ACT 1

Scene 1

0.1–0.2  SD It is likely that Barabas’s counting-house occupies a discovery-space, concealed by a curtain which is drawn by Machevil as he leaves the stage.

1–3  So that… satisfied: Barabas takes great satisfaction in the huge profits from his most recent financial venture.

3          summed and satisfied: Tallied up and settled.

4          Samnites: Emended from Q’s Samintes. Mentioning the Samnites (N), an ancient central Italian tribe, in the same line as the biblical ‘men of Uz’ (N), emphasizes the extent of Barabas’s commercial empire.

8          Well fare: May they fare well.

11        Tell: Count.

13    Would make… coin: Would think such a sum of money miraculous.

21–32  The wealthy… captivity: The delight in precious stones may be a traditional feature of the caricature stage Jew, as in the late-medieval Croxton Play of the Sacrament.

21        eastern rocks: The mountains of India, famed for their precious minerals.

29        indifferently rated: Impartially valued.

34–5  frame… from: Arrange in a way which is distinct from.

36–7  enclose… little room: Perhaps a parody of the traditional conception of Christ within the womb of the Virgin.

39        peers: Points.

halcyon’s bill: Stuffed halcyons (a species of kingfisher) were used as weathervanes.

49        riding… road: Riding at anchor in the roadstead.

52        custom them: Pay the customs duties.

57        as I: As if I.

62        The very custom barely: ‘Even the customs duties alone’ (Bawcutt 1978).

68        there’s somewhat come: ‘At least something has arrived safely’ (Bawcutt 1978).

74        Where Nilus… main: Where the Nile flows into (contributes its waters to) the sea.

79        crazèd: (Here) unseaworthy.

80        they are wise: They think they know best.

82        loading: Bill of lading.

90–91  they coasted… businesses: They sailed by Crete (‘Candy’) for oils and other goods.

93        Without… conduct: I.e. without an escort (which protected against pirates).

94        wafted: Escorted.

103–4  the blessings… happiness: An allusion to the covenant between God and Abraham (Genesis 17:1–22). See also Exodus 6:1–8 and Galatians 3:16.

109      substance: Wealth (cargo).

successful blasts: Propitious winds.

110      happiness: Good fortune.

114      fruits… faith: The fruits of faith are a New Testament commonplace, e.g. Matthew 7:16–20.

116      profession: Professed religion.

117      Haply: Perhaps.

hapless: (i) Unfortunate, (ii) poor.

119  scattered nation: The diaspora was seen as a consequence of the curse in Deuteronomy 28:25.

120      scambled up: (i) Competed fiercely, (ii) sought money rapaciously.

122      Kirriah Jairim: The name of an Old Testament city (I Chronicles 2:50–53), here given to a person.

123      Obed: The name of the son of Boaz and Ruth (Ruth 4:17–22).

Bairseth: An unclear reference; possibly a variation of Baaseiah (I Chronicles 6:40) (Bawcutt 1978).

Nones: Probably alluding to Hector Nuñez (1521–91), the Portuguese physician, merchant and head of the Marrano (Jewish convert) community in London.

134      charge: Expenses.

138      of policy: As a matter of expediency.

146      they: I.e. the Maltese governors.

162      With whom: Against whom.

attempted: Launched attacks.

169      Provide him: Prepare himself.

fashion: Fashion’s.

170      state: Condition.

174      Zaareth… Temainte: Possibly reminiscent of Zophar the Naamathite, and Eliphaz the Temanite, two of Job’s comforters (Job 2:11).

187      Ego… proximus: I am always closest to myself (adapted from Terence, Andria 4.1.12).

Scene 2

0.1   SD Governor: Q’s reading, Governors (also at lines 10,17, 27, 32 and 129), is most likely attributable to compositorial error, but may indicate that Marlowe did not originally give Ferneze the prominence he has later in the play.

0.2   SD BASHAWS: Pashas, or Turkish army officers. The form Basso[es] is used interchangeably.

2          Knights of Malta: The Knights of St John of Jerusalem who were based in Malta from 1530 onward.

9          consider: Show consideration for.

11        my father’s cause: I.e. the Sultan of Turkey’s business.

13        leave: Permission (to talk privately amongst themselves).

15        send: Give orders.

22        That’s more… commission: That is more than we are authorized to do.

23        Callapine: The Bashaw appears to share the name of Bajazeth’s son in Tamburlaine Part Two.

25–6  ’tis more… constraint: Proverbial. ‘It is better to obtain by love than force’ (Tilley L487).

45        there’s more… so: There’s more to it than that.

47        cast: Calculated.

cannot compass it: Cannot manage it.

64        Who… heaven: Christian anti-Semitism was based on the belief that the Jews had accepted responsibility for the death of Christ and in consequence were an accursed race (cf. Matthew 27:25).

91        Corpo di Dio!: Italian, body of God!

97–8  particularly thine… multitude: An echo of John 11:50: ‘it is expedient for us, that one man die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not’ (Geneva Bible).

105      Of naught… made: Proverbial (Tilley N285).

108      your first curse: See line 64n. above.

117      The man… live: Cf. Proverbs 10:2 and 12:28.

121      profession: (i) Barabas’s Jewish faith, (ii) his commercial activities.

136      other: Other Jews.

137      take order… residue: Make arrangements about the rest.

152      And therefore… wrong: And so don’t try to make fine distinctions between equally evil acts.

159      if… day: If we fail to pay the tribute on time.

160      simple policy: The strategy of a simpleton.

161      policy: Trickery (playing on the previous line).

162      simplicity: Honesty (picking up on ‘simple’ in line 160).

163      plagues of Egypt: Cf. Exodus 7–12.

165      Primus Motor: Latin, Prime Mover, God.

182–6  I wot… She-asses: Cf. Job 1:3: ‘His substance also was seven thousand sheep, and three thousand camels, and five hundred yoke of oxen, and five hundred she asses’ (Geneva Bible).

187      indifferent rate: Fair price.

193–6  Thy fatal… eyes: Cf. Job 3:1–10, ‘Afterward Job opened his mouth, and cursed his day. And Job cried out, and said, Let the day perish, wherein I was born, and the night when it was said, There is a man-child conceived. Let that day be darkness, let not God regard it from above, neither let the light shine upon it, but let darkness, and the shadow of death stain it, let the cloud remain upon it, and let them make it fearful as a bitter day… Because it shut not up the doors of my mother’s womb: nor hid sorrow from mine eyes’ (Geneva Bible).

197–9  For only… me: Cf. Job 7:3: ‘So have I had as an inheritance the months of vanity, and painful nights have been appointed unto me’ (Geneva Bible).

208  ’Tis in… I speak: Cf. Job, 7:11: ‘Therefore I will not spare my mouth, but will speak in the trouble of my spirit, and muse in the bitterness of my mind’ (Geneva Bible).

216      for: Because.

220      mould: (i) Mould, (ii) earth, clay.

222      A reaching thought: I.e. one who has foresight.

223      cast: Forecast.

237–8  things past recovery… exclamations: Proverbial (Tilley C921).

239      sufferance breeds ease: Proverbial (Tilley S955).

240–41  And time… turn: ‘And time, which cannot help us in this sudden crisis, may give us an opportunity to do something later on’ (Bawcutt 1978).

267      put me… shifts: Leave me to my own devices.

283      precise: Strict in religious observance.

285      Entreat ’em fair: Be civil to them.

289–90 As good… dissemble it: It makes no difference whether you dissemble from the start or only later when you have lost your faith.

291–2  A counterfeit… hypocrisy: I.e. a Jew’s false profession of Christianity is better than the secret hypocrisy of Christians. Barabas does not entertain the possibility that any religious faith could be sincere.

309      waters: Water supply; perhaps Barabas’s house has ponds and fountains.

312      you, happy virgins’ guide: Although the text does not specify, Abigail perhaps addresses the First Friar, who is guiding the nuns.

315      The hopeless daughter… Jew: Cf. Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy: ‘The hopeless father of a hapless son’ (4.4.84).

324      labouring: Troubled, distraught.

325      proceedeth… spirit: Comes about through the agency of the Holy Ghost.

326      moving spirit: The friar puns on the previous line, implying that Abigail is sexually alluring.

333      profit: In both spiritual and economic senses.

336      What mak’st thou: What are you doing?

339      mortified herself: Become dead to worldly values.

347   ,353  markèd thus: The obelus (†) printed in Q after ‘thus’ indicates that Barabas ironically makes a gesture resembling the sign of the cross.

Scene 3

9          in a dump: Despondent, depressed.

16        metamorphized nun: Turned into a nun.

21        countermured: Fortified with a double wall. The emendation of Q’s countermin’d is supported by the ‘walls of brass’. Cf. 5.3.8n.

27        or it shall go hard: Unless really bad luck prevents me.

ACT 2

Scene 1

0.1   SD with a light: Indicating a nocturnal scene.

1          presaging raven: Ravens were believed to be omens of death.

2          passport: Permit allowing one to pass from life to death.

12–13  O Thou… shades: Cf. Exodus 13:21–2.

19.1  SD above: I.e. on the balcony.

25        wealth: Days of prosperity.

winter’s tales: Fantastic tales.

31        Now that: Now would that.

39        Bueno… no era: Spanish, my gain was not good for everybody.

47–54   O my girl… bliss: Cf. the report of Shylock’s passion over the loss of his gold and his daughter in The Merchant of Venice (2.8.15–22).

53        practise thy enlargement: Devise your freedom.

61        for: In place of.

64        Hermoso… dineros: Spanish, beautiful pleasure of money.

Scene 2

7          Catholic king: The King of Spain.

11        Turkish: Q’s Spanish is clearly erroneous.

14        luffed and tacked: Del Bosco’s ship outmanoeuvred the Turkish galleys by sailing against the wind (‘luffed’) and zig-zagging (‘tacked’). Dyce’s emendation makes nautical sense of Q’s left, and tooke.

15        fired: Destroyed by fire.

23        tributary league: A truce requiring the payment of tribute.

27        he: The Turk.

31–2  The Christian… here: The Knights of St John were removed from Rhodes in 1522 by Süleyman the Magnificent, but later settled in Malta in 1530 by order of Charles V.

38        them: Q’s you makes a threat of Del Bosco’s reassurance.

Scene 3

6          present money: Ready cash.

16        Ferneze’s hand: Perhaps Barabas has either a written assurance from Ferneze or one confirmed by a handshake.

18        the tribe of Levi: Marlowe is probably recalling Joshua 20–21, where the Lévites held jurisdication over the cities of refuge.

23        Florence: The home of Machiavelli.

25        duck: Bow.

26        stall: Shop benches used to display goods were often used by vagrants at night as places to sleep.

27    be gathered for: Have a collection taken for them.

33    insinuate: Ingratiate myself.

36–7  show myself… dove: I.e. be more cunning than innocent (taken from Matthew 10:16).

41        his father too: (Perhaps) Barabas wishes that Lodowick’s future son will also become Governor.

42–3  hog’s cheek new singed: I.e. Lodowick has just shaved.

45–7  custom… purge ourselves: Not a Jewish custom, but a parodie allusion to the anti-Semitic myth that Jews had a distinct smell (the foetor Judaicus ).

48        the promise: God’s promise (cf. 1.1.103–4n.).

53        I’ll sacrifice… wood: This echoes Genesis 22, where Abraham is prepared to sacrifice his son, Isaac, as a burnt offering to God.

54        poison of the city: This is not convincingly explained.

55        white leprosy: White scales on the skin are a symptom of leprosy.

56        a foil: ‘A thin leaf of some metal placed under a precious stone to increase its brilliancy’ (OED 5).

57        foiled: I.e. set by a jeweller.

58        foiled: Defiled, dishonoured (punning on the previous line).

60        pointed: Referring to how the diamond was cut.

61        Pointed: Appointed (punning on the previous line).

it: (i) The diamond, (ii) Abigail, (iii) Barabas’s vengeance.

74        in catechizing sort: In the manner of the catechism.

84–5  doing… fruit: The fruit Barabas has in mind are the offspring of nuns’ and friars’ illicit sexual activity.

87        glance not at: Don’t make slighting remarks about.

91        have a saying to: Have something to say to.

93        no price… part: (i) We won’t quarrel over the price, (ii) you won’t get out alive.

103      new trick… purse: New method of stealing a purse.

105–6  So… the gallows: If he is bought, he could steal the city’s seal, and issue pardons for himself under it.

107–8  The sessions… purged: To thieves, the day of the trial is like the day of crisis in a disease – fatal for most of them.

being purged: (Metaphorically) executed.

113–14  philosopher’s stone: In alchemy, a stone that would turn base metals to gold.

116      shaver: (i) Chap, fellow, (ii) swindler, trickster.

118      youth… Lady Vanity: Two characters from the Morality-play tradition.

121      colour: Pretence.

125–6  an’t be: If it be.

133      for my turn: For my purposes.

135      mark: Brand.

136      mark: Observe.

157      comment on… Maccabees: The two apocryphal books of Maccabees which recount the emancipation of the Jewish people from the Syrians in the second century BC. No Renaissance commentary on them is known.

167      condition: Status.

171      teach thee that: Q omits thee.

176      your nose: Barabas may have worn a large false nose.

179      poison wells: Jews were often caricatured as well-poisoners.

180–83  cherish… my door: I.e. Barabas lets Christian thieves steal from him for the pleasure of seeing them punished.

187      in ure: In practice.

190–91  wars… Charles the Fifth: Alluding to the conflict between Francis I of France and the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, which was initiated in 1519 and continued until 1558.

194      forfeiting: ‘Exacting a fine or forfeit because a borrower of money has been unable to fulfil his obligations’ (Bawcutt 1978).

195      brokery: Financial broking; here, commercial malpractice is implied.

197      And with… hospitals: And supplied the almshouses with orphans.

198      moon: Month (the moon was thought to produce lunacy).

199      one hang: I.e. caused one to hang.

201      with interest: I.e. interest charged at usurious rates.

214      a-good: Heartily.

223      walk in with me: Barabas and Ithamore have arrived at Barabas’s house in the course of their conversation.

231      Philistine: Biblical adversaries of the Jews.

239      made sure: Betrothed.

243  factor’s hand: Agent’s handwriting.

245      The account is made: I.e. settled, reckoned (with pun on the previous line).

251      manna: The food which fell upon the Jews from heaven (cf. Exodus 16).

272      rouse: Drive out (like an animal from hiding).

293      hold my mind: Conceal my thoughts and feelings.

299      golden cross: Gold coin stamped with a cross.

300      Christian posies: Pious maxims engraved onto contemporary coins and rings.

304      offspring of Cain: I.e. Lodowick is a wicked descendant of Cain, the first person to commit murder in the Old Testament.

Jebusite: The tribe of Canaanites who were expelled from Jerusalem by King David in II Samuel 5.

305      Passover: The Jewish observance which celebrates the liberation of the Jews from Egypt in Exodus 12.

306      Canaan: The land promised to the Jews as part of their covenant with God in Genesis 17:8.

307      Messias: Messiah.

308      gentle: Punning on ‘gentile’. ‘Gentle’ was also the common name for a maggot.

338      made thee sure to: Assured you of your engagement to.

365      put her in: Make her enter the house.

385      spirit: Demon, devil.

ACT 3

Scene 1

3          ducats: Venetian gold coins.

8          liberal: (i) Well-educated, (ii) generous.

16        go hard: See 1.3.27n

21        hooks: Gear used by thieves to snatch valuables from windows, or to scale walls.

28        by her attire: I.e. by the red taffeta dress commonly worn by prostitutes.

Scene 2

2.1   SD reading: Lodowick is reading the challenge from Mathias delivered to him by Ithamore. This is inconsistent with 2.3.72–86 and 3.3.19–21.

5          home: Mortally.

7          tall: Brave (said sardonically).

18    lively: Life-giving.

34        reveal: Supplied to correct the absence of a verb in Q.

Scene 3

3          held in hand: Tricked.

flatly: Completely.

10        bottle-nosed: Big-nosed.

to: For.

20        imprimis: Latin, first of all (a comic misuse by Ithamore).

22–3  And then… days: The archaic-sounding couplet parodies the ending of an old ‘story’.

22        and: Omitted in Q.

31        Saint Jacques: I.e. the Dominican friars, who had their headquarters in the Church of St Jacques, Paris. Cf. 3.4.76n.

35        feeling: Earnest (punning on the idea of sexual groping).

Sport: I.e. sexual intercourse.

37        sirrah sauce: Impudent (saucy) fellow.

43        sire: For Q’s sinne.

53        Virgo, salve!: Latin, Greetings, maiden!

54        When, duck you?: Perhaps Ithamore expresses surprise at Abigall’s reverence to the friar.

68        Son: Son of God, with a pun on ‘sun’.

74        heavy: Grievous.

Scene 4

6          Spurcal: Latin, filthy!

pretendeth: Portends.

15        self: Q’s life is probably a corruption from the previous line.

31        within my gates: Cf. Exodus 20:10, and Deuteronomy 14:21.

33        Like Cain by Adam: Barabas adapts Genesis 4   (where Cain was, in fact, cursed by God, and not Adam, for murdering his brother) to his own situation.

37        ’less: Unless.

51        hold: Bet.

55        husht: Shush.

59–60  the proverb… spoon: Cf. Tilley S771.

65–6  mess of rice porridge: Recalls Genesis 25    in which Esau sells his birthright for a mess of pottage (mess = helping).

70        an Italian: The Elizabethans considered Italians accomplished poisoners.

71        bind: Cause constipation.

76        This even they use: The custom on this evening is. This observance of a vigil for the saint’s day (2.5 July) seems to be invented. The Elizabethan liturgy for the day following St James’s includes a reference to ‘a boiling pot’ from Jeremiah 1:13, which may be relevant both to the pot of porridge and to the cauldron in which Barabas dies (5.5). One tradition recalled that the besieged Knights of Malta expected relief (which did not come) on St James’s day (Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens, The Oxford Companion to the Year (1999), p. 306). In The Massacre at Paris, ‘a friar of the order of the Jacobins’ (23.23–4) invokes the saint as he murders King Henry (24.33).

85        pot: For Q’s plot.

92        ’tis better… spared: It’s better to do this than to spare (them).

93        by the eye: ‘In unlimited quantity’ (OED 4b).

98        great Alexander… died: According to Plutarch, Alexander the Great was poisoned.

99        Borgia’s wine: It was commonly thought that Pope Alexander VI was poisoned by his son, Cesare Borgia, in 1503.

101      In few: In short.

103      Stygian pool: The Styx, one of the rivers of the underworld.

104      fiery kingdom: I.e. hell.

112–13  Flanders mares: Belgian horses; also, a euphemism for promiscuous women, which Ithamore directs at the nuns. with a powder: Quickly, at once (punning on the poisoned powder).

114      horse-pestilence: (?) A horse disease.

Scene 5

11        shalt: Thou shalt.

32        profitably: (i) For a good cause, (ii) for financial gain.

Scene 6

5          fair Maria: A ‘ghost’ character whose introduction hints at the friars’ lasciviousness.

12        ghostly father: Spiritual confessor.

18        desperate: I.e. have no hope of salvation.

22        contract: Betroth.

29        Set down at large: Written down in full.

31        work my peace: Obtain absolution.

35        degraded: Defrocked.

36        sent to the fire: The prospect of being burnt alive for transgressing canon law is an elaboration invented by Marlowe (Bawcutt 1978).

42        exclaim on: Denounce.

49        crucified a child: An example of the anti-Semitic myth that Jews crucified Christian children as part of a ceremony which derided the crucifixion.

50        in shrift: In confession.

ACT 4

Scene 1

1          to: Compared with.

6          swell: I.e. become pregnant.

14        royal: Splendid.

21        Cazzo, diabole: Two Italian oaths, meaning ‘penis’ and ‘devil’.

22–3  caterpillars: I.e. parasites.

25        God-a-mercy, nose!: Ithamore is ironically impressed by Barabas’s sense of smell.

30–46  Barabas… Lodowick: Barabas keeps interrupting the friars until they hint at the murder of Mathias and Lodowick.

58        A hundred… ta’en: I.e. I have charged 100  per cent interest on a loan.

61        lost: Damned.

78        banco: I.e. bank. The Italian form suggests the institution was still exotic.

99        rogue: Q’s goe is plausible, but the emendation seems necessary in light of the next line.

115      the Turk: I.e. Ithamore.

123      turned: Converted.

138      order: Religious practice.

144      see him… heels: I.e. see him hanged.

146      girdle: A friar’s rope belt.

150      Confess… hanged: Tilley C587.

152      have: For Q’s save.

155      print: Marking (caused by the noose).

165      proceed: Prosper.

182      on;’s: Of his.

208      particular: Detail.

Scene 2

7          man of another world: Ghost.

14        critical aspect: Malign influence, as of a star.

16        freehold: I.e. pitch (where Pilia-Borza picks pockets).

17        conning: Memorizing.

neck-verse: One could escape hanging by claiming ‘benefit of clergy’, which involved the reading of a verse from the Vulgate Bible (usually Psalm 51).

17–18  friar’s execution: I.e. Jacomo’s.

18        hempen: Alluding to the hangman’s noose.

19        Hodie… tnihi: Latin, today your turn, tomorrow mine.

20        exercise: Act of devotion, at the execution.

23–4  hempen tippet: An ironic allusion to the priest’s stole, i.e. the rope.

25        cure: Parish.

39        Turk of tenpence: A poor Turk (apparently Marlowe’s coinage).

44        family: Household.

stand or fall: Here used with sexual innuendo.

47        foully: Punning on the sense ‘dirty’, not ‘clean’.

59        partridges… eggs: Cf. Pliny, Historia Naturalis X, 100.

8        3 use him in his kind: Treat him according to his nature; also meaning, ‘to treat harshly’, from the proverb, to ‘use someone like a Jew’ (Tilley J52).

91–101  Content… my love: A parodie invitation to love, ending with a quotation of Marlowe’s own lyric, ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’.

94        painted carpets: Bright flowers (the metaphor is comically literalized).

108      beard: Q’s sterd looks like a corruption from stared, line 107.

118      grey groat: Small silver coin worth about fourpence.

119      ream: Approximately 500  sheets of paper (punning on ‘realm, kingdom’).

133      runs division of: I.e. Bellamira is well practised in kissing; here, ‘division’ refers to the exquisite musical variations created by dividing the long notes into short ones.

Scene 3

5          coupe de gorge: French; i.e. I’ll cut his throat.

12        catzerie: Cheating, trickery (apparently Marlowe’s coinage from cazzo: cf. 4.1.21n).

14        husband: I.e. a pimp.

19        want’st… thy tale?: Is anything missing from the sum you demanded?

28        what… for you: I.e. the 100 crowns that Ithamore has demanded

(4.2.123) for the bearer of the letter.

31        make… away: Kill him.

51        as unknown: As befits one to whom I have not been introduced (ironic politeness).

63        demand: Not in Q.

Scene 4

1          pledge thee: Drink to you.

4        Of: On.

5        Nay… none: Q ascribes the line to Pilia-Borza.

10        Rivo Castiliano!: Italian, River of Castile!; possibly used here as a drinker’s cry, calling out for Spanish wine.

A man’s a man: Proverbial (Tilley M243)

23        snickle hand too fast: Since a snickle is a snare or noose, this difficult phrase seems to mean ‘with the quick hand of a poacher (or hangman)’.

30        Love… long: Proverbial (Tilley L559).

31        incony: Fine, delicate, sweet (with a bawdy pun on ‘cunny’ = female genitalia).

40        A vôtre commandement: French, at your command.

46        cat’s guts: Lute strings.

48        Pardonnez-moi: French, pardon me.

49        now all be in: All the strings are now in tune.

54        fingers very well: Plays the lute with skill (punning on ‘filching’).

56        runs: Plays a rapid sweep of notes.

73–4  the elder… hanged himself: Judas reputedly hanged himself from an elder tree.

75–6  Great Cham: The Great Khan, the title applied both to the ruler of the Tartars and Mongols, and to the emperor of China.

77        masty: (?) Fattened on mast (pig food).

87        The meaning… meaning: Ithamore is drunkenly knowing.

ACT 5

Scene 1

4          hovered here: I.e. Calymath’s ships are anchored offshore.

20        cannot out-run… constable: Proverbial (Tilley C615).

29        he: Not in Q.

41        I’ll: Q reads I, which fails to emphasize Barabas’s continuing defiance.

49        passed: Passed judgement.

61        Well fare, sleepy drink: Barabas gives thanks to the effectiveness of the sleeping potion.

80        poppy… mandrake: Soporific drugs (cf. Shakespeare, Othello 3.3.334–7)

86        sluice: The island’s drainage sewers; Q’s truce is clearly incorrect.

91        vault: I.e. the underground drainage system.

Scene 2

0.1    SD Alarms: Sounds of battle, trumpet calls.

22        entrance: The first step.

33        Whenas: Seeing that.

40–42  ass… thistle tops: Not from the Fables of Aesop (N), but from the emblem tradition, where it symbolizes the rich man who does not benefit from his riches.

42        snap: Feed.

44        Occasion’s bald behind: In Renaissance iconography, Occasion or Opportunity was depicted as a bald-headed woman with a long forelock of hair which one had to seize as she passed by.

63        for me: As far as I am concerned.

68        got my goods: Acquired my wealth.

73        remediless: In a hopeless state (qualifying ‘Malta’).

81        outhouse… city: Building outside the city walls.

84        pretendest: Intend, offer.

cast it: I.e. formulate a plan.

106      Ottoman: Turkey.

107      about this coin: Undertake to collect this money.

121      My policy… prevention: ‘I hate to have my cunning plots revealed in advance’ (Bawcutt 1978).

Scene 3

8        countermured: For Q’s countermin’d. Cf. 1.3.21.

9        toward Calabria… Sicily: I.e., Sicily protects die eastern approach to Malta.

10        Where: For Q’s When.

Dionysius: (N) Here recalled as anodier island tyrant.

11        Two lofty turrets: Probably the forts of St Angelo and St Elmo which stood at the entrance of the harbour of Valletta.

16        great Ottoman: The Sultan.

Scene 4

3–4  culverin… kindled thus: The Governor lights die taper (‘linstock’) which will fire the signal cannon (‘culverin’).

9        adventure: Risk.

Scene 5

3          levelled… mind: (i) Designed to achieve my purpose, (ii) smoothly finished to my specifications.

9    die: This may be a simple curse urging the carpenters to drink themselves to death; or Barabas may have poisoned the wine.

10        so: Provided that.

38        blithely set: Cheerfully seated.

39        warning-piece: A gun fired as a signal.

49        Now tell me, worldlings: Barabas adopts the guise of the medieval stage-villain and Morality Vice, directly addressing the audience and appealing to their own sense of mischief.

62        charge: Trumpet-call to signal an attack.

62.1–2   SD The Governor cuts the rope securing the trapdoor from the gallery and Barabas falls into the hot cauldron which is simultaneously revealed in the discovery-space.

77        breathe forth… fate: ‘Breathe out the last moments of life allotted to you by fate’ (Bawcutt 1978).

90        train: Trap.

98        all’s one: It would make no difference.

115      meditate: ‘to arrange by thought and discussion’ (Bawcutt 1978).

118      come all the world: I.e., if you summon all the world.

EPILOGUE SPOKEN AT COURT

1          dread sovereign: Charles I.

4          Thus low dejected: I.e. bowing.

EPILOGUE

4          outgo: Surpass.

5          prize was played: Match was contested (a fencing term).

DOCTOR FAUSTUS

Many of the questions we ask about Doctor Faustus – questions of date, text and interpretation – cannot be answered with certainty. The play can be variously dated 1588–9 and 1591–2. Two early versions of it (known as the A- and B-texts) survive, but there is general agreement that neither text represents exactly what was first performed. Both show signs of theatrical adaptation. Many have suspected that someone else (Thomas Nashe?) wrote at least some of the clowning scenes. So complex are the textual problems that they are discussed in a separate note below. The text of this edition is based on the A-text.

Nor is there agreement about the interpretation of the play, which seems unquestionably orthodox to some and questioningly heterodox to others. For some it is learned and theologically subtle, for others a populist, even subversive, barnstormer. No interpretation which positively excludes any of these possibilities can hope to be complete. The play’s dramatic mode lurches from solemn terror to proverbial, folksy comedy from scene to scene, even from line to line, as when Lucifer tells Faustus, ‘Thou shouldst not think of God. Think of the devil, / And of his dame, too’ (7.92–3). The disconcerting mixture of register is quintessentially Marlovian.

Quintessentially, but not exclusively. Legends of the magician Johann Faust who sold his soul to the devil developed in sixteenth-century Germany, and were collected and published by Johann Spies in the German Faustbook of 1587. Marlowe’s play depends for its detail on an English translation (by one ‘P. F.’), The Historie of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus. The earliest extant edition of this book dates from 1592., which might seem to make the case for the later dating of the play, but there are grounds for thinking that Marlowe knew an earlier, now lost, printing: the arguments are intricately discussed in J. H. Jones’s critical edition, The English Faust Book (1994). As well as supplying the incidents, the Faustbook also probably contributed its ‘solemnly edifying and crudely jocular’ (Levin 1954) tone to the play – a tone also found in such influential sixteenth-century books on magic as Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia. But there are differences. Despite its geographical expansiveness, the world of the Faustbook is domestic, biirgerlich. Faust is a trickster who shares a homely thieves’ kitchen with Wagner his servant and a ‘familiar’ Mephostophiles ‘that ever was diligent at Faustus’ command, going about the house, clothed like a friar, with a little bell in his hand, seen of none but Faustus’ (Jones 1994:100–101); Helen of Troy lives with him for a year and bears him a son. Marlowe sharpens the focus on Faustus’ academic environment, and winnows out many of the more trivial everyday bits of sorcery. The play occupies the less naturalistically defined, more abstract world of the Morality play: in the Faustbook, the old man is simply a concerned neighbour who invites the magician in for dinner and edification; in the play, his appearances are as abrupt and unexplained as those of the Good Angel, whose role, indeed, he seems to take over. By the same token, Faustus himself is sometimes (especially in soliloquy) a distinctive, credible personality, at other times merely an exemplary figure. His habit of talking about himself in the third person may reflect an acute self-consciousness – or a Morality-actor’s tendency to name himself for the convenience of his audience. His subjectivity fades in and out.

Marlowe’s focus on learning is much sharper. The Faustbook deals cursorily with its protagonist’s education in its first chapter:

But Doctor Faustus within short time after he had obtained his degree, fell into such fantasies and deep cogitations that he was marked of many, and of the most part of the students was called the Speculator; and sometimes he would throw the Scriptures from him as though he had no care of his former profession: so that he began a very ungodly life… (Jones 1994:92)

The author is suspicious of learning in general, and he can explain Faustus’ interest in magic only as the product of ‘a naughty mind’. By contrast, the play’s opening scene takes us inside Faustus’ thoughts, and we sense the tedium of the study, the dissatisfaction of knowledge. And Marlowe’s Faustus actually cites his texts. ‘The play itself is almost macaronic in its frequent scholarly lapses into Latinity’ (Levin 1954:137). (Macaronic texts are learned games which mingle Latin with the vernacular – a nice parallel to the play.) But how good was the Latin of its first audiences? And if they understood the words, did they also spot Faustus’ mistakes, his mis-citations and partial quotes? Or is the language of learning (standing out in italic type in the early black-letter quartos) a blind – verbal pyrotechnics to match the fireworks onstage? The Latin formula to summon the devil with which Marlowe furnishes Faustus sounds worryingly like the real thing; and Mephistopheles responds with scholastic precision: ‘That was the cause, but yet per accidens’ (3.47). At a performance one feels that something dangerous is happening.

Both the doctor and the devil are more precisely defined than in the Faustbook. There, Faustus is reluctant to give the devil the soul he demands; here, he offers it in exchange for twenty-four years of life. He seems driven by a terrible curiosity, yet he learns nothing new. Mephistopheles hides nothing, but he is playing a cat-and-mouse game: in the Faustbook, Faustus melts for himself the congealed blood which Mephistopheles here brings fire from hell to unclot, and his asides (‘O, what will not I do to obtain his soul?’, 5.73) are a glimpse into that unseen abyss. Somewhat later in the Faustbook, the devil torments the already damned Faustus with the thought of hell. Marlowe’s Mephistopheles is himself tormented by his own knowledge of hell, the only knowledge he has to offer. Faustus hopes that forbidden knowledge will bring him power (‘All things that move between the quiet poles / Shall be at my command’, 1.58–9), and imagines that power in terms of unlimited spatial extension (‘his dominion that exceeds in this / Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man’, 1.62–3). Instead he finds himself on the brink of an unthinkable infinity: ‘Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it’ (3.78). ‘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’ (5.123–5). In these scenes, the small space of the stage seems to open onto the depths. They are the most darkly compelling in Elizabethan drama.

The play’s middle scenes are disappointing, a loose concatenation of episodes. Hell, significantly, is much less frequently mentioned. At one level, this structural weakness is thoroughly appropriate: Faustus’ adventures are crude and demeaning because he is wasting the powers, and the time, he has secured. The Knight’s insulting observation rings true: ‘I’faith, he looks much like a conjurer’ (10.11). The comedy of the clowns’ scenes, too, though their authenticity is doubtful, may also be functional, parodying the mindlessness of Faustus’ own actions. Still, it seems unlikely that Marlowe was wholly responsible for their execution, and what relevance and coherence they have is thematic rather than theatrical. They treat as comic the very fears that haunt the main plot.

Those fears return in the closing scenes, and with them the intensity of the writing. No other play so deftly exploits the audience’s consciousness of the approaching end. Faustus’ end (the word pervades the play) is predictable, inevitable; he has bargained for it; yet the mind reels trying to comprehend exactly what is happening: ‘no end is limited to damned souls’ (14.101). Faustus’ pleasures become more extreme, more sensual and more desperate as he attempts to ‘extinguish’ (13.85) the thought of damnation. But he cannot escape the knowledge that he is literally a lost soul: ‘Where art thou, Faustus? Wretch, what hast thou done? / Damned art thou, Faustus, damned! Despair and die!’ (13.47–8). We are acutely aware at this point of the overdetermination of the play’s theology and its action. Faustus’ despair is both a psychological condition and a divine punishment, at once the cause and the consequence of his damnation, and in the play’s closing sequence supernatural intervention is indistinguishable from the working of his own mind. ‘Hell strives with grace for conquest in my breast’ (13.64): space bends in the line, as does time in the running hour of his final soliloquy. (The Faustbook provided the merest hint: ‘Time ran away with Faustus as the hour-glass’, Jones 1994:174.) Watching his ‘hellish fall’, we are enjoined ‘[o]nly to wonder’ (Epilogue, 4, 6).

Doctor Faustus was highly successful, mutating but remaining in the repertoire even after the Restoration. A persistent early tradition associated performances of the play with the appearance of real devils. It is a testimony to its black theatrical magic.

The A- and B-Texts

The A-text first appeared in print in a black-letter quarto of 1604 (having been entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1601), with subsequent editions in 1609 and 1611. This is not a perfect text: it is short for a Renaissance play; the comic scenes in particular seem sketchy; and scene 6 is apparently misplaced. Scholars once thought that it was a memorial reconstruction, but modern opinion tends to the view that the text was set from the authorial ‘foul papers’ of Marlowe and the collaborator to whom the central scenes of the play were entrusted.

The B-text was first printed in a quarto of 1616, and reprinted six times between 1619 and 1663. This lacks some 36 lines of the A-text, but adds 676 lines of new material, and makes in addition thousands of smaller verbal changes (a few of these offer better readings than the A-text, and have been adopted in this edition). The additional scenes are probably those for which Philip Henslowe paid William Birde and Samuel Rowley £4 in 1602. They augment the action of the A-text with new incidents, and amplify the supernatural spectacle and anti-Catholic sentiment. In Rome, Faustus becomes involved with an anti-pope whom he spirits away to the imperial court. Here he comes into conflict with Benvolio (based on the A-text’s anonymous Knight) and eventually tricks him with a false head (apparently drawing on the use of the false leg in A). The plot against the Horse-Courser is expanded to provide further comic action for the A-text’s Clowns. It is apparent that the new scenes develop and interweave materials from the A-text. Possibly the most significant changes come at the end of the play, where now the action occurs under the gaze of the devils who remain above in the gallery (a stage space not used in the A-text); and Faustus is dismembered in view of the audience. The B-text thus tends to display literally what is only menacingly suggested in A.

Ultimately a preference for one text over the other cannot be based solely on bibliographical evidence, but rests on an understanding of what the two versions of the play are. Older scholarship viewed the A-text as a mangled version of the fuller B-text. Like most modern editors, we regard the B-text as an interesting theatrical adaptation and the A-text as the more authentic version of the play.

PROLOGUE

0.1   SD The Chorus, apparently for the first time on the English stage, is a single speaker.

1–2  The Carthaginians defeated the Romans near Lake Trasimeno in 217 BC; but since ‘mate’ must mean ‘overcome’, Marlowe seems to attribute the victory to the Romans and their god of war. Some gloss ‘mate’ as ‘side with, ally himself with’ (OED 4); but since its primary sense refers to sexual coupling, it could also be the equivalent to ‘screw’. Such ambiguities are frequent in this speech.

6          muse: Poet.

vaunt: B’s reading. A’s daunt looks like a compositor’s error (‘d’ and ‘V’ are easily confused in black-letter), and both sense and alliteration are against it.

9          To patient… plaud: We appeal (the case of) our applause to patient ‘judgements’ (with a pun), as to a higher court.

13        Wittenberg: For A’s Wertenberg. The university of Luther and of the Faustbook’s Faustus is probably meant; the more theologically radical university of Tübingen in Württemberg is possible but less likely.

15–17  So soon… name: Faustus’ studies in theology, the fertile ground of sanctified (‘graced’) learning, led quickly to his being graced (a technical academic term) with the title of Doctor.

21–2  waxen wings… overthrow: An allusion to the flight and fall of Icarus. See (N).

Scene 1

0.1   SD The study may have been represented by filling the discovery-space at the back of the stage with books, which were then used as props.

2          profess: (i) Claim expertise in, (ii) teach.

3          commenced: (i) Begun, (ii) taken a degree (as at Cambridge).

7          Bene disserere… logices: (Translated from Latin in line 8) not from Aristotle’s treatises on logic, the Prior and Posterior Analytics (A’s Analutikes (6) follows the Greek pronunciation), but the open ing definition of the Dialectic of Ramus (N).

logices: Greek genitive, for A’s logicis.

12        On kai me on: Greek, ‘being and non-being’, a topic in metaphysics.

13        ubi… medicus: Where the philosopher leaves off, there the doctor begins. Not from Galen (N), but from Aristotle, On Sense and Sense-Perception, 1.436a.

16        Summum… sanitas: (Translated in line 17) adapted from Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1094a8.

19        aphorisms: Principles of medicine, like the Aphorisms attributed to Hippocrates.

28–9  Si una… rei: If one and the same thing be left to two people, one (is entitled to) the thing, the other to the value of the thing (legatur for A’s legatus ). Very loosely based on Justinian (N), Institutes II.XX.8.

31        Exhaereditare… nisi: A father cannot disinherit (exhaereditare for A’s ex haereditari ) his son unless… Reminiscent of Justinian, Institutes II.xiii.

33        law: A’s Church could be defended since Justinian’s Institutes were central to Canon Law, but B’s law gives them their rightful place in the corpus juris (‘body of the law’) and makes better sense.

34        His: Of this.

36        Too servile: B’s reading; A’s The devill is nonsense.

38        Jerome’s Bible: St Jerome (N), here pronounced with three syllables, was responsible for the standard Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate.

39        Stipendium… est: Romans 6:23 (translated in line 41). Neither this nor lines 42–3 are quotations from the Vulgate text.

42–3  Sipeccasse… veritas: 1 John 1:8 (translated in lines 44–5).

49        Che serà, serà: Italian proverb, translated in line 50.

53        Lines… characters: The illustrations of line 52’s ‘necromantic books’.

schemes: Accepted emendation of A’s sceanes: diagrams.

characters: Symbols.

58        quiet poles: Motionless poles of the (Ptolemaic) universe.

78        Jove: Classicizing euphemism for God.

80        glutted with conceit: (i) Filled with hungry longing by the thought, (ii) filled only with imagined anticipation.

92        public schools: Universities.

silk: ForA’s skill.

95        the Prince of Parma: Spanish governor-general of the Netherlands, 1579–92.

98        fiery keel… bridge: Parma’s bridge over the Scheldt at Antwerp was destroyed by a Dutch fire-ship on 4 April 1585.

114–15  with… syllogisms / Gravelled: Confounded with succinct logical arguments.

117      problems: Questions posed for scholastic disputation.

119      Agrippa: (N) was famed for raising the phantoms (‘shadows’, 120) of the dead.

124      subjects: Servants, spirits taking material form. B’s spirits is the easier reading.

127      Almain rutters: German cavalry.

131      Queen of Love: Venus.

133–4  from America… treasury: The American gold which supplied the wealth of Philip II of Spain is compared to the Golden Fleece carried to Greece by Jason in the Argo.

140      in: Supplied from A2.

141      tongues: Languages.

well seen: Well versed.

145      the Delphian oracle: The oracle of Apollo at Delphi. A’s Dolphian is corrected from A2.

157      Hebrew Psalter… New Testament: The Psalms and the opening of St John’s Gospel were used in conjuring.

Scene 2

2          sic probo: Thus I prove it (to cap an argument).

11–12  That follows… upon’t: Graduates (‘licentiate[s]’) like you shouldn’t fall into such a non sequitur. Wagner parodies the style of scholastic disputation, punning on the physical and logical senses of ‘follows’ and ‘stand upon’.

17        Ask… a thief: I.e. your witness is as unreliable as one thief’s testimony in support of another.

20–21  corpus naturale… mobile: A natural body… capable of movement.

22–5  But that… execution: Wagner claims that only his good nature makes it safe for them to approach so dangerous a place (or perhaps that they can’t get near his standard of wit), then adds that he expects to see them hanged soon anyway.

28–32  Truly… dear brethren: A parody of the verbal style, as well as the pious expression, of a puritan (‘precisian’).

37        Rector: Head of the university.

Scene 3

1–4  gloomy shadow… breath: Night, the shadow of the earth in Ptolemaic cosmology, rises into the sky from the south towards the constellation of Orion, the winter rising of which was associated with cloud and rain (Virgil’s nimbosus Orion, Aeneid 1, 535).

9          anagrammatized: B’s reading; A has and Agramathist.

10        breviated: The abbreviated form puns on the breviary, the Catholic office-book, which included readings from the lives of the saints.

11–12  Figures… stars: Representations of everything pertaining to the skies, and symbols of the signs of the Zodiac and the planets.

16–23  Sint… Mephistopheles: May the gods of Acheron (Hell) be propitious to me; let the threefold godhead of Jehovah be gone (or be powerful); hail, spirits of fire, air and water [aquatici for A’s Aquatani ]; prince of the east, Beelzebub, monarch of burning Hell, and Demogorgon, we ask your favour, that Mephistopheles may appear [appareat for A’s apariat ] and rise. Why do you delay [quid tumoraris for A’s quod tumeraris ]? By Jehovah, Hell, the consecrated water which I now scatter, by the sign of the cross which I now make, and by our prayers, may Mephistopheles himself now rise to us on our commands [dicatis for A’s dicaetis ].

35        Quin redis… imagine!: Why don’t you return, Mephistopheles, in the guise of a friar!

47        per accidens: As a secondary cause (Mephistopheles too speaks the language of scholarship). A’s accident may indicate Anglicization, or student argot.

61        confounds hell… Elysium: Faustus refuses to distinguish Hell from the pagan Elysian fields.

89        these: B’s reading; A’s those is probably a corruption from line 88.

109–10  I’ll join… Spain: Faustus imagines closing the Straits of Gibraltar.

115      speculation: Contemplation, study.

Scene 4

3          pickedevants: Pointed beards (French pic à devant ).

quotha: Indeed, forsooth (used sarcastically).

4          comings in: Income, with a bawdy quibble.

5          goings out: (i) Expenditure, (ii) holes in clothes. There are similar ‘misunderstandings’ throughout the clown’s lines.

else: If you don’t believe me.

15        Qui mihi discipulus: ‘[You] who [are] my pupil’, the opening of William Lily’s Carmen de Moribus, a didactic poem used as a school textbook.

17        beaten silk… stavesacre: Embroidered silk and delousing powder (with puns on the ache of a servant beaten with staves and (18) acres of land).

33        Gridirons: Robin’s misunderstanding of ‘guilders’ (32). The association of gridirons with torture by fire may suggest the pains of hell.

34–6  French crowns… English counters: The clown implies that French écus are as worthless as ‘counterfeit’ English coins. ‘French crowns’ were associated with the baldness caused by syphilis (‘the French disease’), and ‘counter’ may pun on ‘cunt’.

46        Balioll and Belcher: (N) The devils are summoned with comic variants on their names.

49–51  Do ye… over: The clown imagines himself with the costume (‘the round slop’ (G)) and reputation of a daredevil.

50        tall: Brave.

51    Kill devil: Perhaps also the name of a strong drink.

55–6  horns… clefts: (i) The horns and cloven feet of devils, (ii) the penis (or cuckold’s horns) and vulva.

59        Banios: Punning on bagno (Italian) = brothel.

66        plackets: Slits in petticoats; hence, in the bodies beneath.

72–3  quasi… insistere: As though to follow in our (= my) footprints (the irregular Latin in A may reflect Wagner’s ignorance).

74        fustian: Originally a cloth; hence, ‘nonsense’ (cf. ‘bombast’).

75        that’s flat: That’s for sure.

Scene 5

29        Veni… Mephistophile!: Come, come, Mephistopheles!

31        he lives: B’s reading gives better sense than A’s I live.

35        a deed of gift: Mephistopheles insists on a legally binding document.

42        Solamen… doloris: It is a comfort to the miserable to have had companions in sorrow.

74        Consummatum est: It is finished (Christ’s last words on the cross, in the Latin of the Vulgate, John 19:30).

77        Homo fugel: Flee, man! (1 Timothy 6:11).

105      by these presents: Not ‘gifts’, but ‘documents’ (a legal formula).

153      think no more: The ‘no’ is supplied from A2.

Scene 6

This scene is inserted at this point by modern editors. In A, the action is continuous from the end of Scene 5 to the start of Scene 7.

3          circles: (i) Magic circles, (ii) vaginas.

8          chafing: (i) Quarrel, (ii) rubbing.

16        he for… study: He will wear the cuckold’s horns; her ‘private study’ hints at her ‘privates’.

17        to bear with: (i) Put up with, (ii) support my weight (during intercourse), (iii) bear my child.

27        turn… wind her: (Like meat on a spit.) Both verbs sometimes have sexual connotations.

32        of free cost: For nothing.

Scene 7

27        Alexander: I.e. Paris, who deserted Oenone (N) for Helen.

28        he… Thebes: The walls of Thebes were magically raised by the music of Amphion.

35–43  Tell me… erring stars: Faustus asks how many spheres there are above that of the moon (though ‘heavens’ crosses from cosmology to divinity), and/or whether the heavenly bodies all form a single sphere, with the earth at the centre. Mephistopheles replies that, like the four elements (arranged in concentric spheres of earth, water, air and fire), the spheres too are concentrically arranged round a single great axis, the farthest point of which (‘terminine’) is the pole of the universe. Each of the planets has its own sphere. The questions are provocative, the replies orthodox.

44–5  both situ… tempore: Both in position and in time. Faustus asks whether the spheres all move in the same direction and complete their rotations of the earth at the same intervals.

51–7  Who knows… intelligentia: Faustus demonstrates his familiarity with the rotations of the planets relative to the background stars (the figures are approximations, sometimes inaccurate). The planetary spheres were traditionally under the guidance of angelic ‘intelligences’ (intelligentiae ). ‘Dominion’ (celestial influence) may here be confused with ‘domination’, one of the hierarchies of angels.

61        empyreal: Both ‘imperial’ and ‘empyrean’ (the fiery heaven).

63        conjunctions… aspects: Stars in conjunction appear close together; in opposition, to be opposite each other in the heavens; aspects are their relative positions.

65        Per… totius: Through unequal motion (of the planets) in respect to the whole.

92–3  the devil… his dame: The devil and his dam (mother) were a proverbial comic pairing.

111      Ovid’s flea: The subject of the pseudo-Ovidian erotic Elegia de Pulice. The joke is repeated from 4.64–6.

115      cloth of arras: Luxurious tapestry from Arras in Flanders.

118      leathern bag: A money-bag.

130–31  chimney-sweeper… oyster-wife: Emblematic of dirt and poverty.

139      the devil a penny: Not a damned penny.

pension: Payment for a child’s board and lodging (hence payment of any kind).

144      Martlemas-beef: Beef killed on St Martin’s day (11 November) and salted.

147      March-beer: Strong beer brewed in March.

progeny: (Here) parentage, progenitors.

159–60  I am… stockfish: Lechery prefers an inch of ‘raw mutton’ (slang for ‘food for lust’: cf. 4.10–11) to a lot (an ell = 45 inches) of dried cod (‘stockfish’).

160–61  ell… letter… Lechery: Lechery puns on the name and sound of the letter, presumably to make lewd gestures with her tongue in pronouncing it.

Chorus 2

6          yoky: Yoked (B’s reading).

7          to prove cosmography: To test the accuracy of the geographers’ maps.

Scene 8

12        Quarters… equivalents: Divide the town into four equal parts.

13–15  Maro’s… tomb… space: Virgil was buried outside Naples, where he was reputed to have created a long tunnel by magic. The phrasing is very close to that of the Faustbook.

17        sumptuous temple: Presumably St Mark’s in Venice.

27–8  be bold… cheer: Make free with his hospitality.

31–43  this city… Africa: The local detail (including the inaccurate positioning of the Castel Sant’Angelo on the bridge) is from the Faustbook.

33–4  Just through… parts: Supplied from B.

42        pyramides: (Four syllables) obelisks from Egypt.

51        And take… feast: And play a part in the feast (‘meal’ and ‘feast-day’) of St Peter.

52        bald-pate: Tonsured.

53        summum bonum: Highest good (scholastic term for the goodness of God).

73–4  ghost… pardon: The sale of papal indulgences for the souls of the dead in Purgatory had provoked the start of the Reformation.

75        dirge: Mass for the dead; from its Latin key word, dirige = ‘direct (my soul, O Lord)’.

82–3  cursed… candle: Excommunicated in a ritual in which the bell is rung, the book (the Bible) closed, and the candle put out. As in the Faustbook, the rite is here confused with that of exorcism.

90        Maledicat Dominus: May the Lord curse (him).

99        Et omnes sancti: And all the saints.

Scene 9

2          Ecce signum!: Behold the sign! (a reminiscence of the mass).

2–3  a simple… horse-keepers: An impressive haul for two stable-boys.

3          eat no hay: Be unusually well fed.

11        etc.: Et cetera may be a euphemism, or Latin bombast, or a signal to the actor to improvise. The grooms pass the cup between them as they are frisked.

20        scour you: Knock you about (punning on scouring, polishing a drinking-vessel).

26–8  Sanctobulorum… Mephistopheles!: Robin’s invocation sounds like bits of Latin and Greek, but is nonsense. Yet Mephistopheles comes (perhaps at the mention of his name).

tickle: (Used ironically) thump.

28.1 SD–35 Enter MEPHISTOPHELES… enterprise: Since Mephistopheles dismisses the grooms again in lines 45–7, and there threatens different transformations, these lines are sometimes treated as an undeleted first version of the end of the scene, and omitted. But the Vintner may be included in the first curse, but then left out of the second, because Mephistopheles spares him (he could exit at line 35.1). And the grooms’ initial failure to be transformed seems consistent with their sauciness.

29–32,  O, nomine… nobis!: The scraps of Latin (nomine Domine (for Domini): ‘name of the Lord’; Peccatum peccatorum: ‘sin of sins’; Misericordia pro nobis: ‘pity for us’) recall phrases from the Catholic liturgy (in nomine Domini: ‘in the name of the Lord’; in remissionem peccatorum: ‘for the remission of sins’; miserere nobis: ‘have mercy on us’).

Chorus 3

3          stayed his course: Ended his journey.

Scene 10

11        conjurer: I.e. one who does ordinary magic tricks.

28        Chief… pre-eminence: Most admired of those who have been pre-eminent in the world.

31        motion: Mention.

36        his beauteous paramour: Probably Alexander’s Persian wife, Rox-ana; or perhaps the courtesan Thais.

45        if it like your grace: If your grace pleases. Faustus’ polite formulation disguises his anxiety that the Emperor might be displeased by his inability to bring on the ‘true substantial bodies’ (46 ).

50        lively resemble: Imitate to the life.

59        Actaeon: For his presumption Actaeon (N) was transformed into a stag and killed by his own hounds. Faustus’ reply puns on the cuckold’s horns, which are literalized later in the scene.

64–5  this lady… neck: This legend has not been traced.

81        no haste but good: Proverbial. ‘No haste but good (speed)’ (Tilley H199).

Scene 11

There is no break in the action at the end of Scene 10; leaving the Emperor’s court, Faustus and Mephistopheles walk into a new episode.

0.1    SD HORSE-COURSER: Horse-dealers were proverbially disreputable. Faustus cons this one with a device beyond the usual tricks of the trade.

2          Fustian: (G) The slip identifies Faustus as one who deceives with verbal trickery.

Mass: By the mass; a Catholic oath surviving in Elizabethan English.

10–12  I pray… child: Spoken ironically; the Horse-courser spends a lot (‘has a great charge’), even without the expense of a family.

15        water: Water traditionally dispels enchantment.

16        will he… waters?: ‘Isn’t he ready for anything?’ (Proverbial: R. W. Dent, Shakespeare’s Proverbial Language: An Index (Berkeley, 1981): W131.11).

21        forty: I.e. ‘dollars’.

22        hey, ding, ding: A song-refrain, often a euphemism for sexual intercourse. If the horse were not a gelding, the Horse-courser might ‘make a brave living’ from stud-fees (his slick buttock was a sign of potency).

25        water: Urine.

33–4  Christ… in conceit: Faustus comforts himself with the prime example of a sinner being saved at the last minute, and promptly falls asleep as a sign of his complacency. Christ promised salvation to the repentant thief crucified with him (Luke 23:40–43).

34.2 SD crying: Lamenting loudly, but perhaps also weeping.

36–7  Doctor Lopus… purgation: Doctor Faustus’ medicine (the ‘purgation’) is even worse than that of Lopus, the notorious doctor-poisoner (N). Since he was executed in 1594 (i.e. after Marlowe’s death) the line is probably not Marlovian and may cast doubt on the authenticity of the scene.

36        H’as: He has, like modern ‘he’s’.

46–7  O, yonder… master: Mistaking Mephistopheles for a servant, the Horse-courser addresses him contemptuously (snipper-snapper: whipper-snapper; hey-pass: a magician’s catch-phrase (cf. ‘hey presto’), hence a trickster).

63        So-ho: A hunter’s cry.

83        niggard… cunning: Miser with my skills.

Scene 12

0.1    SD: A’S stage-directions here are slightly inconsistent with those at the end of Scene 11. The action is probably still continuous, but a scene may be missing.

5          great-bellied: Pregnant.

21–4  the year… East: Faustus confuses seasonal differences between northern and southern hemispheres with climatic variation between western and eastern countries. ‘Saba’ (biblical Sheba) is modern Yemen.

30        let us in: Let us go in.

34        beholding: Beholden.

Scene 13

1–8    These lines are sometimes printed as a separate Chorus; but, though Wagner’s function is choric, his speech is assimilated to the action of the scene.

24.1  SD passeth over the stage: The formula indicates a processional entrance and exit.

39–46  Break heart… guilt: The Old Man talks of Faustus’ spiritual state in terms of bodily suffering; and he can be saved only by Christ’s blood.

40        heaviness: Sadness.

50.1 SD dagger: The dagger is a temptation to suicide, and Faustus seems about to kill himself in line 51.

75        age: Old man.

91        topless: Immeasurably high.

93–4   Her lips… again: The soul was believed to rise to the mouth in a kiss (in line 94, Faustus asks for a second). Succubi took human souls through sexual contact.

95        be: Probably just a variant for ‘is’ but perhaps optative (‘Let heaven be…’).

105–8  Brighter… azured arms: Semele’s disastrous request to Jupiter to appear in his full divine form was well known (N). The nymph Arethusa was pursued by the river-god Alpheus, and was transformed into a fountain to escape him. Some commentators described him as a descendant of Apollo, but ‘monarch of the sky’ suggests the sun-god himself. See (N) and Introduction, pp. xiii–xiv.

112.1      SD Enter the DEVILS: They come to torment the old man’s flesh.

113      sift: Make trial of, as in Luke 22:31: ‘Satan hath earnestly desired to sift you as wheat’ (Bishops’ Bible).

Scene 14

10        surfeit: A disease of over-eating.

48        save: Supplied from B.

71         O lente… equi: Oh, run slowly, slowly, horses of the night! Slightly adapted from Ovid, Amores I.xiii.40 (which Marlowe translated), where it is a call to prolong the night for love.

81–2  Mountains… God: Recalling Hosea 10:8: ‘and they shall say to the mountains, “Cover us,” and to the hills, “Fall on us” ‘, and Revelation 6:16, ‘And said to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us, and hide us from the presence of him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb.” ’

86–92  You stars… heaven: Faustus asks the stars which predominated at his birth, and whose ‘influence’ (astrological power) has determined his fate, to draw him up, like moisture, into a thundercloud, and destroy his body when its lightning erupts, so long as his soul may go on up to heaven. In Renaissance meteorology, lightning was produced by the pressure of exhalations on their enclosing clouds.

92.1   SD The watch: The ‘clock’ of 6I.2SD.

104      Pythagoras’ metempsychosis: The doctrine of the transmigration of souls, attributed to Pythagoras (N). Though A’s metem su cossis suggests a compositor’s confusion, it seems also to preserve a learned Greek pronunciation.

120      I’ll burn my books: A traditional gesture of renouncing magic.

EPILOGUE

2          Apollo’s laurel bough: An emblem of poetic, and other intellectual, achievement.

9          Terminat… opus: ‘The hour ends the day, the author ends his work.’ Not apparently part of the foregoing speech, this line, for which no source has been found, and which may be a printer’s addition, reads like a motto on the whole play. It occurs also at the end of the manuscript play Charlemagne in BL MS Egerton 1994.

EDWARD THE SECOND

The play was probably completed in 1592 and was first performed by Pembroke’s Men. Its first printing was in a quarto-size octavo of 1594, which forms the basis of this edition. Later quartos of 1598, 1612 and 1622 (which refers on its title-page to a revival of the play by Queen Anne’s Men at the Red Bull) attest its continuing popularity.

Like other Elizabethan history-plays, Edward the Second is about the conflict between a king and his nobles, and shows the clear influence of Shakespeare’s treatment of the theme in his Henry VI plays. But it differs from them in a number of ways: its characters are unconcerned with dynastic issues and show little interest in the larger shape of history; there is no trace of a providential design and no sense of the sanctity of monarchy (all are important issues in Shakespeare’s other comparable play, Richard II). Edward the Second is a play about power, pure and simple. ‘Essentially,’ writes J. B. Altman, ‘the conflict remains one between willful, mean-minded peers determined to preserve their own ancient prerogatives and a willful king jealous of his right to feed his fantasies, at whatever cost to others’ (The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley, 1978), pp. 363–4).

With the exception of a few details from the chronicles of Richard Grafton (1569) and John Stow (1580), events are drawn from Holins-hed’s Chronicles (probably from its second edition, 1587). But they are drastically reshaped. Holinshed’s narrative of Edward’s twenty-year reign is a long annalistic account cluttered with the detailed circumstances of the conflict with the barons, interwoven with full descriptions of Edward’s equally disastrous relations with Scotland, Ireland and France. Marlowe leaves out the complexities and aggregates events together so that the play is dominated by the intense desires and fierce hostilities of its protagonists, especially Gaveston and Mortimer. He personalizes the action. Gaveston’s relationship with the king is virtually the only issue between Edward and the barons. Marlowe eroticizes their love much more explicitly than does Holinshed, and extends Gaveston’s life to keep him at the centre of contention. The younger Spencer, who had, historically, little connection with Gaveston, becomes first his dependant and later his substitute in the king’s affections. Marlowe, and some members of his early audiences, would have known of at least two contemporary kings whose homosexuality supposedly made them susceptible to the influence of favourites (or minions) – Henri III of France, who figures in The Massacre at Paris, and James VI of Scotland, the future king of England. Gaveston’s sexual behaviour, in the play, matters less than his opportunism and casual cruelty, the exultation he feels when he first arrives and its rapid development into his vengeful humiliation of the bishop of Coventry. Mortimer too is given greater prominence. In the chronicles he scarcely figures until the end of the reign, but here he is present from the first as an antagonist of Gaveston and ally of the queen, later becoming her lover (as Holinshed only belatedly hints) and sole deviser of the plot to murder the king. Unlike the heroes of Marlowe’s other plays, who dominate the action, Edward is thus surrounded by personalities more powerful than himself.

A further consequence of the aggregation of events is a remarkable tightening of the chain of historical causation. Edward the Second is Marlowe’s best-constructed play. Actions lead directly to their consequences, as when Edward’s ill-timed and provocative exaltation of Gaveston goads the barons to switch tactics from legally banishing to kidnapping him (scene 4: this edition preserves the octavo’s fluid division into scenes only, rather than adopting the five act divisions favoured by some modern editors). Many of the causal linkages are made to feel like pointedly ironic reversals: Gaveston’s murder leads to Edward’s one victory in avenging it; his cruelty in exploiting his success provokes Kent’s desertion and leads to Mortimer’s fatal alliance with Isabella against the king. These reversals complicate the play’s characterization: proud Mortimer starts out like Hotspur and ends up a Machiavellian, while Isabella changes from wronged wife to practised hypocrite. Are these inconsistently used stereotypes or subtly ironic modulations? When Isabella sounds formulaic and insincere, she may be meant to – to sound as though she is half-consciously using a false language.

The question is linked to the problem of the play’s verbal style. Its language is generally bare and tense. Big speeches are frequently punctured by colloquially plain counterstatements. Single lines are heavy with hidden meaning. Apparently polite formulae are used as insults (compare the taunting heraldic devices in scene 6); Edward’s murder is ordered in one ambiguous sentence. The language keeps checking itself, its switches of idiom reflecting the larger reversals of the action.

All these reversals are framed by Edward’s own ‘strange exchange’ (21.35), his decline from kingship to abjection. Structural and verbal patterns converge in the closing scenes, where Edward’s laments are juxtaposed with the callous double-talk of Mortimer and Isabella. Details of the king’s torment emphasize the reversal: the shaving in sewer-water is taken from Stow (see note on 23.36.1–SD below) and ‘rhymed’ with the treatment of the bishop of Coventry in scene 1; and in the murder itself there surfaces a ghastly fusion of cruelty and sexuality long latent in the play. The idiom remains grimly ironic: one of the horrors of Marlowe’s invented murderer Lightborne is that he sounds so menacingly comforting.

Scene 1

7          France: Gaveston had been banished to his native Gascony by Edward I.

14        die: (i) Swoon, (ii) reach orgasm.

16–17  What… night: Since Gaveston enjoys the king’s sun-like favour, he has no need for the goodwill of lesser lights, such as the nobles, and least of all for the ‘sparks’ (20) of the common people.

22        Tanti!: Italian, so much for that! fawn: For Q’s fanne.

25        your worship’s service: To serve your worship.

31        lies: Travellers’tales.

33        against the Scot: In Edward I’s military campaign against Robert Bruce.

39        porcupine: It was believed that porcupines would shoot their quills in self-defence, on the authority of Pliny’s Historia Naturalis (VIII.xxxv).

54        masques: Extravagant court entertainments of Italian origin, sometimes involving the use of lavish costumes and sets, were popular in Tudor and early-Stuart England.

56–71  And in… lord: As the speech unfolds, it becomes apparent that Gaveston plans to stage the myth of Diana and Actaeon (N).

57        sylvan nymphs: Wood-nymphs.

89        Mort Dieu!: God’s death! (punning on Mortimer’s name).

94        these knees… stiff: I.e. too stiff to kneel.

107      to the proof: Irrefutably.

110      Mowbray: Q’s spelling Mowberie suggests the name is trisyllabic.

117      Preach upon poles: Traitors’ heads were placed upon poles and mounted above the gates of city walls as a warning to others.

126      Wiltshire: Because the Mortimers had no historical connections with Wiltshire, Roma Gill argues strongly against Q’s reading, maintaining that the compositor may well have misread ‘Welshrye’, i.e. the people of Wales, the power-base of the family. See ‘Mortimer’s Men’, N&Q, n.s. 27 (1980), p. 159.

127–8  All Warwickshire… many friends: Both lines are spoken ironically.

132      minion: (i) Favourite, (ii) darling boy (from French mignon). The nobles perhaps use the word in the latter sense as a term of homo-phobic contempt.

142      Thy friend, thy self: Proverbial (Tilley F696).

149      high-minded: Proud, arrogant.

155      King and Lord of Man: The lords of the Isle of Man were also known as kings because of the sovereign rights they possessed.

There may also be a sexual quibbles.

167      seal: If this is the Great Seal of the realm, Edward confers near-regal power on Gaveston.

185      Saving your reverence: Polite formula, used derisively, with a pun on ‘Sir reverence’, a euphemism for faeces, which might well be found in a ‘channel’ (= sewer: 187).

197      Tower… Fleet: The Tower of London and the debtors’ prison.

200      True, true: A rueful comment on the aptness of ‘Convey’ (= steal: 199)

206      prison… holiness: A prison would suit the austere life of a priest (imprisonment was one of the sufferings of the early Christians).

Scene 2

6          timeless sepulchre: Early grave.

11        villain: Villain, with a pun on ‘villein’, serf.

75        the New Temple: Home of the Knights Templar, and later part of the Inns of Court.

78        Lambeth: Site of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s official residence.

Scene 3

The shortness of this scene has led to suspicions of textual corruption. But it further establishes Gaveston’s brusque confidence, despite his knowledge of the forces ranged against him.

Scene 4

0.1   SD NOBLES: Q is sometimes unspecific about which nobles are required.

1          form: Formal articles.

7          declined from: Less inclined towards.

8          sits here: Edward grants Gaveston the Queen’s place next to himself, probably on a throne.

13        Quam male conveniunt!: How badly they suit each other! (based on Ovid, Metamorphoses II, 846–7: ‘Majesty and love do not suit each other, and do not remain long in one seat’).

19        faced and overpeered: Insolently outfaced and looked down on (with a pun on ‘peer’).

26        pay them home: I.e. punish them fully for their treason.

51        legate to: Representative of.

54        Curse: Excommunicate.

61–2  discharge… allegiance: Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth I in 1570, thus supposedly absolving her subjects of obedience to her.

68        President of the North: Cf. John Cowell, The Interpreter (1607), ‘President… is used in common law for the king’s lieutenant in any province or function, as: President of Wales, of York, of Berwick’ (Gill 1967).

97–105  Proud Rome… live: Such vehement anti-papalism might well appeal to Elizabethan Protestants; but Edward’s obvious pique and murderousness might be more disturbing.

102    make: For Q’s may.

168      repealed: Recalled from exile.

175      those arms: I.e. Edward’s arms (embracing Isabella).

178      frantic Juno: From Ovid, Metamorphoses X, 155–61.

189      ill entreated her: Treated her badly.

191      long of: Because of.

195      Cry quittance: (i) Get even, (ii) quit him, (iii) give up the marriage bond, declare yourself free of marital obligations.

199      wanton humour: Amorous mood (Forker 1994).

211      tend’rest: Care for.

216      him: I.e. Mortimer Senior.

223      torpedo: The electric ray, which can deliver a numbing shock.

224      floats: Sails, but with the implication of a drowned corpse floating.

247      make white… day: Proverbial (Tilley B440).

255      play the sophister: I.e. deceive by false arguments.

261      whereas: While.

269      in the chronicle: In the year-by-year annals of the reign. Mortimer is thinking of how history will judge Gaveston’s hypothetical killer.

284      night-grown mushroom: Because mushrooms grow overnight, this metaphor was proverbially used to describe the unprecedented rise of an upstart (cf. Tilley M1319).

318      Diablo!: Italian, devil!

327      golden tongue: There is some evidence of medieval jewels in the form of metal tongues.

330      these: Edward’s arms.

341      sovereign’s: For Q’s soveraigne.

350      bear the sword: The sword was a symbol of state power, usually carried before the monarch during processions.

358      Chirk: Mortimer Senior’s estate which bordered Shropshire and Wales.

374      Against: In preparation for the time when.

377      made him sure: Betrothed.

378      Gloucester’s heir: I.e. Lady Margaret de Clare.

381  triumph: I.e. the jousting tournament (cf. 375).

390–96  mightiest kings… Alcibiades: Mortimer Senior tries to placate his nephew by citing classical examples of homoerotic love. See (N).

392      Hercules: Q’s Hector mangles the myth.

406      He wears… his back: Proverbial (Tilley L452).

407–8Midas-like… heels: He struts around in court decked in gold, with a train of low-born foreign rascals (literally, ‘testicles’).

415      other: Others.

Scene 5

14        preferred… to: (i) Put me forward for promotion, (ii) liked me more than.

20        our lady: Margaret de Clare.

30        read unto her: Tutored her.

32        court it: Behave like a courtier.

33–4 black coat… serge: Baldock wears the modest, and cheap, clothes of a scholar.

band: collar.

Serge: A cheap material.

38        making low legs: Bowing obsequiously.

44        formal toys: Trivial politenesses.

53        propterea quod: Because. Baldock satirizes the Latinate rhetoric of scholarship.

54        quandoquidem: Because. The joke is unclear.

55        form: Conjugate.

71        coach: Coaches were not widely used in England until the 1560s.

Scene 6

11        device: An emblematic painting and motto which decorated a shield.

20        Aeque tandem: Equal at last.

28        Undique mors est: Death is on all sides.

35        my brother: I.e. Gaveston.

40        jesses: For Q’s gresses.

42        Britainy: Britain.

62        painted: Decorated with flowers.

73        Return… throats: Defy them.

74        Base leaden earls: ‘Spurious nobles (like coin of alloy rather than of true metal)’ (Forker 1994).

75        eat… beef: I.e. the nobles are beef-witted (stupid) and parasitic.

81        Here, here: Pembroke points at Gaveston.

12.2  gather head: Raise an army.

146      the broad seal: Letters patent under the Great Seal, which gave the bearer the right to collect money for a special purpose without fear of being prosecuted for begging.

158      treasure: Treasury.

159      The murmuring… hath: And has overtaxed the discontented common people.

163      O’Neill: Irish clan-leader during Edward II’s reign.

164      the English pale: English settlement around Dublin.

165      made road: Made raid.

167      narrow seas: English Channel.

171      Valois: Philip of Valois, King of France.

186      women’s favours: Love-tokens given to knights and often worn in combat.

189–94  Maids… rumbelow: From Robert Fabyan’s Chronicle (1559).

190      Bannocksbourn: Edward’s forces were famously crushed by the Scots at the Battle of Bannockburn (24 June 1314).

194      rumbelow: A meaningless refrain.

195      Wigmore shall fly: I.e. Mortimer Junior’s Herefordshire estate, Wigmore Castle, shall be sold.

202–3  cockerels… lion: Traditionally, lions feared the cock’s crowing.

225      him: I.e. Mortimer Junior.

241      arms: Coat of arms.

242–3  gentry… Oxford: An MA degree conferred gentlemanly status.

248      well allied: Of good stock.

264      Have at: (Imperative) let us attack.

Scene 7

5          of policy: As an act of politic deception.

20        give the onset: Begin the attack.

23        the name of Mortimer: Historically, the family took its name from Mortemer in Normandy, but Mortimer prefers the association with the Dead Sea (Mortuum Mare) and the Crusades.

Scene 8

4          hold: Fortress.

46        Flemish hoy: Small fishing vessels used in the North Sea by the Flemish.

Scene 9

4          unsurprised: Uncaptured.

5          malgrado: Italian, in spite of.

14    welter in thy gore: Be soaked in your own blood.

15        the Greekish strumpet: Helen of Troy.

27–8  But… our hands: Gaveston is to be beheaded, a privileged form of execution reserved for the nobility.

62–3  seize… possess: Get hold of… keep.

64        in keep: In custody.

67        for: Because.

69        To make… thief: To kill a man of honour who has stood hostage for a dishonest man.

72        Question… thy mates: Bandy arguments with your equals.

84        had-I-wist: (Literally) had I known (proverbial; Tilley H8). Warwick is reluctant to let Gaveston escape, only to repent of it later.

85        over-woo: Plead excessively to.

88        in this: In this matter.

Scene 10

1          wrong thy friend: I.e. betray Pembroke.

5          Centre… bliss: ? Applied to the king.

13        watched it well: I.e. kept a vigilant guard over Gaveston.

14        shadow: Ghost.

Scene 11

13        braves: Insults.

14        beard me: Pluck my beard (i.e. defy me).

20        preach on poles: Cf. 1.117n.

27        We’ll steel… tops: We’ll sharpen our swords against their helmets and cut off (‘poll’) their heads.

29        affection: Desire.

31.2  SD truncheon: A staff which symbolized authority.

36        bowmen… pikes: Lances with sharp metal tips at both ends were driven into the ground just in front of the archers to protect them in battle (Wiggins and Lindsey 1997).

37        Brown bills: Soldiers carrying halberds (covered in bronze to prevent rusting).

42        in him: In his person, to the advantage of his family.

43–4an it… pours: If it please your grace, one who pours…

53        Lord Bruce… land: Holinshed reports that when William de Bruce offered to sell some of his land in the Welsh Marches to the Mortimers to pay his debts, they were outbid, with the king’s help, by Spencer Junior.

54        in hand withal: Are negotiating for it.

57    Soldiers, a largess: Edward promises the soldiers a generous gift of money for their loyalty.

66        Sib: Kinswoman (i.e. wife), or a contraction of her name.

76–7  heaven’s… shoulder: Atlas (N) is here imagined supporting the roof-beams of the heavens.

79        towardness: Boldness.

87        once: Once and for all.

121      part: Action.

127      fire… starting-holes: Smoke them out of their lairs (like animals).

129      moving orbs: The heavenly spheres which, according to Ptolemaic cosmology, moved in their concentric orbits around the earth.

145      merely: Purely.

152      iwis: I know.

158      plainer: Complainant (who brings an allegation).

163      deads: Deadens.

royal vine: Edward’s crown was in fact adorned with strawberry leaves, but the association of the vine with royalty was traditional.

Scene 12

0.1   SD excursions: Soldiers rush across the stage, emulating the confusion of battle.

9          retire: Retreat.

18        Thou’d best… them… trains: You had better quickly abandon them and their intrigues. Q reads Th’ad… thee.

20        on thy face: Apparently a variant of the more usual riposte ‘in thy face’.

23        trow ye: Think you.

35        Saint George: Established as the patron saint of England during Edward III’s reign.

Scene 13

3          hang the heads: As in French, Elizabethan English could use the definite article where modern English uses a possessive.

4          advance: Raise their heads on poles (punning on ‘advance’ = to promote).

22        but temporal: I.e. Edward can only inflict physical torment, and not spiritual suffering.

25        my lord of Winchester: Spencer Senior, earl of Wiltshire.

45        Bestow… France: Spencer Junior employs Levune to bribe the French lords, and thus prevent Isabella from receiving aid in France.

47–8  Jove to… Danaë: The shower of gold in which Jupiter reached Danaë (N) was sometimes interpreted as a bribe.

53    levelled: For Q’s levied.

54        lay their heads: Punning on the sense ‘conspire’.

55        clean: Absolutely.

56        clap so close: (For Q’s claps close) shake hands (to strike a deal) in secret.

Scene 14

10        stay: Await.

11        Stand… device: Kent calls upon the darkness of night to assist Mortimer Junior’s escape.

14        But… so happily?: Did your sleeping potion work successfully on the warders?

Scene 15

1–2  Ah, boy… unkind: Levune’s mission has been successful.

4          a fig: An obscene gesture involving the thumb being thrust between two fingers.

5          my uncle’s: Kent’s.

7          ‘’A: He (unstressed form).

9–10  tuned… jar: The metaphors are from music.

10        jar too far: (i) Quarrel too much, (ii) have become out of tune.

13        Hainault: A Flemish county in the Low Countries adjacent to France.

20        shake off: Cast off. The emendation share of is attractive.

24        staff: Quarter-staff used in combat.

32        marquis: William, Count of Hainault, brother to Sir John.

41        thraldom: (Here) captivity, bondage.

47        Monsieur le Grand: A fictional character invented by Marlowe.

49        king: I.e. the King of France.

50–51  right… weapons want: Mortimer means that right can find an opportunity even without weapons, but his words can also mean that right must cede place if it lacks power.

52        made away: Murdered.

55        cast up caps: Throw caps into the air with joy.

56        appointed for: Armed for battle.

66        to bid… base: Alluding to the children’s game in which players could be caught by opponents when running between two bases.

67        match: Game.

74        brother: I.e. brother-in-law.

75        motion: Proposal.

76        forward in arms: Eager to fight.

Scene 16

8          note: Official list.

11.1  SD SPENCER reads their names: Q does not provide details of those nobles who were executed. However, the following passage (from Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587), vol. 3, p. 331) could be adapted for performance purposes:

the lord William Tuchet, the lord William Fitz William, the lord Warren de L’Isle, the lord Henry Bradbourne, and the lord William Chenie barons, with John Page an esquire, were drawn and hanged at Pomfret aforesaid, and then shortly after, Roger lord Clifford, John lord Mowbraie, and sir Gosein d’Eevill barons, were drawn and hanged at York. At Bristow in the like manner were executed sir Henrie de Willington, and sir Henrie Montfort baronets; and at Gloucester, the lord John Gifford, and sir William Elmebridge knight; and at London, the lord Henry Teies baron; at Winchelsea, sir Thomas Culpepper knight; at Windsor, the lord Francis de Aldham baron; and at Canterbury, the lord Bartholomew de Badelis-mere, and the lord Bartholomew de Ashbornham, barons. Also at Cardiff in Wales, sir William Fleming knight was executed: divers were executed in their countries, as sir Thomas Mandit and others…

12        barked apace: (i) Barked rapidly like dogs, (ii) embarked swiftly (upon their treasons) (Forker 1994).

20        ’A will be had: He will be caught.

28        promised: Levune begins formulaically with a reminder of the dutiful promises he has made. Many editors emend to ‘premised’.

38        Your honour’s… service: At your honour’s disposal for anything you want to do.

41        lead the round: Lead the dance.

42        a’: In.

43        rout: Band of followers.

52        equal: Able.

Scene 17

3          Belgia: The Netherlands.

4          cope with: (i) Engage with, (ii) embrace. Lines 3–9 all reflect this ambiguity.

26        havocs: Causes havoc in (i.e. plunders). Havocking was the indiscriminate slaughter of game.

Scene 18

0.1–0.2  SDflying about: Cf. the ‘fly’ of line I.

6          r’enforce: Once more encourage.

7          bed of honour: The ground on which the soldiers will die honourably, and be buried.

Scene 19

16–17  Bristol… false: I.e. the Mayor of Bristol has betrayed Edward I’s son.

17        Be… suspect: Don’t be found alone for it arouses suspicion.

43        A goodly chancellor. This is spoken sarcastically.

45.1  SD RICE ap HOWELL: A Welshman (Rice = Rhys) employed to arrest Edward.

48        this presence: The royal presence (with a pun in the next line).

60        started thence: Driven from their place of refuge.

63        in a muse: Perplexed.

70        Your lordship… head: Your recently acquired status may save you from hanging, but not beheading.

75        Being of countenance: Having authority.

Scene 20

18        nurseries of arts: I.e. universities.

20        life contemplative: The vita contemplativa, the monks’ life of religious devotion.

29        gloomy fellow: The Mower who appears at line 45.

35        fall on shore: Run aground.

44–5  drowsiness… no good: Sleepiness was sometimes considered an evil omen.

45.1  SD Welsh hooks: Long-handled hedging bills resembling a scythe.

53–4  Quem… iacentem: ‘He whom the coming day [dawn] saw in his pride, the passing day [dusk] has seen laid low’ (from Seneca’s Thyestes, 613–14).

56        by no other names: Leicester denies the titles which Edward has conferred upon Spencer Junior and Baldock.

58        Stand not on titles: Do not depend upon the privileges of noble status.

61–2  O day… stars: A recollection of Gaveston’s lament, 10.4–5.

67        in rescue of: As payment for the release from custody of.

81        Killingworth: A common variant of ‘Kenilworth’, but the associations of the name darken as the play proceeds.

85    As good… benighted: I.e. it would be best to leave for Killingworth before nightfall (Wiggins and Lindsey 1997).

89        hags: Hellish spirits.

90        these, and these: Edward probably indicates the monks of Neath Abbey, Spencer Junior and Baldock.

96        feignèd weeds: False clothes (i.e. the disguises they are wearing).

98        Life… friends: Now that his friends have been sent to their deaths, his life has become meaningless.

101      Rend, sphere… orb: Let heaven be torn apart, and let the fire burst from its sphere (which surrounded the world in Ptolemaic cosmology).

113      the place appointed: I.e. the gallows.

115      remember me: I.e. remunerate me.

Scene 21

3          lay… a space: Resided a while here for pleasure.

9–10  forest deer… herb… wounds: It was believed that the herb dittany could heal wounds. Cf. Pliny, Historia Naturalis VII.xli.97. being struck: I.e. shot with an arrow.

13        And: Missing from all early texts.

18        pent and mewed: Penned and caged (like a bird in a ‘mew’ or cage).

27        perfect: Mere (Rowland 1994).

35        exchange: Change of circumstances.

43–4  this crown… fire: Medea gave Creusa (for whom Jason had left her) a crown which burst into flames when it was worn.

47        vine: An emblem of royal lineage. See also 11.163n.

66        watches of the element: I.e. stars and planets.

67        rest… stay: Remain motionless.

71        tiger’s milk: Tigers were emblematic of cruelty.

85.1  SD The KING rageth: In the Coventry Pageant of the Shearmen and Taylors (Late fourteenth-century mystery play), ‘Erode [Herod] ragis in the pagond and in the strete also’ (783–4).

88         install: Invest (a person) to a position of authority.

109      for aye: For ever.

115      protect: Be Lord Protector to.

130      to… breast: Edward offers ‘himself as to a murderer’s dagger’ (Gill 1967).

149      estate: Condition.

153      I… once: Proverbial (Tilley M219).

Scene 22

2          light-brained: Frivolous.

8          slip: Escape.

9          And grip… himself: And bite more fiercely for having been captured himself. ‘Grip’ is not clearly distinguished at this date from gripe (Q’s reading), used of an animal seizing its prey (cf. 23.57).

10        that imports us much: That (it) is most important for us. us: For Q’s as.

11        erect: Establish on the throne.

13–14  For… under writ: I.e. Mortimer Junior and Isabella will enjoy greater power when they can act in the name of the new king.

17        so: Provided that.

30        or this… sealed: Before (‘or’) Edward’s letter of abdication was sealed.

31        he: Edward.

33        no more but so: Without more ado (Forker 1994).

37        privy seal: Royal seal.

39        To dash… drift: To frustrate the stupid Edmund’s plan.

48        resign: Hand over.

57        casts… liberty: Is contriving to free him.

110      ’sdain’st thou so: Are you so disdainful?

114      nearer: Closer in blood to Prince Edward.

115      charge: Responsibility.

Redeem him: Give him back.

Scene 23

6–7  nightly bird… fowls: The owl, which other birds will mob if it appears in daylight. Because it was thought to foul its own nest, it was traditionally a dirty bird, which may explain Edward’s identification with it.

10        unbowel: Open up.

12    mark: Target.

17        air of life: Breath.

22        closet: Chamber.

26        excrements: (Here) faeces.

27        channel water: Sewer-water.

28        Sit… your grace: Matrevis plays upon the alternative sense of ‘excrements’ (26), which could also mean ‘hairs’.

36.1–2  SD They wash… away: The incident is taken from John Stow’s Chronicles of England (1580).

52    Thrust in: I.e. into Killingworth Castle. Marlowe is thinking of the doors at the back of the stage; cf. Jew of Malta 2.3.365.

Scene 24

8   ,11  Edwardum… est: The two interpretations of the Latin are given in the succeeding lines.

13        Unpointed: Unpunctuated.

14        being dead: I.e. when Edward is dead.

16        quit: Exonerated.

21        Lightborne: An anglicization of ‘Lucifer’ (= light-bearer), this is also the name of a devil in the late fifteenth-century Chester cycle of mystery plays.

26        use much: Am much accustomed.

31        lawn: Strip of linen, here stuffed down a victim’s throat to cause suffocation.

41        At every… horse: Fresh horses have been stationed for him at intervals of ten miles.

42        Take this: I.e. the secret token used at 25.19.

50        seal: Authorize with the royal seal.

51        Feared… feared: Reminiscent of Machiavelli, The Prince, ch. 17: ‘because hardly can [love and fear] subsist both together, it is much safer to be feared, than to be loved’ (trans. Edward Dacres (1640), p. 130).

53–4  Aristarchus’ eyes… boy: I.e. the prince fears Mortimer as much as his pupils feared the Greek scholar Aristarchus (N), whose very looks were like a whipping (‘breeching’).

59        imbecility: (Here) incapacity, weakness.

60        onus quam gravissimum: A very heavy burden. Like the tag in line 62, part of the legal formula for the installation of a Roman governor.

62        Suscepi… provinciam: I have undertaken that office.

68        Maior… nocere: I am greater than one Fortune can harm (i.e. too great for Fortune to harm me), from Ovid, Metamorphoses VI, 195.

71.2  SD CHAMPION: One who, in a formal coronation ceremony, offers to fight any who challenge the claim of the new king to his crown.

79        here’s to thee: The king customarily drank the champion’s health from a silver-gilt cup, which was then presented to him as his fee.

81        blades and bills: Swords and halberds.

106      none of both them: I.e. neither of them (Q2‘s reading; Q has none of both, then).

Scene 25

9          savour: Stench.

16        for the nonce: Purposely.

24        Pereat iste: Let this man perish. The instruction may be included in the unpunctuated letter or inscribed on the token. It is in Latin so that Lightborne cannot understand it.

25        lake: (Here) dungeon, cell.

33        featherbed: Feather mattress.

41        Foh: An expression of disgust at a bad smell.

with all my heart: ‘I must say’ (Bevington and Rasmussen 1995).

41.1  SD Enter KING EDWARD: Because Q provides no stage directions, Edward’s entrance is unclear. He may enter from beneath the stage via a trap door, or he could be ‘discovered’ (i.e. revealed) from behind a curtain drawn by Lightborne.

48        used: I.e. being treated.

54        Caucasus: See (N). The mountains were a byword for hardness.

69        ran at tilt: Jousted.

77        That, even: Q’s That, and even is just possible but strained and hypermetrical.

92        You’re overwatched: You are exhausted (from having little sleep), perhaps punning on the sense, ‘under my eye’.

113.1   SD EDWARD dies: Q is unspecific about the murder, but the details were notorious. In Holinshed’s words:

they came suddenly one night into the chamber where he lay in bed fast asleep, and with heavy featherbeds or a table (as some write) being cast upon him, they kept him down and withall put into his fundament an horn, and through the same they thrust up into his body an hot spit, or (as other have) through the pipe of a trumpet a plumber’s instrument of iron made very hot, the which passing up into his entrails, and being rolled to and fro, burnt the same, but so as no appearance of any wound or hurt outwardly might be once perceived. His cry did move many within the castle and town of Berkeley to compassion…

(Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587), vol. 3, p. 341)

Scene 26

4          ghostly father: Priest (administering the last rites to one about to die), i.e. here a murderer.

9      Fly… savages: Take flight beyond civilization.

11        Jove’s huge tree: The oak.

24        SP FIRST LORD: Though Q attributes speeches in this scene to a collectivity of LORDS, it is likely that they were apportioned to individuals in performance (as at 93).

52        hurdle: The frame or sledge used to drag criminals through the streets on the way to the place of execution.

53        Hang him… quarters up: Mortimer Junior is to be hanged, drawn and quartered – the traditional punishment for treason.

80        trial: Investigation.

101      distilling: Falling.

THE MASSACRE AT PARIS

The Massacre at Paris probably dates from 1592. It must post-date the assassination of Henri III (2 August 1589), and is generally supposed to have been the play whose first performance, under the title ‘The Tragedy of the Guise’, by Lord Strange’s Men at the Rose in January 1593, is recorded in Philip Henslowe’s Diary. That play was a great success, and continued in the repertoire. But the only early publication of The Massacre was in an undated octavo usually assigned on bibliographical evidence to 1602, and from the difficulties presented by this text (the basis of this edition) spring most of the problems which beset the understanding of the play. It seems to have been assembled from the memories of actors, and perhaps as much as half the play Marlowe wrote is missing. A single manuscript leaf, now in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, preserves a significantly fuller version of the opening of scene 19, and hints tantalizingly at the original verbal texture of the play (see Appendix).

The action of the first half of the play, dealing with the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572), derives from François Hotman’s De Furoribus Gallicis, published under the pseudonym ‘Ernest Vara-mund’, translated in 1573 as A True and Plain Report of the Furious Outrages in France and reprinted in 1574 without acknowledgement as Book 10 of Jean de Serres, The Three Parts of the Commentaries… of the Civil Wars in France. Some details of the planning of the massacre may be taken from Simon Goulart’s collection of Mémoires de l’état de France (1576–7). The killing of Ramus comes from the anonymous Tocsin contre les massacreurs (1579). This clearly touched a chord for Marlowe: Guise, impugning Ramus’s scholarship for ‘never sound[ing] anything to the depth’ (9.25), recalls (or anticipates) Faustus’ resolution to ‘sound the depth’ of his ‘profess[ion]’ (1.2). Sources for the latter half of the play, which treats events of seventeen years with distorting compression, cannot be so clearly determined. There are innumerable hostile accounts of the reign of Henri III (his interests in magic and mignons were especially execrated in Guisard polemics); and Marlowe need not have been confined to written sources of information: events were within living memory, English soldiers were fighting in France in the early 1590s, and Marlowe may have been there twice in person.

One of the play’s nineteenth-century editors thought it beneath criticism:

the language seldom rises above mediocrity, the characters are drawn with the indistinct faintness of shadows, and the plot is contemptible: events in themselves full of horror and such as should strike the soul with awe, become ludicrous in the extreme by injudicious management; The whole is in fact not so much a tragedy as a burlesque upon tragedy…

(William Oxberry, quoted in Oliver 1968:1)

Its stock has risen since then (Judith Weil argues that its concerns are central to the understanding of all Marlowe’s work), but the key issues remain the play’s historical accuracy and the interpretation of its black humour. Earlier scholars thought its historical vision corrupted by the Protestant propaganda of its sources. More recently, its bloodthirsty comedy has been seen to reflect the vicious sacrilegious humour which characterized the atrocities of the French wars of religion, ‘the rites of violence’. However, the anthropologically minded historian who coined the term (Natalie Zemon Davis, in Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 1975) was explicitly concerned with popular violence. Marlowe’s is a sixteenth-century ‘Machiavellian’ interpretation of the massacre as a conspiracy engineered by the Catholic nobility. He gives far greater prominence than his sources to his villainous duke of Guise, and, as Guise’s big soliloquy (2.34ff.) makes clear, his motivation is not religion but the distinctly Marlovian ambition for a crown, ‘the diadem of France’ (44). ‘For this,’ the speech insists, are all his actions shaped, including a hypocritical show of religion:

For this, have I a largess from the Pope,

A pension and a dispensation too;

And by that privilege to work upon,

My policy hath framed religion.

Religion: O Diabole!

Fie, I am ashamed, how ever that I seem,

To think a word of such a simple sound,

Of so great matter should be made the ground. (2.62–69)

As in Shakespeare’s early histories, Henry VI, Parts Two and Three (1591–2), with which the play shares a number of lines, popular violence is the tool of aristocratic ambition.

In the fast-moving second half, as in the Shakespeare histories, civil war is treated as a revenge-drama played out by the nobility (the conspirators speak of the Massacre itself as a bloody piece of theatre). The Guise is caught up in a lethal court intrigue, and the massacre he engineers in the first half is ironically recalled in the slaughter of the second. The text is full of ironic symmetries, though we cannot be quite sure of their import: are Queen Catherine’s casually murderous speeches about her two royal sons in scenes 11 and 14 so similar because they depict the terrible repetitive mechanism of civil war (as in Henry VI), or because the reporter mixed up the original speeches? Similarly, is Anjou apparently so different once he becomes Henry III because ideological confusion in Marlowe’s treatment of him makes the character ‘wellnigh unintelligible’ (Kocher 1941), or because Marlowe intended to disconcert his audiences, or, as Potter suggests, because the historical king really was so enigmatic? The problem is acute in the final scene, when the dying king has an unexpected attack of pro-Elizabethan sentiment and violent anti-Catholicism (especially since his anti-papal speech seems to have got tangled up with Edward II’s equally uncharacteristic outburst on the same theme). Can the lines in which Henry gives the Protestant Navarre his blessing be Marlowe’s? If so, was Marlowe being serious? And what would the lines have meant to audiences who saw the play after the new king, Henri IV, converted to Catholicism in 1593?

Scene 1

1          brother: Brother-in-law (he has just married Charles’s sister Margaret).

3        religious league: Between the Catholics and Protestants.

8        fuelled: Perpetuated, continuing the imagery of lines 6–7.

12        queen-mother: Catherine de’ Medici, who retained many of the powers of a regent.

49        house of Bourbon: The Bourbon family, rulers of Navarre, now allied to the royal family of Valois.

52        beats his brains: Racks his brains.

53        pitched… toil: Set… snare.

Scene 2

1–2  Hymen… lights: The frown of the god of marriage and the dim candles on his altars would be unpropitious to the wedding-day.

11        prove and guerdon: Test and reward.

31        perform: Bring about, execute (with a suggestion of his ‘tragic part’ (28)).

32        crowns: Coins (the French ‘écues’ of 61).

34–5  deep-engendered thoughts… flames: Plans conceived in secret to reveal themselves in all their violence.

37        levelled: Guessed, speculated (‘level at’ = take aim at).

38        peril… happiness: Proverbial (Tilley D28, 35).

41        hangs: Like easily picked fruit.

43        pyramides: (Four syllables) pyramids, high spires or obelisks.

49        attendance: ‘Waiting the leisure, convenience, or decision of a superior’ (OED 4).

63        dispensation: A licence to break ecclesiastical law without punishment.

64–5  And by… religion: And with that privilege (the dispensation) to work with, I have shaped religion to suit political expediency.Proverbial: Tilley R63.

66        Diabole: (Mixed French and Italian) the Devil.

74        So that… name: So that in effect he is king in name only.

81        As: Such as.

84        of my knowledge… keeps: To my knowledge in one monastery there live…

86        comprised: (i) Contained, (ii) comprehended, imagined.

98        As Caesar: Guise likens himself to Julius Caesar throughout the play, especially because of his unscrupulous acquisition of power (see The Jew of Malta, Prologue 19).

106        against: I.e. into.

Scene 3

13        late suspicion of: Recent suspicions entertained about.

18        passion: (Here) malady, affliction.

28        fresh supply: I.e. of grief.

Scene 4

2           fatal: Fated, doomed. The Huguenots are spoken of as trapped animals.

7–8 under safety… protection: Apparently the king has given the Huguenot nobles his personal assurance of their safety (‘challenge’ = claim).

24        nephew: Kinsman.

34        ordinance: Artillery (a metrically more suitable form of ordnance).

35        set: Beset (as with a net).

36        watchword: Signal.

50.2. SD Enter: Presumably Charles’s walk upstage to the discovery-space to find the Admiral indicated a change of location.

64        Cossin: Emended from O’s Cosin to distinguish the name of the captain of the guard (cf. 5.19) from ‘cousin’ applied generically to a kinsman.

Scene 5

12        entrance: First part, beginning.

23.1 SD the ADMIRAL’S house: Line 32    indicates that the murder of the Admiral occurs in the stage gallery.

37          missed him near: Just failed to kill him.

38          Shatillian: Châtillon, one of Admiral Coligny’s titles.

40        despite: Contempt.

45        Mount Faucon: Montfaucon, where hanged corpses were left to decompose.

47        thereon: I.e. on the cross of a gibbet.

51        partial: (i) Unfair, (ii) incomplete (in massacring the Huguenots).

Scene 6

1        Tue, tue, tue: Kill, kill, kill.

Scene 7

1          follow Loreine: Punning on ‘follow Lorraine’, the war-cry of the Guise faction.

5        ‘Dearly beloved brother’: Guise mimics the words of a Protestant preacher.

6        Stay… psalm: Anjou continues Guise’s joke, mocking the singing of psalms at Protestant services.

Scene 8

6          ha’t: Have it (O’s hate may indicate its pronunciation).

7          O… death: The line is identical with Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI, 1.3.35.

10–11  Christ… saint: Protestants objected to the Catholic practice of prayer to the saints. Mountsorrell parodically refuses to let Seroune pray to God.

12    Sanctus Jacobus: Saint James. Cf. 24.33 and The Jew of Malta 3.4.76n.

Scene 9

0.1 SD in his study: Probably the discovery-space, filled with books.

1        Seine: For O’s Rene, as at line 57.

24        smack in: Smattering of.

26        scoff’ dst the Organon: Scoffed at Aristotle’s dissertations on logic, collectively known as the Organon (= instrument).

28        flat dichotomist: Outright dichotomizer. In logic, dichotomy was a method (rejected by Aristotle) for dividing a class or genus into two component classes or genera.

29        seen in… epitomes: Well versed only in abridgements. (Ramus shortened and simplified Aristotelian logic.)

31        preach in Germany: Apparently a reference to the distrust of traditional scholastic logic (upon which much Catholic orthodoxy was founded) in the doctrinal expositions of Lutheran preachers.

32        Excepting… axioms: Raising objections to the axioms (for O’s actions) of the Doctors of the Church.

33        ipse dixi: I myself have said, i.e. citing oneself as an authority for an argument.

quiddity: Quibble (from quidditas, the scholastic term for the essence of a thing).

34        Argumentum… inartificiale: An argument from testimony is inadequate, i.e. an argument is not proven by the authority of the person who makes it. Guise ironically disproves this argument in the next lines.

36        nego argumentum: I deny the argument.

41        purge myself: Clear myself (of an imputation).

43        Scheckius: O’s Shekins highlights the obscurity of Ramus’s opponent. See (N).

44        my places… his: Ramus claimed to have successfully reduced the loci or ‘topics’ (‘places’) of Aristotelian logic to three categories.

46        reduced: Compressed, ‘digested’.

50        Sorbonnists: (For O’s thorbonest) scholars from the Sorbonne, the theology faculty of the University of Paris.

55        collier’s son: Despite aristocratic descent, Ramus’s father made money by producing and selling charcoal.

65        pedants: Schoolmasters.

72        stay this broil: Stop this violence.

75        rose: Got up (from bed).

79        whip you: Like a schoolmaster whipping his pupils.

86    the devil’s matins: Since the massacre began at dawn, the bell which signalled its beginning was like a diabolical parody of the bell which sounded to morning service.

88        convey him closely: Steal secretly.

Scene 10

This scene inserts into the action events that occurred a year later, probably for the sake of ironic juxtaposition.

2        Prince Electors: Princes who possessed the right to elect a monarch.

11        Muscovites: The forces of Muscovy in Russia, led by Ivan the Terrible.

Scene 11

4–5  his body… him: Infectious diseases were believed to be communicated by foul air.

22        synagogue: Hebrew terminology was sometimes applied (sardonically, by their enemies) to the Puritans.

26        gather head again: Regroup their forces.

38        let me alone for that: Leave that to me.

45        storm… doum: Complain… overthrow them.

Scene 13

Charles died in 1574    (by poison, Marlowe’s sources suggested); the Queen-Mother’s conduct here, coming after her last speech in scene 11, hints strongly at her responsibility for his death.

2          griping: (Here) agonizing.

9–12  I have… no worse: Admitting that he has deserved divine vengeance (‘a scourge’) for his complicity in the massacre of the Huguenots, Charles nonetheless exonerates them in their patient suffering (‘patience’) of any part in his death, and prays that his ‘nearest friends’ are similarly innocent.

28        Polony: Poland (from Latin Polonia, which may be the pronunciation here).

35        It… just succession: Navarre is next in line to the French throne (ignoring Anjou’s historical younger brother: cf. 14.63–4 and 21.105).

43        march with: (i) Be associated with, (ii) be joined to the host of.

46–7  In spite… wrongfully: Parenthetically inserted into the promise to crown him king in Pamplona, the capital of Navarre.

Scene 14

0.1    SD vive le roi: May the king live.

0.4    SD Minions: (i) Favourites, (ii) homosexual lovers.

15        And yield… deserts: And grant that your intentions towards me are as good as I deserve.

20        his bent: Its natural inclination (Oliver 1968); ‘slack’ suggests a metaphorical application of the stringing of a bow in archery.

30.1–2 SD He cuts… his cloak: No historical source for this incident is known.

40        barriers: Combats between two men on foot armed with short swords, conducted inside barriers or ‘lists’.

tourney: Tournaments fought in groups.

tilt: Combat on horseback with lance or spear.

54        power: Force.

55        are: For O’s as.

56        house of Bourbon: I.e. the royal house of Navarre.

63–4  I’ll dispatch… diadem: I’ll send him the way of his elder brother, and then his younger brother (known as ‘monsieur’) will be king.

67        lord: O’s Lords must be wrong in the light of 42.1–2SD.

Scene 15

3          Mugeroun: His role is conflated with that of the duchess’s historical lover Saint-Mégrin.

16        good array: I.e. bad handwriting (ironically, and to stop Guise looking).

23        trothless and unjust: Disloyal and false.

25–6  Or hath… text?: Is my love for you so inadequate that it needs to be supplemented by others, as an obscure text demands the attentions of commentators?

31        Mort dieu! Were’t not: God’s death! Were it not for.

Scene 16

8          defend… inventions: Defend ourselves against their plots.

16        brunt: (Here) conflict.

19        Spain: I.e. the king of Spain.

20–25  The power… revenge: Obscure, perhaps because of faulty reporting. Navarre seems to be saying that his breast is now occupied with bloody thoughts, as by an army (‘power’) with its menacing red banners; but that his desire for revenge will be altered (to a more benign disposition), like leaves changing colour, once he has defeated his enemies. Alternatively, though he is currently compelled to meet violence with violence, he does not expect his enemies to live up to their menacing show once he has defeated them.

35        thereon do they stay: They are waiting for the appointment of a general.

38        countervail: (Here) repay, be worth.

41        And makes… security: And takes his ease in his over-confidence of safety.

Scene 17

5          suffer’t: (For O’s suffer) endure it. 14.1 SD makes horns: The sign of the cuckold.

28        Par… mourra!: By God’s death, he shall die!

37        may… dead: I.e. He will not be the man to kill me.

41        shake off… heels: (i) Stop her loving me, but (ii) while heels are raised in lovemaking.

Scene 18

0.1    SD The DUKE JOYEUX slain: Oliver 1968    treats this as an offstage cry, rather than an indication of stage-action.

17        relics: A jibe at Catholic reverence for the relics of saints and martyrs.

Scene 19

For the fuller version of the opening of this scene preserved in a manuscript in the Folger Shakespeare Library, see Appendix.

2        counterfeit… door: A bawdy reference to the affair between Mugeroun and the duchess of Guise.

4–5    forestall… should not: I.e. he steals the Guise’s trade (‘market’) and sets up a stall (‘standing’, with a pun on ‘erection’) in a forbidden place (the duchess).

6–8    landlord… land: Mugeroun exercises rights of ownership over the duchess.

7        occupy: With the sense of sexual ‘possession’.

10        gear: (i) Plan, (ii) weapon.

12        this: Money.

25        in the cause: In the matter.

30        I am… Valois’ line: Guise claims alliance with the French royal family.

31        Bourbonites: Navarre’s lineage.

32        juror… Holy League: One who has sworn allegiance to the Holy Christian League (established in 1576    to promote die interests of the Catholic Church in France).

35        able: (Here) sufficiently wealthy.

37        foreign exhibition: A pension from abroad.

45        sectious: Sectarian, factious (for O’s sexious).

50        them: The ‘Puritans’ (45).

55–6    –dictator… senator: In times of crisis, the Roman republic elected a single leader (dictator) to exercise the powers usually vested in the Senate.

placet: Latin, it pleases (me), a form of giving assent in an assembly.

62        simple meaning: Innocent intentions.

73        His Holiness’: The Pope’s.

83        And so… suspect: ‘And in such a way as to clear you from all suspicion’ (Oliver 1968) or, and so rid you of any further anxiety (about Guise).

88        tragical: Disposed to create a tragedy.

Scene 20

23        vantage: Vantage-ground (a military term).

Scene 21

1          bent: Determined.

27        Holà, varlet, hé: Guise calls for a page (French varlet).

28        Mounted… cabinet: Gone up into his private apartments.

65        Yet Caesar… forth: Julius Caesar ignored portents of his impending murder. This line recurs in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (2.2.28).

71        As pale as ashes: Possibly Guise inspects his ‘looks’ (68) in a mirror, or the phrase may refer to an intensification of the third murderer’s ‘ghastly’ look (57).
look about: Be on one’s guard.

81        Sixtus: Pope Sixtus V. See (N).

82        Philip and Parma: King Philip II of Spain and his general (N). Cf. Doctor Faustus 1.95n.

85        Vive la messe!: Long live die mass!

101      Douai… Rheims: Under the patronage of the duke of Guise, a number of students who had been expelled from the seminary at Douai were resettled at Rheims. The Elizabethan authorities were deeply fearful of the seminary at Rheims which was often used to harbour Catholic converts from England (see Introduction, p. xi).

103      Spain’s huge fleet: I.e. the Spanish Armada.

105  monsieur that’s deceased: The duke of Alençon, whose death in 1584 left Navarre the heir to the throne. Cf. 14.63–4n

109      make me monk: Subject me to a life of monastic austerity.

114      yoked: Restrained (as by a yoke).

126      that… cardinal: The Cardinal of Lorraine, whom Marlowe has already made partly responsible for the massacre of 1572.

130      These two… Guise: Together these two are as dangerous as one duke of Guise.

144        changeling: Unnatural children were sometimes supposed to be substitutes left by fairies who stole the real child from its cradle.

145        exclaim thee miscreant: Proclaim you an evildoer (infidel).

155        insult: Exult (over the Catholics).

158      all for thee: All as a result of your death.

Scene 22

13        drench: Drown.

16        pluck amain: Pull with full force.

Scene 23

3          The king’s alone… satisfy: The King’s death alone is not enough (to avenge the death of my brother).

5        stay: Support.

11        He: I.e. King Henry.

13–14    But that’s… Rome: Syntax and punctuation are unclear (and O repeats His life at the beginning of line 14). Dumaine can forestall (‘prevent’) the plot against him by killing the king and the other enemies of the Church.

15        durst: Dared.

23–4, 27–8    I am… meritorious: Religious orders were regarded with deep suspicion by Protestants in England, who believed that the Catholic Church sanctioned the murder of Protestant monarchs (such as Elizabeth).

24        Jacobins: Dominicans (from the church of St Jacques in Paris).

Scene 24

13        lie before Lutetia walls: Besiege Paris, here given its Latin name (for O’s Lucrecia).

14        strumpet: Disloyal (Paris supported the Guisards).

16        cast: (i) Vomit up, (ii) throw down.

stomach: (i) Stomach-contents, (ii) courage.

18        President of Paris: The chief officer of the parlement (local assembly) of Paris.

30    speedy: Hastily written.

33        Sancte Jacobus: Inconsistently inflected Latin vocatives.

41        pagans’ parts: Unchristian actions.

42   .    hold them of: Claim to belong to.

47        his: Emended from O’s their.

52        search: Examine with probe.

60–63  These bloody hands… holy earth: These lines are a mangled recollection of Edward the Second, 4.99–101.

62        crazèd: Unsound.

66        practices: Plots.

78        new-found death: Newly devised method of killing.

98        whet… Sixtus’ bones: Sharpen your sword on the Pope’s bones (i.e. if Sixtus V is, as he was at the time of Henri Ill’s murder in 1589, still alive, kill him).

109–10    As Rome… king: For the unintended historical irony, see headnote to this play.