tackling made of rivelled gold,
Wound on the barks of odoriferous trees;
Oars of massy ivory, full of holes,
Through which the water shall delight toplay (3.1.113,115–18)
and promises Achates a sailor-suit that will allure the nymphs and mermaids, ‘So that Aeneas may but stay with me’ (132). Everyone is turned on, including the old Nurse, who invites Cupid to her
orchard that hath store of plums,
Brown almonds, services, ripe figs, and dates,
Dewberries, apples, yellow oranges… (4.5.4–6)
The cumulative effect is to drive the play away from epic and towards comedy – the comedy of John Lyly, whose Gallathea (1583–5), also written for boy-actors, makes much of the havoc wreaked by Cupid in disguise.
Yet Dido is tragedy, not comedy, a generically labile play in which love is funny but dangerous, its menace signalled by constant reminders of Helen and the fall of Troy. When Cupid snuggles up to Dido and sings a song on her knee in order to get close enough to touch her with his infatuating golden arrow, the dialogue itself glitters ominously:
DIDO
… tell me where learn’dst thou this pretty song?
CUPID
My cousin Helen taught it me in Troy. (3.1.27–8)
To keep Aeneas, Dido is even prepared to copy ‘that ticing strumpet’ (2.1.300):
So thou wouldst prove as true as Paris did,
Would, as fair Troy was, Carthage might be sacked
And I be called a second Helena! (5.1.146–8)
Dramatic irony works here much as it does in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida: Aeneas won’t be true, but will leave in the ships Dido has given him; and Carthage, of course, will be sacked in the wars with Rome which she calls down at the end of the play. Fire is everywhere – even the most woodenly Elizabethan line, ‘Gentle Achates, reach the tinder-box’ (1.1.166), has a spark in it – and the flames of love at once recall the firing of Troy and point forward to the fire in which Dido immolates herself. Dido’s funeral pyre, fuelled by the tokens of Aeneas’ love, is both a solemn sacrifice and a faintly comic hecatomb. Its arch solemnity is typical of the play as a whole; like the rest of the play, its erotic and ironic force are still underrated.
Tamburlaine the Great was Marlowe’s first big hit. Written for adult players, it too is a striking instance of Renaissance neo-classicism. This may surprise us in a history-play about a fourteenth-century Asiatic conqueror, but part of Tamburlaine’s significance to the Elizabethans was the coincidence of his conquests with the European Renaissance: ‘During [his] reign began the restitution of learning and of the arts.’8 Hence the hero praises his wife by claiming that if Zenocrate had lived
before the siege of Troy,
Helen, whose beauty summoned Greece to arms
And drew a thousand ships to Tenedos,
Had not been named in Homer’s Iliads. (Part Two, 2.4.86–9)
Tamburlaine’s poetry of wealth and power – what Ben Jonson called ‘Marlowe’s mighty line’9 – has in fact less affinity with Homer than with the war-poetry of Lucan’s Pharsalia (Marlowe translated its first book, and Tamburlaine alludes in Part One 3.3 to the battle that gives the poem its title). Jonson more sourly complained of the plays’ ‘scenical strutting, and furious vociferation’,10 and modern audiences also sometimes feel wearied by what can seem a formless action driven on by rant.
But Tamburlaine is not one play, but two. Part One, which its original running-title called The Conquests of Tamburlaine the Scythian Shepherd, is about the unstoppable rise of its hero from poverty and obscurity to ‘The sweet fruition of an earthly crown’ (2.6.69). It has an exceptionally clear five-act structure (roughly one per conquest), and its action was originally diversified by comic scenes which the printer cut because he thought them ‘a great disgrace to so honorable and stately a history’ (‘To the Gentlemen Readers’, 16–17). Nonetheless, it begins with comic bathos: Persia, whose past kings ‘triumphed over Afric, and the bounds / Of Europe’ (1.1.9–10) is now ruled by the effete Mycetes; in the first scene, the crown passes with comic rapidity to his ambitious brother Cosroe, who promises the rebels they will ‘triumph over many provinces’ (173). Into this power-vacuum, in Acts 1 and 2, comes Tamburlaine, a passionate shepherd – Marlowe emphasizes his humble origins, just as he exaggerates Aeneas’ destitution in Dido – whose invitation to love (‘Disdains Zenocrate to live with me?…’, 1.2.82–105) is an astonishing offer of barbaric splendour. He even uses the display of his treasure as a military tactic. He briefly supports Cosroe, until the usurper unintentionally fuels his desire to ‘ride in triumph through Persepolis’, then turns on ‘this triumphing king’ (2.5.49, 87) and, at the end of Act 2, hymning ‘aspiring minds’ (2.6.60) over Cosroe’s expiring body, he plucks the crown from his corpse and puts it on. Thereafter, each act ends with a coronation.
We see few battles. Instead the play feels like a triumphal pageant, and the idea of the Roman triumph is deep in its structure. Roman triumphal processions were celebrations of victory, elaborate street-theatre which displayed the triumphator’s glory in plundered spoils and the marching bodies of enslaved captives. Their fascination for Renaissance artists is apparent in Petrarch’s allegorical Trionfi (1356–74); in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590–96); and most memorably in Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar (1486–92), now at Hampton Court and well known in the sixteenth century through reproduction in woodcuts and engravings. Tamburlaine’s catalogues of names, its exhibitions of wealth and its stage-pageantry bring the triumph to the London stage.
Yet Tamburlaine’s triumphs over his enemies increasingly seem the ceremonious exultations of sadism. The defeated Bajazeth is put in a cage and ‘in triumph drawn’ (4.2.86); Tamburlaine, who has felt the ‘thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown’ (2.6.52), feasts while his prisoner starves, and torments him with the strange confection of ‘a second course of crowns’ (4.4.110SD). Zenocrate, herself part of the spoils of war, is increasingly used to register the horror of Tamburlaine’s atrocities. Her pity for his victims prompts his one soliloquy (‘Ah, fair Zenocrate, divine Zenocrate…’, 5.1.135–90); but it is a rapturous contemplation of her suffering beauty – her crying excites him – as a force almost powerful enough to restrain him. The whole play ponders the connection of beauty and pain in his question, ‘What is beauty, saith my sufferings, then?’ (1.160). Its ending is disconcerting. Zenocrate has drawn the traditional warnings about ‘fickle empery’ and ‘earthly pomp’ (1.352–3) from the fall of Bajazeth and his wife; now, with their corpses and her sometime fiancé’s still on stage, she is enthroned and crowned. This extraordinary tableau has been compared to the amoral triumph of the lovers at the end of Monteverdi’s opera L’Incoronazione di Poppea (1642).11 It is at once an emblem of victory and a warning of the brutality and transience of power.
To some, Part Two seems just more of the same. But the effect may be deliberate. The hero is a murderous automaton, compulsively repeating what the play’s running-title calls The Bloody Conquests of Mighty Tamburlaine. And there are differences. Tamburlaine is offstage for most of the first two acts. He is older; his conquests are now an empire; attention shifts to some extent to his heirs and a new generation of antagonists. The play opens on the banks of the Danube, where the Muslim world meets Christendom, and is set against a backdrop of geopolitical conflicts. (Tellingly, the ringing place-names are now more precise: Marlowe was using an atlas.12) The conflicts are at once religious and territorial, and the play is not on the Christian side. The perfidious Christians are overrun by a pious Muslim who calls on Christ; the God he reveres is one ‘that sits on high and never sleeps, / Nor in one place is circumscriptible’ (2.2.49–50). Beyond the vast Asiatic spaces over which the action is fought out, there is a vaster spiritual dimension.
Tamburlaine too is seen against this background. His conquests continue, but are now vulnerable to irony. Callapine escapes his captivity by seducing h
is gaoler with an offer of a crown that parodies Tamburlaine’s invitations to power; his idle and cowardly son is a damaging mockery of his killer-ethic; and, most importantly, he is helpless in the face of Zenocrate’s death: his frustrated rant about invading Heaven and Hell to win her back is deflated by Theridamas’s realism: ‘She is dead, / And all this raging cannot make her live’ (2.4.119–20). Hitherto invulnerable, his wounding his own arm to teach his sons courage is also the self-mutilation of blocked grief. He cannot even bury her body, but drags it with him, burning towns as perverse monuments to her memory. There are more victories, but they are circumscribed by the increasingly persistent references to Heaven, Hell and death.
A nuclear scientist, watching the first atomic bomb explode, grimly applied to himself the words of a great Hindu god: ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’13 Tamburlaine too identifies with death, and his terrible chariot drawn by captive kings belongs in the traditional Triumph of Death. The idea of earthly conquest is still strong towards the end of the play – in Babylon, where earlier conquerors ‘Have rode in triumph, triumphs Tamburlaine’ (5.1.70) – but his march to Samarkand is cut short by his own death. Yet even here, Marlowe avoids conventional Christian moralizing. His final illness begins just after he has burned the Koran, an act which could be interpreted as a fatal defiance of divine power, except that he burns it in the name of God (‘For he is God alone, and none but he’, 5.1.201). And in the last scene, the crown with which he invests his son is the sign of a purely secular power. The play remains studiedly ambiguous about the religious meaning, if any, of ‘Tamburlaine, the scourge of God’ (5.3.248).
Of Marlowe’s own religious views, nothing certain can be known. The closest we come is the dubious record of ‘his damnable judgement of religion, and scorn of God’s word’ preserved in the ‘note’ Richard Baines delivered to the Privy Council close to the time of Marlowe’s death. Baines was a hostile and unreliable witness (he had been apprehended with Marlowe for counterfeiting in Holland; each accused the other of intending to desert to the Catholic enemy), and his note is an informer’s delation. But it is the nearest thing we have to evidence and is reprinted at the end of this Introduction. The opinions it contains are clever and provocative. The religion of Moses was magical trickery, designed, like all religion, ‘only to keep men in awe’. The New Testament is ‘filthily written’, its mysteries sexual scandals. The most entertaining blasphemy – ‘That St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom, and that he used him [note the ambiguity of the pronouns] as the sinners of Sodoma’ – sounds like an accusation until you read the disarming sequel: ‘That all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools.’
More important, perhaps, to an understanding of the place of religion in Marlowe’s plays is the context of Counter-Reformation Europe. ‘Atheism’ in the sixteenth century did not preclude belief in God. It was what you accused someone else of. The unity of Christendom, at once political and religious, was split by a confessional division which turned each side’s deepest spiritual convictions to derision. For Protestants, Catholicism was a murderous conspiracy to uphold the hegemony of Spain and the papacy; in Catholic eyes, Protestants were merely seditious heretics. Much of continental Europe was involved in religious wars. Marlowe knew this world – he had been in France as well as in Holland14 – and it colours the mockeries and solemnities of the plays.
It is literally the setting of The Massacre at Paris, which dramatizes the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) and its aftermath. The play opens with an ecumenical marriage, but within moments the cast is divided by the key ritual that separated Catholics from Protestants: the Catholics go to mass ‘to honour this solemnity’ (which Catherine de Medici promises – aside – to ‘dissolve with blood and cruelty’, 1.24–5), leaving the Protestants to express their satisfaction at the discomfiture of the Catholic leader the duke of Guise, and their hope of making the ‘Gospel flourish in this land’ (56). Guise is a monster of politic atheism – ‘My policy hath framed religion. / Religion: O Diabole!’ (2.62–3) – who engineers the massacre to further his own ambition for the crown. The killing is done with grim sacrilegious humour which ‘reproduces with remarkable accuracy forms of ritualized violence peculiar to the French religious wars’:15 Guise kills a preacher with a mockery of a Protestant sermon (‘“Dearly beloved brother” – thus ’tis written. He stabs him’, 7.5); church-bells sound throughout. The play is virulently anti-Catholic; but, although the text in which it survives is too poor to make certain judgements, its satire seems also to cover the anti-Guisard backlash which follows. Anjou, who has gleefully joined in the killing, becomes king and coolly orders the deaths of the Catholic leaders, only to be slain himself by a treacherous friar. His death allows the Protestant Navarre to gain the throne; but one cannot be sure how complacently an Elizabethan audience would have heard the king’s dying call on his minion to ‘slice the Catholics’ (24.99), nor Navarre’s promise to continue the cycle of violence through revenge. The play’s very ‘orthodoxy’ is disquieting.
In a sense, this is also true of Doctor Faustus. A dark Morality, the play ‘tells the world-story of a man who, seeking for all knowledge, pledged his soul to the devil, only to find the misery of a hopeless repentance in this world and damnation in the world to come’.16 Marlowe’s play should not be confused with later developments of the Faust-legend (‘the world-story’): it is a dramatization of the anonymous German Faustbook, which has been called ‘at once a cautionary tale and a book of marvels, a jest-book and a theological tract’.17 Many of the play’s least critically popular scenes are necessary, famous parts of the story Marlowe took from the Faustbook, a distinctive product of post-Reformation Germany, with its anxieties about magic and religion, knowledge and salvation. This is the world in which the play, especially in its opening scenes, is quite precisely set: the unheroic, academic world of Wittenberg, Luther’s own university, evoked by the technical language of ‘scholarism’ (Prologue, 16) and theology which the characters speak. Faustus’ ambitions too are localized: the desire to ‘be as cunning as Agrippa’ (1.119) alludes ironically to Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, who explored the practice of learned magic in one book (De Occulta Philosophia, 1510, published 1533), and then renounced the follies of learning in another (De Vanitate Scientiarum, 1531); Faustus’ wish to ‘chase the Prince of Parma from our land’ (1.95) makes him a contemporary of Spain’s wars in Northern Europe.
Faustus dreams of ‘omnipotence’ and hopes ‘All things that move between the quiet poles [of the universe] / Shall be at my command’ (1.56, 58–9); instead, he becomes, like Mephistopheles, ‘servant to great Lucifer’ (3.41) and a stage-conjuror of a type familiar from other Elizabethan plays (such as the heroes of Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay or Anthony Munday’s John a Kent and John a Cumber, both c. 1589). The story told in Marlowe’s play, in fact, is well on the way to its ‘degeneration’ in the next two centuries into the popular media of ballads, farces and puppet shows – the last being the form in which Goethe first knew it. Yet it is also a spectacle of damnation.
This makes it all the more disturbing that we do not know quite what we are seeing. Consider Faustus’ first speech, his survey of the arts and decision to practise magic. The spatial setting, with Faustus turning the pages of books ‘in his study’ (1.0SD), is exact. But is this happening in real time? Are we actually watching him make his fatal decision, or is the speech a symbolic condensation of a longer process? Is this the speech of a presenter in a Morality play, or of a character in a tragedy? The soliloquy bespeaks a character with an acute inner subjectivity (Faustus names himself obsessively throughout the play), but one who still receives the ministrations of good and evil angels. The action here, like the play as a whole, is fascinatingly poised between older and still evolving dramatic forms.
There are comparable – fearful – uncertainties in Faustus’ encounters with the devil. Mephistopheles is a n
ew kind of devil, quiet, melancholy, menacing in the very honesty with which he explains his coming ‘to get [Faustus’] glorious soul’. And he brings a new, spatially disquieting Hell with him in his own ‘fainting soul’: ‘Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.’ At first he comes as a familiar ‘Devil’; later, he always accompanies Faustus in the guise of ‘an old Franciscan friar’ (3.50, 84,78, 23SD, 26). Since Faustus wears the robes and cross of a Doctor of Divinity (‘a divine in show’, 1.3), the stage is occupied – apparently – by two religious figures, both of whom (since Faustus bargains to ‘be a spirit in form and substance’, 5.97) are in fact evil spirits. Wagner’s mock-academic question about his master – ‘is not he corpus naturale?’ (2.20–21) – thus has disturbing ironic force. What we see onstage may not be all that is there. Hence the stories of early performances of the play being disrupted by real devils: there is always the danger that a real spirit might answer the actor’s summons. Doctor Faustus is a spiritual tragedy, a play centred on what cannot be staged, the invisible, immortal soul. Part of what is so disturbing about the pact that consigns in his own blood Faustus’ soul to the devil is the ontological uncertainty over how exactly such material, corporeal forms, can bind the immaterial soul. Is it, in fact, the pact that damns Faustus? What does it mean to sell one’s soul? Faustus gains no new knowledge: Mephistopheles’s answers to his cosmological questions are freshman truisms, and Faustus is stupidly blind to the evidence of his own senses:
FAUSTUS Come, I think hell’s a fable.
…
MEPHISTOPHELES
The Complete Plays Page 2