It is not easy to account for the power of Marlowe’s plays.* They are unevenly written, not always well constructed, and some survive only in mangled and unreliable texts. Yet an obscure, even dark, imaginative energy is released in them – in the victories of Tamburlaine, in Faustus’ encounters with the demonic, in the irreverence of Barabas and in the humiliation of Edward. At bottom, this energy is religious. Elizabethan playwrights were not allowed to handle sacred subjects, but their greatest plays often depend on the feeling of a sacred power gone dark. Marlowe’s plays of power and helplessness are filled with the energy of the sacred and its desecration.
He was apparently destined for the Church. Born and brought up in Canterbury, the ancient spiritual capital of England, he went up to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on a scholarship designed to educate boys for the ministry. In 1587 the university authorities considered withholding his MA (he was rumoured to be about to defect to the Catholic seminary at Rheims), until the Privy Council intervened to point out that in his absences from Cambridge he had done the queen ‘good service’ – a phrase usually taken to mean spying – ‘and deserved to be rewarded for his faithful dealing’.1 He got his MA, but instead of taking holy orders began writing plays for the London theatres, disreputable places – at least in the eyes of the godly – which were under constant attack as dens of iniquity. Marlowe’s association with learning continued to be important to him: as late as 1592, when he was deported from Holland for his part in a counterfeiting scheme, he was still ‘by his profession [i.e., by his own account] a scholar’.2 But his learning was turned to distinctly heterodox ends: he translated Ovid’s Amores, erotic poems that verged on pornography in Elizabethan eyes (they were published surreptitiously as All Ovid’s Elegies, the title emphasizing the fact that they were unexpurgated); and he acquired a dangerous reputation for atheism. The sometime Cambridge don, Gabriel Harvey, called him ‘a Lucian’, associating him with the Greek satirist notorious for mocking the gods.3 His religious views were under investigation at the time of his violent death in 1593. One Richard Cholmeley claimed to have been ‘converted’ by him and alleged that ‘Marlowe is able to show more sound reasons for atheism than any divine in England is able to give to prove divinity and that Marlowe told him that he hath read the atheist lecture to Sir Walter Ralegh and others.’4
This learned heterodoxy has obvious relevance to the plays: Dr Faustus, having ‘commenced’ (1.3) and been ‘graced’ (Prologue, 17) like a Cambridge graduate, is a scholar who punningly bids ‘Divinity, adieu!’ (1.50) and makes a pact with the devil; and Machevil, in the prologue to The Jew of Malta, has to stop himself delivering an atheist lecture to the audience. More importantly, Marlowe’s learning gets into the very fabric of his astonishing poetry. Consider his most famous lines, Faustus’ address to the shade of Helen of Troy:
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips sucks forth my soul. See where it flies!
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven be in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.
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 plumèd crest.
Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel
And then return to Helen for a kiss.
O, thou art fairer than the evening 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 azured arms;
And none but thou shalt be my paramour. (13.90–109)
This hymn of sexual desire conceals learned ironies in its dense classical allusions. The opening questions come from Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead, in which a visitor to the underworld, seeing Helen’s no-longer-recognizable skull, asks: ‘And is this what those thousand ships sailed for from all over Greece? Is this why all those Greeks and barbarians were killed? And all those cities sacked?’5 Marlowe turns this into part of an oddly humanistic sexual fantasy, the necrophiliac equivalent of the scholar’s desire to revive the classical past. Faustus has earlier produced Helen as an erotic after-dinner show for his scholars; now, to take his mind off his imminent damnation, he becomes her lover, repeatedly kissing her and crooning her name. Helen haunted Marlowe’s imagination. What fascinated him was the destructiveness of her beauty: men died and cities burned for it. And to complete the fantasy of being a modern Paris, strutting in triumph over the heroes of antiquity, Faustus includes the destruction of his own city: ‘Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked’. The later mythological allusions are similarly fraught with dangerous beauty. ‘Hapless Semele’ would admit the god’s sexual approach only if he came in all his glory; she was consumed by his lightning. Yet the ‘thousand stars’, their number matching the ships, are alight with natural beauty (starlight often ignites Marlowe’s poetry), and the eye catches the flash of sunlight on water in the otherwise unknown conjunction of the sun-god Apollo and the liquefied Arethusa. Moreover, the beauty of these heavenly bodies – uncertainly gods or planets – is male beauty, and the uncertainty in Faustus’ imagining of ravishment plays back over the speech as a whole. The initial question – was this the face? – is only half-rhetorical: this is not Helen but a boy-actor and, more darkly, a succubus (an evil spirit in female form) who ‘sucks forth [his] soul’ in ways that are indistinguishably erotic and terrifying.
The self-destructive desire in these lines is a central preoccupation of all Marlowe’s plays. Dido, Queen of Carthage, possibly the earliest and perhaps co-written with his younger Cambridge contemporary Thomas Nashe, is an adaptation of Virgil’s narrative in the Aeneid of Dido’s tragic passion for the Trojan exile Aeneas. It was performed, its title-page tells us, by the boy-actors of the Chapel Children’s company. These two aspects of the play – its closeness to the most prestigious of Latin texts and its performance by boys – are in tension throughout the action. On the one hand, it is a learned play, full of direct translations of Virgil’s most famous lines: when Aeneas asks his divine mother, disguised as a huntress, ‘But what may I, fair virgin, call your name’ (1.1.188), he is translating Virgil’s ‘o quam te tnemorem virgo?’; his speeches describing the fall and burning of Troy are bravura versions of the great narrative of Aeneid II; and at key moments of Act 5, the play simply quotes Virgil’s Latin directly. On the other hand, the action is frequently mock-heroic, the Aeneid in falsetto voices. The opening scene sets the tone, beginning not with grand heterosexual passion but with the pederastie Jupiter ‘dandling GANYMEDE upon his knee’ (0.2SD). The ambivalence of the posture, an erotic game with a child, is present too in the opening line in his sexual invitation (‘Come, gentle Ganymede, and play with me’); and the Ganymede to whom the god’s bribes are offered is detectably a tarty, petulant Elizabethan page-boy. This scene is not in Virgil. It owes much to Lucian, and fits well the horrified description of the boy-actors’ repertoire in The Children of the Chapel Stripped and Whipped (1569): ‘Even in her Majesty’s chapel do these pretty upstart youths profane the Lord’s day by the lascivious writhing of their tender limbs, and gorgeous decking of their apparel, in feigning bawdy fables gathered from the idolatrous heathen poets.’6 Jupiter’s sexual wheedling – an extended version of Marlowe’s famous lyric ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’ (‘Come live with me, and be my love’)7 – is the first of many such invitations. Marlowe multiplies and complicates the love-affairs, and his characters express their desires in ways that are persistently and disturbingly linked with children. The principal changes to Virgil are in the boy-parts of Ascanius and Cupid. Venus abducts Ascanius with sticky promises of ‘sugar-almonds, sweet conserves, / A silver girdle and a golden purse’ (2.1.305–6) so that Cupid can take his place and cause Dido to fall for Aeneas. When she does, she offers (‘Conditionally that thou wilt stay with me’) to refit his ships with erotically luxurious
tackling made of rivelled gold,
Wound on the barks of odoriferous trees;
Oars of massy ivory, full of holes,
Through which the water shall delight toplay (3.1.113,115–18)
and promises Achates a sailor-suit that will allure the nymphs and mermaids, ‘So that Aeneas may but stay with me’ (132). Everyone is turned on, including the old Nurse, who invites Cupid to her
orchard that hath store of plums,
Brown almonds, services, ripe figs, and dates,
Dewberries, apples, yellow oranges… (4.5.4–6)
The cumulative effect is to drive the play away from epic and towards comedy – the comedy of John Lyly, whose Gallathea (1583–5), also written for boy-actors, makes much of the havoc wreaked by Cupid in disguise.
Yet Dido is tragedy, not comedy, a generically labile play in which love is funny but dangerous, its menace signalled by constant reminders of Helen and the fall of Troy. When Cupid snuggles up to Dido and sings a song on her knee in order to get close enough to touch her with his infatuating golden arrow, the dialogue itself glitters ominously:
… tell me where learn’dst thou this pretty song?
CUPID
My cousin Helen taught it me in Troy. (3.1.27–8)
To keep Aeneas, Dido is even prepared to copy ‘that ticing strumpet’ (2.1.300):
So thou wouldst prove as true as Paris did,
Would, as fair Troy was, Carthage might be sacked
And I be called a second Helena! (5.1.146–8)
Dramatic irony works here much as it does in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: Aeneas won’t be true, but will leave in the ships Dido has given him; and Carthage, of course, will be sacked in the wars with Rome which she calls down at the end of the play. Fire is everywhere – even the most woodenly Elizabethan line, ‘Gentle Achates, reach the tinder-box’ (1.1.166), has a spark in it – and the flames of love at once recall the firing of Troy and point forward to the fire in which Dido immolates herself. Dido’s funeral pyre, fuelled by the tokens of Aeneas’ love, is both a solemn sacrifice and a faintly comic hecatomb. Its arch solemnity is typical of the play as a whole; like the rest of the play, its erotic and ironic force are still underrated.
Tamburlaine the Great was Marlowe’s first big hit. Written for adult players, it too is a striking instance of Renaissance neo-classicism. This may surprise us in a history-play about a fourteenth-century Asiatic conqueror, but part of Tamburlaine’s significance to the Elizabethans was the coincidence of his conquests with the European Renaissance: ‘During [his] reign began the restitution of learning and of the arts.’8 Hence the hero praises his wife by claiming that if Zenocrate had lived
before the siege of Troy,
Helen, whose beauty summoned Greece to arms
And drew a thousand ships to Tenedos,
Had not been named in Homer’s Iliads. (Part Two, 2.4.86–9)
Tamburlaine’s poetry of wealth and power – what Ben Jonson called ‘Marlowe’s mighty line’9 – has in fact less affinity with Homer than with the war-poetry of Lucan’s Pharsalia (Marlowe translated its first book, and Tamburlaine alludes in Part One 3.3 to the battle that gives the poem its title). Jonson more sourly complained of the plays’ ‘scenical strutting, and furious vociferation’,10 and modern audiences also sometimes feel wearied by what can seem a formless action driven on by rant.
But Tamburlaine is not one play, but two. Part One, which its original running-title called The Conquests of Tamburlaine the Scythian Shepherd, is about the unstoppable rise of its hero from poverty and obscurity to ‘The sweet fruition of an earthly crown’ (2.6.69). It has an exceptionally clear five-act structure (roughly one per conquest), and its action was originally diversified by comic scenes which the printer cut because he thought them ‘a great disgrace to so honorable and stately a history’ (‘To the Gentlemen Readers’, 16–17). Nonetheless, it begins with comic bathos: Persia, whose past kings ‘triumphed over Afric, and the bounds / Of Europe’ (1.1.9–10) is now ruled by the effete Mycetes; in the first scene, the crown passes with comic rapidity to his ambitious brother Cosroe, who promises the rebels they will ‘triumph over many provinces’ (173). Into this power-vacuum, in Acts 1 and 2, comes Tamburlaine, a passionate shepherd – Marlowe emphasizes his humble origins, just as he exaggerates Aeneas’ destitution in Dido – whose invitation to love (‘Disdains Zenocrate to live with me?…’, 1.2.82–105) is an astonishing offer of barbaric splendour. He even uses the display of his treasure as a military tactic. He briefly supports Cosroe, until the usurper unintentionally fuels his desire to ‘ride in triumph through Persepolis’, then turns on ‘this triumphing king’ (2.5.49, 87) and, at the end of Act 2, hymning ‘aspiring minds’ (2.6.60) over Cosroe’s expiring body, he plucks the crown from his corpse and puts it on. Thereafter, each act ends with a coronation.
We see few battles. Instead the play feels like a triumphal pageant, and the idea of the Roman triumph is deep in its structure. Roman triumphal processions were celebrations of victory, elaborate street-theatre which displayed the triumphator’s glory in plundered spoils and the marching bodies of enslaved captives. Their fascination for Renaissance artists is apparent in Petrarch’s allegorical Trionfi (1356–74); in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590–96); and most memorably in Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar (1486–92), now at Hampton Court and well known in the sixteenth century through reproduction in woodcuts and engravings. Tamburlaine’s catalogues of names, its exhibitions of wealth and its stage-pageantry bring the triumph to the London stage.
Yet Tamburlaine’s triumphs over his enemies increasingly seem the ceremonious exultations of sadism. The defeated Bajazeth is put in a cage and ‘in triumph drawn’ (4.2.86); Tamburlaine, who has felt the ‘thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown’ (2.6.52), feasts while his prisoner starves, and torments him with the strange confection of ‘a second course of crowns’ (4.4.110SD). Zenocrate, herself part of the spoils of war, is increasingly used to register the horror of Tamburlaine’s atrocities. Her pity for his victims prompts his one soliloquy (‘Ah, fair Zenocrate, divine Zenocrate…’, 5.1.135–90); but it is a rapturous contemplation of her suffering beauty – her crying excites him – as a force almost powerful enough to restrain him. The whole play ponders the connection of beauty and pain in his question, ‘What is beauty, saith my sufferings, then?’ (1.160). Its ending is disconcerting. Zenocrate has drawn the traditional warnings about ‘fickle empery’ and ‘earthly pomp’ (1.352–3) from the fall of Bajazeth and his wife; now, with their corpses and her sometime fiancé’s still on stage, she is enthroned and crowned. This extraordinary tableau has been compared to the amoral triumph of the lovers at the end of Monteverdi’s opera L’Incoronazione di Poppea (1642).11 It is at once an emblem of victory and a warning of the brutality and transience of power.
To some, Part Two seems just more of the same. But the effect may be deliberate. The hero is a murderous automaton, compulsively repeating what the play’s running-title calls The Bloody Conquests of Mighty Tamburlaine. And there are differences. Tamburlaine is offstage for most of the first two acts. He is older; his conquests are now an empire; attention shifts to some extent to his heirs and a new generation of antagonists. The play opens on the banks of the Danube, where the Muslim world meets Christendom, and is set against a backdrop of geopolitical conflicts. (Tellingly, the ringing place-names are now more precise: Marlowe was using an atlas.12) The conflicts are at once religious and territorial, and the play is not on the Christian side. The perfidious Christians are overrun by a pious Muslim who calls on Christ; the God he reveres is one ‘that sits on high and never sleeps, / Nor in one place is circumscriptible’ (2.2.49–50). Beyond the vast Asiatic spaces over which the action is fought out, there is a vaster spiritual dimension.
Tamburlaine too is seen against this background. His conquests continue, but are now vulnerable to irony. Callapine escapes his captivity by seducing his gaoler with an offer of a crown that parodies Tamburlaine’s invitations to power; his idle and cowardly son is a damaging mockery of his killer-ethic; and, most importantly, he is helpless in the face of Zenocrate’s death: his frustrated rant about invading Heaven and Hell to win her back is deflated by Theridamas’s realism: ‘She is dead, / And all this raging cannot make her live’ (2.4.119–20). Hitherto invulnerable, his wounding his own arm to teach his sons courage is also the self-mutilation of blocked grief. He cannot even bury her body, but drags it with him, burning towns as perverse monuments to her memory. There are more victories, but they are circumscribed by the increasingly persistent references to Heaven, Hell and death.
A nuclear scientist, watching the first atomic bomb explode, grimly applied to himself the words of a great Hindu god: ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’13 Tamburlaine too identifies with death, and his terrible chariot drawn by captive kings belongs in the traditional Triumph of Death. The idea of earthly conquest is still strong towards the end of the play – in Babylon, where earlier conquerors ‘Have rode in triumph, triumphs Tamburlaine’ (5.1.70) – but his march to Samarkand is cut short by his own death. Yet even here, Marlowe avoids conventional Christian moralizing. His final illness begins just after he has burned the Koran, an act which could be interpreted as a fatal defiance of divine power, except that he burns it in the name of God (‘For he is God alone, and none but he’, 5.1.201). And in the last scene, the crown with which he invests his son is the sign of a purely secular power. The play remains studiedly ambiguous about the religious meaning, if any, of ‘Tamburlaine, the scourge of God’ (5.3.248).
Of Marlowe’s own religious views, nothing certain can be known. The closest we come is the dubious record of ‘his damnable judgement of religion, and scorn of God’s word’ preserved in the ‘note’ Richard Baines delivered to the Privy Council close to the time of Marlowe’s death. Baines was a hostile and unreliable witness (he had been apprehended with Marlowe for counterfeiting in Holland; each accused the other of intending to desert to the Catholic enemy), and his note is an informer’s delation. But it is the nearest thing we have to evidence and is reprinted at the end of this Introduction. The opinions it contains are clever and provocative. The religion of Moses was magical trickery, designed, like all religion, ‘only to keep men in awe’. The New Testament is ‘filthily written’, its mysteries sexual scandals. The most entertaining blasphemy – ‘That St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom, and that he used him [note the ambiguity of the pronouns] as the sinners of Sodoma’ – sounds like an accusation until you read the disarming sequel: ‘That all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools.’
More important, perhaps, to an understanding of the place of religion in Marlowe’s plays is the context of Counter-Reformation Europe. ‘Atheism’ in the sixteenth century did not preclude belief in God. It was what you accused someone else of. The unity of Christendom, at once political and religious, was split by a confessional division which turned each side’s deepest spiritual convictions to derision. For Protestants, Catholicism was a murderous conspiracy to uphold the hegemony of Spain and the papacy; in Catholic eyes, Protestants were merely seditious heretics. Much of continental Europe was involved in religious wars. Marlowe knew this world – he had been in France as well as in Holland14 – and it colours the mockeries and solemnities of the plays.
It is literally the setting of The Massacre at Paris, which dramatizes the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) and its aftermath. The play opens with an ecumenical marriage, but within moments the cast is divided by the key ritual that separated Catholics from Protestants: the Catholics go to mass ‘to honour this solemnity’ (which Catherine de Medici promises – aside – to ‘dissolve with blood and cruelty’, 1.24–5), leaving the Protestants to express their satisfaction at the discomfiture of the Catholic leader the duke of Guise, and their hope of making the ‘Gospel flourish in this land’ (56). Guise is a monster of politic atheism – ‘My policy hath framed religion. / Religion: O Diabole!’ (2.62–3) – who engineers the massacre to further his own ambition for the crown. The killing is done with grim sacrilegious humour which ‘reproduces with remarkable accuracy forms of ritualized violence peculiar to the French religious wars’:15 Guise kills a preacher with a mockery of a Protestant sermon (‘“Dearly beloved brother” – thus ’tis written. He stabs him’, 7.5); church-bells sound throughout. The play is virulently anti-Catholic; but, although the text in which it survives is too poor to make certain judgements, its satire seems also to cover the anti-Guisard backlash which follows. Anjou, who has gleefully joined in the killing, becomes king and coolly orders the deaths of the Catholic leaders, only to be slain himself by a treacherous friar. His death allows the Protestant Navarre to gain the throne; but one cannot be sure how complacently an Elizabethan audience would have heard the king’s dying call on his minion to ‘slice the Catholics’ (24.99), nor Navarre’s promise to continue the cycle of violence through revenge. The play’s very ‘orthodoxy’ is disquieting.
In a sense, this is also true of Doctor Faustus. A dark Morality, the play ‘tells the world-story of a man who, seeking for all knowledge, pledged his soul to the devil, only to find the misery of a hopeless repentance in this world and damnation in the world to come’.16 Marlowe’s play should not be confused with later developments of the Faust-legend (‘the world-story’): it is a dramatization of the anonymous German Faustbook, which has been called ‘at once a cautionary tale and a book of marvels, a jest-book and a theological tract’.17 Many of the play’s least critically popular scenes are necessary, famous parts of the story Marlowe took from the Faustbook, a distinctive product of post-Reformation Germany, with its anxieties about magic and religion, knowledge and salvation. This is the world in which the play, especially in its opening scenes, is quite precisely set: the unheroic, academic world of Wittenberg, Luther’s own university, evoked by the technical language of ‘scholarism’ (Prologue, 16) and theology which the characters speak. Faustus’ ambitions too are localized: the desire to ‘be as cunning as Agrippa’ (1.119) alludes ironically to Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, who explored the practice of learned magic in one book (De Occulta Philosophia, 1510, published 1533), and then renounced the follies of learning in another (De Vanitate Scientiarum, 1531); Faustus’ wish to ‘chase the Prince of Parma from our land’ (1.95) makes him a contemporary of Spain’s wars in Northern Europe.
Faustus dreams of ‘omnipotence’ and hopes ‘All things that move between the quiet poles [of the universe] / Shall be at my command’ (1.56, 58–9); instead, he becomes, like Mephistopheles, ‘servant to great Lucifer’ (3.41) and a stage-conjuror of a type familiar from other Elizabethan plays (such as the heroes of Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay or Anthony Munday’s John a Kent and John a Cumber, both c. 1589). The story told in Marlowe’s play, in fact, is well on the way to its ‘degeneration’ in the next two centuries into the popular media of ballads, farces and puppet shows – the last being the form in which Goethe first knew it. Yet it is also a spectacle of damnation.
This makes it all the more disturbing that we do not know quite what we are seeing. Consider Faustus’ first speech, his survey of the arts and decision to practise magic. The spatial setting, with Faustus turning the pages of books ‘in his study’ (1.0SD), is exact. But is this happening in real time? Are we actually watching him make his fatal decision, or is the speech a symbolic condensation of a longer process? Is this the speech of a presenter in a Morality play, or of a character in a tragedy? The soliloquy bespeaks a character with an acute inner subjectivity (Faustus names himself obsessively throughout the play), but one who still receives the ministrations of good and evil angels. The action here, like the play as a whole, is fascinatingly poised between older and still evolving dramatic forms.
There are comparable – fearful – uncertainties in Faustus’ encounters with the devil. Mephistopheles is a new kind of devil, quiet, melancholy, menacing in the very honesty with which he explains his coming ‘to get [Faustus’] glorious soul’. And he brings a new, spatially disquieting Hell with him in his own ‘fainting soul’: ‘Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.’ At first he comes as a familiar ‘Devil’; later, he always accompanies Faustus in the guise of ‘an old Franciscan friar’ (3.50, 84,78, 23SD, 26). Since Faustus wears the robes and cross of a Doctor of Divinity (‘a divine in show’, 1.3), the stage is occupied – apparently – by two religious figures, both of whom (since Faustus bargains to ‘be a spirit in form and substance’, 5.97) are in fact evil spirits. Wagner’s mock-academic question about his master – ‘is not he corpus naturale?’ (2.20–21) – thus has disturbing ironic force. What we see onstage may not be all that is there. Hence the stories of early performances of the play being disrupted by real devils: there is always the danger that a real spirit might answer the actor’s summons. Doctor Faustus is a spiritual tragedy, a play centred on what cannot be staged, the invisible, immortal soul. Part of what is so disturbing about the pact that consigns in his own blood Faustus’ soul to the devil is the ontological uncertainty over how exactly such material, corporeal forms, can bind the immaterial soul. Is it, in fact, the pact that damns Faustus? What does it mean to sell one’s soul? Faustus gains no new knowledge: Mephistopheles’s answers to his cosmological questions are freshman truisms, and Faustus is stupidly blind to the evidence of his own senses:
FAUSTUS Come, I think hell’s a fable.
…
MEPHISTOPHELES
But, Faustus, I am an instance to prove the contrary,
For I am damnèd and am now in hell. (5.129, 138–9)
Faustus lives for twenty-four years after he signs the pact, but in some sense he is already damned.
A witty student once remarked that the play has ‘a beginning, a muddle, and an end’,18 and Marlowe may not have written all its middle scenes. But there is a terrible bathos in Faustus’ adventures. His journeys seem aimless; time is uncertain (the chronology shifts uneasily to the reign of Charles V) and empty, structured only by episodes of trickery. Elizabethan audiences probably enjoyed Faustus’ pope-baiting as a liberating defiance of an exploded religious solemnity. Yet there is something troubling here. Magic, in sixteenth-century eyes, was an inverted religion, and, when Faustus and Mephistopheles are anathematized, though they ‘beat the FRIARS, and fling fireworks among them’ (8.99SD), they do also leave. It is not quite clear how much spiritual power the old religion still commands.
The clowning scenes too seem confused and irrelevant. One of their functions is parodic. Wagner is a sorcerer’s apprentice whose taking Robin the Clown into his service reflects ironically on Faustus’ ambiguous master-servant relationship with Mephistopheles. Faustus experiences his longings as appetites to be glutted, and thinks the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins ‘feeds [his] soul’ (7.163): Hazlitt called it ‘a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness’.19 The Clown’s hunger is comparable (‘he would give his soul to the devil for a shoulder of mutton’, 4.8–9), but more safely comic. The devils Robin and Rafe conjure up (remember that in the main plot Mephistopheles is free not to answer Faustus’ summons) are as familiar as their lice. There is never a sense that their souls are in danger, the clowns are safe with these devils: they are the devils you know, and they play by the older rules. When Mephistopheles punishes them by turning them into animals, they look forward to satisfying their humble appetites: Robin will ‘get nuts and apples enow’ as an ape; Rafe’s head, as a dog, ‘will never be out of the pottage pot’ (9.49, 51). Faustus’ jokey adventures, by contrast, are pointless distractions from the appalling reality of his damnation, and, as the ‘fatal time’ draws closer, they are full of grim anticipation: ‘What, dost think I am a horse-doctor?’ he mockingly asks the Horse-courser, who later pulls off his leg in innocent anticipation of Mephistopheles’s threats to dismember him; and then immediately reels to a sudden apprehension of despair: ‘What art thou, Faustus, but a man condemned to die?’ (11.30, 27–8, 29). The play’s middle scenes accord with a contradictory Elizabethan aesthetic, violently juxtaposing the serious and the comic.
Its final scenes are highly concentrated. With Faustus’ return to Wittenberg, space and time contract, and Marlowe exploits the audience’s consciousness of the approaching end. Body and soul are again prominent. ‘Belly-cheer’ at the scholars’ feast and lust for Helen ‘glut the longing of [his] heart’s desire’ (13.6, 82), but we are watching a man lose his soul. The good and evil angels no longer appear, their allegorical contest replaced by one between Helen and Mephistopheles and the mysterious Old Man who suddenly materializes with each of Helen’s appearances and calls on Faustus to repent. Helen takes both his soul and his bodily substance: Faustus is committing the sin of demoniality, carnal intercourse with an evil spirit (one of the play’s editors thought this his unforgivable sin).20 The Old Man draws attention to other body fluids, calling on Faustus to ‘drop blood, and mingle it with tears’ (13.39) in a highly corporeal appeal to the redeemer whose blood Faustus will see streaming ‘in the firmament’ in his last hour. Instead, Faustus again uses it to sign away his soul. The bodily and the spiritual are interfused. Faustus has taken a ‘surfeit of deadly sin that hath damned both body and soul’, and when he finds himself unable to pray – ‘I would lift up my hands, but see, they hold them, they hold them’ (14.75, 11–12, 31–2) – it is all the more disturbing that ‘they’ are not, to our eyes, there.
When the Old Man dies, his body tormented but his soul untouched, he walks off the stage into another world (‘Hence, hell! For hence I fly unto my God’, 13.118), and we are made acutely aware of that other world at the end of the play. As in the first scene, Faustus is alone in his study; but he ‘sees’ Heaven and Hell. Time ‘really’ passes in this scene’s ‘one bare hour’ – the clock strikes it – and beyond it, ‘perpetually’ (14.63, 64), stretches damnation. Faustus’ monologue is a frenzied attempt to stop the cosmic clock, but his magic is useless: ‘The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, / The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned’ (14.72–3). His punishment approaches with the inexorability of a natural law. His body does not ‘turn to air’, nor his soul ‘into little waterdrops’ (14.113, 115). The devils come and lead him out of sight.
His fall is as inevitable as the law of gravity. God seems not to act at all – perhaps the most fearful thing to its first audiences. In ancient tragedy, the gods destroy a mortal who offends them with his pride (hubris). Marlowe’s application of this tragic model to the damnation of Faustus is not reassuring to a Christian audience.
‘Pythagoras’ metempsychosis’ (14.104), the transmigration of the soul, offers no escape in the harshly orthodox world of Doctor Faustus. At the start of The Jew of Malta, the soul of Machevil (Machiavelli’s post-mortem name spells out his immorality as clearly as his claiming to ‘count religion but a childish toy’, Prologue, 14), having transmigrated through the body of the duke of Guise, arrives to ‘present’ (Prologue, 30) Barabas, who sits in his counting-house, like Faustus in his study, counting his wealth – ‘Infinite riches in a little room’ (1.1.37). Thereafter, the soul is irrelevant to the material world of a play filled with jewels and gold. Malta itself is a little room, cramped and urban, a fortified Mediterranean island which draws Turks, Christians and Jews alike, all blown in by ‘The wind that bloweth all the world besides: / Desire of gold’ (3.5.3–4). Religious differences here are harshly ethnic, territorial, not moral. The Knights of Malta sanctimoniously confiscate Barabas’s wealth to buy off the Turks, and most of the action is taken up with his vengeance against Ferneze for this judicial theft. The play is largely a satire on Christian venality and hypocrisy. There is little poetry: ‘The Passionate Shepherd’ reappears in parody-form in the mangled mythologies of the runaway slave Ithamore’s invitation to the prostitute Bellamira:
I’ll be thy Jason, thou my golden fleece;
…
Thou in those groves, by Dis above,
Shalt live with me and be my love. (4.2.93, 100–101)
The language is dominated by obliquities, puns and asides. It is a revenge-tragedy that tips over into farce, ‘the farce of the old English comic humour’, in T.S. Eliot’s inescapable formulation, ‘terribly serious even savage comic humour’.21
Barabas entirely dominates the plot, and he is something other than a vulgar anti-Semitic stereotype: he is a stereotype, a monster, in the making. Alone when he first appears, Barabas is consistently isolated. He feels no more solidarity with his fellow Jews than with ‘these swine-eating Christians, / (Unchosen nation, never circumcised…)’ (2.3.7–8), and is unmoved by the Turkish threat: ‘Nay, let ’em combat, conquer, and kill all, / So they spare me, my daughter, and my wealth’ (1.1.150–51). But the provisos make him vulnerable. Robbed of his wealth and his house, he becomes further desocialized. His soliloquies and snarling asides, besides being brilliant comic devices, are also the verbal tics of a man talking principally to himself. The complex satirical functions of his interactions are especially clear in 2.3, in which he lures his daughter’s two Christian suitors, Lodowick and Mathias, into a murderous rivalry to be avenged on Lodowick’s father. Barabas covers his asides to the audience with some invented Jewish ritual:
’Tis a custom held with us
That, when we speak with gentiles like to you,
We turn into the air to purge ourselves;
For unto us the promise doth belong. (2.3.45–8)
This enactment of Jewish separateness maliciously parodies the Christian fantasy of the foetor Judaicus, the ‘Jewish stench’ supposedly given off by menstruating Jewish men, and neatly captures the mutual hostility of the two religions.22 Later in the scene, a respectable Christian matron conveniently illustrates the usual prejudice: ‘Converse not with him, he is cast off from heaven’ (3.161). But this apartheid masks a secret commerce. Both groups, after all, have come to buy people at a Christianrun slave-market; the ‘diamond’ Barabas discusses with Lodowick is his daughter. But in the complicated equivocations it is not clear Lodowick knows they are talking about Abigall. The puns are Barabas’s private joke.
Something odd happens to him in this scene. Many readers complain that his famous ‘confession’ to Ithamore, a compound of familiar anti-Semitic fantasy – ‘As for myself, I walk abroad a-nights / And kill sick people groaning under walls’ (3.177–8) – is both ethically and aesthetically offensive. Why should so secretive a character blurt out the truth? Is this earlier career not implausible? Exactly. As he talks with his newly purchased alter ego (‘we are villains both. / Both circumcisèd, we hate Christians both’, 3.217–18), we watch Barabas being dehumanized, becoming the anti-Semitic mask he wears (‘O brave, master, I worship your nose for this!’, 3.176). From now on, he is alienated even from Abigail – eventually, he kills her – and creates a mock-family by promising, falsely, to adopt Ithamore as his heir. There is a huge comic relish in his murder of a whole convent along with his daughter in an act of poisonous charity, and as his murderousness gets funnier, it gets steadily less and less human, as in his response to the passing bells that sound for the nuns (compare the bells in The Massacre at Paris):
There is no music to a Christian’s knell.
How sweet the bells ring, now the nuns are dead,
That sound at other times like tinkers’ pans! (4.1.1–3)
He suffers a further symbolic loss of identity when he goes to poison Ithamore disguised as a French lutanist. And when he ‘dies’, his dehumanization is completed by having his corpse thrown out over the city-walls like rubbish.
Those who deplore this un-charactering of Barabas also feel the play tails off in its later acts into unmotivated intrigue. Certainly, The Jew of Malta is Marlowe’s only play to make such extensive use of intrigue, and its characters share Barabas’s delight in ‘crossbiting’ (4.3.13): Ithamore wonders,
Why, was there ever seen such villainy,
So neatly plotted and so well performed?
Both held in hand, and flatly both beguiled? (3.3.1–3)
This delight in symmetry is present in individual scenes – Shakespeare found the germ of Romeo and Juliet’s balcony-scene in the antithetically constructed 2.1 – and in the plot at large. For the ending brings Barabas full circle. In the opening scenes, he had recognized the exclusion of the Jews from political power, and was content not only to leave such power to Christian ‘policy’ (1.1.138), but to relish his own separation from the ‘polity’. At the end, when he is made governor, he rashly forgets Ferneze’s unscrupulousness, and is therefore caught in his own trap, dropped into the burning cauldron he has prepared for the Turks. If this has the too-neat symmetry of poetic justice, it also makes Ferneze’s closing Te Deum seem all the more ironic.
Edward the Second too is markedly symmetrical. In charting the king’s decline, from his coronation to abjection and murder, the play also frames the rise and fall of his lover Gaveston, in the first half, and, in the second, the rise and fall of his enemy Mortimer. Looked at more closely, its symmetries are those of irreconcilable conflict, the civil war that breaks out to the cries,
WARWICK
Saint George for England and the barons’ right!
EDWARD
Saint George for England and King Edward’s right! (12.35–6)
This pattern of verbal contest is everywhere. Characters measure lines like swords:
MORTIMER
Why should you love him whom the world hates so?
EDWARD
Because he loves me more than all the world. (4.76–7)
The barons’ hatred of Edward’s love is less homophobia than class-antagonism. Gaveston is an upstart on whom the king showers favours at the expense of the old nobility. From his first appearance, he is a Marlovian overreacher, who, while Edward loves him, thinks himself
Unlike Tamburlaine, however, or Shakespeare’s history-plays, Edward the Second is strikingly unceremonious. ‘Triumphs’ here often mean ‘idle triumphs, masques, lascivious shows’ (6.156), erotic courtly entertainments of the kind with which Gaveston intends to manipulate ‘the pliant king’ (1.52), lavish tournaments without the substance of military power. Edward and Gaveston’s love looks like a hopeless fantasy in the face of the barons’ armed muscle:
EDWARD
Lay hands on that traitor Mortimer!
MORTIMER SENIOR
Lay hands on that traitor Gaveston!
[They seize GAVESTON.]
KENT
Is this the duty that you owe your king?
WARWICK
We know our duties. Let him know his peers. (4.20–23)
This manhandling is symptomatic. In this brutally pragmatic world, physical proximity, bodily intimacy, is the key to political influence. Gaveston is exiled and returned; Edward embraces him and pushes Isabel his queen aside. The first half of the action is literally fought out over the possession of Gaveston’s body, ‘That, like the Greekish strumpet [Helen], trained to arms / And bloody wars so many valiant knights’ (9.15–16). When the barons get hold of him, they bundle him round the stage and the country, and then treacherously cut off his head. Beheadings and references to beheadings are unnervingly abundant. They point forward to the play’s final tableau, in which Mortimer’s head is placed on top of the coffin of the recently murdered king, whose own death – on a bed, with a red-hot spit forced up into his bowels – is an obscene parody of sexual penetration.
The middle scenes are confusing, filled with sudden shifts of allegiance and unexpected reversals of fortune. Mortimer emerges as a full-blown Machiavellian and seduces the queen, who changes from wronged wife into her more historically traditional role of ‘she-wolf of France’. But the biggest changes are in Edward. Almost imperceptibly, as he is separated from Gaveston, his affections are transferred to the younger Spencer, to whom he is introduced, pointedly, on Gaveston’s wedding-day, and with whom, rather than with Gaveston, he flees from Tynemouth. More importantly, he is now a pathetic victim, and it is his body that is moved passively about the stage. The people change but the roles remain the same, and the characters are increasingly aware of traditional patternings that give shape to the action. Mortimer’s ascendancy is a familiar affair: Edward is his prisoner and he keeps control of the prince by physically abducting him from his uncle; Kent is dispatched in the usual way:
EDWARD III
My lord, he is my uncle and shall live.
MORTIMER
My lord, he is your enemy and shall die. (24.90–1)
Appropriately, Mortimer envisions his own career in the traditional, secular terms of the wheel of Fortune (26.59–63).
But there is something more eerie in the counterpointed scenes of Edward’s fall. Disguised in a monk’s habit and surrounded by other cowled figures, the king begins to contemplate his decline as an instance of the medieval genre of the Falls of Princes, his language too becoming momentarily archaic: ‘Whilom I was, powerful and full of pomp’ (20.13). A play which opened with a fantasy of Renaissance courtly shows (‘Italian masques by night’, 1.54) is becoming medieval. Its action fills with obscure atavistic menace. The mower who betrays Edward is only ‘A gloomy fellow in a mead below’ (20.29) – but he is a Reaper, a figure of death touched in to the landscape. ‘The day grows old’ (20.85) in the most ordinary sense, but the diurnal references are oddly insistent about the coming of night, and the emphasis returns when the king, plunged into darkness in the closing scenes, tries, like Faustus, to hold back the end of the day:
Stand still, you watches of the element;
All times and seasons, rest you at a stay,
That Edward may be still fair England’s king.
But day’s bright beams doth vanish fast away,
And needs I must resign my wishèd crown. (21.66–70)
His head brought low by uncrowning and unmanned by shaving, his deconsecrated body immersed in excrement and murderously violated through the anus, Edward’s torments are physically appalling symbolic degradations. They suggest the torments of the damned, and his murderer is a kind of devil. ‘Lightborne’ is a version of ‘Lucifer’, and he shares the name with a fallen angel in the Chester Mystery plays. The closing scenes of this least providential of history-plays are full of a hellish fear that is made the worse by being so resolutely unreligious.
Modern criticism, concentrating on Marlowe’s ‘subversiveness’, sometimes makes him sound like Joe Orton in doublet and hose. To some Elizabethans, he was something more dangerous. Richard Baines’s testimony against Marlowe includes the pious wish that ‘all men in Christianity ought to endeavour that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped’. Speculation continues that, when Marlowe was killed in Deptford in May 1593, that is exactly what happened.23
1. Quoted by Frederick S. Boas, Christopher Marlowe, A Biographical and Critical Study (Oxford, 1940), p. 22.
2. R. B. Wernham, ‘Christopher Marlowe at Flushing’, English Historical Review 91 (1976), pp. 344–5.
3. Gabriel Harvey, A New Letter of Notable Contents (1593), sig. Dr.
4. British Library MS Harley 6848 fols. 190–91.
5. Lucian, Selected Works, tr. Bryan P. Reardon (Indianapolis, 1965), p.34.
6. Quoted by Thomas Warton, History of English Poetry (1774–81), ed. W. C. Hazlitt (1871), IV, 217. The original is now lost, and it is possible that this is a forgery, but the sentiment was commonplace.
7. Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Poems and Translations, ed. Stephen Orgel (Harmondsworth, 1971), p. 211.
8. Louis Le Roy, Of the Interchangeable Course, or Variety of Things, tr. Robert Apsley (1594), sig. A4r. Tamburlaine is in effect the hero of Le Roy’s book: see fols. 107v – 109v and 119v –120r.
9. ‘To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr William Shakespeare: And What He Hath Left Us’ (30), The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 263.
10. Discoveries 963–4, in Complete Poems, ed. Parfitt, p. 398.
11. Emrys Jones, ‘Into the Open’, Essays in Criticism 33 (1983), p. 344.
12. Ethel Seaton, ‘Marlowe’s Map’, Essays and Studies 10 (1924), pp. 13–35.
13. Jack Rummel, Robert Oppenheimer, Dark Prince (Oxford, 1992), p. 11. Oppenheimer was recalling the words of Siva to Arjuna, Baghavad-Gita 10.
14. Philip Henderson, ‘Marlowe as a Messenger’, Times Literary Supplement, 12 June 1953, p. 381.
15. Julia Briggs, ‘Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris: A Reconsideration’, Review of English Studies n.s. 34 (1983), p. 259.
16. Felix E. Schelling, English Drama (London, 1914), p. 68.
17. Harry Levin, Christopher Marlowe: The Overreacher (London, 1954), p.131.
18. Reported by Roma Gill, ‘“Such Conceits as Clownage Keeps in Pay”: Comedy in Dr Faustus’, in The Fool and the Trickster: Studies in Honour of Enid Welsford, ed. Paul V. A. Williams (Cambridge, 1979), p.56.
19. Lectures on the Age of Elizabeth (1820), repr. in Marlowe, ‘Dr Faustus’: A Casebook, ed. John Jump (London, 1969), p. 27.
20. W. W. Greg, ‘The Damnation of Faustus’, Modern Language Review 61 (1946), repr. in Jump, Casebook, pp. 71–88.
21. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (London, 1951), p. 105.
22. Cf. Wilbur Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea: Studies in the Plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1968), p. 42.
23. See Charles NichoU, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (London, 1992).