But, Faustus, I am an instance to prove the contrary,
For I am damnèd and am now in hell. (5.129, 138–9)
Faustus lives for twenty-four years after he signs the pact, but in some sense he is already damned.
A witty student once remarked that the play has ‘a beginning, a muddle, and an end’,18 and Marlowe may not have written all its middle scenes. But there is a terrible bathos in Faustus’ adventures. His journeys seem aimless; time is uncertain (the chronology shifts uneasily to the reign of Charles V) and empty, structured only by episodes of trickery. Elizabethan audiences probably enjoyed Faustus’ pope-baiting as a liberating defiance of an exploded religious solemnity. Yet there is something troubling here. Magic, in sixteenth-century eyes, was an inverted religion, and, when Faustus and Mephistopheles are anathematized, though they ‘beat the FRIARS, and fling fireworks among them’ (8.99SD), they do also leave. It is not quite clear how much spiritual power the old religion still commands.
The clowning scenes too seem confused and irrelevant. One of their functions is parodic. Wagner is a sorcerer’s apprentice whose taking Robin the Clown into his service reflects ironically on Faustus’ ambiguous master-servant relationship with Mephistopheles. Faustus experiences his longings as appetites to be glutted, and thinks the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins ‘feeds [his] soul’ (7.163): Hazlitt called it ‘a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness’.19 The Clown’s hunger is comparable (‘he would give his soul to the devil for a shoulder of mutton’, 4.8–9), but more safely comic. The devils Robin and Rafe conjure up (remember that in the main plot Mephistopheles is free not to answer Faustus’ summons) are as familiar as their lice. There is never a sense that their souls are in danger, the clowns are safe with these devils: they are the devils you know, and they play by the older rules. When Mephistopheles punishes them by turning them into animals, they look forward to satisfying their humble appetites: Robin will ‘get nuts and apples enow’ as an ape; Rafe’s head, as a dog, ‘will never be out of the pottage pot’ (9.49, 51). Faustus’ jokey adventures, by contrast, are pointless distractions from the appalling reality of his damnation, and, as the ‘fatal time’ draws closer, they are full of grim anticipation: ‘What, dost think I am a horse-doctor?’ he mockingly asks the Horse-courser, who later pulls off his leg in innocent anticipation of Mephistopheles’s threats to dismember him; and then immediately reels to a sudden apprehension of despair: ‘What art thou, Faustus, but a man condemned to die?’ (11.30, 27–8, 29). The play’s middle scenes accord with a contradictory Elizabethan aesthetic, violently juxtaposing the serious and the comic.
Its final scenes are highly concentrated. With Faustus’ return to Wittenberg, space and time contract, and Marlowe exploits the audience’s consciousness of the approaching end. Body and soul are again prominent. ‘Belly-cheer’ at the scholars’ feast and lust for Helen ‘glut the longing of [his] heart’s desire’ (13.6, 82), but we are watching a man lose his soul. The good and evil angels no longer appear, their allegorical contest replaced by one between Helen and Mephistopheles and the mysterious Old Man who suddenly materializes with each of Helen’s appearances and calls on Faustus to repent. Helen takes both his soul and his bodily substance: Faustus is committing the sin of demoniality, carnal intercourse with an evil spirit (one of the play’s editors thought this his unforgivable sin).20 The Old Man draws attention to other body fluids, calling on Faustus to ‘drop blood, and mingle it with tears’ (13.39) in a highly corporeal appeal to the redeemer whose blood Faustus will see streaming ‘in the firmament’ in his last hour. Instead, Faustus again uses it to sign away his soul. The bodily and the spiritual are interfused. Faustus has taken a ‘surfeit of deadly sin that hath damned both body and soul’, and when he finds himself unable to pray – ‘I would lift up my hands, but see, they hold them, they hold them’ (14.75, 11–12, 31–2) – it is all the more disturbing that ‘they’ are not, to our eyes, there.
When the Old Man dies, his body tormented but his soul untouched, he walks off the stage into another world (‘Hence, hell! For hence I fly unto my God’, 13.118), and we are made acutely aware of that other world at the end of the play. As in the first scene, Faustus is alone in his study; but he ‘sees’ Heaven and Hell. Time ‘really’ passes in this scene’s ‘one bare hour’ – the clock strikes it – and beyond it, ‘perpetually’ (14.63, 64), stretches damnation. Faustus’ monologue is a frenzied attempt to stop the cosmic clock, but his magic is useless: ‘The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, / The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned’ (14.72–3). His punishment approaches with the inexorability of a natural law. His body does not ‘turn to air’, nor his soul ‘into little waterdrops’ (14.113, 115). The devils come and lead him out of sight.
His fall is as inevitable as the law of gravity. God seems not to act at all – perhaps the most fearful thing to its first audiences. In ancient tragedy, the gods destroy a mortal who offends them with his pride (hubris). Marlowe’s application of this tragic model to the damnation of Faustus is not reassuring to a Christian audience.
‘Pythagoras’ metempsychosis’ (14.104), the transmigration of the soul, offers no escape in the harshly orthodox world of Doctor Faustus. At the start of The Jew of Malta, the soul of Machevil (Machiavelli’s post-mortem name spells out his immorality as clearly as his claiming to ‘count religion but a childish toy’, Prologue, 14), having transmigrated through the body of the duke of Guise, arrives to ‘present’ (Prologue, 30) Barabas, who sits in his counting-house, like Faustus in his study, counting his wealth – ‘Infinite riches in a little room’ (1.1.37). Thereafter, the soul is irrelevant to the material world of a play filled with jewels and gold. Malta itself is a little room, cramped and urban, a fortified Mediterranean island which draws Turks, Christians and Jews alike, all blown in by ‘The wind that bloweth all the world besides: / Desire of gold’ (3.5.3–4). Religious differences here are harshly ethnic, territorial, not moral. The Knights of Malta sanctimoniously confiscate Barabas’s wealth to buy off the Turks, and most of the action is taken up with his vengeance against Ferneze for this judicial theft. The play is largely a satire on Christian venality and hypocrisy. There is little poetry: ‘The Passionate Shepherd’ reappears in parody-form in the mangled mythologies of the runaway slave Ithamore’s invitation to the prostitute Bellamira:
I’ll be thy Jason, thou my golden fleece;
…
Thou in those groves, by Dis above,
Shalt live with me and be my love. (4.2.93, 100–101)
The language is dominated by obliquities, puns and asides. It is a revenge-tragedy that tips over into farce, ‘the farce of the old English comic humour’, in T.S. Eliot’s inescapable formulation, ‘terribly serious even savage comic humour’.21
Barabas entirely dominates the plot, and he is something other than a vulgar anti-Semitic stereotype: he is a stereotype, a monster, in the making. Alone when he first appears, Barabas is consistently isolated. He feels no more solidarity with his fellow Jews than with ‘these swine-eating Christians, / (Unchosen nation, never circumcised…)’ (2.3.7–8), and is unmoved by the Turkish threat: ‘Nay, let ’em combat, conquer, and kill all, / So they spare me, my daughter, and my wealth’ (1.1.150–51). But the provisos make him vulnerable. Robbed of his wealth and his house, he becomes further desocialized. His soliloquies and snarling asides, besides being brilliant comic devices, are also the verbal tics of a man talking principally to himself. The complex satirical functions of his interactions are especially clear in 2.3, in which he lures his daughter’s two Christian suitors, Lodowick and Mathias, into a murderous rivalry to be avenged on Lodowick’s father. Barabas covers his asides to the audience with some invented Jewish ritual:
’Tis a custom held with us
That, when we speak with gentiles like to you,
We turn into the air to purge ourselves;
For unto us the promise doth belong. (2.3.45–8)
This enactmen
t of Jewish separateness maliciously parodies the Christian fantasy of the foetor Judaicus, the ‘Jewish stench’ supposedly given off by menstruating Jewish men, and neatly captures the mutual hostility of the two religions.22 Later in the scene, a respectable Christian matron conveniently illustrates the usual prejudice: ‘Converse not with him, he is cast off from heaven’ (3.161). But this apartheid masks a secret commerce. Both groups, after all, have come to buy people at a Christianrun slave-market; the ‘diamond’ Barabas discusses with Lodowick is his daughter. But in the complicated equivocations it is not clear Lodowick knows they are talking about Abigall. The puns are Barabas’s private joke.
Something odd happens to him in this scene. Many readers complain that his famous ‘confession’ to Ithamore, a compound of familiar anti-Semitic fantasy – ‘As for myself, I walk abroad a-nights / And kill sick people groaning under walls’ (3.177–8) – is both ethically and aesthetically offensive. Why should so secretive a character blurt out the truth? Is this earlier career not implausible? Exactly. As he talks with his newly purchased alter ego (‘we are villains both. / Both circumcisèd, we hate Christians both’, 3.217–18), we watch Barabas being dehumanized, becoming the anti-Semitic mask he wears (‘O brave, master, I worship your nose for this!’, 3.176). From now on, he is alienated even from Abigail – eventually, he kills her – and creates a mock-family by promising, falsely, to adopt Ithamore as his heir. There is a huge comic relish in his murder of a whole convent along with his daughter in an act of poisonous charity, and as his murderousness gets funnier, it gets steadily less and less human, as in his response to the passing bells that sound for the nuns (compare the bells in The Massacre at Paris):
There is no music to a Christian’s knell.
How sweet the bells ring, now the nuns are dead,
That sound at other times like tinkers’ pans! (4.1.1–3)
He suffers a further symbolic loss of identity when he goes to poison Ithamore disguised as a French lutanist. And when he ‘dies’, his dehumanization is completed by having his corpse thrown out over the city-walls like rubbish.
Those who deplore this un-charactering of Barabas also feel the play tails off in its later acts into unmotivated intrigue. Certainly, The Jew of Malta is Marlowe’s only play to make such extensive use of intrigue, and its characters share Barabas’s delight in ‘crossbiting’ (4.3.13): Ithamore wonders,
Why, was there ever seen such villainy,
So neatly plotted and so well performed?
Both held in hand, and flatly both beguiled? (3.3.1–3)
This delight in symmetry is present in individual scenes – Shakespeare found the germ of Romeo and Juliet’s balcony-scene in the antithetically constructed 2.1 – and in the plot at large. For the ending brings Barabas full circle. In the opening scenes, he had recognized the exclusion of the Jews from political power, and was content not only to leave such power to Christian ‘policy’ (1.1.138), but to relish his own separation from the ‘polity’. At the end, when he is made governor, he rashly forgets Ferneze’s unscrupulousness, and is therefore caught in his own trap, dropped into the burning cauldron he has prepared for the Turks. If this has the too-neat symmetry of poetic justice, it also makes Ferneze’s closing Te Deum seem all the more ironic.
Edward the Second too is markedly symmetrical. In charting the king’s decline, from his coronation to abjection and murder, the play also frames the rise and fall of his lover Gaveston, in the first half, and, in the second, the rise and fall of his enemy Mortimer. Looked at more closely, its symmetries are those of irreconcilable conflict, the civil war that breaks out to the cries,
WARWICK
Saint George for England and the barons’ right!
EDWARD
Saint George for England and King Edward’s right! (12.35–6)
This pattern of verbal contest is everywhere. Characters measure lines like swords:
MORTIMER
Why should you love him whom the world hates so?
EDWARD
Because he loves me more than all the world. (4.76–7)
The barons’ hatred of Edward’s love is less homophobia than class-antagonism. Gaveston is an upstart on whom the king showers favours at the expense of the old nobility. From his first appearance, he is a Marlovian overreacher, who, while Edward loves him, thinks himself
as great
As Caesar riding in the Roman street
With captive kings at his triumphant car. (1.171–3)
Unlike Tamburlaine, however, or Shakespeare’s history-plays, Edward the Second is strikingly unceremonious. ‘Triumphs’ here often mean ‘idle triumphs, masques, lascivious shows’ (6.156), erotic courtly entertainments of the kind with which Gaveston intends to manipulate ‘the pliant king’ (1.52), lavish tournaments without the substance of military power. Edward and Gaveston’s love looks like a hopeless fantasy in the face of the barons’ armed muscle:
EDWARD
Lay hands on that traitor Mortimer!
MORTIMER SENIOR
Lay hands on that traitor Gaveston!
[They seize GAVESTON.]
KENT
Is this the duty that you owe your king?
WARWICK
We know our duties. Let him know his peers. (4.20–23)
This manhandling is symptomatic. In this brutally pragmatic world, physical proximity, bodily intimacy, is the key to political influence. Gaveston is exiled and returned; Edward embraces him and pushes Isabel his queen aside. The first half of the action is literally fought out over the possession of Gaveston’s body, ‘That, like the Greekish strumpet [Helen], trained to arms / And bloody wars so many valiant knights’ (9.15–16). When the barons get hold of him, they bundle him round the stage and the country, and then treacherously cut off his head. Beheadings and references to beheadings are unnervingly abundant. They point forward to the play’s final tableau, in which Mortimer’s head is placed on top of the coffin of the recently murdered king, whose own death – on a bed, with a red-hot spit forced up into his bowels – is an obscene parody of sexual penetration.
The middle scenes are confusing, filled with sudden shifts of allegiance and unexpected reversals of fortune. Mortimer emerges as a full-blown Machiavellian and seduces the queen, who changes from wronged wife into her more historically traditional role of ‘she-wolf of France’. But the biggest changes are in Edward. Almost imperceptibly, as he is separated from Gaveston, his affections are transferred to the younger Spencer, to whom he is introduced, pointedly, on Gaveston’s wedding-day, and with whom, rather than with Gaveston, he flees from Tynemouth. More importantly, he is now a pathetic victim, and it is his body that is moved passively about the stage. The people change but the roles remain the same, and the characters are increasingly aware of traditional patternings that give shape to the action. Mortimer’s ascendancy is a familiar affair: Edward is his prisoner and he keeps control of the prince by physically abducting him from his uncle; Kent is dispatched in the usual way:
EDWARD III
My lord, he is my uncle and shall live.
MORTIMER
My lord, he is your enemy and shall die. (24.90–1)
Appropriately, Mortimer envisions his own career in the traditional, secular terms of the wheel of Fortune (26.59–63).
But there is something more eerie in the counterpointed scenes of Edward’s fall. Disguised in a monk’s habit and surrounded by other cowled figures, the king begins to contemplate his decline as an instance of the medieval genre of the Falls of Princes, his language too becoming momentarily archaic: ‘Whilom I was, powerful and full of pomp’ (20.13). A play which opened with a fantasy of Renaissance courtly shows (‘Italian masques by night’, 1.54) is becoming medieval. Its action fills with obscure atavistic menace. The mower who betrays Edward is only ‘A gloomy fellow in a mead below’ (20.29) – but he is a Reaper, a figure of death touched in to the landscape. ‘The day grows old’ (20.85) in the most ordinary sense, but the diurnal references are
oddly insistent about the coming of night, and the emphasis returns when the king, plunged into darkness in the closing scenes, tries, like Faustus, to hold back the end of the day:
Stand still, you watches of the element;
All times and seasons, rest you at a stay,
That Edward may be still fair England’s king.
But day’s bright beams doth vanish fast away,
And needs I must resign my wishèd crown. (21.66–70)
His head brought low by uncrowning and unmanned by shaving, his deconsecrated body immersed in excrement and murderously violated through the anus, Edward’s torments are physically appalling symbolic degradations. They suggest the torments of the damned, and his murderer is a kind of devil. ‘Lightborne’ is a version of ‘Lucifer’, and he shares the name with a fallen angel in the Chester Mystery plays. The closing scenes of this least providential of history-plays are full of a hellish fear that is made the worse by being so resolutely unreligious.
Modern criticism, concentrating on Marlowe’s ‘subversiveness’, sometimes makes him sound like Joe Orton in doublet and hose. To some Elizabethans, he was something more dangerous. Richard Baines’s testimony against Marlowe includes the pious wish that ‘all men in Christianity ought to endeavour that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped’. Speculation continues that, when Marlowe was killed in Deptford in May 1593, that is exactly what happened.23
Notes
1. Quoted by Frederick S. Boas, Christopher Marlowe, A Biographical and Critical Study (Oxford, 1940), p. 22.
2. R. B. Wernham, ‘Christopher Marlowe at Flushing’, English Historical Review 91 (1976), pp. 344–5.
3. Gabriel Harvey, A New Letter of Notable Contents (1593), sig. Dr.
4. British Library MS Harley 6848 fols. 190–91.
5. Lucian, Selected Works, tr. Bryan P. Reardon (Indianapolis, 1965), p.34.
The Complete Plays Page 3