Ithamore, Lodowick also defies the law of the father in his attempt to marry the fair daughter of a despised Jew, without the knowledge and probably against the wishes of his father, the Maltese governor Ferneze. Lodowick’s motivations for his pursuit of the beautiful Abigail remain obscure—we never know whether he is driven by love, lust, or masculine competition with Mathias. However, his manipulated death conforms to the familiar paradigm informing Marlowe’s plays. Like all of Marlowe’s rebels against the “law of the name of the father,” Lodowick dies. Of all the sons in the play, therefore, only Selim-Calymath, the obedient, albeit compassionate son of the Grand Seignor, survives. VII. Doctor Faustus Doctor Faustus does not fit neatly into my paradigm because no tension exists in the play between mother and father (or between feminine and masculine principles) for the allegiance of a son. However, although Doctor Faustus lacks the numerous familial relationships that dominate most of Marlowe’s plays, one significant father/ son relationship does exist in this most famous of Marlowe’s dramas: Faustus and his heavenly Father.25 While very little reference is made to Faustus’s biological parents, Faustus’s heavenly Father—the supreme patriarch—haunts the play. Moreover, Faustus’s conversation with the Seven Deadly Sins in 2.3 can be read as foregrounding the important relationship between parents and their offspring and the significance of family and parenting to an individual’s development of personal identity. When Faustus first encounters the Seven Deadly Sins, Beelzebub tells him

25 Unless otherwise noted, I use the 1616 version (or B-text) of Doctor Faustus to illustrate my argument.

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to “question them of their names and dispositions” (2.3.110–11). After Faustus asks them, “What art thou, the first?” each deadly sin identifies its name and then gives a brief derogatory description of its parentage or method of conception, possibly reminding Faustus of how one’s identity is shaped and influenced by one’s parents or lack thereof: PRIDE. “I am Pride. I disdain to have any parents.” (2.3.113) COVETOUSNESS. “I am Covetousness, begotten of an old churl in a leather bag.” (2.3.123– 24) ENVY. “I am Envy, begotten of a chimney-sweeper and an oyster-wife.” (2.3.128–29) WRATH. “I am Wrath. I had neither father nor mother.” (2.3.137) GLUTTONY. “I am Gluttony. My parents are all dead ... [but] I come of a royal pedigree. My father was a gammon of bacon and my mother was a hogshead of claret wine.” (2.3.144, 147–9) SLOTH. “Heigh ho; I am Sloth. I was begotten on a sunny bank.” (2.3.157–58)

Furthermore, while Hopkins reads this section of Doctor Faustus as suggesting that “fractured or non-existent family structures lie behind the darkest events of the play,”26 I see Faustus’s encounter with the Deadly Sins as Marlowe’s gentle reminder that family structures do exist and that connection and loyalty to one’s parents—in this case between Faustus and his heavenly Father—are the only path to salvation. All of the Deadly Sins except one comment on their parentage; Lechery (“Mistress Minx”) uses bawdy slang to indicate her preferences for male genitalia, illustrating how a singular focus on desire and passion (traditionally identified as a “feminine” attribute) can have deleterious effects on one’s masculine identity. Later in his exchange with the three scholars in 5.2, the Second Scholar urges Faustus to turn to his heavenly Father. In reply, Faustus recounts how he “would lift up [his] hands” to heaven, but is restrained by Lucifer and Mephistopheles (5.2.64– 65, 67); however, the audience never knows whether malignant devils or Faustus’s own lack of faith impede his prayers to his heavenly Father. With only “one bare hour to live,” Faustus understandably seems on the brink of insanity and prays for more time; in soliloquy, he blames others for his fate—including his parents— instead of accepting responsibility for his own actions. Then, for one brief moment he seems to acknowledge that neither his birth parents nor even his heavenly Father are responsible for his damnation; instead, it is his own fatal error: “No, Faustus, curse thyself” (5.2.187). However, Faustus’s anagnorisis is brief and he immediately shifts the blame to Lucifer. Thus, at the end of the play as the devils draw near to drag him to hell and the tormented magician calls on his heavenly Father one last time, Faustus cannot repent, and because he cannot repent, he cannot be saved. Once again, Marlowe illustrates what happens to another rebellious son who cannot obey his father.

26 Hopkins, “Fissured Families” 205.

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VIII. The Massacre at Paris The Massacre at Paris, like Doctor Faustus, lacks the typical Marlovian struggle between fathers and mothers (or between masculine and feminine principles) for the loyalty of a son. In fact, although the mother/son affiliation looms large in this play, the only father/son relationship—that of the Duke of Guise and his son—is covered in a mere eight lines in scene 22. King Henry, who has just had the Duke of Guise killed, tells the Duke’s son to look at his father’s dead body lying on the floor: “Boy, look where your father lies” (22.121). In response to the boy’s query—“Who hath done this deed?”—the king boldly asserts, “Sirrah, ’ twas I that slew him; and will slay / Thee too, and thou prove such a traitor” (22.122–24). The Duke’s son angrily reacts and draws his dagger, warning, “Art thou king, and hast done this bloody deed? I’ll be revenged!” (22.125–26). The king orders his guards to restrain the boy and take him to prison, and the audience may assume that the loyal son will follow in his father’s footsteps and soon die the death of a “traitor.” While this father/son relationship might be read as one of the few instances in which Marlowe has the obedient son punished, it could also be read as the conflict between a son’s allegiance to his biological father and to the king, the father of the state. As God’s representative on earth, at this time the king served as the supreme patriarch who demanded unswerving loyalty from all of his subjects. Thus, in a patriarchal order, the rule of the king as father of the state took precedence over the wishes of a biological father. Thus, perhaps the Duke’s son must be punished for failing to switch his allegiance from his biological father (deemed a “traitor”) to the father of the state. IX. Edward II Edward II features four father/son relationships: 1. Edward II and his father Edward I; 2. Spenser Junior and his father Spenser Senior; 3. Mortimer Junior and his uncle and father figure Mortimer Senior; and 4. Edward III and his father Edward II. The tortured affiliation between Edward II and his father Edward I provides a framework for the play’s events. Although Edward I dies before the play begins, his presence looms over the drama’s action and haunts his rebellious son after his father’s death. Apparently, Edward I, disgusted with his son’s infatuation with Gaveston, had banished Edward’s French minion before his death, and the barons and churchmen who seek to exile Gaveston do so in the name of Edward I (1.1.81–88). Not only does Edward II defy the wishes of his dead father, but he also refuses to perform masculinity as defined in the early modern period; instead, he celebrates love above duty and personal passion above public responsibility.27 Edward II protests that only to honor Gaveston is he “pleased with kingly regiment” (1.1.163–64); he asserts that before he parts with Gaveston, he would have 27 See Simon Shepherd, Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (Sussex, UK: Harvester, 1986), for a useful discussion of masculinity in the early modern period and in Marlowe’s plays, especially his analysis of the connection between masculinity and sodomy (204–7).

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his country “fleet upon the ocean” and “wander to the unfrequented Inde” (1.4.49– 50); and he shows a willingness to divide his country and parcel it among the barons, so that he may have a “nook or corner left / to frolic with [his] dearest Gaveston” (1.4.70–73). Most egregious of all, he rejects the roles of soldier, breadwinner, and Lord, instead assuming the parts of the sybarite and the actor. In 2.2, the barons recite a litany of Edward’s sins, the most serious of which is his inability to protect his country from attack. As Lancaster tells the king, “Thy garrisons are beaten out of France, / And lame and poor lie groaning at the gates. / The wild O’Neill, with swarms of Irish kerns, / Lives uncontrolled within the English pale. / Unto the walls of York the Scots made road, / And unresisted drive away rich spoils” (2.2.161–66). Furthermore, he reports that “the northern borderers, seeing their houses burnt, / Their wives and children slain, run up and down, / Cursing the name of thee and Gaveston” (2.2.178–80). Later, briefly spurred by his anger over the death of his beloved Gaveston and exhorted to manliness by Spenser Junior, Edward asserts himself to “play the man,” and the result is a resounding victory for the king. Yet, even in victory Edward lacks the courage—or the callousness—to solidify his victory by executing his most dangerous adversary, Mortimer Junior (3.2.68–70), a fatal error, since Mortimer Junior will be the agent of Edward’s death. According to Deats, at the end of the play, “Physical and mental torment elicit [from Edward] an amazing fortitude, unsuspected in the frivolous, frangible King of the earlier acts. Tortured almost beyond bearing, starved, humiliated, sleepless—still he survives.” Yet, Deats admits that even this final suffering “conforms more to the feminine pattern than to the masculine”; thus, to the very end Edward refuses to perform masculinity.28 Ultimately, Edward defies the law of the name of the father and suffers perhaps the cruelest death in all of Marlowe’s plays. The relationship between Spenser Junior and Spenser Senior remains undeveloped in the play—Spenser Junior remains loyal to his father and both stay obedient to their patriarch and liege lord, Edward II. More central to my discussion is the pairing of Mortimer Junior and his uncle and surrogate father Mortimer Senior. Although Mortimer Junior and Senior are nephew and uncle rather than father and son, their relationship in the play is very similar to that of father and son, a close relationship punctuated by the similarity of their names. Initially, both Mortimers are presented as patriots centrally concerned with the welfare of their country, who oppose Gaveston’s return out of loyalty to their dead king and liege lord, Edward I. Indeed, critics have identified Mortimer Junior as an early model for the fiery Hotspur.29 However, the observant spectator (or reader) will note that Mortimer Junior, alone among the barons, initially advocates not only the banishment of Gaveston but also the deposition of the King Edward II (1.2.59–60, 73; 1.4.54–55). Also, in his colloquy with his uncle Mortimer Senior, Mortimer Junior reveals that he is motivated not only by patriotic concern but also—and perhaps principally—by personal jealousy and spite: “Uncle, his wanton humour grieves not me, / But this I scorn, that one so basely born / Should be his sovereign’s favour grow so pert / And riot it with 28 Deats, Sex, Gender, and Desire 185. 29 W. D. Briggs, qtd. in Harry Levin, The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952) 98–9.

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the treasure of the realm” (1.4.401–4). Mortimer Junior then describes Gaveston’s expensive pearl-decorated Italian cloak and his jeweled cap, asserting that the king and Gaveston look out their window and jeer at the attire of persons such as himself (1.4.412–18). In this same revealing exchange, Mortimer Senior wisely urges his nephew to make peace with Edward II: “Leave now to oppose thyself against the King. / Thou seest by nature he is mild and calm, / And seeing his mind so dotes on Gaveston, / Let him without controlment have his will” (1.4.386–89). Mortimer Junior’s failure to heed the sage advice of his uncle leads to his degeneration into a power-seeking Machiavellian villain and to his ultimate beheading. To the very end, Mortimer Junior performs masculinity—although he is really more the fox than the lion—but his ruthlessness foregrounds the limitations of masculine virtu unleavened by feminine virtue. As both a disobedient son and a rebel against his sovereign, Mortimer suffers the fate of Marlowe’s rebels against the establishment—death. X. Tamburlaine Five father/son relationships exist in Tamburlaine: 1. Tamburlaine and each of his three sons—Amyras, Celebinus, and especially Calyphas; 2. Bajazeth and his son Callapine; and 3. the Captain of Balsera and his son. Marlowe’s depiction of Tamburlaine as the ultimate warrior who kills innocent virgins, needlessly tortures and humiliates conquered peoples, and heartlessly murders his own son for failing to perform proper masculinity, serves to foreground and problematize the soldier hero as a man and a father to his sons and his people. In “Violence, Terrorism, and War in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Plays,” Logan sees the play as simultaneously affirming or idealizing “the masculine values of a patriarchal society” (in terms of power and success) and graphically demonstrating “the horrible consequences of war, in part through the shattering of value systems.”30 Furthermore, as Logan describes them, Tamburlaine’s “comic book heroics” may be admired by the audience until we realize in his speech in I.2.7.12–29 “that his tough-minded means are undermining the gloriousness of his ends.… Implicitly, he gives sanction to the means by which he obtains his ‘earthly crown,’” creating “ambivalence and, finally, ambiguity in our estimation of him and in our attitude toward war.”31 And, I might add, in the performance of traditional masculinity. In J. B. Steane’s edited collection of Marlowe’s plays, the title page of Tamburlaine, Part II contains Marlowe’s concise articulation of the lessons to be taught by the father Tamburlaine: “The Second Part of the Bloody Conquests of Mighty Tamburlaine. ... [with] his form of exhortation and discipline to his three sons.”32 Thus, before Tamburlaine II even begins, an audience of readers would know that the father/son dyad, and specifically the education (in the form of an 30 Robert A. Logan, “Violence, Terrorism, and War in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Plays,” War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare, ed. Sara Munson Deats, Lagretta Tallent Lenker, and Merry G. Perry (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2004) 75. 31 Logan, “Violence, Terrorism, and War” 69–70. 32 J. B. Steane, Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays (1969; Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986) 179; emphasis added.

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exhortation—“a communication intended to urge or persuade the recipients to take some action”—and discipline—“training expected to produce a specific character or pattern of behavior” or “punishment intended to correct”) of Tamburlaine’s sons will shape a significant part of the action and events to follow.33 Before discussing Tamburlaine’s education of his sons in the lessons of hypermasculinity, I will analyze two other father/son dyads that function as foils to the Tamburlaine/sons affiliation. In 1.2 the audience is introduced to another father/son dyad: Bajazeth (who has been cruelly imprisoned, tortured, and killed by Tamburlaine) and his son Callapine, who is also imprisoned. Callapine uses his sophisticated rhetorical skills to persuade Almeda to help him escape so that he can avenge his father’s death. Callapine’s vow, “Even straight; and farewell, cursèd Tamburlaine. / Now go I to revenge my father’s death” (1.2.77–78) contrasts sharply with Tamburlaine’s later murder of his own son. While Callapine enacts a form of honor by seeking revenge for his father’s murder, Tamburlaine’s later filicide serves to problematize the idea of honor, education, and love between father and son. Later in the play, in 3.4, another father/son relationship is introduced to contrast with that of Tamburlaine and his sons. When the Captain of Balsera dies, leaving his wife Olympia and their son alive, only one course of action seems feasible. The son begs his mother to kill him, saying “Mother, dispatch me, or I’ll kill myself; / For think ye I can live and see him dead?” (3.4.26–27). This devotion of a son who cannot live without his father contrasts sharply with the forced devotion of Tamburlaine’s sons, Amyras and Celebinus, whose loyalty is driven primarily by fear of their father’s wrath and a possible desire for the power he possesses. Furthermore, by their own admission, they would do anything necessary to gain a future kingship. Olympia obeys her son’s wishes and kills him, providing a foil to the filicide that occurs just two scenes later when Tamburlaine stabs Calyphas because his son is not performing his masculine role as scripted by his father. Act 1, scene 3 begins Tamburlaine’s education of his sons. In this scene, Tamburlaine makes clear to his sons and to his audience what exactly is expected of an offspring of the “scourge and terror of the world.” Also, Marlowe uses Tamburlaine to illustrate the performative aspects of masculinity, specifically in terms of appearance, mannerisms, speech, and actions. According to Tamburlaine, repeated failure to perform socially accepted masculinity makes one less a man; in fact, the ultimate transgression is for a man to behave in what society identifies as “feminine” ways. Tamburlaine begins his lessons by affirming the value of his sons, who are, he asserts, “more precious in mine eyes / Than all the wealthy kingdoms I subdued” (1.3.18–19). However, he then describes how he is disappointed by his sons’ performance of masculinity, which he finds too “amorous, / Not martial as the sons of Tamburlaine” (1.3.21–22). Moreover, he complains that they lack courage and wit and are “too dainty for the wars” (1.3.24, 28) and that both their demeanor and their physical appearance fall short of his masculine ideal of a rugged, toughened warrior. For example, their “hair as white as milk and soft as down” 33 “Exhortation,” Dictionary.com, 7 January 2005 ; “Discipline,” Dictionary.com, 7 January 2005 .

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should be “like the quills of porcupines, / As black as jet, and hard as iron or steel” (1.3.25–27). He is so disappointed by their failure to perform masculinity that he even suggests that he might “think them bastards, not my sons” except that he knows that Zenocrate “never looked on man but Tamburlaine” (1.3.32, 34). Tamburlaine’s speech can be read as a verbal “test of manhood,” a challenge to his sons to prove that they are masculine copies of their father. In answer to this challenge, Zenocrate describes how Celebinus undertook a dangerous game on horseback of “trotting the ring, and tiltling at the glove,” that made her cry out for fear that he might fall, whereupon Tamburlaine praises his son’s reckless courage and pledges to give him “shield and lance, / Armour of proof, horse, helm, and curtle-axe” (1.3.39; 1.3.43– 44), all implements of the masculine warrior. He then promises to provide his son important lessons in manliness: “And I will teach thee how to charge thy foe / And harmless run among the deadly pikes. / If thou wilt love the wars and follow me, / Thou shalt be made a king and reign with me, / Keeping in iron cages emperors” (1.3.45–9). Here, Tamburlaine illustrates the masculine attributes of aggressiveness; fearlessness; physical prowess; love of war, battle, and power; and the desire to imprison and torture conquered peoples. Tamburlaine continues by foregrounding the highly competitive nature of masculinity when he challenges his son Celebinus to prove himself more worthy (and masculine) than his brothers, anticipating King Lear’s challenge to his daughters to prove their love for him by a verbal performance. As Tamburlaine promises, “If thou exceed they elder brothers’ worth / And shine in complete virtue more than they, / Thou shalt be king before them, and thy seed / Shall issue crownèd from their mother’s womb” (1.3.50–53). In response, Celebinus vows to “Have under me as many kings as you / And march with such a multitude of men / As all the world shall tremble at their view” (1.3.55–57). Celebinus has learned well his father’s lessons of masculinity, violence, and power, knowing the payoff for his masculine rhetorics—the guarantee of future rule. Thus, Tamburlaine is reassured by Celebinus’ masculine rhetorics and challenges his son to “Be thou the scourge and terror of the world” (1.3.60). When the competitive Amyras queries, “Why may not I, my lord, as well as he, / Be termed ‘the scourge and terror of the world,’” Tamburlaine responds, “Be all a scourge and terror to the world, / Or else you are not sons of Tamburlaine” (1.3.63–64). With this statement, Tamburlaine clearly articulates what role his sons must play if they are to be truly masculine and truly his sons: they must replicate his performance of hypermasculinity by exercising power and domination and inspiring fear and terror. Marlowe uses this hyperbolic exchange of a masculine rhetorics of violence to illustrate the limited boundaries of father/son relationships based on egotism and the performance of savagery and bloodshed. Tamburlaine wants his sons to be “chips off the old block,” to repeat his hypermasculine performance, thus verifying and legitimating Tamburlaine’s own life and actions. Unfortunately, one of his sons refuses to play the scripted role, heeding the voice of the mother rather than the law of the father, even deliberately goading his father to anger. After listening to his brothers assert their masculine prerogative, Calyphas requests: “But while my brothers follow arms, my lord, / Let me accompany my gracious mother: / They are enough to conquer all the world, / And you have won enough for me to keep” (1.3.65–68). Tamburlaine responds in angry, violent

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language that questions his son’s parentage and his manliness, threatening to negate his son’s inheritance unless he behaves in the proper masculine fashion: “Bastardly boy, sprung from some coward’s loins, / And not the issue of great Tamburlaine! / Of all the provinces I have subdued / Thou shalt not have a foot unless thou bear / A mind courageous and invincible” (1.3.69–73). Tamburlaine then continues his angry diatribe by giving his sons a detailed lesson in what it will take for one of them to become the next ruler after him. The future king among them will be the one “Whose head hath deepest scars, whose breast most wounds, / Which, being wrought, send lightning from his eyes, / And in the furrows of his frowning brows / Harbors revenge, war, death, and cruelty” (1.3.75–78). Furthermore, the next ruler must be prepared to do whatever is necessary to engage in and win numerous bloody and ferocious battles. Tamburlaine’s paternal lesson in hypermasculinity uses descriptions of war and violence to educate the three sons in their proper role as men and as sons of Tamburlaine: in both speech and in action they must harbor revenge, war, death, and cruelty; they must arm themselves and “wade up to the chin in blood” through a field “sprinkled with the brains of slaughtered men” (1.3.81, 84); in order to be men and to gain the throne, they must compete with each other to see who can display the most violent, destructive, and fearless behavior. When Zenocrate responds by questioning Tamburlaine’s use of language to their sons, “My lord, such speeches to our princely sons / Dismay their minds before they come to prove / The wounding troubles angry war affords” (1.3.86–87), two of Tamburlaine’s sons rise to the masculine challenge and model the rhetorics of violence they have just learned from their doting father. Celebinus asserts that “these are speeches fit for us” and contends that “if his chair were in a sea of blood / I would prepare a ship and sail to it, / Ere I would lose the title of a king” (1.3.88–91). Similarly, Amyras boasts that he will “strive to swim through pools of blood / Or make a bridge of murdered carcasses, / Whose arches should be framed with bones of Turks, / Ere I would lose the title of king” (1.3.92–95). In both cases, the sons mirror their father’s bloody and horrific language to assert their own masculinity, to gain their father’s approval, and to reveal that their life’s guiding principle will be doing whatever it takes to gain and maintain the crown. Tamburlaine is very pleased at how well two of his sons have learned their lesson in masculinity. Moreover, in spite of his failure to exhibit the proper masculine behavior, Calyphas is offered another chance to prove himself as both a man and Tamburlaine’s son, as Tamburlaine commands, “And, sirrah, if you mean to wear a crown, / When we shall meet the Turkish deputy / And all his viceroys, snatch it from his head, / And cleave his pericranion with thy sword” (1.3.98–101). In what I interpret as a response designed intentionally to enrage his father, Calyphas responds, “If any man will hold him, I will strike, / And cleave him to the channel with my sword” (1.3.102–103; emphasis added). Tamburlaine’s angry reply foreshadows Calyphas’s eventual death at the hands of his father: “Hold him, and cleave him too, or I’ll cleave thee; / For we will march against them presently” (1.3.104–105). Failing to perform the proper masculine role and to obey the tutelage so clearly articulated and modeled by his father, Calyphas aligns himself with his mother and dooms himself to die at the hands of his furious father. Furthermore, in 2.4 when Zenocrate lies dying, her last words to her sons can be read as acknowledging that her sons must perform their roles as prescribed by their father and as foreshadowing

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the future murder of Calyphas: “Sweet sons, farewell, in death resemble me, / And in your lives your father’s excellency” (2.4.75–76). After burning the town in which his wife has died—illustrating his vow to exact revenge and violence on conquered peoples—Tamburlaine begins a new lesson in masculinity for his sons: do not express sorrow or show any sign of weakness, even if your mother has died; instead, speak about the horrors of war, slice your own arm with a sword, and stoically refuse to display pain or any sign of emotional or physical weakness. Tamburlaine’s lesson in the “rudiments of war” in 3.2 consists of a verbal lesson in the challenges, hardships, and constant struggles of battle, including scorching heat, freezing cold, hunger, and thirst. When Calyphas pragmatically demurs, “My lord, but this is dangerous to be done; / We may be slain or wounded ere we learn,” Tamburlaine expresses extreme contempt for his son: “Villain, art thou the son of Tamburlaine, / And fear’st to die” (3.2.95–96). After cutting his own arm to illustrate how a “real man” bears pain, Tamburlaine explains the purpose of his fatherly lesson: “My speech of war, and this my wound you see, / Teach you, my boys, to bear courageous minds, / Fit for the followers of great Tamburlaine” (3.2.142–44). Tellingly, only two of his sons offer their own arms to be wounded; in contrast, Calyphas looks at his father’s wounds and says, “I know not what I should think of it; / Methinks ’ tis a pitiful sight” (3.2.130–131). Clearly, Tamburlaine’s lessons in hypermasculine virtue have failed to affect the sympathetic—and thus socalled “feminine”—sensibilities of Calyphas. At the opening of act 4, Calyphas lies sleeping in his tent while his brothers participate in battle. Celebinus refers to Calyphas as a “lazy brother” because he refuses to perform the “proper” role of a man as defined by Tamburlaine. Calyphas’s explanation for his behavior, “I know, sir, what it is to kill a man; / It works remorse of conscience in me. / I take no pleasure to be murderous, / Nor care for blood when wine will quench my thirst” (4.1.27–30), reveals his compassion and identifies pleasure with hedonism rather than with murderous sadism. His brothers accuse Calyphas of being a “cowardly boy” who “dost dishonour manhood and [his] house,” yet he refuses to participate in battle, even at the risk of inciting his father’s wrath, choosing instead to play “cards to drive away the time” (4.1.31–32, 61–2). Finally, Tamburlaine arrives, shouting, “But where’s this coward villain, not my son, / But traitor to my name and majesty?” (4.1.91–92). He then drags Calyphas out of the tent and proceeds to act as judge and jury for Calyphas’s crimes against both his father and masculinity, referring to Calyphas as an “Image of sloth and picture of a slave, / The obloquy and scorn of my renown!” (4.1.93–94). Although his men and Amyras all plead for mercy for Calyphas, Tamburlaine pronounces that he has one final lesson for his followers and for his sons: “Stand up, my boys, and I will teach ye arms, / And what the jealousy of wars must do” (4.1.105–106). He then stabs Calyphas, explaining that his son had “neither courage, strength, or wit, / But folly, sloth, and damnèd idleness” (4.1.127–28). Critics read Tamburlaine’s brutal act in different ways. Shannon Mrkich proposes that the death of Zenocrate, and the subsequent loss of her “feminine influence,” contributes to Tamburlaine’s irrational behavior (24). Hopkins cites an idea introduced by Carolyn Williams, whereby “Tamburlaine might in fact be seen as a good father

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in terms of Renaissance values.”34 However, other critics would demur that in killing Calyphas, Tamburlaine kills the only one of his sons who exhibits the courage to defy his father and thus the “only being he [Tamburlaine] has endowed with some measure of his own vitality.”35 The denouement of the play supports this reading. As Deats notes, in the final scene of the play as Tamburlaine dies, his “obviously inadequate son Amyras, tentatively accepting his father’s crown and mounting his father’s king-drawn cart, provides an indelible visual emblem for the similarly catastrophically unprepared adolescent of classical myth, who futilely attempted to guide the coursers of the sun, a similarity punctuated by Tamburlaine’s double reference to Phaeton.”36 In my reading, therefore, the language and imagery of the play suggest that Tamburlaine’s lessons in masculinity have failed, an interpretation supported by actual historical events. XI. Conclusion To conclude, in Marlowe’s drama, to rebel against patriarchal authority seems fatal. However, Marlowe’s plays are certainly more than cautionary caveats against insubordination. Rather, by foregrounding the suffering of the rebels against patriarchy, female as well as male—the fiery death of Dido, the stabbing of Calyphas, the poisoning of Abigail and Ithamore, the dismemberment of Faustus, the torture of Edward II—Marlowe’s plays not only question the rigid limitations governing the behavior of sons and daughters at the time but also highlight the horrendous punishment meted out to those, particularly sons, who dare to defy the patriarch. In my reading, Marlowe’s plays offer us the opportunity to rethink traditional conceptions of masculinity and manhood, conceptions that continue to shape male identity formation and relationships even today. By foregrounding the effects of a limiting and proscriptive masculinity on both males and on the father/son relationship and by illustrating the power of language to shape reality and social beliefs, Marlowe offers his audience the simultaneous opportunity to valorize, accept, or critique patriarchy, power imbalances, and traditional notions of masculinity training and the politics of gendered subjectivity.37

34 Hopkins, “Fissured Families” 302. 35 M. M. Mahood, Poetry and Humanism (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1950) 63. 36 Deats, Sex, Gender, and Desire 159. 37 Special thanks to Sara Munson Deats for her excellent, detailed, and comprehensive suggestions for expanding and revising this essay. I am eternally grateful for her editing expertise and friendship. Also, I would like to thank my expert research assistant, Alysia Peich, who carefully proofread this essay.

PART 3 Marlowe, Ethics, and Religion

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Chapter 7

Almost Famous, Always Iterable: Doctor Faustus as Meme of Academic Performativity Rick Bowers University of Alberta

Everyone recognizes the impossible situation in which Doctor Faustus finds himself, and most people read his bargain-with-the-devil as a powerful cautionary moral fable. But the drama also represents itself significantly as a multi-layered parody of academic culture. In this essay I will argue that Faustus simultaneously parodies an old academic world of faithful belief, an emerging academic world of discovered knowledge, and a new academic world of multiple ironies. Moreover, all three worlds collide and combine within the title character, making him a postmodern cultural meme (rhymes with “theme”), a self-replicating cultural concept or loose modeling of behavior, in this case propagating the very term “Faustian.” I borrow the conceptual term “meme” from sociobiologist Richard Dawkins who, in The Selfish Gene, asserts memes as analogous to genes. But whereas genes replicate physical life through DNA, memes replicate cultural life through powerful ideas, fashions, and images, such as the idea of an overwhelming desire for academic fame. “Hamlet” is so famous as to be meme of the tragic hero, and “Shakespeare” is at once synecdoche and meme of English literature. But Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is related to human inquiry and academic professionalism in a complex cultural parody in which information supplants knowledge, celebrity replaces fame, and performativity overrules reputation. In 1972, in an article denounced in Year’s Work in English Studies as “a crude piece of philistinism,” H. W. Matalene observed that Faustus enjoys “the comforts of academicism,” a pose of knowing combined with reliance on irrefutable superficiality.1 Paradoxically, as any academic knows, such performance is exactly not comfortable. Moreover, that pose of “knowing” has combined often with “irrefutable superficiality” in the past thirty years under the rubric of cultural studies. This is not to dismiss cultural studies or Faustus’s powerful interdisciplinarity 1 H. W. Matalene, “Marlowe’s Faustus and the Comforts of Academicism,” ELH 39 (1972): 495; see also Brian Gibbons, “English Drama 1550–1660, Excluding Shakespeare,” Year’s Work in English Studies 53 (1972): 199.

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as under-theorized pluralism but to recognize that Doctor Faustus performs an academic’s fame that is not at all similar to real fame. Real fame is a name without footnotes. Faustus opens the play rejecting, among other things, two of the most famous names of western academic consciousness: Aristotle and the Bible. Items of such fame morph meanings with compelling cultural and dramatic power, a power that can dispense with footnotes in favor of flip parodic reference or unchallengeable authority. Ancient Romans considered such fame to be a God. Academic fame (somewhat like basic celebrity) has to be worked at. As that celebrity star of stage and screen Tallulah Bankhead—herself a significant style-spawning meme—once said, “Nobody can be exactly like me. Sometimes even I have trouble doing it.”2 Her unguarded quip says something surprisingly relevant about the driven, performative iterability of Doctor Faustus, who craves—even as he constantly repeats through performance—the desperately ironic significance of an academic star. First, let’s accommodate the textual alterity of Doctor Faustus. Existing in two states, the A (1604) and B (1616) texts are linked in ways so problematic as to appear separately in the recent Everyman edition of Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Plays, edited by Mark Thornton Burnett—and for good reason. The complexities of this text(s) make it especially appropriate as multi-layered, multi-linked hypertext. In “Hell and Hypertext Hath No Limits: Electronic Texts and the Crises in Criticism,” Hilary Binda (who has produced hypertext of Marlowe’s work online with the “Perseus Project” at Tufts) describes Doctor Faustus as “a representation of cultural anxieties analogous to, if not coterminous with, those anxieties more recently associated with the advent of electronic hypertext.”3 Even relatively famous textual scholars such as W. W. Greg, Fredson Bowers, and David Bevington agree that Doctor Faustus’s complicated textuality involves at least a full decade and possibly more of postulated cuts, memory lapses, compositorial errors, intertextual parallels, and authorial collaborations—not to mention the actual death of the author(s), before appearing in print. Moreover, in an article titled “The Interests of Critical Editorial Practice,” Anna Mette Hjort writes (in specific relation to Doctor Faustus): “All of the different scribal emendations, all of the changes made by actors, all of the various appropriations, become an integral and unalienable part of the work’s meaning.”4 Editors variously cut, dismiss, reproduce, interlink, and explain, but drama always represents cumulative, cultural, and unstable performative energies. And performative possibilities, especially in the theater and on the script, have asserted themselves for years prior to Roland Barthes’s rather belated general obituary in 1968 concerning authors and intentions. In what follows, I link “performativity,” loosely and theoretically, to the conceptions of Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler, who see it in terms of iterability and constant ongoing process. Herein, language is not innocent of performance because it produces the reality it claims merely to describe, as in J. L. Austin’s famous speech-act examples: “I name this ship the 2 Qtd. in Philip Oliver, “Tallulah: a passionate life,” n.d. . 3 Hilary J. Binda, “Hell and Hypertext Hath No Limits: Electronic Texts and the Crises in Criticism,” EMLS 5.3 (January 2000): 3. 4 Anna Mette Hjort, “The Interests of Critical Editorial Practice,” Poetics 15 (1986): 274.

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Queen Elizabeth,” or “I now pronounce you man and wife,”5 or perhaps even Faustus’s “This night I’ll conjure, though I die therefore” (1.1.168 [160]). Butler affirms that performativity “is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms,”6 and Faustus finds himself constrained from the outset by a passé medieval monasticism that also underwrites his intoxicatingly new academic exploration, discovery, and forms of publication. Yet, as a present-tense theatrical character, he performs his actions within a recombinant postmodern age of multiplicity. His career, once plotted as A-and-B-textual near the start of the seventeenth century, also manifests itself as current information theatrical whereby he performs as a ghost within the machine of academic protocols and expectations. As an academic dealing with this most unstable of unstable theatrical texts, I affirm that unless indicated otherwise every passage quoted (and I quote Doctor Faustus from the Revels edition) is common to both the A- and B-Text with B-Text references also in square brackets. In his seminal work How to Do Things with Words, J. L. Austin is categorical about performative usage, declaring that A performative utterance will, for example, be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage, or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in soliloquy … Language in such circumstances is in special ways—intelligibly—used not seriously, but in ways parasitic upon its normal use—ways which fall under the doctrine of the etiolations of language. All this we are excluding from consideration.7

But Derrida insists on including those parasitic etiolations (such as actors’ speeches and ceremonial poetic verse) as central to the very essence of language because they demonstrate its iterability and citationality. He answers Austin as follows: “Could a performative utterance succeed if its formulation did not repeat a ‘coded’ or iterable utterance, or in other words, if the formula I pronounce in order to open a meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable as conforming with an iterable model, if it were not then identifiable in some way as a ‘citation’?”8 Faustus’s career can be read, even played, and certainly studied in the same citational, performative way. Throughout, he models scholarly intensities of awareness, experience, and exchange that are in themselves not new but reiterated—a genealogy of academic performativity. In his opening speech, Faustus produces meaning as fame, as distinction, as elite singularity performed above any perceived humanistic standards. To be “eternised for some wondrous cure” (1.1.14) would be fine, but Faustus aspires to “a world of profit and delight, / Of power, of honour, of omnipotence” (1.1.55–56 [53–4]) not usually attained by actual lawyers, doctors, divines, or committed academics in any discipline. Instead, Faustus’s transcendent interdisciplinarity is like magic, only 5 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975) 5. 6 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993) 12. 7 Austin 22. 8 Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., ed. Gerald Graff, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988) 18.

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better—he performs his disciplines through powerfully iterated associations: Icarus haunts Wittenberg in the form of Martin Luther disguised as Faustus. In an article compellingly subtitled “Theological Strip Tease and the Histrionic Hero,” David Webb somewhat shortsightedly uncovers Faustus’s bravura rejection of humanist learning to reveal literalist self-satisfaction in performative terms: “it smacks of showing off, of self-dramatisation.”9 Webb reads Faustus’s performance in terms of delayed gratification related to the certainty of damnation. A more materialist, performative analysis would align itself with Linda Hutcheon’s observation in A Poetics of Postmodernism that postmodern writing “asserts and then deliberately undermines such principles as value, order, meaning, control, and identity … that have been the basic premises of bourgeois liberalism.”10 Perhaps not surprisingly, these are the stated premises of all responsible societies—irresponsible ones would include the premises (stated or unstated) of criminal organization, teenage contrariety, and radical academic dissent which enjoys the principle of perversity for the purposes of inconsequential theoretical consideration. But, conforming to Butler’s sense of gendered performance, Faustus’s first material request is a predicable one: “Let me have a wife, the fairest maid in Germany, for I am wanton and lascivious and cannot live without a wife” (2.1.143–45). The devil, however, knows what Faustus really wants, and he provides the gratification for him instantaneously while rejecting the “ceremonial toy” (2.1.154–55[150]) of marriage and moving on to further textual and intellectual discussion. As culture critic Louis Menard observes, “[Academic] professionalism is a way of using very smart people productively without giving them too much social power.”11 Faustus, always too late, rediscovers precisely this predicament in every instance of his personal and professional life. But beyond what Webb, Hutcheon, Butler, Binda, or Hjort suggest, Faustus’s selfdramatization smacks of posthumanist cultural studies which realizes that justice is not impartial; science is not disinterested; legal precedence means contestability; and altruism is basically sinister. Herein, professional study does not rely on constant doubt as in the paradigm of Descartes. Rather, professional study is equivalent to serious and constant play as in the non-paradigm of poststructuralist literary criticism. Faustus, to his credit, knows it all along. He appropriates scholarly expertise the way a chameleon moves through densities of light. His shades transform with everything he absorbs, just as an actor’s does. And the actorly metaphor is not gratuitous: “Then in this show let me an actor be” (B.3.1.75), declares Faustus at the Vatican, the site of his first efforts in histrionic rascality. He then moves on to become outrageous court magician to the Emperor, patronized illusionist for the Vanholt Duchy, and titillating terror of the gossiping countryside. Previous criticism has scoffed at all of this as a far cry from Faustus’s early scholarly promise and ambition, but Faustus’s anarchic disruption of blessings and table manners at the Pope’s banquet rehearses a form of citizen protest that parodies as it debunks the authority of medieval Catholicism. Invisible, he moves at light speed, boxing ears, stealing wine, and reveling in gleeful 9 David C. Webb, “Damnation in Doctor Faustus: Theological Strip Tease and the Histrionic Hero,” Critical Survey 11 (1999): 35. 10 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1988) 5. 11 Louis Menard, “The Trashing of Professionalism,” Academe 81.3 (May–June 1995): 18.

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mimicry: “Bell, book, and candle, candle, book, and bell, / Forward and backward, to curse Faustus to hell” (3.1.84–5[3.2.93–94]). Similarly, Faustus explains new research in world climate even as a “swift spirit” (4.2.26[4.6.32]) delivers virtual grapes in the “twinkling of an eye” (5.1.90[93]), which suggests the “magic” of more recent technologies. In a recent essay titled “Very Slow Memes,” cultural commentator Steve Beard shrewdly identifies Faustus as inaugural antihero of unregulated mobility, a concept addressed originally in Speed and Politics by Paul Virilio, a post-Foucauldian analysis of power and surveillance as mobilization and speed. Steve Beard uses Virilio’s concept of “dromology”—from the Greek dromos; hence, as Virilio describes it in an interview with John Armitage, “the science of the ride, the journey, the drive, the way”—and applies it to Doctor Faustus as follows: The good doctor sells his soul to Mephostopholis [sic] less for knowledge or pleasure and more for the promise of unrestricted mobility (“I’ll be great emperor of the world / And make a bridge through the moving air”). Faustus is the world’s first dromocrat, an ambivalent figure poised between subjection to Virilio’s “dictatorship of movement” and anarchic mobility.12

Having signed his pact, Faustus begins to range widely through physical, mental, and virtual spaces. Indeed his movement becomes as restless as it is compulsory. Such theorized anarchy of movement also relates directly to Faustus’s academic performance as identified by Clifford Leech in Christopher Marlowe: Poet for the Stage. Herein, Leech observed an ironic and generalized “near-equation between learning and showmanship” in Faustus’s every action.13 After all, as every postadolescent knows, it’s all a trick: lawyers make the guilty appear innocent—and vice versa; physicians can make the sick feel well—and vice versa; philosophers can prove that evil does not exist or that good does not exist or that humans are incapable of perceiving either category; divines can prove that life has no meaning or that it does have meaning—but only in relation to a certain discipline. It is all a matter of image, of rhetorical, histrionic indeterminacy. And Faustus has already learned many scholarly roles, as evidenced by his early divestment of law, medicine, philosophy, and divinity. He now proceeds to move on, to expand and innovate within his academic pursuits, linking his own life to his research with all the authenticity of exploration that he must have felt when he left the peasant confines of his parents’ house in the nondescript little village of Rhode. He represents a shifting, imagemaking, innovative consciousness that is remarkably postmodern in its disjunctive creativity, appropriation, and scattergun application of ideas and involvements. Faustus enacts a variety of cognitive experiences through the various terms of scholarly interdisciplinarity. The learning that he absorbs becomes, in a real sense, his disparate cognitive being: he really is a theologian, a lawyer, a physician, a philosopher, and a professional student. Earlier critics such as J.B. Steane took this

12 Steve Beard, “Very Slow Memes,” Aftershocks: The End of Style Culture (London: Wallflower, 2002) 137. Virilio relates his concept of “dromology” in Virilio Live: Selected Interviews, ed. John Armitage (London: Sage, 2001) 26. 13 Clifford Leech, Christopher Marlowe: Poet for the Stage (New York: AMS, 1986) 89.

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multifarious position literally to deride “an undergraduate quality of enthusiasm” in Faustus.14 Such an indictment rings rather hollow, however, within a postmodern world of enthusiastic alterity and decentered multiplicity of consciousness. In stolid Latinate passivity, Steane concedes, “very moving is the personal note of his love for the University.”15 However, Faustus begins by wishing off all constraints of the University and concludes with regret that he ever attended or taught there: “Though my heart pants and quivers to remember that I have been a student here these thirty years, O, would I had never seen Wittenberg, never read book!” (5.2.18–21 [47–9]). H. W. Matalene concedes nothing in his withering observation: “To Faustus, books are not to be read; they are props for a ritual to make you feel smart.”16 Matalene’s use of the impersonal you seems decidedly on purpose, leading to images of the book-lined study as obligatory backdrop for a professor’s office or for an “expert’s” on-camera interview. Wouldn’t Faustus have been great on CNN? And yet the power of the book as symbol for value, truth, and personal totem still prevails. The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Gutenberg Bible on display at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, was evacuated to Fort Knox to ensure its safety. Along with the original Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, the Gutenberg Bible and other irreplaceable items were returned to Washington only in 1944 after military assurance that all danger of an enemy attack had passed. Referencing the “Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress” (Washington: GPO, 1945: 47–51), Gerald Wager, Head of the Rare Book Reading Room at the Library of Congress, writes as follows: “The Library does its utmost to safeguard the national treasures in its custody, and I have no doubt that contingency plans are in place to secure this material in times of national emergency, but those plans, understandably, have not been publicized.”17 Faustus receives, handles, and consults books throughout the play, and each text redefines him in the same way as he redefines himself: through an excruciatingly precious, utterly indispensable, cognitive, performative desire. But, as every professional scholar knows, cognition also replaces and destroys. Horrified, Faustus even links books to his own personal apocalypse: “I’ll burn my books. Ah, Mephistopheles!” (5.2.123[191]). By this point Faustus wishes he had never been invested with rational intelligence in the first place, wishes he could be as intellectually and behaviorally nonliable as the animals. After all, unlike Aristotle or the Bible, Tallulah Bankhead or Doctor Faustus, the animals can never be otherwise than what they really are; even the cuckoo deceives by unselfconscious instinct. J. B. Steane goes beyond allegations of academic failure to quote Faustus’s irresponsible apostrophe, “You stars that reigned at my nativity, / Whose influence hath allotted death and hell” (5.2.89–90 [160–161]), and declares: “The free-thinking Renaissance humanist only hides a traditionalism which is basically mediaeval: the conservatism of Lear’s Gloucester as against the bright scepticism of the ‘new man’ 14 J. B. Steane, Marlowe: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964) 128. 15 Steane 151. 16 Matalene 507. 17 Gerald Wager, letter to the author, 22 September 2003.

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Edmund.”18 Steane’s mid-century character analysis reveals his own traditionalism in demonstrating that reformers—intellectual, political, literary, social—are basically selective interpreters: Faustian rascals at best, at the very worst—as in the literalized case of Edmund in King Lear—they are real bastards. But despite rumors of his illegitimacy, Faustus never plays the role of a real academic bastard. His orientation is open and curious; he is willing to try anything in defiance of a curriculum or even a world that attempts to impose limitations and silence debate. At times he even enjoys himself within the constant contingencies of performative interaction. As Zizek puts it in The Sublime Object of Ideology, “every element in a given ideological field is part of a series of equivalences.”19 Thus, welcome Mephistopheles, who arrives in the play as equivalent othered consciousness in relation to Faustus’s subjectivity. Herein critics too easily suggest that Faustus’s subjectivity “may be said to originate in satanic emulation.”20 Rather, Faustus explores; he does not emulate. He certainly relies on the laughable bad faith popularized by 1970s comedian Flip Wilson who constantly declared, “The Devil made me do it,” but Faustus’s subjectivity—in theater, in theology, in education, and in the text—communicates itself within his Bakhtinian, self–other interactions. Hence its compelling interactive quality, wherein Faustus’s aporia of identity within academic culture becomes more and more his real identity. Recently, in Literature and Theology, Adrian Streete observed: “It is the subject who creates the space for God to signify, a moment that is at once generative and apocalyptic.”21 To which I would add: performative—not magically, but indeed spatially, self-consciously reiterated in moment-by-moment subjectivity that Austin-through-Derrida-throughButler argues produces the reality it claims merely to perform. Faustus in performance represents a parody of professional academic inquiry. There truly is no end of subversion—“only not for us,” as Stephen Greenblatt so adroitly and intertextually first put it over twenty years ago.22 Thus, Faustus constantly engages himself in second-guessing personal analysis. He is capable of seeing the other side of any argument. All information is as subject to context and alterity as it is to flexible interpretation, iterated possibility, and metaphorical contrivance. The “truth” of anything exists only to be discerned in fleeting glimpses that are subject always to reconsideration. Hence ironic scholarly one-upmanship becomes a personal habit of conversation, seen especially in Faustus’s calculated repartee with Mephistopheles. Knowing that demons are always already liars, Faustus engages Mephistopheles in theological absolutes with all the confidence of linguistic free play. The devil’s “answer,” however, is as compellingly determined in its proportions as it is undermined by its expression:

18 Steane 160. 19 Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989) 88. 20 Pompa Banerjee, “I Mephastophilis: Self, Other, and Demonic Parody in Doctor Faustus,” Christianity and Literature 42 (1993): 225. 21 Adrian Streete, “‘Consummatum est’: Calvinist Exegesis, Mimesis and Doctor Faustus,” Literature and Theology 15 (2001): 148. 22 Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets,” Glyph 8 (1981): 57.

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Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place, for where we are is hell, And where hell is must we ever be. And, to conclude, when all the world dissolves, And every creature shall be purified, All places shall be hell that is not heaven. (2.1.124–29)

Such words convey the excruciating relativism that Faustus, true to his academic training, both loves and hates. He relishes the joyously damning empathy of any academic trained in detecting paradoxes and refuting with reductivist irony. But his immediate response, so self-assured and patronizing in its academic presumption, only betrays his comfortable inexperience: “Come, I think hell’s a fable” (2.1.130). Informed by his humanist learning and contained by his reformed Protestantism, Faustus parodies hell as a fable. Moreover, this occurs after only a short seminar with a demonic consciousness that he rejects from the outset as false. We academics today find our involvements similarly contained by a flexible combination of faculty, periodicity, genre, deadlines, schedules, basic political commitments, and under-funded intellectual curiosity. Boldly, Faustus announces the death of the author, the hero, and the god, as well as the death of science and humanism with a single stroke of biblical parody: “Consummatum est. This bill is ended” (2.1.74). The parody represents a form of communication itself after which no answers are forthcoming. As such, for academics, Faustus’s action represents a wickedly transgressive act wherein he is neither damned because he is wicked nor wicked because he is damned. Faustus undermines his own undermining, putting himself under erasure like the blood that clears and coagulates on his arm, producing a tattoo that marks and literalizes his body as a performance site. Similar to the action in Kafka’s “Penal Colony,” the tattooed label both identifies and punishes the offender. But the extreme imperative “Homo, fuge!” (2.1.81)—cautionary advice of the New Testament in I Timothy 6.11, or dangerous assertion of Renaissance aspiration in the story of Icarus—also identifies and performs Faustus’s compulsory academic action. He literalizes the tragic paradox: Damned if he does / Damned if he doesn’t. As self-replicating meme of academic performativity, Faustus is constantly between the doing and the thing done. His paradox as an academic involves turning the past into history and the future into some form of publication. The present is always (and forever) a moment of performative choice and performative energy that is dangerous and—yes, I’ll say it—Faustian in its realization. Herein, time itself gets experienced as bits of information. Promised a world of open-ended humanist possibilities, he researches and finally discovers his limited materialist state in the imperative: “O soul, be changed into little waterdrops, / And fall into the ocean, ne’er be found!” (5.2.118–19 [186–87]). Such is the experience of lost and irretrievable data. He performs the Faustian centrifuge only too-well-known in the world of twenty-first century crash theory: a world of protest, of assassination, of poverty, of terrorist attack and self-nauseating response, of third-world consciousness and post-colonized anthropology, of educational reform, reproductive liberation, HIV complications, and world “peaces.” All the information is readily, radically accessible.

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One is permanently connected. As Virilio puts it, “The new technologies bring into effect the three traditional characteristics of the Divine: ubiquity, instantaneity and immediacy,”23 and everyone is implicated. Virtually interconnected at the speed of light, we find ourselves like Faustus to be simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, constantly between nodal links of information, forever on topic and off topic, metaphorical and real. Faustus performs, even as he conveys, the attendant discomfort. Faustus’s performative tricks of violence, mutilation, world/time travel, and convincing misrepresentation contain possibilities as unsettling as they are ecstatic for a world that craves information/entertainment connections through video, webmail, DVD, wireless networking, real-time reportage, messenger spam, and virtual realities. The reality is that no one and no thing is ever turned off, thus explaining something of the rollicking comic power of the middle scenes of the play. Literary critics continue routinely to dismiss these scenes with an informed mixture of historicized textual explanation or editorial embarrassment, but the subversive theatrical power of these scenes is legendary. In their asinine irreverence, they demonstrate how dangerous, how bold, how relentlessly disjunctive Faustus really is—like the terrifying discovery of an extra devil onstage or a sophisticated postmodernist rewriting of a whole political economy. Those Elizabethan playgoers who appreciated mimetic, demonic blasphemy with delight and terror are closely linked to us in the twenty-first century, we who crave internet security, but also appreciate the power of virtual states and cannot get enough cool information. We effectively literalize Faustus’s ludicrous, actorly metaphors. His illusions are equivalent to his scholarly performativity. That is the hysterical Faustian scary part. Back in 1964, J. B. Steane could still gesture toward Faustus as some sort of naughty schoolboy. Today, naughty schoolboys (and more rarely schoolgirls) go beyond hysteria: they demean, traumatize, self-immolate, and kill. Only then can they be venerated or loathed as martyrs. Faustus would perform the same sort of distressing irony if he were not so busy experiencing fame in reverse—itself a workable definition of cult celebrity. With regard to the remarkable final scene of the play, David Webb asks if Faustus’s speech signals authenticity? Or brilliant performance? Or even a mixture of both? Webb observes that “contemporary audiences would have seen and trembled at all the possibilities which might lead to irrevocable damnation.”24 We of the twentyfirst century do not. Or do we? At the end of the sixteenth century, the play clearly parodies medieval scholasticism and faith. It de-emphasizes spiritual conformity to foreground humanist inquiry. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the play clearly parodies renaissance discovery and humanist knowing. It de-emphasizes tragic conformity to foreground open-ended academic performativity. Such parody signals comic similarities but also crucial ideo-intellectual differences between sites of parody. In A Theory of Parody, Linda Hutcheon observes that modern parody “does not always permit one of the texts to fare any better or worse than the other.”25 23 Qtd. in Armitage 36. 24 Webb 45. 25 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody (New York: Methuen, 1985) 31.

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Bakhtin goes further in his description of the power of parodic forms: “They liberated the object from the power of language in which it had become entangled as if in a net; they destroyed the homogenizing power of myth over language; they freed consciousness from the power of the direct word, destroyed the thick walls that had imprisoned consciousness within its own discourse, within its own language.”26 Such is the case in Doctor Faustus, in which medieval morality, humanist learning, and postmodern play combine and reconfigure themselves constantly to re-graft academic similarities onto remarkable ideological differences. In the final scene, Mephistopheles—in Marjorie Garber’s words, “a born deconstructer”27—appears but does not speak. Speech is not necessary. He has already put it clearly and his perception is worth repeating, only this time with the sort of conceptual italics that academics are fond of: “Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed / In one self place, for where we are is hell, / And where hell is must we ever be” (2.1.124–26; my italics). Academic parody? Similarity and difference? Hell as a state of mind? Worse. Hell represents a self-consciously performative irony—the sort of linked irony perceivable in Faustus’s constant third-person references to himself. Popular celebrities in the world of music, multimillionaire sports stars, and overexposed actors all routinely refer to themselves from time to time in the third person. Publicly interviewed, they know their names as brands and they step outside themselves to assert an immature self-consciousness masking as accomplishment. Faustus does much the same. But in a celebrated provocative essay titled “Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and the Ends of Desire,” Edward A. Snow claims that the play goes well beyond traditional notions about the fulfillment of human will or the search for personal identity. Using a phenomenological approach, Snow digs behind the humanist moral and ontological concerns of Steane, Leech, Matalene, and others to observe, “The Faustian project, we might say, becomes a matter of stabilizing the ‘I’ by converting ‘wanting’ in the sense of ‘lacking’ into ‘wanting’ in the sense of ‘desiring.’”28 This deceptively simple insight surpasses and refines academic generalizations about subversion of authority, moral responsibility, or deferral of closure. To stabilize the “I” represents a problem of performativity very much at the heart of the play and of the compelling power that it both conveys and contains. The title character, like the play itself in its curiously multiple state, is involved in a search for completion by containing an uncertain objective. Neither Faustus nor the play can ever “Settle” (1.1.1), to quote the opening imperative of the title character. Objective desires and their accomplishment provide Faustus with satisfactions that he rejects in the very moment he experiences them. Such is the reiterated motion near the very beginning of the play. Logic: “Then read no more; thou hast attained the end” (1.1.10); Medicine: “Why Faustus, hast thou not attained that end?” 26 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) 60. 27 Marjorie Garber, “`Here’s Nothing Writ: Scribe, Script, and Circumscription in Marlowe’s Plays,” Theatre Journal 36 (1984): 308. 28 Edward A. Snow, “Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and the Ends of Desire,” Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, ed. Alvin Kernan. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) 70.

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(1.1.18[17]); Law: “A pretty [petty] case of paltry legacies!” (1.1.30[28]), and “What will be, shall be? Divinity, adieu!” (1.1.50[48]). Faustus, like the rest of us, requires more, moving always between representative intellectual and performance sites of then, now, and whomever we may momentarily discover ourselves to be. Such discomfort might well be voiced in Faustus’s terrible realization near the ending: “O, no end is limited to damnèd souls” (5.2.104[172]). Stability is not an option. To Virilio, himself a Christian thinker, such compulsory mobility represents the true postmodern condition. However, such relentless endlessness might also represent fame with all of its painful self-realization. After all, as the really famous know, real fame makes one endlessly lonely. Like Doctor Faustus, professional academics are always, already, almost famous. Such is the gleefully tragic irony of the play. Archival theologians and literary critics might well recoil from such fallacies of anachronism, interpretationism, and essentialism. Recently, Stephen Orgel counters them this way: “Theological arguments citing strict Calvinist doctrine about the impossibility of repentance for the confirmed sinner are doubtless technically correct but dramatically irrelevant. ... [T]he play is more a temptation than a warning.”29 Faustus replicates himself within consciousness as academic longing with all of its multiple desperations. But the devil is not involved so much as performance is. In an interesting metaprofessional discourse titled “Stars, Tenure, and the Death of Ambition,” Sharon O’Dair argues that “Because we continue to think like quasi-monastic teachers, assuming as a bottom line the benefits of lifetime tenure, we do not accept our [academic] star system for what it is: not evil or demeaning, but risky business, with potentially huge rewards, that is played successfully only by those with unique talents who are— additionally—both positioned to perform and able to maintain their performance over many, many years.”30 Such performance is perhaps captured in the observation of the great Hollywood movie producer Samuel Goldwyn, Jr., who actually met that inimitable Marlovian, Professor Fredson Bowers, and declared enthusiastically: “That guy could run a major studio.”31 Throughout Doctor Faustus, in Judith Butler’s early phenomenological sense, Faustus does the body in performative realizations. As Butler puts it, “To do, to dramatize, to reproduce, these seem to be some of the elementary structures of embodiment,” and all materiality bears meaning.32 Doctor Faustus materially dramatizes and reproduces some sort of horrible breakdown related to dissatisfaction with intellectual performance—in print, tenured, publicly quoted, accessible on the Internet, but virtually unknown outside the classroom. Early in the play, Faustus gloats about the feeling in self-referential terms of university outreach: 29 Stephen Orgel, “Tobacco and Boys: How Queer Was Marlowe?” GLQ 6 (2000): 570–71. 30 Sharon O’Dair, “Stars, Tenure, and the Death of Ambition,” Day Late, Dollar Short: The Next Generation and the New Academy, ed. Peter C. Herman (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000) 53. 31 Qtd. in George Garrett, “Afterthoughts” English as a Discipline, ed. James C. Raymond (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996) 181. 32 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40 (1988): 521.

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Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe I, that have with concise syllogisms Gravelled the pastors of the German Church And made the flow’ring pride of Wittenberg Swarm to my problems as the infernal spirits On sweet Musaeus when he came to hell. (1.1.114–18 [106–10])

Clearly, Faustus is already “in hell.” His intense desire for fame is self-destructive, but it manifests itself within as consolation. Like the rest of us, Jacques Derrida knows the feeling. Speaking professionally, academic to academic, over twenty years ago at Columbia University’s centenary of the founding of its Graduate School, he declared, “We feel bad about ourselves. Who would dare to say otherwise? And those who feel good about themselves are perhaps hiding something, from others or from themselves.”33 Doctor Faustus, yesterday or four hundred years ago, tried hiding something from Mephistopheles when he recklessly declared, “How? Now in hell? Nay, an this be hell, I’ll willingly be damned here. What? Walking, disputing, etc.?” (2.1.141–43[141–2]). Deceived in his comfort and comforted in his deception, Faustus protests with words that suggest only vague discomfort at the prospect of eternal debate with one’s colleagues. His words, however, make the devil wilt in self-recognition. They reconfirm Faustus’s self-respect as a successful academic just as they speak to us today in all of our various Faustian compromises, ambitions, animosities, and misgivings, our ideological alliances, intellectual pursuits, and professional assertions. Like Faustus, we can never—nor should we ever—“settle.” That perception alone ensured his tragic recognition—or perhaps his terrible comic versatility—as meme of professional academic performance speaking about us and to us across time.

33 Jacques Derrida, “Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties,” trans. Richard Rand and Amy Wygant, Logomachia, ed. Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992) 7.

Chapter 8

Misbelief, False Profession, and The Jew of Malta William M. Hamlin Washington State University

Some people make the world believe that they hold beliefs they do not hold. A greater number make themselves believe it, having no idea what “believing” really means, once you go deeply into the matter. —Montaigne, Essays He that cannot dissemble knows not how to live. —English Renaissance proverb

In the Prologue to Christopher Marlowe’s Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta, Machevil readily acknowledges that “To some perhaps my name is odious.”1 One of those he might have in mind is Michel de Montaigne, whose remarkable book of essays underwent its most important printing in 1588, shortly before the first production of Marlowe’s play and the same year as the death of the Guise to whom Machevil refers. Montaigne’s Essays migrated to England almost as quickly as the spirit of Machiavelli, and, while I make no suggestion that Montaigne served as a source of any kind for Marlowe, I find his censure of Machiavellian duplicity a useful point of departure in considering misbelief and false profession in Marlowe’s play. Consider, for instance, the following passage from Montaigne’s chapter “On presumption”: As for that novel virtue of deceit and dissimulation that is now much honoured, I hate it unto death, and among all the vices I can find none which bears better testimony to cowardice and to baseness of mind. It is an abject and a slave-like humour to go disguising and hiding yourself behind a mask and not to dare to let yourself be seen as you are.2 1 I quote throughout from N. W. Bawcutt’s edition of The Jew of Malta (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978); here, Prologue 5. I take my epigraphs from Montaigne’s Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991) 494; and from M. P. Tilley’s Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950) D386. 2 Montaigne 735–6. Montaigne mentions Machiavelli by name only twice: in “On presumption” (744) and in ”Observations on Julius Caesar’s methods of making war” (833). Both references are severely critical.

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No doubt this is a principled condemnation, but it derives from an especially privileged vantage point, and it also (rather unusually for Montaigne) ignores the problem of self-deception and presupposes a transcultural, essentialized morality in which vice and virtue are clearly discernible and easily separable. 3 But in Marlowe’s Malta, where talk of transgression is always contextualized by talk of policy, dissimulation is intimately connected to questions of identity and, indeed, to survival. Moreover, as various scholars have recently argued, the creation of fictional selves can help— paradoxically enough—to establish and preserve identity in ideologically oppressive circumstances, as for example among Marranos, or crypto-Jews, in Elizabethan England.4 So, given all of this, what relations obtain between dissembling and what Marlowe calls “misbelief” in The Jew of Malta? What does “misbelief” mean in a setting where belief is consistently portrayed as empty profession? And what status do revenge and villainy have in a world where, as Machevil asserts, “there is no sin but ignorance” (Prologue 15)? My essay will attempt to answer these and related questions. Machevil’s precept immediately establishes a baseline expectation for the rest of the play. We enter a realm where we anticipate ideological demystification, where morality may be merely conventional, where vice and virtue may lack natural or transcendental grounding. Coburn Freer’s essay on lying in The Jew of Malta usefully distinguishes between lies and social fictions, arguing that Barabas “collapses the distinction” between the two and indeed “uses the existence of social fictions” to justify and facilitate lying.5 An example is Barabas’s duplicitous effort to reassure Mathias: “Thou know’st, and heaven can witness it is true, / That I intend my daughter shall be thine” (2.3.254–55). Barabas invokes divine “witness” to guarantee the truth of his claim, and Mathias has little choice but to trust him or to question the basis of his own religious profession—a profession most powerfully intimated to be socially fictitious by Ferneze’s repeated, unctuous, and hypocritical allusions to heavenly justice (e.g., 1.2.62–67; 3.2.33; 5.1.55; 5.5.122–3). But it would be inadequate to view Barabas merely as the most ideologically conscious of the play’s characters, and this is not only because, as D. J. Palmer and others have argued, Barabas “does not come to grief because he is a Machiavel, but because he is not Machiavellian

3 Montaigne exhibits divided feelings, for instance, about Natural Law, condemning it in his “Apology for Raymond Sebond” but elsewhere assuming its existence. 4 For Anglo-Jewry, see James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), esp. 62–88; Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 2004) 258–9; and David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Henry Holt, 2004) 264. For Marranism as the form of Jewishness most pertinent to Elizabethan theatrical presentations of Jews, see Peter Berek, “The Jew as Renaissance Man,” Renaissance Quarterly 51.1 (1998): 128–62. See also Shari A. Zimmerman, “Disaffection, Dissimulation, and the Uncertain Ground of Silent Dismission,” ELH 66 (1999): 556–60, which treats dissembling speech as a survival strategy. 5 Coburn Freer, “Lies and Lying in The Jew of Malta,” “A Poet and a filthy Playmaker”: New Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill, and Constance B. Kuriyama (New York: AMS, 1988) 143–4.

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enough.”6 For the most part I agree with this, but I would add three qualifications. First, in many respects, Barabas is inept as a villain. Despite his credentials as a mass-murderer, he is not only a failed Machiavellian at the play’s denouement but all through the action: he loses the vast majority of his wealth—rather than merely half—by disputing pointlessly with Ferneze; he confides far too much in Ithamore; and he gives insufficient poison to Bellamira and her fellow extortioners.7 Hence we are well prepared for his disastrous mistake of trusting Ferneze. This leads to my second qualification, which is that, despite such character-tracking as that in which I have just indulged, The Jew of Malta resists over-emphasis on consistency of characterization, and here I think that recent essays dealing with the overt and selfconscious theatricality of the play (and its various local effects) have been usefully corrective.8 Above all, however, I want to suggest that Marlowe presents Barabas as manifesting a complex and shifting relation to ideology, to moral norms, and to belief and religious profession. Specifically, Barabas displays an uncharacteristic blindness to the fact that his own conviction of ideological detachment conceals a deeper adherence to a largely unexamined notion of transcultural morality. This blindness, moreover, is perhaps best captured and conveyed through the play’s deployment of the unusual word “misbelief.”9

6 D. J. Palmer, “Marlowe’s Naturalism,” Christopher Marlowe, ed. Brian Morris (London: Ernest Benn, 1968) 174. Cf. Catherine Minshull, “Marlowe’s ‘Sound Machevil,’” Renaissance Drama 13 (1982): 35–53; James L. Smith, “The Jew of Malta in the Theatre,” Christopher Marlowe, ed. Brian Morris (London: Ernest Benn, 1968) 13, 19; Bob Hodge, “Marlowe, Marx, and Machiavelli: Reading into the Past,” Literature, Language, and Society in England, 1580–1680, ed. David Aers, et al. (Dublin: n.p., 1981) 7; Simon Shepherd, Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986) 86–7; Emily Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993) 92; Fred B. Tromly, Playing with Desire: Christopher Marlowe and the Art of Tantalization (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998) 106; Benjamin Bertram, The Time is Out of Joint: Skepticism in Shakespeare’s England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004) 126; Riggs 271–2. 7 Constance B. Kuriyama associates Barabas’s ineffectuality with his status as a predominantly comic character; see Hammer or Anvil: Psychological Patterns in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1980) 156–7, 161–2. 8 See, e.g., Smith; Freer; Sara Munson Deats and Lisa S. Starks, “‘So neatly plotted, and so well perform’d’: Villain as Playwright in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta,” Theatre Journal 44 (1992): 375–89; Darryll Grantley, “‘What means this shew?’: Theatricalism, Camp, and Subversion in Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta,” Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture, ed. Darryll Grantley and Peter Roberts (Aldershot,.UK: Ashgate, 1996) 224–38; Thomas Cartelli, “Endless Play: The False Starts of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta,” “A Poet and a filthy Play-maker”: New Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill, and Constance B. Kuriyama (New York: AMS, 1988) 117–28; and Rick Bowers, “The Jew of Malta and the World of Wrestling,” English Studies in Canada 25 (1999): 137–56. 9 My understanding of ideology is based on discussions by Terry Eagleton, Ideology (London: Verso, 1991); Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review, 1971)

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Marlowe uses this word three times in The Jew of Malta and nowhere else in his writings. Shakespeare uses it twice, in Titus Andronicus and The Merchant of Venice—both plays indebted to The Jew.10 The word also surfaces in the Book of Common Prayer, in The Faerie Queene, and in John Florio’s 1603 translation of Montaigne, but it is by no means common in Elizabethan English.11 More ambiguous than “unbelief,” “misbelief” oscillates in meaning between “erroneous belief” and “absence of belief,” with connotations of incredulity, distrust, and doubt. Thus Shylock alleges that Antonio has called him a “misbeliever,” while Aaron, who disavows belief in any God, is condemned by Marcus as a “misbelieving Moor.” Elements of this ambiguity are activated early in The Jew of Malta, when Friar Jacomo, deceived into thinking that Abigail intends Christian conversion, brusquely upbraids her father: Barabas, although thou art in misbelief, And wilt not see thine own afflictions, Yet let thy daughter be no longer blind. (1.2.350–52)

Here “misbelief” is conceived alternately as willing and involuntary, and indeed Marlowe insists on the metaphor of sight and blindness all through this section of the play, stretching back to the moment when Barabas counsels Abigail that “A counterfeit profession is better / Than unseen hypocrisy” (1.2.292–93).12 So Jacomo’s censure of Barabas’s misbelief as a form of blindness, coming as it does in the midst of an elaborate deception in which Jacomo is, in fact, the gull, acquires trenchantly ironic proportions. The seeing/unseeing binary is effectively inverted, and Jacomo 127–86; and Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) esp. 55–71. 10 The Jew of Malta 1.2.350; 2.2.46; 3.3.67; Titus Andronicus 5.3.142; The Merchant of Venice 1.3.107. 11 The Book of Common Prayer, “Prayers to be said in the morning” (1559); Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene 4.12.26 (“And chyde at him, that made her misbelieue”); John Florio, trans., The Essayes of Montaigne (1603; New York: Modern Library, 1933) 394 (“the errours of mis-beleeving”). See also Florio’s 1598 Italian-English dictionary (“Menscredenza” is defined as “misbeliefe, incredulity”); Beaumont and Fletcher’s 1611 The Maid’s Tragedy (4.1.215); Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (“Mescreance” defined as “Miscreancie, misbeleefe, a wrong beleefe”). It is worth noting that “miscreant” originally meant “misbeliever”—a fact that becomes self-evident when the word is examined in light of its Latin and French etymology. 12 Compare the uses of “see,” “seen,” “unseen,” and “sight” at 1.2.301; 1.2.306; 1.2.349; 1.2.355; 1.2.361; 1.2.373; 1.2.374; 1.2.383; 2.1.22. For discussions of Barabas’s “counterfeit profession” speech, see Bawcutt 26; Kuriyama 151–2; Bartels 94; Riggs 156–7, 267; Stephen Greenblatt, “Marlowe, Marx, and Anti-Semitism,” Critical Inquiry 5 (1978): 302; William M. Hamlin, “A Note on Teaching The Jew of Malta,” Marlowe Society of America Newsletter 11.2 (1991): 3–4; James R. Siemon, ed., The Jew of Malta (New York: Norton, 1994) 30; Ian McAdam, “Carnal Identity in The Jew of Malta,” English Literary Renaissance 26 (1996): 64; Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997) 151; Lisa Hopkins, Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) 101.

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emerges as the “unseen” hypocrite—both self-deceived and ideologically blind. Barabas’s “misbelief,” in this case, is a clear-sighted understanding of operant social fictions.13 Abigail is present throughout this interchange, and her presence accentuates a major structural pattern in the play, that of repeated indoctrination in customary social practice. “Religion / Hides many mischiefs from suspicion” (1.2.281–82), her father tells her, and his authoritative tone derives in equal measure from his impressive cross-cultural savvy and his will to impose his cunning. Ithamore and Lodowick are other beneficiaries of Barabas’s local knowledge: we learn with them that alms are sent to the nunnery on Saint Jacques’s Evening and that Friar Barnardine sleeps in his clothes as a function of monastic rule. Moreover, because Barabas is so conversant with varied cultural practice, he easily dupes others on the basis of spurious insider knowledge, as when he tells Lodowick to ignore Abigail’s tears: “’tis the Hebrews’s guise / That maidens new-betrothed should weep a while” (2.3.327–28).14 Coming from a detail-oriented micro-manager who knows everything from the Levantine shipping lanes to the sewage channels of subterranean Malta, this claim is entirely convincing to Lodowick, and, as audience members, we are encouraged to sympathize with the cultural relativism implied by Barabas’s keen sense of local difference. He also admits to fornication—but “that was in another country” (4.1.41).15 Whatever Barabas’s origin, Marlowe makes it clear that he has been a traveler, and travelers were routinely regarded in early modern Europe as potential atheists, since sharp awareness of cultural relativism can induce skepticism regarding the truth-status of particular practices and beliefs.16 For the skeptics of antiquity— figures such as Pyrrho of Elis and Sextus Empiricus—this awareness was typically accompanied by quietistic adherence to local custom, and, in the later sixteenth century, Montaigne of course advocates such behavior, though the age-old debate about his religious profession has always revolved around its degree of sincerity.17 13 This is all the more apparent when we take into account the resonance of Jacomo’s word “afflictions,” used here for the fifth time in this scene. Far from being ignorant of his current afflictions, Barabas is acutely conscious of them. 14 For other examples, see 2.3.45–8 and 2.3.311–15. 15 It is worth noting that Sextus Empiricus’s tenth mode of doubt stresses the relativity of custom, belief, and law; Sextus concludes that we should “suspend judgment on the nature of external existing objects”—objects which in this case include the truth-status of laws and moral claims (Outlines of Scepticism, trans. Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], 40). Though condemned in Malta, fornication might be accepted elsewhere. See Hamlin, “On Continuities Between Skepticism and Early Ethnography,” Sixteenth Century Journal 31 (2000): 366–9; Hamlin, Tragedy and Scepticism in Shakespeare’s England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 234–5; and Bertram, 129–30. 16 See Hamlin, “Continuities” 361–66. For Barabas as traveler, see 2.3.23; 3.4.69– 70; 4.1.41; 4.4.68, and possibly 2.3.182–90. Ithamore is also a traveler (2.3.130; 2.3.209). Compare Berek 135–36. 17 Sextus, Outlines (e.g., 7, 9, 60); Montaigne, Essays (e.g., 136–37, 302, 563, 629–30, 745, 1180).

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Social conformity, however, need not imply assent to the truth-value of specific practices; indeed, sustained recognition of the disparity between the two seems crucial for the cultivation and maintenance of individual subjectivity. But, in Barabas’s case, such recognition is complicated by his ostensible Jewishness in a Christian setting, and, as a result, he engages in some rather tortuous mental acrobatics when he indulges in self-justifying logic. “Who is honoured now but for his wealth?” he asks in an early soliloquy (1.1.112); and later, meditating on his plan to profit from policy, he concludes, “This is the life we Jews are used to lead, / And reason, too, for Christians do the like” (5.2.115–16). The social accommodation here is obviously self-serving, and, as Stephen Greenblatt and others have noted, any Jewish-Christian difference is in dire peril of collapse.18 But, at the same time, Barabas’s embrace of the way things are amounts to conformity with a vengeance, and it is precisely here that Barabas acquires further purchase on his own interiority, since he builds on an already coerced conformity, or social constrictedness, which is premised on his social difference from mainstream Maltese culture. In other words, Barabas’s Jewishness, however superficial, ultimately allows him to be more like the Christians who harass him while also guaranteeing a satisfying degree of individuation.19 The most intriguing of Barabas’s self-justifying arguments is that in which he urges Abigail to feign love for the Governor’s son. “What, shall I be betrothed to Lodowick?” she protests. And he replies: It’s no sin to deceive a Christian, For they themselves hold it a principle, Faith is not to be held with heretics. But all are heretics that are not Jews; This follows well, and therefore, daughter, fear not. (2.3.311–15)

Part of the irony here lies in the fact that Barabas deceives Abigail even as he instructs her in the fine points of deceiving someone else. But part of it inheres in Barabas’s superfluousness: his argument would be stronger with one fewer premise, for when he adds that all non-Jews are heretics he reaches uncustomarily for a universality of application that contradicts his normal habit of employing situational 18 E.g., Greenblatt, “Marlowe” 296: “Marlowe quickly suggests that the Jew is not the exception but rather the true representation of his society”; compare Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) 204; J. B. Steane, Marlowe: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964) 169; Dena Goldberg, “Sacrifice in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta,” SEL 32 (1992): 239; Jeremy Tambling, “Abigail’s Party: ‘The Difference of Things’ in The Jew of Malta,” In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, ed. Dorothea Kehler and Susan Baker (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1991) 101; Hopkins 90. See also Greenblatt, Self-Fashioning 207, on Barabas’s aphoristic speech habits. 19 For conflicting opinions on Barabas’s Jewishness, see Kuriyama 167; Hopkins 100– 101; Jean-Marie Maguin, “The Jew of Malta: Marlowe’s Ideological Stance and the PlayWorld’s Ethos,” Cahiers Élisabéthains 27 (1985): 23; and Roma Gill, ed., The Jew of Malta (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) xiii. Some scholars argue that Marlowe creates a fairly impressive Jewish identity for Barabas out of Old Testament materials and allusions; others say this Jewishness is mainly constructed from Christian anti-Semitism.

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ethics.20 And Abigail is not persuaded; she merely obeys. We see here perhaps a trace of performativity, a delight in histrionics of the sort that Sara Munson Deats and Lisa Starks have discussed, and which is part of Barabas’s aesthetic sense—a sense that even in the appreciation imperils its possessor.21 But we also detect a move away from the flexible relativism that has been Barabas’s greatest asset. It is the beginning of the end: not only for Abigail, but for her father too. For after Mathias and Lodowick kill one another, and after Marlowe fastforwards their parents through the conventional postures of grief, despair, solidarity, and revenge-conception, Abigail learns of her father’s duplicity, and moments later she informs Friar Jacomo that “experience” has now made her “see the difference of things”: My sinful soul, alas, hath paced too long The fatal labyrinth of misbelief, Far from the Son that gives eternal life. (3.3.64–68)

Couched in the language of newfound vision, Abigail’s speech echoes the metaphor in Jacomo’s earlier rebuke of Barabas, thus raising questions about Marlowe’s attitude toward her conversion. Furthermore, “misbelief” resonates far beyond the confines of religious profession.22 Abigail is not so much saying that Judaism is a “fatal labyrinth” as that she now renounces the world and any hope for happiness in this life. Her “misbelief” was a belief that goodness and worldliness were not mutually exclusive, a faith that things might be as they seemed. But now, disabused, she perceives that there is “no love on earth, / Pity in Jews, nor piety in Turks” (3.3.50–51). Abigail wants to die—and becoming a Christian is the way to do it.23 Her father is happy to assist. “She that varies from me in belief,” he muses, “Gives great presumption that she loves me not, / Or, loving, doth dislike of something done” (3.4.10–12). Once again we encounter an ostensible reference to religious profession (“belief”) which is instantly diffused by wider implication. And the blurring is aided by the laughably mechanistic quality of Barabas’s reasoning; he focuses exclusively, and with no trace of emotion, on the signifier and the possibly signified.24 Abigail indeed varies from him in belief, just as she did before she learned of his role in the 20 Compare Baldwin’s speech to Sigismond in 2 Tamburlaine (2.1.33–40). See Siemon xxvi–xxvii; Kuriyama 167; and Sara Munson Deats, “Biblical Parody in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta: A Re-Examination,” Christianity and Literature 37 (1988): 33. 21 Deats and Starks, passim; Barabas’s “artistry in evil” has also been stressed by David Bevington, From Mankind to Marlowe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962) 227–8; Greenblatt, “Marlowe” 303; and Kuriyama 158–9. 22 Gill’s 1995 edition of The Jew provides useful commentary on possible patristic origins of the “labyrinth” image (113), but the image was common in Marlowe’s day. See, for example, Lady Mary Wroth’s sonnet “In this strange labyrinth” or, later, Milton’s depiction of fallen angels confusedly debating providence, free will, and foreknowledge, “in wandering mazes lost” (Paradise Lost 2.555–61). 23 This desire may be usefully connected to Jacomo’s eagerness to die in 4.2—a fact otherwise unexplained by the play. 24 This is related to the use of proverbial expression that Greenblatt and others have discussed.

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death of Mathias. But now she knows “the difference of things”; she is in fact closer to Barabas in terms of her understanding of the world than at any other moment in the play. The crucial distinction is that she wants out. Her father, meanwhile, cannot bear for someone to see things as he does yet respond quite differently. He is happy to be surrounded by gulls, and he can enjoy knaves as well, but gulls with knavish vision are intolerable. The ultimate reason for this is that Marlowe presents Barabas’s mind as more thoroughly infiltrated by traditional ethical categories than he himself would ever acknowledge. Barabas’s self-image may be that of someone who disavows moral absolutes and agrees with Machevil that “there is no sin but ignorance,” but his language repeatedly reveals that he relies on conventional moral distinctions and ethical explanatory constructs far more than his Maltese adversaries. He almost obsessively meditates on Christian malice, falsehood, and pride (1.1.116), thereby implying moral standards from which Christians often deviate; he claims that “nothing violent ... can be permanent” (1.1.131–32); and, when his wealth is seized, he accurately accuses Ferneze of using scripture to justify his “wrongs” (1.2.111). But also, and more fundamentally, Barabas confesses to foul play, as when he tells himself in soliloquy that “since by wrong thou got’st authority, / Maintain it bravely by firm policy” (5.2.35–36), or, later, when he gloats before the audience: is not this A kingly kind of trade, to purchase towns By treachery and sell ’em by deceit? Now tell me, worldlings, underneath the sun, If greater falsehood ever has been done. (5.5.46–50)25

Barabas, in short, not only appropriates the language of morality, as do Ferneze and various Maltese knights, but he allows it to structure his consciousness. My own (unscientific) survey of morally inflected language in the play suggests that Barabas is responsible for about 56 percent of such language, despite the fact that he speaks 49 percent of the play’s lines. In other words, while Barabas dominates the play in terms of verbal presence, the ratio of his dominance of its moral language is even greater. Ferneze’s moral language, meanwhile, is often marked by hollowness. Consider, for instance, his use of the word “patient” (1.2.123), which is unconnected to any personally-invested moral outlook, unlike the use of the same word shortly afterwards by the First Jew (1.2.170), who counsels Barabas not to curse. In general, Ferneze’s speech habits betray scant interest in the moral reflection of which Barabas is at least intermittently capable. It is true, of course, that self-definition within a scheme of ethical absolutes is a far cry from moral probity, and, as all readers of The Jew of Malta know, Barabas never exhibits remorse. But Ferneze never admits or even seems aware of wrongdoing. The closest he comes is when he neglects to contradict Barabas’s allegation that 25 Siemon claims this boast “is clearly derived from the overconfident braggart villains and vices of earlier drama” (xxvi). Shakespeare perhaps draws on it when Aaron exclaims “O, how this villainy / Doth fat me with the very thoughts of it!” (Titus Andronicus 3.1.201– 202).

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he is a thief (1.2.95–128). On the whole, however, Ferneze is severed from any binding relation to moral norms, and his clear lack of initiative in investigating his son’s death is an index not only of his tepid affections but of his ethical unmooring. (It is worth noting, for instance, that vengeance is Katharine’s idea, not Ferneze’s, and that Ferneze never in fact pursues it.26) For his part, Barabas may not much resemble, say, Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy, but his impulse to revenge is at least premised on a sense of transcultural moral standards, so his cynicism and his praise of unblinkered vision ultimately constitute a peculiar form of self-deceit.27 Abigail’s defection almost forces him to confront it. My argument, of course, is indebted to Stephen Greenblatt’s claim that Marlowe’s protagonists are unable fully to reject the establishmentarian views against which they rebel. But it differs in that it questions his assertion—based primarily on the “counterfeit profession” speech—that Barabas exhibits a “freedom from all ideology.”28 I do not find that this is the case, and, while I concur that Barabas’s honesty about dissembling is more attractive than blindness to hypocrisy, I think that his very confidence in his own ideological detachment screens him from a fitful dependence on the categories of private and public morality from which Ferneze, to his evident success, has distanced himself. At the play’s outset Barabas complains that the Christians’ iniquity “fits not their profession” (1.1.117), and Marlowe gradually nurtures the irony implicit in Barabas’s sharp recognition of a gap between act and value in others while failing to note its subtle manifestations in himself. Interviewing Ithamore, he demands, “Let me know ... thy birth, condition, and profession,” and Ithamore responds, “My profession [is] what you please” (2.3.165–68). But Barabas’s profession, notwithstanding his consummate deployment of cultural relativism, is not what he pleases, and, in the end, he cannot sustain the ideological flexibility that has generally served him so well. Barabas believes too fully in his “misbelief”; the misbelief itself becomes a false profession. Yet even as it does so—and even as Barabas’s prior flexibility gives way to mechanistic deployment of general premises about social behavior—Barabas emerges as humanly vulnerable and thus as the antithesis of the relentlessly consistent Ferneze. In a community of knaves and gulls, 26 Fredson Bowers approaches this matter in a different way, arguing that Marlowe indeed relies heavily on Kyd but fails to incorporate “the Kydian principle of conflict” (Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587–1642 [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940] 278). On Marlowe/Kyd similarities and differences more generally, see Siemon xxiii–xxvi. 27 Bawcutt discusses Barabas’s self-deception, concentrating on the disparity between a glorified self-image and a relatively sordid reality (21). Siemon mentions it too, in conjunction with an allusion to ideology, but focuses on Barabas’s continuation of the project of accumulating wealth, a major “value” of the establishment (xxxvi–vii). McAdam writes that Barabas is “deceiving himself in believing he is still practicing Machiavellian policy” (71). 28 Greenblatt, “Marlowe” 302. Hodge argues that Barabas is “a brilliant study in confused consciousness” (13), sometimes seeing through the dominant ideology, sometimes being “trapped” by it. Michael Hattaway thinks Marlowe’s plays work to denaturalize ideological formations; Marlowe himself is a dissident (“Christopher Marlowe: Ideology and Subversion,” Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture, ed. Darryll Grantley and Peter Roberts [Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1996] 198–223).

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Barabas is both, and this is a primary source of his fascination for us. Moreover, if Marlowe, as many critics have supposed, envisions a world divorced from the transcendent in The Jew of Malta, he nonetheless reveals the power of ideological formations which are premised on projections of transcultural reality—and he also suggests that susceptibility to them can be humanizing, even attractive.29 Montaigne, despite his condemnation of Machiavellian duplicity, would have agreed. We tend not to associate Marlowe with a strong sense of human warmth, but The Jew of Malta, for all its authorial detachment and cool political analysis, finally encourages a peculiar undercurrent of fellow feeling.

29 Joel B. Altman speaks of the play’s “essentially amoral universe” (The Tudor Play of Mind [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978] 360); M. M. Mahood talks of its being cut off entirely from the transcendent (Poetry and Humanism [London: Jonathan Cape, 1950] 74).

Chapter 9

Doctor Faustus and the Early Modern Language of Addiction Deborah Willis University of California at Riverside

I take as my starting point the Old Man’s lines in the B-text of Doctor Faustus: “Yet, yet, thou hast an amiable soul / If sin by custom grow not into nature” (5.1.40–41).1 These lines invite modern readers to think of Faustus’s attachment to the “damned art” of magic as a form of addiction or, as Leah Marcus has put it, “a bad habit which is gradually becoming engrained.”2 Faustus is not born a reprobate, the lines imply, nor did he become one at the moment of conjuring the devil or signing the pact. Rather, repeated actions over time have put him at risk of creating a sinful inner nature that, once fully established, will be impossible to change. That moment has come, the Old Man suggests, shortly after he leaves the stage. My essay, then, investigates the place of Doctor Faustus in an emerging early modern discourse of addiction and explores its possible influence on that discourse. It is a discourse that has affinities with, but also crucial differences from, our own contemporary ideas about addiction. Many recent studies of the history of addiction begin their account in the nineteenth century, despite the fact that the word first appears in print shortly after 1600 and that references to persons “addicted to” various behaviors appear as early as the 1530s.3 Early modern notions of addiction get scant attention if they are discussed at all. Instead, these histories focus on the rise of addiction as a scientific concept out of a nineteenth-century discourse of habit and habituation and an

1 Ed. David Bevington (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1993). 2 “Textual Indeterminacy and Ideological Difference: The Case of Dr. Faustus,” Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Emily C. Bartels (New York: Hall, 1997) 23. 3 The Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed., 1989) gives line 2.2.6 (“Each man to what sport and revels his addiction leads him”) from Shakespeare’s Othello (1604) as its earliest example for “addiction,” though the word also appears in 1.1.54 of Henry the Fifth, first performed in 1599. The early quartos of this play, however, omit scene 1.1, and the line does not appear in print until the First Folio (1623). The OED’s first example of the adjective comes from Thomas More’s On the Passion, where he speaks of the necessity for Christ’s sacrifice to save “The kinde of man, that was by synne addicted and adiudged to the diuel, as his perpetuall thrall.”

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expanding literature about drug use.4 By the early twentieth century, “addiction” as a term had become intimately associated with the chronic, compulsive use of particular substances—morphine, opium, alcohol—and was increasingly thought of as a diseased state.5 Such substances produced physical dependence and damaged both mind and body, especially in those with an inborn susceptibility. Indeed, it is now difficult to divorce the term from its substance-related, pathologized meanings; the “disease model of addiction” has come to seem the “true” or literal meaning, while others are merely metaphorical. Hence, some contemporary theorists lament the escalating use of “addiction” as a label for any number of behaviors—shopping addictions, sex addictions, internet addictions, chocolate addictions—and treat such labeling as symptomatic of our age. Eve Sedgwick, for example, in her influential essay “Epidemics of the Will,” notes that “it has become a commonplace that ... any substance, any behavior, even any affect may be pathologized as addictive.”6 4 See, for example, Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards, Opium and the People (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981). Mariana Valverde, in Diseases of the Will: Alcohol and the Dilemmas of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), glances back briefly to the 1780s in her discussion of the American physician Bernard Rush (2), but her book too focuses primarily on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In “The Rhetoric of Drugs: An Interview” (differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 5.1 [1993]: 1–25), Jacques Derrida and his interviewer explore the “modernity” of drug addiction (known as toxicomanie in France) and cite De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium Eater as a literary point of origin (9). Derrida also stresses that the concept requires the “technical possibility for an individual to reproduce the act” of drug-taking, an “easy access” only made possible by “techno-economical transformations of the market-place” and other technologies of the last two centuries (5). Studies of Victorian contexts for the emergence of modern notions of addiction also include Susan Zieger, Addictive Fictions: Medical Knowledge, Novelistic Form, and Habits of Mind in Britain, 1860–1914 (Ph.D. Diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2002) and Robyn R. Warhol, “The Rhetoric of Addiction: From Victorian Novels to AA,” High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction, ed. Janet Farrell Brodie and Marc Redfield (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 97–108, among many others. Few early modern scholars have examined the idea of addiction. One exception is Dennis Kezar’s “Shakespeare’s Addictions,” in Critical Inquiry 30 (Autumn 2003): 31–59, which discusses the emergence of the term in the seventeenth century in the context of a close study of Othello. But Kezar’s focus turns out primarily to be on what might better be called “intoxication”; that is, for him, Othello’s importance for a history of addiction lies in its “portrayal of minds that seem as though they must be specifically subject to easily identified and quarantined drugs (poisonous minerals, poppy, mandragora, medicinable, drowsy syrups, alcohol).” Intoxication clouds reason more than it impairs the will. See also Tanya Pollard, Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 5 The Oxford English Dictionary defines the modern concept of addiction as the “state of being addicted to a drug” and “a compulsion and need to continue taking the drug as a result of taking it in the past” (Def. 2b.), giving 1906 as the date of its earliest example. For a history of legal and medical drug policies and concepts, see David F. Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), and (edited by the same author) Drugs in America: A Documentary History (New York: New York University Press, 2002). 6 Tendencies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993) 132. Similarly, in a study of William Burroughs, Timothy Melley states, “The most striking feature of America’s general

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For Sedgwick, we are in the grip of an “epidemic of addiction attribution” that points to a crisis in “the propaganda of free will”—an epidemic paradoxically demonstrating that propaganda’s “direct and inexorable continuation” (133). For others, addiction attribution is just one more manifestation of an “unwholesome therapism” or “victim mentality” pressed on us by liberal do-gooders who unwittingly undermine longstanding American traditions of self-reliance and personal responsibility.7 For still others, the proliferation of addictions is simply the end result of the inexorable logic of “consumer culture,” “machine culture,” or even the notion of culture itself—all of which make the notion of “the addict” increasingly difficult to distinguish from the subject-as-such.8 These symptomatic readings of current discourses of addiction have a point: it is hard to escape the impression of a dramatic increase in addiction attribution in recent years. As the editors of High Anxieties: Cultural Studies in Addiction remark, “Our peculiar, recent, extremely cultural notion of addiction has a generalizing force that needs to be reckoned with.”9 Even in present-day medical and scientific communities, the notion of addiction has moved beyond strictly substance-based definitions, as recent research into the neurobiology of behavior has demonstrated that activities such as gambling and overeating can affect the brain in ways similar to drugs or alcohol. Nevertheless, the generalizing force of the idea of addiction can be detected at least as early as the late-sixteenth century. Then as now, persons could be described as “addicted to” any number of behaviors, substances, or even affects—chastity, for example, or books, or melancholy, or sherry sack, or blasphemy and swearing, or superstitious ceremonies.10 In order for the medicalized, substancebased twentieth-century notion to take shape, the term first had to shed a history of wider applications in play for several centuries.

discourse on addiction ... is just how general it has become: Americans now account for all sorts of ordinary human behavior through the concept of addiction” (“A Terminal Case: William Burroughs and the Logic of Addiction,” in Brodie and Redfield, eds., High Anxieties, 38). 7 For example, Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel, One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance (New York: St. Martin’s, 2005). This theme has also been pursued in some of George Will’s columns. 8 See the introduction to Brodie and Redfield, eds., High Anxieties, 20–24; Mark Selzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992) 89–92; Derrida, “The Rhetoric of Drugs,” 1–25. 9 Brodie and Redfield, eds., High Anxieties, 5. 10 Robert Greene, a close contemporary of Marlowe, frequently employed the term “addicted” and gives us some sense of the range of early modern usage of this term. One can be addicted to a person or a god, as is Castania in Gwyndonius (London, 1584), who resists inducement to vow service to Venus because she is already “addicted to Diana” (36). One can be addicted to an opinion or ideology, as when Gwyndonius later chides Castania for being “addicted to the opinion of Danae” (86). One can be addicted to a vice, as when Lewcippa in the same work denies being “addicted to selfe love” (106); or when in Mamillia (London, 1583), the title character suspects that Madame Castilla’s outward show of gravitas hides the fact that she is inwardly “addicted to vanitie” (28). One can also be generally “addicted to virtue” (Gwyndonius, 154) or to more specific virtues, such as “chastitie” (in Menaphon [London, 1589] 48).

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Some scholars, seeking to emphasize the modernity of addiction, characterize earlier usage in rather cheery, trivializing terms. Addiction merely meant a “penchant, a fondness.”11 This is, indeed, a fairly common early modern meaning— as when scholars are said to be “addicted to books.” In such contexts, addiction is not stigmatized, nor does it seem particularly compulsive; the term can refer to attachments and repeated actions that constructively shape the will as well as those that destructively impair or bind it. In other words, one can be addicted to good habits as well as to bad ones. This thread in early modern discourse is indebted to classical discourse about habits of virtue and vice, going back at least to Cicero. Other threads come from religious discourse about sinful habituation, going back to Augustine; from Galenic medical discourse about melancholy, gluttony, and drunkenness; and—most relevant to Doctor Faustus—from demonological discourse about possession and the demonic pact. In these early modern contexts, darker implications of bondage and compulsion are pronounced. The term itself entered English via the Latin term for being “bound over” in law: to be “addict” or “addicted to” something or someone was to be “formally made over or bound (to another); attached by restraint or obligation; obliged, bound, devoted, consecrated” (Oxford English Dictionary Definition 1; examples range from 1529–83). In this sense, a prisoner or a bondslave is “addicted to” a master against his will. But addiction can also result from a commitment or contract one enters into freely and is subsequently obligated to keep. Vassals “addict themselves” to a ruler; disciples, to Christ; witches, to the devil. This nearly obsolete usage emphasizes the voluntary nature of the original act that leads to a more binding relationship. A tension between the voluntary and the compulsive or compulsory, then, seems to be built into the idea of addiction from its English beginnings. Yet, as Sedgwick rightly notes, one form of the word is clearly absent in early modern usage—the noun form “addict,” as in drug addict, denoting an identity or state of being12 The twentieth-century addict, moreover, becomes embedded in a range of discourses and institutional practices undreamt of in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In contemporary discourse, we frequently meet a person addicted to drugs or alcohol in medias res; his or her habit has already been firmly established, and he or she is powerless to resist or moderate it. In Alcoholics Anonymous narratives, for example, one’s identity as an addict is literally inescapable. As Robyn Warhol has said, being an alcoholic in the AA view is “not about what you do or even what you have done, it is about who you are ... The belief that the addicted drinker must never pick up a drink is directly related to the belief that alcoholism is an identity; because of who the alcoholic is, drinking ‘is not an option.’”13 In early modern discourse, however, there are persons addicted to various activities or substances but not addicts per se, and the (more or less) voluntary beginnings of an addiction tend to be more visible than the (more or less) constrained repetitions once an addiction is in place. Certainly many early modern uses of the term are in line with this voluntarist version of addiction’s definition. Indeed, the line cited by the Oxford English 11 Zieger, Addictive Fictions, 8. 12 Tendencies, 130–131. 13 “The Rhetoric of Addiction,” 99.

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Dictionary from Othello can be taken as an example: “[Let] every man put himself into triumph: some to dance, some to make bonfires, each man to what sport and revels his addiction leads him” (2.2.3–6).14 “Addiction” here seems primarily to mean a preference for a particular leisure activity, with little sense of compulsion associated with it; we could easily substitute the word “inclination” or “preference.” Other early modern texts describe persons “addicted to” a variety of neutral or even virtuous pursuits, such as martial arts, or even “the ministry of the saints.”15 Even when the pursuit is less positive, its voluntary nature may be suggested. Thus in Twelfth Night when Maria describes Olivia as “addicted to a melancholy” (2.5.200), she implies that Olivia is willfully clinging to the role of grief-stricken sister. In 2 Henry IV Falstaff comically promotes the vice of drinking and openly embraces addiction as a free and desirable choice: “If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them should be, to forswear thin potations, and to addict themselves to sack” (4.2.122–25). Drawing on Galenic medical discourse in his description of the physiology of sack’s effects (90–122), Falstaff’s celebration has affinities with modern notions of addiction in its clinical specificity, if not in its valorization of drinking to excess.16 But when persons are said to be addicted to vices, sins, or the devil, a sense of bondage is almost always implied. Thus, the Archbishop of Canterbury in Shakespeare’s Henry V describes Hal’s former life with Falstaff and the tavern crowd as an “addiction to courses vain” (1.1.55), which Hal is only able to throw off by a seemingly miraculous conversion experience: “Consideration like an angel came / And whipped th’ offending Adam out of him, / Leaving his body as a paradise / T’envelop and contain celestial spirits” (29–33). The language of addiction occurs with special frequency in demonological texts. Indeed, to enter into the demonic pact is in essence to “addict oneself” to the devil, and sorcerers and witches are commonly described as “addicted” to magical practices. In the very first chapter of the English Faust Book, we find that though Faustus’s parents wish him to study Divinity, Faustus is already of “a naughty minde, and otherwise addicted,” giving himself instead 14 Although even here a darker reading is possible. All Shakespeare citations are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (2nd ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 15 The King James Version of the Bible translates 1 Corinthians 16:15 as “the house of Stephanas … have addicted themselves to the ministry of the saints.” The Oxford English Dictionary notes that this is the only time the word “addicted” appears in a translation of this verse—perhaps suggesting that, over time, the negative connotations of the word drive out the positive ones. 16 As does Karen in the TV show Will and Grace. Jessica Warner offers an illuminating account of the emergence of ideas about drinking in the early modern period, in “Before there was ‘alcoholism’: lessons from the medieval experience,” Contemporary Drug Problems (Fall 1992): 409–29. She writes, “Although texts from the Middle Ages feature descriptions of drunkenness and binges, they contain very little that could even remotely be construed as ‘alcoholism.’ For this we must wait until the early modern period .… Documents from the 17th century are shriller still, and it is here, and not in medical writings from the 18th century, that we find our first descriptions of habitual drunkenness as a ‘disease’ and even as an ‘addiction’ although both terms would seem to denote failings more moral than clinical” (414–15). For some examples, see n. 27 below.

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“secretly to study Necromancy and Coniuration.”17 Similarly, in Thomas Beard’s Theatre of God’s Judgment (London, 1597), the conjurer Bladud is described as “hee that ... addicted himselfe so much to the deuilish arte of Necromancie, that he wrought wonders thereby: in so much that hee made himselfe wings, and attempted to flie like Dedalus: but the deuill (as euer, like a false knaue) forsooke him in his iourney, so that he fell downe and brake his necke” (Book 23, “On conjurers and enchanters” 125).18 Both of these accounts present addiction to devilish practices as a voluntary act. So, to some extent, does James VI and I in his Daemonologie (Edinburgh, 1597) when he describes the witches’ pact with the devil (II.ii). Yet James also includes a subtle psychological account of a longer developmental process, in which the voluntary nature of the witch’s initial attachment to the devil is complicated by her pre-existing mental state, and, once established, gives way to increasing enslavement. The devil looks for potential witches among those whose passions make them vulnerable to his enticement: And finding them in an utter despair ... he prepares the way by feeding them craftely in their humour, and filling them further and further with despaire, while he finde the time proper to discover himself unto them. At which time ... always without the company of any other, he either by a voice, or in likenesse of a man inquires of them, what troubles them: and promiseth them, a suddaine and certaine way of remedie, upon condition ... that they follow his advise; and do such things as he wil require of them. Their mindes being prepared before hand ... they easily agreed to that demande of his ... At which time, before he procede any further with them, he first perswades them to addict themselves to his service: which being easily obtained, he then … makes them to renunce their God and Baptisme directlie.19

James, like Beard, emphasizes active agency; witches “addict themselves” to the devil via the demonic pact, underscoring the idea that they voluntarily agree to become disciples of the devil with obligations to him.20 Yet even so, he shows the devil’s exploitation of the witch’s state of mind; these vulnerable and troubled souls are isolated and already in the grip of “utter despair.” They are not fully in control 17 The Historie of the damnable life, and the deserved death of Doctor Iohn Faustus, London, 1592, online ed., Perseus Digital Library Project, ed. Gregory R. Crane. 2005. Tufts University 4 December 2005 . 18 Beard’s description seems to echo the Chorus’s Prologue to Doctor Faustus, where we are told that Faustus’s “waxen wings did mount above his reach” (20). 19 Daemonologie, ed. Yvonne Frost (Oxford: Godolphin, 1996) 22. This is a lightly edited version of the 1597 edition in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. 20 Note that in James’s view, magicians are no different from witches. Although magicians like to think they are “commanders” of the devil, they too are “addicted to his service.” As in Doctor Faustus, the devil merely gives magicians “some trifles” so that he may “obteine the fruition of their body and soule, which is the onlie thing he huntes for” (9). Magicians, just like witches, become “bond-slaves to their mortall enemie” (10). As Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts point out in Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland: James VI’s Demonology and the North Berwick Witches (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000), “Book I’s analysis of a magician’s career … is remarkably like that of Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus” (344).

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even when they initially agree to serve him. Even after the witches have entered into his service, the devil must go on binding them to him, which he does by means of the mark he places on “some secreit place of their bodie.” In James’s telling, the mark is a sore that does not heal, a reminder to the witches that the devil has power over them and that “all their ill and well doing thereafter, must depend on him.” The mark makes them feel “intollerable dolour” and “serves to waken them, and not to let them rest” (23). The devil, in other words, creates in his new-made witches emotional and physical dependency and a craving to keep meeting with him. Soon James is referring to the witches as the devil’s “slaves” as they repeatedly convene to ritually enact the Witches’ Sabbath (24–5). It is difficult to know whether James’s text was directly influenced by the AText of Marlowe’s play, or whether the B-Text was influenced by James, or whether all three were independently shaped by preexisting structures of meaning.21 Similar psychologically inflected accounts of the witches’ pact can be glimpsed in other late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century demonological writings, such as those by Laurence Daneau and William Perkins. In A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (London, 1608), Perkins makes the shift from voluntary choice to compromised vassaldom very clear: We must make a difference of Witches in regard of time ... When they first beginne to grow in confederacie with the devil, they are sober, and their understanding sound, they make their match waking, and as they thinke wisely enough, knowing both what they promised the devil, and upon what conditions ... But after they once be in the league, and have beene entangled in compact with the devil ... the case may be otherwise. For then reason and understanding may be depraved, memorie weakened, and all the powers of their soule blemished. Thus becoming his vassalls, they are deluded, and so intoxicated by him, that they will run into thousands of fantasticall imaginations. (195–6)

These authors imagine a relationship to the devil that evolves over time and follows a progression from voluntary pact making to mental impairment, abjection, and bondage to sin. In part, they are responding to the challenge of skeptics such as Johann Weyer and Reginald Scot, who held that those who confessed to witchcraft were merely deluded old women suffering from melancholy. James, Perkins, Daneau, and other demonological writers acknowledge the apparent mental impairment of many of the accused but make it a consequence of the pact instead of a deluded fantasy about it.22 But they may also be taking their inspiration from the very discourse 21 Scholars have often emphasized the derivative nature of James’s treatment of magic and witchcraft, yet the portrait of the will’s progressive enslavement after the witch makes the original pact does not appear in Scot, Weyer, or Bodin, James’s chief sources. For an overview of these sources, see Normand and Roberts, Witchcraft, 328–49, and Stuart Clark, “King James’s Daemonologie: Witchcraft and Kingship,” in Sydney Anglo, ed., The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), 156–81. 22 Lambert Daneau’s version of the pact and its aftermath can be found in A dialogue of witches, in foretime named lot-tellers, and now commonly called sorcerers (London, 1575): after the initial pact, the devil, “distrusting the constancie of his servauntes,” requires them to meet repeatedly in “Divelish Sinagoges” and uses a varieties of strategies to bind them more strongly to him (38). For a brilliant treatment of debates about witchcraft and melancholy, see

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that the Old Man in Doctor Faustus summons up in his lines in the B-Text—the discourse of sinful habituation, in which “sin by custom” may change one’s very nature.23 Henry Holland, another late-sixteenth century demonological writer, brings this discourse into his description of so-called white witches: they are “blind in their mindes, hardened in their harts, strangers from the life of God, and if God give them not speedie repentance, they will become past feeling by custome and continuance in their sinnes.”24 Perkins, though he does not explicitly use this language in his tract against witchcraft, often does so in his writings on repentance, describing in detail the way that sin, through repetition, becomes a binding habit that makes repentance increasingly difficult. The sinner’s “minde, will, and affections are so knitte and glewed to the will of the divell, that he can do nothing but obey him, and rebel against God. ... The longer a man liveth in any sinne, the greater daunger: because by practice sin getteth heart and strength. Custome is of such force, that that which men use to doe in their life time, the same they do and speake when they are dying.”25 The idea that the voluntary repetition of sinful acts impairs the will and produces a sense of powerlessness can be traced back to St. Augustine in Book 8 of his Confessions, in which he recounts his difficulty in fully committing himself to a Christian life due to habits of lust that had become “necessity.” Augustine’s description of his anguished struggle to change his way of life makes dramatically explicit the tension between voluntary and involuntary sin: “For the rule of sin is the force of habit, by which the mind is swept along and held fast even against its will, yet deservedly, because it fell into the habit of its own accord. ‘Pitiable creature that I was, who was to set me free from a nature thus doomed to death?’” 26 The Old Man’s line also points ahead to the emerging seventeenth-century genre of Protestant conversion narrative that finds its secular parallel in the recovery narratives of Alcoholics Anonymous today.27 H. C. Erik Midelfort, A History of Madness in Sixteenth Century Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 182–227. 23 The phrase “sinful habituation” is from Paul A. Cefalu, “Damned Custom … Habits Devil’: Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Anti-Dualism, and the Early Modern Philosophy of Mind,” in ELH 67 (2000): 399–431. Although Cefalu’s article is about Hamlet, his discussion (especially on pages 410–412) of early modern writings on habits of sin is very pertinent to the Old Man’s lines in Doctor Faustus. Critics who have explored contexts for the Old Man’s lines include Marcus, “Textual Indeterminacy”; Eric Rasmussen, A Textual Companion to Doctor Faustus (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 83–7; and Michael J. Warren, Doctor Faustus: The Old Man and the Text” ELR 11 (1981): 111–47. 24 A Treatise Against Witchcraft (London, 1590), F4. 25 Two treatises. 1. Of the nature and practise of repentance. 2. Of the combate of the flesh and spirit (London, 1615) 87. Ominously for Faustus, Perkins concludes that “Late repentance is seldome or never true repentance” (89). 26 Confessions, transl. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 164–5. Augustine also describes the “strange phenomenon” of the divided or unwilling will as “a disease of the mind” (172), and his exploration of its apparent paradoxes takes up most of Book 8. There is, of course, a great deal of scholarly analysis of this episode, as well as centuries of Christian commentary. A classic modern discussion is Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 158–81. 27 See especially Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). On the emergence of AA narratives from this earlier

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By the mid-seventeenth century, the idea that habitual sin could become a second nature was elaborated by many Puritan writers, such as Thomas Goodwin (“Every sin in us, by a miraculous multiplication, inclines our nature more to every sin than it was before”), Jeremy Taylor (“It is worse” for a man to sin repeatedly, since “ if he contracts a custom or habit of sin, he superadds a state of evil to himself, distinct from the guilt of all those single actions which made the habit”), and Richard Baxter (“The inward habit of sin is a second nature: and a sinful nature is worse than a sinful act.”).28 Similar statements became a staple of conversion narratives when individuals recounted their pre-conversion states, as in John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Greatest of Sinners. Bunyan describes his childhood and early adulthood as a time “without God,” when “it was my delight to be taken captive by the devil at his will ... being filled with all unrighteousness. ... Yea, so settled and rooted was I in these things, that they became as a second Nature to me.”29 In the same period, tracts about the specific sin of drunkenness shifted the focus of their concern from discrete acts of excess—the concern of much premodern and early modern Galenic and Christian writing on drinking and gluttony—to the habitual condition of the drunkard. Habitual drinking, as Jessica Warner has shown, began to be described as a “disease” and an “addiction” as well as a sinful state in the early decades of the seventeenth century. In 1619, for example, Robert Harris described drunkenness as an “incurable” disease. Later in the century, Edward Bury, in England’s Bane, or the Deadly Danger of Drunkenness (1677) claimed that men “addicted to Drunkenness” were caught in the grip of a “disease” reaching “epidemical” proportions, which “all the Physicians in England know not how to ... stop.” Similarly, Owen Stockton, in sermons collected in a volume called A Warning to Drunkards (1682) offered several examples of men so “addicted” to the “bewitching” sin of drunkenness that they could not give it up however much they tried. As one put it: “I have such inclinations to drinking, and have been so long addicted to this sin, and am so enslaved to it, that I think it is in vain to pray for help against it.”30 By the end of the seventeenth century, major features of the modern “disease model of addiction” are already in place, at least in discourse about alcohol. The B-Text of Doctor Faustus, then, appears at a transitional moment in this history. Given that we live in an age of increasing “addiction attribution,” it is rather surprising that Marlowe critics have not made more out of the play’s links to the tradition, see Valverde, Diseases of the Will, and Warhol, “Rhetoric of Addiction.” 28 Goodwin, Taylor, and Baxter are quoted in Cefalu, “Damned Custom” 410–411. 29 John Stachniewski and Anita Pacheco, eds., John Bunyan: Grace Abounding with Other Spiritual Autobigraphies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 6–7. 30 Quoted in Warner, “Before there was ‘alcoholism’ 415–16. In addition, around this time in the colonies, Increase Mather published Wo to drunkards two sermons testifying against the sin of drunkenness, wherein the wofulness of that evil, and the misery of all that are addicted to it, is discovered from the Word of God (Cambridge, MA, 1673). See also John Hart, The dreadfull character of a drunkard. Or, the odious and beastly sin of drunkenness described and condemned Shewing the fearful judgements that have befallen notorious drunkards: with brief exhortations to perswade men from that swinish and abominable sin (London, 1663). There may not yet be an “addict” in the modern sense, but there is certainly a drunkard.

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discourse of addiction. However, some have come close to viewing Faustus as something of an addict—Stephen Greenblatt, for example, concludes that Faustus (along with Marlowe’s other heroes) is in the grip of a “repetition compulsion,” while C. L. Barber relates Faustus’s compulsive blasphemy to a psychoanalytic understanding of perversion.31 Indeed, it is not hard to draw an analogy between Faustus’s evolving relationship to magic and modern narratives of addiction. The play’s opening scene foregrounds the first ecstatic rush of pleasure associated with magic, as Faustus describes his sense of “ravishment”: “How I am glutted with conceit of this ... ’Tis magic, magic that hath ravished me” (1.1.77, 104). This magical “high,” however, is followed by the morning-after “low” of remorse and despair, and by act 3, if not earlier, Faustus seems driven to search out more frequent, yet increasingly less satisfying, forms of magical stimulation: “Not long he stayed within his quiet house / To rest his bones after his weary toil, / But new exploits do hail him out again ...” (3.1.15–17). By the end of act 4, his acts of magic have degenerated into little more than hollow practical jokes, and his cravings make him return repeatedly to Mephistopheles as to a drug pusher, degraded by his dependency: “One thing, good servant, let me crave of thee / To glut the longing of my heart’s desire” (5.2.85–86). The “heavenly conspiracy” of Mephistopheles and Lucifer can be read as an attempt to entrap Faustus by turning him into an addict and inculcating a dependency on magical stimulation. However, my point is not to subsume Doctor Faustus into modern narratives of addiction; rather, I want to call attention to some historically specific differences— or, at any rate, differences specific to this text of the play. One significant contrast may already be obvious: Faustus’s powerlessness at the end of the play is identified with damnation; whereas in modern-day 12-Step programs a confession of powerlessness begins the movement toward redemption and recovery. But, more important, what does it mean to be “addicted to” magic, anyway? There is a certain diffuseness of the object; Faustus is not addicted to a specific substance, or even to a particular sin; the “damned art” enables many types of sins to be committed.32 (The Old Man himself speaks broadly of “sin” as a general category.) Nor does Faustus compulsively engage in ritual behavior; despite the fact that the initial thrill of magic is closely bound up with “Lines, circles, letters, characters” (1.1.51), we see Faustus actually casting a spell only once (1.3). As the chief architect of Faustus’s addiction, Mephistopheles enlists multiple pleasures and sensations to weaken his will, distract him from thoughts of repentance, and make him increasingly dependent, yet these pleasures remain for the most part insubstantial—simulations rather than substances. Although magic is closely bound up with gluttony (and the discourse of gluttony is

31 Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) 200; “The Form of Faustus’ Fortunes Good or Bad,” Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus: Text and Major Criticism, ed. Irving Ribner (Indianapolis: Odyssey, 1966) 173–99. 32 Compare Edward Snow’s rich exploration of the ambiguities of what fulfillment of desire consists of in “Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and the Ends of Desire,” Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, ed. Alvin Kernan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) 70–110.

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one of several bound up with the early modern discourse of addiction), there is very little actual eating in the play. Faustus frequently equates magic with experiences of power and omnipotence, yet even at first, the “high” of magic is in the anticipation of omnipotence rather than its actuality—power, honor, and omnipotence is “promised to” the studious artisan (1.1.55); the list of things Faustus will receive in exchange for his soul is all in the future tense (1.3.101–13); he “lives in speculation of this art” (112). Most of Faustus’s pleasures are mental, not physical experiences— conversing, disputing, getting answers to questions, listening to music, looking at pictures in books, watching theatrical shows. Faustus becomes addicted to fantasies, enactments, and simulations of power, more than to power itself. We are a long way, in this regard, from modern notions of addiction as “substance abuse,” rooted in physiological changes produced by the consumption of substances (though not, perhaps, very far from internet or video game addiction). The play also places Faustus’s progressive impairment of the will in a relational context. Modern narratives of addiction tend to emphasize the isolating effects of alcoholism or drug use; the addict becomes increasing separated from friends, family, community. Faustus’s relationship with Mephistopheles, by contrast, intensifies as the play goes on, as Faustus moves from viewing Mephistopheles primarily as servant and supplicant in acts 1 and 2, to comrade and partner in crime in acts 3 and 4, and finally to magistrate and lord in act 5. Indeed, already in act 1, Mephistopheles’s mere presence seems to be the thing Faustus desires: “Had I as many souls as there be stars, / I’d give them all for Mephistopheles. ... I’ll live in speculation of this art / Till Mephistopheles return again” (1.3.101–102, 112–13). Faustus’s first experience of despair (2.1.1–13) follows upon Mephistopheles’s departure at the end of this scene, as if generated by his absence. Perhaps one might say that Faustus at this point turns to thoughts of God in search of a substitute for Mephistopheles. Once Mephistopheles returns, Faustus experiences him as a kind of ultimate protector (“When Mephistopheles shall stand by me, / What god can hurt thee, Faustus? Thou art safe” [24–5]) as well as a beloved object (“Lo, Mephistopheles, for love of thee / I cut mine arm” [53–4]). At the same time, the play suggests that a sense of despair may have preceded Faustus’s initial turn toward magic—a despair awakened by his partial reading of St. Jerome’s Bible and his recognition that humanity cannot ever be completely free of sin (1.1.36–48). Like the devil in James I’s Daemonologie, Mephistopheles is a kind of perverse therapist, preying on this sense of despair and helping Faustus to extinguish it each time it resurfaces through the self-medication of magic—or rather, through the fantasies of power that Mephistopheles uses magic to help him experience. Magical powers in and of themselves are too limited; their true utility is to enable Faustus to indulge the fantasy that he is himself a deity of sorts: “A sound magician is a demigod. / Here, tire my brains to get a deity” (1.1.61–62). By playing the part of a servant, Mephistopheles helps reinforce Faustus’s fantasy of omnipotence, and he uses the device of the pact to elicit Faustus’s identification with Lucifer’s imagined power: “bind thy soul that at some certain day / Great Lucifer may claim it as his own, / And then be thou as great as Lucifer” (50–52). Paradoxically, however, Mephistopheles also binds Faustus to him by playing the role of punitive judge, threatening him for disloyally succumbing to the temptation

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of repentance and showing him Lucifer’s anger (2.3.70–99; 5.1.69–77). Faustus needs a blasphemous substitute for God’s wrath as well as for his power. Fantasies of omnipotence become less satisfying for Faustus as the play progresses, following addiction’s law of diminishing returns. Reduced to petty tricks upon the horse-courser in 4.4, Faustus’s weariness and despair again break through: “What are thou, Faustus, but a man condemned to die? / ... Despair doth drive distrust into my thoughts. / Confound these passions with a quiet sleep” (4.4.23, 25–6). By the time that the Old Man returns to exhort Faustus to repent one last time, Faustus is worn down and suicidal, and Mephistopheles easily bullies him into a reaffirmation of the pact. But if the Old Man’s speech invites us to see Faustus’s ultimate damnation as the result of a habit of sin that eventually changes his nature, at what point, exactly, is his habituation complete? Michael J. Warren and others have argued that the BText differs most sharply from the A-Text by making Faustus’s final encounter with Helen the conclusive moment that Faustus is truly damned. While in the A-Text, the possibility of salvation appears to be open to Faustus until the very end of the play, “the B-Text is a play in which Faustus is irrevocably damned after the Helen scene.”33 As Warren goes on to point out, in the B-Text, the Helen encounter is preceded by the Old Man’s final departure, who leaves “with grief of heart, / Fearing the enemy of thy hapless soul.” Mephistopheles then enters, as if in fulfillment of the Old Man’s sense of foreboding, quickly convinces Faustus to reaffirm the pact one more time, and satisfies his “craving” to make Helen his paramour (5.2.85–86). One last “fix” fixes Faustus for good. Kissing the demon simulating Helen seems to be the crucial sinful act in the long line of repetitions that changes Faustus’s “nature” into an irredeemably sinful one: “Her lips suck forth my soul. See where it flies!” (97). This act enables yet another identification with an omnipotent figure; as C. L. Barber has suggested, what Faustus sees in Helen’s face is not beauty itself but beauty’s power—to “launch a thousand ships” and achieve lasting fame and immortality.34 As the scene continues, Faustus’s fantasy expands into a larger scenario, reenacting key moments in the Iliad and turning Wittenberg into a virtual Troy: I will be Paris, and for love of thee Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked, And I will combat with weak Menelaus, And wear thy colours on my plumed crest, Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel And then return to Helen with a kiss. O, thou art fairer than the evening’s air, Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars. Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter When he appeared to hapless Semele, More lovely than the monarch of the sky In wanton Arethusa’s azure arms; And none but thou shall be my paramour. (99–113)

33 Warren, “Old Man” 139. 34 Barber, “Form” 182.

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In this virtual reality, Faustus becomes Paris, Wittenberg becomes Troy, and Helen becomes Jupiter and the “monarch” of the sky—a fantasy of “having it all” in which Faustus can feel fused with masculine and feminine, heroic human and mighty god, through the immortal kiss and embrace of a demon. His reenactments of omnipotent fantasies have achieved a critical mass, apparently permanently altering his nature. That this may be the crucial moment of damnation in the B-Text is further reinforced in the next scene, when Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Mephistopheles descend, confident of claiming Faustus as their subject. Moreover, if we are to believe Mephistopheles, some internal, almost physiological change to Faustus’s nature seems to have occurred: Faustus now is in a state of “desperate lunacy,” and “his heart-blood dries with grief; / His conscience kills it, and his labouring brain / Begets a world of idle fantasies” (5.2.11–14). Later, the Scholars think him ill “from being over-solitary” (35) and he tells them he suffers from a “surfeit” of deadly sin (40). Here too are signs that repeated sinning has affected his state of being. Nevertheless, it is ultimately not clear that a wholly hardened will is the cause of Faustus’s damnation in the B-Text. Faustus, even after the Helen scene, seems to retain a potential to repent and a desire to turn to God, though each time he makes a move in this direction he feels that an external force stops him. As he explains it to the Scholars, “I would weep, but the devil draws in my tears ... O, he stays my tongue! I would lift up my hands, but see, they hold ’em, they hold ’em” (59–63). Similarly, in his final speech, he cries, “O, I’ll leap up to heaven! Who pulls me down? ... O, my Christ! / Rend not my heart for naming of my Christ! Yet will I call on him. O, spare me, Lucifer” (150–153). What is the nature of this external force? It could be, as Faustus suggests, that Lucifer and Mephistopheles now literally possess him. In the B-Text, they proudly take credit for other coercive manipulations not mentioned in A (as when Mephistopheles boasts, “’Twas I that, when thou wert i’the way to heaven, / Dammed up thy passage. When thou took’st the book / To view the Scriptures, then I turned the leaves / And led thine eye.”[98–101]). If so, the older, legal sense of addiction may pertain, as Faustus is in effect abandoned by God and “bound over” as a prisoner to Lucifer and his coercive power. Yet Faustus’s language also suggests that the coercion is coming from somewhere inside himself (the devil “draws in” his tears”; Faustus’s “heart” is rent). Developing the Old Man’s logic, these seemingly involuntary effects could also be Faustus’s own internalized habit, now disowned by the “I” of consciousness, acting independently within him as a second will—the product of Faustus’s own repeated choices but still not wholly dominating his “nature.” The aim of Mephistopheles’s tactics of distraction, gratification, and bullying has been precisely to guide Faustus to the choices that over time will produce this inward habituation, short-circuiting repentance whenever he attempts it. Faustus’s final state resembles that of the pre-conversion Augustine, caught in the mystery of the unwilling will, or of the modern-day addict, who speaks of his addiction as a separate, personified entity controlling his choices and ravaging

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his body. Ultimately, neither Faustus nor the audience can answer the question, “Who pulls me down?” It may be Faustus’s own habituated will, Christ, or Lucifer, or some complex combination of all three.35 The Old Man’s notion of sinful habituation, then, offers an explanation for Faustus’s inability to repent that almost, but not quite, accounts for his fate. In the end, it may be just another one of Marlowe’s teases.36 As other recent work on the B-Text has suggested, its differences from the A-Text do not necessarily make it a less ambiguous or less interesting play.37 Nor is the B-Text a play that, as some have contended, ultimately shows Faustus to be “a puppet manipulated by external powers.”38 Instead, the B-Text complicates our sense of what is voluntary and involuntary, leaving open the possibility that Faustus’s own choices have produced a habit which creates puppet-like effects. The B-Text has, at the very least, a special contribution to make to the history of early modern discourses of addiction, enabling us to read Faustus’s fall as the spectacle of a free agent manipulated into the repetition of acts that, over time, produce a changed inner nature and a diminishment of agency. At the same time, it suggests that the repetition of such acts may be symptomatic of an even deeper problem: a stubbornly intractable experience of despair.

35 Sara Munson Deats, in personal correspondence, points out that the ambiguity of Faustus’s motivations in both the A- and B-Texts indicates that Steven Greenblatt is mistaken in crediting Shakespeare with the invention of the technique of “strategic opacity” when representing the inwardness of the tragic hero (Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare [New York: Norton, 2004] 323–4). As she puts it, “the deliberate ambiguity surrounding Faustus’s failure to repent is every bit as intriguing as the deliberate ambiguity surrounding Hamlet’s failure to act.” 36 Or, perhaps more precisely, Marlowe’s revisers. See Rasmussen, Textual Companion; as he sums up on page 93: “the B-text appears to be at many removes from Marlowe’s own hand (three quartos, possibly one or more playbooks, one transcript, and untold non-authorial revisions).” 37 Marcus, for example, states that she does not want “to suggest that the degree of Faustus’s responsibility for his fate is altogether clear in either A or B, or that either text delivers an unequivocal doctrinal message” (24). Warren, however, holds that the B-Text “reflects a simpler doctrine, a more certain, absolute, and pious confidence in its cautionary morality” (139). Bevington quotes Warren approvingly, yet (rather puzzlingly) also calls the B-Text more “inconsistent” (48). 38 This is the position of Roma Gill in her 1965 introduction to the New Mermaid edition of Doctor Faustus, as quoted in and endorsed by Warren, “Old Man” (139) and (with some qualification) by Rasmussen, Textual Companion (91).

Chapter 10

Rhetorical Strategies for a locus terribilis: Senses, Signs, Symbols, and Theological Allusion in Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris1 Christine McCall Probes University of South Florida

The Massacre at Paris, generally dismissed by critics as a memorial reconstruction rather than an original text, is the most neglected play in the Marlowe canon; it is rarely read, almost never performed, and, until fairly recently, was often omitted from critical discussions of Marlowe’s plays. However, within the past two decades, critics have called for a closer analysis of Marlowe’s often-ignored play dramatizing the events surrounding the St. Bartholomew Day massacre. Vivien Thomas and William Tydeman (1994) have gathered texts illustrating the wide variety of sources available to Marlowe, thereby furthering the earlier work of John Bakeless (1937, 1942), Paul H. Kocher (1941, 1946, 1947), R. B. Wernham (1976), and Constance Kuriyama (1988). Julia Briggs (1983) has stressed the complexity and ambiguity of the play, arguing that Massacre is “either ... a subtle, perhaps even a humane, analysis of contemporary crowd violence and religious hatred or ... [a] black comedy that paradoxically invites its audience to laugh at helpless Protestant victims.”2 Sara Munson Deats (2004) adds her eloquent voice to the current reevaluation, deploring the “traditional scholarly neglect” of the play and insisting that this “interrogative drama ... provides insights into the nature of the playwright’s [Marlowe’s] dramatic art.”3 Finally, my paper, delivered at the 1998 Marlowe Conference at Cambridge, focuses on biblical allusion and characterization, notably of the Guise, while offering

1 All references to the Massacre are from the recent edition by Mark Thornton Burnett, Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays (London: Dent, 1999), and will be indicated in the text of the article. 2 “Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris: A Reconsideration,” Review of English Studies 34 (1983): 278. 3 “Dido, Queen of Carthage and The Massacre of Paris,” The Cambridge Companion to Marlowe, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 193–4.

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a comparative analysis of Pierre Matthieu’s Guisiade and The Massacre.4 Yet, despite these valuable reappraisals of the play, many significant aspects of The Massacre have been overlooked. Although critics have written perceptively on biblical and theological allusion in relation to the themes, imagery, and social comment in many of Marlowe’s plays, this aspect of The Massacre has been largely disregarded. While scholars, such as Kocher (1946), Douglas Cole (1962), R. M. Cornelius (1984), and others, have surveyed the entire Marlowe canon from this perspective, the tendency has been to concentrate on particular plays, notably Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta. James H. Sims has gone so far as to declare that “biblical allusions in [other] plays ... are negligible.”5 My own research, however, suggests the contrary. The present essay thus seeks to redress this critical imbalance as it analyzes this and other neglected features of The Massacre, thereby contributing to the play’s reevaluation. Specifically, in this essay, I will focus on four rhetorical strategies that Marlowe employs to dramatize a crucial historical locus terribilis—a terrible event—and to

4 A refocused version of the paper appeared in Mediaevalia: “Lamentation in the Service of the Dramatization of History: The Choir in Pierre Matthieu’s La Guisiade,” Mediaevalia 22 (1999): 245–62. Concerning Matthieu, see also the article by Olivier Millet, “L’Assassinat politique sur la scène au temps des guerres de religion: trois pièces d’actualité,” Vives Lettres 4 (1997): 7–44. Exceptions to the general neglect of The Massacre include the following: Vivien Thomas and William Tydeman, eds., Christopher Marlowe. The Plays and their Sources (London: Routledge, 1994); two studies by John Bakeless, “Christopher Marlowe and the Newsbooks,” Journalism Quarterly 14 (1937): 18–22 and The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942); three studies by Paul Kocher, Christopher Marlowe: A Study of his Thought, Learning and Character (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946), “Contemporary Pamphlet Backgrounds for Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris,” Modern Language Quarterly 8 (1947): 157–73, 309–18, and “François Hotman and Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris,” Papers on Language and Literature 9 (1941): 349–68; R. B. Wernham, “Christopher Marlowe at Flushing in 1592,” English Historical Review 91 (1976): 344–5; Julia Briggs, “Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris: A Reconsideration,” Review of English Studies 34 (1983): 257–78; Rick Bowers, “The Massacre at Paris: Marlowe’s Messy Consensus Narrative,” Marlowe, History and Sexuality, ed. Paul Whitfield White (New York: AMS, 1998) 136–41; and Constance Kuriyama, “Marlowe’s Nemesis: the Identity of Richard Baines” “A poet and a filthy Playmaker”: New Essays on Christopher Marlowe, eds. Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill, and Constance Kuriyama (New York: AMS, 1988) 343–60. 5 Sims, Dramatic Uses of Biblical Allusions in Marlowe and Shakespeare (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1966) 1. See also Paul H. Kocher, Christopher Marlowe: A Study of his Thought, Learning and Character; Douglas Cole, Suffering and Evil in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962; New York: Gordian, 1974); R. M. Cornelius, Christopher Marlowe’s Use of the Bible (New York: Peter Lang, 1984); Joseph Westlund, “The Orthodox Christian Framework of Marlowe’s Faustus,” Studies in English Literature 3 (1963): 191–205; and G. K. Hunter, “The Theology of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1965): 211–40. Sara Munson Deats has written perceptively on biblical allusion as it relates to irony and parody; see her “Ironic Biblical Allusion in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus,” Medievalia et Humanista, ns 10 (1981): 203–16, and “Biblical Parody in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta: A Re-examination,” Christianity and Literature 37.2 (1988): 27–48.

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paint an indelible dramatic portrait of the horror of sectarian violence.6 Through my systematic examination of Marlowe’s evocation of the senses, his employment of signs and symbols, and his use of biblical and theological allusion, I shall attempt to illumine Marlowe’s dramatization of religious terror as it was enacted in seventeen years of French history—from St. Bartholomew’s Day on August 23, 1572, to the assassination of Henri III by the Friar (representing the Dominican Jacques Clément) on 2 August 1589.7 My study will interrogate essential constituents of the locus terribilis: the evocation of the senses (ranging from the perfumed gloves that cause the death of Navarre’s mother in scene 3 to the ubiquitous imagery of blood saturating the play); signs (stage directions for scene 12 emphasize the books carried by the Protestants, and the signifying words spewed from the mouth of the Guise, “’tis written,” convey contempt for these “people of the book”—referring no doubt to the Protestant emphasis on the Bible as the source of truth); multifarious liturgical symbols (in scene 5, Gonzago taunts the Admiral with words abhorrent to a Protestant: “Then pray unto our Lady; kiss this cross”); and theological allusions (ranging from Navarre’s expressions of hope based on God’s mercy in scene 13 to the Guise’s exculpatory depiction of his own nefarious deeds in scene 19: “What I have done, ’tis for the Gospel sake [sic]).” Marlowe lived in a violent age. Citizens of Elizabethan London attended bear and bull baitings, public executions, even witch burnings for entertainment. Religious terror was endemic, and religious dissent was brutally punished. Stephen Greenblatt in Will in the World imagines the young William Shakespeare shuddering as he viewed the heads of traitors and dissenters (often the same in the eyes of the Elizabethan establishment) displayed on London Bridge.8 Marlowe would surely have walked this same path and shuddered at these same ominous reminders of political and religious tyranny. I thus suggest that Marlowe’s Massacre may be an indictment not only of the atrocities that occurred on St. Bartholomew’s Day in

6 I am using the term locus terribilis in a broad sense, as the opposite of the more common pleasurable place, the locus amoenus. The term finds a notable exploration in chapter 10 of E. R. Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962). Rather than limit the term to a landscape, I return to the original meaning of locus and its early literary uses: “a place,” “a spot,” “the inhabitants of a place,” “an occasion,” “a situation,” “the place of the dead,” “the theatre,” “a place, seat in the theatre,” “a topic of discussion or thought,” “grounds of proof, “ in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, eds., A Latin Dictionary. 7 While Marlowe does not hesitate to alter historical facts “to make for a better story,” Anne Dowriche in her coetaneous The French Historie (1589) poetizes history “to convey moral ... truths,” declares Megan Matchinske, “Moral, Method, and History in Anne Dowriche’s The French Historie,” English Literary Renaissance 34 (2004): 176. Randall Martin, in his article “Anne Dowriche’s The French History, Christopher Marlowe, and Machiavellian Agency,” calls for a critical reevaluation of Dowriche’s “multilayered narrative of conspiracy, martyrdom, and retribution” and argues that “her quasi-theatrical representations of Machiavellian characters and ideas came to influence his own [Marlowe’s],” Studies in English Literature 39 (1999): 70, 75. 8 Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World (New York: Norton, 2004) 172–4.

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1572, but of all religious terror, and, as such, is relevant not only to sixteenth-century France and England but also to our own post-9/11 age. Since antiquity the senses have been judged essential to art, literature, knowledge, understanding, and ethical action. Aristotle intertwines the senses, sensation, perception, and the arts, declaring that “the imagination ... cannot exist without sensation.” In the Confessions, St. Augustine stresses the importance of the senses as transmitters of images to the memory, and in the renowned “Frui-uti” section of De Doctrina Christiana, he exposits the classic text of Romans 1:20 in which sensory perception is linked to theological understanding and ethical judgment: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” Similarly, the Eucharist with its sensible signs reminds the partaker of Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross. Here the sensible sign is associated as well with symbols, the broken bread representing Christ’s body and the cup representing, in Jesus’ words of institution, “the new covenant” (Luke 22:20). Additionally, in his masterful treatment of sensory perception or “the banquet of sense,” Frank Kermode evokes, additionally, “the pagan shadow of the Eucharist,” Plato’s Symposium or banquet, and Ripa’s Iconologia, the early modern handbook which recapitulated St. Augustine’s characterization of the organs of sense as “gateways to the mind.” Kermode, who examines at length Marvell’s Dialogue between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure and Chapman’s Ovids Banquet of Sence, finds that sensory perception and appeal, or, borrowing Chapman’s term, the “banquet of sense,” is an important topos or “theme in Renaissance art and literature: one of those patterns, literary and iconographical, that recur more frequently than is supposed: which import into the context in which they are found meanings that the modern eye can miss; and which can alter and deepen what seems to be the obvious significance of even familiar passages.”9 In the Massacre, the senses—particularly sight and hearing—are vividly assailed, as the reader/spectator imagines with the playwright and the performers the terrible sight of “bloody clouds” (2.3), the sound of Guise stamping on the “lifeless bulk” of Admiral Coligni (5.41), and the “fearful cries from the river Seine,” which frighten Ramus (9.1). When Guise is slain in scene 21, metaphor, maxim, and antithesis combine with sensory appeal to convey the event. The Captain of the Guard, through a metaphor evoking the brilliance and the power of the Guise, announces his impending death: “Now falls the star whose influence governs France, / Whose light was deadly to the Protestants” (21.16–17). Marlowe sustains the appeal to the visual as Guise describes the murderers as “ghastly” and “as pale as ashes” (59, 74). Their fear, betrayed by the lack of color in their faces, contrasts with the boastful courage of their intended victim, whose maxim, “princes with their looks engender fear,” reinforces his desired identification with Caesar, “Yet Caesar shall go forth” (68), and his declaration, “Let mean conceits and baser men fear death” (69–71), stresses 9 Aristotle, De Anima (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1900) 2.5, 3.3; Augustine, Confessions, 2 vols. (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1998) 2.10.17 and De Doctrina Christiana (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 1997) 1.4.4; Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays (London: Routledge, 1971) 184.

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his arrogance and pride. Sight and memory are connected as King Henry exclaims over the duke’s lifeless body, “Ah, this sweet sight is physic to my soul,” and swears “in remembrance of those bloody broils” to which the Guise had allured him, “I ne’er was King of France until this hour” (95, 99, 102). The recurrent emphasis on the visual (the Guise’s son repeats the anticipated qualifier “bloody” as he exclaims, “Art thou king, and has done this bloody deed?” 125) is associated with the auditory as sounds of rejoicing by King Henry contrast with sounds of cursing from Queen Catherine. Not content to put the double invective in Catherine’s mouth, “I curse thee, and exclaim thee miscreant” (150), Marlowe has Henry encourage her violent sounds by means of a triple imperative: “Cry out, exclaim, howl till thy throat be hoarse” (152). If hearing and sight predominate, the contribution of the other senses to the Massacre is far from negligible. I have alluded to the perfumed gloves, ordered by the Guise to rid France of “that huge blemish in our eye / That makes these upstart heresies” (2.21–22). Insistence on the poisonous sense of smell appears in Guise’s question to the Apothecary as he seeks assurance of the gloves’ efficacy: “Will ev’ry savour breed a pang of death?” (14). The concision of the Apothecary’s response, “He that smells but to them, dies” (16), prepares the spectator/reader for the action of the following scene in which the Old Queen succumbs, her brain and heart poisoned by the gloves whose “strong perfume” and “scent” is again emphasized (3.4–5). After an even more horrendous death, that of the Huguenot Admiral, the scent of death permeates the very air that Queen Catherine and the Guise breathe as they view the body and conspire further massacres. Catherine’s remark, “But come, let’s walk aside, th’air’s not very sweet” (11.16) seems to provoke the immediately ensuing action commanded by the Guise, the dumping of the Admiral’s body in a ditch. Throughout the play, references to taste are associated with ambition, death’s corruption, and jubilant ceremony. First, thirst functions metaphorically to convey the scope of the Guise’s rampant ambition. In the soliloquy of scene 2 that inventories his multi-faceted avidity, Guise succinctly characterizes his ambition as “my quenchless thirst wheron I build” (47). Allusions to eating are both literal and figurative. Queen Catherine had been repulsed by the smell of death in the air as she looked upon the Admiral’s body in scene 11. Before he is hanged on a tree, concerns are voiced about the manner of disposing of the body—should it be burned, thrown into the river or into a ditch? As the elements of fire, air, and water are rejected one by one, the characters express fear of being “poisoned” or “corrupted” by eating fish from a river befouled by the body. Marlowe’s characters embody the widespread reaction of the opposing religio-political groups in the play (and characteristic of religiopolitical groups even today)—the fear of contamination from opposing religious sects. Natalie Zemon Davis has discussed at length the importance of “pollution” in the primary sources of the play, the “frequent goal” of religious riots—“to rid the community of dreaded pollution”—and “the extent to which Protestants could be viewed [by the Catholics] as vessels of pollution.”10 Thus, for his enemies, the 10 “The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France,” The Massacre of St. Bartholomew: Reappraisals and Documents, ed. Alfred Soman (The Hague: Nijoff, 1974) 209.

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dead body of the Admiral is a source of both literal and figurative contamination. The literal and the figurative associations of taste are also operative in King Henry’s double reference to that sense in scene 14. The fracas between the Cutpurse and Mugeroun has detained King Henry and his lords from a dinner. Henry pardons the Cutpurse, enjoining him, “Go, sirrah, work no more / Till this our coronation-day be past.” (14.36). Consonant with his character, as Catherine will cynically remark, “All his heaven is to delight himself” (46), King Henry envisions jubilant feasting and entertainment as a fitting sequel to the coronation. The gustatory pleasures, though literal, would metaphorically represent the king’s supposed triumph. Indeed, only a few lines earlier, Mugeroun refers to the coronation itself as “this holy feast” (30). Given the historical events dramatized in the Massacre, the constant appeal to the tactile is inevitable, from the “wisdom” offered by characters such as Anjou on scourging enemies (4.15), enhanced by a double antithetical maxim (“Though gentle minds should pity others’ pains, / Yet will the wisest note their proper griefs” 13–14), to the repeated and violent actions of the play. The murderous touch is twice punctuated by a triple imperative enunciated in French by the Guise; first during the general massacre (scene 6), then during the killing of “five or six PROTESTANTS with books [who] kneel” (didascalics, scene 12). The triple imperative “Tue, tue, tue” is in each case the first period of a tripartite construction, the whole successfully conveying the intensity of the action: “Let none escape. Murder the Huguenots” (6.2) and “Let none escape. / So, drag them away” (12.7–8). The “Collier leaf,” in its alternative version of scene 19, offers an example of appeal to two senses—touch and sight—coalesced and understood metaphorically. The soldier following Guise’s orders has killed Mugeroun (in scene 17 Guise vows Mugeroun’s death because Mugeroun had supposedly cuckolded him). Allusions to breath, sun, and a fiery meteor intensify Guise’s exclamation; then the heat metaphor is reiterated, first to apply to the Guise’s soul, then to Henry’s shame: Thus fall, imperfect exhalation, Which our great sun of France could not effect, A fiery meteor in the firmament! ………………………………………………… Fondly hast thou [Henry] incensed the Guise’s soul, That of itself was not hot enough to work Thy just digestion with extremist shame!

The Massacre’s didascalics allow us to experience centuries later the tactile violence of early performances of this “memorial construction.” Reports of shootings, slayings, and killings in scenes 18 and 19 augment the reiterated descriptions of the tools with which the violence is perpetrated. Both the general and the particular have their place. Drawn “weapons” accompany the march with the body of King Henry in the play’s final scene. Elsewhere the stage directions not only indicate the type of weapon but, in a varied descriptive verbal register, announce their functions: agents of violence discharge muskets (scene 3); point to, offer or draw daggers or swords (scenes 2, 6, 8, 21); and stab with a knife (scene 24). Other directions intensify the effect on the spectator/reader by portraying violent outcomes variously: “hang him,” “stab/s him,” “kill/s him/them,” “strangle him” (scenes 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 21, 22, 24).

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A command in the play’s text may precede the didascalics, such as in scene 9 in which the stage direction “kills him” confirms that the Guise’s command, “stab him [Ramus],” has been executed. A final example of the unrelenting appeal to the senses from scene 5 will serve to illustrate Marlowe’s rhetorical efficacy in fusing senses, signs, symbols, and theological allusion. Since antiquity, “sign” has been understood as an “object of sense perception” that transmits knowledge, “denoting both things and processes whether in the secular or the sacral sphere.” The sign, or “external reality,” is often symbolic, connected to belief and, in a religious context, to “considerable theological significance.”11 Modern critics have emphasized the “dynamics of the sign in the theater” (J. Honzl) and have called for a semiotics of character (Anne Ubersfeld). Recent monographs such as Theatre as Sign-System (Elaine Aston and George Savona) and A Semiotics of the Dramatic Text (Susan Melrose) make a strong case for an all-encompassing “semiotics of text and performance” as the subtitle of the Aston-Savona study announces. Other studies analyze how the theater or playwright of a particular era “worked as a system of signs.”12 Thus, sign is essential to plot, character, dialogue, mise en scène, stage directions, the actor him or herself, even the reader/spectator. It could be argued that scene 5, in which Admiral Coligni is stabbed, recalls a key biblical scene, Christ’s crucifixion. The taunts in the play echo the insults to Jesus of the soldiers and the populace as recorded in the Gospel accounts. The obvious physical violence of touch in the stabbing, the stamping on the Admiral’s body, and Anjou’s order to “Cut off his head and hands, / And send them for a present to the Pope” (42–3), combine with a violence to the Admiral’s beliefs to accentuate the victim’s suffering. As Coligni lies dying and asks to pray, Gonzago taunts him with references both to liturgy and to the two symbols most abhorrent to a Protestant: “Then pray unto our Lady; kiss this cross” (28). Since Homer, literature has closely linked sign and command13; Gonzago’s double command evokes first, the Catholic practice of the adoration of Mary along with the concept of her position as Mediatrix of Grace, and, second, the reverence for the material object, the cross (in actuality, the hilt of Gonzago’s sword)—both anathema to Protestants. Command (“kiss”), sign, and symbol combine to taunt the Admiral by demanding a liturgical practice in opposition to his most essential beliefs. Marlowe thus skillfully intensifies the physical and mental pain inflicted since Gonzago pronounces the injurious words as he stabs the Admiral. As a final ironic touch, Anjou insists that the Admiral, “that living hated so the cross, / Shall, being dead, be hang’d thereon in chains” (46–7).

11 Gerhard Kittel, ed., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament 7: 201, 213, 244, 257. 12 Honzl, “Dynamics of the Sign in the Theater,” Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contributions, ed. L. Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976) 74–93; Ubersfeld, Lire le théâtre (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1978); Aston and Savona (London: Routledge, 1991); Melrose (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994); and David Wiles, who analyzes sign and meaning in Greek and Roman performance in his The Masks of Menander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 14. 13 Kittel refers to the Iliad 16.172 and the signs set over the rowers on the warship (7: 263).

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Sign and symbol intermingle in the cross (a white one for purity!), the means of identification of the Guisians. In scene 4, Guise explains to Catherine the “order for the massacre”: “They that shall be actors in this massacre / Shall wear white crosses on their burgonets, / And tie white linen scarfs about their arms; / He that wants these ... / Shall die” (29–33). In the following scene, Guise enjoins his brother, Dumaine, and Anjou, the future King Henry, as well as the Guisians, Gonzago and Retes, to swear “By the argent crosses in your burgonets / To kill all that you suspect of heresy” (5.1–3). As the Guise galvanizes his men to resolute action and his ultimate goal that “There shall not be a Huguenot breathe in France” (50), Anjou swears, again by the cross, to “slay as many as we can come near” (52). Donald R. Kelley has underscored the “countless statements of official policy” made since the 1562 Massacre at Vassy and “the belief ... that the government was literally intent upon the ‘extermination’ of those of the [Huguenot] religion.”14 By the frequent invoking of the cross linked to oath-taking, Marlowe underscores the horror of the ensuing actions and the polarization of the two religious forces. While the oath is an appeal to God and to power, the cross symbolizes divinity itself. Indeed, the oaths of vengeance sworn on the cross are doubly ironic since the cross is also an easily recognizable symbol of God’s mercy and forgiveness, Christ’s redemption of sinful humanity through his crucifixion. Since antiquity, a vow or oath involved invocation of the deity, although certain ancient philosophers rejected swearing by God (Philo) and found the oath unworthy (Plutarch) or unnecessary (Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius Antonius). The basic meaning of the Greek word οµνυω, “to swear,” is “to grasp firmly” or “to grasp the sacred object,” thus linking the speaker’s assurance to a “sacred material.”15 While the Old Testament emphasizes the sanctity of the oath, forbidding false oaths (Leviticus 19:12, for example), the New Testament, in the person of Jesus, seems to reject its use altogether (Matthew 5:33–37).16 Following John Calvin, the Huguenots would have condemned oaths considered forbidden by the Scriptures, such as “rash, frivolous, promiscuous or passionate” ones. While calling upon God as one’s witness is permissible (Romans 1:9, 2 Corinthians 1:23), Calvin declares that “special vengeance will be executed on those who have taken the name of God in vain.”17 Although a complete study of oaths in the Massacre is outside the scope of this study, it is evident that the vows contribute both to the irony of the play and to the dramatic tension between the Guisians, who swear to murder on a symbol of divine mercy, and the Huguenots, who are enjoined by Navarre to “go to the church, and pray / That God may still defend the right of France, / And make His Gospel flourish in this land” (1.54–56). However, even Navarre will swear, “In God’s name,

14 Kelley 194. 15 Kittel 2:775 and 5:176, 179. 16 Generally, Christianity views oath taking as allowed, but as early as 61 A.D. the fourth Council of Carthage reproved clergy for swearing by created objects. See John McClintock and James Strong, eds., Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1981) 7: 259. 17 Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1957) 2: 8.23, 26–7.

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let them come!” on hearing of the arrival of the opposing army in scene 16, and, in the closing lines after King Henry’s stabbing, will declare: “I vow for to revenge his death” (24.108). Thus, once sectarian violence is unleashed, no one remains uncontaminated. Another religious symbol contributes to the play’s irony. The bell, a liturgical object closely related to worship in the Old Testament (the priests wore bells as they ministered in the Holy Place, Exodus 28:35), is used as a signal to kill in the Massacre: “a bell shall ring, / Which when they hear, they shall begin to kill, / And never cease until that bell shall cease” (4.36–38). The casual spectator/reader might think the bell simply a call to action of any kind, unrelated to religion, but Marlowe makes the connection unmistakable in scene 9. Guise interprets for us, explaining that the bell is calling the so-called heretics, many of whom have perished in the massacre, to worship the devil in hell. The Paris segment of the massacre being over (his leaders will go to Orléans, Dieppe, Rouen), Guise declares, “And now stay that bell, that to the devil’s matins rings” (9.86). A final liturgical reference, to relics, is made by Navarre, who alludes to an alliance with Elizabeth I against Catholicism. Lamenting the numerous lives lost and yet convinced of the ultimate victory of his cause, he underscores his alliance with his eternal King before declaring one with a temporal Queen: How many noble men have lost their lives In prosecution of these cruel arms, Is ruth and almost death to call to mind. But God, we know, will always put them down That lift themselves against the perfect truth; Which I’ll maintain so long as life doth last, And with the Queen of England join my force To beat the papal monarch from our lands, And keep those relics from our countries’ coasts. (18.9–17)

Through the parallel construction, Marlowe contrasts the doctrine of relics and the power of the papacy, two of the Catholic beliefs most offensive to Protestants, with the “perfect truth” of verse thirteen. We should remember that scholars date the composition of the Massacre during a period from Henry III’s death (1589) to that of Pope Sixtus V (1590), in any case “before the first recorded performance of January 1593.”18 Thus history adds an irony equal to that of Marlowe, since the Navarre who had vowed to banish relics and defeat the Pope would embrace Catholicism (and papacy) at Saint-Denis on July 25, 1593, six months after Marlowe’s play was first performed. Biblical and theological allusions in the Massacre often function to underscore the characters’ desires and motivations, highlight ironic distinctions, and, as commonplaces, create an atmosphere consonant with the play’s action. Marlowe’s Guise is no hero of epic dimensions but an anti-hero whose lines in scene 2:

18 E. D. Pendry and J. C. Maxwell, eds., Christopher Marlowe. Complete Plays and Poems (London: Dent, 1976) 235.

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echo those of Lucifer, the “morning star” of Isaiah 14:12–15: How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations! You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of the sacred mountain. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.’ But you are brought down to the grave, to the depths of the pit.

Cornelius argues that by this identification early in the play, “Marlowe conveys to his audience the role of the Duke as the despicable villain.”19 Judith Weil and Julia Briggs present evidence for a less clear-cut view, drawing attention to the play’s pervasive irony (Weil) and to Marlowe’s reliance on League pamphlets and oral information (Briggs). Briggs’s close reading of the Massacre also reveals other techniques employed by Marlowe to arouse sympathy toward the Guise: alteration of the sequence of historical events (in the play Henry lulls the Guise “into a state of false confidence” before the assassination), personal courage in the face of death (the Guise’s reiterated identification of himself with Caesar), and the viewing of the body by Guise’s son and his question to King Henry, “Art thou king, and hast done this bloody deed?”20 However, a recent study by Ian McAdam challenges the view that Guise’s death is heroic; McAdam reasons, “The imagined identity [with Caesar in scene 21] cannot come to terms with reality. … The Guise as Marlowe portrays him hardly shows genuine courage.”21 While I agree that the techniques to which Briggs alludes may indeed inspire an audience’s sympathy toward the Guise, they are insufficient, in my view, to construct him as a hero. Perhaps heroism is impossible in the dark world of the Massacre; at any rate, courage in the face of death does not necessarily make one a hero. Iago in Othello faces torture bravely;

19 Cornelius 60. 20 Weil, Christopher Marlowe: Merlin’s Prophet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 82; Briggs 262–3, 265–7. 21 The Irony of Identity: Self and Imagination in the Drama of Christopher Marlowe (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999) 186.

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Goneril and Regan in Lear are fearless; Mortimer, the Machiavel in Edward II, is defiant and courageous in death.22 A seemingly theological allusion may be devoid of religious significance, as, for example, Catherine de Medici’s use of “heaven” to denote “happiness” or her son’s infatuation with his minions: “And all his heaven is to delight himself” (14.46). Similarly, references to the Almighty may be only empty conventional maxims or a nod to God’s providence, as when Anjou, covenanting with the Lords of Poland to undertake the charge of their kingdom, agrees with the following proviso: “For if th’Almighty take my brother hence [if Charles dies] / By due descent the regal seat [of France] is mine” (10.19–20). When Henry rejoices that the Guise is dead, “I slew the Guise, because I would be king” (21.141), his mother Catherine emits the token divine reference “Pray God thou be a king now this is done” (21.143) before she curses him, declaring him “miscreant, / Traitor to God and to the realm of France” (21.150–151). As previously noted, Marlowe’s characteristic irony is evident in the Guise’s oath taking—on the saints, on Christ’s death, on the holy sacrament—a practice which Renaissance audiences would have recognized as censured by the biblical passages adduced above, as well as by James 5:12, which Guise seems particularly to contravert: “Above all, my brothers, do not swear—not by heaven or by earth or by anything else. Let your ‘yes’ be yes, and your ‘no,’ no, or you will be condemned.” Blasphemous oaths are intensified as Marlowe renders them in French: “Mort Dieu!” exclaims Guise to his wife who has cuckolded him with Mugeroun (15.31); “Par la mort Dieu, il mourra!” (17.28), promises Guise, as he restates his threat against his wife’s lover, sworn a few lines earlier “by all the saints in heaven” (23). However, on another level, biblical allusions in the play portray God’s character even as they reveal the character of the speaker. When Navarre offers comfort and hope to King Charles IX who is suffering a heart attack in scene 13, he invokes God as the physician. Since Charles dies soon after, the spectator/reader would find this highly ironic, just as Navarre’s later vow of vengeance contrasts with his reiterated affirmations of God’s power and providence. The irony serves to undermine Navarre, in particular his over-eager quasi-prophesying in the first instance, and, in the second, his own facile acquiescence to the dying King Henry’s bidding, “Weep not, sweet Navarre, but revenge my death” (24.95), rather than trusting God’s providence to effect the vengeance. After Charles’s death and fearing “Guise, join’d with the King of Spain” (13.38), Navarre nevertheless comforts himself and Plesché, declaring that God “always doth defend the right, / [and] Will show his mercy and preserve us still” (13.40–41). Thus, the biblical God of comfort and mercy who defends the right inspires confidence and trust in Navarre, who will nevertheless “speedily ... muster up an army secretly” (13.36–37). Andrew M. Kirk argues for an “instability in Navarre’s identity,” stating that his “dependence on God seems to mirror Charles’s dependence on his mother and Guise” while his “boastful rhetoric” mirrors “Guise as the strong challenger to weak royal power.”23 22 I am indebted to Sara Munson Deats and Robert Logan for these references. 23 “Marlowe and the Disordered Face of French History,” Studies in English Literature 35 (1995): 206–7.

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Contrasting allusions in proximity underscore dissimilarities of character, serving Marlowe’s exposition in the opening scene. The playwright contrasts the malice of the Guise’s “envious heart / That seeks to murder all the Protestants” (29–30) and his actions, ratified by the Pope “in murder, mischief, or in tyranny” (40), with Navarre’s confidence that “He that sits and rules above the clouds / Doth hear and see the prayers of the just / And will revenge the blood of innocents” (41–3). The writer of Proverbs included among the seven things that the Lord hates “a heart that devises wicked schemes” (6:18) and a case could be made, I believe, for the application of all seven things to Marlowe’s Guise: There are six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, A false witness who pours out lies and a man who stirs up dissension among brothers. (Proverbs 6:16–19)

By means of multiple allusions to the “Gospel,” “the Catholic faith,” and the “Pope,” as well as to the King of Spain, Marlowe renders the complex picture of the Guise’s motivation. Conversely, Navarre’s motivation seems clear from the first scene in which he invites the lords to pray “That God may still defend the right of France, / And make his gospel flourish in this land” (1.55–56). For Navarre and his lords, the Guise, along with the Pope and the King of Spain, are the “proud disturbers of the faith” (16.3–4). As he characterizes the Guise as “wicked” and impugns his motivation—“For his aspiring thoughts aim at the crown, / And [he] takes his vantage in religion” (20.22–23)—Navarre expresses his fear that the Guise, by “plant[ing] the Pope and popelings in the realm,” will cause “the ruin of that famous realm of France” (20.24, 21). The reader/spectator need not rely on Navarre’s lines. Guise’s declaration, “What I have done, ’tis for the Gospel sake” (19.22) is immediately disputed by Epernoun’s “Nay, for the Pope’s sake, and thine own benefit” (23). In the following line Marlowe emphasizes the charge of self-interest by a qualifier oft-repeated in the play, “aspiring,” as in “the aspiring Guise.” Here Marlowe places this adjective in the mouth of Epernoun, but Admiral Coligni (1.35), Navarre (20.22), and the Guise himself, who refers to his “aspiring wings” in scene 2.43, all use this adjective to characterize Marlowe’s overreaching protagonist. The qualifier “aspiring” conveys an ambition that nothing can restrain, not even “hell”, as the Guise reveals in the following line: “Although my downfall be the deepest hell” (44). Cornelius identifies here, as in Theridamas’s depiction of Tamburlaine in 1.2.154–57, a clear echo of Isaiah’s previously cited words (14:12–15) describing Lucifer’s fall.24 Similarly W. L. Godshalk stresses the “undertone of the diabolic in 24 Cornelius 142, 215. Cornelius identifies the Isaiah passage as the source for a “major repeated concept in Christopher Marlowe’s works ... that of Lucifer aspiring” (59). An alternative interpretation, according to numerous biblical commentators, suggests that Isaiah is here referring to the king of Babylon—also a type of the “beast” of Revelation.

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the Guise’s attitude ... in this first soliloquy,” and Cole qualifies both the spirit and the quality of the evil as “the ambition of Lucifer over again.”25 The verb “ascend” in Isaiah 14:13, “You said in your heart, I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God,” authorizes Marlowe’s repeated use of the related “aspiring,” as he convincingly renders the Guise as a Satan-like figure. The etymologies of “aspire” and “ascend” demonstrate the close association of these key words. “Aspire” from the Latin aspirare retained at least until the time of William Blake the archaic sense of “to rise upward, soar,” a meaning common in antiquity. Contemporaries of Marlowe use “aspire” in this sense (Spenser in Ruins of Time 408, “Pyramides, to heaven aspired,” and Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor 5.5.101, “Whose flames aspire, As thoughts do blow them higher and higher”).26 This definition is fundamentally related to the “ascend” and “exalt” of Isaiah, “ascend” deriving from ascendere “to climb toward” and “exalt” from ex+altus “to lift up high.” A further reminder of the Isaiah text may have been significant to Marlowe’s creative imagination as he penned the Guise’s soliloquy; as the ambitious “morning star” schemed to “ascend above the tops of the clouds” and “sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of the sacred mountain,” so the Guise resolves to “scale the high Pyramides.” Finally, the “resolution” of line 36 may provide a further biblical echo, since the Hebrew of Isaiah 14:13 translated by the expression “said in your heart” signifies “to resolve in one’s own mind.”27 We recall that Marlowe had linked the qualifier “aspiring” with Lucifer in Doctor Faustus when Mephistopheles explains the fall of the prince of devils: “O, by aspiring pride and insolence, / For which God threw him from the face of heaven” (1.3.66–67). In the Massacre, the Guise’s curse confirms this interpretation as it clarifies the ascendancy of ambition or “policy” over religion: “My policy hath fram’d religion. / Religion: O Diabole!” (2.62–63). Theological allusions succinctly convey doctrines at the heart of the religious struggles. King Charles IX embodies tolerance, although Anjou, their mother Catherine, and the Guise would term it “weakness,” when he laments, as he considers the massacre, that “noble men, / Only corrupted in religion, / Ladies of honour, knights, and gentlemen, / Should for their conscience taste such ruthless ends” (4.9–12). The Reformers prized conscience above all else; John Calvin called it “integrity of heart,” declaring that it “refers to God only.”28 Thus Marlowe, through the reference to conscience, successfully evokes the driving force of the persecuted “noble men [and] ladies of honour.” While the Reformers encouraged their followers to honor magistrates “because they are ordained of God,” they would also affirm that

25 The Marlovian World Picture (The Hague: Mouton, 1974) 85 and Cole 158. 26 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. See also numerous examples given in Lewis and Short’s A Latin Dictionary, including Virgil’s Aeneid 1,7,8; Pliny’s Historia Naturalis 13,22,43; and Horace’s Ars Poetica 204. 27 See, for example, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, ed. Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs (Oxford: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1968) 56 and Calvin’s Commentaries: Isaiah (Grand Rapids, MI: Associated Publishers and Authors, n.d.) 3: 206. 28 Calvin, Institutes 3: 19.16; 4: 10.4.

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“the worship of God, and the spiritual rule of living righteously are superior to all the decrees of men.”29 The Reformation slogan “Sola Scriptura” expressed the primacy of the Word of God. “The virtues of our true religion,” as Pleshé puts it, or more simply “truth,” in Navarre’s words, represented the raison d’être of the Reformers (13.42, 49). Navarre elaborates: “God so prosper me in all / As I intend to labour for the truth / And true profession of his holy word” (13.49–51). Marlowe accentuates Navarre’s purpose by setting it against Henry’s words. Having been crowned king, Henry utters a theological commonplace to the crowd. But the reference to God is quickly displaced by expressions of love for his minions, pride, and a belief in fortune’s power: “The guider of all crowns / Grant that our deeds may well deserve your loves! / And so they shall, if fortune speed my will, / And yield your thoughts to height of my deserts” (14.12–15). Conversely, in the mouth of the Guise, doctrine becomes an occasion for mockery. As he stabs Loreine, the self-styled “preacher of the word of God,” Guise derides both the language of preaching and its reliance on what the Protestants believed was the written word of God: “Dearly beloved brother, thus ’tis written” (7.5). Marlowe reinforces the mockery with Anjou’s reference to the Reformed practice of psalm-singing: “Let me begin the psalm” (7.6). Similarly, in scene 12, the Protestants, “people of the book”—stage directions present them entering with their books—are not allowed to speak; Guise kills them before their tongues drive “plaints into the Guise’s ears” (5). The Reformers based their central doctrine of justification by faith on passages such as Ephesians 2:8–9, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith— and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast,” and I Timothy 2:5, “For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” Marlowe calls to mind the doctrines of justification by faith and the forgiveness of sins in a straightforward manner by the prayers of the Admiral as Gonzago stabs him, “O God forgive my sins” (5.29), he pleads, making no reference to merit or works; and by Seroune’s prayer, “O Christ my Saviour!” (8.10), in which he recalls Christ’s ransom of sinners, regardless of merit. In addition, when Seroune refuses to pray to Mountsorrell’s saint, he is stabbed. Guise and the Friar represent the opposite ends of the spectrum. As the murderers in the service of King Henry stab Guise, they enjoin him “Pray to God, and ask forgiveness of the king” (21.79–80). Proud to the last, and privileging merit (as he perceives it) over faith, Guise will do neither, insisting that, as for God, “I ne’er offended Him” (21.81). Conversely, The Friar recognizes his sin but hopes to obtain merit by killing King Henry: “O my lord [he says to Dumaine], I have been a great sinner in my days, and the deed is meritorious” (23.28–29). On at least four occasions in the Massacre Marlowe imitates, consciously or unconsciously, syntactic patterns from Holy Scripture, underscoring key concepts. Lessons of God’s providence, faith, and trust in spite of earthly circumstances are frequently introduced in the Bible by lexical elements conveying both opposition and the act of faith. Thus Habakkuk confesses his joy and trust in the Lord, “yet I will rejoice in the Lord, / I will be joyful in God my Savior,” despite devastation of his 29 Calvin, Institutes 4: 10.5.

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crops and cattle (Habakkuk 3:17–18). The classic New Testament passage displaying this pattern is Ephesians 2:1–5 in which the opposition “But God” highlights God’s mercy in contrast to man’s sin: “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of the world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air. ... But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ. ... It is by grace you have been saved.” In scene 13 of the Massacre when King Charles dies, Navarre recognizes that there is “no safety in the realm for me” (13.33). Yet despite his fear of the Guise “join’d with the King of Spain” (13.38), he proclaims “But God, that always doth defend the right, / Will show his mercy and preserve us still” (13.40–41). Similarly, in scene 18 Navarre rejoices that one of King Henry’s minions, the Duke Joyeux, has been slain.30 He expresses, by two maxims, his faith in God as defender of the just: Thus God ... doth ever guide the right, To make his glory great upon the earth. (18.3–4)

and But God ... will always put them down That lift themselves against the perfect truth. (18.12–13)

The second maxim with its verbal antitheses accentuates the opposition delivered by the phrase “But God.” God’s battle is Navarre’s, which he protests that he’ll “maintain so long as life doth last” (18.14). The maxim itself is, of course, a significant stylistic feature of Holy Scripture. In Navarre’s mouth, it is particularly appropriate since it demonstrates a clear moral purpose and seemingly reveals the hero of Marlowe’s play to be a man of good character, two salient qualities of a maxim, according to Aristotle.31 Marlowe’s irony is particularly evident when a rhetorical pattern used in Scripture to convey complete devotion to God finds its way into Guise’s mouth; as, for example, in the monologue of scene 2 when the Guise sounds most like Satan. Marlowe’s use of accumulation and synonymy further impresses on the spectator/ reader the resolution of the earlier verse: “... peril is the chiefest way to happiness, / And resolution honour’s fairest aim” (2.35–36). Alliteration joins with accumulation to communicate this resolution: “For this, this head, this heart, this hand and sword, / Contrives, imagines, and faithfully executes” (2.49–50). The trinary pattern of “The Greatest Commandment,” Matthew 22:37 “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,” finds an inverse, ironic echo in Guise’s diabolical and resolute aim. Marlowe effectively punctuates moments of high action by double commands, each the length of a hemistich. In scene 7, the command communicates the Guise’s resoluteness: “Let none escape. Murder the Huguenots” (6.2); it is a resoluteness that follows him to death. As the murderers in the employ of King Henry stab Guise, 30 Burnett and others remind us that Joyeux died at the battle of Contras in 1587, having been appointed commander of the Huguenot forces in Guienne. 31 Rhetoric 2.21.

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he cries: “Vive la messe! Perish Huguenots!” (21.90). The exclamatory hemistich dramatically conveys a central theological controversy; the Huguenots opposed the Mass because they believed that it sacrificed Jesus Christ anew (Protestants would point to Scriptures such as chapter ten of Hebrews to insist on the doctrine of Christ’s sacrifice once for all on the cross). Marlovian scholars repeatedly refer to the Massacre as a theater of extreme violence, horror, and cruelty. Janet Clare usefully examines the playwright’s “aesthetics of violence” in relation to the essays of French theoretician and dramatist Antonin Artaud; I concur with her conclusion that “Marlowe’s dramaturgy works through an assault on the audience’s sensory perceptions and the release of extreme conflicts, ambitions and passions.”32 Terming the Massacre a “messy consenses narrative,” Rick Bowers convincingly demonstrates that the play “works like a mirror,” presenting “messy violent action and messy reflexivity of audience association.”33 Briggs and others have cited the modern performance review by Robert Cushman in which he affirms that the Massacre “tells you more about the springs of atrocity than any more tasteful piece.”34 My analysis develops the study of the extreme violence in the Massacre, demonstrating that a Marlovian rhetoric heavily reliant on the senses, signs, symbols, and theological allusion conveys the atrocity of the historical events in the years surrounding St. Bartholomew’s Day, as a locus terribilis. Keeping in mind the corrupt quality of the text and its particularly extensive stage directions, scholarly conclusions may have as much to say about early performances as about Marlowe’s talents. The appeal to the senses is constant; I have noted significant solicitation of all, with the visual and auditory predominating. The literal resonates into the metaphorical, as thirst signifies ambition and sight triggers memory. Heaped sensory references join with antitheses (sounds of rejoicing and cursing), invectives, and imperatives to intensify ensuing action, confirm commands, and reveal character. Historically warranted, the unremitting references to “blood” or “bloody” underscore not only the atmosphere of the entire play but also multiple conniving plans and deeds, revealing a French aristocracy and royalty rife with moral corruption. Catherine plans to “dissolve [Navarre’s marriage] with blood and cruelty” (1.25); for the Guise, “the sun stained heaven with bloody clouds” (2.3); if King Charles objects to the public reaction of the planned massacre, “an action bloody and tyrannical” (4.6), Anjou promptly corrects him linking wisdom to scourging one’s enemies (4.14–15); and if the dying King Henry decries Rome’s “bloody practices” (24.66), he simultaneously promises revenge with “these bloody hands” (24.60). Marlowe links the omnipresent “blood” with love as Henry swears to ruinate Rome and protests “eternal love” to Navarre and the Queen of England (24.64–68). A dictum confers authority on the connection between blood and love; the dying King Henry, who only a few lines earlier had uttered the wish that the reign of the House of Bourbon “never end in blood, as mine hath done” (24.94), declares:

32 “Marlowe’s ‘theatre of cruelty,’” Constructing Christopher Marlowe, ed. J. A. Downie and J. T. Parnell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 87. 33 Bowers 140. 34 Briggs cites Cushman’s review of a 1981 Glasgow production (277).

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“He loves me not that sheds most tears, / But he that makes most lavish of his blood” (24.100–101). Signs, symbols and theological allusion fuse in a rhetoric of violence that complements the physical violence of the events depicted. Striking reflections of key biblical concepts and scenes, as well as lexical and syntactic parallels with biblical texts, contribute to the Massacre’s irony, revealing self-deception and inversion of positive Christian values. Sign linked to command and to key doctrines profoundly repulsive to Protestants effectively communicates both dramatic tension and the polarization of the two religious camps. A protagonist’s confusion of the sacred with the profane may reveal her own character (Catherine) as well as that of the person described (Henry). References to God or the sacred may be undercut by expressions indicating reliance on fortune or might; this rhetoric of antithesis successfully conveys the complexity of a character’s motivations (Guise) or instability (Navarre), while it also provides contrasts between characters (Navarre and Guise, Navarre and Henry). The rhetoric of antithesis informed by sensory appeal, signs, symbols, and theological allusion highlights the opportunism and distortion of values evident in both Protestant and Catholic protagonists. Briggs has convincingly demonstrated that it is not only the Guise who “announces ... his intention of using religion for his own ends ... [;] he merely voices openly the values that his enemies adhere to secretly.”35 Briggs is referring here to King Henry, but Navarre will also invoke his intent “to labour for the truth / And true profession of his holy word” alongside “my opportunity [and] / ... my due” (13.50–51, 31, 35). His final speech, moreover, makes it abundantly clear that, in his view, laboring for the truth includes vowed revenge (24.108). Bowers has aptly remarked that “the more Navarre appeals to moral abstractions such as ‘Truth’ and ‘Righteousness,’ the more immoral the action of the play becomes.” 36 In his pertinent examination of the role of Ramus’s martyrdom in the Massacre, John Ronald Glenn avers: “No Marlovian world is darker than that of the Massacre.”37 The dramatic strategies that I have explored in this essay accentuate this dark world of violence and hatred, while simultaneously revealing the characters’ desires and motivations and highlighting the play’s irony. I have noted the considerable impact of these strategies on both meaning and structure in this dramatic canvas, which invites the modern reader/spectator to reflect on conscience, honor, valor, duty, ambition, faith, and the horror of religious terrorism.

35 Briggs 270–272. 36 Bowers 134. 37 “The Martrydom of Ramus in Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris,” Papers on Language and Literature 9 (1973): 377.

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Chapter 11

Barabas and Charles I John Parker Macalaster College

We do not know when exactly Marlowe wrote The Jew of Malta. Provided the prologue is not a belated addition, then its reference to the assassination of Henry, third duke of Guise, puts the earliest date for the play’s composition at December 23, 1588, when “the Guise” was killed. A reference in Henslowe’s diary to “the Jewe of malltuse”1 on February 26, 1592 establishes the latest date by which it could have been written—if by “it” we allow for a text substantially different from what we read today. The play we read today was published only in 1633 and by then may well have enjoyed considerable enrichment from other contributors. We learn further from Henslowe that Lord Strange’s Men staged The Jew ten times in the first half of 1592, grossing more than all but one other play in their repertoire,2 and that was before the trial of Lopez, when for obvious reasons it reappeared.3 According to Henslowe, in June 1596, the total number of performances could be “equaled by no other play of Marlowe’s, as far as we know.”4 In 1601, the play was back as part of the vogue for revenge, then once again gone. This time its retirement lasted 30 years. Were it not for the late recrudescence when Thomas Heywood brought the play to press on the heels of public and court performances in 1632, The Jew of Malta would have joined in oblivion The Jew by Dekker, Love’s Labors Won, Kyd’s Hamlet, and a hundred other ephemeral dramas. Without the Caroline printing, in other words, there would be no Barabas; his permanence is posthumous. I rehearse this textual and stage history because it shows how the life of Barabas depends on his afterlife—more generally, how Marlovian drama survives through a series of events that does not end with the death of its author. The Jew of Malta can speak to us today only because it also once spoke to subjects of Charles I, and apparently it did this in part by directly addressing Charles himself. “Gracious 1 Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 16. 2 As noted by H. S. Bennett, ed., The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris (New York: Gordian, 1966) 1. 3 See Paul Whitfield White, “Marlowe and the Politics of Religion,” The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 74–6. 4 Bennett, ed., The Jew of Malta 2: “although it must be remembered that we have no record of Edward II or Dido, as these did not belong to Henslowe.”

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and Great,” says Heywood’s prologue at court, “we humbly crave your pardon.”5 The apology claims to offset any potential offence at playing something so out of step with the times, “writ many years agone,” but if lack of fashion were really a problem, why present it at all? What is dated in the play, I think, is rather what made it belatedly so relevant. Its antiquity was in fact just then topical—and dangerously so; a contemporary play could not have spoken quite as critically. I want to argue here that the play’s typically Tudor attack on monasticism and religious hypocrisy gave cover at the time of its court performance and subsequent printing for a specifically Caroline form of politico-religious dissent; that its revival was an attempt, in other words, to use explicitly dated material as a means of contesting publicly—yet somehow invisibly, too—the increasingly Catholic appearance of Charles’s regime. I. Barabas under Elizabeth The details by which we have tried to date the play give us quite a bit more than dates. The death of Guise, figured as rebirth, figures as well the most pressing political threat in Elizabeth’s reign: Albeit the world think Machevil is dead, Yet was his soul but flown beyond the Alps; And now the Guise is dead is come from France To view this land and frolic with his friends. (prologue 1–4)

Most everybody would probably have remembered the Duke of Guise as the Catholic leader responsible for the Bartholomew Day’s Massacre; his father, for the fall of Calais. Marlowe had perhaps already brought him to the stage in The Massacre at Paris, where he also appears as an unscrupulous plotter of ruin. Like these lines from The Jew of Malta, The Massacre addressed an audience that for over a decade had shivered in the shadow of impending invasion—some more with longing than fear. That Machevil had friends in England with whom he might frolic could in either case give rise to a certain frisson. In 1579, the papacy had supported an uprising in Ireland. The next year, with the rebellion gathering strength, the first missionary Jesuits, Parsons and Campion, arrived in England—“an ominous conjuncture.”6 Even if the Jesuit “invasion” was only intended spiritually (as claimed) to support the faithful, Elizabethan officials thought otherwise and began passing repressive legislation at an unparalleled rate. Parliament considered the death penalty for the crime of saying mass but wound up instead levying heavy fines and imprisoning recusants who failed to appear in church. In 1581, “the definition of treason was extended to include reconciling or being reconciled to the Church of Rome, and from 1585 any priest ordained by the pope’s authority since 1559 and being in

5 N. W. Bawcutt, ed., The Jew of Malta, The Revels Plays (Manchester, Eng.: Manchester UP, 1978) 192. All citations from the play are taken from this edition. 6 Penry Williams, The Later Tudors: England 1547–1603 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995) 296.

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England was by that very fact guilty of treason.”7 As a consequence, priests bore the brunt of the crackdown; those who were not deported or imprisoned—and there were many—went to the scaffold. In 1587, they were joined by their own true Queen, Mary Stuart, after she had been implicated in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth. The conspirators—some of them actually working on behalf of Elizabeth as double agents—planned the regicide as prelude to an invasion in which none other than the Duke of Guise was scheduled to lead the French forces.8 These plans were not the first devised for Guise’s entrance. In the early 1580s the Protestant influences in James VI’s court were ousted in favor of less certain advisers. When Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s secretary of state, arrived with instructions to restore the balance, the young king fell “into some kind of distemperature and did with a kind of jollity say that he was an absolute King.”9 James was, of course, the son of Mary Stuart, then under house arrest, and grandson of Mary Guise, Scotland’s former regent. Through the latter, the Duke of Guise was a direct blood relation,10 and, in the early 1580s, a potential friend. Knowing James’s love for hunting, the Duke sent him horses and gunpowder as gifts. In 1582, James wrote to his mother concerning the Duke, “I know by his letters that he bears me a very affectionate goodwill which he will find reciprocated in me.”11 In 1583, Francis Thockmorton was arrested, tortured, and forced to reveal a conspiracy festering in James’s court, whereby “the Duke of Guise would invade England, with the backing of the Pope and of Phillip II, to release Mary and install her by force upon the throne.”12 Even the eventual route of the Spanish Armada did nothing to relax Elizabeth’s fears, if the ensuing persecution of Catholics is any indication; 31 were executed in 1588, 27 of them after the destruction of the fleet. In the late 1580s and early 1590s, “Catholics were watched and oppressed with the same severity as before or even with greater.”13 The Jew of Malta both reflects and indirectly participates in this continued surveillance. One does not see any Protestants on stage; Catholics are the only Christians there to be watched.14 7 Patrick McGrath, Papists and Puritans Under Elizabeth I (London: Blandford, 1967) 181. 8 Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: the Murder of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992) 149. 9 Qtd. in Williams, Later Tudors 300. 10 For the lineage, see Gordon Donaldson, Mary Queen of Scots (London: English Universities Press, 1974) 58. 11 G. P. V. Akrigg, ed., Letters of James VI & I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 47. 12 Williams, Later Tudors 300. See also McGrath, Papists and Puritans 181. 13 A. O. Meyer, England and the Catholic Church under Elizabeth (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1969) 346; compare Curtis Breight, Surveillance, Militarism and Drama in the Elizabethan Era (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996) 166ff. 14 See Breight, Surveillance, Militarism and Drama for a full account of Burghley and Cecil’s clandestine observation of Catholics, as well as Marlowe’s involvement. For my purposes it is pretty immaterial whether one ultimately buys Breight’s argument about Marlowe’s own Catholic sympathies in The Massacre and Edward II (The Jew of Malta receives scant mention). His central point, that the Protestant authorities in England were

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Machevil would give ample justification to the worst of Protestant worries: “Though some speak openly against my books,” he says, Yet will they read me, and thereby attain To Peter’s chair; and when they cast me off, Are poisoned by my climbing followers. I count religion but a childish toy, And hold there is no sin but ignorance. (Prologue 10–15)

These poisonous “followers” of Machevil, in their struggle against one another, clearly anticipate Barabas’s simile for the poison that he uses on the nuns, among them his daughter: “with her let it work like Borgia’s wine, / Whereof his sire, the Pope, was poisoned” (3.4.98–100). Both comments refer—one obliquely, the other directly—to the death of Pope Alexander VI; in 1503 (so the story went), he accidentally drank from a poisoned cup intended for another by his son, Caesar Borgia, to whom Machiavelli would dedicate The Prince. One should probably bear this legend in mind when considering the ostensibly atheist lines that follow in Machevil’s soliloquy: “I count religion but a childish toy.” An earlier audience would not necessarily have heard in this boast the unmediated declaration of Marlowe’s heterodoxy that subsequent critics have found; on the contrary, they would have inferred that Machevil and his followers were Catholic, and Catholicism, Machevil here tells us, is the same as no religion. In his opening lines, Machevil toys with religion, not as a modern atheist but as a typical Catholic seen from the perspective of Protestant critics. For example, when Sir Christopher Hatton calls William Allen, first president of the Douai seminary, “That shameless atheist and bloody Cardinal,”15 he is not saying that Allen does not believe in God but that he is so deluded as to believe in Transubstantiation. Not incidentally, the first sign we have of Marlowe’s own religious notoriety appeared during his Cambridge years when his masters seem to have warned the government of his intention to study at Rheims. This was tantamount to an accusation of treason but provoked, as we know, the calm and famously suggestive reply from the Privy Council that Marlowe “had no such intent, but that in all his acions he had behaved him selfe orderlie and discreetelie, wherebie he had done her Majestie good service.”16 Their pronouncement, in conjunction with the Corpus Christi records showing Marlowe’s profligate expenditures at the buttery after long absences (when his income, derived from a stipend, ought to have hung on attendance), suggests, at least to some scholars, that between 1585 and 1587 Marlowe was employed as an anti-Catholic spy in Walsingham’s secret service.17 Possibly he drew out would-be seminarians by pretending to hold priestly aspirations himself. Some have supposed themselves the real Machiavellians and were described as such by dissidents, however much these authorities tried to displace the label onto their opponents, is at any rate very well taken and certainly deepens the complexities of Malta (see, e.g., 2, 25, 129). 15 McGrath, Papists and Puritans 203. 16 Transcribed in Constance Brown Kuriyama, Christopher Marlowe: a Renaissance Life (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002) 202. 17 Nicholl, The Reckoning 98–101.

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that Marlowe wound up actually going to Rheims at one point, so strong were his faked convictions. If he had gone, he would have found himself under the direct protection of the seminary’s powerful patron, the Duke of Guise.18 I bring up this aspect of Marlowe’s biography not with any hope of resolving its many difficulties but to make a relatively straightforward point about The Jew of Malta: outside the theater as within, whatever Marlowe’s personal views, he seems to have profited from involvement in anti-Catholic machinations on behalf of a Protestant state. The obvious criticisms against “Christians” leveled in the play are, after all, identical to the traditional rhetoric of Protestant polemic, the same rhetoric out of which state power had been fashioned for a century. Many of the withering parodies of Christianity that one finds in The Jew of Malta, one can also find, for example, in an early Protestant polemicist like Simon Fish.19 In both Marlowe’s play and treatises of this sort, society’s holiest representatives under Catholic rule also have the most voracious of appetites, sexual and fiscal. Their vows of chastity and poverty are actually in the service of an unholy surplus. “And yet I know the prayers of those nuns,” says Barabas, And holy friars, having money for their pains, Are wondrous, and indeed do no man good; [Aside] [To Lodowick] And seeing they are not idle, but still doing, ’Tis likely they in time may reap some fruit— I mean in the fullness of perfection. (2.3.81–85)

Barabas pretends that the sexual implications of his words—“doing,” “reap some fruit”—are inadvertent so that he can qualify them with their “intended” spiritual sense: “I mean, in the fullness of perfection.” Yet the addition only drives his point home all the more insidiously, as “perfection” connotes a ripe pregnancy every bit as much as the “fruit” whose connotation “perfection” was supposed to nullify.20 A nunnery, we learn from Abigail’s initial conversion, is a place of increase in every sense. With a pretense akin to her father’s, she tells the abbess, “I do not doubt, by your divine precepts / And mine own industry, but to profit much.” Barabas responds with the glossing aside, “As much, I hope, as all I hid is worth” (1.2.333–35). As G. K. Hunter has already explained, a massive amount of Protestant polemic long complained that the spiritual treasures of Catholicism really were a material treasure, accumulated by the Church through the sale of indulgences, mass-stipends,

18 Nicholl, The Reckoning 121. 19 I have written in greater detail about Fish in the fourth chapter of my doctoral dissertation, “God Among Thieves: Marx’s Christological Theory of Value and the Literature of the English Reformation” (Diss. University of Pennsylvania, 1999). See also Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) 10–13, 28–33, 133ff. and passim. 20 As remarked upon in the note to these lines by Bawcutt in the Revels edition. Children were commonly said to “grow to perfection” in their mothers’ wombs before birth. See, in addition to the examples Bawcutt gives, Pliny, the Elder, The historie of the world: commonly called, The naturall historie of C. Plinius Secundus, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1634) 303, 395, and passim.

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Offertory processions, etc.21 In particular, clerics regularly said masses for a sum on behalf of the dead—these being the prayers by which they get “money for their pains.” By satirizing how the Church generates monetary profit from doctrines concerning the spirit, Barabas gives voice to one of the deepest concerns, and most widespread complaints, about Catholic theology in Protestant England. As Fish and every other Protestant enthusiastically argued, and as the majority of conforming members of an Elizabethan audience would have probably agreed, the Catholic spirituality had actually invented purgatory for this very reason: that an unsuspecting populace, ignorant of the Bible and consequently unable to see that purgatory lacked scriptural authority, would hand over their money. The Catholics we see on stage in the Jew of Malta more than earn such Protestant criticism, although, in this case, the critic is Barabas. “How sweet the bells ring, now the nuns are dead,” he rejoices after poisoning them, “That sound at other times like tinkers’ pans!” The glance at their voluntary (and thus potentially duplicitous) beggary is followed by the obligatory derision of their uncontrolled sexuality: I was afraid the poison had not wrought, Or, though it wrought, it would have done no good, For every year they swell, and yet they live. (4.1.4–6)

If the nuns’ fellow friars are any indication, Barabas is not exactly kidding: they are unable to discern the fakery of Abigail’s first conversion, for example—“No doubt, brother, but this proceedeth of the spirit”—yet such discernment is not a priority: “Ay, and of a moving spirit too, brother” (1.2.326–27). The sensual implications of her “moving spirit,” as with the swelling sisters, do not linger below the surface; they are a constant source of hilarity. Ithamore asks Abigail in confidence whether the nuns “have not … fine sport with the friars now and then” (3.3.32–33), and his comic suspicions are fully confirmed when the nuns are poisoned. “The abbess sent for me to be confessed,” says Bernardine, then exclaiming, “O, what a sad confession will there be” (3.6.3–4). In case anybody misses the insinuation, when a moment later he acts as Abigail’s confessor and is asked to witness that she dies a Christian, he responds with the wisecrack, “Ay, and a virgin, too, that grieves me most” (3.6.41). Against this backdrop, Barabas’s “wicked” mockery of the friars is not without its grim fairness. The gleeful extremity of his violence against them clearly conforms to anti-Jewish stereotype,22 yet to assume too quickly “the Jew” as the play’s primary critical object underestimates, I think, the extent to which Barabas’s executions involve the normative pleasures, far closer to home, of contemporary anti-Catholic campaigns. At these moments of comic bloodshed, audiences who elsewhere happily fed on anti-Catholic propaganda would be more likely than not to approve 21 See G. K. Hunter, “The Theology of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 27 (1964): 211–40; esp. 225–7. 22 On anti-Semitism in the play, see Julia Reinhard Lupton, “The Jew of Malta,” The Cambridge Companion, esp. 149; Stephen Greenblatt, “Marlowe, Marx and Anti-Semitism,” Christopher Marlowe, ed. Richard Wilson (Harlow: Longman, 1999) 140–58; and Hunter, “The Theology of Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta.”

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of Barabas and cheer him on. There is no doubt a powerful strain of anti-Judaism in the play, but it seems to work as much to the discredit of Catholicism. The particular means that Barabas devises for the nuns’ execution arguably tempers the supposed excess of his bloodlust, insofar as it makes for a strangely poetic justice. These “religious caterpillars” (4.1.21) had allegedly devoured the land with impunity for centuries before the dissolution. When Barabas makes his poisonous donation to the nunnery, the very alms that they would once more steal from the truly poor deliver symbolically the long deserved death blow. Similarly, the telling position of Bernardine’s corpse “justly” parodies his former occupation: Barabas and Ithamore prop him up “as if he were begging of bacon” (4.1.154–55). Cozened and killed by a diabolical Jew, these Catholic cozeners are probably supposed to be getting exactly what they deserve according to the righteous mandate of the talion. Barabas works, so to speak, as the left hand of an otherwise hidden, Protestant God. The satire surrounding the Catholic rite of penance shows Barabas at his most polemically orthodox. His newfound regrets would have sounded to many Elizabethans as correctly parodic: “Would penance serve for this my sin,” he says, “I could afford to whip myself to death—” ITHAMORE. And so could I; but penance will not serve— BARABAS. To fast, to pray and wear a shirt of hair, And on my knees creep to Jerusalem. (4.1.59–62)

This is not a Judaic, much less Islamic, critique of traditional Christian ritual but the critique of Catholic rites by Protestants. That Barabas so quickly and with such success shifts the focus from what he will do as a penitent to all that he will pay the friars if they offer him absolution—a shift anticipated from the beginning as Barabas tells them the kind of penance he might “afford”—follows axiomatically the most well-thumbed tropes of Tudor polemic: BERNADINE. Barabas, thou hast— JACOMO. Ay, that thou hast— BARABAS. True, I have money; what though I have? (4.1.28–30)

The move from the auxiliary use of “hast,” which in the penitential formula ought to precede the verb “committed,” to a finite verb meaning “possess” captures in microcosm the whole of the Protestant critique of penance and auricular confession. At last called to account, Barabas simply confesses the sin he shares with his confessors, that of greed; if penance is what he must make in recompense for a wealth of sins, a man of such means as himself can surely afford the payments. The longstanding critical anxiety over Marlowe’s ethics, the uncertainty whether so flamboyant a deviant as Barabas confirms or undermines a Christian moral order, tends to stress insufficiently that “Christian” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries nearly always defined one branch of true Christianity against a competing, Satanic branch that also claimed the title. No polemic worth its weight ever shied away from describing in utmost detail and with terrific gusto the horrors against which it warred, and The Jew of Malta borrows wholesale its depiction of “Christian” hypocrisy from these conventions. When Barabas justifies Abigail’s deception of Lodowick with

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promises of marriage, a single word of denigration in this respect stands out among the rest: “this offspring of Cain,” Barabas calls him, “this Jebusite” (2.3.302; my emphasis). That latter word, drawn from the Bible (in which it was supposed to signify the reprobate, especially to Protestants), had become in the course of the early 1580s a term of opprobrium for the Jesuits then infiltrating England. So at least had “Jebusite” been used by William Fulke, author of, among other confutations, two attacks on William Allen, along with a host of refuting annotations to the New Testament as translated “by the papists of the traiterous seminarie at Rhemes,” which of course Allen directed.23 Barabas’s similar use of “Jebusite” against a Catholic shows with special clarity the extent to which, although a Jew, he could also speak for, and do his small part towards, the consolidation of a Protestant state.24 II. Barabas under Charles When The Jew of Malta came to press, the Protestant nation was coming unglued. No single explanation for the political crises of the 1630s and 1640s was more often cited by contemporary writers than the accusation that Church and State had fallen victim to a Catholic plot.25 Pamphlets before and after the collapse of the government continually warned of the popish conspiracy threatening English liberties. There were anti-Catholic riots on and off throughout the country, and these popular outcries found an official outlet in the house of Commons as it “constantly threw in Charles’s face” the Elizabethan sentiment that earlier monarchs “had prosecuted Catholics and made England great.”26 Appealing to the immanent threat of a national reversion to Catholicism in fact provided parliament with a powerful 23 Fulke’s pejorative use of “Jebusite” is the earliest given by the Oxford English Dictionary and appears in a treatise whose title is worth reproducing in full: A defense of the sincere and true translations of the holie Scriptures into the English tong: against the manifolde cauils, friuolous quarels, and impudent slaunders of Gregorie Martin, one of the readers of popish diuinitie in the trayterous Seminarie of Rhemes (London, 1583). Martin was the principle translator of the Douai-Rheims Bible, which Fulke, as mentioned above, later reprinted so as all the better to attack (The Text of the New Testament, etc. [London, 1589]). 24 English nationalism relied heavily on the model of nationhood found in the biblical histories of God’s “chosen people.” James Shapiro touches on this in Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996): “Indeed, by the late sixteenth century the Protestant English began to see themselves as having taken the place of God’s first elect people, the Jews” (44). See also the excellent analysis of England’s “chosen status” in the first chapter of Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: St. Martin’s, 1988). 25 Robin Clifton, “Fear of Popery,” The Origins of the English Civil War, ed. Conrad Russell (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1973) 144–67; Caroline M. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983); Peter Lake, “Antipopery: The Structure of a Prejudice,” Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–1642, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London: Longman, 1989) 72– 106. 26 Martin Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 199.

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justification for the unprecedented regicide that it later carried out. In effect, the antiCatholic propaganda developed under the Tudors, especially under Elizabeth in the 1580s and 1590s, had established the symbolic structures that would eventually be employed (either cynically or in earnest) against the crown, in the person of Charles. Connecting these two historical moments and equally useful to both, we find The Jew of Malta. To a number of Charles’s subjects, it was apparently as though the invasion via Scotland long awaited and feared in Elizabeth’s time had finally come to pass, although without arms or bloodshed and with insufficient alarm. All it had taken was the legal installation of James and the death of his firstborn, leaving Charles next in line to the throne. Charles’s early courtship of the Spanish Infanta presaged, to patriots, bad things to come. Despite parliament’s petition in 1621 that James marry Charles to a Protestant, Buckingham and the young prince set off together, disguised in false beards and without the usual royal train, to settle the match themselves, so to speak, in propria persona. Those most distressed by Charles’s attempt to marry not only a Catholic but a Catholic from the nation whose defeat had been among Elizabeth’s greatest glories may have rejoiced when a humiliated Charles returned to England and prepared for war against Spain,27 but he soon went on to marry another Catholic, this one French, and his pique against Spain proved short-lived. In 1630, Henrietta Maria gave birth to an heir, and the religion in which she was going to raise him became a national concern. The same year that The Jew of Malta was printed, a cleric was arrested for his public prayer that “the prince be not brought up in popery, whereof there is great cause to fear.”28 Charles built a baroque Catholic chapel in St. James’s Palace and was the first monarch since Mary Tudor to welcome a papal legate to London. By the early 1630s, men who were either confirmed in or strongly suspected of Catholicism held some of the nation’s highest offices: Richard Weston, Earl of Portland, was Lord Treasurer; Sir Francis Windebank, junior Secretary of State; and Sir Francis Cottington, Chancellor of the Exchequer. These crypto-Catholic advisers formed the core of the so-called Spanish faction, probably the most powerful group to emerge in the wake of Buckingham’s death.29 Their pro-Spanish foreign policy greatly compounded popular suspicions of Charles’s loyalties. By the early 1630s, Charles not only refused to come to the aid of the Dutch Protestants then fighting Spain, he could not even manage a diplomatic neutrality. Instead, he actively colluded with England’s historic enemy. Sometime after March of 1632—very near the time of The Jew of Malta’s revival—Charles orchestrated a trade deal whereby he agreed to allow the Spanish use of the Mint. They brought bullion to Dover, coined it in London, and then, with the fresh coin in 27 These facts are rehearsed in any biography of Charles. Michael B. Young has written a short study of the king that contributes an especially judicious account of the central historiographical debates—like everything connected with the revolution, controversy abounds—and is for that reason especially informative. See Charles I (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997). 28 Qtd. in Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot 40. 29 See Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot 34–9; also A. J. Loomie, “The Spanish Faction at the Court of Charles I, 1630–8,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 59 (May 1986): 37–49.

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hand, purchased English promissory notes, which made their way, protected by the Channel Fleet, to Flanders. There the notes were used to buy from English Merchants the supplies needed by Catholics in their war against the Dutch.30 A greater reversal of Elizabeth’s foreign policy and Leicester’s campaigns could not be imagined— least of all by Heywood, whose own anti-Spanish plays were just then also revived.31 It was as if Charles, an English Ferneze, had thrown in his lot with Del Bosco. Then there was the problem of Laud. Appointed archbishop in the same year that The Jew of Malta was printed, he had been a close adviser to the king almost from the beginning of the reign. He officiated at the king’s coronation when the honor should have fallen to the Dean of Westminster, and this inaugurated a series of similar usurpations. Laud baptized the infant Charles, for example, in place of George Abbot, “His Grace of Canterbury being infirm.”32 This infirmity turned out to provide a metaphoric commentary on Abbot’s overall power, which declined in proportion to Laud’s rise. In 1627, Laud was made a Privy Councilor; by 1629, he held the bishoprics of Bath, Wells, and London; the same year he became Chancellor of Oxford. The 1633 promotion to Canterbury only made him in name the Archbishop he had already become in fact. Half of all episcopal offices were filled by members of his party by 1629, when, no longer obligated to support Buckingham’s inept foreign policy and free from the attacks of parliament, he was finally able to concentrate on the domestic, religious issues most dear to him.33 Together, he and Charles initiated a program of “reform” which, to those already reformed, appeared as the slippery slope declining to Catholicism or, worse, an explicit reversion. Vestments, altar rails, stained glass, and organs reappeared in churches across the country, accompanied now by a mandatory scraping of knees and bowing. So-called “Puritan” lecturers were suppressed in favor of moderates, or, more and more frequently, Arminians. Charles, if not Laud himself, appears to have thrown his weight wholly behind Arminianism, which sounded like a covenant of works to Protestant ears and tended in practice towards sacramentalism. Francis Rous, for example, did not mince his words when speaking of the Arminian threat to the last session of parliament before the Personal Rule (when Charles ruled on his own without parliament’s input): “I desire that we may look into the very belly and bowels of this Trojan horse to see if there be not men in it, ready to open the gates to Romish tyranny and Spanish Monarchy; for an Arminian is the spawn of a papist.”34 His clarion call helps summarize the tensions occurring during the period between the death of Buckingham and the 30 See J. S. Kepler, The Exchange of Christendom: the International Entrepôt at Dover, 1622–1651 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1976) 36–9, and Harland Taylor, “Trade, Neutrality and the ‘English Road,’ 1630–1648,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 25 (1972): 236–60. 31 See Butler, Theatre and Crisis 200–204, who notes as well the “extravagantly Marlovian” villain in Thomas Rawlin’s The Rebellion, a Spanish courtier named Machvile. 32 Qtd. in H. R. Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud 1572–1645 (London: Macmillan, 1963) 127. For a more recent, somewhat less colorful work on Laud, see Charles Carlton, Archbishop William Laud (New York: Routledge, 1987). 33 Trevor-Roper, Laud 89. 34 Qtd. in Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot 22. The standard work on Arminianism is Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: the Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590–1640 (Oxford:

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revolution: according to Rous, a covert Catholicism had sneaked into the heart of London under the guise of Arminianism and with the open encouragement of Laud and Charles; without some kind of intervention, the allies of Catholic Spain (covert and otherwise) would overturn the hard-won Elizabethan settlement. Historians are surely right to dispute the accuracy of these accusations, but there is little doubt about Laud’s basic program, which bears some further remarks in connection to the revival of Marlowe’s play. What mattered to Laud more than theological disputation was the restoration of the Church as an independent power. To do this he needed to replenish the coffers that a century of expropriation had depleted.35 This is why he revived—along with the other “popish” rites described above—the neglected ritual of consecration, which was thought to impress on the fabric of a freshly built or renovated church “a magic seal as a deterrent to those who might otherwise be tempted to despoil it.”36 Naturally, Laud knew better than to rely exclusively on ritual for his hoped-for rejuvenation. He knew the most reliable source of income was land and so set about restoring the ancient right of the Church to collect tithes de jure divino, free from the impropriations and other legal means of despoliation that had cropped up under the Tudors. “Throughout [Laud’s] administrative career,” writes Trevor-Roper, “we find him seeking to recover the alienated property of the Church and to secure it against a second dissolution by an emphatic declaration of its sacred character.”37 More than that, he did what he could to reverse the effects of the first dissolution. When writing to a friend and inheritor of Church properties, for instance, Laud hoped that his posterity might “restore to the Church that which [his] ancestors consented to buy and take from it.”38 At other times, he was not content to wait on posterity and devised various legal strategies for recovery. The Feoffees of Impropriations and Charles’s Revocation Act seem most pertinent to The Jew of Malta, since they appeared between 1632 and 1633. But long before these years, Laud’s Calvinist adversaries recognized and decried his project as a Catholic vendetta against the inheritors of the dissolution. Events on the continent did nothing to assuage holders of former Church lands, as Catholic victories there had been quickly followed by restorations of land to the Church.39 The incorrigible Francis Rous once again alerted

Clarendon, 1987). See also Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism, 1625–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992). 35 On the depletion, see Christopher Hill, Economic Problems of the Church: from Archbishop Whitgift to the Long Parliament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956). 36 Trevor-Roper, Laud 120. 37 Trevor-Roper, Laud 96. 38 Their correspondence is edited and reprinted as an appendix to Trevor-Roper, Laud; see esp. 450–453. 39 See Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution—Revisited (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997) 297. For more on English fears of restoration of Church lands, see J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984) 184–5 and Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642 (New York: Harper & Row, 1972) 135.

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parliament to their collective danger from Laud’s fiscal policies: “It was an old trick of the Devil: when he meant to take away Job’s religion, he begins at his goods.”40 All of this provides an immediate context for the renewed appreciation of Barabas. As David Riggs has recently argued, the transformation of his house into a nunnery, through some sort of symbolic comeuppance, “recalls and reverses the conversion of St. Sepulchre’s nunnery at Canterbury [where Marlowe grew up] into a private dwelling.”41 In other words, it fantastically dissolves the dissolution. When The Jew of Malta was finally printed, people were just then facing precisely this reversal, and the play, like Francis Rous, likens the threat to the trials of Job.42 Although Barabas himself spurns his role—“What tell you me of Job?” he wants to know (1.2.181)—the point is the same: Barabas has no intention of taking it on the chin, and neither does Rous. (Neither, in fact, did Job—his legendary patience is, precisely, a medieval legend43; ironically enough, the impatience of Barabas, in strictly Protestant fashion, better reflects the Job of the Bible.) Rous’s invocation is meant to stir MPs to action; like Marlowe’s Barabas, Rous’s fellows are compared to Job only that they might measure their active resistance to appropriation in relation to Job’s victimization. Both parliament and Barabas, threatened with or suffering the loss of their property, scheme for the execution of the leaders afflicting them. Nor was it difficult for contemporary observers to link parliament’s behavior, no matter how professedly “Christian,” with the stereotypical antics of Jews: Those Jewish Zelot-Sepratists, Who seem’d more holy than the rest; A Superstitious Sect to Obey Strict Fasts, and Stricter Sabboth day: Of the Jews Parliament these were Speakers still, and men of the Chair. ... These were the men [who] their King did chase From Fort to Fort, from Place to Place.44

One can clearly see in this passage how anti-Semitic rhetoric might be used to discredit the wrong kind of Christian (in this case anti-royalist Protestants), yet by a similarly associative logic those same Protestants might well have found themselves in secret sympathy with a Jew like Barabas: in the 1630s his political program of violent resistance put him closer to Milton than Maimonides.45 40 Hill, Intellectual Origins 93. 41 David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (London: Faber and Faber, 2004) 15. 42 Many critics have commented on the role of Job in the play; for a helpful summary, see Sara M. Deats, “Biblical Parody in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta: a Re-examination,” Christianity and Literature 37.2 (1988): 27–48; here 36–7. 43 For the invention of Job’s patience, see Lawrence L. Besserman, The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). 44 J. W., King Charles I, His Imitation of Christ (London, 1660) 2–4. I am grateful to Bernie Rhie for this reference. 45 Michael Jones makes a similar argument with respect to the Jews in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament: we probably owe the preservation of the play, in a single manuscript (c. 1520–1540), to the sympathy and interest it provoked among the newly reformed. See

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Such displacement onto a Jew of Protestant discontent was probably needed for so anti-Catholic a play as The Jew of Malta to be performed not only in public, but at the most Catholic, aesthetically conservative and censorious court of Renaissance England. If pressed, its actors could easily claim that the play had only one villain, and that the villain was comfortably Jewish; he made for an unlikely, so all the more effective, Puritan hero. Viewed from this perspective, the words spoken to the court in Heywood’s prologue begin to sound almost like a challenge: Gracious and great, that we so boldly dare (’Mongst other plays that now in fashion are) To present this, writ many years agone, And in that age thought second unto none, We humbly crave your pardon. (prologue at Court 1–5)

The lines follow epideictic tradition closely—i.e., forgive this spectacle, so unworthy of your greatness, etc.—but, as in the best of that tradition, critical undertones temper its sycophancy. A prologue emphasizing the play’s antiquity, its lack of fashion, nonetheless “boldly dares” through a major ambiguity to celebrate the age of Elizabeth as “second unto none”—implying that the age of Charles was second to it.46 Elizabeth’s was a reign, not incidentally, that Heywood himself had already chronicled in several earlier plays, one of which (If You Know Not Me) he would revive the next year to enormous acclaim. “It must have been an astonishing spectacle in Charles’s London to see Elizabeth and Henry [VIII] striding the indoor stage,” writes Martin Butler of revivals like this, “icons of good princes piously furthering the gospel whose presence implicitly damned a king who had failed to further the continuing process of reform.”47 Their revival was no doubt allowed because of the plays’ royalist bias, but this Caroline nostalgia for the Tudors, as Butler observes, “was sweeping the country relentlessly towards the challenge to the king” (Butler 98), whether the king could see it or not. Marlowe’s play might well have required the king’s pardon more than king Charles was expected to realize. As the Prologue says: We pursue The story of a rich and famous Jew Who lived in Malta. You shall find him still, In all his projects, a sound Machevill; And that’s his character. He that hath passed “Theatrical History in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament,” English Literary History 66.2 (1999): 223–60, esp. 247ff. 46 Compare Kathleen E. McLuskie, Dekker and Heywood: Professional Dramatists (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994) 167. 47 Butler, Theatre and Crisis 201. Scholars have debated the extent to which Heywood himself should be classed as a “Puritan,” especially late in his career. For a survey of the arguments over the last century, see Nancy A. Gutierrez, “Exorcism by Fasting in A Woman Killed with Kindness: A Paradigm of Puritan Resistance?” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 33 (1994): 43–62; here 44; Gutierrez herself sees A Woman as “both product and participant in the making of the Puritan value system” (55).

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Now, “censures” can include both ethical and aesthetic judgments, both opinions as to Barabas’s morality and to the play’s excellence. Presumably the last sentence means that The Jew of Malta has survived every aesthetic censure over the years and by passing these tests has finally earned a royal audience. The aesthetic survival of the play is thus ironically akin to the resourcefulness of its hero-villain, his remarkable ability to reinvent himself after meeting with ruin, to be resurrected when taken for dead. The same shiftiness that makes him so worthy of incurring moral “censure” allows him to “pass” aesthetic muster. Yet “censure” includes a third meaning, that appropriate to the office of a censor, and it seems an even more stunning irony that such a play appeared before the king who preferred to see in court only the most obsequious of drama. Laud, as Bishop of London, worked in conjunction with Charles’s taste to produce a major clampdown on artistic production. According to the prologue, Barabas has overcome or “passed” this censor, too, and is about to practice his ancient devilment before the man who most resembles Barabas’s own Catholic victims. “Princely ears” are in this case the ears of an ass. “If aught here offend your ear or sight,” the epilogue assures Charles, “We only act and speak what others write” (4–5). The fact that the “other” had been dead forty years helped place the guilty beyond punishment. We know for certain that Caroline players used dramatic revivals as just such an expedient when staging topical satire that might otherwise have gotten them into trouble. We know because it did not always work: on May 31, 1639 “the players of the Fortune were fined £1,000 for setting up an altar, a bason, and two candlesticks, and bowing down before it upon the stage, and although they allege it was an old play revived, and an altar to the heathen gods, yet it was apparent that this play was revived on purpose in contempt of the ceremonies of the Church.” The Valiant Scot [ca. 1626; publ. 1637] by one J. W. was also conveniently revived in 1639 in London after Charles’s unsuccessful attempt to force a new prayer book upon the Scots.48

I think we can safely add to the list of “convenient revivals” The Jew of Malta. The plague of piracy that it dramatizes, together with the appropriation of a private estate by the Church, the Maltese Christians’ opportunistic alliance with the Spanish, the subsequent skewering of the political establishment by someone who borrows wholesale from conventional anti-Catholic polemic—all this had become in the time of Charles more topical than it had ever been under Elizabeth. Like Ferneze, Charles had also “been unable to protect English merchants from pirates in the Mediterranean”49; Charles’s regime also threatened a reversal of the dissolution; he

48 Albert Tricomi, Anticourt Drama in England 1603–1642 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989) 181, quoting from the Calendar of State Papers. 49 Hill, Intellectual Origins 289. On piracy as a major impediment to Stuart foreign policy, see David Delison Hebb, Piracy and the English Government 1616–1642 (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1994).

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too had allied himself with Spanish Catholics. London had seemingly turned into Marlowe’s Malta. In effect, a revived Barabas, by embodying the dissatisfactions of contemporary, Caroline London, spared the true London radicals from punishment. Or rather, Barabas took that punishment upon himself, boiling in his cauldron for the political complaints of others. Charles could rest assured, if he scented the parallels, that his own malcontents might go the same way. Meanwhile the critics of his rule could look on Barabas as somehow their clandestine martyr. In any event, the play’s revival wound up anticipating far more open and revolutionary transgressions then on their way; this nostalgia for the age of Marlowe paradoxically looked forward, it turned out, to a future revolt: attempting to relieve the country from pirates, the monarchy would eventually demand from coastal towns the so-called Ship Money, much to their residents’ chagrin. Laud’s episcopal reforms, enforced on the Presbyterian North, would then initiate a complementary crisis, as people alleged these were yet another crypto-Catholic ruse to appropriate their wealth. Finally, when Charles brought the Personal Rule to an end and requested money from parliament to aid in his many difficulties, parliament declined to surrender a cent. “Is theft the ground of your religion?” they, like Barabas, wanted to ask (1.2.96). Soon they too were planning revenge.

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PART 4 Marlowe and Shakespeare

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Chapter 12

Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Theoretically Irrelevant Author Constance Brown Kuriyama Texas Tech University

“What does it matter who is speaking?” Michel Foucault, quoting Samuel Beckett, poses this question at the beginning and end of his influential essay, “What Is an Author?”1 According to Foucault, the issue of who is speaking should matter far less than it does. Rather than trying to answer questions about the author and his relationship to his work, we should consider the political significance both of literature and of the process of author-construction. In this respect Foucault differs markedly from Barthes, whose vaguely parricidal goal in “The Death of the Author” is to obliterate the supposed creator of texts in order to liberate and empower the reader.2 Neither Barthes nor Foucault offers any compelling rationale for the superiority of the approach he advocates over others. Nor does Foucault supply any basis for his claims that the author is a device for limiting and controlling meaning or that the author-function emerged at a particular time, when discourses became potentially transgressive. What Foucault and Barthes do give us, in addition to a number of cheeky assertions, are their names clearly printed at the beginning of their essays—just in case anyone cares who is speaking. And yes, Foucault does attribute his pivotal question “What does it matter who is speaking?” to Beckett, as well as referring to St. Jerome, Freud, Marx, Ann Radcliffe, Karl Abraham, and other authors, so it appears that even Foucault recognizes that it sometimes matters who is speaking. Sometimes, indeed, it does not matter who is speaking, particularly when we are considering writing rather than discourse. When an announcer reads the latest bulletin from the National Weather Service, it hardly matters who the announcer is, or which employee of the National Weather Service wrote the bulletin. However, when the comedian Dennis Miller says he wants Kim Jung-Il’s head on a platter, we interpret his remark as an amusing fantasy, whereas if George W. Bush made such a statement, we would more likely respond with alarm. The ability to distinguish speakers is of course crucial in drama. When we read or watch a play, including one by Samuel Beckett, knowing who is speaking can be 1 Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979) 141, 159. 2 Image/Music/Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977) 142–8.

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as important as knowing what is said because the speaker’s character and motives determine the significance of the words. The authorship of plays is equally crucial, for when Beckett’s Hamm quotes Shakespeare’s Prospero in Endgame, “Our revels now are ended” (The Tempest 4.1.148),3 the line acquires meaning simply by being transposed from one of Shakespeare’s best known, most affirmative romances to Beckett’s barren, dying world, which, like Shakespeare’s magical island, may be only a product of the observer’s imagination. Hamm’s deliberate echo of Prospero’s line invites us to see Hamm as a failed Prospero and a failed Shakespeare who nevertheless, like them, ends the play by acknowledging his limitations and his mortality. The implications triggered by the allusion are manifold, and many of them depend partly on our awareness of Shakespeare’s status as iconic author. Since playwrights are inherently less obtrusive than omniscient narrators, they might seem to conform to Barthes’s and Foucault’s notion of the self-effacing author, which is based primarily on twentieth-century experiments with multiple narrators and other non-traditional literary techniques. From a Foucaultian perspective, it shouldn’t matter who wrote The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice, since both plays mirror anti-Jewish prejudices prevalent in the Renaissance and therefore serve the purpose of social control. But in fact these two plays are quite different, and the difference, or difference, becomes more fully comprehensible when we know who their authors were and consider how one of them, Shakespeare, typically reacted to and appropriated the work of his predecessor and rival, Marlowe. In other words, we have to resort to the messy but necessary business of biographical and psychological reading and try to untangle an intertextual dynamic of filiations that are far from mythical. This is, of course, an exercise that Harold Bloom has already undertaken. Well aware that his critical methods and assumptions were under attack by critics he dismisses as “the French flock,” Bloom leapt to Shakespeare’s (and his own) defense, most incisively in his preface to the revised edition of The Anxiety of Influence.4 Shakespeare, the author of authors, offered a logical vantage point from which to defend the sacred principle of authorship, but in Bloom’s eagerness to glorify, if not deify, Shakespeare as the inventor of the human, he does Marlowe a grave disservice. Bloom is not the first critic to champion Shakespeare at Marlowe’s expense. Wilber Sanders’s The Dramatist and the Received Idea (1968) relied heavily on similar gratuitous invidious comparisons. As Kenneth Muir argued in a paper read at the Marlowe Society’s First International Conference in 1983, it is absurd to compare the work of an author in his twenties to the work of an author in his forties.5 This is particularly true when these authors were born in the same year, 3 (New York: Grove, 1958) 56. All quotations from Shakespeare’s plays are from The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 4 The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) xxvii. 5 “Marlowe and Shakespeare,” “A Poet and a filthy Play-maker”: New Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill, and Constance Kuriyama (New

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and when the latter outlived the former by twenty-three years, while working in a genre that evolved and matured as rapidly as English Renaissance drama. Bloom tries to leapfrog these complications by consulting his magic mirror and proclaiming that Marlowe would never have developed as a playwright.6 However, Marlowe’s obvious progression beyond the Tamburlaine plays in just a few years casts serious doubt on this convenient argument. In general, Bloom’s attempt to compare Marlowe and Shakespeare is handicapped by his relatively superficial knowledge of Marlowe’s plays. Bloom tells us, for example, that Marlowe was “murdered by the government,” that he was “a veteran street fighter, a counterintelligence agent.”7 How anything Marlowe supposedly did would be considered “counterintelligence” is a mystery, as is the whereabouts of any evidence that he was “probably” murdered on government orders.8 Unfortunately, Bloom’s reading of Marlowe’s plays is no more judicious than his brief forays into Marlowe biography. The essence of Bloom’s argument about Marlowe and Shakespeare is that Marlowe was incapable of realistic characterization, that his characters are mere cartoons, and that Shakespeare largely freed himself from Marlowe’s influence in the mid 1590s by discovering inwardness and using it to give his characters human depth. While few would deny that Shakespeare developed characterization far beyond the level attained by any of his contemporaries, this refinement was a gradual process, culminating when Shakespeare was in his late thirties and forties, and it was no doubt partly attributable to the experience Shakespeare was fortunate enough to gain in his relatively long life. During Marlowe’s brief lifetime, as Bloom concedes, Shakespeare assiduously imitated Marlowe. He began to develop his own poetic voice only when he stopped trying to write mighty lines, which he never did particularly well. By the time Shakespeare began to recognize and capitalize on his own strengths as a writer, Marlowe had already moved well beyond the stilted rhetoric and rudimentary characterization of Tamburlaine. Since much of Bloom’s argument about the relative merits of Marlowe and Shakespeare is based on a comparison of The Jew of Malta and The Merchant of Venice, we can test his claims against the plays themselves. Indeed, Shakespeare’s title invites comparison of the two by deliberately echoing Marlowe’s title, but it is unlikely that Shakespeare did this to display the artistic superiority of his play to Marlowe’s, as Bloom suggests. Probably what he wanted to emphasize was the difference in perspective or argument of the plays—the matter rather than the manner. The characters in The Jew of Malta, probably written in 1589 or 1590, are indeed farcical, cartoonish characters, as is entirely appropriate. But such characters are not necessarily devoid of inwardness and particularity, which Bloom claims were Shakespeare’s great discoveries. In fact the characters in The Jew of Malta are given an extraordinary number of soliloquies and asides, far more than we find in both York: AMS, 1988) 9. 6 Anxiety xxi. 7 Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead, 1998) 64. 8 Anxiety xxi.

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Tamburlaine plays, or for that matter in The Merchant of Venice. The play opens with a long soliloquy by Barabas running 97 lines, or slightly over half of 1.1, in which he reveals his egoism; his equation of wealth with power and personal worth; his ambivalent assessment of his status as a Jew; his resentment of Christians; his relationship to his daughter; and his reliance on deception for survival. Barabas continues to share his thoughts and feelings with the audience in soliloquies in 1.2, 2.1 and 2.2, 3.4, 4.1 and 4.3, and in 5.1 and 5.2, as well as in a large number of asides. In these we are extensively informed about his devastation at losing his wealth, his rage and plans for revenge, his fears and doubts. The cumulative effect is to underline the difference between Barabas’s public mask and his private self, which the play recognizes as part of the condition of being a Jew in Renaissance Europe. Other characters, notably Abigail and Ithamore, also debate with themselves in soliloquies. Both have an inner life to convey to the audience. Ithamore, unexpectedly but plausibly, proves to be a gullible romantic. Abigail must wrestle with the conflicting claims of her intuitive moral sense, her love for Mathias, and her loyalty to her father. Furthermore, the characters in The Jew of Malta are sharply drawn and distinct. One would never confuse Ithamore with Pilia-Borza, Abigail with Bellamira, or even Jacomo with Bernardine or Mathias with Lodowick, in spite of the fact that the two latter pairs are driven by similar motives. When characters in The Jew of Malta are indistinguishable, such as the Three Jews who represent the Jewish “multitude,” their lack of individuation is purposeful. This refinement and elaboration of character, like the use of more natural, colloquial diction and speech rhythms in the blank verse and prose of The Jew of Malta, is a decided advance over Tamburlaine, in which Tamburlaine’s friends, Techelles, Usumcasane, and Theridamus, speak lines that are often interchangeable. The Merchant of Venice was written in 1596 or 1597, six or seven years after The Jew of Malta, apparently in response to the continuing popularity of Marlowe’s play, which was revived with great success after the execution of Dr. Lopez in 1594. Given the rapid development of technique in English Renaissance drama, we might expect Shakespeare’s play to show some gains in realistic characterization. However, most of the differences in characterization between Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s plays are attributable to Shakespeare’s choice of genre. Rather than write a satirical, generically volatile tragic farce, Shakespeare turned to the familiar ground of romantic comedy for his dramatic framework, made his Jew an antagonist and blocking character rather than a protagonist and titular character, and radically altered the terms of conflict between the Christians and Shylock. Compared to Barabas, Shylock is a far less imposing figure. Barabas is an enormously wealthy merchant who probably only imagines the wicked deeds he catalogues to impress Ithamore—among them usury. This inventive curriculum vitae has less to do with characterizing Barabas than with injecting some incidental satirical thrusts at doctors (a favorite target), money lenders, amoral technicians, and double-dealing war profiteers. Shylock, on the other hand, is a usurer of limited means, who has to borrow from his friend Tubal to finance Bassanio’s extravagant courtship of Portia. Shylock, like Barabas, wants to exact revenge for the disrespect the Christians have shown him, but overall his grievances seem comparatively petty—

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Antonio has been rude to him and, more importantly, cost him money. Shylock has not, like Barabas, had his entire worldview shattered or been robbed of his home and deprived of his secure niche in society by cynical political manipulation and egregious injustice. Instead, Shakespeare makes Shylock the egregious offender and defeats him through an orderly and flexible legal process. Perhaps his more modest dimensions make Shylock more realistic than Barabas, more credible and human, but where in Shylock is the rich inner life that Bloom associates with superior characterization? Virtually all of Shylock’s thoughts and motives are on the surface. He has only one aside, in 1.3, to let us know that he means no good to Antonio when he deceitfully proposes the bond. Otherwise, he tells others exactly what he thinks and what he intends to do. His “I am content” (4.2.394), followed by his hasty exit from the courtroom, suggests depths beneath the surface, but the depths are not mystifying. Shylock is content to escape with his life and keep half of his wealth; he is by no means content with losing his case and being forced to convert. This line, considered with “I am not well” (4.2.396), only reinforces the suspicion that a forced conversion will never make Shylock a better man because his personality is too limited and rigid. Shylock’s energetic defense of Jewish humanity, “Hath not a Jew eyes?” (3.1.59), is an eloquent rhetorical performance, but does his saying this make Shylock seem any more human than the stricken Barabas when he groans, “Why pine not I, and die in this distress?”—especially since Shylock ends his appeal with a bitter threat, “And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” (3.1.66–67). Shylock seems most sympathetically human, and paradoxically most comic, when he expresses his anguish over losing the ring his dead wife gave him during their courtship: “I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys!” (3.1.22–23). Unfortunately, Barabas is no less human and no less comic—though considerably less sympathetic—when he callously tries to excuse a past indiscretion: “But that was in another country; / And besides, the wench is dead” (4.1.44–45).9 The most important difference between the two plays, and one that troubles Bloom, is not a matter of depth of characterization but of attitude. Marlowe’s play, as Bloom recognizes, is a comprehensive attack on hypocrisy and false, selfaggrandizing moral categories. As Bloom and many others have recognized, the most unscrupulous villains are the Christians. Compared to them Barabas, who fancies himself a Machiavel, is woefully inept and inevitably goes down to defeat. On the other hand, those proverbially wicked and treacherous infidels, the Turks, are comparatively generous and fair-minded—giving the Maltese extra time to pay their grossly delinquent tribute and rewarding Barabas generously for his help in capturing the town—while the only inherently virtuous character is a Jewish girl, Abigail. This intricate web of mischievous reversals and inversions mocks conventional stereotypes, and the scathing criticisms it implies obviously disturbed Shakespeare enough to provoke a response. He therefore chose a less aggressive generic mode, reduced Christian crimes to misdemeanors, foibles, and forgivable sins, and placed the burden of deeply ingrained moral inferiority squarely on the Jew, Shylock.

9 All quotations from Marlowe are from The Complete Plays, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett (London: Everyman, 1999).

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Bloom calls Shakespeare’s attitude anti-Semitic, but the term is arguably anachronistic. For Shakespeare, Shylock’s legalism and incapacity for mercy are not ethnic traits, nor are they signs of an innate lack of humanity. Launcelot may tease Jessica by suggesting that she is damned at birth, but nobody in the play, probably not even Launcelot, takes this nonsense seriously. Rather, Shylock’s attitude is a result of a legalistic, pre-Christian belief. His forced conversion, however distasteful it may be for him, offers him a chance at redemption, or so many Elizabethans believed, probably including Shakespeare. From this perspective, his sentence might be considered relatively merciful. One of the cardinal myths about Shakespeare is that we cannot know what he thought. Certainly Shakespeare left many questions unanswered, as did Marlowe, and for that matter as most of us do. Yet in spite of the fact that drama lends itself to indeterminacy, we can sometimes tell exactly what Shakespeare thought. From all indications, he was a mainstream Renaissance Christian of unknown sect who consulted his Geneva Bible often and knew it well. Marlowe had a tendency to irk such people, precisely because it is impossible to tell what Marlowe thought about religion, except that he felt it was open to question and to criticism, in both theory and practice. Marlowe’s insistent chipping away at some of Shakespeare’s fundamental beliefs, such as his probable conviction that Christianity was a morally superior religion, probably did much to energize Shakespeare’s long quarrel (or “agon,” as Bloom calls it) with Marlowe.10 This quarrel, the “extraordinary case of indigestion,” in Bloom’s words, that Marlowe gave Shakespeare,11 lasted well beyond the 1590s, as did Marlowe’s influence on Shakespeare. However, as Shakespeare matured he tended to use Marlowe less obtrusively, and far more skillfully. Hamlet, according to Bloom, is Shakespeare’s definitive masterpiece of inwardness and realistic characterization, and one that is purely self-generated. To bolster this argument, Bloom attributes the Ur-Hamlet to Shakespeare rather than Thomas Kyd, and claims that “when Hamlet begins to speak, Marlowe is not even a shade, and has ceased to trouble the heir who transcended him”12 (Anxiety xxxvii). This is a desperate tactic on Bloom’s part, for Thomas Nashe’s preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon (1589) contains strong indications that Kyd wrote the UrHamlet, and there is no evidence whatsoever that Shakespeare wrote it. Yet regardless of who wrote the Ur-Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600–1601) is deeply indebted to Kyd, as Kyd’s surviving masterpiece, The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587), illustrates. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in his melancholy mourning state, believes Denmark and the world have fallen into decay; Kyd’s Hieronymo, in his melancholy mourning state, sees the universe as corrupt and questions divine justice. Both revengers delay, chide themselves, and debate their course of action in long soliloquies. Both are university men with a passion for drama, both use plays to achieve their goals, and both justify their revenge by claiming to act in accordance with divine will. While Hieronymo is not as intricate and baffling a personality as Hamlet, he clearly possesses inwardness. The obstacles he must overcome are internal as well as external. 10 Anxiety xxxix. 11 Anxiety xxi. 12 Anxiety xxxvii.

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Hamlet’s breadth of speculation and obscure motives are beyond the scope of Hieronymo, but they are hardly Shakespeare’s invention. Prior to Hamlet, the most notable character in English drama with a similar questioning and speculative nature was another student of Wittenberg—Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Bloom wisely avoids discussing this play, for, to a great degree, Fausus shares, and therefore anticipates, Hamlet’s notorious inability to act. Just as Hamlet swears he will avenge his father but seems inexplicably incapable of keeping his word, Faustus repeatedly vows to repent but seemingly cannot do it, for reasons that elude both him and us. Both characters soliloquize extensively, speculating and theorizing without arriving at any definitive answers. Marlowe’s play taught Shakespeare a great deal about the dramatic impact of a cerebral character who knows very well what he must do but for some indefinable reason cannot do it. But Shakespeare’s Christian prince, in pointed contrast to Marlowe’s reprobate scholar, reconciles himself to the divinity that shapes our ends and is presumably wafted up to Heaven by flights of angels rather than being dragged into a gaping Hell Mouth by devils, in spite of the fact that he is wholly or partly responsible for the deaths of eight people, including himself. The ending of Hamlet is distinctly Shakespeare’s, characteristically edging back from the Marlovian abyss to more or less conventional, and ostensibly safer, ground. Similarly orthodox counter-Marlovian assertions mark The Tempest (1611), and once again, the play provoking the reaction appears to be Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, which was revived successfully in 1602, and was frequently performed for more than a decade thereafter.13 As in Hamlet, Shakespeare seems to be trying to exorcise the devils raised in Marlowe’s play by creating an anti-Faustus. Whereas Faustus, whose name means “fortunate,” is ironically damned, Prospero ultimately prospers. Shakespeare’s magician is no base-born necromancer but a deposed duke, a beneficent philosopher-prince, overthrown by his evil brother, who wants only to reclaim his dukedom and forestall future coups. Faustus is a necromancer; Prospero, a white magician. Faustus is wanton and lascivious; Prospero, a stern enforcer of chastity. Time is a crucial element in both plays.14 Prospero, instead of squandering 24 years in frivolous distractions, accomplishes his goal in a few hours. Unlike Faustus, who wants godlike power and clings irrationally to his bad bargain, Prospero finally recognizes and accepts his human limitations. When the time comes to renounce his magic, he willingly complies. Instead of offering desperately to burn his book, Prospero calmly resolves to drown it. Rather than trying frantically to escape death, Prospero ruefully accepts it. Does it matter who is speaking? In the case of Marlowe and Shakespeare, it matters tremendously because of fundamental differences in authorial personality, style, and attitude. Marlowe was an intellectual provocateur who aimed to startle and disturb his audience and managed to do so in a strangely entertaining fashion. 13 David Lucking has pointed out a number of parallels between Faustus and The Tempest, but he does not see them as part of a pattern of response on Shakespeare’s part. “Our Devils Now Are Ended: A Comparative Analysis of The Tempest and Doctor Faustus,” Dalhousie Review 80.2 (Summer 2000): 152–60. 14 Lucking 154–6.

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Shakespeare was more reserved, generally keeping at least one foot firmly planted on familiar ground and allowing his audience to do the same. Once Shakespeare stopped trying to imitate Marlowe, he seemed mainly concerned with defanging or detoxifying him because Marlowe’s unconventional thinking and transgressive energies aroused far more anxiety in Shakespeare than Marlowe’s influence. At the same time, Shakespeare was busily appropriating and adapting features of Marlowe’s work that he admired, whenever such material suited his purposes. It is even possible that he felt no anxiety at all about his indebtedness to Marlowe, since creative borrowing was actively encouraged during the period, beginning in the grammar schools, as was the ambition to equal or surpass one’s literary models. Eventually Shakespeare developed a dramatic style so distinct from Marlowe’s, as his temperament, perceptions, and attitudes were always distinct, that it seems impossible for either one of them to have written the other’s plays. Shakespeare, for all his genius and massive acquired skill, was constitutionally incapable of writing The Jew of Malta—or Volpone, or The Changeling, or The Duchess of Malfi. Similarly, Marlowe was incapable of writing The Merchant of Venice, not because Marlowe would never have developed as a playwright, but because this play’s conceptual and aesthetic premises were anathema to him. We should celebrate this vital diversity of authorship, not dismiss it as mythical bourgeois individualism. The uniqueness of human beings is not a myth; it is a biological fact. Nor should we sacrifice other authors on the altar of one privileged, supposedly monolithic genius. Neither of these approaches can tell us how literature, and the subtly interdependent individual talents who create it, actually work.

Chapter 13

“Glutted with Conceit”: Imprints of Doctor Faustus on The Tempest Robert A. Logan University of Hartford

I. The following study focuses on just one portion of the legacy of Doctor Faustus found in Shakespeare’s works: it explores the possibilities of the influence of Marlowe’s drama on The Tempest and the metadramatic connections between the two plays. I am basing my exploration on the premise that an influence embedded in Shakespeare’s consciousness as firmly and deeply as Marlowe’s does not simply wither and die but, over time, extends its roots and develops. Few would dispute Shakespeare’s familiarity with Doctor Faustus, even though the degree to which it influenced him is still heavily in contention. Records of the earliest productions of Doctor Faustus indicate that it enjoyed an unusual popularity.1 Moreover, whatever other versions of the play may have existed, the variations in the 1616 B-Text from the 1604 A-Text tell us that it was so well received initially that the response provided Marlowe, his collaborator(s), his reviser(s), or some combination thereof with strong incentives to enhance the original script—principally, by adding comic antics and displays of magic. Shakespeare could not have missed either the initial impact of the play or its continuing popularity. Furthermore, he appears to have been captivated by Faustus’s exclamation, “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships.”2 His adaptation of this line in Richard II, Troilus and Cressida, and King Lear indicates that its emphatic rhythm, hyperbolic sentiment, and wondering

1 See David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen’s edition of Doctor Faustus A- and B-texts (1604, 1616): Christopher Marlowe and His Collaborator and Revisers (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1993) 48–9, for a survey of the earliest recorded performances of the play. See also Frances A. Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge, 1979) 115, who describes the popularity of the play, mentioning that Henslowe’s Diary records “over twenty performances” between 1594 and 1597. 2 Doctor Faustus 5.1.91 (A-Text) or 5.1.94 (B-Text). All references to the two texts of Doctor Faustus are from the edition by Bevington and Rasmussen. Act, scene, and line numbers of both the A- and B-Texts are included in parentheses in the body of the text.

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tone lingered in his imagination with undiminished force.3 In continuing to make use of the line, he also reflects a confidence that its familiarity was widespread enough to produce resonances in his audiences some ten to fifteen years after Doctor Faustus was composed and first performed.4 The abiding popularity of the play provided Shakespeare’s imagination with renewed opportunities for ruminating on the agony of damnation and the fascination of magic and for transforming both of these subjects for use in his own dramas. The two late plays of Shakespeare that seem to bear the most obvious imprints of Doctor Faustus are Macbeth and The Tempest. There is no clear critical consensus, however, on how strong a debt, especially an indirect debt, each of the plays owes. In surveying criticism on this subject, I find that the degree of influence Doctor Faustus exerts, especially on The Tempest, has produced contradictory assessments. For example, James Shapiro believes that Shakespeare’s “engagement with Marlowe appears to come to an end, around the turn of the century”5 and, consequently, that neither Macbeth nor The Tempest reveals a Marlovian inheritance. Marjorie Garber 3

Shakespeare uses the line in Richard II: Was this face the face That every day under his household roof Did keep ten thousand men? Was this the face That like the sun did make beholders wink? Is this the face which faced so many follies That was at last outfaced by Bolingbroke? (4.1.281–86); in Troilus and Cressida: Why, she [Helen of Troy] is a pearl Whose price hath launched above a thousand ships And turned crowned kings to merchants. (2.2.81–83); and in King Lear: Was this a face To be opposed against the jarring winds? [To stand against the deep dread-bolted thunder? In the most terrible and nimble stroke Of quick cross lightning to watch, poor perdu, With this thin helm?] (4.7.32–7) All references to the plays of Shakespeare are from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller (New York: Penguin, 2002). 4 Jonathan Bate points out in The Genius of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 129, that Doctor Faustus is “the one pre-Shakespearean play to endure in the theatrical repertoire.” Thus, it is not surprising that Shakespeare could expect his audiences to respond to what many think is its most famous line. Furthermore, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, the casualness and familiarity with which Bardolph mentions Marlowe’s Faustus suggests that the story of Faustus was widespread and enduring: “... they threw me off ... in a slough of mire; and set spurs and away, like three German devils, three Doctor Faustuses” (4.5.62–4). Interestingly, Bardolph recalls an incident in the 1616 B-text version of Doctor Faustus (4.2.79–85), published long after The Merry Wives of Windsor was written (c.1600). This apparent anomaly may indicate that other versions that included this incident existed before 1600. 5 James Shapiro, Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) 81. In a parenthesis, however, Shapiro does say, “... in the

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posits an indebtedness to Doctor Faustus in Macbeth but evidently not in The Tempest.6 Jonathan Bate also perceives some connections between Marlowe’s play and Macbeth but, apparently, locates even stronger links between the concern with magic in Doctor Faustus and that in The Tempest and, more particularly, a significant verbal parallel between the two plays: When Prospero says ‘I’ll drown my book,’ he is clearly echoing Faustus’ last unfulfilled promise, ‘I’ll burn my books.’ The fact that the quotation bobs up to the surface of The Tempest shows that Shakespeare is still haunted by Marlowe.7

David Lucking and David Young both support the connection between Doctor Faustus and The Tempest; like Bate, Lucking notes the same specific verbal “transmutation” in “I’ll drown my book.”8 I am less sure of the inevitability of the verbal echo than are Bate and Lucking, but I do agree with all three critics that, even in this very late play, “Shakespeare is still haunted by Marlowe.” Moreover, in all probability, there is at least a grain of truth in Bate’s emphatic overstatement that “Shakespeare ... only became Shakespeare because of the death of Marlowe.”9 The influence of Doctor Faustus on The Tempest is chiefly doctrinal. Each play expresses a strong interest in magic and the magician as representations of the imagination; and each play features a protagonist who is a magician and, from a metadramatic perspective, also a playwright.10 Ostensibly, however, Faustus and Prospero are on opposite sides of the fence since the former is fascinated with

Faustian moments of Macbeth or The Tempest we find no verbal recollections, or parodies of Marlowe’s play” (96), but he fails to explore his suggestion of “Faustian moments.” 6 Marjorie Garber, “Marlovian Vision / Shakespearean Revision,” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 22 (1979): 3. Garber concentrates largely on the influence of the two Tamburlaine plays on Henry IV, Parts I and II, Henry V, and Julius Caesar. Shapiro 79, endorses her reading of Hal’s victory over Hotspur as a metaphor for Shakespeare’s dramatic victory over Marlowe. I prefer a less bellicose metaphor to describe Shakespeare’s assertion of his creative individuality during his lifelong emulation of Marlowe. 7 Bate 129. 8 David Lucking, “Our Devils Now Are Ended: A Comparative Analysis of The Tempest and Doctor Faustus,” The Dalhousie Review 80 (Summer 2000): 151–67, esp. 152 and 163. For a discussion of the “transmutation” of Faustus’s “I’ll burn my books,” see 158– 60 and 166. See also David Young, “Where the Bee Sucks: A Triangular Study of Doctor Faustus, The Alchemist, and The Tempest,” Shakespeare’s Romances Reconsidered, ed. Carol McGinnis Kay and Henry E. Jacobs (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978) 149–66, esp. 160–161. Young appears to be less certain of the verbal echo than Bate and Lucking (see Young 153). 9 Bate 105. 10 Alvin B. Kernan has a book on this subject: The Playwright as Magician: Shakespeare’s Image of the Poet in the English Public Theater (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979). The most recent essay on the subject is Sara Munson Deats’s “‘Mark this show’: Magic and Theater in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus,” the first essay in the present volume.

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necromancy and the latter absorbed in white or natural magic.11 Early in Marlowe’s play, the Evil Angel encourages Faustus to enter into ... that famous art Wherein all nature’s treasury [treasure—B-Text] is contained. Be thou on earth as Jove is in the sky, Lord and commander of these elements. (A-Text 1.1.76–79; B-Text 1.1.73–76)

Spurred on by this exhortation, Faustus envisions his powers as a magician and exclaims, “How am I glutted with conceit of this” (A-Text 1.1.80; B-Text 1.1.77). But the exhortation contains confusion. Neither the Evil Angel nor Faustus gives a hint that becoming “Lord and commander of these elements” conforms to the religio-moral aim of white, not black magic. Nor, on the contrary, do they indicate that they are purposely undermining a conventional belief. According to Pico della Mirandola in his Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), because white magic has the power to command spirits and demons, it “brings forth into the open the miracles concealed in the recesses of the world, in the depths of nature and in the storehouses and mysteries of God,” enabling the magician to “wed earth and heaven, that is ... lower things to the endowments and powers of higher things.”12 Conversely, in black magic, the magician is subservient to hellish demons and usually works on their behalf.13 Thus, Faustus has subordinated himself to a much more exacting taskmaster than the God he rejects. By selecting black rather than white magic, he has also limited the chances for the “omnipotence” (A-Text 1.1.56; B-Text 1.1.54) that he initially sought. Whether Marlowe deliberately and subversively creates confusion through the ambiguity of the Evil Angel’s words and Faustus’s immediate affirmation, the jumbling of attributes of white and black magic reflects a popular notion of magic that was no clearer in the early modern period than it is now. The intoxication that Faustus conveys when he says, “How am I glutted with conceit of this,” is a psychological state that Prospero also experiences as he thrills to the acquisition of unlimited power in “being transported / And rapt in secret studies” (The Tempest 1.2.76–7). One can imagine that Marlowe and Shakespeare themselves experienced something similar as they set about, with the absolute power of a god, to people the worlds of their plays, select the events, and position them in movements of time. In the two plays, however, we are invited to regard this state with ambivalence, for, as exhilarating as it is for each protagonist to experience and for an audience to watch and hear, we are made aware that both protagonists cross the line into self-indulgence and become self-destructive: Faustus sells his soul for power; and, in order to empower himself as a magician, Prospero neglects his political responsibilities, not only making himself and his daughter vulnerable to his enemies but ensuring that they suffer the consequences. In reflecting on the 11 In saying this, I am not overlooking the interest in black magic introduced into the play through Sycorax, a witch who could easily have fit into the group of witches in Macbeth. 12 These quotations are included in William Blackburn’s discussion of Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486): “‘Heavenly Words’: Marlowe’s Faustus as a Renaissance Magician,” English Studies in Canada 4.1 (Spring 1978): 3. 13 Blackburn 3.

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ambivalence in our response to the glutted emotional state of each aspirer, we are led to consider the uses and abuses of the imagination and, ultimately, the functions and powers of the imagination in the two dramatists themselves. As Alvin Kernan expresses it, “Shakespeare is following Marlowe in using the magician to prefigure the playwright.”14 I agree. But before assessing Shakespeare’s debt to Marlowe in The Tempest, let us examine Marlowe’s play and attempt to locate in it what Shakespeare might have discovered and wanted to admit as an influence. II. For Marlowe in Doctor Faustus, magic consists of what in the twenty-first century we understand as a combination of science and fantasy. However, for sixteenthand seventeenth-century minds, influenced by a complex of Hermetic ideas and the theories of Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino, and especially Giordano Bruno, magic encompassed the material and spiritual worlds and on every social level was believed in, practiced, and widely revered.15 Consequently, the magician was highly esteemed. As James Robinson Howe explains, the magician not only links old and new science and philosophy but also “is the embodiment of the ideal qualities of man, as the Renaissance saw them. He represents deep religion and philosophy

14 Kernan 157. 15 For a highly informative, clearly written examination of ideas about magic and the magician during the Renaissance in England and the influence of these ideas on the Tamburlaine plays in particular but briefly on Marlowe’s other plays as well, see James Robinson Howe, Marlowe, Tamburlaine, and Magic (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976). Howe’s description of the strains of magic in the Renaissance and the currents of intellectual thought about it are summarized in his introductory chapter (3–14). His treatment of the pervasiveness of magic in the Renaissance occurs on page 24. For a consideration of the notion that “magical beliefs were both widespread and passionately contested in early modern England,” see Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997) 128. For a discussion of the influence of Agrippa and his writings on Doctor Faustus, see Gareth Roberts, “Necromantic Books: Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus and Agrippa of Nettesheim,” Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture, ed. Darryll Grantley and Peter Roberts (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1996) 148–71. For an account of the way in which magical thinking serves as the underpinning for several of Shakespeare’s notions as far-ranging as his “seeming obsession with threatened female chastity and ... his preoccupation with siege warfare” (11), see Linda Woodbridge, The Scythe of Saturn: Shakespeare and Magical Thinking (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1994). I must admit that the more I read about early modern magic, the more I agree with Barbara Howard Traister, Heavenly Necromancers: The Magician in English Renaissance Drama (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1984): . . . the study of Renaissance magical theory is enormously complicated by the imprecision of terminology and by variations in kinds of magic, many of which seem to overlap or duplicate one another. Discussions of magic are further obfuscated by a deliberate vagueness on the part of philosophers about their specific beliefs. (8)

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tied to practical ability in this world.”16 Because Faustus espouses necromancy, he understandably falls short of the ideal; yet, paradoxically, he associates “honour” with the study of necromancy, suggesting that his initial self-image was that of a white magician: O, what a world of profit and delight, Of power, of honour, of omnipotence Is promised to the studious artisan! (A-Text 1.1.55–57; B-Text 1.1.53–55; my italics)

Once he makes his pact with the devil, he turns away from acting as a magician to practicing what, strictly speaking, must be identified as witchcraft.17 Even so, he can never quite forget his instinctive aspirations as a white magician, for he continues to act the part whenever he tries to find “the holy in the profane,” as he does in responding to Helen.18 Like Macbeth, he has to suppress good to embrace evil, and we are always aware of what he might have been had his inclinations toward good prevailed. William Blackburn points out19 that Faustus confuses the two types of magic as they are clearly set forth by Pico della Mirandola: goetia (witchcraft), which is demonic and involves subservience to the powers of evil, and magia, which asserts the superiority of the magician to all spirits and demons (they are in fact subservient to him) and seeks “the utter perfection of natural philosophy.”20 Blackburn’s view is that Faustus reveals his ignorance of magic, particularly in his conjuring,21 and that “ignorance of magic is a central metaphor in the play because … it is really an ignorance of the proper way to use language.”22 Thus, he concludes, Faustus “tends to confuse language and reality, his words with those things to which they refer.”23 The argument Blackburn presents would be more persuasive if it explained why the Evil Angel also reveals the same ignorance when he urges Faustus to indulge in magia and become, like Jove, lord and commander of the natural elements (AText 1.1.76–79; B-Text 1.1.73–76). Ultimately, I am more willing than Blackburn to attribute the cause of the confusion about magic to Marlowe than to Faustus. 16 Howe 12. 17 One critic who makes such an identification is David Woodman, White Magic and English Renaissance Drama (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973) 37–8. For an explanation of how Faustus differs from Prospero once he makes his pact with the devil, see Anthony Harris, Night’s Black Agents: Witchcraft and Magic in SeventeenthCentury English Drama (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1980) esp. 3 and 115–18. 18 The phrase is from C. L. Barber, Creating Elizabethan Tragedy: The Theater of Marlowe and Kyd, ed. and intro. Richard P. Wheeler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) 104. Barber explains the applicability of the phrase to Faustus on pages 104–9. 19 Blackburn 2–7. 20 Blackburn 3; here quoting Pico’s words in his Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486). 21 Blackburn 4–5. 22 Blackburn 6. 23 Blackburn 7.

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Unlike Faustus, Prospero comes close to portraying the ideal of the magician,24 even if he seems not to satisfy Howe’s criterion of “deep religion,” for he has the most crucial attribute of the magus: “the unifying mind which sees into the essence of things.”25 Prospero has a mind that rises above feelings of personal animosity, discarding superficies to assert the union of proper ethical and social values. Ironically, Prospero supports the conventional values of a society from which he willingly isolated himself and, at the end of the play, to which he is reluctant to return. At the risk of psychological impairment, in returning to Milan he has made a noble gesture on behalf of society, thereby proving that “the unifying mind” requires a serious humbling of the ego. In reaching into the “essence” of social morality, Prospero has had to abjure his magic, the study of which, paradoxically, enabled his unifying mind. Shakespeare appears to be exalting moral idealism on the one hand and subverting it with psychological realism on the other, leaving the characterization and the values of the play deliberately in a state of tantalizing ambiguity. At first, thinking of himself as a magician, Faustus seems eager to acquire the grandeur that attaches itself to the figure of the magus, but, at the same time, his deepest, controlling motivation is, unquestionably, a goal to which the magus did not aspire, the desire for unlimited power: “A sound [i.e., effective] magician is a mighty god” (A-Text 1.1.64) or “A sound magician is a demigod” (B-Text 1.1.61).26 Faustus describes the desired outcome of this driving force in the most encompassing of terms, not only pertaining to the earth but to the cosmos: “All things that move between the quiet poles [the motionless poles of the universe] / Shall be at my command” (A-Text 1.1.59–60; B-Text 1.1.56–57). In an exhortation quoted above (A-Text 1.1.76–79; B-Text 1.1.73–76), the Evil Angel reduces and makes more specific the scholar’s aims; he urges Faustus to achieve what we would understand as a scientific mastery of the four basic “elements” of nature—earth, air, fire, and water—and, presumably, the laws and processes of nature which govern the 24 Howe’s assessment is the following: Shakespeare, becoming gradually more and more aware of the grand meaning of art in the theatre, culminates his career with a glorification of the magus in the character of Prospero. (138; my italics) For another supportive discussion, see Woodman’s chapter (in White Magic and the English Renaissance Drama) entitled “Prospero as the White Magician” 73–86. For still another, see Patrick Cheney, “Love and Magic in Doctor Faustus: Marlowe’s Indictment of Spenserian Idealism,” Mosaic 17.4 (Fall 1984): 93–109, who claims that Shakespeare’s idealization of Prospero as a magus is like Spenser’s idealization of Merlin; both focus on magic and its ability to promote ideal love: “like Merlin, the great magus Prospero uses magic power not to secure a beloved for himself, as Faustus and Subtle do, but to unite other lovers … [in] an incarnate form of heaven on earth that he presents in his wedding masque” (101). 25 Howe 12. Howe believes that Marlowe confers on Tamburlaine the attributes of the figure of the magus and that, as a result, in a sixteenth-century context Tamburlaine would have been seen as an ideal man. 26 See Ian McAdam, The Irony of Identity (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999) 124, for a discussion of some possible implications contained in the differences between the A- and B-Texts’ versions of this line.

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elements’ myriad combinations. The advice of the Evil Angel is strikingly similar to the ultimate ends, if not the inductive means, of Descartes when, in his Discourse on Method (1637), he advocates a pragmatic over a speculative knowledge. Descartes suggests that through such useful knowledge, we can learn about the force and actions of fire, water, air, of the stars, of the heavens, and of all the bodies that surround us—knowing them as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our artisans— we may in the same fashion employ them in all the uses for which they are suited, thus rendering ourselves the masters and possessors of nature.27 (my italics)

The italicized final line, understood less cosmologically, could be taken as Faustus’s chief goal as the Evil Angel states it. Ironically, Faustus’s evil is Descartes’s good and, as the history of intellectual currents of thought has proved, especially with regard to science, ours as well. As it turns out, Faustus’s power is considerably less than he hoped for, and he is deflected from his lofty goal of control in the universe, for his achievements are the consequence of relatively innocuous fantasies rather than scientific endeavors, beginning with the parade of sins and ending with the grapes brought instantaneously from another part of the world to satisfy the longings of the pregnant Duchess of Vanholt. In an anguished moment, Faustus commands Mephistopheles to torment or perhaps even kill the Old Man. But Faustus never commits violent crimes and, therefore, never uses his magic powers to escape punishment; nor does he ever object to Mephistopheles’s failure to live up to their bargain.28 Compared with the evil nature of the Duke of Guise or of Macbeth, his wickedness is very bland pudding. Because of his activities as a magician, Faustus has been likened to Prospero,29 although their perspectives differ. For Prospero, happily self-involved, magic is an engrossing scholarly project, one, he discovers, that can be used to promote moral wellbeing and serve practical ends. More heady and more eager for absolute power, Faustus finds in magic a means for engaging in incantations and making a pact with the devil in order to fulfill his fantasy of creating for himself a world of profit and delight.30 However, psychologically, the two men share similarities. While in Milan as its ruler, Prospero becomes as “glutted with conceit” of the powers of magic as 27 René Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637). In Descartes: Philosophical Writings, sel. and trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Random, 1958) 130–131. 28 For the possible traditions behind Faustus’s foolishness in not balking at Mephistopheles’s violations of the terms of the bargain, see L. T. Fitz, “‘More Than Thou Has Wit to Ask’: Marlowe’s Faustus as Numskull,” Folklore 88 (1977): 215–19. 29 See, for example, Bevington and Rasmussen 32–3. See also Matthew N. Proser, The Gift of Fire: Aggression and the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Peter Lang, 1995) 6. Lucking 151–67, not only sees a correspondence in Faustus’s and Prospero’s involvement with magic but also points to a parallel in the way in which the protagonists’ magical powers are parodied in the two plays’ subplots (160). See also Lisa Hopkins, Christopher Marlowe: A Literary Life (New York: Palgrave, 2000) 75, who, among other associations, links the two protagonists’ “desire to control seeing and being seen.” 30 See the distinctions that McAdam 112–13 makes about Faustus’s relationship with the devils and the foolishness of his incantation. McAdam reads Faustus’s involvement with magic psychologically, as a sign that Faustus’s “identity is extremely unstable” (113), and

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Faustus does. Thus, both magicians, in their most exhilarating moments of suffusion in magic, reveal an egotistical pride that blinds them to a more pressing reality. In spite of the obvious difference of focus between Faustus’s necromancy and Prospero’s white magic, some of their actions are similar. The most specific parallel is the snatching of the food at the “banquet” in each play—from the Pope and his entourage in Doctor Faustus (A-Text 3.1.60–87; B-Text 3.2.29–90) and from Alonso, Gonzalo, Sebastian, and Antonio in The Tempest (3.3.18–82). Ironically, Marlowe’s earliest audiences would have cheered Faustus’s anti-Catholic antics and considered them moral, although, generally speaking, Faustus is an amoral magician. Prospero, on the other hand, despite the prickly elements in his personality, always works toward moral ends; he never runs the risk of blasphemy, even when he is, in effect, playing God. From an early modern religious perspective and in accordance with the dictates of honorable white magic, what he is doing would be understood as an attempt to please God. Taking a purely secular perspective, Shakespeare portrays Prospero as a magician who uses his powers to free Ariel from the spell of Sycorax, to control Caliban in order to inculcate him with something more than brute instinct, and to secure an appropriate husband for his daughter. Moreover, even though his magical powers do not appear to extend beyond the island, once the royal party arrives, instead of acting out of anger and merely seeking revenge, he takes advantage of the opportunity to forgive Alonso, Sebastian, and Antonio and to try to revive in them some semblance of an ethical consciousness. As he says to Ariel: Though with their [his enemies’] high wrongs I am struck to th’ quick, Yet with my nobler reason ‘gainst my fury Do I take part. The rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance. They being penitent, The sole drift of my purpose doth extend Not a frown further. (5.1.25–30)

Prospero’s eventual abandonment of his magic—“... this rough magic / I here abjure” (5.1.50–51)—and his departure from the island not only suggest that his intentions are honorable and have always been so, but also that, like Faustus, he is forced to succumb to “the strong necessity of time” (Antony and Cleopatra 1.3.42) and to renounce the pleasures that his imaginative engrossment with magic brings. From the perspective of maintaining the stability of society, such pleasures are considered dangerously self-indulgent. Thus, he relinquishes his individuality as a magician and as a father to reenter society as a political leader and, in arranging for the marriage of his daughter, to meet the conventional demands of society. But, sadly, returning to society is returning to a place “where / Every third thought shall be my grave” (5.1.311–12)—certainly not a ringing endorsement of his new corporate existence. Considered from the viewpoint of a humanist, bringing down the curtain on the protagonist’s magical powers in both Doctor Faustus and The Tempest signals the beginning of a final, direct confrontation with what the two plays recognize as the most ugly and fearful aspect of ultimate reality for human beings, the descent into concludes that his “damnation, his descent into hell, may be seen as a theatrical metaphor expressing his inability to resolve the conflict between self-assertion and self-surrender” (113).

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death.31 Neither playtext embraces the solution to the passage of time and death offered by orthodox Christianity—namely, salvation—but, given the presence of its religious and moral atmosphere, Doctor Faustus has more trouble exorcising the possibility than does The Tempest. Symbolically, the manifestations of magic in both dramas represent the results of a free play of the protagonists’ imaginations and the absoluteness of their power. Joel Altman points out that, strictly speaking, the knowledge of magic is not dependent upon possessing an imagination.32 Both Faustus and Prospero claim that such intelligence is achieved through study, not imaginative rumination. In a passage already quoted, Faustus exalts the knowledge open to “the studious artisan” (A-Text 1.1.57; B-Text 1.1.55) and Prospero tells Miranda: the liberal arts ... being all my study, The government I cast upon my brother And to my state grew stranger, being transported And rapt in secret studies. (1.2.73–77) …………………………………………….. I thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated To closeness, and the bettering of my mind With that which, but by being so retired, O’erprized all popular rate ... (1.2.89–92)

But, once Marlowe and Shakespeare have indicated that Faustus and Prospero have mastered a knowledge of magic, they associate their protagonists’ practice of magic with the imagination. Altman and Ian McAdam have both argued, although on different grounds, that Marlowe establishes a discernible link between magic and imagination.33 For Altman, Marlowe conflates magic and poetry because both use the imagination to invent reality34; he feels that “Marlowe is testing the viability of an imagination that seeks to liberate itself from the trap of a fallen history and reassert its dominion over nature.”35 In establishing the link between magic and imagination, McAdam takes his argument in a universalized, humanistic direction (different from mine). He tells us that in Doctor Faustus, “the false power of the play—magic—may

31 Something similar about the concern with death in Doctor Faustus and Macbeth can be posited. The fact that another parallel can be drawn between Doctor Faustus and The Tempest not only gives support to the notion of Shakespeare’s consistency, showing how haunted he was by the destructiveness of time, but makes even more plausible the influence of Marlowe’s dramatization on the artistic consciousness of Shakespeare. 32 Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) 374–5 and note 47. 33 Altman 374–5 and note 47 and McAdam 133–40. Like Altman and McAdam, I am interested in Marlowe’s concern with the failure of the imagination in Doctor Faustus and elsewhere, but I am also interested in its functions, powers, uses, and abuses, seen from the perspective of Marlowe and Shakespeare commenting on themselves professionally. 34 Altman 374. 35 Altman 375.

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thus be seen as a symbol of the imagination.”36 As such, Faustus’s failure is his lack of imaginative response to human experience: “This failure arises in part from an excessive confidence in words, as if the poetic imagination gives one direct access to worldly power.”37 McAdam concentrates on Marlowe’s continuing interest in the failure of the imagination; Altman would agree with his position, although, as we have just seen, he arrives at it by a different route. That Shakespeare follows in Marlowe’s footsteps in linking magic with the imagination is patently suggested by Prospero’s commentary upon the masque that he directs for the benefit of Ferdinand and Miranda (4.1.148–63), beginning “Our revels now are ended,” and by his summary of his magical feats as he abjures his “rough magic” (5.1.33–57). In both speeches, the feats of a magician merge with the acts of imagination of the playwright, a representation that has readily enabled critics and students of Shakespeare to interpret the speeches from the playwright’s perspective as, in part, self-referential. If we also regard the practice of magic in Doctor Faustus and The Tempest as a symbol of the imagination in happy psychic operation, whatever other associations this practice may evoke as a symbol of deleterious consequences and, ultimately, failure in Faustus and Prospero, we see that performing magic feats can be a source of joy. Initially, Faustus is “glutted with conceit” and Prospero “transported” and “rapt”; in addition, and more pragmatically, the imagination proves to be highly useful to both figures. But it can also be abusive—knowingly or unknowingly. Faustus is aware of its abusive potential because his magical powers are tied securely to the devil as his treatment of the Old Man and Benvolio attest (in the B-Text 4.2.67–95); but, generally, he does not cruelly maltreat others in his use of it. Prospero is unintentionally injurious in risking his and Miranda’s lives as a result of his absorption in the study of magic, and he can be hurtful with his powers as a means of keeping Caliban under control; but he, too, is not gratuitously cruel. Insofar as Faustus and Prospero unwittingly deceive themselves through their involvement with their magical powers, they are self-abusive. Faustus, with Mephistopheles’s help, also deceives himself knowingly, for he does not want to face the truth of either damnation or salvation. In imposing such a restriction on himself as he exercises his powers of magic, Faustus evinces a limited and, hence, defective imagination. Without realizing it, Prospero allows magic to become an all-consuming obsession until he arrives on the island, where it also becomes a necessity for neutralizing the black magic of Sycorax and for creating civil order out of chaos. Both men find in magic a means for escaping from a conventional public life, and both are aware that their imaginative flight is deliberate. In each play, the figure of the magician or magus can be seen to stand for the author who, in playing God the Creator, uses his imagination to become glutted with conceit. Thus, inescapably, Doctor Faustus and Prospero reflect to some extent Marlowe and Shakespeare as creators. I say, “to some extent,” because Marlowe and Shakespeare as writers of dramatic fiction have greater autonomy in exercising their imaginations in art than either Faustus or Prospero who, as magicians, appear to have

36 McAdam 133. 37 McAdam 133.

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stringent obligations to the communities of which they are a part.38 Thus, Faustus maintains self-control, not becoming a fiend and creating havoc in his world, and Prospero establishes order in the small island community over which he presides. If it is not unusual in literary criticism to find manipulators of magic likened to writers manipulating the products of their imagination to enthrall an audience, it is less common to discover writers providing commentary on their own artistic endeavors through the figure of a magus.39 Faustus, who defies the norms and attempts to reinvent orthodox reality, is an extension of Marlowe the writer who challenges traditional theatrical and literary norms in the Tamburlaine plays and subverts standard ethical, gender, and sociopolitical norms in works as diverse as Dido, Queen of Carthage, The Massacre at Paris, Edward II, and Hero and Leander. However, Faustus also serves as a counterpoint to his creator. The magician’s self-imposed limitations are not the playwright’s nor is the paltriness of his imagination Marlowe’s, except, as Altman declares, “in the structure itself, where for the first time Marlowe reverts to the moral frame technique of the older drama, so that his action proper is ‘contained’ in a way that it has never been before.”40 Unlike Marlowe, Faustus relies more on accepted traditions than on spontaneous inventions in plying his imagination—in a sense, more on the book than the word. But, like Marlowe, Faustus understands the importance of the imagination in those creative endeavors that give meaning to existence. At the same time, also like Marlowe, he makes clear the limitations of the imagination in achieving and sustaining power. In the case of Prospero as a surrogate for Shakespeare’s commentary on his art, there exists a long, sentimental critical tradition of associating the Duke with the playwright readying himself for retirement from the theatrical world of London. As everyone acknowledges, this tradition is occasioned by Prospero’s two most wellknown speeches, referred to already—the first, uttered after the masque he produces for the benefit of Ferdinand and Miranda: “Our revels now are ended ... ” (4.1.148– 63), and the second, when he promises to “abjure” “this rough magic” and “drown” his “book” (5.1.33–57). More important than this association is Shakespeare’s selfreflexive employment of Prospero to comment upon how the powers and function 38 Compare Altman 389–90, who makes a similar distinction in his discussion of Tudor drama as “a medium of liberal inquiry” (389). Altman makes the point that “While it is true that logic, rhetoric, and poetry may be applied to both good and evil ends, nonetheless as arts they may be cultivated without immediate and obvious reference to external cultural values” (389). The same distinction holds true for drama, with one difference. Given the live theater audience and the necessity of communicating with it with immediacy, the playwright has a stronger obligation to the community that makes up the audience than the poet does. 39 In addition to Kernan’s The Playwright As Magician and Deats’s “‘Mark this show’: Magic and Theater in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus,” another recent example of a critic who not only makes the connection between magic and imagination but between the magical arts and the dramatic arts is Diehl 76–80. Closer to my focus while commenting on a different play are Sara M. Deats and Lisa S. Starks, “‘So neatly plotted, and so well perform’d’: Villain as Playwright in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta,” Theatre Journal 44 (1992): 375–89. Of course, the chief early proponent for this critical perspective is James L. Calderwood, Shakespearean Metadrama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971). 40 Altman 272.

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of the creative imagination can be stifled by society. This concern is certainly not new to Shakespeare’s dramas. It takes us back, for example, to a similar concern in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There, Shakespeare sets society, represented by the court and associated with reason and the establishment of social values, in opposition to nature, represented by the woods and linked with the imagination and the acting out of personal, individual values. During the course of the play, Shakespeare never allows the imagination to be seriously hampered by reason and society. But we nevertheless see the potential for serious conflict, indicated by Theseus’s insistence upon controlling the imagination: when he tells Hermia she must look with her father’s eyes and marry Demetrius (1.1), when he scoffs at the imagination of the lover, lunatic, and poet (5.1.2–22), and when he allows the imagination of the newlyweds to be unleashed only after the mechanicals’ play: “Lovers to bed; ’tis almost fairy time” (5.1.356). Shakespeare’s self-reflection in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as in The Tempest (but more distantly), comes in the wake of his early awareness of Marlowe’s boldness in standing back to assess and even admire his accomplishments as a playwright. This boldness is reflected not only in the selfadvertising prologue to the first Tamburlaine play and “The general welcomes [the first part of] Tamburlaine received” from its audiences, noted in the prologue to the second Tamburlaine play (line 1), but also in the innovative employment of heroic language and a mix of the genres of epic and tragedy strongly in evidence in the two Tamburlaine plays. Magicians and dramatists both revel in their ability to express themselves imaginatively and in the momentary sense of omnipotence that such ability provides. Faustus tells us as much when he says, “How am I glutted with conceit of this.” We know from Prospero’s near obsession with magic before he was set adrift and from his reluctance to break his wand and abjure his magic that he has been similarly affected, and we see evidence of the intense emotional nature that makes his obsession possible when he tells Ferdinand and Miranda that he wants to retire to his cell in order “To still my beating mind” (4.4.163). However, as I have just argued, both Faustus and Prospero become too caught up in their “conceit”—so much so that they involuntarily deceive themselves.41 Apart from the reasons already given, an involvement with magic as magic and magic as imagination is for each protagonist a way of escaping from the unpleasantness of mortality. We watch Faustus cut himself off from all hope of salvation, and we agonize at the inexorability, bleakness, and severity of the death that he is facing, augmented by our knowledge of the permanence of his suffering in the terrors of Hell. Prospero’s sad, valedictory mood and his awareness of his aging (“my old brain”—4.1.159) tell us that his involvement with magic, no longer just a refuge from a nasty world of politics and public life in Milan, has become a buffer against the fact of his mortality and his increasing awareness of physical decay. I am in full agreement with Reuben A. Brower who finds that “The key metaphor of the

41 Lawrence Danson, “Continuity and Character in Shakespeare and Marlowe,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 26.2 (1986): 217–34, comments that “Faustus uses his magic to produce only illusions of self-transformation” (222). This trait is still another element in the scholar-magician’s process of self-deception.

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play is ‘change’”42 in the sense of metamorphosis or transformation or “transshifting states of being.”43 Within this category, the form of change that brings most sadness, of course, is Prospero’s aging and his very reluctant return to a way of life that he is no more suited for than are Edward II and Richard II44; like the two kings, his individuality and temperament thrive better in private than in public surroundings. Thus, Faustus and Prospero exercise their imaginations in feats of magic partly to deceive themselves about the encroachments of time.45 They use their imaginations to outface time psychologically, to provide a temporary respite from thoughts about the power of time to destroy, and to avoid confronting the physical evidences of time’s puissance. In portraying their protagonists’ act of inventing a reality, Marlowe and Shakespeare convey psychological understanding rather than moralistic judgments, perhaps because they are sympathetic to the desire to defy the onslaught of time and because, as writers, they are so strongly predisposed to delight in the act of imaginative creation itself. Yet, they are clearly not oblivious to the ability of the imagination to deceive through uncontrollable excess and to inflict involuntary selfabuse, whether on magicians or on playwrights. On the whole, Marlowe and Shakespeare are less skeptical and less ambivalent about the function and powers of the imagination than those who are not artists might be. To writers, understandably, the diverse workings and salutary effects of a proliferating imagination far outweigh its abuses. Given the success of the Tamburlaine plays and Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare must have marveled at the dramaturgical possibilities of the imagination as he saw them manifested by Marlowe. Even at the end of his career, we sense Shakespeare’s enthusiasm for feats of imagination. We hear in Prospero the thrill of recalling the accomplishments of his imagination: I have bedimmed The noontide sun, called forth the mutinous winds, And ‘twixt the green sea and the azured vault Set roaring war; to the dread rattling thunder Have I given fire and rifted Jove’s stout oak With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory Have I made shake and by the spurs plucked up The pine and cedar; graves at my command Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ’em forth By my so potent art. (5.1.41–50)

The simple stateliness and pride expressed here are entirely in keeping with Prospero’s reflections on his art—that is, until he mentions opening graves (48–9). 42 Reuben A. Brower, “The Mirror of Analogy: ‘The Tempest,’” The Fields of Light: An Experiment in Critical Reading (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951) 112. 43 Brower 121. 44 One might also compare Prospero’s cloistering tendencies with those of the Duke, Angelo, and Isabella in Measure For Measure. Each tries to escape from the world of social and political obligations—ultimately, to no avail. 45 See Lucking 154–6, who comments on the awareness of the movement of time in the two plays.

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This action asks to be understood metadramatically, for it seems to apply more to Shakespeare than to Prospero, especially when one considers the famous historical figures the playwright’s English and Roman histories have portrayed.46 Marlowe never had the chance to assess the powers of the creative imagination at the end of a long career, but I suspect that he would have felt similarly: that for any and all of its inadequacies, the imagination well merits glorification. III. Down through the centuries, until our own day, Doctor Faustus has remained Marlowe’s most popular play. The Tamburlaine plays had an unprecedented, instantaneous popularity that extended into the early seventeenth century, thanks in part to Ben Jonson’s continuing interest in the warrior leader and his language,47 but Doctor Faustus has persisted in inspiring playwrights from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first, and, beginning with the twentieth century, screen writers as well.48 If Doctor Faustus continues to have such a strong impact over four centuries after it was written, it is certainly not surprising that Shakespeare was deeply influenced by the play and that it held a firm place in his artistic imagination throughout his career. For examples of dramas that portrayed the figure of a magus, Shakespeare had principally Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Doctor Faustus.49 Of course, he also had access to the Tamburlaine plays that Howe maintains embodied the spirit of the magus, especially as Giordano Bruno set it forth. By the time he came to write The Tempest, Shakespeare knew well how to reconfigure the magician to suit his own 46 The opening of graves at night seems to be a well-known tradition, but it does not always require the powers of a magician. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck says, “Now it is the time of night / That the graves, all gaping wide, / Every one lets forth his sprite, / In the churchway paths to glide” (5.1.371–74); compare his earlier reference to this tradition in 3.2.378–87. In Julius Caesar, Cassius speaks of “ … this dreadful night / That thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars” (1.3.72–73), and Calphurnia tells Caesar that “A lioness hath whelpèd in the streets, / And graves have yawned and yielded up their dead” (2.2.17–18). Here, the opening of the graves is an ominous omen. The passages from these two plays do not help us to understand why opening graves has been one of Prospero’s activities—unless he simply needs random spirits to accomplish the everyday tasks of making life comfortable or providing entertainment on the island. 47 Shapiro 52–4 and 57, discusses Jonson’s interest in Tamburlaine. I also see Sir Epicure Mammon as a comic response to Tamburlaine. Shapiro’s chapter on Marlowe and Jonson (39–73) convincingly explains how strong an influence Marlowe was on Jonson throughout his career. 48 An essay on the connection between Doctor Faustus and Man Fly, titled “Man Fly: Sam Shepard’s Adaptation of Doctor Faustus,” was presented by Professor Johan Callens as part of a Marlowe Society of America session at the Modern Language Association Convention in Washington, DC, on 27 December 2000. The movie Bedazzled, which first appeared in October 2000, is yet another contemporary example of the Faustus story retold, this time with the figure of the devil a beautiful and seductive woman. 49 See Traister 1–2.

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needs. If, within the markedly different context of The Tempest, Marlowe’s influence seems generalized and broad, it is because the play is a testament to Shakespeare’s creative independence, his mature artistry, and his boldness of imagination. Similar to his use of Barabas when he came to compose Shylock, in The Tempest Shakespeare looks to Marlowe less for dramaturgical technique than for an example of a specific type of figure, in this case a potent magician, that he could rework in creating his magus. In addition, The Tempest affirms Marlowe’s dramatization of the ineluctable desire, joys, and yet the inevitable sadness of living a life of unrestricted imagination. We see that Shakespeare could draw upon Marlowe without fearing any loss of creative individuality and with utter ease could confidently present a magician who, though metadramatically similar, is in important ways quite the opposite of Faustus: Prospero is less concerned with acquiring power; he shows no confusion in his understanding of white and black magic; and he has the forcefulness that Faustus, in his tendency to be influenced and manipulated by others, lacks. Even so, Shakespeare finds in Faustus a figure with an unusual capacity for control and a symbol of the imagination; and he undoubtedly perceives the dramatic effectiveness of portraying a world in which time acts as an indomitable hostile force. One might have expected Marlowe’s influence to diminish with the passing years, but, as Shakespeare’s career progressed, the influence seems only to have manifested itself with greater profundity, breadth, and complexity. Because of its subtlety, it also becomes more elusive but it certainly cannot be ignored—as the present study demonstrates. The Tempest reveals a highly probable indication of the increased range of Marlowe’s influence, the result of Shakespeare’s having had many years to muse upon productions of Doctor Faustus. Consequently, assuming the perspective of late Shakespeare, who, over the course of his career, found Marlowe’s daring imagination a continuing source of inspiration, our understanding and appreciation of Marlowe’s greatness grows stronger, and Shakespeare’s tacit tribute becomes our vocal one.

Chapter 14

Christopher Marlowe: The Late Years David Bevington University of Chicago

My attempt, under cover of this deliberately provocative title, is to look at Edward II not simply as a late play in Christopher Marlowe’s regrettably short and compressed oeuvre but also as indicative perhaps of what Marlowe might have written had he not died in 1593. What would he have gone on to achieve had he been given more time? The question is, of course, unanswerable, but that does not mean that we should not think about the possibilities. An often-repeated truism about Marlowe is that he had already achieved more than his exact contemporary, William Shakespeare, and that if both had happened to die in 1593 the dramatist to whom we would pay greater attention today is Marlowe. The playful film Shakespeare in Love makes the point by introducing us to a young Will Shakespeare who is so consumed with envy for the better known Marlowe, whose name is shouted even by boatmen on the Thames eager to meet the current darling of the London theatrical scene, that Shakespeare anxiously seeks the advice of Marlowe about his own floundering attempt called Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter, and sees at once that the self-assured Marlowe has a far better idea for a title in Romeo and Juliet. Here is a suggestion, if you like, that Marlowe would have known better than Shakespeare where next to turn in shaping a career as a successful London dramatist. The envy takes its most extreme form of wish-fulfillment when it appears for a time that Shakespeare has unwittingly brought about the death of his rival. The kind of drama in which these two rival poet-dramatists were most visibly contesting for supremacy was the English history play. Marlowe was light years ahead of Shakespeare at this point in the field of tragedy with his Doctor Faustus, and his The Jew of Malta scored a success that Shakespeare would attempt to emulate only some years later in The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare, conversely, might have been perceived to hold a distinct advantage over Marlowe in the genre of romantic comedy, assisted by Shakespeare’s own indebtedness to the comedies of John Lyly, George Peele, and Robert Greene. The history play offered a more interesting battleground. Marlowe, arguably, held the upper hand, with his huge successes in the Tamburlaine plays, which, though of course not concerned with English history, offered revolutionary insights into the nature of political and military conflict, and then his stunning achievement in Edward II. Shakespeare, meantime, was doing not badly at all with his 1 Henry VI, immortalized by Thomas Nashe in his invocation of the heroic death of Lord Talbot. Then, too, Shakespeare’s 3

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Henry VI had drawn an openly envious response from Robert Greene (or else from Greene’s literary executor, Henry Chettle) in the famous complaint about an “upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his ‘Tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide’” supposes “he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and, being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shakescene in a country.”1 This ill-natured admonition was of course directed to Marlowe, along with Nashe and Peele, as fellow University Wits in need of warning about the plagiarizing parvenu from Stratford. Perhaps we should find some significance in the fact that this first quotation (or deliberate misquotation) of Shakespeare is from an English history play, one in which the competition for dramatic success was seen as especially keen and even unethical. Shakespeare and Marlowe were perceived as rivals in the new art of writing plays about English history. This perception of a particularly vivid rivalry may have gained sustenance from a couple of circumstances: first, that the English history play was the genre in which Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s dramatic writing could be most easily compared,2 and second, that the very newness of that genre and the uncertainty as to whether or not it constituted a valid literary genre or not added to the piquancy of the competition. What, after all, was the English history play? That puzzling exercise in literary definition had been placed under a glaring spotlight by The Famous Victories of Henry V, an anonymous potboiler of the late 1580s that unquestionably dealt with one of England’s most famous kings but did so in a way that stressed the legendary and the outrageous, and also by Robert Greene, in his Scottish History of James IV and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, where chronicle materials were blended with cheerful romantic nonsense in what John Lyly might have called a “gallimaufry” or “mingle-mangle.”3 The uncertain early years of the English history play, in other words, were ones in which all attempts at generic definition were gleefully compromised by repeated forays into hilarity and romantic plotting. George Peele added to the entertaining confusion with his Edward I, similarly written during these heady years of 1590 to 1593, in which the portrayal of Elinor of Castile had much more to do with jingoistic national feeling in the aftermath of the Spanish Armada than with nuances of history. Without meaning to condescend to the plays of Greene and Peele and to The Famous Victories, all of which are quite wonderful in their ways and important in the development of mixed-genre English comedy, perhaps we can say that Marlowe and Shakespeare were the first professional dramatists to take up the English history play 1 E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage. 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923) 4.241–2. 2 F. P. Wilson, Marlowe and the Early Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953); Wilbur Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea: Studies in the Plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); and James Shapiro, Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 3 John Lyly, Galatea and Midas, ed. George K. Hunter and David Bevington (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000): Midas, “The Prologue at Paul’s” 20. See Robert Weimann, “History and the Issue of Authority in Representation: The Elizabethan Theatre and the Reformation,” New Literary History 17 (1986): 449–76. See also David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982).

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as a serious if also entertaining exploration of English history. These two dramatists gave themselves ample freedom to invent dialogue, to introduce new characters, and to compress and rearrange historical events, but their motive in doing so seems to have been to interpret recent history as a way of understanding England’s political self-definition in the wake of the Reformation, the conflict with Catholic Spain, and England’s emerging sense of a national identity. It is in this special sense that Marlowe and Shakespeare together invented the English history play. Shakespeare was to be given more time to explore and develop the genre and to become its leading practitioner, right to the end of the decade of the 1590s in which it served as such a dominant dramatic genre on the London stage. Marlowe did what he did for the English history play in a creative burst of the imagination. Together, perhaps, these two extraordinary playwrights redirected the course of historical dramatizing, which otherwise appears to have been headed in the direction of good-natured horseplay and wish-fulfillment. To be sure, English history had been seriously and polemically treated in the earlier Gorboduc (1562), but that was some time in the past, and was written by two influential members of the Queen’s Parliament and administration for a select courtly audience in a time of political crisis as a way of advising the Queen on the succession question. Other plays had made occasional attempts of a similarly patrician nature, such as The Misfortunes of Arthur, by Thomas Hughes, Francis Bacon, and other gentlemen of Gray’s Inn, presented before the Queen in 1588, and Richardus Tertius, an academic play in Latin. The onrush of competition among the adult companies jockeying for position in the London commercial theaters around 1590 to 1593, on the other hand, was driven by an essentially different aim, that of catering to the tastes of paying audiences. To what uses would English history be put in such a new and rapidly changing and commercial theatrical environment? Marlowe’s accomplishment as a dramatist of history, in tandem with and in rivalry with the analogous achievement of Shakespeare, is the subject of this present investigation. Marlowe’s precocity in the dramatizing of English history can be seen in the comparisons that offer themselves between Edward II and Shakespeare’s second tetralogy, from Richard II through the Henry IV plays, even more than between Edward II and Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays and Richard III.4 Edward II is often compared with Richard II, of course, centering the comparison on a weak king and his fatal predilection to align himself with personal favorites at the expense of the barons of the realm.5 The comparison is flattering to Marlowe, implying as it does that he established a model that would prove useful some few years later to Shakespeare. I should like to carry the comparison forward to 1 Henry IV, a juxtaposition not so often attempted. I do so in order to explore further what Shakespeare had to learn from Marlowe about the conflicting motives of patriotism and personal self-interest

4 See, for example, Peter Alexander, Shakespeare’s “Henry VI” and “Richard III” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1929). 5 See, for example, Michael Manheim, The Weak King Dilemma in the Shakespearean History Plays (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1973).

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in the portrayal of political conflict and to examine the way in which Shakespeare would take the subject in his own direction. Henry Bolingbroke’s problem is not one of surrounding himself with personal favorites. He has seen all too clearly what that predilection has done to Richard II and avoids it all costs. His stern lectures to his son on statecraft stress again and again how a king must not “enfeoff himself to popularity,” presenting himself to the English people as a “skipping King” who “amble[s] down / With shallow jesters and rash bavin wits, / Soon kindled and soon burnt,” giving his countenance, “against his name, / To laugh at gibing boys and stand the push / Of every beardless vain comparative” (3.2.60–69).6 Henry knows that he won the support of Northumberland and the rest in the first instance because the barons, like those in Marlowe’s play, were appalled at Richard’s closeness to Bushy, Bagot, Green, and the Earl of Wiltshire. Yet the new Henry IV goes on to make a no less serious miscalculation. However aware he must be that the barons have accepted him as king in order that they may enjoy the autonomous privileges in their own realms that they have long enjoyed under the feudal system, Henry insists on being a king with greatly increased central authority. He favors Hotspur with his admiration only on condition that Hotspur return his prisoners by way of acknowledging who is really in charge and where obedience is due. Henry banishes the Earl of Worcester from his court as too untrustworthy an ally, “Malevolent to you in all aspects,” as Westmorland characterizes him (1.1.96). Henry refuses to ransom Mortimer because he suspects with good reason that Mortimer too is an uncertain ally at best, being married already to the daughter of Glendower, the Welsh rebel whom Mortimer was supposed to be fighting on behalf of King Henry. Mortimer’s key role as claimant to the English throne on the Yorkist side is more than enough to put King Henry on his guard. Shakespeare sees the motivation of King Henry with admirable clarity and presents it with sympathy even while he shows to us how Henry’s handling of the situation is pushing England toward a constitutional crisis. Part of the reason for this crisis is that the barons have their own point of view, and one that is entirely plausible. They have made Henry king in order to be rid of Richard II’s affronts to their dignity and power, and, though they no longer have to fear the authority of personal favorites around the King (Westmorland is presented as an admirably capable adviser, interested only in serving the King as well as he can), they certainly have reason to fear that Henry’s ultimate aim is to curb their baronial power in the interests of a strong central administration. Never mind that his wishing to do so may be motivated by a desire to provide a strong leadership that England has undeniably lacked; from the barons’ point of view, their own separate interests are now as threatened as they were before under Richard II. In 1 Henry IV, Shakespeare anatomizes the distressing way in which England slides down the slippery slope toward civil war with frightening inevitability, despite the fact that persons on both sides are motivated by intelligent self-concern and by strongly held views as to the best course that their beloved country ought to pursue.

6 Shakespeare quotations are from David Bevington, ed., The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 5th ed. (New York: Longman, 2003).

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Let me now turn to Edward II in order to see how Marlowe anatomizes a similar impasse. For all the differing temperaments of these two dramatists, their ability to create a new kind of English historical drama arises out of their great skill in portraying the conflict between powerful and intelligent persons in a situation where we are invited to sympathize with both sides. The barons are united not simply by their disdain for Gaveston but by their perception that England is the poorer as a result of such insolent ambition at the heart of the monarchy. Mortimer Junior, to be presented later in the play as increasingly Machiavellian and power-mad, is simply a spokesman for his peers when he characterizes Gaveston as one “Who, swoll’n with venom of ambitious pride, / Will be the ruin of the realm and us” (1.2.31–32).7 Lancaster similarly deplores the way in which “the guard upon His Lordship [i.e., Gaveston] waits, / And all the court begins to flatter him” (1.2.21–22). Gaveston’s personal behavior is intolerable to the barons and at the same time represents a visible threat to their power because of his nearness to the King. They perceive that the King is “bewitched” by Gaveston (1.2.55). Warwick inveighs against the “Ignoble vassal” who “like Phaëthon / Aspir’st unto the guidance of the sun” (1.4.16–17). The barons urge that a king who is “princely born” should “shake him off” as unworthy (1.4.81). They know that the commons, for all their inclination to honor and obey the King, cannot tolerate the circumstance that “a night-grown mushroom, / Such a one as my Lord of Cornwall is, / Should bear us down of the nobility” (1.4.284–86). They insist that the King’s doting on Gaveston is not in itself the problem, since, as Mortimer Senior puts it, “The mightiest kings have had their minions,” along with other great persons of the classical past like Alexander, Hercules, Achilles, Cicero, and Socrates (1.4.391–97). (The allegation that Cicero had such a fondness for Octavius seems unfounded.) Instead, as Mortimer Junior explains, their animus is against one whose personal power with the King is detrimental to England’s economy and the national defense: Uncle, his wanton humor grieves not me, But this I scorn, that one so basely born Should by his sovereign’s favor grow so pert And riot it with the treasure of the realm. While soldiers mutiny for want of pay He wears a lord’s revenue on his back. (1.4.402–407)

To be sure, Mortimer goes on in such a fashion as to make plain that personal distaste is also at the heart of his campaign against Gaveston. Mortimer Junior cannot tolerate one who, “Midas-like,” “jets it in the court ... . As if that Proteus, god of shapes, appeared. / I have not seen a dapper Jack so brisk.” Gaveston offends the barons in the way he dresses: “He wears a short Italian hooded cloak, / Larded with pearl, and in his Tuscan cap / A jewel of more value than the crown.” No less offensive is his insolent manner: “Whiles other walk below, the King and he / From out a window laugh at such as we, / And flout our train, and jest at our attire” (1.4.408–18). Still, 7 Marlowe quotations are from Christopher Marlowe: “Doctor Faustus” and Other Plays, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, Oxford Drama Library (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995).

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we see how all of these feelings of outrage against Gaveston coalesce with a more patriotic motive on the part of the barons. Gaveston’s insolent behavior is symptomatic of his threat to their power of influence over the King, and his extravagant dress symbolizes the misappropriation of national wealth that impoverishes the economy and the national defense. Later, the younger Spencer turns out to be no less “a putrefying branch / That deads the royal vine” (3.2.162–63). Marlowe takes care to introduce the younger Spencer to us, as in the case of Gaveston, with the disarmingly frank talk of the stage Machiavel, as Spencer Junior boastfully discusses how an ambitious courtier must “learn to court it like a gentleman,” make “low legs” to a nobleman, “be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute,” and be ready now and then to “stab, as occasion serves” (2.1.31–43). Perhaps no passage in the play better expresses and sympathizes with the barons’ point of view than that in act 2, scene 2 when Gaveston has been recalled at the Queen’s behest only to engender a more painful confrontation than ever. Again, the barons speak with one voice; Mortimer Junior’s outrage is indistinguishable from that of the Earls of Lancaster and Warwick. Mortimer Junior begins the indictment against royal irresponsibility: The idle triumphs, masques, lascivious shows, And prodigal gifts bestowed on Gaveston Have drawn thy treasury dry and made thee weak, The murmuring commons overstretchèd hath.

Lancaster continues in antiphonal echoing: Look for rebellion; look to be deposed. Thy garrisons are beaten out of France, And lame and poor lie groaning at the gates. The wild O’Neill, with swarms of Irish kerns, Lives uncontrolled within the English pale. Unto the walls of York the Scots made road, And, unresisted, drave away rich spoils.

Mortimer Junior picks up the refrain: The haughty Dane commands the narrow seas, While in the harbor ride thy ships unrigged. LANCASTER. What foreign prince sends thee ambassadors? MORTIMER JR. Who loves thee but a sort of flatterers? LANCASTER. Thy gentle queen, sole sister to Valois, Complains that thou hast left her all forlorn. MORTIMER JR. Thy court is naked, being bereft of those That makes a king seem glorious to the world: I mean the peers, whom thou shouldst dearly love. Libels are cast again thee in the street; Ballads and rhymes made of thy overthrow.

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LANCASTER.

The northern borderers, seeing the houses burnt, Their wives and children slain, run up and down, Cursing the name of thee and Gaveston. MORTIMER JR. When wert thou in the field with banners spread? But once, and then thy soldiers marched like players, With garish robes, not armor; and thyself, Bedaubed with gold, rode laughing at the rest, Nodding and shaking of thy spangled crest, Where women’s favors hung like labels down. (2.2.156–86)

I have quoted this passage at length to stress the seriousness of the charges. The barons attack not simply personal favoritism but neglect of military preparedness, ruinous expenses at court for masques and shows instead of a proper national defense, overbearing taxes imposed on the commons, loss of military control on England’s frontiers, breaking of treaty obligations with the French, and still more. Nor are these charges denied, even in part. When Mortimer Junior insists to King Edward that the King has more weighty matters demanding his attention than concern for Gaveston, and that in particular the King of France has taken advantage of political disarray in England to set foot in Normandy, Edward throws off the accusation not with a defense of his policy but with airy dismissal: “A trifle. We’ll expel him when we please” (2.2.9–10). The situation is not unlike that in Shakespeare’s Richard II, where Richard candidly confesses that he has been enforced by his own extravagance to “farm the realm” and seize the dukedom of Lancaster without legal sanction, except that Edward is more openly flippant and never willing to admit that he has not led England well. We see this later in both plays when Richard, for his part, confesses that “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me” (5.5.49); Edward, conversely, though made sympathetic by his humiliating treatment, seems never to reflect on the state of the country to whose predicament he has certainly contributed. He is impenitent about his eagerness to offer undeserved promotions to his favorites, Gaveston and then the Spencers, even when he is warned by his well-meaning brother that the titles of “Lord High Chamberlain, / Chief Secretary to the state and me, / Earl of Cornwall, King and Lord of Man” (1.1.153–55) are outrageously excessive: “Brother, the least of these may well suffice / For one of greater birth than Gaveston” (157–58). (Marlowe’s dramatic compression of historical events has the effect of magnifying the King’s effusive rashness.) Edward is not only an incapable king but one who seems unaware of his own failures and conscious only of how he has been wronged. Moreover, Gaveston’s behavior is presented in such a way as to valorize all that is charged against him. For all the sympathy that is invited toward the King’s personal longing to be with Gaveston, Gaveston’s ambitions are nothing less than what the barons have feared. “What greater bliss can hap to Gaveston / Than live and be the favourite of a king?” he muses in the play’s opening scene (1.1.4–5). Even if we are allowed to see in him an amorous attachment matching that of Edward, we are simultaneously shown his desire to humiliate the barons: “Farewell, base stooping

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to the lordly peers!” (18). No less disturbing is his contempt for the commoners: “As for the multitude, that are but sparks / Raked up in embers of their poverty, / Tanti; I’ll fawn first on the wind / That glanceth at my lips and flieth away” (20–23). Gaveston proceeds to demonstrate just how truly he means this cynical observation by pretending to entertain the petitions of three poor men only to confide to us in soliloquy that he has no intention of helping them out: “But yet it is no pain to speak men fair; / I’ll flatter these, and make them live in hope” (1.1.41–42). The pleasing shows he will devise for King Edward have no further intent than to “draw the pliant king which way I please” (1.1.52). We sense the hypocrisy of his insisting, when Edward heaps authority and wealth upon Gaveston, that “It shall suffice me to enjoy your love” (1.1.170), as though pure selfless devotion were all that he asks from the King’s favor. At the same time, Marlowe is at pains to let us understand what is selfish and inglorious about the barons’ motivations in opposing Gaveston. They are men of violence, prepared, as Mortimer Junior says, to “henceforth parley with our naked swords” (1.1.125). They are only too aware that what they are undertaking is treasonous and disloyal and that their stratagems can be interpreted as means of achieving their own personal ends. By provoking Gaveston into outrageous behavior they hope to achieve “some colour” to “rise in arms; / For, howsoever we have borne it out, / ’Tis treason to be up against the King” (1.4.279–81). Mortimer Junior’s interest in the plight of Queen Isabel is tainted at the start by a suggestion of erotic desire. King Edward charges that she fawns “On Mortimer, with whom, ungentle Queen—/ I say no more; judge you the rest, my lord” (1.4.147–48). She of course denies this, and the truth of the allegation is not borne out until later, but the very suspicion of it invites us to perceive that baronial patriotism is mingled indistinguishably with selfish personal motives. The role of Edmund, Earl of Kent and brother to the King, provides Marlowe with an especially effective way of registering the ambiguity of political conflict in this play. The very fact that Edmund shifts sides more than once out of principle, siding for an extensive time with the barons against King Edward, lends moral authority to his distress in the opening scenes at the baronial revolt. “Yet dare you brave the King unto his face!” he objects to them (1.1.115). He urges Edward to proceed implacably against the rebels: “Brother, revenge it, and let these their heads / Preach upon poles for trespass of their tongues” (116–17). Driven at length by his conviction that Edward’s love to Gaveston “Will be the ruin of the realm and you” (2.2.208), he deserts to the other side, eventually to return to the royalist position when the barons’ vile treatment of Edward proves too much for Edmund. He is finally cut down by his political enemies, victimized in his attempts at finding a middle way. He is thus like the Duke of York in Richard II to the extent that we are shown how the middle way is made to appear inglorious and even ridiculous in a time of extremism. He is even more like the Duke of Clarence in 3 Henry VI and Richard III in that he is murdered for his pains. Marlowe handles the religious issue in Edward II with an eye to dramatizing the balanced ambiguity of political conflict. The Bishop of Coventry sides with the barons for apparently well-reasoned considerations. He freely admits that he “did incense the parliament” out of protest against the favoritism extended to Gaveston

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(1.1.183). When Edward threatens to “Throw off his golden mitre, rend his stole, / And in the channel christen him anew,” the violence of the proposal prompts the fair-minded Edmund of Kent to warn against the consequences: “Ah, brother, lay not violent hands on him, / For he’ll complain unto the see of Rome!” (186–9). This elicits in turn a flippantly defiant response from Gaveston: “Let him complain unto the see of hell” (190). Edward proposes thereupon to seize upon the Bishop’s goods and bestow them instead on Gaveston. Both Gaveston and Edward are ready to commit the Bishop to prison, to “the Tower, the Fleet, or where thou wilt” (197). The Bishop’s understandable reply is to pronounce a curse, seemingly on Edward himself and no doubt on Gaveston as well: “For this offence be thou accurst of God!” (198). This is of course excommunication, but it is issued as a personal act of the Bishop of Coventry, not as a papal edict. Anti-Catholicism is always good for a laugh on the Elizabethan stage, of course, and yet in this scene we get none of the buffoonish mumbo-jumbo that we hear in the scenes in the papal chambers in Doctor Faustus. Later, to be sure, the Archbishop of Canterbury, as “legate to the pope,” bids Edward “On your allegiance to the see of Rome, / Subscribe as we have done to his [Gaveston’s] exile,” and is ready to curse King Edward if he refuses (1.4.51–53), eliciting an aside response from the King that “The legate of the pope will be obeyed” (63), and yet even here the church’s role is essentially that of one of the three powerful estates of the realm, siding with the barons against royal tyranny in the interests of political stability in England; there is no hint (as there is in Shakespeare’s King John, for instance) of papal interference for the sake of Rome’s international agenda. At the same time, Edward and Gaveston presumably gain some sympathy from Elizabethan audiences by their defiance of the papacy. Marlowe’s dramatic handling of Queen Isabella seems thoroughly in line with a dramaturgic intent, so close to that of Shakespeare, of pairing opposite loyalties in a historical drama of uncertain political conflict. Some years ago, I argued that Isabella’s changing loyalties owe something to the tradition of the Tudor morality play in that her vacillations can be described as an increasing revelation of an innate viciousness rather than as a shift of position occasioned by Edward’s desertion of her and her resulting vulnerability and susceptibility to the insinuations of the powerfully masculine Mortimer Junior.8 Here, in the context of my present argument, I want to suggest that the Queen’s ambivalent and puzzling character is dramatically useful as a way of indicating the tug of war of conflicting political considerations. Like Edmund of Kent, though no doubt less sympathetically, she acts a kind of weathervane, directing and controlling our sympathies. Her stance at first is one of patient endurance. She urges the barons to let Gaveston stay, “for, rather than my lord / Shall be oppressed by civil mutinies, / I will endure a melancholy life, / And let him frolic with his minions” (1.2.64–67). Her account of her husband’s behavior with Gaveston reads like a set of stage directions, indicating the way that the two actors are to gesture and interact: “For now my lord the king regards me not / But dotes upon the love of Gaveston. / He claps his cheeks and hangs about his neck, / Smiles in his face, and whispers in his ears” (49–52). Stage action of this sort 8 David Bevington, From “Mankind” to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962) 234–4.

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is calculated to reinforce concern about all that the barons find objectionable. Her motives are both personal and patriotic: she is deeply concerned lest Edward and his nation be troubled “by civil mutinies.” Her pleading with the barons that Gaveston be recalled from exile proceeds presumably from such considerations. At the same time, the suggestion is implanted that she does not find Mortimer Junior’s attentions unwelcome and that she uses sexual appeal as a weapon in prevailing on Mortimer Junior to persuade his colleagues that Gaveston’s exile be repealed. Later, Isabella’s manifest and increasing hypocrisies can be seen not simply as an indication of who she really is but as a dramaturgic device to win sympathy for the King in his hour of tribulation. When she sends a ring to her imprisoned husband by Matrevis, commending her humble duty to His Majesty and insisting that “I labour all in vain / To ease his grief and work his liberty” (5.2.70–71), Mortimer congratulates her with an appreciative aside: “Finely dissembled. Do so still, sweet queen” (74). Her brother Edmund is undeceived: “Ah, they do dissemble” (86). Even her son cannot be persuaded that Isabella has the best interests of the country at heart when she counsels her son to accept the crown and consent to the execution of Edmund. Our changing and uncertain opinion of Isabella is integral to the dramatist’s strategy in showing how baronial opposition succumbs to its own inevitable tendency toward self-glorification and monomania. Indeed, Mortimer’s evolution as a dramatic character is one more compelling instance of self-destroying mania for power. At the height of his ambitious rise to eminence, he is given a soliloquy that sounds for all the world like Richard of Gloucester’s vice-like boasting in 2 Henry VI and Richard III: The Prince I rule, the queen I do command; And with a lowly congé to the ground The proudest lords salute me as I pass. I seal, I cancel, I do what I will. Feared am I more than loved. Let me be feared, And when I frown, make all the court look pale. I view the prince with Aristarchus’ eyes, Whose looks were as a breeching to a boy. They thrust upon me the protectorship And sue to me for that that I desire, While at the council table, grave enough, And not unlike a bashful Puritan, First I complain of imbecility, Saying it is onus quam gravissimum, Till, being interrupted by my friends, Suscepi that provinciam, as they term it, And, to conclude, I am protector now. (5.4.48–64)

The very term “protector” reminds us of Richard III, and the boasting of hypocrisies is so close to that of Richard in both 2 Henry VI and Richard III that we would really like to know which of these great soliloquies were written first. The safest view to take is that Shakespeare and Marlowe worked simultaneously and in tandem, owing much to the morality tradition, and putting that tradition to work in forming a new

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genre of history play that was strikingly unlike anything by Peele or Greene on the popular stage of the 1580s and 1590s. King Edward himself, in the late scenes of this play, is portrayed in such a way as to help define and further elaborate the kind of nuanced political ambiguity that was to be so essential in the formation of the popular English history play. He is, of course, the chief victim at last, wretchedly tortured. “This dungeon where they keep me is the sink / Wherein the filth of all the castle falls,” he tells Lightborn (5.5.56–57): And there in mire and puddle have I stood This ten days’ space, and, lest that I should sleep, One plays continually upon a drum. They give me bread and water, being a king, So that for want of sleep and sustenance My mind’s distempered and my body’s numbed, And whether I have limbs or no I know not. (5.5.58–65)

Marlowe plays heavily on the pathos of a king forced to endure such horrible indignities and physical privations. Marlowe’s title figure is devout at the last, insisting that his murderer let him see the stroke before it falls in order that “My mind may be more steadfast on my God” (5.5.78). Indeed, Edward’s next to last utterance is one of exemplary piety: “Assist me, sweet God, and receive my soul!” (109). Like Richard II, this unhappy protagonist hopes that his soul will rise up to heaven even as his body sinks downward to die. In a similar chiastic movement, his own position of pity and sympathy ascends while the fortunes and characters of his tormentors, Mortimer Junior and Isabella, decline. Marlowe provides a kind of direction of sympathies at the end of Edward II that is new to his writings and is notably close to that of Shakespeare’s historical plays. The defiant agnosticism of the ending of Tamburlaine, Part II is no longer observable, nor the magnificent ironies that surround Ferneze’s declaration of the fulfillment of divine purpose in The Jew of Malta, nor the tragic despair with which Doctor Faustus comes to its close. A sense of order is restored in Edward II that is new in its kind, and it seemingly has something to do with the fact that Marlowe has at last brought his scene home to English shores after his bold explorations of the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and Middle Europe. Justice is served on Mortimer Junior and on Isabella in such a way that Edward II’s corpse can be properly honored in burial and his fate redeemed after death from the ignomy of his deposition and murder. Manifestly, the role of young Edward III is central to this new kind of closure. Young Edward arrives in this play with significant historical baggage, of course. Any Elizabethan audience would know that the prince is to become Edward III, one of England’s most successful monarchs. Edward III had been preceded in the fourteenth century by a weak king in his father, Edward II, and was to be succeeded by no less weak a king in his grandson, Richard II. Young Edward is presented as innocent and idealistic in his first scenes. He expresses unwillingness to journey into France at his father’s behest to “parley with the King of France,” partly because he feels himself not old enough for matters of such weight but also because he has no

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taste for French alliances (3.2.71–78). Later, having been taken to France despite his misgivings, he is confident that if he and his mother will only return to England and forget about trying to form French or Burgundian alliances, he will be able to win his father around to a right course of conduct: “’A loves me better than a thousand Spencers” (4.2.6–7). His mistrust of Mortimer Junior is understandably immediate and visceral, since Mortimer Junior is both his mother’s lover and the mortal enemy of Edward II. In the play’s final action, young Edward is reluctant to become king not out of a sense of inability but because he wishes for that event to occur in the distant future as the result of natural circumstances. “Mother, persuade me not to wear the crown,” he implores his mother, “Let him [Edward II] be king; I am too young to reign” (5.2.92–93). He loves his uncle Edmund and is appalled that the Queen and Mortimer Junior are prepared not to forgive a man who regrets what he has done: “he repents and sorrows for it now” (108). Young Edward is sensible in what danger he himself stands when Mortimer and the Queen cannot be restrained from ordering the beheading of Edmund: “What safety may I look for at his hands / If that my uncle shall be murdered thus?” (5.4.109–10). Despite the manifest insecurity of his position, young Edward as King Edward III manages to order the arrest of Mortimer Junior. The situation is presumably touchand-go as to whether this order will be obeyed by the lords present, but Edward manages to carry the day by the constitutional authority that is his as king and to no less a degree by personal charisma. His rightmindedness and just proceedings command assent. The sentence he announces for Mortimer Junior is appropriately that of hanging and quartering, the punishment for treason: “Drag him forth, / Hang him, I say, and set his quarters up, / But bring his head back presently to me” (5.6.52–54). He proceeds with his mother in a way that is no less firm and judicious: she is to be committed to the Tower and there tried on charges of having conspired with Mortimer Junior, with the dire promise that if she is found guilty, “though I be your son, / Think not to find me slack or pitiful” (81–2). Edward III is given the authoritative last lines of the play, offering up the severed head of Mortimer Junior to the murdered ghost of Edward II as expiation and revenge. Edward III is entirely in charge; England’s future is assured. Justice has been done, and the monarchy is secure. It is instructive in this regard to compare the final speech with that of Ferneze in The Jew of Malta, who talks similarly of a restored order but in a situation that obliges the audience to ponder the ironies of the success of such a Machiavellian ruler. The Marlovian ending of Edward II is, to be sure, of a different order from that of Shakespeare’s history plays generally. Any notion of providential delivery of England from her enemies, both internal and external, is wholly absent. The implications for history in Marlowe’s last play are that much depends on the personal charisma and integrity or at least governing ability of the incumbent of the throne. Mortimer Junior’s downfall, in his own interpretation, has nothing to do with providence and everything to do with historical contingency and the inexorable turning of Fortune’s wheel: Base Fortune, now I see that in thy wheel There is a point to which when men aspire, They tumble headlong down. That point I touched,

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And, seeing there was no place to mount up higher, Why should I grieve at my declining fall? (5.6.59–63) What goes up must come down. History itself is an undulating pattern of rises and falls, as evidenced in the successive reigns of the incapable Edward II, the immensely successful Edward III, and the self-destroying Richard II. Shakespeare complicates the providential picture he encountered fitfully in Hall and his other sources, including perhaps the English Corpus Christi plays, but he does at least allow it to be expressed as a common ideology frequently touched on and appealed to by the participants. Marlowe leaves providence out of the picture. Yet for all that, Edward II ends on a recognizably assured note of political and even ethical stability. The major chord resolution with which this play ends is a precedent for plays to come, such as Richard III, King John, Henry V, and Henry VIII. My argument, then, is that Shakespeare and Marlowe, acting separately more or less at the same time and perhaps in self-aware competition, devised what was to become an essential part of the new genre of English history play. The models and precedents on which they could have drawn seemed to point in other directions for the dramatizing of English history. Peele and Greene and the author of the anonymous The Famous Victories of Henry V had shown how a medley of English history and entirely fanciful storytelling could entertain London audiences well accustomed to the high jinks of romantic comedy. Conversely, the few experiments in the “serious” dramatizations of history—Gorboduc, The Misfortunes of Arthur, Richardus Tertius—had thus far been devised for courtly and select audiences fascinated with political advice to the throne. Both Marlowe and Shakespeare, to be sure, allowed themselves plentiful liberties in compressing the events of history, rearranging those events, changing key facts about them, introducing new characters, and the like. The new English history play enjoyed the kind of freedom of treatment, and even of genre, that enabled the English Renaissance drama to be so fruitfully experimental. Yet Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s history plays are not constructed with sorts of multiple plots that one finds in James IV, for example, or Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. These new history plays are episodic, but all the episodes are chosen to bear on the interpretation of history at hand. Moreover, they all contribute to the sustained atmosphere of serious debate between contending sides, in which the rival points of view that are so fatally at war are given eloquent expression by figures from all sides. This dramatic unity of theme is, I suggest, at the heart of what constitutes the new English history play. Lacking any formal definition in the classical opposition of comedy and tragedy, so much so that Francis Meres in 1598 had to fall back on defining Henry IV as comedy and Henry VI, Richard III, and Richard II as tragedy (a classification that would have also listed Edward II as tragedy),9 the history play came into being as a theatrical event, largely unselfconscious in terms of generic form. Such a new theatrical phenomenon had to devise its ready-made working sense of generic integrity through experiment, through seeing what would work with London audiences and would provide some sense of overarching architectonic structure moving toward closure. It is in this context that 9

Chambers, Elizabethan Stage 4.246.

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Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s concurrent experiments with sustained ideological duality and final resolution provided such a theatrically and thematically satisfying answer. We have only one play from Marlowe in this vein, but it is a masterpiece, and the continuation of the new genre in Shakespeare’s ongoing work can at least show us some of the directions in which this highly innovative new dramatic genre could move.

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Index

Abraham, Karl 185 addiction 2, 6, 9, 135–47 Adelman, Janet 80–83 Allen, William 170, 174 Alleyn, Edward 55, 56 Altman,Joel B. 14, 29, 30, 134, 202–4 Amussen, Susan Dwyer 97 anti-Semitism 3, 4, 9, 43–59, 130, 172 antitheatricality 2, 3, 9, 14–19, 21 Aristotle 114, 118, 152, 163 audiences expectations 27, 36, 39 response 26, 34 early modern 3, 6, 25, 98 playhouse 3, 25–41 Austin, J. L. 114–15, 119, 122 Bakeless, John 17, 149, 150 Barber,C. L. 144, 146, 198 Bartels,Emily C. 49, 127, 128, 135 Barthes, Roland 8, 114, 185, 186 Bate, Jonathan 7, 194, 195 Bawcutt,N. W. 67, 125, 128, 133, 168, 171 Beard, Thomas 31, 140 Beckerman, Bernard 28, 49 Beckett, Samuel 185–6 Belsey, Catherine 69, 94 Bevington, David 8, 18, 21, 33, 35, 39, 72, 89, 114, 131, 135, 148, 193, 200, 209–10, 212–13, 217 the Bible/biblical 6, 31, 46, 63, 67, 114, 118, 120, 139, 149–51, 155, 159–62, 165, 172, 174, 178 Binda, Hilary J. 114, 116 Blackburn, William 15, 196, 198 Blackwood’s Magazine 44, 47, 49, 52–4 blasphemy 15, 121, 137, 144, 201 Bloom, Harold 7, 8, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191 Boose, Lynda E. 63, 65–6, 70–71, 80 Bowers, Fredson 114, 123, 133 Bowers, Rick 5, 113, 127, 150, 164–5 Braunmuller, A. R. 28, 37, 194 Briggs, Julia 104, 149, 150, 158, 161, 164–5

Broughton, James 46, 47 Brower, Reuben A. 205, 206 Bruno, Giordano 197, 207 Bullough, Vern L. 95, 96 Burnett, Mark Thornton 98, 114, 149, 163, 189 Butler, Judith 114–16, 119, 123 Butler, Martin 174, 179 Calderwood, James L. 13, 204 Calvin, John 156, 161 Cartelli, Thomas 25–6, 36, 48–9, 127 cautionary tales 3, 30, 31, 36 Cefalu, Paul A. 142, 143 Cheney, Patrick 7, 14, 15, 20, 89, 128, 149, 167, 199 Christianity 9, 15, 22, 48, 58–9, 67–8, 72, 84, 119, 123, 128, 130–32, 142–3, 150, 156, 165, 171–3, 178, 189–91, 202 Catholicism 7, 116, 155, 157, 160, 165, 168–77, 179–81 Protestantism 14, 78, 120, 151–3, 155, 157, 160, 162, 164–5, 169, 171, 173–5, 178, 197 Cicero 29, 138, 213 Clare, Janet 35, 44, 64, 69, 70, 72, 96, 164 Cole, Douglas 35, 150, 161 copia 28 cultural studies 79, 113, 116 Daly, Brenda O. 79, 80 Danson, Lawrence 49, 205 Dawkins, Richard 5, 113 memes 5, 113–24 Dawson, Anthony B. 25, 26 Deats, Sara Munson 1–4, 13, 22–3, 26–7, 35, 54, 67, 69, 75, 77, 83, 85–8, 93–5, 98–9, 104–5, 110, 127, 131, 148–50, 159, 178, 195, 204 Derrida, Jacques 114–15, 119, 124, 136–7 Descartes, René 116, 200 Dessen, Alan 27, 28, 30 Diehl, Huston 14, 36, 197, 204

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Dolan, Frances E. 78, 91 dramaturgy 2, 3, 164, 206, 208 ethics 2, 5, 43, 77, 111, 131–3, 152, 173, 180, 199, 201, 204, 221 exempla 3, 28, 29, 30, 32–40 false profession 6, 125–33 family 4, 57, 63–6, 75–8, 83, 95, 97 fantasy/fantasies 22–3, 26, 28, 69, 80–81, 84, 141, 145–7, 185, 197, 200 father-daughter relationship 4, 63–9 father/son relationship 5, 79, 93–110 feminism 63, 75, 79, 84 Fender, Stephen 26, 33 Fildes, Valerie 76, 79 Fleischer, Martha Hester 33, 34 Flowers, Betty 63, 65–6, 70–71 Foucault, Michel 8, 185–6 Freer, Coburn 126–7 Freud, Sigmund 79, 84, 185 Friedenreich, Kenneth 2, 33, 35, 49, 126–7, 150, 186 Galperin, William 45–6, 57–9 Garber, Marjorie 122, 194, 195 Garner, Stanton B. 25, 27–8 Garrett, George 1, 123 Garrick, David 50–51 Gerzon, Mark 94–6 Gill, Roma 2, 33, 35, 49, 126–7, 130, 148, 150, 186 Gosson, Stephen 16, 18–19 Grantley, Darryll 14, 20, 127, 133, 197 Greenblatt, Stephen 13, 29, 35, 83, 119, 126, 128, 130–31, 133, 144, 148, 151, 171–2 Greene, Robert 17, 31, 137, 190, 209–10 Gurr, Andrew 25, 33 Hamlin, William M. 6, 125, 128–9 Hattaway, Michael 28, 32, 133 Hawkins, F.W. 44, 47, 51, 54, 56 Hazlitt, William 46–7, 57 Heywood, Thomas 43, 167–8, 176, 179 Hibbard, Caroline M. 174–6 Hill, Christopher 178, 180 historicism 3, 80 Hjort, Anna Mette 114, 116 Hopkins, Lisa 1, 4, 52, 66, 69–70, 75, 83, 86, 93, 100, 102, 109–10, 128, 130, 200

Howe, James Robinson 46, 197–9, 207 Hull, Suzanne 63–5 Hunter, G. K. 23, 27, 37, 38, 40, 150, 171–2, 210 Hutcheon, Linda 116, 121 hypocrisy 4, 6, 7, 9, 15, 21, 48, 128, 133, 168, 173, 189, 216 ideology 2, 6, 43, 77, 88, 95, 127, 133, 137, 221 illusion 14, 22, 23 imagination 8, 21–3, 26, 46, 69, 152, 161, 186, 194–5, 197, 202–8, 211 irony 5–6, 35, 49, 67, 113, 120–23, 130, 133, 150, 156–9, 163, 165, 180, 219–20 Islam 173 James VI and I 140–41 Jankowski, Theodora A. 76–7 Jewishness 126, 130 Jonson, Ben 7, 14, 28, 122, 144, 194, 207, 210 Karpay, Joyce 4–5, 75 Katz, David S. 51, 52 Kean, Edmund 3–4, 43–59 Keats, John 51, 57 Kermode, Frank 72, 152 Kernan, Alvin B. 14, 122, 144, 195, 197, 204 Kittel, Gerhard 155, 156 Klein, Melanie 79, 81, 84 Kocher, Paul H. 149, 150 Kuriyama, Constance Brown 1, 2, 4, 8, 33, 35, 49, 68–70, 75, 82–3, 85, 87, 89–90, 93, 98–9, 126–28, 130–31, 149–50, 170, 185–6 Kyd, Thomas 8, 34, 37, 133, 167, 190, 198 Lamb, Charles 46–7, 56, 58–9 Leech, Clifford 117, 122 Lenker, Lagretta 4, 5, 63, 66, 76, 105 Levin, Harry 70, 99, 104 liberalism 46, 116 Logan, Robert A. 1, 2, 7, 8, 22, 26–7, 85, 93, 105, 159, 193 Lopez, Jeremy 25–7, 167, 188 Lucking, David 191, 195 Lunney, Ruth 3, 25, 28, 33 Lyly, John 21, 209, 210

Index Macauley, [Elizabeth Wright] 47–8, 50, 52, 56–7, 59 Machiavelli, Niccolò 2, 125, 127, 170 Machiavellian 4, 9, 66, 68–9, 105, 125–7, 133–4, 151, 213, 220 MacLure, Millar 44, 46–7, 49, 53–4, 58 magic 3, 6, 8, 13–15, 17–20, 22, 24, 115, 117, 135, 141, 144–5, 177, 187, 191, 193–206 black 15, 196, 203, 208 magicians 8, 14–15, 18, 20, 24, 140, 201, 203, 206 white 15, 196, 201, 208 witchcraft 15 18, 141–2, 198 witches 15, 17–18, 138–42, 196 wizards 3, 15, 18 Mahood, M. M. 110, 134 Malcolm, James Peller 51, 52 Marlowe, Christopher and mothers 4, 75–91 and Shakespeare 7–8, 49, 85, 150, 183, 187, 191, 196, 202–3, 206, 210–11, 221 works Dido, Queen(e) of Carthage 4, 22, 26, 79, 82, 85–6, 88–9, 95, 98–101, 110, 149, 167, 204 Doctor Faustus 13–24, 26, 37, 46–7, 95–6, 101–3, 110, 113–24, 127, 135–48, 150, 161, 191, 193–209, 213, 217, 219 Edward II 3, 5, 7, 8, 22, 25–41, 46–7, 69, 75, 79, 82–3, 88, 95–6, 103–5, 110, 159, 167, 169, 204, 206, 209, 211, 213, 216, 219, 220, 221 Hero and Leander 204 The Jew of Malta 4, 6–7, 9, 14, 23, 40, 43–59, 63–73, 76, 82, 91, 100, 101, 125–34, 150, 167–9, 171–80, 186–8, 192, 204, 209, 219–20 The Massacre at Paris 5–6, 79, 82, 88, 95, 103, 149–68, 204 Tamburlaine the Great 1, 5, 9, 22–3, 26, 28, 33–4, 40, 69, 72–3, 79, 82–3, 86–7, 91, 93, 95–6, 100, 105–10, 131, 160, 187–8, 195, 197, 199, 204–7, 209, 219 Marx, Karl 127–8, 171–2, 185 masculinity 5, 9, 79, 84, 93–110 hypermasculinity 95, 106–9

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Matalene, H. W. 113, 118, 122 McAdam, Ian 14, 23, 67, 128, 133, 158, 199, 200, 202–3 McGrath, Patrick 169, 170 Mebane, John 14, 20 metadrama 3, 8, 14, 19–21, 193, 195, 207, 208 Miller, Naomi J. 43, 77, 78 Milton, John 23, 46, 131, 178 misbelief 6, 125–33 Montaigne, Michel de 6, 125–6, 128–9, 134 morality 19, 20, 28–9, 48, 51, 122, 126–7, 132–3, 148, 180, 199, 217–18 motherhood 76–4, 88, 90–91 cultural representations of 90 mother/son relationship 4, 75–91 Muir, Kenneth 37, 186 Mulryne, J. R. 26, 33 Munday, Anthony 15–19 narrative expectations 3, 28 framework 27, 33, 39 historical 29 Nashe, Thomas 34, 190, 209 Nicholl, Charles 1, 169–71 occult 3, 13, 15, 17, 20, 22, 24 O’Reilly, Andrea 79, 86 Orgel, Stephen 31, 123, 194 Page 43 Page, Judith W. 43–4, 56–8 Palmer, D. J. 126–7 Parker, John 7, 167 parody 6, 68, 101, 113, 119–22, 150 patriarchy 4, 5, 63–9, 71, 73, 76–7, 83–4, 90–9, 931, 95–8, 103, 105, 110 Peele, George 209, 210 Penley, Simon 43, 49, 51, 53–5 performativity 6, 94, 106, 113–23, 131 Perkins, William 44, 77, 141–2 Perry, Merry 5, 93, 105 philo-Semitism 4, 46, 50, 56, 58, 59 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 15–16, 196–8 Plato 22, 152 playhouses 25, 26, 41 politico-religious dissent 7, 168 postmodernism 5, 59, 113, 115–18, 121–3

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and Marlowe see Marlowe, Christopher works All’s Well that Ends Well 81–2 Antony and Cleopatra 75, 201 Coriolanus 80, 84 Hamlet 50, 80–81, 113, 142, 148, 190–91 Henry IV 30, 139, 195, 211–12, 221 Rasmussen, Eric 18, 142, 148, 193, 200, 213 Henry V 28, 139, 195, 210, 221 reception theory 2, 3 Henry VI 7, 28–9, 32–4, 36–7, 209–11, Reddy, Maureen T. 79, 80 216, 218, 221 Reformation 59, 162, 171, 177, 210–11 Julius Caesar 80, 195, 207 religion 4–7, 9, 25, 48, 50, 54, 64–5, 111, King John 28, 37–8, 217, 221 126–7, 129, 131, 138, 149, 151–3, King Lear 107, 119, 193–4 155–7, 159, 161, 165, 167–8, 170, Love’s Labor’s Lost 84 173–4, 176, 201–2, 216 Macbeth 78, 89, 194–6, 198, 200, 202 dissent 7, 151, 168 Measure For Measure 206 doubt 25 The Merry Wives of Windsor 161, 194 hatred 149 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 21, 205, hypocrisy 4, 7, 9, 168 207 terror 151–2 Othello 59, 72, 77, 135–6, 139, 158 Renaissance 1, 4, 7, 13–16, 20, 23, 28–9, 36, The Rape of Lucrece 37 49, 59, 69, 76–7, 80–4, 90–91, 110, 118, Richard II 7, 32, 47, 193–4, 206, 211, 120, 122, 125–8, 130, 133, 144, 151–2, 212, 215–16, 219, 221 159, 170, 179, 186–8, 190, 196–9, 221 Richard III 3, 28, 31, 37, 51, 55, 211, rhetoric 28–9, 31–2, 34, 36–8, 40, 48, 50, 86, 216, 218, 221 98, 149–65, 171, 178, 187, 204 Romeo and Juliet 80, 209 Christian 48 The Tempest 8, 20, 80, 81, 186, 191, dramatic 28 193–208 exemplary 32, 34, 36–8, 40 Titus Andronicus 36–7, 128, 132 masculine 107 Troilus and Cressida 44, 193–4 strategies 6, 31, 149–65 The Winter’s Tale 20, 23, 82, 84 of violence 107, 108 Shapiro, James 7, 33, 35, 39, 126, 174, Riggs, David 1, 15, 29, 126–8, 178 194–5, 207, 210 Roberts, Gareth 140, 197 Shepard, Alan 93, 95 Roberts, Peter 14, 127, 133 Shepherd, Simon 28, 103, 127 Romanticism 43–6, 48, 50, 56–9 Smith, Adam 56, 57 Rose, Mary Beth 7, 24, 34, 76–7, 79–80, Smith, Bruce R. 94, 98 81–2, 84 Smith, James L. 52, 54, 127 Rous, Francis 176–8 Snow, Edward A. 122, 144 Sprengnether, Madelon 81, 84 satire 7, 9, 48, 173, 180 Starks, Lisa S. 23, 54, 69, 127, 131, 204 Sedgwick, Eve 136–8 Staub, Susan C. 78, 79 senses 6, 57, 149–65 St. Augustine 138, 142, 147, 152 Seven Deadly Sins 19–21, 24, 101–2 Steane, J. B. 85, 99, 105, 117–19, 121–2, Shakespeare, William 4–5, 7–9, 13–14, 18, 130 20–21, 23, 25–31, 34, 37–9, 44, 46, Stone, Lawrence 64, 76, 177 48–9, 55, 66, 69, 72, 75–6, 78–85, 89, Stubbes, Philip 16–18 94, 98, 113, 126–30, 132, 135–6, 139, 142, 144, 148, 150–51, 161, 174, 183, Tambling, Jeremy 69, 70–71, 130 185–97, 199, 201–12, 215, 217–22 Probes, Christine McCall 6, 149 Proser, Matthew N. 1, 200 William Prynne 18 Puritanism 13, 64, 77, 79, 142, 143, 176, 179, 218 Puttenham, George 29, 30

Index theater of cruelty 69, 72, 73 theology 6, 24, 35, 119, 150–52, 155, 157, 159, 162, 164, 165, 177 theological allusion 6, 149–65 Thomas, Catherine E. 90, 91 Thomas, Vivien 149, 150 Traister, Barbara Howard 14–15, 19, 197, 207 Trevor-Roper, Hugh 176–7 Tydeman, William 149–50 violence 2, 6, 25, 64, 69, 83, 87, 89, 95, 107–9, 121, 149, 151, 154–5, 157, 164–5, 172, 216–17 Virgil 98, 99, 161 Warhol, Robyn R. 136, 138, 143 Warner, Jessica 139, 143 Warren, Michael J. 142, 146 Webb, David 116, 121 Wernham, R. B. 149, 150 Johann Weyer 141 White, Paul Whitfield 2, 150, 167 Williams, Raymond 27, 128, 169 Wimsatt, James I. 29, 30 Wordsworth, William 44, 57, 58, 59 Yachnin, Paul 25, 26 Yates, Frances A. 193 Yates, Francis A. 15 Zieger, Susan 136, 138 Zucker, David Hard 33, 39

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