by David Riggs
6.3 Extract from George Gascoigne’s Certain Notes of Instruction, 1575.
Gascoigne makes no provision for metrical variety because he does not believe that English poets working with stressed and unstressed syllables can achieve this effect. He recognizes that the built-in stress patterns of long words are likely to disrupt iambic rhythms, and so advises vernacular poets to avoid ‘words of many syllables’. Gascoigne understandably found native accentual verse bereft of the richness and complexity that he recognized in classical poetry. His lament ‘that we are fallen into such a plain and simple manner of writing, that there is none other foot used but one’ is a fair description of the lines just quoted from Gorboduc. Since he cannot see a way around the problem of monotony, Gascoigne advises English poets to ‘take the ford as we find it’ and make the best of the meagre resources at their disposal.
When Gascoigne regrets the ‘plain and simple manner’ of native poetry he draws a tacit comparison between English iambic pentameter and the Latin hexameter. Virgil’s hexameter line superimposes its quantitative measures of long and short vowels on to the stress accents that reside in the pronunciation of individual words. During the first four feet there are numerous mismatches between syllable quantities and stress accents: that is, short syllables are likely to be stressed and long syllables to be unstressed. The pattern is reversed during the last two feet of the line, where the stress accents match up with the antepenultimate and penultimate long syllables. This stylized distribution of mismatches and matches conveys the sense of a relatively prosaic voice first moving in counterpoint to the metrical pattern, and then reinforcing it at the close of the line. Linguists call this effect ‘relative stress’: the entire line is metrical, yet the last two feet take an audible emphasis in relation to the first four. Although Marlowe’s peers among the grammar-school poets – Robert Greene, George Peele, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Lodge, Thomas Kyd, William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and John Webster – lacked a critical vocabulary in which to formulate this concept, they understood it very well as working poets.
Marlowe turned directly to the question that his contemporaries assumed was unanswerable: how to approximate the metrical variety of the Latin hexameter in unrhymed English verses? His solution is the mismatch. Listen to the opening lines of Dido, Queen of Carthage:
Both verses contain the five pairs of alternating weak (w) and strong (s) syllables that constitute an iambic pentameter line. But the first line moves well beyond Gascoigne’s rudimentary proviso ‘that all the words … be so placed as the first syllable may sound short or be depressed, the second long or elevated’. In the first foot, ‘gen-’ is at once the second syllable of the iamb ‘Come gen-’ (ws) and the first syllable of the trochaic (sw) word ‘gentle’. In the second, ‘Gan-’ likewise completes the iambic foot ‘-tle Gan’ (ws) and initiates the trochaic ‘Gany-’ (sw). Even as these two feet adhere to the iambic pattern of alternating weak and strong syllables (ws ws), they voice a second-order mismatch (w sw sw s) between metrical and verbal stress that suspends the rhythm, breaks the monotony and divides the line into two metrically discrete verb clauses:
A similar mismatch occurs in the second half of line two. Once again, the mismatch occurs in a polysyllabic word that takes a trochaic stress on the first syllable:
Since polysyllabic words in English generally have trochaic (sw) rhythms (gentle, Ganymede, Juno), Gascoigne’s advice to avoid ‘words of many syllables’ makes a certain amount of common sense. Just as phrasal stress runs to the right (‘what she will’), verbal stress leans to the left, and trochaic words invariably disrupt iambic meters, however slightly. Marlowe turns this supposed liability into an asset. Instead of avoiding polysyllabic words, he incorporates them into the architecture of his verse. The mismatches at the opening of Dido sculpt the two lines into four discrete intervals of sound; these in turn mirror the four verb clauses that govern the syntax of the verse sentence: ‘Come … play … love … say…’ Sound reinforces sense, enabling the actor to project meaning in the theatre. The prominent mismatches in the first two lines (Ganymede, Juno) focus the audience’s attention on the primal conflict that motivates Dido, Queen of Carthage. Jupiter makes love to his cupbearer Ganymede – young, male and Trojan – while his irate wife Juno waylays the Trojan Aeneas on his voyage from Troy to Italy.
* * *
Dido, Queen of Carthage preserves the broad outline of the story everyone knew from Virgil’s Aeneid. Aeneas’s battered fleet finds a haven in Carthage, where Queen Dido falls in love with him. Aeneas returns her love until the Carthaginians have refitted his ships; when Jupiter reminds Aeneas that he is destined to refound Troy in Rome, the hero abandons Dido and sails on to Italy. Virgil’s admirers regarded this episode as a parable about manly Roman piety prevailing over effeminate Eastern passion. A rival tradition, however, which came down through Ovid, Chaucer and other medieval love poets, saw Aeneas as a cad and a prig. Dido, Queen of Carthage belongs to this Ovidian tradition. Marlowe’s love tragedy marks his progress from the narrower compass of the love elegy to the ‘greater area’ of tragedy and epic. Dido’s letter to Aeneas in the Heroides gave Marlowe an inkling of what Ovid’s lost tragedy Medea was like. For Ovid, as for Marlowe, the leading question comes from the jilted queen, who asks, ‘What can you charge me with but love?’
Marlowe considers this question from a queer point of view. In place of the epic conflict between manly reason and effeminate passion, the play juxtaposes Jupiter’s homosexual love for his young cupbearer Ganymede with Aeneas’s heterosexual love for Dido. There was classical precedent for Marlowe’s approach. Virgil gives two reasons for Juno’s hostility towards the Trojans. One is ‘the judgement of Paris’, the Trojan shepherd who sided with Venus (love) against Juno (marriage) and was rewarded with Helen, the loveliest woman in the world. The other is ‘the honours paid to ravished Ganymede’, the beautiful Trojan boy abducted by Juno’s husband Jupiter. George Peele’s Arraignment of Paris (1581–84) explores the aftermath of Paris’s fatal choice. Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage begins with Ganymede.
His opening scene takes the audience straight to Mount Olympus, where ‘the curtains draw’ to reveal ‘Jupiter dandling Ganymede upon his knee’. Although the moment of nocturnal bliss has passed, the memory of the
youth,
Whose face reflects such pleasure to mine eyes
As I, exhaled with thy fire-darting beams,
Have oft driven back the horses of the night,
When as they would have haled thee from my sight
(I.i.23–27)
lingers on in Jupiter’s adoring gaze. Mortal lovers can only beg the horses of the night to ‘run slowly’; Jupiter can drive them back. The god’s refusal of time becomes palpable in the gift of eternal youth that he bestows on his beautiful bedfellow. Ganymede can ‘Control proud fate, and cut the thread of time’ (I.i.29). Their love belongs to the divine order of things – ‘say Juno what she will’.
Jupiter’s reference to his jealous wife turns his invitation to love (‘Come, gentle Ganymede, and play with me’) into a parody of ‘Come live with me and be my love’. Ganymede adopts the posture of an ill-used mistress, demanding to be shielded from Juno’s ‘shrewish blows’; Jove cross-dresses him in ‘These linkèd gems / My Juno wore upon her marriage-day’ (I.i.4, 42–43). As his beloved youth turns into a transvestite prostitute hustling jewellery (for which, he promises, ‘I’ll hug with you a thousand times’), the god becomes an older customer intent on getting his money’s worth: ‘And shalt have, Ganymede, if thou wilt be my love’ (48,49).
Marlowe’s audience knew about Jupiter’s rape of Ganymede from Book Ten of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where the story originates with Orpheus, the legendary founder of poetry, who ‘set the example … of giving his love to tender boys, and enjoying the springtime and first flower of their youth.’ For Renaissance humanists, this was the definitive myth about homoerotic love. Jove’s choice of Ganymede over Juno epitomized the Socra
tic preference for boys over women. The abduction became an allegory of the soul’s ascent to divine knowledge: Jupiter was the quintessential teacher, his cupbearer Ganymede the perfect pupil. This idealization of boy-love sublimated, but could never completely efface, the carnal thrust of Jove’s love for Ganymede.
6.4 Raffaele da Montelupo, Jupiter Kissing Ganymede, drawing, mid-sixteenth century.
The distinction between eroticized male friendship and sodomy turned on cultural rather than exclusively sexual criteria. During the Renaissance, men were encouraged to love boys if both parties belonged to the same class and the relationship was not mercenary. The spectacle of adult males hugging, kissing, caressing and sleeping with younger male servants and companions was part of daily life. These were the ties that bound one generation of men to another. The stigma of sodomy attached to the base interloper who traded sex for reward and threatened the marital alliances that maintained class privilege. Elizabethans viewed this figure as an effeminate or adolescent kind of male, on the supposition that ‘he’ took the woman’s part in a perversely marital relationship. The vocabulary of early modern homophobia includes a whole set of words to designate this role – pathic, ingle, catamite and Ganymede.
The Chapel Children were uniquely qualified to enact this part. Like Ganymede, many of the queen’s choirboys had been abducted in broad daylight. Queen Elizabeth gave her choirmasters blanket authority to ‘take up such apt and meet children as are most fit to be instructed and framed in the art and science of music and singing as may be … found within any place of this our realm’. The Earl of Oxford, the leading patron of boy actors in the mid-1580s, was himself a pederast, the only titled Elizabethan to be charged with sodomy. Gabriel Harvey dubbed John Lyly, who wrote for the Children of St Paul’s Cathedral, ‘the Vicemaster of Paul’s’. In performance, the Children purveyed sexual titillation to sophisticated urban audiences. The playwright Thomas Middleton assured London theatregoers that they would find ‘a nest of boys able to ravish a man’ at the Blackfriars Theatre.
John Rainolds, the professor of Greek at Oxford, saw a causal relationship between cross-dressed boy actors and homosexual desire; he wondered ‘what sparkles of lust to that vice the putting of women’s attire on men may kindle in unclean affections’? The Puritan preacher John Stubbes answered his question with characteristic bluntness. After the performance is over, ‘everyone brings another homeward of their way very friendly, and in their secret conclaves (covertly) they play the Sodomites or worse’.
The homosexual foreplay that sets the stage for Dido soon comes to a close. Fifty lines into the play, Venus summons Jupiter away from his elegiac interlude, and into the greater space of epic and tragedy:
Ay, this is it! You can sit toying there
And playing with that female wanton boy,
Whiles my Aeneas wanders on the seas,
And rests a prey to every billows pride …
What shall I do to save thee, my sweet boy …
(I.i.50–54, 74)
Although Venus despises Ganymede, the female boy who distracts Jove’s attention from Aeneas, she has no use for heterosexual marriage (Venus is Juno’s enemy). She just wants Jove to take care of her sweet boy, the manly Aeneas, rather than the effeminate Ganymede. In reply, Jupiter delivers a curiously truncated version of the celebrated prophecy that his counterpart delivers to Venus in the Aeneid. Marlowe’s Jupiter omits the famous lines about crushing proud nations, setting up laws and city walls and the advent of universal peace. Instead, the god rhapsodizes over Aeneas’ lovely boy,
bright Ascanius, beauty’s better work,
Who with the sun divides one radiant shape …
No bounds but heaven shall bound his empery,
Whose azured gates, enchased with his name,
Shall make the morning haste her grey uprise
To feed her eyes with his engraven fame.
(I.i.96–97, 100–03)
Jupiter’s idea of ‘beauty’s better work’ recalls his paedophiliac vision of Ganymede at the outset of the play. Although Jove’s cupbearer only appears in the opening scene, the figure of the beautiful boy, as embodied in Ascanius and Cupid, pervades the play. Newly attentive to his patriarchal duties, Jove now affords Aeneas safe conduct to Carthage.
Marlowe’s Queen of Carthage, like Virgil’s, enables Aeneas and his son to proceed from Africa to Italy. Doubly disadvantaged, Dido must preserve the male Trojan line at the same time that she personifies the dangers of erotic love. Having served her purpose, she suffers the pain of abandonment, and takes her own life. Virgil is ambivalent on the question of Dido’s responsibility for her fate. Marlowe, following Ovid’s lead, minimizes her moral culpability. When Aeneas asks Dido to repair his ships, she responds with a lyric entreaty that evokes the Passionate Shepherd: ‘Conditionally that thou wilt stay with me,’ she replies, ‘I’ll give thee tackling made of rivelled gold … So that Aeneas may but stay with me’ (III.i.113, 115, 132). However fleetingly, the union of Dido and Aeneas becomes a palpable, even preferable, alternative to the founding of Rome.
When Jove’s messenger first orders Aeneas to set sail for Italy, the hero refuses to budge. His vision of Troy reborn in Africa inspires the most exuberant poetry in the play:
Carthage shall vaunt her petty walls no more,
For I will grace them with a fairer frame,
And clad her in a crystal livery
Wherein the day may evermore delight …
(V.i.4–7)
Marlowe enlarges the role of Cupid to show Dido as the victim of forces beyond her control. He discards the mythological figure of Rumour who stains the reputation of Virgil’s lovers. He deconstructs the stale antithesis between Roman manliness and the ‘wanton motions’ of erotic self-indulgence: Marlowe’s vision of Roman destiny originates in the wanton dalliance of Jupiter and Ganymede. When Aeneas tells Dido that he must abandon the queen at ‘the Gods’ behest’, she understandably replies, ‘The Gods? What Gods … Wherein have I offended Jupiter / That he should take Aeneas from mine arms?’ (V.i.128–30). What can you charge me with but love?
Aeneas has no answers to Dido’s questions. What little he does say he says in Virgil’s Latin, tacitly acknowledging the textual authority that is speaking through him: ‘Italiam non sponte sequor’ (V.i.140) – ‘I do not seek Italy of my own free will’. In the end, his reputation as a leaver of women comes back to haunt him. Marlowe’s Aeneas abandons three of them (his wife, his cousin Cassandra, her sister Polixena) during his escape from the sack of Troy. Dido finally calls him a Paris come to ruin a second Troy, a ‘perjured man’ and a ‘traitor’ (V.i.146–48, 156, 174). One modern feminist critic confirms her verdict: ‘Less of a bastard than Jason, less “pure” in plain brute sensuality than Theseus, more moral; there is always a god to excuse or explain Aeneas’ skill at seeding and shaking off his women.’
‘I do not seek Italy of my own free will.’ Aeneas forsakes love for empire, but without the supplement of libertine pleasure afforded by Ganymede. Virgil’s hero epitomizes the self-denying ethic taught in Renaissance Latin lessons, and Marlowe’s play finds him wanting. Despite the misogyny that surrounds her, the radical will in this early work belongs to Dido. She alone speaks with the voice of desire that would become the trademark of Marlowe’s tragic heroes.
That voice had yet to be heard in the large public amphitheatres that housed the public drama of Elizabethan England. Marlowe prepared Dido for select audiences in a small theatre or courtly hall. Literary tradition had predetermined both the shape of the plot and the likely responses of most spectators. Marlowe veils the subversive element of his text in classical allusions. The lines from Ovid’s Amores that appealed to the young William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson apply to Dido as well: ‘Let base-conceited wits admire vile things, / Fair Phoebus lead me to the Muses’ springs’ (I.xv.35–36). As Hamlet would later remark, the play was caviare to the general audience. Still, Marlowe’s classical phase had a limited lease
on life. When he writes Edward II a few years later, the conflict of king, queen and Ganymede descends from Mount Olympus into history, and the struggle between opposed sexualities comes to its appalling conclusion.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Plots and Counter Plots
A year before the Spanish Armada sailed for England, the mystery of Marlowe’s absences grew more urgent. The Queen’s Privy Council learned about a ‘rumour’ that Christopher Marlowe ‘was determined to have gone beyond the seas to Rheims’. The English seminary at Rheims was a prime destination for Catholic students in exile; it housed many of Queen Elizabeth’s mortal enemies. On 29 June 1587 the Councillors informed the authorities at Cambridge that Marlowe ‘had done her Majesty good service … in matters touching the benefit of his country’. They denied that he had ever intended to ‘remain’ at Rheims, which lay seventy miles east of Paris, and finessed the loaded question of whether or not he had actually gone there. Although the Councillors did not say when Marlowe’s ‘good service’ began, or of what it consisted, their letter leaves the impression that he has carried out covert missions on the Council’s behalf. Secrecy was of the essence: ‘Their Lordships’ request was that the rumour thereof should be allayed by all possible means.’
Was Marlowe a government agent during the weeks and months that he spent away from Cambridge? Although his scholarship payments were docked while he was absent, he began to spend more lavishly when he returned to college. He took in 19s 6d of his grant during 1584–85, less than half the usual amount; but when he was in residence his weekly buttery bills averaged nineteen pence a week, well in excess of the twelve pence a week he received from his scholarship. The theory that he was being paid for doing Her Majesty good service looks more compelling with the benefit of hindsight. The major figures in his postgraduate life, apart from Thomas Kyd, worked for the Elizabethan secret service. The spy Richard Baines, the poet Thomas Watson, the Kentish squire Thomas Walsingham and the informant Robert Poley all belonged to the band of intelligence operatives that kept watch on the seminarians at Rheims and their English allies. These men worked in a clandestine world of plots and counterplots, double identities and ulterior motives. What was at stake in their cloak-and-dagger adventures?