Christopher Marlowe, Renaissance Dramatist (Renaissance Dramatists)

SERIES EDITOR, SEAN MCEVOY An invaluable resource for all students of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, each volume in the series provides an authoritative and up-to-date survey of a major dramatist’s work with a focus on the plays in performance on stage and screen. Each guide provides: An informative account of the writer’s entire dramatic output, with an emphasis on those plays most frequently studied at university, college and school Detailed and relevant contextual information on history, culture, politics and biography A lucid survey of important recent criticism Original critical readings of the major plays

• • • •

Christopher Marlowe, Renaissance Dramatist LISA HOPKINS This book offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to all of the plays of Christopher Marlowe. It explores Marlowe as a playwright whose work taps into the central concerns of his age, and our own: religious uncertainty, the clash between Islam and Christianity, the discovery of America, ideas of sexuality and gender identity, and the rôle of the marginalised individual in society.

Lisa Hopkins is Professor of English at Sheffield Hallam University.

Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.eup.ed.ac.uk ISBN 978 0 7486 2473 7

Edinburgh

Cover design: Cathy Sprent

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

R enaissance D ramatist

LISA HOPKINS

Each of the six chapters focuses on a specific aspect of Marlowe’s work and its cultural contexts: Marlowe’s life and death; the Marlowe canon; the theatrical contexts and stage history of the plays; Marlowe’s distinctive interest in old and new branches of knowledge; the ways in which he transgresses against established norms and values; and the major issues which have been raised in critical discussions of his plays. Each chapter allows the reader to see the significance, scope and distinctive contribution made by Marlowe in all his plays, and his place in the development of Renaissance drama.

Christopher Marlowe, Renaissance Dramatist

Renaissance Dramatists

Lisa Hopkins

Christopher Marlowe, Renaissance Dramatist

Titles in the Series Christopher Marlowe, Renaissance Dramatist Lisa Hopkins Ben Jonson, Renaissance Dramatist Sean McEvoy Forthcoming Thomas Middleton, Renaissance Dramatist Michelle O’Callaghan John Webster, Renaissance Dramatist John Coleman

Christopher Marlowe, Renaissance Dramatist Lisa Hopkins

Edinburgh University Press

© Lisa Hopkins,  Edinburgh University Press Ltd  George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in ./ Monotype Ehrhardt by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester and printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wilts A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN      (hardback) ISBN      (paperback) The right of Lisa Hopkins to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act .

Contents

Acknowledgements Chronology  Marlowe’s Life and Death

vi vii 

 The Marlowe Canon



 Marlowe on Stage, –: Theatrical Contexts and Dramaturgical Practice



 Marlowe as Scholar: Old and New Knowledges in the Plays



 Marlowe the Horizon-Stretcher: Daring God out of Heaven and Conquering New Worlds



 Critical Issues



Bibliography Index

 

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my colleague Matt Steggle and my student Andy Duxfield for all their help and support with this. Thanks are also due to Annaliese Connolly and to Sean McEvoy.

Chronology

Plays and playwrights

Theatre and politics

 Shakespeare born Marlowe born 

Queen Elizabeth excommunicated by Pope Pius V

 Jonson born

Bartholomew’s Eve Massacre in France



James Burbage opens The Theatre

 Webster born (?)  Middleton born

Last performance of miracle plays at Coventry

 Kyd The Spanish Tragedy Marlowe  Tamburlaine

Mary Queen of Scots executed. Rose Theatre opens

 Marlowe Dr Faustus

Defeat of Spanish Armada

 Marlowe The Jew of Malta

viii  ,   Plays and playwrights  Marlowe Edward II Marlowe Massacre at Paris Shakespeare Richard III

Theatre and politics Azores expedition

 Marlowe killed Shakespeare The Taming of the Shrew  Shakespeare Titus Andronicus

First of four bad harvests

 Shakespeare Richard II

Spanish raids on Cornwall. O’Neill’s revolt in Ireland

 Jonson The Case is Altered Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice

Private Blackfriars theatre constructed

 Shakespeare Julius Caesar

Satires proscribed and burnt. Globe Theatre opens

 Marston Antonio’s Revenge Shakespeare Hamlet

Fortune Theatre opens. East India Company founded. Children of the Chapel at the Blackfriars

 Dekker Satiromastix Jonson Poetaster Shakespeare Twelfth Night

Essex’s rebellion and execution. Defeat of joint Irish/ Spanish army in Ireland

 Jonson Sejanus Marston The Malcontent

Death of Elizabeth; accession of James I. Lord Chamberlain’s Men become The King’s Men

 ix Plays and playwrights

Theatre and politics

 Chapman Bussy D’Ambois Shakespeare Measure for Measure Shakespeare Othello  Middleton A Mad World, My Masters Shakespeare King Lear

Gunpowder Plot

 Jonson Volpone Middleton Michaelmas Term Middleton The Revenger’s Tragedy Shakespeare Macbeth  Shakespeare Antony and Cleopatra 

King’s Men lease the Blackfriars Theatre

 Beaumont and Fletcher The Maid’s Tragedy Jonson The Alchemist  Dekker and Middleton Authorised Version of the The Roaring Girl Bible published Jonson Catiline Shakespeare The Winter’s Tale Shakespeare The Tempest  Webster The White Devil   Jonson Bartholomew Fair Webster The Duchess of Malfi  Middleton and Rowley A Fair Quarrel

Overbury scandal begins. Globe Theatre burns down

x  ,   Plays and playwrights

Theatre and politics

 Jonson The Devil is an Ass Middleton The Witch Shakespeare dies

Jonson Folio published

 Webster The Devil’s Lawcase

Jonson made poet laureate



Thirty Years War begins

 Middleton Women Beware Women  Middleton and Rowley The Changeling 

Prince Charles’ unsuccesful visit to Spain to marry the Infanta. Shakespeare First Folio published

 Middleton A Game at Chess 

James I dies; accession of Charles I

 Jonson The Staple of News  Middleton dies

Failure of La Rochelle expedition



Petition of Right



Buckingham assassinated. Beginning of Charles I’s personal rule

 Ford ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore  Webster dies (?) Jonson The Magnetic Lady  Jonson dies

 

Marlowe’s Life and Death

arlowe has suffered more than most authors from the attempt to read his works in simple biographical terms, as when, in the middle of his discussion of Doctor Faustus, one of his recent biographers suddenly asks ‘Was Marlowe impotent?’ on the grounds that a number of his works are interested in unfulfilled sexuality (Honan : –). The attempt to read Marlowe narrowly in terms of his own biography has generated two principal problems. In the first place, it has led to some very crude readings of his plays as little more than personal wish-fulfilment – as Lawrence Danson observes, we mistake the situation if, when reading Tamburlaine, ‘we assume that the Scythian shepherd is really only the Cantabrigian Marlowe in fancy-dress’ (Danson : ), and so regard the play as entirely uncritical of its hero, or if we see Faustus as simply a self-portrait of Marlowe. The view that this gave rise to, of Marlowe as an entirely solipsistic writer obsessed with success at all costs, undoubtedly contributed to the long-held view of him as decidedly inferior to Shakespeare and prevented attention being paid to the breadth and depth of Marlowe’s wideranging interests in the world around him, something which I will explore further in Chapter . Secondly, the focus on Marlowe’s life has spawned an entirely spurious industry which attempts to prove that Marlowe did not in fact die at Deptford and actually went on to write the works of Shakespeare. As it happens, however, Shakespeare and Marlowe are entirely distinct in style, and we

M

  ,   have, as will be discussed later, copious evidence of the details of Marlowe’s death. Partly because it has led to such abuses, some critics would argue that we should not consider biography at all when looking at Marlowe’s works. Matthew Dimmock, discussing Tamburlaine the Great, argues that ‘it seems increasingly important to look beyond biographical distractions’ (Dimmock : ). Emily Bartels is more confident that Despite recent skepticism about the validity of assigning a text, and especially a play-text, to a single, identifiable author, I tend to believe that there was indeed an historical figure by the name of Christopher Marlowe, who wrote what we know as “Marlowe’s” plays and whose alienated subject position, as homosexual, a spy, and a playwright at the least, affected them. (Bartels : xvi) Nevertheless, she concludes that ‘the Marlowe we can speak of with most authority . . . is the one constructed by the texts’ (Bartels : xvi–xvii), and along the same lines J. A. Downie declares that ‘We know next to nothing about Christopher Marlowe. When we speak or write about him, we are really referring to a construct called “Marlowe” ’. Specifically, Downie claims that ‘The recent spate of fictions published about Marlowe, in which category one is forced to include Charles Nicholl’s book about Marlowe’s murder, are merely the latest manifestation of a (dis)honourable tradition’ (Downie : ). It is true that many of the surprisingly numerous novelisations of Marlowe’s life are simply bizarre (see Hopkins ). It is also true that Nicholl’s book, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, is written in an unusually lively style for a biographer (he says of Marlowe being deported from Flushing, ‘Whatever Marlowe’s mood and intent when he had left England, this is how he returns: a prisoner under escort, cold, scared, dying for a smoke’) (Nicholl : ). Nevertheless, Nicholl is scholarly, alert, and thoughtful and has made an enormous contribution to Marlowe studies, and it seems a pity to dismiss his serious engagement with Marlowe in this way, or even to speak of him in the same breath as the authors of novelisations of Marlowe’s life, which are

’     all too often ill-informed or salacious or both. The fact that some people who have written about Marlowe’s life have fictionalised it hardly means that everyone must have done so. I believe that it is important for an understanding of Marlowe’s career and achievements to have a grasp of the context in which he wrote and in which his works were first received, so attention to his biography certainly has its place in that. Moreover, Marlowe had not only an unusually interesting and eventful life, but also one which brought him into contact with a number of other people who made a significant impact on history and literature. Finally, Marlowe himself was notably interested in stories about people’s lives. The Tamburlaine the Great plays, Doctor Faustus, Edward II, and to only a slightly lesser extent The Jew of Malta all trace the course of an individual’s career over a considerable period of time, and David Riggs notes the degree of Marlowe’s investment in narratives with a personal interest for him, saying of poetry that ‘Marlowe lived by it. He formed strong personal attachments to stories about poverty, poetry and social mobility’ (Riggs : ), while Patrick Cheney points out that ‘Marlowe’s authorial imagination is intriguingly biographical. In both poems and plays, he shows a fascination with the lives of famous historical figures’ (Cheney : ). It seems, therefore, only reasonable to examine him in the same light. To begin at the beginning, then, Christopher Marlowe was christened on  February , in the church of St George the Martyr in Canterbury. (This was later bombed in the Second World War and only the tower now survives.) As with many Elizabethans, we do not know the date on which he was born, but babies were usually christened when they were only two or three days old, so it is a fair bet that he had been born in the second half of February. This would make him an almost exact contemporary of William Shakespeare, who was christened on  April , and again born probably two or three days before that (the birth date traditionally given for Shakespeare,  April, is only a guess). Marlowe, though, seems to have been a rather quicker starter than Shakespeare, whose early years remain in many respects mysterious, and a little more is known of Marlowe’s early life than of Shakespeare’s. His parents, John Marlowe, a cobbler, who had

  ,   moved to Canterbury from the small Kent town of Ospringe, and Katherine Marlowe, née Arthur, who had come originally from Dover, had been married on  May , and Marlowe was their second child and first son. It is a testament to the high infant mortality of the time that in August , when Marlowe was four, his elder sister Mary died at the age of only six; similarly, one brother did not live long enough to be named, a second, called Thomas, died at only a few days old, and a third, also named Thomas, seems to disappear from history and may well also have died young. Another sister, Joan or Jane, died aged thirteen either during or shortly after giving birth, having been married less than a year. (The Elizabethan age of consent was twelve for girls and fourteen for boys, so such an early marriage was not particularly unusual.) Three of Marlowe’s sisters, Margaret, Anne, and Dorothy, did survive to adulthood, and their subsequent lives shed some light on the circumstances in which the young Marlowe grew up, for these three Marlowe daughters were without exception quarrelsome, litigious, and occasionally violent women: when Anne was fifty-five years old, she fought a neighbour, armed with a staff and a dagger, and the following year she assaulted the same neighbour with a sword and a knife. She was also reported to the ecclesiastical authorities in  as a scold and blasphemer. Marlowe’s father too seems to have been of a quarrelsome temperament; he was certainly frequently involved in law suits. It is perhaps not surprising that from at least the time he left Cambridge, Marlowe was regularly involved in violence or in trouble with the law. He was arrested on  September  for his part in the killing of William Bradley by his friend Thomas Watson, and on  January  for coining in Flushing in the Netherlands; on  May  he was bound over in the sum of £ to keep the peace towards Allen Nicholls, Constable of Holywell Street, Shoreditch, and Nicholas Helliott, beadle, and to appear at the General Sessions in October; and on  September  he was arrested for fighting in the streets of Canterbury with a tailor named William Corkine. Perhaps it is not surprising either that he ultimately died by violence. However, Marlowe was also clever, and he seems to have distinguished himself early in this respect, because on  December  he was admitted to a scholarship at the King’s School, Canterbury.

’     Since Marlowe was then only six weeks short of fifteen, which was the cut-off date for eligibility for the scholarship, and since this was unusually old to enter an Elizabethan grammar school, he may well already have been attending the school as a fee-paying pupil before he was awarded his scholarship; though no record survives of that, David Riggs points out that two years later John Marlowe told the probate court dealing with the headmaster’s will that he had ‘provided footwear and board for two boys who were Commoners entrusted to the Master’s care’, and suggests that he and the headmaster might therefore have come to an arrangement about Marlowe’s schooling (Riggs : ). The King’s School stands in the shadow of the ancient Canterbury Cathedral, the seat of the Primate of England and the foremost religious site of the Anglican Church. Canterbury had been the home of Christianity in England since St Augustine arrived there in , and the cathedral had attracted many pilgrims and much wealth because it contained the shrine of St Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury who had been murdered on the orders of Henry II in . The shrine had been demolished during the Reformation, but the cathedral still retained its prestige, and his education in its shadow may well lie at the heart of Marlowe’s fascination with ritual and ceremony in his plays. Certainly there seem to be echoes of his Canterbury days in his later works: in The Jew of Malta, for instance, Barabas says to Ithamore of the poisoned porridge, ‘There’s a dark entry where they take it in’ (III, iv, ), and this clearly recalls the ‘dark entry’ which was indeed to be found adjacent to the cathedral. From Canterbury Marlowe went to Cambridge. In December  he arrived at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, also known as Bene’t College. Once again, he benefited from a scholarship, this time one established by a previous Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker. The Parker scholarships, whose recipients were selected by the Archbishop’s son John, were essentially designed to be held primarily by students intending to proceed to holy orders. Perhaps Marlowe did indeed, at that stage of his life, foresee a future in the church, which could offer many opportunities to bright young men from poor backgrounds; perhaps, though, he was simply prepared to jump at any chance to secure a prestigious and lucrative scholarship to one of the two universities. Or there may also have

  ,   been other factors at work which led him to change his mind: David Riggs suggests that ‘The ecclesiastical job market was fast becoming a dubious proposition. Even with his Master’s degree, Marlowe would have to contend with the diminishing supply of vacant parishes and the late Elizabethan influx of gentlemen’s sons’ (Riggs : ). In the circumstances, someone who found he had a talent for a different career might well decide to pursue that instead. One of Marlowe’s principal areas of study at Cambridge was theology. Nina Taunton points out that critics rarely fail to make the obvious connection between Marlowe’s scholarly habits of mind and the scholastic curriculum at Cambridge in their discussions of Doctor Faustus . . . the study of postgraduate theology . . . was after all the major area of study at this level, and Marlowe spent four years steeped in its debates. (Taunton : ) Taunton sees other aspects of the curriculum as equally influential, arguing that ‘[a] training in Aristotelian logic and rhetoric typically conditioned the framework of Marlowe’s plays’ (Taunton : ) and that ‘the struggle for Faustus’ soul unfolds within the structure of scholastic debate’ (Taunton : ), while the defense of Ramus in the core scene of The Massacre at Paris illustrates the French logician’s contribution to the training of the mind by combining logic with rhetoric in order to make disputation the more effective in the art of practical thinking. (Taunton : )1 In a particularly informative analysis of the curriculum Marlowe would have studied, David Riggs observes that ‘First- and secondyear students concentrated on logic; advanced undergraduates worked on moral and natural philosophy’ (Riggs : ). Cicero and Aristotle featured prominently on the curriculum, and Riggs comments on the accuracy of the depiction of Leander in Hero and Leander arguing ‘like a bold sharp sophister’ (l. ), that is a second year undergraduate who is currently being taught the principles of

’    

Putative portrait of Christopher Marlowe, . © Corpus Christi College Cambridge.

structured and persuasive argument; similarly Mortimer Senior warns Mortimer Junior in Edward II, ‘But nephew, do not play the sophister’ (I, iv, ) (Riggs : ). When Marlowe finished his BA degree, he moved on to further study, towards a Master of Arts degree. Riggs observes that ‘The Elizabethan MA programme

  ,   descended from the medieval quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music) as it had been adapted to accommodate early modern state systems’ (Riggs : ). It included study of optics, Greek, philosophy and cosmography and retained astronomy, but music had disappeared. Riggs also notes that ‘Although astrology had no formal place in the university curriculum, MA candidates routinely studied it and kept notebooks of occult learning’ (Riggs : ). Marlowe also deepened his acquaintance with the classics, and he seems at some stage to have acquired some knowledge of anatomy and physiology. Marlowe, however, was, like so many undergraduates before and since, doing far more at Cambridge than simply studying. One of the conditions of the bestowal of the Parker scholarships was that their recipients were able to read music, sing, and, if possible, be ‘such as could make a verse’, suggesting that Marlowe must already have had to demonstrate a talent for poetry. Amateur dramatic performances, usually in Latin, were also regular features of university life, so Marlowe would have been well aware of plays and acting (this would indeed already have been a feature of life at the King’s School). During his time at Cambridge, Marlowe may already have been at work on his translations of Ovid, and conceivably also of Lucan. Certainly he does not seem to have been devoting his full attention to his official curriculum, since Roma Gill points to various egregious errors in his translation of the Elegies that do not speak well for the degree of his attention to his official studies (Gill ). In Ovid’s Elegies Book One, Elegy Eight, for instance, he mistakenly substitutes the adjective canis, which has a long ‘a’ and means ‘white-haired’, for the noun canis, which has a short ‘a’ and means ‘dog’, while in Elegy One of Book Two, a line whose literal translation is ‘poetry bursts snakes apart and pulls out their fangs’ appears in Marlowe’s version as the nonsensical ‘Snakes leap by verse from caves of broken mountains’. Some of the errors in translation in these poems can be explained by the fact that Marlowe was working from poorer editions of the originals than we now possess, but some are simply howlers. It is also highly probable that he had already written one or both of Dido and the first part of Tamburlaine while still at the university. Indeed Irving Ribner suggests that Tamburlaine springs naturally from this time at Cambridge, for it

’     coincided with a turning away from the theological studies to which his Parker Foundation scholarship committed him . . . Tamburlaine stands in opposition to every religious principle which Anglicans like Matthew Parker revered. Marlowe’s turning away from theology must bear some relation to an absorption with classical poetry which he seems to have developed at Cambridge. (Ribner : ) In particular, Ribner suggests, Tamburlaine is a scholar’s play in that it exemplifies the ‘historical method’ and secular perspective of the Roman historian Polybius (Ribner : ), and indeed it seems almost certain that Tamburlaine the Great, Part One must have been written while Marlowe was at university because it was acted almost as soon as he left. As well as writing while he was still a student, Marlowe was also, it seems, spying. We know this because when the time came for Marlowe to take his MA degree in , a problem arose. On  June  the Queen’s Privy Council drafted a letter to the Cambridge authorities ordering them to stop making difficulties in the matter of conferring Marlowe’s degree. Unfortunately we only have the minutes of the meeting, which recorded what was going to be said in that letter, rather than the text of what actually was said, and the surviving document has many ambiguities: Whereas it was reported that Christopher Morley was determined to have gone beyond the seas to Reames and there to remain, their Lordships thought good to certify that he had no such intent, but that in all his actions he had behaved himself orderly and discretely, whereby he had done Her Majesty good service, & deserved to be rewarded for his faithful dealing. Their Lordships’ request was that the rumour thereof should be allayed by all possible means, and that he should be furthered in the degree he was to take this next Commencement, because it was not Her Majesty’s pleasure that anyone employed, as he had been, in matters touching the benefit of his country, should be defamed by those that are ignorant in th’affairs he went about. (Acts of the Privy Council,  June )

  ,   However, two things seem to be relatively clear. The first is that the authorities were reluctant to allow Marlowe to proceed to the degree because he had been away somewhere, hence presumably failing to fulfil the university’s strict residence requirements. The draft wording recorded in the Privy Council’s minute says that ‘it was reported that Christopher Morley was determined to have gone beyond the sea to Reames and there to remain’. Unfortunately, this formulation is susceptible of two different interpretations, like the letter which orders the death of Edward II in Marlowe’s play (V, iv, –). It could mean that Marlowe had never in fact gone to ‘Reames’ (i.e. the French city of Rheims) at all; alternatively, it could mean that he had indeed gone there but had not intended to remain there. Fortunately there is not much doubt about what Marlowe would have been doing in Rheims if he had in fact gone there, and that gives us a pretty good clue to what this was all about. Since , Rheims had been the home of the seminary to which young English Catholic gentlemen could go in secret to train for the priesthood, which they were forbidden to do in Elizabeth’s Protestant England. We are reminded of this in The Massacre at Paris, where the French King, speaking of the Duke of Guise, asks, Did he not draw a sort of English priests From Douai to the seminary at Rheims, To hatch forth treason ’gainst their natural Queen? (xxi, –) As the French king’s words indicate, to go to Rheims to join the seminary was a treasonable act, since it implied an intention to return to England and proselytise on behalf of the forbidden religion. Presumably the implication of the Privy Council’s letter is that it had been erroneously rumoured that Marlowe was one of this ‘sort of English priests’. Since we have the Privy Council’s assurance that this was not in fact the case, two possibilities remain open: first, that the entire Rheims story was a total red herring – or perhaps simply a misunderstanding – and that Marlowe had actually been somewhere else entirely; secondly, that Marlowe had in fact been to Rheims, but for completely the opposite purpose to the one he was accused of – not

’     because he himself was a Catholic, but because he was spying on Catholics. If that were indeed the case, then, as Charles Nicholl describes, there must inevitably have been treachery of a rather different sort involved: The government described Marlowe’s service as ‘faithful dealing’, but in the performance of it there must have been much deception, much unfaithful dealing towards people with whom he consorted day by day at Cambridge, people whose violent disaffection he in some measure shared. We do not know what kind of pressure he was under, or how deeply he damaged those he informed on, but in our estimation of Marlowe we have to take on board the elements of falsehood and coldness, the hidden left hand behind the velvet sleeve. (Nicholl : ) William Empson suggested that such an experience is echoed in Marlowe’s work, most notably in Doctor Faustus: ‘To explain the original story, Marlowe supposes a Middle Spirit who is a quisling or rather a double agent, professing to work for the devils, and actually inducing them to grant their powers to Faust’ (Empson : ). David Riggs, however, argues that Marlowe might well never have gone to Rheims at all, suggesting that a quite different destination was in fact much likelier: Riggs’ contention is that ‘The Councillors who signed the letter of  June had a motive for sending him to the Duke of Parma’s garrison at Brussels’, since they were trying to negotiate to avoid war. Riggs argues of Faustus’s wish to chase the Prince of Parma that ‘whenever he wrote these lines, Marlowe was thinking about – and like – a recent graduate who found himself in the Low Countries soon after Parma’s conquest of Antwerp’ (Riggs : ). Unless new evidence emerges, however, we simply cannot know for sure where Marlowe had been during his absence from Cambridge. Once the difficulties over the granting of his MA had successfully been resolved, Marlowe left Cambridge in  for London. His circle of acquaintance in London seems to have been wide. We know that his friends included Thomas Watson and Matthew Royden, both poets (the former was thought in his own day to be so distinguished

  ,   that Shakespeare was initially acclaimed as Watson’s ‘heir’) (Urry : ); George Chapman, the dramatist and poet; one ‘Warner’, who may have been either Walter Warner, the mathematician, or William Warner, author of the long poem Albion’s England; Thomas Nashe, who may or may not have co-written some of Marlowe’s plays; Thomas Kyd, the dramatist, who said around the time of Marlowe’s death that the two had roomed together; and Edward Blount, who posthumously dedicated Hero and Leander to Sir Thomas Walsingham of Scadbury in terms which clearly indicated that both he and Walsingham were on good terms with Marlowe. In addition, Marlowe certainly knew the dramatist Robert Greene and the writer Gabriel Harvey, though he does not seem to have been on friendly terms with either of them, and he may well have known Shakespeare, since they lived not far apart in London and worked in the same profession. He also seems to have associated with Thomas Hariot, the great mathematician, and, perhaps through Hariot, he may well have known Sir Walter Ralegh. Christopher Devlin suggests that he may also have known the poet and Jesuit Robert Southwell (Devlin : ), who was later to be martyred for his faith, and Marlowe himself, when he was arrested for coining in Flushing in January , told Sir Robert Sidney that he was ‘very wel known both to the Earle of Northumberland and my lord Strang[e]’ (Wernham : ). Henry Percy, th Earl of Northumberland, was a friend of Ralegh and Hariot, and Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, who was a noted patron of actors, was related to John Poole, whom Marlowe met while in prison in Newgate and who seems to have taught him how to ‘coin’, that is, mint false money. In all of these cases, Marlowe was associating with men who constituted risky and sometimes violent company. It was while he was in company with Watson that he was arrested over the death of William Bradley, with whom he and Watson had had a fight in a London street, and Watson also encouraged the delusional London woman Anne Burnell to believe herself to be the daughter of the King of Spain, which eventually resulted in her being whipped (Nicholl : –). It is also remarkable how many of these men were associated with the embryonic English colonial enterprise, since Northumberland, Ralegh and Hariot were all involved in the

’     attempt to establish an English colony in America, and Chapman was later to write an epic poem about Ralegh’s voyage to Guiana. America was also a strong influence on Thomas Hariot, who travelled to Sir Walter Ralegh’s embryonic Roanoke colony in , taught himself some of the native Algonquian language, and returned with two Native American companions, Manteo and Wanchese. The evidence that Marlowe knew Hariot personally seems reasonably compelling, and certainly, as Park Honan remarks, ‘Marlowe appears to have known Harriot’s book [A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia ()], as well as John White’s American engravings for it in an edition of the text printed two years later’ (Honan : ). I shall be suggesting in Chapter  that America is a topic of considerable importance in Marlowe’s work. The general assumption is that Marlowe continued spying during his time in London, although there are no concrete indications of this other than his links with known spies, his arrest for coining in Flushing in  (and the fact that he escaped punishment for this) and the fact that one of the three men in the room when he died, Robert Poley, was a senior intelligence officer. Marlowe died on  May , in circumstances which remain mysterious, in the house of Eleanor Bull, a widow with connections at court, at Deptford, near London. The events leading up to this were complicated, and it is not easy to understand their significance. During the night of Saturday,  May , a threat against ‘strangers’ – i.e. foreigners – appeared on the wall of the Dutch Churchyard in Broad Street. It was signed ‘Tamburlaine’ and also contained allusions to two other Marlowe plays, The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris: Ye strangers yt doe inhabite in this lande Note this same writing doe it vnderstand Conceit it well for savegard of your lyves Your goods, your children, & your dearest wives Your Machiavellian Marchant spoyles the state, Your vsery doth leave vs all for deade Your Artifex, & craftesman works our fate, And like the Jewes, you eate us vp as bread ...

  ,   Since words nor threates nor any other thinge canne make you to avoyd this certaine ill Weele cutte your throtes, in your temples praying Not paris massacre so much blood did spill As we will doe iust vengeance on you all In counterfeitinge religion for your flight When ‘t’is well knowne, you are loth, for to be thrall your coyne, & you as countryes cause to slight With Spanish gold, you all are infected And with yt gould our Nobles wink at feats Nobles said I? nay men to be reiected, Upstarts yt enioy the noblest seates That wound their Countries brest, for lucres sake And wrong our gracious Queene & Subiects good By letting strangers make our harts to ake For which our swords are whet, to shedd their blood And for a truth let it be vnderstoode Fly, Flye, & never returne. per. Tamberlaine Though the style means this cannot possibly have been by Marlowe, it clearly contains a number of references to him. Apart from the signature ‘per. Tamberlaine’ (i.e. ‘by Tamberlaine’), there is the mention of a ‘Machiavellian Marchant’ in conjunction with ‘Jewes’, a clear pointer to The Jew of Malta, and to the ‘paris massacre’. The idea of upstarts occupying the seats of nobles might also glance at Edward II. Marlowe’s name is thus drawn into the controversy over the presence of ‘strangers’ in London. Charles Nicholl has recently suggested Richard Cholmeley, a man who is later mentioned as having been converted to atheism by Marlowe, as the most likely author of what has come to be known as ‘the Dutch Church libel’, but what counted in the eyes of the Privy Council was the weight of evidence apparently incriminating Marlowe. On or before  May, Marlowe’s fellow dramatist Thomas Kyd was arrested in connection with this libel. Kyd seems to have been tortured (his death the following year may well have been the result of his injuries) and was interrogated in particular about a handwritten transcript of part of a book alleged to be heretical which had

’     been found in his lodgings, The Fal of the Late Arrian by John Proctor. Possibly simply because he was seeking to exculpate himself or possibly because he was telling the truth, Kyd said that this belonged to Marlowe. On  May the Privy Council issued a warrant to seek for Marlowe at Scadbury, the Kent home of Sir Thomas Walsingham. Sir Thomas was the nephew of the late Sir Francis Walsingham, the head of the principal Elizabethan intelligence network, and it was to him that the stationer Edward Blount later dedicated the posthumous publication of Marlowe’s great poem Hero and Leander. On  May Marlowe was fatally stabbed by Ingram Frizer’s dagger; and, either on  May or  June, Richard Baines submitted what has become known as the Baines Note, a memorandum detailing Marlowe’s ‘monstrous opinions’, which was headed A ‘note containing the opinion of one Christopher Marly concerning his damnable judgment of religion, and scorn of God’s word’. This listed a number of wildly provocative things which Marlowe was alleged to have said: That the Indians, and many authors of antiquity, have assuredly written of above  thousand years agone, whereas Adam is proved to have lived within six thousand years. He affirmeth that Moses was but a juggler, and that one Heriots [i.e. Thomas Hariot] being Sir Walter Raleigh’s man can do more than he. That Moses made the Jews to travel  years in the wilderness (which journey might have been done in less than one year) ere they came to the promised land, to the intent that those who were privy to many of his subtleties might perish, and so an everlasting superstition reign in the hearts of the people. That the beginning of religion was only to keep men in awe. That it was an easy matter for Moses being brought up in all the arts of the Egyptians to abuse the Jews, being a rude and gross people. That Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest. That he was the son of a carpenter, and that if the Jews among whom he was born did crucify him, they best knew him and whence he came.

  ,   That Christ deserved better to die than Barabas, and that the Jews made a good choice, though Barabas were both a thief and a murderer. That if there be any God or any good religion, then it is in the Papists, because the service of God is performed with more ceremonies, as elevation of the mass, organs, singing men, shaven crowns, etc. That all Protestants are hypocritical asses. That if he were put to write a new religion, he would undertake both a more excellent and admirable method, and that all the New Testament is filthily written. That the woman of Samaria and her sister were whores and that Christ knew them dishonestly. That Saint John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom; that he used him as the sinners of Sodoma. That all they that love not tobacco and boys are fools. That all the apostles were fishermen and base fellows, neither of wit nor worth; that Paul only had wit, but he was a timorous fellow in bidding men to be subject to magistrates against his conscience. That he had as good a right to coin as the Queen of England, and that he was acquainted with one Poole, a prisoner in Newgate, who hath great skill in mixture of metals, and having learned some things of him, he meant through help of a cunning stamp-maker to coin French crowns, pistolets, and English shillings. That if Christ would have instituted the sacrament with more ceremonial reverence, it would have been in more admiration; that it would have been much better being administered in a tobacco pipe. That the angel Gabriel was bawd to the Holy Ghost, because he brought the salutation to Mary. That one Richard Cholmley [the man whom Nicholl suggests as the author of the Dutch Church Libel] hath confessed that he was persuaded by Marlowe’s reasons to become an atheist.

’     This note is not necessarily reliable evidence, because Richard Baines was not a very trustworthy witness. In the first place, in , while at the English College at Rheims, he had been imprisoned by Cardinal Allen for double-dealing; in the second, he and Marlowe had been arrested together for coining in Flushing in  and each had accused the other of being responsible, so there was likely to be bad blood between them. Most of all, there is a strikingly close relationship between what Baines accuses Marlowe of and what he had himself confessed to after his arrest in Rheims. As Roy Kendall puts it, ‘the portrait Baines painted of Marlowe in  was remarkably similar to the dark self-portrait(s) Baines had painted ten years before when in prison in Rheims’ (Kendall : ). Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that Baines would have attempted to incriminate Marlowe in this way if the accusations he made did not have some inherent credibility, and we do also know from recent discoveries that the insinuation about coining and the mention of ‘one Poole’ did have a solid basis in fact, since Marlowe was arrested for coining in Flushing in January  and had been in Newgate Prison at the same time as a known coiner named John Poole. I think, therefore, that it is worth paying serious attention to at least some of Baines’ accusations, especially since there appears to be further evidence for the allegation that Marlowe said ‘That the Indians, and many authors of antiquity, have assuredly written of above  thousand years agone, whereas Adam is proved to have lived within six thousand years’: there seems to be a glance at this in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, where Rosalind asserts that ‘The poor world is almost six thousand years old’ in the midst of a number of clear allusions to Marlowe (IV, i, –). It is also of obvious interest that the dramatist of The Jew of Malta should be supposed to have said that ‘Christ deserved better to die than Barabas, and that the Jews made a good choice, though Barabas were both a thief and a murderer’. Particularly suggestive too is how many of these accusations have to do with America, as I shall explore in more detail in Chapter . There are two possible dates when the Baines Note could have been delivered. An annotation on the note itself gives two mutually contradictory pieces of information: that it was delivered three days

  ,   before Marlowe died (i.e.  May) and that it was delivered on Whitsun Eve (i.e.  June). It really comes down to whether you think that whoever made the annotation was more likely to remember the date of a church festival (as Juliet’s nurse does in Romeo and Juliet) but be confused about when Marlowe died, or be sure when Marlowe died but not so sure about when Whitsun Eve was; ultimately, we are forced back onto guesswork here. One thing we can be clear about is that there were three other men in the room when Marlowe died: Nicholas Skeres, Ingram Frizer, and Robert Poley. Poley was a senior officer in the intelligence services. Frizer was the man of business of Marlowe’s friend Sir Thomas Walsingham, with whom the Privy Council expected to find Marlowe staying at Scadbury when they issued the warrant for his arrest on  May, and Frizer had been concerned in various shady business dealings with the third man, Nicholas Skeres. According to the coroner’s report, it was Ingram Frizer who actually wielded the knife which killed Marlowe, and indeed took the lead at every stage of the proceeding: according to the pardon which was issued to him after the event and which was so brilliantly discovered by Leslie Hotson, after supper the said Ingram & Christopher Morley were in speech & uttered one to the other divers malicious words for the reason that they could not be at one nor agree about the payment of the sum of pence, that is, le Reckoninge, there; & the said Christopher Morley then lying upon a bed in the room where they supped, & moved with anger against the said Ingram ffrysar upon the words aforesaid spoken between them, and the said Ingram then & there sitting in the room aforesaid with his back towards the bed where the said Christopher Morley was then lying, sitting near the bed, that is, nere the Bedd, & with the front part of his body towards the table & the aforesaid Nicholas Skeres & Robert Poley sitting on either side of the said Ingram in such a manner that the same Ingram frrysar in no wise could take flight; it so befell that the said Christopher Morley on a sudden & of his malice towards the said Ingram aforethought, then & there maliciously drew the dagger of the said Ingram which was at his

’     back, and with the same dagger the said Christopher Morley then & there maliciously gave the aforesaid Ingram two wounds on his head of the length of two inches & of the depth of a quarter of an inch; whereupon the said Ingram, in fear of being slain, & sitting in the manner aforesaid between the said Nicholas Skeres & Robert Poley so that he could not in any wise get away, in his own defence & for the saving of his life, then & there struggled with the said Christopher Morley to get back from him his dagger aforesaid; in which affray the same Ingram could not get away from the said Christopher Morley; and so it befell in that affray that the said Ingram, in defence of his life, with the dagger aforesaid to the value of twelve pence, gave the said Christopher then & there a mortal wound over his right eye of the depth of two inches & of the width of one inch. Many people have been sceptical about the details of this, and indeed the wound simply could not have caused instant death if it was at the precise point on the skull where it was here said to have been, while Poley and Skeres’s protestations that they were merely innocent bystanders seem a little far-fetched. Nevertheless, the fact that the men had spent all day together before Marlowe died does not really suggest a premeditated killing; it perhaps indicates more negotiations that had gone wrong, or, as they themselves say, an unexpected disagreement, in which Marlowe was outnumbered. What caused the events surrounding Marlowe’s death is even less easy to pin down than what actually happened. If Marlowe’s death was murder, he outraged so many norms that possible suspects proliferate. Smoker, coiner, homosexual, atheist, spy – which one of these did society or the government finally find unacceptable? Was he silenced before he could reveal something compromising about someone – Ralegh, Essex, Walsingham – with whom he had been associating? Could this, for instance, have been a preliminary skirmish in the enquiry into Ralegh’s alleged atheism which was launched the year after Marlowe’s death? Was it just a coincidence that Marlowe’s death occurred the day after the execution of John Penry, principal author of the religiously controversial Martin Marprelate tracts, which questioned the authority of the

  ,   Church of England, and in the context of a general government clampdown on religious dissent? Or was it, as the three other men in the room unanimously averred, an accident which occurred during a brawl of precisely the kind which we know Marlowe to have been involved in on other occasions, and of which the immediate cause on this occasion was that he could not afford or did not want to pay his share of the bill? And why was he in Deptford in the first place – because it was free of the bubonic plague which was then raging through London, because it was convenient for Scadbury, because Eleanor Bull’s house was a government safehouse, or because Deptford was a port – with departures for Scotland being particularly common – and Marlowe was about to take ship for somewhere? The question of what lay behind Marlowe’s death has been most comprehensively explored in Charles Nicholl’s The Reckoning, which situates Marlowe’s death squarely within the context of his espionage work. However, perhaps it does not much matter who killed Marlowe, because despite his own death, his works proved immortal.2 Less than a month after his death, George Peele was paid £ by the Earl of Northumberland, who may well have known Marlowe personally, for his poem The Honour of the Garter, which praised both Marlowe and his friend Watson, who had died in late , and this was only the first of many tributes to his talent, many of them personally affectionate in tone. As we shall see in later chapters, Marlowe’s plays also continued to be acted and published for many years after his death, and new editions and continued allusions to him made him a significant presence in the London literary scene well into the s. Though the question of the relationship between an author’s life and works is always, as we have already seen, a theoretically vexed one, the disputed facts of Marlowe’s life and death give rise to a number of questions which one might want to see as bearing on the reception and interpretation of his plays and poems. The first of these is the question of whether or not he was homosexual. According to the Baines Note, Marlowe said that ‘all they that love not tobacco and boys are fools’ and put forward what we would now term a ‘queer reading’ of the life of Christ. For a number of critics and adapters of Marlowe, the question of his sexuality has been a

’     crucial issue. The director Derek Jarman chose to make a film of Edward II because he saw Marlowe as an important member of a counter-cultural, alternative ‘great tradition’ of homosexual artists including Shakespeare, Caravaggio, Bacon and, by implication, Jarman himself. Conversely, it is a remarkable phenomenon that a number of those who claim, in the teeth of the evidence, that Marlowe wrote the works of Shakespeare also claim with equal ferocity that Marlowe was not and could not possibly have been homosexual. So was Marlowe homosexual? In a technical sense, no: the word ‘homosexual’ did not exist until the s, and a number of pieces of evidence suggest that people in the sixteenth century did not think of a preference solely for men as a possible sexual identity. From a more practical, ‘commonsense’ position, though, the answer to the question ‘Was Marlowe homosexual?’ is almost certainly yes. It is rarely easy to get a reputation to stick if there is no evidence to support it, as has happened in this case, and those who argue that Marlowe was not homosexual are all too often motivated by a palpable distaste for the idea of homosexuality. No one who knew Marlowe when he was alive contradicted the implication of homosexuality in the Baines Note; his name was never coupled with that of a woman; to the best of our knowledge, which seems reliable on this point, he never wrote a sonnet, that classic form of heterosexual love poetry in the period; and both Hero and Leander and Edward II show a clear and open interest in homosexuality, while parts of Tamburlaine the Great and The Massacre at Paris also certainly or possibly glance in the same direction. In the circumstances, there doesn’t seem much point in going out of one’s way to try to recuperate a Marlowe who was straight. Whether you think an author’s personal sexual orientation should make a difference to the interpretation of his works is of course quite another thing, but Marlowe’s reputation as homosexual has certainly been an important factor in the reception of his works in the centuries since his death. I would give a similar answer to the equally vexed question of whether or not Marlowe was an atheist: people thought he was, and that matters in itself. It is often argued that it was conceptually extremely difficult to think in atheist terms in the sixteenth century

  ,   (though if anyone could, Marlowe was surely the man). Certainly there is ambiguity about what precisely the term ‘atheist’ may have meant in the period, when it was quite likely to be used as a catchall term of abuse for anyone who was not Protestant. Nevertheless, attempts to argue for an orthodox Marlowe are essentially as desperate as arguments for a heterosexual one. Personally the thing I most deplore is the fondness for tobacco, but there doesn’t seem much point in trying to argue that away either: this was a man who rebelled, who thought for himself, and who liked to shock.

NOTES

. See also Keefer :  and Versfeld : . . For some of the tributes to Marlowe, see Riggs : –.

 

The Marlowe Canon

hristopher Marlowe wrote seven major plays and two great poems, and also translated works by the Roman writers Lucan and Ovid. This book is called Christopher Marlowe, Renaissance Dramatist, so I will naturally be concentrating primarily on the plays, but Marlowe was a writer who brought very much the same preoccupations to all his works, and it will be impossible to consider the plays entirely in isolation from the other works. I will, however, begin with the plays.

C

TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT

The seven plays that Marlowe certainly wrote are Tamburlaine the Great, Parts One and Two, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, The Massacre at Paris, Dido, Queen of Carthage, and Edward II. Tamburlaine the Great, Parts One and Two might initially seem to be just one play, and you may sometimes see it referred to as a tenact drama. However, there is no evidence that Marlowe had intended to write Part Two before the runaway success of Part One, so it seems that it was originally intended as a freestanding play, since the Prologue to Part Two explicitly declares that The general welcomes Tamburlaine received When he arrivèd last upon our stage

  ,   Hath made our poet pen his second part (Part Two, Prologue, –) It is certainly the case that Marlowe used up far more than half of his source material in Part One. The historical event on which the end of Part One was based, the death of Beyajid (Marlowe’s Bajazeth), occurred in , and the historical Timur the Lame, on whom Marlowe based his Tamburlaine, died in . Consequently, when he came to write Part Two Marlowe was forced to seek outside the life-span of the historical Timur the Lame for events to fill his play. He took the story of Sigismund and Orcanes from accounts of the Battle of Varna, which did not take place until . He borrowed Tamburlaine’s military instructions to his sons from The Practise of Fortification, by Marlowe’s fellow Walsingham agent Paul Ive, and this is also only one of the many important scenes in which Marlowe switches the focus decisively from the public events of the first play to the more private, family-oriented ones of the second, which are entirely his own invention and for which no source other than personal observation was needed. It looks, therefore, as though Marlowe had originally planned only one play, which would have ended in the marriage of Tamburlaine and Zenocrate, but, in the true style of Hollywood sequels, was prompted to write Part Two by the success of Part One. Marlowe based his play on the historical figure of Timur Leng or Timur the Lame, who was born in the Central Asian city of Samarkand c.  and became one of the most feared and successful warlords ever known. By , Timur had secured himself total control of what is now known as Turkistan; by , he was in control of all land east of the Euphrates; in  he advanced beyond the Euphrates; in  he conquered and sacked the Russian cities of Astrakhan, Sarai and Bolgar; in  he invaded India; in  he captured Aleppo and Baghdad; and in  he captured Sultan Beyajid I (Marlowe’s Bajazeth) at Angora. He is still a national hero in Uzbekistan; in  his body was exhumed for a reverential examination and in  the th anniversary of his birth was widely celebrated in Uzbekistan, with the events held in his honour including, improbably enough, a conference held by the Uzbek Women’s Committee to celebrate his progressive attitude towards women.

    It will be immediately obvious that Marlowe made one very major change in adapting the story of the historical Timur for the stage: he abandoned any idea or suggestion of lameness. Indeed Marlowe’s hero is distinguished by his physical perfection, as is spelled out for us in a long speech describing him by Menaphon (Part One, II, i, –). The loving detail lavished on the description of Tamburlaine’s person here should alert us to the fact that there is more going on in Marlowe’s play than a simple transcription of the life of a historical figure: Marlowe is less interested in what actually happened to the real Timur than he is in creating the image of an invincible superman. By a bizarre fluke, Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two is the only one of Marlowe’s works which can be securely dated. Marlowe left Corpus Christi College, Cambridge at the end of March . On  November of the same year, a Londoner called Philip Gawdy wrote to his father that My L. Admyrall his men and players having a devyse in ther playe to tye one of their fellowes to a poste and so to shoote him to deathe, having borrowed their callyvers one of the players handes swerved his peece being charged with bullett missed the fellowe he aymed at and killed a chyld and a woman great with chyld forthwith, and hurt an other man in the head very soore. E. K. Chambers took this to refer to the shooting of the Governor of Babylon in  Tamburlaine, v. (Chambers : ); this idea has never been challenged and is now generally accepted. This seems therefore to prove that the second part was already on the stage by mid-November , less than nine months after Marlowe left Cambridge. It therefore seems probable that Tamburlaine the Great, Part One was already written by the time Marlowe arrived in London and that Part Two was written between March and November of that year.

DOCTOR FAUSTUS

It is much less clear what came after that, but there is a growing consensus that it was Doctor Faustus. Doctor Faustus is Marlowe’s most

  ,  

Title page to a  printing of Doctor Fautus, showing Faustus studying and a demon rising through a stage trap door.

    famous and arguably his greatest play. It tells the story of a scholar who, disillusioned with all conventional branches of study, turns to magic and eventually decides to sell his soul to the devil. Doctor Faustus was informed by a number of different sources. Marlowe seems, for instance, to have drawn on the story of the Italian lawyer Francis Spira, who died in  after despairing of the possibility of salvation. Spira’s case grew out of the single most urgent issue for post-Reformation Europe, which was whether the old Catholicism or the new Protestantism were the true and right religion which could guarantee a person entrance to heaven. Spira’s despairing reaction to this dilemma became internationally famous, inspiring many accounts of his death including one published in Basle in  with a preface by the Swiss theologian John Calvin. Marlowe may also have been inspired by the story of the German necromancer George Sabellicus, who was reported in  as terming himself ‘the younger Faust’. Most important of all, though, was the publication of the English Faust Book, a translation from the German of the accounts of the doings of a Dr Georg or Johann Faustus, who seems to have been born near Heidelberg in around , studied there, and was reputed by many, including Martin Luther and his fellow reformer Philip Melanchthon, to have sold his soul to the devil and to perform magic. The importance of the English Faust Book as a source also bears on the most important question about Doctor Faustus: when was it written? It used to be thought that the first and only edition of the English Faust Book was not published until . This would have meant that Doctor Faustus could not have been written before then, and many critics felt that this was right because they regarded Doctor Faustus as Marlowe’s best play and hence as likely to have been written later rather than earlier in his career. However, there are also strong links between Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine, and there is increasing evidence that there was an earlier edition of the English Faust Book which is now lost. The wording of the title page of the  edition seems to imply that there had been an earlier one, and on or around  November , an inventory was taken of the possessions of Matthew Parkin, a student at Christ Church, Oxford, listing among his possessions a book called ‘Doctor faustus’ which seems likely to have been an early edition of the English

  ,   Faust Book (Fehrenbach ). This would clear the way for Doctor Faustus to have been written earlier in Marlowe’s career, in which case it was probably the immediate successor to the two Tamburlaine plays. A final piece of evidence is adduced by Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, in their analysis of the Queen’s Men play The Troublesome Reign of King John; they argue that that play refers to Doctor Faustus, and that ‘The references to Marlowe make it apparent that Dr Faustus was on the stage well before The Troublesome Reign of King John was printed in ’ (McMillin and MacLean : ). It is certainly the case that Doctor Faustus would have been a much more urgent and contemporary play in  than it would in , because  was the year in which the Spanish Armada, led by the Prince of Parma, attacked England, and Doctor Faustus actually refers to the Prince of Parma, saying that he will ‘chase the Prince of Parma from our land’ (I, i, ). By ‘our land’ Faustus means the Low Countries, but this would have been a powerfully resonant battle-cry in England too in Armada year, when householders all along the Channel and the towns near it, including Marlowe’s own father John in Canterbury, who is recorded as having a bow, a headpiece, a sword, a dagger, and a brown bill (a halberd-like weapon), were readying themselves for invasion. Even if the vexed question of its dating were to be finally and definitively solved, however, Doctor Faustus would still present an impenetrable mystery, because it exists in two different texts. The first of these, known as the A Text, was published in , and the second, known as the B Text, in . Both thus date from after Marlowe’s death, and both bear clear signs of having been altered by someone other than Marlowe, since both contain lines which refer to events which happened after Marlowe’s death, which Marlowe himself could not possibly have written. This has given rise to a long and heated debate about whether we should read the A Text, the B Text, or both. There is no obvious answer to this. My own preference is for the A Text, because it is earlier, shapelier and clearer, and it is certainly the one which, in my experience, works better on the stage, but this is merely a personal preference. Moreover, the position is further complicated by the fact that the play may well have been censored, perhaps extensively. For

    instance, we know from the notebooks of the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe that a dragon prop was needed for Doctor Faustus, but where in the play as we have it could this go? Roger Sales suggests that ‘Mephostophilis appears first of all as an actor. He enters the “solitary grove” in the shape of a dragon, but is ordered by Faustus to wear another costume’ (Sales : ), but William Empson thinks rather that Faustus must have flown over Rome on the dragon (Empson : ) – after all, Wagner tells us that Faustus’ chariot was ‘Drawn by the strength of yoky dragons’ necks’ (III, Chorus, ) – and argued that ‘the play was disrupted by an act of censorship. There is a real likeness to the ruin left by volcanic action, where a specially hard pillar of rock often marks the place where the hole used to be, through which the molten lava forced its way’ (Empson : ). Empson also used the argument about censorship to put forward a very surprising reading of the overall tonality of the play. He claimed that, because the censor only saw the words of the script and had no idea of the tone in which they would be spoken or of any gestures which might accompany them, the only parts which might have escaped him were a few moments where expression would have to be relied on to create meaning: The last two words of Faust are ‘Ah Mephastophilis’, and the censor could not rule how the actor was to speak them. He dies in the arms of his deceitful friend with immense relief, also gratitude, surprise, love, forgiveness, and exhaustion. It is the happiest death in all drama. (Empson : ) By definition, however, any such intention could leave no trace in the written text, so this has to remain speculation. The fact that what is arguably Marlowe’s most important work survives only in questionable form need not, though, be such a loss to literature as it first appears, because it can in fact guide us to uncovering some of the play’s meanings and resonances. In the first place, what stands out in both texts is the general shape and conception of the play. Goethe said of Doctor Faustus ‘How greatly it is all planned!’, and that is indeed perhaps the most striking aspect of

  ,   the play: the story has a simplicity that is quite astonishing in its starkness. Whatever has happened to the text subsequently has in a sense only helped to hone and strip it still further down to the bare essentials: Doctor Faustus sells his soul to the devil, fails to achieve or receive anything notable in return, and is ultimately damned. In the second place, the reason why Marlowe’s play was altered after his death is in itself extremely revealing. Essentially it was because the subject of Doctor Faustus was one so close to the central concern of the period: how to find the correct route to salvation now that there were two separate branches of Christianity to choose between (the technical term for these two subsections, Protestantism and Catholicism, is ‘confessions’ – not religions, since both were forms of Christianity). Moreover, Protestantism had subdivided within itself into a number of different forms. The two most important of these were Lutheranism and Calvinism, and it is in fact possible to read the two texts of Doctor Faustus as each reflecting a different one of these two theologies (Marcus ). Broadly speaking, Lutheranism stressed the need for humans to develop a personal relationship with God, without the intercession of a priest, but assured its followers that if they did this they could achieve salvation. Calvinism was a less optimistic and a less comfortable theology. According to Calvinism, God had already decided whether an individual would be saved (the term Calvin used for those saved was ‘the Elect’) or damned (for these the term was ‘reprobate’) before that person had even been born, and nothing that an individual did during the course of his or her life could affect their ultimate spiritual destiny. This meant that there was, in effect, no incentive to behave well in this life and no fear of punishment if one did not. The effects that this removal of both carrot and stick could have are neatly summed up in the title of James Hogg’s memoir of a Calvinist upbringing, Confessions of a Justified Sinner (). It was because Doctor Faustus spoke so directly to this issue that it continued to hold the stage and be updated even after Marlowe’s death, for the crucial question is when is Faustus damned? There are various possible answers to this. In dramatic terms, it is obviously all downhill from the moment Faustus does his deal with the devil. Technically, Faustus could be damned when he

    kisses Helen of Troy, since she is not a woman but a succubus – an evil spirit in human form – so when he says ‘Her lips suck forth my soul’ (V, i, ) he could be telling the literal truth. But from a Calvinist point of view, Faustus, if he is damned at the end, must automatically have been damned from the very beginning of the play and never had any meaningful choice. Here we come to one of the most interesting differences between the two texts. In the  B text, the Good Angel tells Faustus that it is ‘Never too late, if Faustus will repent’ (II, ii, ). This would be the standard Lutheran position: repentance is possible if the person chooses it. In the  A text, however, the Good Angel’s words are ‘Never too late, if Faustus can repent’ (II, ii, ), suggesting the Calvinist position that it may be impossible to repent because God may have chosen to withhold from the individual the grace that would enable him or her to do so. (Claudius in Hamlet has a similar ‘Calvinist moment’, finding that he cannot repent, even though he wants to [III, iii, –].) Marlowe can have written only one of these lines, but both make perfect sense in that each speaks to a dominant theological position of the time, and indeed the fact that both exist, and that we must choose between them, forces us to share the choice that every Renaissance Christian had to make between competing theologies. So if Doctor Faustus was altered after Marlowe’s death, which bits of it did he write, and which did he definitely not? It is relatively easy to identify at least some bits of the play which Marlowe cannot have written. On  February , nine months after Marlowe’s death, the Queen’s Jewish physician, Dr Rodrigo Lopez, was arrested on charges of treason and attempted poisoning. Since his trial is referred to in the House-courser scene of Doctor Faustus – ‘Mass, Doctor Lopus was never such a doctor’ (IV, i, –) – this is clearly evidence of a posthumous addition to the play. (The Lopez affair also brought a new lease of life to The Jew of Malta, which became suddenly topical; it was acted three times in the three weeks after Lopez’s execution.) The reference to Dr Lopez may have been one of the ‘additions to Doctor Faustus’ for which William Birde and Samuel Rowley were paid £ by the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe on behalf of the Admiral’s Men on  November . It has also been generally suspected that

  ,   Marlowe was not responsible for some or most of the comic scenes of the play, since comedy was not his forte (though our view of Marlowe’s comic writing may be skewed by the fact that the publisher of Tamburlaine, Richard Jones, by his own account omitted some comic scenes which were originally in the play, and although David Bevington has offered some interesting speculation on what these missing comic bits of Tamburlaine might have been [Bevington : –; see also Melnikoff], it must remain speculation).

THE JEW OF MALTA

The Jew of Malta probably dates from c. . This strange, mischievous play plays a typical Marlowe trick by taking as its protagonist a character who was, in Renaissance terms, the ultimate outsider, since he was a Jew. To the Renaissance mind, Jews were anathema because they were considered responsible for the crucifixion of Christ. The Jew of Malta alludes directly to this idea by having its hero named Barabas. In the Bible, this was the name of the murderer whom the Jews asked Pontius Pilate to release instead of Jesus. Moreover, Marlowe’s Jew is certainly wicked. He gives us a quite remarkable history of himself: As for myself, I walk abroad o’ nights, And kill sick people groaning under walls: Sometimes I go about and poison wells; And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves, I am content to lose some of my crowns; That I may, walking in my gallery, See ’em go pinioned along by my door. Being young, I studied physic, and began To practise first upon the Italian; There I enriched the priests with burials, And always kept the sexton’s arms in ure With digging graves and ringing dead men’s knells: And after that I was an engineer, And in the wars ’twixt France and Germany,

    Under pretence of helping Charles the Fifth, Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems. Then after that I was a usurer, And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting, And tricks belonging unto brokery, I filled the jails with bankrupts in a year, And with young orphans planted hospitals, And every moon made some or other mad, And now and then one hang himself for grief, Pinning upon his breast a great long scroll How I with interest tormented him. But mark how I am blest for plaguing them, I have as much coin as will buy the town! (II, iii, –) Barabas tops this remarkable career by poisoning an entire convent of nuns just to be revenged on his daughter Abigail for her conversion to Christianity. Moreover, though Barabas offers this account as his own personal history, it is equally possible to read it as a kind of composite or representative overview of recent history and the ways Jews might have become involved in it, and indeed Barabas has been compared to a number of historical Jews, including David Passi and, most notably, João Micques, later known as Nassi, who was called ‘The Great Jew’ and ultimately became Duke of Naxos and thus the only Jewish duke in Europe (Thomas and Tydeman : ) However, Marlowe does not seem to associate Barabas’ wickedness with his Jewishness. In the first place, Barabas speaks proudly of his Jewish heritage in ways which are never connected with any of the evil things he does. He refers, for instance, to how the Jews were conquered by Titus and Vespasian, suggesting that Marlowe had an unusually sound grasp, for the period, of the nature of Judaism and of Jewish history, just as in Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two, he has Orcanes exhibit an unusually informed understanding of Islam for the period: By sacred Mahomet, the friend of God, Whose holy Alcaron remains with us,

  ,   Whose glorious body, when he left the world Closed in a coffin, mounted up the air And hung on stately Mecca’s temple roof . . . (Part Two, I, i, –) Here Marlowe clearly registers the crucial distinction between Allah, as God, and Mahomet, as his Prophet, which has eluded several later writers with only a shaky grasp of Islam, and also shows some knowledge of Islamic tradition. In the same way, Marlowe gives Barabas a number of speeches which stress his pride in his heritage and are underpinned by at least a basic knowledge of Jewish custom and tradition, such as Some Jews are wicked, as all Christians are: But say the tribe that I descended of Were all in general cast away for sin, Shall I be tried by their transgression? The man that dealeth righteously shall live (I, ii,–) He remembers that Jews will be quoting only from the Old Testament, as when the First Jew says ‘Yet, brother Barabas, remember Job’ (I, ii, ) or when Barabas himself says O thou, that with a fiery pillar led’st The sons of Israel through the dismal shades, Light Abraham’s offspring, and direct the hand Of Abigail this night

(II, i, –)

Finally, Marlowe remembers that for Jews redemption is still to come: This offspring of Cain, this Jebusite, That never tasted of the Passover, Nor e’er shall see the land of Canaan, Nor our Messias that is yet to come

(II, iii, –)

    Conversely, the play makes it abundantly clear that Jews do not by any means have a monopoly on wickedness. The Jew of Malta carefully lines up representatives of all the three ‘religions of the book’, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, and there is notably little to choose between them. At the outset of the play, the ghost of Niccolò Machiavelli appears. Machiavelli, author of The Prince, was notorious throughout Europe for his amoral advocacy of the pursuit of power at all costs and his hero-worship of the murderous Cesare Borgia, son of the corrupt Pope Alexander VI. English writers punned on their pronunciation of his name to label him ‘Old Nick’ and ‘Much-evil’. To have Machiavelli as one’s sponsor was thus a badge of shame, but this is the personage who appears at the beginning of the play to introduce us to Barabas. Or does he? Above all, Machiavelli was interested in success, and Barabas is not ultimately successful. Alone, unloved, having poisoned his daughter and having been betrayed by his surrogate child Ithamore, he is eventually killed by being plunged into a boiling cooking vat. By contrast, Selim-Calymath, the leader of the Turks, has suffered only a temporary setback and will ultimately be rescued and enabled to return to his place as heir to the Ottoman Empire, while Ferneze, the governor of Malta, has simultaneously seen off the Turkish menace and substantially enriched himself. Consequently, Catherine Minshull has suggested that it is Ferneze, not Barabas, who is the true disciple of Machiavelli (Minshull ). It is true that he has also lost his son, but in a sense this serves only to underline his status as paradigmatic representative of Christianity, a religion which centres on a father’s sacrifice of his son for the general good. Indeed to some extent The Jew of Malta can be seen as a programmatic exploration of the relationship of Christianity to Judaism and Islam. When Katherine overhears her son Mathias talking to Barabas, Barabas pretends that the subject of their conversation was a commentary on the Macabees, and Mathias assures her that ‘my talk with him was / About the borrowing of a book or two’ (II, iii, –). Given that Christianity shares the five books of the Pentateuch with Judaism, this looks like a particularly sharp comment on Marlowe’s part on the relationship of the play’s Christian characters to its Jewish ones. After all, Marlowe could

  ,   hardly have missed the irony of the fact that the Knights of Malta, as Knights Hospitaller of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, claimed a direct link with the Holy Land, but at the same time excluded all Jews and Semites from membership of the Order. We might also note that the names of Mathias and Lodovico look uncannily like the evangelists Matthew and Luke, and that Barabas compares Abigail to a light shining in the East, like the light which guided the Magi to the infant Jesus, as if we were watching the emergence of a Christianity in a previously Jewish world. As Marlowe’s reference to the knights shows us, a crucial fact about The Jew of Malta is that it is rooted in very specific historical circumstances. In , the Turks laid siege to the island of Malta. Initially, it seemed that the island must fall, but in fact it withstood the Turkish attack for the entire summer, whereupon the fleet sailed away unsuccessful. Marlowe’s play certainly recalls this conflict, but it bears no relation to the actual facts of the siege, except insofar as it inverts them: the knights never collaborated with the Turks, and the Italian soldier Francisco Balbo di Correggio, who served in the siege and published an account of it in , specifically says that in the Turkish expeditionary force there were ‘many Jewish merchants, who joined the expedition with a lavish supply of goods and money, so as to be able to purchase Christian slaves’ and that the Knights were given valuable information by ‘a friendly Moor’ (Balbi di Correggio :  and ), behaviour quite opposite to that of Marlowe’s Barabas and Ithamore. Moreover, Marlowe’s account of events deliberately reaches out to invite us to register an entirely different religious conflict when Ferneze says to Calymath, ‘Why, then the house was fired, / Blown up, and all thy soldiers massacred’ (V, v, –), since the word ‘massacre’ was effectively synonymous with the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris in August , before which the word ‘massacre’ was unknown in the English language. (The first usage recorded by OED is in , referring specifically to St Bartholomew’s Day.) As with Tamburlaine the Great before it and Edward II after it, then, The Jew of Malta takes a basically historical framework, but follows it only as far as suits Marlowe’s dramatic purposes.

    THE MASSACRE AT PARIS

The use of the word ‘massacre’ brings us, of course, to The Massacre at Paris itself, another play which plays fast and loose with history. This strange play is one of the most puzzling in the canon. It seems much too short for a Renaissance play, and takes a cartoon approach to both characterisation and storytelling: no sooner have we heard in the opening scene of a forthcoming wedding than Queen Catherine announces in an aside ‘Which I’ll dissolve with blood and cruelty’ (i, –), and the story continues to unfold at the same breakneck pace. The explanation for this may well be that since the events it describes were wildly controversial and continued to have political repercussions, there might have been heavy censorship at work. Certainly on  July  Sir Ralph Winwood, English ambassador to Paris, wrote home to England complaining that Italian actors had represented the queen on stage in Paris, and that the French authorities were refusing to take any action on the grounds that ‘the Death of the Duke of Guise hath ben plaied at London . . . and . . . that the Massacre of St. Bartholomews hath ben publickly acted’. Presumably this refers to The Massacre at Paris, of which news had clearly reached Paris, where it had not been well received. The possibility of censorship might perhaps be reinforced by the fact that in  John Payne Collier announced that he had discovered a much longer version of a speech from the play. Unfortunately, Collier is known to have forged many of the Elizabethan documents he claimed to have discovered, but The Massacre at Paris certainly does read like a garbled and truncated text, and there is nothing inherently implausible in the ‘Collier leaf ’. The reason why the play was so controversial that it might have been censored was because the events it relates were, in essence, true. On  August , the French princess Marguerite married Henri of Navarre at the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. Although king in his own right of the tiny Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre, Henri was also in the line of succession to the crown of France, because his grandmother Marguerite of France had been the only sister of King François I. However, he was also a Huguenot (the French term for a Protestant), and this made him deeply unpalatable to the majority of the French public, who were Catholic.

  ,   The wedding of Henri and Marguerite was designed partly as a way to resolve these tensions, but it failed miserably. On Friday,  August, only four days after the wedding, the noted Huguenot Admiral Coligny was shot and wounded, precipitating the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (Marlowe’s ‘massacre at Paris’). On Sunday,  August Coligny was murdered in bed while recovering from his injuries. Many other prominent Huguenots were also killed and the King of Navarre himself was saved only by the intercession of his bride. Marlowe would have known all about this, because not only were Sir Francis Walsingham and Sir Philip Sidney in Paris at the time of the massacre, but a number of the persecuted Huguenot party fled across the channel to Marlowe’s native Canterbury (including Cardinal Odet de Coligny, the Admiral’s brother, who is buried in Canterbury Cathedral). Its mutilated state makes it impossible to judge the artistic quality of The Massacre at Paris’ representation of these events, but its political explosiveness is beyond question, not least because in the early s, when Marlowe probably wrote it (it refers to the ‘bones’ of Pope Sixtus V [xxiv, ]), who died in August ), Henri IV, the Navarre of the play, was still struggling to establish his authority and defeat the Catholic League.

DIDO, QUEEN OF CARTHAGE

Almost equally mysterious, and certainly equally political, is Dido, Queen of Carthage. This, perhaps the most neglected of Marlowe’s plays, is actually one of the most interesting. It is not possible to establish for certain at what stage of his career Marlowe wrote it, but all the signs are that it is early, probably even before Tamburlaine the Great, Part One, and one attractive possibility is that it may belong to  or  and have been partly prompted by Sir Francis Drake’s  sacking of the South American city of Cartagena, especially given that Francisco de Vitoria compared Europeans arriving in America to Trojans arriving in Carthage (Hulme : ). The title page says that Thomas Nashe collaborated on Dido, Queen of Carthage. Nashe was certainly a friend of Marlowe’s, and is often thought to have been responsible for the

    prose scenes of Doctor Faustus. However, Dido, Queen of Carthage bears no obvious traces of another hand, and it is possible that Nashe did no more for the play than prepare it for publication after Marlowe’s death. It might also be worth noting that Nashe elsewhere accepts the alternative version of Dido as perpetually chaste (Purkiss : ), which might seem to make it improbable that he would be partly responsible for the lustful Dido of Marlowe’s play. Dido, Queen of Carthage focuses on a story which was exceptionally important to the English Renaissance, the story of the fall of Troy and its aftermath. It is no exaggeration to say that for the Renaissance period this was in fact the story. It is the central material of both the Greek and Roman national epics, and it is also the story which Hamlet asks the Player King to recite. The reason it was so resonant for the Renaissance was that not only was it the central story of the classical world, but it was also, in a very special sense, England’s own story. The chain of events runs like this. Menelaus, one of the many kings to rule in Greece, had a beautiful wife, Helen. She was abducted by Paris, one of the fifty sons of King Priam of Troy, who took her back to Troy (in modern-day Turkey). The Greeks, led by Menelaus’s brother Agamemnon, the High King, laid siege to Troy, but the city held out for ten years, until the Trojan horse, containing concealed warriors, was introduced into the city. Of the very few Trojans who escaped the resulting slaughter, the most prominent was the Trojan prince Aeneas, who escaped with his father Anchises and his little son Ascanius. Aeneas was saved by the favour of his mother, the goddess Venus, who told him to go and found a new Troy in Italy. However, on his way there Aeneas got lost and landed instead in Africa, where he met Dido, the widowed Queen of Carthage. This is where Marlowe’s play begins, and it goes on to tell the classic story of how Dido fell in love with Aeneas and tried to persuade him to stay in Carthage with her. Marlowe’s play ends with Dido’s tragic failure and ultimate suicide, but the story of Aeneas in fact carries on well beyond that. After he has left Carthage, Aeneas does eventually arrive in Rome, where he defeats the local prince Turnus to secure the hand of the princess Lavinia. (This is the point at which Virgil’s epic poem The Aeneid,

  ,   on which Marlowe drew extensively in Dido, Queen of Carthage, ends; it is also alluded to in Tamburlaine the Great, where Zenocrate’s first lover, Arabia, is identified as a Turnus to Tamburlaine’s Aeneas.) Aeneas then proceeds to found a dynasty in Rome. However, a generation or so further down the line that dynasty was disrupted once again when Aeneas’ great-grandson Brutus accidentally killed his father Silvius after mistaking him for a stag while out hunting. Exiled from Rome for his act of parricide, Brutus was forced to flee, and wandered until he found an uninhabited island which he named after himself, Brutain – or, as it became better known, Britain. This is why the story is so important to Renaissance England – it is our story, and the iconography of the Tudor kings and queens made much of the fact that they originated in Wales, and so claimed descent from King Arthur, who in turn was supposed to be a descendant of Brutus. To the Renaissance, this was known as the story of the translatio imperii – literally the translation of the empire, with the attendant cultural authority of first Troy and then Rome, to its ultimate destination of Britain. Given its cultural importance, Marlowe’s choice of an episode from this cycle is hardly surprising, but the particular episode he chooses is an interesting one. Focusing on Dido rather than Aeneas is not in itself without classical precedent – several classical tragedies, such as Euripides’s Medea and Sophocles’s Antigone, focused on women – but it also allowed Marlowe to make a much more contemporary and sharply political point because the other name by which Dido was often known, Elissa, was so close to that of Elizabeth I, who was sometimes actually known as Eliza. In Marlowe’s play, however, the resonant name ‘Eliza’ is presented as ‘a hideous echo’ (IV, ii, ) rather than a glorious paean, and a ruling queen is presented as an unstable and unreliable victim of passion. A play that may to us initially seem trapped in the very distant past, then, was to its original audience full of dangerous resonances in the present.

EDWARD II

The last play which remains to be considered may well also have been the last play Marlowe wrote. This was Edward II, Marlowe’s

    one contribution to the very popular genre of the history play. (An indication of the genre’s popularity is that history plays make up almost a third of the output of Marlowe’s exact contemporary Shakespeare.) However, Marlowe’s history play is, characteristically, rather different from others of the genre. Most history plays either celebrated a strong king – Shakespeare’s Henry V is an obvious example – or pointed up the moral to be drawn from the reign of a less successful one (as in Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy or his Richard II). Marlowe chose to dramatise the reign of one of the least successful kings in English history without presenting any very obvious moral. Edward II came to the throne in , on the death of his father, the strong and dynamic Edward I, who in the course of his long reign had finally succeeded in subduing the fierce resistance to English rule in Wales and stamping his authority on the land through a huge chain of castles, in one of which, Caernarfon, Edward II was born. Edward II, however, had neither the ferocity nor the military skill of his father. To the total incomprehension of his nobles, he preferred to spend his time in manual work such as stonecarving, which was considered wholly unsuitable for a king. Even more damagingly, he had male favourites, first a Frenchman of undistinguished birth called Piers Gaveston, and then, after the rebellious nobles had executed Gaveston, Hugh Le Despenser. The king quite clearly preferred the company of both these men to that of his wife, Isabella of France, although his marriage did produce a son, the future Edward III. As a result of his unconventional behaviour and military ineptitude, seen most notably in his disastrous defeat by the Scots at the battle of Bannockburn, Edward had trouble with the barons throughout his reign, and his difficulties came to a head when his disaffected queen Isabella took a prominent baron, Roger Mortimer, as her lover and helped lead the rebels. Edward was defeated and imprisoned at Berkeley Castle, where he died – murdered, according to the chronicler Raphael Holinshed, by means of a red hot poker which was pushed up his anus, partly because this was a means of killing that left no visible mark on the corpse and partly, perhaps, as ironic retribution for behaviour which we would now call homosexual, though the term homosexuality did not enter the English language until the s and the nature of Edward’s

  ,   relationship with his favourites is never actually spelled out either by the chroniclers or in Marlowe’s play. However, it seems clear enough what we should infer, especially when Gaveston declares that he proposes to entertain the king with the spectacle of ‘a lovely boy’ who has ‘in his sportful hands an olive tree / To hide those parts which men delight to see’ (I, ii, , –). After Edward’s death, Isabella and Mortimer ruled the land in the name of Edward and Isabella’s son the young prince Edward, now Edward III, until he declared himself of age to rule, executed Mortimer, and imprisoned Isabella for life for her part in the death of his father. Marlowe sticks closely to these historical facts in his play, but his treatment of them conspicuously lacks the strong moral stance which playwrights normally brought to the depiction of unsuccessful kings. As so often in Marlowe’s plays, the moral seems unclear or irrelevant. Are we meant to condemn Edward for loving Gaveston? But the relationship seems one of the few genuinely warm and loving ones in the play, as seen in lines such as ‘Why should you love him whom the world hates so?’ – ‘Because he loves me more than all the world’ (I, iv, –). Edward and Gaveston at least have more about them than the barons, who are portrayed as vacillating and ridiculous in exchanges such as ‘Ay, but how chance this was not done before?’ – ‘Because, my lords, it was not thought upon’ (I, iv, –), and it is notable that Mortimer is associated with ‘the desert shore of that Dead Sea’ (II, iii, ) while Gaveston is much more dynamic and alive. Edward during his persecution takes on positively Christological overtones, with the false comfort of the channel water offered by the jailers (V, iii, –) paralleling the offer of vinegar on a sponge to Christ, and Edward and Gaveston’s relationship has certainly been one which modern productions have found themselves able to portray sympathetically. We might notice, too, that however much the barons and the queen are offended by it, Edward’s son is not; indeed the relationship between him and his father is one of the few other strong and affectionate ones. Moreover, everything we know about Marlowe himself suggests that he too was homosexual, and he surely knew other men who were too, so it does not seem likely that he supposed his entire audience would automatically recoil in horror from the idea of two men loving each other.

    The reason for the play’s ambiguous stance may well be to do with the fact that once again, Marlowe is touching on politically contentious issues. Parallels could be drawn in at least two potentially dangerous directions. At one point, Mortimer and his uncle have a rather queasy conversation about why exactly Edward’s behaviour is unacceptable, during which Mortimer Junior denies that it is the mere fact of the king’s having a male favourite which offends him: Uncle, his wanton humour grieves not me, But this I scorn, that one so basely born Should by his sovereign’s favour grow so pert And riot it with the treasure of the realm. While soldiers mutiny for want of pay, He wears a lord’s revenue on his back, And, Midas-like, he jets it in the court With base outlandish cullions at his heels, Whose proud fantastic liveries make such show As if that Proteus, god of shapes, appeared.

(I, iv, –)

What Mortimer Junior objects to, it seems, is less the sexual aspect of the relationship than the disruption it causes to the established social hierarchy, and this was a complaint that, as Marlowe was surely well aware, was also levelled at Elizabeth I’s predilection for favourites such as Sir Walter Ralegh, a man from a relatively obscure family whom the queen’s favour, to the fury of those from the older aristocracy such as the Earl of Essex, had propelled to great heights. Indeed Dennis Kay suggests that ‘When in the first scene of the play Gaveston anticipates the performance of his new role as royal favourite, he uses terms that explicitly echo the behaviours and discourses of royal celebration under Elizabeth’ and that ‘The mythological entertainments he imagines, with Italian masques and water pageants . . . are wholly characteristic of Elizabethan shows’ (Kay ). Secondly, the idea of a king loving other men found an even closer parallel in the behaviour of James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, Queen of Scots and heir presumptive to the throne of

  ,   England. (He did eventually succeed as James VI and I after the death of Elizabeth in .) James had recently become extremely attached to his cousin the Earl of Lennox, in the first of many relationships which were almost certainly homosexual in nature. Marlowe, who was said by Thomas Kyd at the time of his death to have been planning to follow his friend Matthew Royden to Scotland, would surely have been aware of this, especially since, as Constance Brown Kuriyama points out, Sir Francis Walsingham, who may have been Marlowe’s employer and whose cousin Sir Thomas he certainly knew, ‘himself traveled to Scotland for a personal confrontation with James in September , in which, very like Edward’s barons, he lectured James on his errors with brutal frankness’ (Kuriyama : ). Marlowe might perhaps have thought that a play about a homosexual king would be a good way to advertise his talents to the man who seemed likely to be the next king of England, but at the same time he would have known that the subject needed very careful handling. Politics were not the only factor which may have borne on Marlowe’s composition of the play, however. Shortly before it was acted, he seems to have fallen out with his previous patron, Lord Strange, and thus to have lost the services of Lord Strange’s Men, the acting company which had performed all his previous plays. Most notably, he no longer had Edward Alleyn, the most famous actor of his day, to play the hero. Marlowe’s awareness of this may perhaps explain why Edward lacks the stature and dynamism of Tamburlaine, the Guise, Barabas or Doctor Faustus, and why he indeed seems to be virtually displaced as hero by Mortimer halfway through the play. It is one of the sad ironies characteristic of Marlowe’s career that Edward II, which is the one Marlowe play which does not seem to be incomplete, textually mangled, or possibly of joint authorship, should nevertheless still not be able to show us how Marlowe would choose to write in ideal conditions.

PLAYS OF DOUBTFUL AUTHORSHIP

As well as the seven plays which Marlowe is known to have written, his name is sometimes associated with others. In  John

    Warburton recorded among the playscripts which were used to line pie-dishes by his cook, Betsy, ‘The Mayden Holaday by Chris. Marlowe’, and in  David Erskine Baker in his Companion to the Playhouse declared that Marlowe and Day co-authored The Maiden’s Holiday. However, nothing further is known of this and, whatever The Maiden’s Holiday was, there seems no reason to suppose that Marlowe had any connection with it. It is also often said that Marlowe wrote a lost play on the history of the Albanian patriot George Scanderbeg, but the only evidence for this is Gabriel Harvey’s reference to ‘a Scanderbegging wight’ in ‘Gorgon’, which Charles Nicholl has convincingly suggested actually refers to Peter Shakerley (Nicholl : –). More credibly, Marlowe is sometimes thought to have contributed to Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays, though the evidence is inconclusive. Perhaps the most interesting of the plays sometimes ascribed to Marlowe is Arden of Faversham, a lively domestic tragedy based on a true story and set in the town of Faversham, not far from Canterbury. However, apart from the local connection and a few phrases found in both Arden of Faversham and Edward II, which could as easily be the result of borrowing as of shared authorship, there is no evidence for the attribution.

THE POEMS

What Marlowe certainly did write in addition to the seven known plays is poetry. Most Renaissance dramatists wrote poetry as well as plays, for two principal reasons. First, writing plays was a precarious way of making a living because the theatres would be closed at the first sign of plague, whereas poems could be printed, sold, or submitted to a patron at any time. Secondly, classical authors had valued the epic above all literary forms, and had developed the notion of an appropriate writing career which began with experimentation in lesser poetic forms and culminated in the writing of an epic. In England, Marlowe’s near-contemporary Spenser was trying to produce just such an epic in the shape of his ultimately unfinished The Faerie Queene, and we know that Marlowe read this

  ,   even before it was first published in  because he quotes from it in Tamburlaine, acted in . Marlowe himself, however, showed no interest in producing an original epic poem (though Tamburlaine has some epic features, and he did embark on a translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia). Nor, even more surprisingly, did he ever, to the best of our knowledge, write a sonnet, the staple form of most Renaissance poets, and indeed Patrick Cheney has recently argued in his book Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession that Marlowe deliberately constructed his poetic career in opposition to the accepted model, patterning himself on the subversive and licentious Roman poet Ovid rather than Ovid’s more pious and civic-minded contemporary Virgil. What Marlowe did write were a group of other poems. One of these was a Latin elegy for a judge who had been on the bench during his  acquittal in the Bradley case, of which Georgia E. Brown argues that ‘ “On the Death of Sir Roger Manwood” (probably written in ) is Marlowe’s least read poem, which is unfortunate because it is an excellent example of the way Marlowe uses classical culture to undermine the social and political authority classicism is supposed to uphold’ (Brown : ). Much better known are a short lyric poem, ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’, and a possibly unfinished epyllion (the technical term for an erotic poem shaped like a short epic), Hero and Leander. Both these last are significant not only in their own right but also in terms of their place in the wider literary culture of the day. ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’ is a delicate pastoral lyric cast in the voice of a shepherd, a favourite persona of Elizabethan pastoral poetry because of its connotations of rural innocence and overtones of the Good Shepherd Jesus. The poem is so short that I can quote the whole of it: Come live with me, and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove That valleys, groves, hills and fields, Woods, or steepy mountain yields. And we will sit upon the rocks, Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks

    By shallow rivers, to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals. And I will make thee beds of roses, And a thousand fragrant posies, A cap of flowers, and a kirtle, Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle. A gown made of the finest wool Which from our pretty lambs we pull, Fair linèd slippers for the cold, With buckles of the purest gold. A belt of straw and ivy-buds, With coral clasps and amber studs, And if these pleasures may thee move, Come live with me, and be my love. The shepherd swains shall dance and sing For thy delight each May morning. If these delights thy mind may move, Then live with me, and be my love. Marlowe’s shepherd, like so many others, is inviting his beloved to share his life in the country by singing the praises of a simple rustic existence. He does this by painting the countryside in improbably rosy terms, and this point was soon seized on by the queen’s favourite Sir Walter Ralegh, who knew many of Marlowe’s friends and probably Marlowe himself. Ralegh’s ‘The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd’ counters pastoral fantasy with realism: If all the world and love were young, And truth in every shepherd’s tongue, These pretty pleasures might me move To live with thee and be thy love.

(Marlowe : )

The terms of the debate are reproduced too in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, which clearly refers to Marlowe’s death and speaks of

  ,   Marlowe himself as a ‘dead shepherd’ before quoting from Hero and Leander, and in The Merry Wives of Windsor, which is delicately poised on the fringes of town and country and in which Parson Evans quotes from ‘The Passionate Shepherd’. Lastly, Marlowe himself recurs to ‘The Passionate Shepherd’ when he has Ithamore quote from it in The Jew of Malta (IV, ii, –). Hero and Leander was even more influential: in his Remains Concerning Britain, William Camden, contending that Renaissance English literature was the equal of its classical models, wrote ‘Will you reade Virgill? take the Earle of Surrey, Catullus? Shakespeare and Marlowes fragment, Ovid? Daniell, Lucan? Spencer, Martial? Sir John Davies and others’ (Camden : ). By ‘Marlowes fragment’ he meant Hero and Leander, and he compares it not only with Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis but with the great Roman love poet Catullus. Marlowe’s sophisticated and irreverent poem tells a story celebrated since antiquity, of the handsome youth Leander and the beautiful maiden Hero, who lived in the twin cities of Sestos and Abydos, which faced each other across the stretch of sea known as the Hellespont, which divided Greece from Asia Minor. Leander, inflamed by love for Hero after catching sight of her in the temple of Venus, swam the Hellespont and Hero admitted him to her bedchamber, where the two made love. On a subsequent visit, however, he drowned. As usual, Marlowe’s retelling of events contains a twist – or in this case, possibly two. In the first place, the poem comes to an abrupt end in the middle of the story, just after Hero and Leander have consummated their love. The last lines certainly do not give any particular sense of closure: By this Apollo’s golden harp began To sound forth music to the Ocean, Which watchful Hesperus no sooner heard, But he the day’s bright-bearing car prepared, And ran before, as harbinger of light, And with his flaring beams mocked ugly Night, Till she, o’ercome with anguish, shame and rage, Danged down to hell her loathsome carriage. (Sestiad II, –)

    This is followed by the words Desunt nonnulla, which is Latin for ‘Not a little is lacking’. It looks as though Marlowe was killed before he could finish it, but some critics have argued that he deliberately halted the narrative there in a piece of typically Marlovian nonconformity (Campbell ). Secondly, even though he does not describe Leander’s eventual drowning, Marlowe has already hinted at a motivation for it which is certainly not part of the original story, when the god Neptune encounters Leander on his swim and is instantly seized with unrequited desire for him: The god put Helle’s bracelet on his arm, And swore the sea should never do him harm. He clapped his plump cheeks, with his tresses played, And smiling wantonly, his love bewrayed. He watched his arms, and as they opened wide At every stroke, betwixt them would he slide And steal a kiss, and then run out and dance, And as he turned, cast many a lustful glance, And threw him gaudy toys to please his eye, And dive into the water, and there pry Upon his breast, his thighs, and every limb, And up again, and close beside him swim, And talk of love. Leander made reply, ‘You are deceived, I am no woman, I.’ Thereat smiled Neptune, and then told a tale, How that a shepherd, sitting in a vale, Played with a boy so fair and kind, As for his love both earth and heaven pined. (Sestiad II, –) This provocative retelling unsurprisingly produced reactions. After Marlowe’s death, George Chapman wrote a continuation, and Hero and Leander is also clearly in dialogue of some kind with Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, though it is not clear which came first. It is Hero and Leander which Shakespeare quotes in As You Like It, and it probably has a fair claim to being the work of Marlowe’s which his contemporaries valued most.

  ,   THE TRANSLATIONS

Marlowe also produced two major translations of works by classical writers. The first of these was of the provocatively erotic elegies of the Roman poet Ovid. These were considered so risqué that not long after Marlowe’s death the Bishop of London ordered his translation to be publicly burnt, another Marlovian event referred to by Shakespeare in As You Like It. The second translation was the almost equally dangerous First Book of the epic poem Pharsalia, by the Roman poet Lucan, nephew of Seneca, who had been forced by the Emperor Nero to commit suicide at the age of twenty-seven. Pharsalia tells the story of the Civil War between Caesar and Pompey, but its claim to fame is that, alone of classical epic poems, it makes no use of machinery – that is, direct intervention by the gods. The atheist perspective on events which this appears to imply was one which Marlowe himself would presumably have found sympathetic. Like his plays, then, Marlowe’s poems and translations can all be seen as daring, political, and edgy works, which collectively challenge Elizabethan orthodoxies on a wide range of fronts.

 

Marlowe on Stage, –: Theatrical Contexts and Dramaturgical Practice

MARLOWE’S THEATRICAL CONTEXTS

lizabethan playwrights wrote for conditions very different from our own. Theatre, for the Elizabethans, was not, as now, something performed in darkened auditoria in front of a silent audience who have probably paid a fairly considerable sum for tickets, and may well have got dressed up to come. Rather, it was acted in the open air and by natural light, with performances typically starting in the early afternoon and running for two or three hours. Props and scenery were minimal, not least because the stage might have to be hurriedly cleared if the weather turned sufficiently unpleasant. Audiences were large and not necessarily well behaved. On the plus side, however, they were probably likely to be more ready to be moved and involved by aspects of Marlowe’s plays which we might now struggle to take seriously: a famous anecdote in William Prynne’s Histrio-Mastix describes

E

the visible apparition of the Devill on the Stage at the Belsavage Play-house, in Queene Elizabeth’s dayes, (to the great amazement both of the Actors and Spectators) whiles they were prophanely playing the History of Faustus (the truth of which I have heard from many who now live, who well remember it,) there being some distracted with that fearfull sight. (Bakeless : –)

  ,   Indeed Edward Alleyn, who created the role of Faustus, always wore a cross when he played the part in case the devil really did come to get him. As with so many other aspects of Marlowe’s career, imagining the theatre for which he wrote has been made more difficult for us by Shakespeare. Anyone who goes to London can now visit the very successful reconstruction of the Globe Theatre on Bankside. This offers a very good approximation of the experience of watching a Shakespearean play in its original performance conditions, but in fact it is not much help for Marlowe’s. The Globe opened in ; Marlowe died in , six years earlier. The theatre for which Marlowe wrote was the Rose, whose foundations lie not far from the reconstructed Globe under Rose Court, at the end of Southwark Bridge. Though the Rose may perhaps have been in size, shape and general atmosphere not unlike its eventual neighbour the Globe, it was run on significantly different lines. Shakespeare was a ‘sharer’ in the finances of his company, the King’s Men. Marlowe and his fellow Rose playwrights, however, were entirely dependent on the goodwill of Philip Henslowe, the theatrical entrepreneur who managed the theatre. We may tend to think of authors as lone geniuses, but it is only a slight exaggeration to say that Henslowe and his stepson-in-law, the actor Edward Alleyn, played almost as large a part in the production of Marlowe’s plays as Marlowe himself did. (Here, Shakespeare can perhaps help us for once, since both Henslowe and Alleyn feature in John Madden’s  film Shakespeare in Love, as indeed does Marlowe himself.) Alleyn in particular played a key part in Marlowe’s success, for he was the man who incarnated virtually all Marlowe’s heroes – Tamburlaine, Dr Faustus, Barabas, and the Guise – and his grand, declamatory manner and imposing physique (he was over six feet, exceptionally tall for an Elizabethan) seem to have been responsible for a considerable part of their impact. It is certainly noticeable that after Marlowe had apparently quarrelled with his previous patron Lord Strange, and thus lost the services of Lord Strange’s Men, of whom Alleyn was the lead actor, he produced a very different kind of play in Edward II, which was written for Pembroke’s Men and, rather than one astonishing, larger-than-life hero, has two principal

  , ‒  characters, Edward II and Mortimer, who could be said almost to share the role of hero between them, with one rising as the other falls.1 Edward II also shows the marks of the switch of theatre company in other ways: at one point, a character actually says, ‘My Lord of Pembroke’s men, / Strive you no longer’ (II, vi, –), showing the extent to which playwrights were conscious of the material conditions for which they wrote. That we should read in an extradiegetic self-consciousness here seems confirmed by the fact that there appears to be another such instance in The Jew of Malta. On Saturday,  February , The Jew of Malta played at the Rose. Henslowe did not mark it ‘ne’ (the abbreviation in his diary which is usually taken to stand for ‘new’), and that often indicated that it had been acted before. The takings were nevertheless still  shillings, making it the highest-grossing performance of the week. On Friday,  March it was acted again, this time grossing s; on its next appearance, on Saturday  March, it took s, on Tuesday  April s. A week after that, on Tuesday  April, Lord Strange’s Men acted a new play, Titus and Vespasian, at the Rose, grossing the impressive sum of £ s. Titus and Vepasian was played again on Wednesday,  May, grossing s d, and probably on Monday,  May (there appears to be a confusion in Henslowe’s Diary), taking s. In between, The Jew of Malta had appeared on Friday,  May, grossing s. It was acted again on Thursday,  May, grossing s, and on Saturday,  May, grossing s, but these takings were far outshone by Titus and Vespasian’s £ on Monday,  May. On their next appearances, Titus and Vespasian grossed s on Wednesday,  May and The Jew of Malta took s on Tuesday,  May. Thereafter Titus and Vespasian took s on Tuesday,  June, and The Jew of Malta s on Wednesday,  June. Shortly afterwards plague suspended playing. It would be wrong to present Titus and Vespasian and The Jew of Malta as being locked in a head-to-head battle for takings – there were also other plays being acted at the same time – but the proximity of these performances, and the superior takings of Titus and Vepasian, must at least have given sharp new point and could even conceivably have prompted revision to The Jew of Malta, for in that play Barabas specifically refers to how ‘Titus and Vespasian conquered us’ (II, iii, ).

  ,   Even though good actors such as Alleyn were clearly crucial to the success of a play, however, they did not operate in the ways we would expect now. Theatres were only profitable when there were actors in them performing for live audiences, so there was minimal rehearsal time, since that was a drain on resources. For instance, in , when Henslowe’s diary first begins to record details of theatrical transactions and performances, Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay was acted on Saturday,  February; on Sunday,  February it was ‘Muly Mollocco’ (Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar); on Monday,  February, Greene’s Orlando Furioso; on Wednesday,  February, the anonymous The Spanish Comedy of Don Horatio (presumably a spinoff of The Spanish Tragedy); on Thursday,  February, the anonymous Sir John Mandeville; on Friday,  February, the anonymous Harry of Cornwall; and on Saturday,  February The Jew of Malta, apparently for the first time. Of the whole previous week, it was only on the Tuesday that the actors could possibly have given any time or thought to preparing The Jew of Malta for its first performance. Even when actors did rehearse, they did so in a way we would now find very strange, for not one of them would have a copy of the whole script, since it would be far too time-consuming to have to write out numerous copies of the author’s original by hand. Instead each actor was given a copy of his own part and the lines immediately before it, so he knew which cues to look out for (all actors were male, as will be discussed below). Thus no actor would be engaging with the totality of the play. Perhaps an even more significant difference was that, as mentioned above, all the performers were male, with boy actors playing the female roles. Marlowe is often criticised for creating weak female roles, but it is worth bearing in mind that he knew that all his female characters would be played by pre-pubescent boys with less experience than anyone else on the stage. Not until much later, in the second half of the s, did Shakespeare find a boy actor who could carry such major roles as Rosalind, Viola and Beatrice. Moreover, one of Marlowe’s plays, Dido, Queen of Carthage, seems to have been first performed by a company composed entirely of children, and part of the irreverence of the play depends on the comic effect of mighty gods and heroes being seen as literally cut down to size. Finally, many actors were required to double, that is

  , ‒  to play more than one part, further impeding their ability to engage with and develop a role in the the way that a modern actor would be likely to attempt to. It is because so many other people had a stake in Marlowe’s plays that so few of them appear to have survived in the form in which Marlowe wrote them. The Massacre at Paris was almost certainly a victim of the censor; Tamburlaine the Great was, according to its printer, published minus some ‘fond and frivolous jestures, digressing and (in my poor opinion) far unmeet for the matter’, which had formed part of the original performances; Doctor Faustus, as I discussed in Chapter , contains references to events which occurred after Marlowe’s death; The Jew of Malta may well have been reworked at some unidentifiable time between Marlowe’s death in  and its first publication in . In each case, the tinkering, as I have argued in Chapter , bears powerful testimony to the continuing popularity, political explosiveness, and, in most cases, the continuing stageworthiness of Marlowe’s plays. In fact, the shortcomings of Marlowe’s plays as stable literary texts are, by the same token, the strongest possible testimony to his success as a man of the theatre. One final thing to bear in mind in connection with Marlowe’s theatre is that it was an exceptionally unsafe profession. Accidents happened: on Sunday,  January , the collapse of some scaffolding at Paris Garden during a bearbaiting left a number of spectators killed or injured, and, as we have already seen, there appears to have been a fatal shooting accident during a performance of Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two. Other things could also go wrong. The censor could intervene to insist that a play be rewritten or to prevent its being staged at all, as seems to have happened in the case of The Book of Sir Thomas More, written by Anthony Munday, Shakespeare, and others. The queen herself, or a great noble, could take offence at something that was said or implied by a play, as happened in the case of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, when the playwright was forced to remove all reference to Falstaff’s original name of Oldcastle after objections by Lord Cobham, who was connected with the historical Sir John Oldcastle. It is worth remembering that many playwrights of the period, including Marlowe himself, spent time in prison (though in Marlowe’s case it was not, as far as we know, as a direct result of anything he had written).

  ,   Most dangerously of all, theatres brought together large groups of people in close proximity, and thus encouraged the spread of disease. As a result, the first step taken by the authorities during any of the frequent outbreaks of plague in London was invariably to close the theatres, which would have no option but to send their actors on a provincial tour or to remain dark until further notice. It may well be that it is to one such outbreak of plague that we owe Marlowe’s great poem Hero and Leander, and maybe his Lucan translation too, since poetry could provide an income from sales and patrons even when the theatres were closed.

MARLOWE’S DRAMATIC INHERITANCE

Although Marlowe was an exact contemporary of Shakespeare, he seems to have been a much quicker starter than Shakespeare. Both parts of Tamburlaine the Great were on the stage by ; the earliest Shakespeare play is hard to date, but is very unlikely to have been earlier than the beginning of the s. Marlowe is, therefore, primarily influenced not by Shakespeare’s increasingly innovative practice but by the much older traditions of late medieval, mid-Tudor, and early Elizabethan stages, as well as by what the Renaissance knew – or thought it knew – about ancient Greek and Roman theatre. Marlowe also inherited ideas about tragic form and literary aesthetics from other literary genres, most notably Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry. Sidney was a major figure of the day – poet, courtier, diplomat, soldier, and heir to the Earl of Leicester, the favourite of Queen Elizabeth – and he and Marlowe shared an interesting network of connections: Sidney’s father-in-law, Sir Francis Walsingham, was probably Marlowe’s employer in his secret service work; Sidney’s brother, Sir Robert Sidney, was the Governor of Flushing who arrested Marlowe for coining (another Low Countries link); and it has been suggested that Marlowe may at some point have been a member of the literary circle surrounding ‘Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother’, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, to whom The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia was dedicated and to whom Marlowe seems to have dedicated the posthumous publication of his friend Thomas Watson’s Amintae Gaudia. Sidney’s work is, however, very

  , ‒  different from Marlowe’s. For Sidney the historian is ‘loaden with old mouse-eaten records, authorizing himself (for the most part) upon other histories, whose greatest authorities are built upon the notable foundations of hearsay’ (Sidney : ). Sidney here is deliberately contrasting poetry with history to argue that the strength of poetry lies precisely in its freedom to tell lies. Thus liberated from the mundanity of history, it can conceptualise man at his noblest, offering models for imitation and so uplifting human thought. History, on the other hand, is tied to actuality, and since it cannot therefore perform the role of providing noble and inspiring examples, the implication is that it has in fact no function at all. Sidney actually seems to be in accord with the school of thought that recycled past history for its contemporary lessons, in that he agrees that the past teaches clear lessons about human behaviour; however, since his notion of perfectibility demands that we relinquish old patterns in favour of the more inspiring ideals provided by imaginary heroism, he can grant history no didactic role except, by implication, a negative one. Marlowe, by contrast, has no interest in didacticism: indeed Thomas Healy declares that ‘Marlowe’s drama is a sustained assault on preconceptions about a didactic role for literature’ (Healy : ). Another area of disagreement between Marlowe and Sidney would seem to be the related question of realism. Sidney praises Thomas Sackville’s and Thomas Norton’s play Gorboduc, but condemns it for failing to observe the classical unities of time, place and action: But if it be so in Gorboduc, how much more in all the rest? where you shall have Asia of the one side, and Afric of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms, that the player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be conceived . . . While in the meantime two armies fly in, represented with four swords and buckram, and then what hard heart will not receive it for a pitched field? (Sidney : –) Marlowe, however, displays a sublime indifference to any such considerations, and indeed Leslie Thomson identifies ‘abrupt mid-change scenes in location’ as ‘characteristic of Marlowe’

  ,   (Thomson : ). In Tamburlaine the Great Part One, Cosroe announces in the first scene, The plot is laid by Persian noblemen And captains of the Median garrisons To crown me Emperor of Asia.

(Part One, I, i, –)

Twenty lines later, a trumpet sounds and Menaphon declares, Behold, my lord, Ortygius and the rest, Bringing the crown to make you emperor.

(I, i, –)

There is clearly no attempt at a realistic depiction of time here, but Marlowe is not remotely embarrassed by that – such considerations are immaterial to his dramaturgical concerns. Similarly in Edward II the king declares at III, i,  that he will promote Spencer’s father to the earldom of Wiltshire, and barely a hundred lines later, while we are still in the same scene, a herald brings the barons’ demand that ‘from your princely person you remove / This Spencer’ (III, i, –); again, we are to understand events as unfolding emblematically rather than realistically. In similar vein, Leslie Thomson further suggests that ‘If Faustus were taken off through the same space from which he had originally and then repeatedly entered, this would conflate his study with hell and act as a reminder of why he has been “in hell” spiritually from the start’ (Thomson : ); this would make it apparent that stage space as well as stage time is being used suggestively and expressionistically rather than literally. Thomson also sees something similar happening in Tamburlaine: Each of the two majestic entrances of Tamburlaine in his chariot would have been instantly recognizable as an emblematic “triumph” of conquest, an image explicitly and ironically changed to a triumph of death in the final scene when Tamburlaine is unable to stand and the chariot becomes a necessity. (Thomson : )

  , ‒  For Thomson, ‘Marlowe’s directions demonstrate his strong interest in the visual and the importance of that dimension to the structure of his plays’ (Thomson : ). They also, though, bear testimony to his closeness to a conception of drama which was fluid and expressionist rather than tied to rules of realism. Marlowe was also influenced by the de casibus (literally ‘of falls’) tradition of narrative best exemplified in The Mirror for Magistrates, which first appeared in  and was regularly reprinted until . Originally intended to carry on the tradition begun in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, the first edition of this told the stories of nineteen people (most of them involved in the Wars of the Roses) who rose to great heights and then fell disastrously, its moral being essentially that what goes up must come down, and that we are all subject to the turns of Fortune’s wheel. This idea is directly echoed in Mortimer Junior’s speech at the end of Edward II: Base Fortune, now I see that in thy wheel There is a point to which, when men aspire, They tumble headlong down. That point I touched, And, seeing there was no place to mount up higher, Why should I grieve at my declining fall? (V, vi, –) Equally, the end of Tamburlaine the Great, Part One depends for its effect partly on the frustration of audience expectation that a similar pattern will unfold there, and indeed Tamburlaine has openly inverted the morality pattern when he claims that ‘I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains, / And with my hand turn Fortune’s wheel about’ (I, ii, –). Marlowe was also susceptible to other influences. The title of David Bevington’s influential From Mankind to Marlowe (first published in ) postulated a link between Marlowe’s drama and the medieval morality play. There is certainly something in this: many of Marlowe’s plays do indeed have elements of the morality play. Bevington observes that we . . . find in both parts of Tamburlaine a sequence of episodes strikingly reminiscent of the moral play and the

  ,   mid-century hybrid chronicle. It is hardly necessary to point out that Tamburlaine has an episodic linear structure, for the fact has long been known and almost universally deplored . . . A study of Tamburlaine’s structure in relation to that of its homiletic predecessors, however, reveals the inner logic and consistency of its ‘primitive’ form. (Bevington : ) Bevington notes that, in accordance with the tradition of writing for small casts, with each new incident in the life of his hero Marlowe suppresses one group of supporting roles in order to introduce another. In addition, following the model of Cambises and plays of its type, Marlowe retains a few central characters throughout the work in order to provide a continuity of narrative. (Bevington : ) He compares Tamburlaine’s three supporting lords with the groups of threesomes in moralities (Bevington : ). Finally, David Riggs points out that Tamburlaine’s vision of Death (V, iii, –) ‘recalls the coming of death in homiletic morality plays like Everyman’ (Riggs : ), while Stephen Greenblatt argues that ‘Tamburlaine repeatedly teases its readers with the form of the cautionary tale, only to violate the convention’ (Greenblatt : ). Nor is the appropriation of a morality structure confined to Tamburlaine. In The Jew of Malta, Bevington notes that Barabas ‘is in part a lifelike Jewish merchant caught in a political feud on Malta, and in part an embodiment both of the morality Vice and of the unrepenting protagonist in homiletic “tragedy” ’ (Bevington : ), and though he thinks Edward II the least like the morality drama, he finds elements there too (Bevington : ). Most notably, he observes that ‘The debt of Faustus to the morality has long been acknowledged – the spiritual conflict, the Good and Evil Angels, the seven Deadly Sins’ (Bevington : ), while Park Honan suggests that in Doctor Faustus Marlowe ‘reaches back to Canterbury’s electioneering or moral plays for somewhat grotesque

  , ‒  emblems which he now transforms’ (Honan : ). Ironically, of course, the evocation of the morality structure in Doctor Faustus serves only to point up how far Marlowe’s drama has come from the spiritual certainties which underpinned the morality plays: in Everyman, God himself appears onstage. In Doctor Faustus, only the Devil does, and God’s throne is empty. Marlowe also, however, owed much to more recent drama. While at Cambridge, he would almost certainly have seen, and might even have taken part in, a number of plays. Most notably, the playwright Thomas Kyd, author of The Spanish Tragedy, by his own account shared rooms with Marlowe two or three years before his death. Marlowe and Kyd have much in common as playwrights. Kyd’s masterpiece The Spanish Tragedy – the one play we can be sure he wrote – was produced in the mid-to late s, probably around the same time as Marlowe was launching his career with Tamburlaine, and shares with Marlowe’s drama the use of classical mythology, a fondness for lengthy speeches, and the use of a chorus, as well as a savage irony and sophisticated self-reflexivity.2 Finally, Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean argue that Marlowe was effectively at war with another theatre group, the Queen’s Men: declaring that ‘The cultural contest was under way in , and as far as we know Marlowe launched it’, they identify the Queen’s Men play The Troublesome Reign of King John as offering a pious, patriotic corrective to the aspiring mind of Tamburlaine and the despair of Faustus. This, however, was a war which Marlowe won decisively, since it ended with the Queen’s Men losing their place in the London theatre and forced to fall back on provincial touring (McMillin and MacLean :  and ). HOW THE PLAYS WORK ON STAGE

Dido, Queen of Carthage Marlowe wrote for performance, and it is in performance that his plays come alive. The title page of Dido, Queen of Carthage records that it was performed by the Children of the Queen’s Chapel. Strange as it may now seem to us, it was not unusual for children

  ,   to act on the Renaissance stage. A culture that was in many ways still predominantly oral saw nothing odd in even young children being able to memorise large chunks of verse, or in some cases prose, and the practice in public speaking and self-presentation was valued. However valuable the experience for the performers, though, it must inevitably have had some drawbacks for the audience. Both the emotional and the vocal range of the child performers were subject to insuperable limitations: to write a play and confine yourself only to unbroken child voices is a little like writing an opera where all the parts are to be sung by sopranos. The child actors’ ability to perform certain physical skills and feats will also have been restricted. Finally, a playwright might well feel constricted as to subject matter and choice of language, since he might feel obliged to keep within the bounds of what is suitable for young children to know and say. In typical Marlowe fashion, Dido, Queen of Carthage shows itself aware of these restrictions, but indifferent to them. Instead of keeping to topics of which child performers would have personal experience, Marlowe centres the play on love and war, two areas of which they could have none. In the first few lines of the play, he touches on at least two topics which we would now think wholly unsuitable for a play for children, paedophilia and domestic violence, as Jupiter invites Ganymede to ‘play with me’ (I, i, ) and Ganymede describes how Jupiter’s wife Juno ‘reached me such a rap for that I spilled / As made the blood run down about mine ears’ (I, i, –). Additionally, rather than adjust the age range of his characters to fit that of his performers, he goes out of his way to put on stage the widest possible variety of ages, from the small Ascanius to Dido’s aged nurse; this last, moreover, is a character whom Marlowe himself added to the traditional story, almost as if he deliberately wanted someone very old whom it would be particularly difficult for a young boy to act. Additionally, although all the performers were young boys, one of them has to represent the goddess Venus, queen of love and beauty – so not even just a woman but a particularly beautiful and shapely woman (Marlowe will play the same game in Doctor Faustus, where a young boy has to represent Helen of Troy), while another has to be the great

  , ‒  warrior Aeneas, and a third to take the part of Jupiter, mightiest of all the gods. The actors are also required to rise to prodigious feats of memory in order to recall the exceptionally long speeches: in II, i, for example, Aeneas speaks forty lines, then, after one line from Dido, another forty-three, and before the scene is over a further forty-four. Marlowe also introduces other complications. Although all the child performers were likely to have been of roughly the same age, Marlowe repeatedly scripts scenes which demand a significant difference in size, since they rely on one character either carrying another (as is repeatedly done to Ascanius and Cupid) or having another sit on his or her lap, as Ganymede does on Jupiter’s. It is of course the crowning irony that although this scene may look like a charming and happy bit of typical family life, it actually represents an older man and his toyboy, hardly, one would have thought, a suitable subject for representation by children. Marlowe is not, however, simply being wilful in writing in such a way. When he invites us to see Ganymede not just as a child but as an object of desire, he may well be drawing attention not so much to any private predilection as to a general property of theatre at the time, if Lisa Jardine’s influential argument that boy actors were always eroticised is correct (Jardine : –) – and Jardine’s case derives some considerable support from the fact that the Latin playwright William Gager felt obliged specifically to deny that plays are occasions for immoral pleasure in cross-dressing: I haue bene often mooved by our playes to laughter, and sometime to teares: but I can not accuse either my selfe, or any other, of any such beastlie thought stirred vp by them. (qtd Rainoldes : ) Whatever his own intent, Gager’s denial is effective confirmation that some people might indeed imagine that ‘beastlie thoughts’ would be aroused. Moreover, when Marlowe asks his child performers to act gods, goddesses, and heroes, the effect is in fact not to stretch the children hopelessly beyond their range but, on the contrary, to reveal the basic childishness of the gods, goddesses and heroes in question. Finally, the limited range of the performers’

  ,   voices ironically chimes with the limited range of actions and responses exhibited by the characters in this play: people repeat the actions of carrying children, falling in love, and, finally, throwing themselves into a pyre with an insistence that deliberately comes closer to comedy than tragedy, and the discrepancy between the actual size of the children and the supposed stature of the characters they play is part of the effect. Dido, Queen of Carthage has not been much performed. On the rare occasions when it has been staged in recent years, however, the logic of Marlowe’s dramatic choices has been clearly revealed. It was performed at Marlowe’s old school, the King’s School, Canterbury, in , as part of events for the quatercentenary of his death. It had been originally intended that all the parts should be taken by pupils, echoing the original performance conditions, but a late indisposition on the part of one of the leading ladies meant that Venus had to be replaced at the last moment by a professional actress. Far from being a problem, this in fact proved to be exceptionally interesting, since it revealed the significant difference which even a slight variation in size could make to the dynamics of the play’s relationships. To have a Venus who was taller than Aeneas was funny; it would, perhaps, be even more so to have a Dido who was (as in Shakespeare’s poem Venus and Adonis, where there is a comic disparity between the big, aggressive Venus and the smaller, shy Adonis). Equally, a play which makes so much of relative age and relative status has sharp resonance in the context of a secondary school, a place where status is so dependent on age. The most recent professional production in the UK, at Shakespeare’s Globe in summer , directed by Tim Carroll, was also very illuminating about the dynamics of the play. With a cast of only five, three of whom took several parts each, it was set in a children’s playground, with a set made up of a sandpit and slide, which both allowed for ease of movement and also functioned as an emblem of a precipitous descent, visible throughout, while its gods and goddesses, although played by adult actors, were infantilised by wearing shoes that were far too big for them. Again, a point was neatly made: what hope is there for humans, when the gods we have imagined for ourselves are so pitiful? The play was most recently performed in the US by the American Repertory

  , ‒ 

Dido, Queen of Carthage, Shakespeare’s Globe, June 

Theatre at the Loeb Drama Center in March  (see Henderson ). The Massacre at Paris Despite its brevity and obvious incompleteness, The Massacre at Paris has received two professional stagings, the first directed by Philip Prowse at the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre in  and the second, directed by Paul Marcus, as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Youth Festival at The Other Place in Stratford-uponAvon in October . (The latter was chiefly memorable for a hilarious scene in which a dummy representing Coligny was thrown from an upper railing.) There have also been amateur performances by the Marlowe Society and at Marlowe’s old college, Corpus Christi, and a read-through of the play as part of the International Marlowe Conference at Cambridge in July . What such stagings and demi-stagings tend to reveal is the raw energy of Marlowe’s play, but they also accentuate its incompleteness and brevity.

  ,   Edward II Although it was not performed in the US until  (and then only in an all-female student production), there have been several notable productions of Edward II in the UK. Joan Littlewood directed it for her Theatre Workshop company at Stratford East in . In  Clive Perry directed it at the Phoenix Theatre, Leicester, keeping Edward’s murder offstage in order to concentrate on the play’s politics rather than its personal element, and two years later John Harrison did it at Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Frank Dunlop directed Bertolt Brecht’s adaptation at the National Theatre in  (see Willis ); in this, Gaveston’s name is changed to Daniel, possibly because we hear a lot about the ‘peers’ and it would be confusing if there were also a character called Piers, and Isabella’s to Anne, for no evident reason. There are scenes in which commoners comment on what is happening, and in one of many interpolated references to Ireland, Baldock betrays the king because ‘My mother in Ireland wants bread to eat’ (Brecht : ). The Brecht adaptation was also staged by the Bush Theatre Company in  and at the Roundhouse in . Toby Robertson did the Marlovian original for the Prospect Theatre Company in  (see Stewart : –), and it also appeared at the Edinburgh Lyceum in , directed by Stephen MacDonald, at the Bristol Old Vic in , directed by Richard Cottrell, from the Compass Theatre Company on a touring production during  and , and at the Manchester Royal Exchange, directed by Nicholas Hytner, in . Gerard Murphy, himself a fine Dr Faustus at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon in , directed it for the Royal Shakespeare Company in  with Simon Russell Beale in the title role; in this production, as Roger Sales comments, the line ‘Come fellows, it booted not for us to strive’ (, i, ) directly preceded the interval ‘and so made this statement into more of a question for the spectators. Would they have tried to protect Gaveston?’ (Sales : ). There were particularly memorable productions directed by Michael Grandage at the Sheffield Crucible, with Joseph Fiennes playing Edward, in , and by Timothy Walker at Shakespeare’s Globe in , the second of which had an all-male cast, and so nicely revealed the

  , ‒ 

Edward II by Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare’s Globe, July : Liam Brennan as Edward II and Gerald Kyd as Gaveston.

  ,   utter illogicality of its being acceptable for Edward to kiss the male Isabella but not for him to kiss the equally male Gaveston. Other things also emerged from these productions: at the Crucible, Lloyd Owen’s Mortimer proved magnificently what a strong role this is and how closely it rivals the predominance of Edward (a comments board placed in the theatre foyer for the duration of the run sprouted a sign saying ‘Mortimer for King’), while at the Globe, the fact that Liam Brennan’s Edward was simultaneously appearing as Bolingbroke in Richard II pointed up the parallels between the two plays. The other thing that staging tends to reveal most strongly about this play is the possibilities for doubling and the resonances these may generate: one US production, for instance, had the same actor as Gaveston, the mower, and Lightborn on the grounds that all in one way or another betray the king. Edward II has been filmed three times. (In addition, Deborah Willis suggests that we should read Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, too, as ‘a homophobic retelling of the Edward II story’, and also points to its presence in Sidney Lumet’s  The Deadly Affair [Willis : ].) The first filmed version, made in , was directed by Richard Marquand and Tony Robertson and starred Ian McKellen as Edward and Timothy West as Mortimer. The second, directed by Bernard Sobel, was made in , and was in French. The third, filmed by Derek Jarman in , is both the most interesting and the most controversial, and is the subject of a book by Jarman, Queer Edward II, as well as being still available on video (and on DVD in an Italian-packaged version, Eduardo II). For David Hawkes, this film not only retells Marlowe but offers a wide-ranging critique of the norms of heterosexist cinema: Jarman’s treatments of Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare’s The Tempest call attention to these plays’ meditations on identity, sexuality and history. He also employs these themes as vehicles for his critiques of the narrative conventions and gender constructions inculcated by the cinema. (Hawkes : ) For many critics, this film is doubly important, both for what it tells us about Marlowe and also for what it tells us about Jarman. Colin

  , ‒  MacCabe says of Jarman’s approach that ‘Edward II is . . . unquestionably his most autobiographical work in what has been a consistently autobiographical œuvre’ (MacCabe : ), while Jonathan Romney observes that ‘this film is partly recognisable as Marlowe and wholly recognisable as Jarman’ and suggests in particular that ‘the leather-clad thugs . . . embody a sadomasochistic “rough trade” fantasy’ (Romney :  and ). Jarman’s epigraph to the book begins, ‘How to make a film of a gay love affair and get it commissioned. Find a dusty old play and violate it’ (Jarman : ), and Jarman certainly does not hesitate to do things that might be construed by purists as violation. The epigraph continues, ‘The best lines in Marlowe sound like pop songs and the worst, well, we’ve tried to spare you them’ (Jarman : ), and Gaveston exclaims, As for the multitude, that are but sparks Raked up in embers of their poverty. Fuck them! Other textual alterations also occurred. Jarman notes that ‘Nigel comes up with this great Jacobean line “Girlboy”. We add it’, and observes of Lightborn (played by his companion) that ‘Kev, delivering his lines in Geordie, changes the words to fit. Ears became “lugs”, mouth becomes “gob” ’ (Jarman : ), and Gaveston too says ‘gasped’ with a flat northern ‘a’. Isabella pointedly asks: ‘Is it not queer that he is thus bewitched?’ and ‘Mortimer Junior’ looks the oldest character. Most notably, Jarman declares that We’ve adopted the conspiracy theory for the end of the film. Manuel Fieschi, writing to Edward III, told him that his father had escaped from Berkeley Castle, to Corfe, and from there to Avignon, where he was received by Pope Urban XXII, and from there he made his way to North Italy, to become a hermit living a life of prayer. (Jarman : ) However it is not easy to guess this from the film itself, perhaps because Jarman was too ill to film the scene himself; perhaps the

  ,   biggest hint is the prominence given to the last line, ‘or if I live, let me forget myself ’, suggesting that Edward might be able to survive under a new identity. Even this, however, has been more cynically read by J. Horger, who writes that ‘Jarman offers a “happier” ending that includes the evolution of a love affair between Edward and his would-be assassin, Lightborn. As a result, Edward II, though still deposed, continues living a life of homosexual gratification, no wiser for the experience’ (should he be?) and further assumes – though so far as I know without warrant – that Jarman is ‘Perhaps alluding to the controversy over President Kennedy’s mysterious murder’ (Horger :  and ), something which seems unlikely in the context of the film’s loudly UK-based setting. For Bette Talvacchia, though, The unspeakably savage execution of Edward as offered in Marlowe’s drama – impalement on a red hot poker – is performed in a dream sequence, and in this way acknowledged as a possible outcome . . . The alternative ending is well-served by the duplicitous language that Marlowe gives to Lightborn in the play, where his slippery assurances could be those of either a saviour or an assassin. In Jarman’s version, compassion wordlessly wins. (Talvacchia : ) For Susan Bennett, Edward II is a hopeful film. Its insistence on a future that might emerge at the interstices of transgression, dissidence and desire confronts the shortcomings of its own historical moment not, in the end, by looking back but by resolutely looking forward and with some pleasure to all the dangers, to the inevitable and costly conflicts, and, finally, to death. (Bennett : ) It is Jarman’s illness – AIDS, from which he died three years later – that lies at the heart of this film; indeed Colin MacCabe calls it ‘Jarman’s deathwork’ (MacCabe : ). In Queer Edward II, Jarman compares Edward I’s pharmacopoeia with his own, and

  , ‒  sharp ironies play around Gaveston’s dismissive remark that ‘There are hospitals for men like you’ (Jarman : ) and the fact that Spencer smokes. Consequently Jarman is at pains to stress the contemporary and recent parallels and resonances of the story. He observes that ‘Ken, my ghost, pushed me to update the script to the nineties instead of dithering. I insisted that the clothes were not fantasies, a leather jacket from Lewis Leathers, a T-shirt, nothing fancy. Just like Tennessee Williams’ (Jarman : ), and his comments on the filming process are interspersed with more general ones about the contemporary gay scene and other cultural issues. One of the many sideswipes at Cliff Richard is followed by the declaration that ‘[Ian] McKellen’s knighthood is more shocking; wining and dining in the erroneous belief that his honour improves our [gay men’s] situation’ (Jarman : ); Jarman says of the confrontation between the police and OutRage in the film that ‘The scene resembles the Poll Tax riot’ (Jarman : ); and he writes of ‘Tilda [Swinton] recording her speech, mike stand, spotlight, like “Evita” – the musical, not the politician’ (Jarman : ). Jarman’s own politics, as evinced in the film, are complex. His use of OutRage and his own very public homosexuality certainly make it clear that homosexuality is not to be demonised, as does the weirdness of the straight sex in the film, not least Mortimer’s leopardskin and his night with three booted women, a scene Jonathan Romney classes as ‘well-worn British cinema shorthand for Establishment hypocrisy’ (Romney : ); Rowland Wymer calls Mortimer and Isabella ‘joyless exemplars of a deadening heterosexuality’ (Wymer : ). Equally the fact that Gaveston’s and Edward’s parting is played against a background of Annie Lennox’s soulful rendition of ‘Every time we say goodbye’ certainly adds pathos to the relationship. However, Jarman observes in Queer Edward II that ‘Not all gay men are attractive. I am not going to make this an easy ride. Marlowe didn’t’. What is clear, however, is that his particular targets are the church and the army, as prime representatives of ‘official’ culture; as Kate Chedgzoy puts it, ‘The idea that, in Jarman’s words, “the whole of the modern British state is founded on the repression of homosexuality” was to become crucial to his interpretation of Marlowe’s Edward II’ (Chedgzoy : ). Jarman writes,

  ,   I felt we should change the Rome to Canterbury, or York. Then decided to leave it as it is, the Roman church has a greater congregation than the Church of England. Marlowe’s atheism is his joy. He would have had no problem putting on a condom. (Jarman :  and ) In the film itself, we hear the order ‘Take this fucking priest to the Tower’; Gaveston has to run the gauntlet of two rows of spitting clergymen; and Mortimer Junior wears army uniform throughout, with what Colin MacCabe terms ‘the dress and bearing of an SAS officer in Northern Ireland’ (MacCabe : ) (John Orr comments on ‘Jarman’s love-hate relationship towards the British Army uniforms of the twentieth century, a fetish source of fear and attraction he may well have inherited from his childhood in the domestic quarters of an army barracks he thought of more as prison than as home’) [Orr : ]), and he is backed by a chorus accompanied by baying hounds, clearly representing the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ set, while the dead Edward I is seen only as a suit of armour. Jarman’s film does retain some of the morality element of the original play, most notably in the repeated use it makes of the visual motif of slopes, with their clear connotations of metaphorical as well as literal descent: the throne stands at the top of a slope, and Isabella walks down a suicidally steep one. Its use of the throne is also emblematic: Deborah Willis points to the importance of ‘the image of the throne, to which Jarman’s camera repeatedly returns as different individuals occupy it’ (Willis : ). The film’s own moral values, however, are less clear. Most complex is the film’s treatment of its Isabella. Initially Jarman considered having a boy play Isabella, but in the event the role went to his muse and friend, Tilda Swinton. Swinton’s Isabella is a creature of appearances, conceived of, according to Swinton herself, ‘as a composite of Margaret Thatcher, Grace Kelly, Ivana Trump and others’ (Romney : ): much of the film’s small budget was visibly spent on her wardrobe, giving a sharp point to her line that her objection to the king and his minions is that they ‘jest at our attire. ’Tis this that makes me impa-

  , ‒  tient’ (a line which is in fact spoken by Mortimer Junior in the play [I, iv, ]). She is also, however, vampiric. Jarman notes in Queer Edward II that ‘we start the shoot at Bray – home of Hammer Horror’ (Jarman : ), and particularly of Dracula, which is evoked when Isabella bites Kent to death, and also in the scene in which Mortimer Junior is in bed with three Gothic-clad girls. The stress on the figure of the queen may arise because Jarman himself is filming in a society presided over by a queen, Elizabeth II – certainly the line that we so ironically hear in the background, ‘The king’s life is drawing peacefully to a close’, was the wording of the announcement of the death of the queen’s father George VI in  – as well as by the fact that, as Bette Talvacchia points out, ‘It is very significant for the symbolic system of Edward II that England’s recent past has been so affected by a female embodiment of patriarchal control’, Margaret Thatcher, whose government passed the Section  legislation outlawing the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality (Talvacchia : ). Susan Bennett notes that When Edward is persuaded to sign the order which effects Gaveston’s deportation from England, the close-up shot reveals not any royal insignia but the logo of Britain’s presentday rulers, the House of Commons, and the charter is visibly dated  . . . In this social index, Jarman deftly draws into frame the recent signing of Britain’s pernicious Section  of the Local Government Act, which denies public money to any project that might be identified with what is defined by that Section as the promotion of homosexuality. (Bennett : ) However, it is easy to see why Jarman’s Edward II has often been interpreted as hostile to women in general rather than just to female symbols of government; Susan Bennett comments simply that ‘Derek Jarman’s film remake of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II is breathtakingly misogynistic’ (Bennett : ) while Bette Talvacchia writes that at this point in the struggle to dismantle the cultural signs of a mythologized Woman, it is difficult to override a dominant

  ,   reading with a qualified contextualization embedded in an individual discourse. In other words, I do not interpret Jarman’s intention to be misogynistic, although I believe that in its reception the image will overwhelmingly be construed in terms of misogyny. (Talvacchia : ) Tracy Biga comments of Jarman’s work in general, ‘Women’s sexuality becomes emblematic of Heterosoc [Jarman’s term for the homophobic Establishment] – violent, destructive and unsympathetic’ (Biga : ), though Kate Chedgzoy offers a more recuperative reading when she comments that ‘Like many gay film directors, Jarman has often been accused of misogyny in the representation of female roles . . . Such criticisms sometimes appear to be generated by a confusion of Jarman’s critique of what has been called compulsory heterosexuality with an attack on individual heterosexual women’ (Chedgzoy : ). Doctor Faustus Doctor Faustus has been by far the most often produced of Marlowe’s plays, partly because it can be put on with a small cast (albeit with much doubling): at the Liverpool Playhouse in , for instance, there were only seven actors, and all except Faustus and Mephistopheles played several parts, while the Contact Theatre Company stripped it down to eight, none of whom doubled. It can also be done with relatively few ‘special effects’, since any poverty of staging can so easily be made to seem part of the general tawdriness and unimpressiveness of what Faustus sells his soul for, and if done without an interval, as at the Liverpool Playhouse, the A text can come in at a taut and gripping hour and forty minutes. There were at least fifty productions in the UK alone in the last century, including Royal Shakespeare Company stagings in , , , and ; more recently, – saw four within the UK. An adaptation of the play by the noted scholar Nevill Coghill was filmed in , with Richard Burton both directing and starring as Faustus and his then wife Elizabeth Burton appearing as Helen of Troy, whose role was inevitably given somewhat more prominence than usual.

  , ‒  Doctor Faustus on stage rarely fails to be an interesting experience. Whether a company stresses the medieval heritage of the play, as in the Medieval Players’ staging as filmed for the Open University, or its contemporary resonances, as in the Liverpool Playhouse’s  staging with its echoes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this is a play which can work on many levels. Here too doubling can be very interesting: Mephistopholis, for instance, has sometimes doubled the Old Man, while the use of an all-male cast, a regular feature of productions of this play, underlines the deceptiveness of the Helen figure whom Faustus so vainly pursues. The Jew of Malta The Jew of Malta has received few professional stagings. Its bumper year was , the quatercentenary of Marlowe’s birth, when there were three productions: at the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury; at the Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent; and by the Royal Shakespeare Company, directed by Clifford Williams, in Stratford-upon-Avon and London. Twenty years after that it was directed by Peter Benedict at the Donmar Warehouse, and in  at the Swan Theatre, Stratford. In  Michael Grandage directed Ian McDiarmid in a fine production at the Almeida Theatre. There were also four productions in the United States in the twentieth century, and in  Theatre for a New Audience performed it in tandem with The Merchant of Venice, with F. Murray Abraham as Shylock and Barabas. Perhaps inevitably, productions of the play often succumb to the temptation of overemphasising the comic elements. This works well in the theatre, but does have the effect of marginalising the pathos of Abigail, and of definitively branding the play as the ‘savage’ ‘farce’ which T. S. Eliot accused it of being (Eliot : –). Tamburlaine the Great Tamburlaine the Great represents a very significant staging challenge. Its two parts make it unappealing to modern theatre-goers, so the two are often compressed into one, as by Tyrone Guthrie at the Old Vic in ,3 or at the National Theatre in  where it

  ,   was suggested that ‘the onset of Tamburlaine’s final illness is purely coincidental’ (Sales : ), or by Terry Hands for the RSC in , with Antony Sher in the title role. Sher replaced the stature and stateliness of Edward Alleyn, the original Tamburlaine, with sheer physical energy, swinging Tarzan-like across the stage to give a powerful sense of Tamburlaine’s charisma and dynamism. The most recent major revival was directed by David Farr, first at the Bristol Old Vic and then at the Barbican, in October and November , with Greg Hicks as Tamburlaine. This collapsed Part One (which took us up to the interval) and Part Two into one slick, smooth-running production which came in at two hours fifty minutes, including the interval. Much of this rapidity was due to the director’s smart segueing between scenes; typically, a group of characters finishing their scene would fall silent and immediately be plunged into darkness, while the lights seamlessly picked out a different group, already onstage, who immediately started speaking, in what was virtually a visual demonstration of Bevington’s point about successive groups of characters being ‘suppressed’. The result was to counteract the static and repetitive feel of many of these scenes with a sense of paciness and drive. Farr’s was a very Brechtian production. The similarities between Marlowe and Brecht have often been commented on, and indeed Michael Hattaway opined in  that ‘it is no accident that a number of notable productions of Marlowe have occurred at the time when Brecht has been coming into his own on the English stage’ (Hattaway : ). There was a stark set of metal poles and rows of clothes hanging from rails for characters to don and doff outfits – and hence roles – onstage. The horse-kings strained and sweated as they pulled the chariot round and round the stage, and the closing tableau was accompanied by bloodstained white outfits, representing all the dead of the plays, which descended from on high and hovered above the characters’ heads. Those who were not acting often sat by the side of the stage, and the braining of Bajazeth (played by Jeffery Kissoon, who had previously played Tamburlaine in Keith Hack’s  Edinburgh Festival production) and Zabina was signalled as much by loud music as by action. Against this backdrop, Greg Hicks’ rangy Tamburlaine characteristically stood in three-quarters profile, as if only temporarily

  , ‒ 

Tamburlaine by Christopher Marlowe, Barbican Theatre, November : Greg Hicks as Tamburlaine. Adapted and directed by David Farr.

  ,   pausing in his stalk across the globe, and ranted and thundered in suitably splendid style. Apart from the cuts, which included the Prologue, the King of Arabia episode, almost the entirety of the Sigismund / Orcanes plot, and the speech of Tamburlaine’s doctor, Farr was generally faithful to the text, but there were one or two changes. Zenocrate’s ‘rape’ by Tamburlaine became her ‘use’, which was a good idea since the use of the word ‘rape’ in its sense of abduction rather than violation can only confuse modern audiences, and Tamburlaine died romantically sighing ‘Zenocrate’ rather than declaring that ‘For Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die’. More contentiously, Tamburlaine burned not the Qur’an but ‘the works of the prophets’, a decision which outraged the Times reviewer, who complained that Audiences at the Barbican in London did not see the Koran being burnt, as Marlowe intended, because David Farr, who directed and adapted the classic play, feared that it would inflame passions in the light of the London bombings . . . Members of the audience also reported that key references to Muhammad had been dropped, particularly in the passage where Tamburlaine says that he is ‘not worthy to be worshipped’ (Alberge ) Taking up the cause, the Times leading article in the same issue further fulminated that to rewrite -year-old texts because they may not perfectly reflect contemporary concerns is a dangerous precedent. It is therefore with a sense of unease that we report the tweaking of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great in order to protect Islamic sensibilities. ... And where does it lead? Shakespeare would need a thorough overhaul. No more references to ‘the Turk’. Shylock could be made less Jewish, or demand a mere drop of blood. ...

  , ‒  The other worry is more serious. The Muslim Council of Britain, with admirable common sense, cannot understand the fuss about Marlowe’s depiction of the burning of the Koran. But there will be wild voices in some Muslim communities who will greet the compromise with glee and seek to leverage it.4 The allusion in the final paragraph is to the statement by Inayat Bunglawala, the media secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, who commented that ‘In the context of a fictional play, I don’t think it will have offended many people’ (qtd Alberge ). The director himself replied (choosing the liberally-minded Guardian as a more congenial forum than The Times) that my decision to adapt the text was purely artistic . . . Tamburlaine did burn the Qur’an centre-stage in an old petrol drum – but I wanted to make it very clear that his act was a giant two fingers to the entire theological system, not [a] piece of Christian triumphalism over the barbarous Turk. So, in our production, Marlowe’s ‘heap of superstitious books’ were the books of all religions. Indeed he maintained that his version of the play was more provocative than the original, since it allowed the audience to see that ‘Tamburlaine is positing what Marlowe could never have proposed at that time without literally risking his neck. He is proposing atheism’ (Farr ). However, one can see something of why Farr might have felt the need to be cautious in Jeff Dailey’s justification for why, when he directed Part Two in  at the American Theatre of Actors in New York City, he did it without cuts: ‘Tamburlaine’s burning of the Koran is a sign of Christian power and victory. Mahomet does nothing to prevent it, although challenged by Tamburlaine to do so’. For Dailey, ‘the amount of time that elapses between the burning and the illness’ onset, which may not be apparent to readers, is critical to interpreting this scene’, and thus ‘The theme of the sub-plot is not an anti-Christian message, but rather a moral one’ (Dailey ). If that is what the Qur’an-burning scene can be perceived as meaning, Farr was wise to avoid it. It is also not unreasonable to suggest, as Farr implies,

  ,   that Marlowe would really have chosen to have the Bible burned onstage if he could have got away with it, and picked the Qur’an as the next best thing rather than in its own right. Farr added a further innovation in that Tamburlaine also vomited copiously (and convincingly) on stage, assigning an actual physical cause for his death in a way the text signally fails to do. The actual staging of the burning was one of the few spectacular effects, with an onstage incinerator visibly ablaze. The burning of the bodies of Olympia’s son and husband was also accompanied by a substantial conflagration, though generally the ethos was very much one of poor theatre. Not so much a change but a deviation from what might have been expected was the fact that the map was visibly not the Ortelius one which we know Marlowe to have had in mind, but looked to be a much more large-scale and localised image of the areas with which Tamburlaine is most closely associated. It is not easy to like Tamburlaine, and this production did not even try: there was no real sense of passion between Tamburlaine and Rachael Stirling’s austere, distant Zenocrate in her nun-like white gown, and only the most fleeting sense of camaraderie between him and his sheepskin-clad lieutenants, who served mainly as a largely silent audience for his feats. The sons were colourless, with Amyras and Celebinus, in their identical robes of purple, largely interchangeable, and only John Wark’s Calyphas making a brief bid for individuality even if not for likeability by smoking on stage. However, this submerging of the personal only enhanced the Brechtian sense of scope and sweep. Marlowe’s play may no longer be possessed of the same urgent energies with which, a year before the Armada, it spoke to nervous English audiences, but its amenability to the Brechtian paradigm and the controversy sparked by the changes clearly showed that it still has many others. Finally, it is worth noting that Marlowe himself appears directly or indirectly in a number of films. In Richard Loncraine’s Richard III, Marlowe’s lyric ‘The Passionate Shepherd’ is sung at the outset, alerting the viewer to the queer reading of the text to follow, and in John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love, Rupert Everett’s Marlowe, though mysteriously uncredited, is an important character in the development of the young Shakespeare. Marlowe also very nearly had another existence on the screen: the stage name

  , ‒  originally proposed by Columbia Pictures for the actress eventually known as Kim Novak was ‘Kit Marlowe’. Even without that, though, Marlowe and his plays have had an impressive career on stage and screen.

NOTES

. Though see Knutson  for a counter-argument that Edward II was designed for Strange’s Men. . On the influence of Kyd on Marlowe, see too Honan : , and Riggs : –. . On this production (which starred Donald Wolfit), Peter Hall’s at the National Theatre –, with Albert Finney, and Terry Hands’ RSC production in –, starring Antony Sher, see Fuller . . Ironically, the online version of the article is immediately followed by advertisements for two Muslim dating agencies and a Bible video.

 

Marlowe as Scholar: Old and New Knowledges in the Plays

hristopher Marlowe spent by far the greater part of his life in formal education, and what he learned informs his plays at every level. To a very considerable extent, Marlowe presented himself as a scholar-dramatist, and his plays offered their audiences knowledge as well as entertainment. In the opening scene of Doctor Faustus, Doctor Faustus runs through in turn each branch of knowledge currently available. Beginning with the study of Aristotle, a staple of the university undergraduate curriculum, he moves through Galen, the theorist of medicine, Justinian, who wrote on the law, and finally divinity. Each of these, in turn, he finds wanting. His judgement may have paralleled Marlowe’s own: familiar with what was offered by Cambridge, Marlowe showed no known signs of regret at moving on from it in , and there is no evidence that he ever visited it again. Nevertheless, his connection with it proved useful throughout what remained of his short life. To be a Master of Arts of either university assured a man the status of a gentleman, even if he was being arrested at the time: it was on this basis that Marlowe could assure Sir Robert Sidney, after his arrest in Flushing, that he was a scholar, and secure for himself a more favourable hearing than he could otherwise have expected to obtain, and, although there is no direct record of it, his status as MA may well have proved similarly helpful during his various other brushes with the law. Marlowe’s status as a Cambridge Master of Arts also brought him a peer group, the so-called University Wits, a group loosely

C

    consisting of John Lyly (like Marlowe, a former pupil of the King’s School, Canterbury), Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, and George Peele. Shakespeare’s lack of qualifications for membership of this group was raised at the outset of his career by Greene’s notorious references to him in his Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, and might well have cost him dearer than it did. Marlowe was very much on the fringes of it, but his undoubted right to belong underpinned his self-presentation as scholar-dramatist (it was, after all, as ‘scholar’ that he described himself to Sir Robert Sidney when he was arrested in Flushing). I will discuss four different aspects of Marlowe’s self-presentation as scholarly dramatist: his deployment of classical allusion, and his interests in geography, medicine, and cosmology. The classics in particular, staple of a Tudor education, underpin all Marlowe’s work.

CLASSICAL KNOWLEDGE

Deployment of classical allusion was the primary badge of a university education and is a favoured tactic of Marlowe’s. Marlowe is, however, not using classical allusion simply as a badge of learning: as Roma Gill observes, ‘the difference between Marlowe and the usual run of poets who speak of Achilles’ bravery and Penelope’s fidelity, is that Marlowe expects the reader [/] listener [/] spectator to supply the context of his allusion’ (Gill –: ).1 There is no work of his in which reference to the classics is not important, and in many it is central. In this section, I will look briefly at each of his works in turn, tracing the ways in which they deploy the discourse of the classical. Dido, Queen of Carthage Dido, Queen of Carthage is so closely dependent on Virgil’s Aeneid that it has sometimes been described as a translation of it. The effect of the play depends heavily on the audience recognising the various deities and knowing what their characteristics and attributes are, so that they can notice that in every case, Marlowe has deployed these ironically. Thus, Jove is the all-powerful father of the gods, occupying the place in the classical pantheon closest to that of God

  ,   the father in the Christian belief system; in Dido, Queen of Carthage, however, he is a petulant and capricious tyrant with no interest in anyone’s welfare but his own. Venus is the goddess of love and beauty, assisted by her son Cupid, but his primary efforts in the play are spent on the aged and ugly old Nurse; Juno is the goddess of matrimony and childbirth, but she tries to harm a child. As usual, then, Marlowe pours his dramatic energies into subversion. This can be clearly seen in the opening scene of the play. Jupiter says to Ganymede of Juno: What? Dares she strike the darling of my thoughts? By Saturn’s soul, and this earth-threat’ning hair, That, shaken thrice, makes nature’s buildings quake, I vow, if she but once frown on thee more, To hang her meteor-like ’twixt heaven and earth, And bind her, hand and foot, with golden cords, As once I did for harming Hercules! (I, i, –) This scene has opened with what looks like a classic image of family life: a man with a boy on his lap. However, not only does the image actually mean to prove something very different from that – indeed in many ways its antithesis – but every classical reference in this speech points us to conflict within the family: Saturn was Jupiter’s own father, whom Jupiter killed; Hercules is Jupiter’s son by one of his numerous infidelities with mortal women, and what Jupiter relates here is a tale of how he himself harmed Juno, who was both his sister and his wife, for harming his son by one of his many mistresses. The whole neatly strikes the keynote for the story of strife and squabbling between the gods which is to follow, in which the authority and status of the classical pantheon is comprehensively undermined and some of the central figures of the most prestigious classical narratives are burlesqued. Tamburlaine the Great Although set in the medieval rather than the classical past, Tamburlaine the Great too is rich in classical references. Early in

    Part One, Meander describes Tamburlaine as advancing on Persia ‘with barbarous arms’ (I, i, ). Meander’s own unimpeachably Greek name underscores the original meaning of the word ‘barbarian’ as one who does not speak Greek, and made a noise which the Greeks thought was no better than ‘bar, bar’, and it thus sets in train a sustained series of ironic playing with the question of who is truly barbarous. Ironically, the ‘barbarous’ Tamburlaine will very soon prove himself completely at home in deploying the discourse of Greek mythology and culture, when he uses it to woo Zenocrate: Zenocrate, lovelier than the love of Jove, Brighter than is the silver Rhodope, Fairer than whitest snow on Scythian hills, ... A hundred Tartars shall attend on thee, Mounted on steeds swifter than Pegasus (Part One, I, ii, –) The Greek-named Mycetes, meanwhile, has to consult Meander about the details of the classical legend of the dragon’s teeth (II, ii, –). At once we see that expected polarities here, typically for Marlowe, have been reversed. The importance of classical culture is again evident when Mycetes almost immediately afterwards terms Meander ‘a Damon for thy love’ (I, i, ), alluding to the classical friendship of Damon and Pythias. Soon after, though, Mycetes adjures Meander to return ‘smiling home, / As did Sir Paris with the Grecian dame’ (I, i, ), thus figuring his friend as a Trojan rather than a Greek, and Menaphon’s advice to Cosroe to invade Greece is coupled with an invocation of the Persian Cyrus (I, i, ), who made war on Greece, a subtle reminder that those who are so anxious to label Tamburlaine as a barbarian are in fact the literal descendants of those to whom that term was once most accurately applicable. The same game is played when the Soldan of Egypt enters saying ‘Methinks we march as Meleager did’ (IV, iii, ): the Soldan is Egyptian, but he lays claim to the cultural authority of ancient Greece, and called his daughter by the Greek name Zenocrate – though that, in a further twist, is most likely to have been intended

  ,   by Marlowe (who invented it) to mean ‘ruler of foreigners’. Meanwhile, Philemus first compares Tamburlaine with Aeneas (Part One, V, ii, ), and then goes on to figure the Arabian king as Turnus, the first, defeated lover of Aeneas’ bride Lavinia, with whose death Virgil’s Aeneid ends. This image doubly encodes a wave of westward invasion, since, as we saw in Chapter , Aeneas’ great-grandson Brutus would later arrive in Britain. Aeneas is thus, in a major sense, the founder of Marlowe’s Britain – mythically, through Brut, and historically, both through the literal Roman conquest of the island and the metaphorical conquest of its literary allegiances by classical learning. To cast the ‘barbarous’ Tamburlaine as an Aeneas overpowering the King of Arabia’s Turnus is, once again, to show us a sharply focused image of the Scythian savage whom this play forces us to see not as an Other but in a ‘tragic glass’ – that is, a mirror. Doctor Faustus For all its conspicuous modernity in so many other ways, Doctor Faustus too is heavily influenced by the classical. It is framed by a chorus who could have stepped straight off the classical stage, where a chorus characteristically represents a mediating point between the audience and the protagonist. The Greek chorus comments dispassionately on the protagonist, and rarely becomes involved in the events of the play – indeed in some ways it is almost as if the chorus is occupying a slightly different plane of the stage, since we always know that they will ultimately prove immune from even the worst disasters which befall the characters. In Doctor Faustus, the Chorus at first ironically seems explicitly to deny the importance of the classical, beginning the play by telling us that we are Not marching in the fields of Trasimene, Where Mars did mate the Carthaginians

(Prologue, –)

That is, we are not dealing with events from Roman history or mythology. However, at the beginning of Act Three Wagner, here effectively acting as Chorus, declares that

    Learnèd Faustus, To know the secrets of astronomy, Graven in the book of Jove’s high firmament, Did mount himself to scale Olympus’ top (III, Chorus, –) Here the blasphemy of Faustus’s actions is sharply, perhaps shockingly, defused by recasting his assault as being against the Greek god Jove, who dwelt on Olympus, and whom the audience could comfortably accept as a myth, rather than against the Christian God whom they were all expected to accept as omnipotent and omniscient. Finally, the closing Chorus definitively inserts events within a classical framework with the pronouncement that ‘burnèd is Apollo’s laurel bough’ (Epilogue, ). It is also, of course, notable that Doctor Faustus’s ultimate desire is, typically for a man of the Renaissance, for possession of something from the classical world – Helen of Troy, embodiment of ultimate beauty, but also, ominously, the cause of strife, since her abduction by the Trojans prompted the Greeks to take revenge by starting the Trojan War. For Faustus, the classical world is both the ultimate prize and the direct cause of destruction, and his attraction to it provides a powerful emblem for the opposing tug between the twin forces of Christian and classical which configured the Renaissance. At the same time, though, the play’s references to the classical world subtly remind us that the Christian belief system against which Faustus sins is not the only one ever to have held sway over people’s imaginations, and so may perhaps prompt us to see the play’s apparently solid moral stance as provisional rather than absolute: after all, as Faustus reminds us in his closing speech, if Pythagoras’s idea of metempsychosis were true rather than the Christian belief system, he would have nothing to fear. The Jew of Malta The Jew of Malta has fewer classical references than most Marlowe plays, but one of those it does have is enormously significant. When Barabas declares that he has ‘But one sole daughter, whom I hold as dear / As Agamemnon did his Iphigen’ (I, i, –), he ironically

  ,   foreshadows exactly what is going to happen: like the Greek general Agamemnon, who led the Greek armies in the Trojan war, he will kill his daughter, and perhaps he too, like Agamemnon, can be seen as doing so in what he perceives as an act of putting wider cultural and national interests before his own personal ones, since his motive for killing Abigail is that she has abandoned Judaism and converted to Christianity. Once again, as in Tamburlaine the Great where the counsellor on whom Mycetes relies has his instability marked by the name ‘Meander’, the mere use of a classical name can create ripples of meaning. It is notable, too, that when Barabas seeks to do wickedness, he finds a classical precedent readily at hand, as he proposes to temper a poison: In few, the blood of Hydra, Lerna’s bane, The juice of hebon, and Cocytus’ breath, And all the poisons of the Stygian pool Break from the fiery kingdom.

(III, iv, –)

What the classical world has taught this student of it is infanticide and murder. Later, when Ithamore deploys it, classical allusion is debased even further to a simple language of seduction: ‘I’ll be thy Jason, thou my golden fleece’ (IV, ii, ) he meaninglessly promises Bellamira, before making the ludicrous mistake of referring to ‘Dis above’ (IV, ii, ) (Dis being the presiding deity of the underworld). In this respect, Marlowe’s Malta may remind us of T. S. Eliot’s waste land: it is composed of half-remembered scraps of a once great but now debased culture. As in Dido, Queen of Carthage, where the gods have been reduced to children, pettiness and triviality are all that is left of what was once serious; and as in Doctor Faustus, the deployment of classical references may also be working to wider effect. Historically, Malta in classical times had been the scene of the shipwreck of St Paul, one of the greatest of the Apostles (and the one mentioned in the Baines Note). Paul preached of hope, faith, and charity, but it would be hard to think of three values more comprehensively absent from the Malta of Marlowe’s play. Perhaps the debasement of classical culture and learning which the play shows so clearly should alert us

    to the possibility that much the same thing is implied about Christianity too, though inevitably in a more delicate and circumspect manner. The Massacre at Paris In The Massacre at Paris, despite the mutilation of the text, a number of classical references survive. The Guise, despite his selfproclaimed role as champion of the Catholic church, announces: If ever Hymen loured at marriage-rites, And had his altars decked with dusky lights; If ever sun stained heaven with bloody clouds, And made it look with terror on the world; If ever day were turned to ugly night, And night made semblance of the hue of hell; This day, this hour, this fatal night, Shall fully show the fury of them all.

(ii, –)

Hymen, the classical god of marriage, is evoked at the beginning of this passage; it concludes with the idea of a fury, one of the Erinyes who, in classical mythology, pursue murderers, particularly those who have killed members of their own family, an ironically appropriate allusion in a play in which one character, the Queen Mother, plots the murders of a son, a son-in-law, and a cousin. Guise also makes alleged disrespect for the classics the pretext for his killing of Ramus, the scholar who had challenged the authority of Aristotle: Was it not thou that scoff’dst the Organon, And said it was a heap of vanities? He that will be a flat dichotomist, And seen in nothing but epitomes, Is in your judgement thought a learnèd man; And he, forsooth, must go and preach in Germany, Excepting against doctors’ axioms, And ipse dixi with this quiddity,

  ,   Argumentum testimonii est inartificiale. To contradict which, I say: Ramus shall die. How answer you that? Your nego argumentum Cannot serve, sirrah. Kill him.

(ix, –)

Equally, Guise compares himself with one of the great names of the classical past. Warned of his death, the Guise declares ‘Yet Caesar shall go forth’ (xxi, ), before concluding ‘Thus Caesar did go forth, and thus he died’ (xxi, ), and just before that he has insisted on a Roman identity for himself: Now by the holy sacrament I swear: As ancient Romans over their captive lords, So will I triumph over this wanton king, And he shall follow my proud chariot’s wheels.

(xxi, –)

For all his Christian credentials, Guise, then, finds it suits him very well to use classical ideas and rhetoric too. Edward II In his first significant speech in Act One, scene one, Gaveston proposes to delight the king with what he calls ‘Italian masques’ (I, i, ), but which are in fact clearly classical in inspiration: Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad; My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns, Shall with their goat-feet dance an antic hay. Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s shape, With hair that gilds the water as it glides, Crownets of pearl about his naked arms, And in his sportful hands an olive tree To hide those parts which men delight to see, Shall bathe him in a spring; and there, hard by, One like Actaeon, peeping through the grove, Shall by the angry goddess be transformed,

    And running in the likeness of a hart By yelping hounds pulled down and seem to die.

(I, i, –)

For Gaveston, classical mythology provides both a precedent for and a grammar of homosexuality, and so it does again when Edward says to Gaveston, ‘Not Hylas was more mourned of Hercules / Than thou hast been of me since thy exile’ (I, i, –). Ironically, even Edward’s and Gaveston’s enemies recognise the legitimacy of classical culture’s authorisation of homosexuality, as we see when Mortimer Senior reminds his nephew that The mightiest kings have had their minions: Great Alexander loved Hephaestion, The conquering Hercules for Hylas wept, And for Patroclus stern Achilles drooped. And not kings only, but the wisest men: The Roman Tully loved Octavius, Grave Socrates, wild Alcibiades.

(I, iv, –)

For the political purposes of Edward II, then, classical mythology offers a discourse which the play finds very useful indeed. The Poems Although this is a book about Marlowe’s plays, it is impossible to discuss the role of classical allusions in Marlowe without referring also to his poems. Two of these, All Ovids Elegies and Lucans First Book, are translations of classical works, and Hero and Leander draws on a classical poem and is set firmly in the classical world. Once again, though, Marlowe is far from pious in his depiction of these repositories of cultural capital. Marlowe may well have chosen the Lucan to translate partly or wholly because it was the only classical epic to lack intervention by the gods, and because of its clearly republican sympathies; in both respects, it tilted against the most treasured ideologies of Elizabethan England. His translations of Ovid are if anything even racier than the original:

  ,   Stark naked as she stood before mine eye, Not one wen in her body could I spy. What arms and shoulders did I touch and see, How apt her breasts were to be pressed by me! How smooth a belly under her waist saw I, How large a leg, and what a lusty thigh! To leave the rest, all liked me passing well; I clinged her naked body, down she fell. Judge you the rest: being tired she bade me kiss; Jove send me more such afternoons as this. (Elegy V, –) It is not surprising that they were publicly burnt by order of the Bishop of London six years after Marlowe’s death. Finally, in Hero and Leander Marlowe draws on the strong association of classical Greek culture with institutionalised same-sex relationships to represent Neptune’s desire for Leander as the ultimate cause of his drowning, so that, as in Edward II, classical culture is seen as authorising or at least normalising homosexuality. In the poems, then, we see even more clearly than in the plays how Marlowe plunders classical mythology primarily to suit himself, and to make it mean what he wants it to mean.

GEOGRAPHY

Marlowe, however, was interested in new knowledges as well as old ones. In the Tamburlaine plays in particular, Marlowe demonstrates conspicuous familiarity with the Dutch mapmaker Abraham Ortelius’ atlas Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, and colonisation and the conquest of new lands are central themes in all his plays. This section will trace the extent to which Marlowe’s plays reveal his knowledge of the latest understandings of the world. First, though, it is important to understand the imperatives that configured geographical exploration in Marlowe’s day. In Dido, Queen of Carthage, Dido says, I would have given Achates store of gold, And Ilioneus gum and Libyan spice;

    The common soldiers rich embroidered coats, And silver whistles to control the winds, Which Circe sent Sichaeus when he lived

(IV, iv, –)

Here she touches on two of the most important manifestations of the principal goal of Elizabethan travellers, wealth. Gold, and even more so silver, were to be found in South America, which men like Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Ralegh were trying to wrest from the control of Philip of Spain; spices came from the Spice Islands of Indonesia, and the attempt to find an easier passage to them than the perilous one around the bottom of Africa was what spawned the search for a north-west passage around the top of Canada or a north-east one round Russia. These priorities are closely reflected in Marlowe’s works. Perhaps the location with the most enduring fascination for Marlowe is the East, the scene of the two Tamburlaine the Great plays, but he is also fascinated by the idea of America, the most exciting arena for contemporary exploration, which recurs insistently in the Baines Note. At the end of the two Tamburlaine the Great plays, Marlowe’s thoughts clearly turn to America. In his last great speech, Tamburlaine declares: Look here, my boys, see what a world of ground Lies westward from the midst of Cancer’s line Unto the rising of this earthly globe, Whereas the sun, declining from our sight, Begins the day with our Antipodes: And shall I die, and this unconquerèd? Lo here, my sons, are all the golden mines, Inestimable drugs and precious stones, More worth than Asia and the world beside; And from th’Antarctic Pole eastward behold As much more land which never was descried, Wherein are rocks of pearl that shine as bright As all the lamps that beautify the sky: And shall I die, and this unconquerèd? (V, iii, –)

  ,   A glance at Abraham Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, which Marlowe is known to have used, enables us to track the trajectory of Tamburlaine’s thought very precisely here and makes it quite clear that it is to South America that his thoughts are turning, both on account of its own ‘Inestimable drugs and precious stones’ and also because Ortelius shows it as offering virtually a land passage to the still undiscovered southern continent, which is what really fires Tamburlaine’s imagination. The same concern is also found in another Marlowe play, Dido, Queen of Carthage, which, although it has (for obvious reasons, since it is set in the classical past) no direct reference to America, does nevertheless offer a particularly acute perspective on how ideas about new lands intersected with ideas about old ones in the English Renaissance mind – indeed Margo Hendricks suggests it is directly prompted by the sack of Cartagena, in South America, in , from which Drake was returning when he brought Hariot back to England from Roanoke with the two Native Americans Manteo and Wanchese (Hendricks : ), since the parallel between Carthage and Cartagena was one often drawn, and the exploration of the New World was seen very much in terms of the narratives provided by the old. Dido, Queen of Carthage certainly focuses on the origins of the supposed translatio imperii by which imperial power was allegedly transferred from Troy and thence to Rome and ultimately to England, which provided the ideological justification for Elizabethan pretensions to empire. When Aeneas first arrives in Carthage, he asks a rather surprising question: ‘Where am I now? These should be Carthage walls’ (II, i, ). When Achates asks, ‘Why stands my sweet Aeneas thus amazed?’ (II, i, ), Aeneas replies: O my Achates, Theban Niobe, Who for her sons’ death wept out life and breath, And, dry with grief, was turned into a stone, Had not such passions in her head as I. Methinks that town there should be Troy, yon Ida’s hill, There Xanthus’ stream, because here’s Priamus, And when I know it is not, then I die. (II, i, –)

    The idea of a person being turned into stone, as Niobe was, is very pertinent here, as we see when Aeneas goes on to remark, O, yet this stone doth make Aeneas weep! And would my prayers, as Pygmalion’s did, Could give it life, that under his conduct We might sail back to Troy, and be revenged On these hard-hearted Grecians which rejoice That nothing now is left of Priamus! O, Priamus is left, and this is he! Come, come aboard, pursue the hateful Greeks!

(II, i, –)

Pygmalion was Dido’s brother, and the legend which Aeneas here recalls about him is that of his carving of Gallathea, a statue so beautiful that Pygmalion prayed it might come to life, which it duly did. Thus Aeneas recalls two very different and indeed almost complementary legends about people and stones. In one, that of Niobe, a woman is turned into stone for grief; in the other, that of Pygmalion, a woman was turned out of a stone for love. One took place in Greece, the other is associated here, through Dido, with Carthage. For Aeneas, however, both seem to blur together in this moment. He looks at a stone which reminds him of Niobe, and remembers Pygmalion; he looks at Carthage, and thinks of Troy. The twin speeches function as a powerful emblem of how new lands can only ever be understood, for the Renaissance mind, in terms of the old, as when ‘In , George Clifford, the Earl of Cumberland, “built the greatest Fleet of shipping that ever any subject did”’ to sail to America, according to Aubrey, who adds, ‘The Armada of the Argonauts was but a trifle to this’ (qtd Rukeyser : ). In a very real sense, then, the process of exploring the New World is seen as intimately linked to and fundamentally rooted in the old. As well as being glanced at in Doctor Faustus – indeed Marlowe’s friend and possible collaborator Thomas Nashe referred to the play as ‘Faustus: studie in indian silke’ (Kocher : ) – America figures in other plays too. It would naturally have been impossible for it to have been mentioned in Edward II, which is set in a period which precedes its discovery, but it is alluded to in both The

  ,   Massacre at Paris and The Jew of Malta. In The Jew of Malta, Ferneze disingenuously demands, Desire of gold, great sir? That’s to be gotten in the Western Ind: In Malta are no golden minerals.

(III, v, –)

Ferneze’s remark suggests that in The Jew of Malta, America may perhaps be something of a dog that doesn’t bark. Barabas looks entirely to the past, comparing, with savage irony, his love for Abigail to that felt by Agamemnon for his daughter Iphigenia, whom he sacrificed at Aulis. In this (as also in his stage-manager role, when he is seen busy with a hammer [V, v, s.d.]) he echoes Aeneas, while his very name is emblematic of another aspect of the past, the inaugural moment of Christianity. This, perhaps, is one reason why he is doomed: he is oriented wholly on the past, whereas America represents the future. Another area of interest for Marlowe is the Low Countries. These represented one of the most important locations for Elizabethan England, and much of Elizabeth’s foreign policy was concentrated on them. This was because of the troubled religious and political situation of the Netherlands, which had been inherited by the Catholic Habsburg rulers of Spain but where the population was inclined to Protestantism. Elizabeth I supported the Protestant cause and sent an army under the Earl of Leicester to assist the Dutch, leading to frequent comings and goings between England and the Netherlands in this period and the presence in London of a number of Dutch refugees, which gave rise to tensions with Londoners and much antiimmigrant feeling. Marlowe refers several times to the Netherlands. Sir John of Hainault appears as a character in Edward II, while in The Jew of Malta Ithamore refers to the poisoned porridge as ‘a drench to poison a whole stable of Flanders mares’ (III, iv, –), with a clear glance at Henry VIII’s famously insulting dismissal of Anne of Cleves as a ‘Flanders mare’ which invites us to register the important role the Low Countries had played in the development of the English Reformation. Similarly, Barabas notes that Antwerp is one of the places to which he trades and recalls how

    I was an engineer, And in the wars ’twixt France and Germany, Under pretence of helping Charles the Fifth, Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems.

(II, iii, –)

And in Tamburlaine, Park Honan suggests that the Netherlands figure among a number of modern locations remembered in the play: ‘In Act V, Tamburlaine’s order to kill every man, woman and child at Babylon reflects the fate of the Dutch town of Naarden in the poet’s own youth’ (Honan : ). Doctor Faustus in particular seems to be informed by language, ideas, and a worldview derived from the Spanish wars in the Low Countries, as seen most clearly when Faustus declares that if he succeeds in raising spirits, I’ll levy soldiers with the coin they bring, And chase the Prince of Parma from our land, And reign sole king of all our provinces: Yea, stranger engines for the brunt of war Than was the fiery keel at Antwerp’s bridge, I’ll make my servile spirits to invent.

(I, i, –)

Of course, the fact that Marlowe himself visited the Netherlands (as we know from his  arrest for coining in Flushing) will inevitably have sharpened his interest. He may well have travelled elsewhere too. Park Honan writes rather airily that ‘It is not certain whether or when Marlowe, in a bright doublet, sailed through the Paris embassy, but there are signs that he delivered and picked up letters there. For one thing, he became familiar with the French capital; he depicts Paris with easy confidence’ (Honan : ). Honan further suggests that ‘In Paris . . . Marlowe seems to have absorbed a French view of the Tartar warrior, Timur or Tamerlane, or at least he offers a more nearly French than English idea of the hero in both parts of Tamburlaine’; if this were indeed the case, he would have had to have visited Paris before  (Honan : ), but there is no other evidence for this.

  ,   One thing that is particularly striking is that in Marlowe, questions of religious belief are insistently linked with questions of geography. In The Massacre at Paris, the Guise twice insists that his efforts on behalf of the Catholic League are directly funded by Spain from its New World profits. He says first that For this, from Spain the stately Catholics Sends Indian gold to coin me French écues.

(ii, –)

Later, he declares, And know, my lord, the Pope will sell his triple crown, Ay, and the Catholic Philip, King of Spain, Ere I shall want, will cause his Indians To rip the golden bowels of America. (xix, –) Donne said that the ‘new philosophy calls all in doubt’ (Donne : ), and new geographical discoveries did indeed shake previous certainties, religious ones among them. The exploration of America was conducted along religiously demarcated lines: William Strachey in The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania spoke of how the Indians planned to break into our Plantations with acts of hostility (as most despightfully did Pedro Melendes, their Admirall, into the French-Colonie . yeares since in Noua Francia who rased their fort, and hung vp the common Soldiers . . . and wrought over them disdeignefull Inscriptions in Spanish, importing, I doe not this as vnto Frenchmen, but as vnto Lutherans. (Strachey : ) More profoundly, however, it was, in a sense, the discovery of America that had precipitated the great crisis of faith which ultimately produced the Reformation, since the failure of the Bible to mention the New World cast doubt on the supposed omniscience of the Scriptures. As Strachey noted in The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania,

    It were not perhappes too curyous a thing to demaund, how these people might come first, and from whome, and whence, to enhabite these so far remote westerly partes of the world, having no entercourse with Africa, Asia nor Europe, and considering the whole world, so many yeares, (by all knowledg receaved), was supposed to be only conteyned and circumscrybed in the discovered and travelled Bowndes of those three . . . as also to question how yt should be, that they (if descended from the people of the first creation) should maynteyne so generall and grosse a defection from the true knowledg of God, with one kynd, as yt were of rude and savadge life, Customes, manners, and Religion,? yt being to be graunted, that with vs (infallably) they had one, and the same discent and begynning from the vniversall Deluge, in the scattering of Noah his children and Nephewes, with their famelies (as little Colonies) some to one, some to other borders of the Earth to dwell? (Strachey : ) Similarly, William Lisle asked in his translation of Du Bartas, But all this other world, that Spaine hath new found out By floating Delos like the Westerne Seas about, And raised now of late from out the tombe of Leath, And giu’n it (as it were) the Being by the death; How was’t inhabited? if long agone, how is’t Nor Persians, nor Greeks, nor Romans euer wist, Or inckling heard thereof, whose euer-conquering hoasts Haue spred abroad so far and troad so many coasts? (Lisle : ll.–) The recourse to the theologically safer ground of the discourse of the classical, which Christianity had already theorised, does not quite mask the fact that the orthodox answer to ‘How was’t inhabited?’ – that is, by the descendants of Noah – is conspicuously absent. It seems clear here that the new understanding of the physical world has cast those growing doubts on the understanding of the spiritual world which are ultimately to prove the cause of Faustus’ downfall.

  ,   America is certainly associated with unbelief by Richard Baines in the Baines Note. It is remarkable how many of the allegations made about Marlowe there can be seen to be directly linked to America. The first of them is ‘That the Indians, and many authors of antiquity, have assuredly written of above  thousand years agone, whereas Adam is proved to have lived within six thousand years’. That this refers to the myths of origin of Native Americans is confirmed by the direct mention of Hariot in the next of Baines’ allegations: ‘He [Marlowe] affirmeth that Moses was but a juggler, and that one Heriots being Sir Walter Raleigh’s man can do more than he’. Moreover, one of the most distinctive products of America is twice mentioned, first in the notorious ‘That all they that love not tobacco and boys are fools’ and second in ‘That if Christ would have instituted the sacrament with more ceremonial reverence, it would have been in more admiration; that it would have been much better being administered in a tobacco pipe’. For Marlowe, therefore, knowledge of geography gives access to the contours of the next world as well as the present one – and as the present one expands, the imaginative space allotted to the next one visibly shrinks and withers.

MEDICINE

As well as ideas associated with geography, Marlowe was also interested in scientific thought; indeed David Riggs calls him ‘better at expressing scientific ideas in poetic language than any English poet since Chaucer’ (Riggs : ). In Tamburlaine the Great, Part One, for instance, Bajazeth speaks of how My empty stomach, full of idle heat, Draws bloody humours from my feeble parts, Preserving life by hasting cruel death. My veins are pale, my sinews hard and dry, My joints benumbed; unless I eat, I die.

(IV, iv, –)

Carroll Camden remarks of Marlowe that ‘[h]is psychology is founded upon a firm physiological basis, and he is the first dramatist

    to show an interest in and a knowledge of the construction of the human body’ (Camden : ), in lines such as those in which Cosroe, in Tamburlaine the Great, Part One, laments his death: An uncouth pain torments my grievèd soul, And Death arrests the organ of my voice, Who, entering at the breach thy sword hath made, Sacks every vein and artier of my heart. (Part One, II, vii, –) In his article ‘Christopher Marlowe’s Wound Knowledge’, Matthew Greenfield observes that Few writers have tried harder than Christopher Marlowe to find language for the representation of physical pain. Wounded characters in Marlovian drama often speak vividly and compellingly about what they feel. What they feel, though, includes not just agony but also a stranger response to severe physical trauma: they develop an uncanny knowledge of what is happening inside their bodies, including the precise anatomy of their injuries and the physiology of the onset of death. (Greenfield : ) Although he points out that this was not without precedent – ‘Homer . . . described wounds in great anatomical detail’ – Greenfield suggests that ‘A crucial context for Marlowe’s use of anatomical knowledge is the new commitment in the early modern period to the dissection of human bodies’, and that this leads the establishment of ‘one of the fundamental transactions of Marlovian drama: a physical wound can be converted into theatrical power’ (Greenfield : –). Thus Tamburlaine exhorting his youngest son to kill a man orders him to ‘cleave his pericranion with thy sword’ (Part Two, I, iii, ), and describes his soldiers drinking as ‘Filling their empty veins with airy wine / That, being concocted, turns to crimson blood’ (Part Two, III, ii, –). Perhaps most striking of all is Olympia’s husband’s description of his own death:

  ,   A deadly bullet gliding through my side Lies heavy on my heart; I cannot live. I feel my liver pierced, and all my veins That there begin and nourish every part, Mangled and torn, and all my entrails bathed In blood that straineth from their orifex. Farewell, sweet wife, sweet son, farewell, I die. (Part Two, III, iv, –) It is not surprising that Tamburlaine’s physician should offer us a detailed diagnosis of his condition (Part Two, V, iii, –), but it perhaps is that the King of Soria curses Tamburlaine in remarkably medicalised terms: May never spirit, vein, or artier feed The cursèd substance of that cruel heart, But, wanting moisture and remorseful blood, Dry up with anger, and consume with heat! (Part Two, IV, i, –) It is, however, notable that the terms of Soria’s wish will be almost exactly fulfilled, allowing for two possible explanations of the direct cause of Tamburlaine’s death: one which proposes that there is a divine overseer who causes Soria’s curse to be fulfilled, and another which sees humans in wholly physical and material terms, since what Soria utters here is in fact less a pious hope than an analysis of Tamburlaine’s ‘sanguine’ temperament (that is, one in which blood is the one of the four humours which predominates) which is, in the terms of its day, scientific, and a prediction of its inevitable selfcombustion.

COSMOLOGY

Marlowe was also very interested in what happened in the sky, an interest which he may partly have derived from Hariot, who did a very accurate drawing of the moon (Rukeyser : ). Caroline Spurgeon contrasted him strongly with the nature-loving Shakespeare:

    with Marlowe, images drawn from books, especially the classics, and from the sun, moon, planets and heavens far outnumber all others . . . Indeed this imaginative preoccupation with the dazzling heights and vast spaces of the universe is, together with a magnificent surging upward thrust and aspiration, the dominating note of Marlowe’s mind. He seems more familiar with the starry courts of heaven than with the green fields of earth, and he loves rather to watch the movements of meteors and planets than to study the faces of men. (Spurgeon : ) The reference in Tamburlaine to ‘black streamers in the firmament’ (Part Two, IV, iii, ) and the description of how ‘the sky shall wax as red as blood’ (Part One, IV, ii, ) may, it has been suggested, derive from a display of the Northern Lights visible from Canterbury in November , when Marlowe was ten. This interest in the sky is particularly prominent in the earlier part of his career: Dido in Dido, Queen of Carthage says, Not bloody spears, appearing in the air, Presage the downfall of my empery, Nor blazing comets threatens Dido’s death: It is Aeneas’ frown that ends my days.

(IV, iv, –)

Similarly Francis Johnson observes that Doctor Faustus and the two parts of Tamburlaine are ‘the three dramas in which [Marlowe] makes greatest use of astronomical imagery’ (Johnson : ), while John Mebane sees both as profoundly influenced by neoplatonic philosophy (Mebane : ). Faustus’ interest in astronomy, in particular, goes much beyond anything suggested in the sources, and also takes us very near to Marlowe’s studies at Cambridge and to urgently contemporary debates in which people who seem to have been members of his own circle were participants. Francis R. Johnson says that the playwright has characteristically transformed the ignorant jumble of wholly unscientific astronomical lore of Chapters 

  ,   and  of the Faust Book. He raises, instead, problems inspired by the disagreement among the astronomical textbooks then current at Cambridge, and has the answers given by Mephistophilis accord with the doctrine expounded by the unconventional rather than the more orthodox authorities. (Johnson : ) Nevertheless, Faustus is notably not particularly satisfied with Mephistopheles’ responses, reminding us that in this as in every other respect, this play is far more interested in the questions it asks than in any possible answers to them, which it exposes as always provisional and partial. This may, perhaps, explain why Marlowe surprisingly ignores the new theory of Copernicus that the earth orbited the sun rather than vice versa, though some critics have argued that this may be because there was in fact less tension between the new Copernican model and the old Ptolemaic one than is sometimes supposed: Katherine Eggert remarks that ‘Giordano Bruno saw no contradiction between accepting Copernicus’s concept of the heliocentric universe and adapting the Copernican diagram into a mystical, hermeticist-kabbalistic scheme of an infinite number of infinite worlds’ (Eggert : ). Along similar lines, David Riggs declares that ‘The celebrated clash between Ptolemy’s geocentric universe and Copernicus’s heliocentric alternative obscures the fact that Copernicus vindicated Ptolemy’s way of doing mathematical astronomy’ (Riggs : ), while John Gillies argues that Tamburlaine’s cosmos is always the old cosmology associated with the name of Ptolemy of Alexandria, in which a stationary earth is represented as encased in roughly nine layers of concentric ‘spheres,’ each the circular track of a heavenly body or bodies around the earth . . . Typically, Tamburlaine invokes this traditional cosmic architecture only to usurp it. This is more dangerous than his geographic expansionism not just because there was no ideological counterpart to the new geography in terms of which it might seem legitimate, but because the Ptolemaic cosmos was regularly invoked as a model of the Elizabethan social order. (Gillies : )

    On different lines, Park Honan dismisses the question entirely by declaring that Marlowe had little chance to hear of Copernicus’s new idea that the earth revolves round the sun – no widely used textbook discussed it. A few up-to-date texts briefly denounced the heliocentric hypothesis. But – far from crediting Ptolemy’s idea of an earth-centred universe – Marlowe expresses a sceptical cosmology, which he may take from Agostino Ricci, a converted Spanish Jew (whose brilliant work is Augustini Ritii de motu octavae sphaerae), though similar ideas were expressed by Oronce Finé, of the Collège de France. (Honan : ) Most simply, William Empson declares that reference to Copernicus must have been censored from Dr Faustus (Empson : –). In a way, Empson’s simple confidence, even though it may be mistaken, is perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the reputation Marlowe had succeeded in establishing for himself: so completely did he claim the role of scholar-dramatist for himself that where Marlowe and contemporary authorities are at odds, a critic of Empson’s stature instinctively looks for a way for Marlowe to be in the right.

NOTE

. The necessary slashes are missing in the original; Roma Gill’s own copy of this volume, which she kindly passed onto me before her death, contains a letter to her apologising for the fact that she had not been given the chance to correct proofs and that the piece is consequently riddled with errors.

 

Marlowe the HorizonStretcher: Daring God out of Heaven and Conquering New Worlds

arlowe does not only rely on existing knowledge, but is also interested in questioning, charting and stretching the frontiers of what is known, practised, believed and expected. This chapter will explore this aspect of his dramaturgy. It will fall into four sections: formal experimentation, the question of religious belief (which focuses principally on the Tamburlaine the Great plays), Marlowe’s exploration of extreme psychological states, and his transgressive heroes.

M

FORMAL EXPERIMENTATION

Marlowe was above all an innovator. Matthew Dimmock suggests that Zabina in Tamburlaine the Great, Part One is ‘perhaps the first Ottoman woman on the stage’ (Dimmock : ), while Stephen Greenblatt points to the way in which, unlike his predecessors and contemporaries, From his first play to his last, Marlowe is drawn to the idea of physical movement, to the problem of its representation within the narrow confines of the theater. Tamburlaine almost ceaselessly traverses the stage, and when he is not actually on

  -  the move, he is imagining campaigns or hearing reports of grueling marches. (Greenblatt : ) In his hands, indeed, the Elizabethan stage expanded to offer imaginative representations of areas it had never before visited. Marlowe’s drama also probes other areas which his contemporaries’ plays did not. In The Massacre at Paris, the King of France appears when he has just ‘Mounted his royal cabinet’ (xxi, ) – that is, on the toilet. This irreverent tableau is characteristic of Marlowe’s scatological humour: Roger Sales points out that ‘The outcasts in The Jew of Malta surprise the city by entering it through the sewers’, and that ‘Edward II places a monarch in a space that was associated with grotesque characters who threatened order and stability’ (Sales : ). Marie Rutkoski argues that this interest in the lower bodily stratum is in fact so pervasive in Edward II that it extends even to the improbable figure of Mortimer: As Mortimer Jr. considers exactly what he will do to Prince Edward’s buttocks, his self-styled role as a schoolmaster could have elicited thoughts of sodomy for an Elizabethan audience and elicits such thoughts in us when we view Mortimer Jr.’s words as a foreshadowing of Edward’s death. (Rutkoski : ) Similarly in Tamburlaine the Great, Part One, Mycetes’ attempt at solemnity in ‘Well, here I swear by this my royal seat’ is crudely punctured by Cosroe’s schoolboy punning, ‘You may do well to kiss it then’ (I, i, –). This irreverence is also typical of Marlowe’s inventive and iconoclastic approach to stagecraft and visual imagery, as with the picture of a man with a boy on his lap in Dido, Queen of Carthage, which turns out to represent what we would now call paedophilia rather than a happy family scene, or the anticipation of Brechtian techniques in the use of people as horses in Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two. Marlowe’s irreverence is particularly marked in the staging of death. At the end of Dido, Queen of Carthage, not one but three

  ,   people cast themselves into a fire; in The Jew of Malta, someone is boiled alive on stage; in Tamburlaine the Great, Part One, two people brain themselves on the bars of a cage, while in Part Two, Olympia burns the bodies of her husband and son, before later cutting her own throat. All of these posed considerable staging challenges, as did the shooting of the Governor of Babylon, as was so clearly demonstrated when it went wrong in the performance that Philip Gawdy saw. Here, actual physical harm certainly ensued; it would not be surprising if it had also done so during the scene when Tamburlaine is being pulled by the four kings, which imposes serious physical strains on the actors. Even if there were no accidents, though, these are all odd, challenging, and unusual ways for death to occur on the Elizabethan stage. In the first place, shooting in itself was a highly unusual form of onstage death, partly because of the danger of accident and partly because its unheroic, arbitrary nature makes it much less dramatic than single combat with swords. Secondly, even when Marlowe’s characters die by more conventional means, they do so in ways that challenge the limits of theatrical illusionism: it is easy enough to stab yourself in the armpit and pretend it is the chest, but it is difficult to imagine how Olympia could convincingly stab herself in the throat, or set fire to the corpses of her husband and son, or how Zabina and Bajazeth could appear to have their brains dashed out. Finally, Marlowe also likes to tread a disturbingly fine line between pathos and comedy in his staging of death, as we see when Barabas plunges into the cookingpot or when the dignity of Dido’s suicide is undermined as two more people join her in the flames. Most famously, Marlowe was verbally innovative. Ben Jonson justifiably referred to ‘Marlowe’s mighty line’ as the distinguishing feature of his verse, and it is verbal style on which Shakespeare homes in both in his many echoings of Marlowe and in his most sustained piece of commentary on him, when Hamlet says to the Player King, I heard thee speak me a speech once, but it was never acted, or if it was, not above once – for the play, I remember, pleased not the million, ’twas caviare to the general. But it was, as I received it – and others, whose judgments in such matters

  -  cried in the top of mine – an excellent play, well digested in the scenes, set down with as much modesty as cunning. (II, ii, –) After a long introductory passage and an interruption by Polonius, the speech in question proves to run like this: Anon he finds him, Striking too short at Greeks. His antique sword, Rebellious to his arm, lies where it falls, Repugnant to command. Unequal match’d, Pyrrhus at Priam drives, in rage strikes wide; But with the whiff and wind of his fell sword Th’unnerved father falls. Then senseless Ilium, Seeming to feel this blow, with flaming top Stoops to his base, and with a hideous crash Takes prisoner Pyrrhus’ ear. For lo, his sword, Which was declining on the milky head Of reverend Priam, seem’d i’th’air to stick; So, as a painted tyrant, Pyrrhus stood, And like a neutral to his will and matter, Did nothing. But as we often see against some storm A silence in the heavens, the rack stand still, The bold winds speechless, and the orb below As hush as death, anon the dreadful thunder Doth rend the region; so after Pyrrhus’ pause Aroused vengeance sets him new awork, And never did the Cyclops’ hammers fall On Mars’s armour, forg’d for proof eterne, With less remorse than Pyrrhus’ bleeding sword Now falls on Priam. Out, out, thou strumpet Fortune! All you gods In general synod take away her power, Break all the spokes and fellies from her wheel, And bowl the round nave down the hill of heaven As low as to the fiends. (II, ii, –)

  ,   The speech on which Shakespeare is musing here seems to be from Dido, Queen of Carthage, the play of Marlowe’s which he remembered perhaps more than any other (Williams : –; Savage : –): At which the frantic Queen leaped on his face, And in his eyelids hanging by the nails, A little while prolonged her husband’s life. At last the soldiers pulled her by the heels, And swung her howling in the empty air, Which sent an echo to the wounded King: Whereat he lifted up his bed-rid limbs, And would have grappled with Achilles’ son, Forgetting both his want of strength and hands: Which he disdaining whisked his sword about, And with the wind thereof the King fell down. Then from the navel to the throat at once He ripped old Priam; at whose latter gasp Jove’s marble statue gan to bend the brow, As loathing Pyrrhus for this wicked act. Yet he, undaunted, took his father’s flag And dipped it in the old King’s chill cold blood, And then in triumph ran into the streets, Through which he could not pass for slaughtered men; So, leaning on his sword, he stood stone still, Viewing the fire wherewith rich Ilion burnt. (II, i, –) Shakespeare has recalled four specific features of this speech here: the fact that it was about Pyrrhus; the idea of Priam falling from the ‘wind’ of the sword alone; the immobility of Pyrrhus; and the protracted death of Priam. (The idea of forgetting one’s want of hands may also have been influential in Titus Andronicus.) Shakespeare seems to be suggesting that, in the case of sensitive spectators, the Marlovian line could have a powerful, indeed almost hypnotic, effect, though his own variations in line length and frequent use of the caesura also imply a critique of the ‘mighty line’ as monotonous and inflexible. Even if the implications of the

  -  borrowing are not wholly positive, however, it is worth noting that Shakespeare never engaged as closely as this with the style of any other of his contemporaries; even though his last plays imitate something of the plotting and modality of Beaumont and Fletcher, his use of language is poles apart. For Marlowe alone does Shakespeare profess admiration both here and elsewhere, as in As You Like It, where the jokes about ‘elegies on brambles’ (III, ii, –) and ‘honest Ovid’ (III, iii, ) appear to allude to the recent public burning of Marlowe’s pioneering translation of Ovid’s Elegies and the reference to the saw of a dead shepherd clearly points us to ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’. Marlowe also influenced many others of his contemporaries, as is seen in works like Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, which offers a clear imitation – even if a pale one – of the rhetoric of Tamburlaine, while Jasper Fisher’s Fuimus Troes also clearly alludes to Tamburlaine: In Eldol’s reign, the earth and sky were filled With prodigies, strange sights and hellish shapes: Sometimes two hosts with fiery lances met, Armour and horses being heard amid the clouds; With streamers red, now march these airy warriors, And then a sable hearse-cloth wraps up all (II, iii, –) Indeed it is hard to think of any play of the period which was more influential or more often imitated than Tamburlaine, and the area in which later playwrights try hardest – and for the most part most unsuccessfully – to imitate Marlowe is invariably the sweep and rhetorical force of the ‘mighty line’.

‘RIDE AGAINST THE CITY OF THE GODS’

The thing for which Marlowe was most notorious in his own time was his alleged atheism. In , two stories were recorded on the authority of an elderly Canterbury man with Cambridge connections. First the man, Simon Aldrich, recounted that

  ,   Marlo who wrot Hero & Leander was an Atheist: & had writ a booke against the Scripture; how that it was al one man’s making, & would haue printed it but could not be suffered. He was the son of a shomaker in Cant. He [Aldrich] said hee was an excellent scoller & made excellent verses in Lattin & died aged about ; he was stabd in the head with a dagger & dyed swearing. (Eccles : ) Secondly, Mr Ald.[rich] sayd that mr Fineux of Douer was an Atheist & that hee would go out at midnight into a wood, & fall down uppon his knees & pray heartily that that Deuil would come, that he might see him (for hee did not beleiue that there was a Deuil) Mr Ald: sayd that hee was a verie good scholler, but would neuer haue aboue one booke at a time, & when hee was perfect in it, hee would sell it away & buy another: he learnd all Marlo by heart & diuers other bookes: Marlo made him an Atheist. This Fineaux was faine to make a speech uppon The foole hath said in his heart there is no God, to get his degree. Fineaux would say as Galen sayd that man was of a more excellent composition then a beast, & thereby could speake; but affirmed that his soule dyed with his body, & as we remember nothing before wee were borne, so we shall remember nothing after wee are dead. (Eccles : ) This used to be identified as Thomas Fineux, who matriculated at Corpus Christi in the Easter Term of , but Constance Kuriyama has recently suggested that it might in fact have been his younger brother John, who was an exact contemporary of Simon Aldrich (Kuriyama : ). Whatever the precise identity of Mr Fineux, however, the drift of the story told about him is quite clear: Marlowe, according to Aldrich, did not believe in God, and directly or indirectly influenced others not to believe either. Other evidence points in the same direction. The Baines Note is headed ‘A note containing the opinion of one Christopher Marly

  -  concerning his damnable judgment of religion, and scorn of God’s word’, and contains numerous alleged blasphemies which Baines clearly expected people to find credible as utterances of Marlowe’s, and in  Thomas Beard’s Theatre of God’s Judgements alleged of Marlowe’s death that It so fell out that in London streets, as he purposed to stab one whom he ought a grudge unto with his dagger, the other party perceiving, so avoided the stroke that withal catching hold of his wrist, he stabbed his own dagger into his own head, in such sort that notwithstanding all the means of surgery that could be wrought, he shortly after died thereof. (MacLure : ) Beard’s account is clearly at variance with that given at the inquest, but as we see in Cyril Tourneur’s play The Atheist’s Tragedy, accidentally stabbing oneself in the head, particularly in the region of the eye, was a death that was considered particularly appropriate for an atheist, since it pointed up his moral and spiritual blindness. Also pertinent is Robert Greene’s comment in the preface to Perimedes the Blacksmith: I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins, every word filling the mouth like the fa-burden of Bow Bell, daring God out of heaven with that atheist Tamburlan, or blaspheming with the mad priest of the sun. But let me rather pocket up the ass at Diogenes’s hand than wantonly set out such impious instances of intolerable poetry, such mad and scoffing poets that have prophetical spirits as are bred of Merlin’s race. The reference to Tamburlaine and the allusion to Merlin (‘Merlin’ and ‘Marlin’ are both found as variants of the name ‘Marlowe’, along with ‘Morley’ and ‘Marley’) make it quite clear that it is Marlowe who is meant. (The ‘mad priest of the sun’ is generally supposed to be Giordano Bruno.) Presumably Greene is responding to lines such as that in which Tamburlaine declares that ‘A god is not so glorious as a king’ (Part One, II, v, ) or threatens to make

  ,   war upon the gods, and indeed to his resolutely worldly perspective as a whole. Whatever Marlowe’s personal beliefs actually were, then, there can be no doubt about what the public perception of them was. In his plays, Marlowe is particularly prone to provocative juxtapositions of allegedly opposed religious systems, particularly in Tamburlaine Part Two, where religious affiliation first starts to emerge as a serious issue in Marlovian drama. Here there is a heady mixture of references to various religious systems. Christianity is alluded to, as in the three kings who acclaim Tamburlaine or when Tamburlaine, having cut his arm, mentions India, the country of which Doubting Thomas, who required the sight of a fleshly wound, was the apostle (Vitkus : ); Matthew Greenfield suggests that ‘Tamburlaine’s self-wounding, like Faustus’s, echoes several aspects of the iconography of Christ . . . The Christian resonances are blasphemous but not frivolous; they underline Tamburlaine’s conviction of the sacredness of his person’ (Greenfield : ). Equally, though, the plays show increasing interest in Islam, about which, as we have seen, Marlowe is unusually well informed for the period. Although Tamburlaine dismisses the power of Mahomet, Amasia declares that he actually sees him, albeit in a guise which eerily mingles Islam with classical mythology: Fear not, my lord, I see great Mahomet Clothèd in purple clouds, and on his head A chaplet brighter than Apollo’s crown, Marching about the air with armèd men To join with you against this Tamburlaine. (Part Two, V, ii, –) The fact that Tamburlaine dies shortly after burning the Qur’an could well suggest that Amasia’s confidence in Muhammad is justified, if Stephen Greenblatt is right to suggest that we are invited to perceive a causal link between the two events: ‘Tamburlaine falls ill, and when? When he burns the Koran!’ (Greenblatt : ). This mischievous engagement with Islam, which would have been anathema in the period, is of a piece with Marlowe’s generally irreverent attitude to religion. What is particularly interesting

  -  is that contrary to the promise of eternal life found in both Christianity and Islam, death in Marlowe is final: although Aeneas in Dido, Queen of Carthage says that Hector’s ghost warned him to flee Troy (II, i, –), there are no actual ghosts in Marlowe’s plays (and we have, as we shall see in the final section of this chapter, no particular reason to believe that Aeneas is telling the truth). There are also sarcastic little moments such as that in Dido, Queen of Carthage when the goddess Juno says ‘God wot’ (III, ii, ), sounding for all the world like an Elizabethan housewife, but not remotely like a classical goddess, or the fact that, as S. Britton pointed out in the nineteenth century, A review of his leading characters shows a series of colossal figures living without religion and generally defying it, while the course of events exhibits the gods as powerless to interfere, or interfering only, as in the case of Faustus, with cruel malignity . . . The only exception is ‘Dido,’ where the deities that Marlowe and all his contemporaries knew to be fabulous are active, effectual, and reverently obeyed controllers of destiny. (qtd MacLure : ) In the Tamburlaine the Great plays, moreover, there are two striking aspects to Marlowe’s representation of the repeated acts of violence in the play: the extent to which religious iconography and ideology accrue to depictions of violence and the fact that staging violence also often involves Marlowe in a ‘fastforwarding’ approach which brings him eerily close to his own time. This is because for Marlowe, religion, at least as he sees it practised in contemporary Europe, is violence. What is particularly striking about Marlowe, moreover, is that it is not any specific individual creed or confession that is indicted: all manifestations of religious beliefs are equally liable to find themselves in his sights, as is suggested by his habit of juxtaposing apparently different ones. For the first point, the extent to which religious iconography and ideology accrue to depictions of violence and episodes leading up to violence, I want to turn first to turn to the episode of the Virgins of Damascus, towards the end of Part One. In her only utterance, the Second Virgin says,

  ,   Then here, before the majesty of heaven And holy patrons of Egyptia, With knees and hearts submissive we entreat Grace to our words and pity to our looks, That this device may prove propitious, And through the eyes and ears of Tamburlaine Convey events of mercy to his heart; Grant that these signs of victory we yield May bind the temples of his conquering head To hide the folded furrows of his brows And shadow his displeasèd countenance With happy looks of ruth and lenity. Leave us, my lord, and loving countrymen; What simple virgins may persuade, we will. (Part One, V, i, –) This is a speech rich in religious vocabulary: ‘the majesty of heaven’, ‘holy pictures’, the idea of kneeling, and the resonant word ‘Grace’. In such a context, moreover, the whole idea of an interceding virgin might well seem to evoke the idea of the Blessed Virgin Mary and her role as intercessor with Christ, something which might be reinforced by the mention of Egypt, where the holy family fled after the massacre of the innocents. ‘Grace’ is a word whose connotations are primarily Protestant – it is particularly important in Calvinist thought – while the other echoes of religion are associated principally with Catholicism; however, both are equally cheapened here by the fact that they will actually lead up to the death of the virgins. Indeed Tamburlaine’s whole career of destruction can be seen to be structured around ironic inversions of religious iconography: the onstage tearing off of his shepherd’s weeds to reveal the armour can be read as an unsettling riff on the Transfiguration, when Jesus’ garments are revealed to be miraculously white; Tamburlaine’s description of his soldiers drinking as ‘Filling their empty veins with airy wine / That, being concocted, turns to crimson blood’ (Part Two, III, ii, –) could be read as a blasphemous parody of the consubstantiation of the Eucharist, where the wine represents the blood of Christ; and as Bajazeth comments, his military successes are attended with signs of Christian celebration:

  -  Now will the Christian miscreants be glad, Ringing with joy their superstitious bells And making bonfires for my overthrow. (Part One, III, iii, –) Finally, Zenocrate’s sarcophagus will be carried before Tamburlaine like the Ark of the Covenant in all his later campaigns. The Jew of Malta, of course, is even more reliant on such ironic allusions and inversions: as Julia Reinhard Lupton points out, ‘The appropriation of Barabas’s property and its conversion to a nunnery recalls [a] familiar typological theme, the transformation of the Synagogue into the Church’ (Lupton : ). The link between violence and religion in Marlowe’s plays is hardly surprising given what we know or can deduce of Marlowe’s own personal history. He grew up in Canterbury, a city whose very fabric had been torn apart by the iconoclasm which had destroyed the -year-old shrine of St Thomas Becket a generation before Marlowe’s birth. He may well have spent at least some of his university years spying on young men who were being groomed for horrific martyrdom in the name of religion. He knew Francis Kett, a fellow of his own college, Corpus Christi, who died in Norwich for his faith, and probably several others who died in similar circumstances on both sides of the religious divide. Barabas’ remark in The Jew of Malta that ‘religion / Hides many mischiefs from suspicion’ (I, ii., –) would have been dangerously close to home. This topicality is also a contributory factor in a second notable feature of the Tamburlaine plays, the way in which staging violence typically often involves Marlowe in a ‘fastforwarding’ approach which brings him eerily close to his own time. There are numerous instances of this. The Orcanes / Sigismund material is completely anachronistic, deriving from events which occurred a generation later than the story of Tamburlaine himself. When Zenocrate tries to convince Tamburlaine that their sons are suitably martial, she describes something which sounds very like an Elizabethan tournament: This lovely boy, the youngest of the three, Not long ago bestrid a Scythian steed,

  ,   Trotting the ring, and tilting at a glove, Which when he tainted with his slender rod, He reined him straight and made him so curvet As I cried out for fear he should have fall’n. (Part Two, I, iii, –) The coach of which Zabina thinks at the moment of her suicide is an Elizabethan mode of transport rather than a medieval one. Tamburlaine’s use of gold in combat has been related to Sir Walter Ralegh (Burgess : ), and certainly there seem to be some definite similarities between Tamburlaine and the notorious conquistador Lope de Aguirre, of whom Ralegh gave the first written account in English, in The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana. (Charles Nicholl comments on how in the accounts of Ralegh’s adventuring ‘[t]he exotic syllables roll out like some lost line from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine’ (Nicholl a: ).1 Like Tamburlaine, though for different reasons, Lope de Aguirre killed one of his own children: in  he killed his daughter, Elvira, to prevent her being captured – in which he exactly foreshadows the motives of Olympia in Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two – and, like Tamburlaine, he signed himself ‘Wrath of God’. Finally Nick de Somogyi, commenting on the contemporaneity and cosmopolitanism of Tamburlaine’s vocabulary of war, declares that the term ‘Scourge of God’ ‘was a sine qua non of Elizabethan war theory’ (De Somogyi :  and ) and argues of the Tamburlaine plays that written within two years of Leicester’s expeditionary force reaching the continent, by an author with known connections in military intelligence, their soldier-hero . . . wages war by instructively commanding the modern technologies proselytized by [the military theorist] Thomas Hood. (De Somogyi : ) And Anthony Miller comments that The Turks who are Tamburlaine’s major antagonists are, on occasion, unmistakably early modern Turks. There is mention

  -  of Turkish slaughters ‘through the midst of Varna and Bulgaria’ (Part II, II.i.) and Orcanes is ‘he / That with the cannon shook Vienna walls’ (Part II, I.i.–). Marlowe is remembering the Turkish victory at Varna in  and the siege of Vienna in . (Miller : ) It seems, then, that in episodes focusing either on the personal violence of Tamburlaine or his more generally aggressive proclivities, Marlowe’s imagination moves closer to his own time. Certainly Tamburlaine’s imagination is strikingly of Marlowe’s time rather than of his own when it turns first to ‘Mexico’ (Part One, III, iii, ) and then ultimately, in the ‘And shall I die, and this unconquerèd?’ speech, to South America as a whole. South America was Ralegh’s own dream destination, and also that to which Sir Francis Drake had already sailed in  to sack Cartagena, an episode which Margo Hendricks has suggested as the inspiration for Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage (Hendricks : ),2 and on the way back from which Drake picked up the stranded Roanoke colonists, including Marlowe’s friend Thomas Hariot. The historical Timur the Lame died in ,  years before Columbus discovered America; Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, however, has the imagination of a conquistador or an English sea-dog. Both the New World and the circle of Sir Walter Ralegh seem, then, to be close indeed to the conception of Tamburlaine. Other contemporary echoes also abound in Marlowe’s representation of violence. Richard Wilson has compared Tamburlaine’s arsenal to that of Ivan the Terrible, and it certainly seems significant that Tamburlaine is referred to as ‘the rogue of Volga’ (Part One, IV, i, ) and that there are a number of strongly marked parallels between Tamburlaine and Ivan the Terrible – both killed their sons, both lost beloved wives whose memories were subsequently fetishised, and the English envoy Jerome Horsey directly compared Ivan to a Scythian: ‘ “This Heliogabalus,” as Horsey reported him . . . was “a right Scythian” ’ (Wilson :  and ). Tamburlaine proves to be even more of Marlowe’s time than of his own when he delivers to his three sons advice based not on any received wisdom of his own time but on a manuscript by Marlowe’s

  ,   contemporary (and fellow-spy) Paul Ive. Its inappropriateness to the context is highlighted by the fact that so much of it is concerned with defence (Part Two, III, ii, –), whereas Tamburlaine’s own wars are entirely offensive; this is in fact conspicuously not historically authentic advice but Elizabethan realpolitik. Tamburlaine’s opponents, by contrast, identify themselves with the antiquated world of the classics, as when the Soldan says, Methinks we march as Meleager did, Environèd with brave Argolian knights, To chase the savage Calydonian boar (Part One, IV, iii, –) The effect of the contrast between a Soldan equipped like an ancient Greek and a Tamburlaine equipped like Ivan the Terrible is perhaps best compared to the moment in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indiana Jones, confronted by a man twirling a sword, pulls out a gun and shoots him. I think the reason that Marlowe’s imagery of violence is simultaneously religious and modern is that, for Marlowe, religion, at least as he sees it practised in contemporary Europe, is violence, an idea encapsulated in the phrase which resonates through the Tamburlaine plays, ‘the scourge of God’. There is a particularly resonant phrase in the Baines Note, where it is claimed ‘That the first beginning of Religioun was only to keep men in awe’. If Baines is right about Marlowe’s stated beliefs, Marlowe is subscribing to an essentially Machiavellian concept of religion, and one which presents religious ideology as the ultimate form of terrorism, since its aim, like that of terrorism, is to manipulate behaviour by creating a mass fear and panic based on something which may or may not happen. Tamburlaine himself may seem synonymous with terror, but he is in fact merely a particularly striking instance of this powerful ideological mechanism, and the Tamburlaine plays themselves form both a preamble to and a telling diptych with what was almost certainly their immediate successor, Doctor Faustus, in which religion’s technologies of terror will come directly to the fore, as Doctor Faustus vows that

  -  I’ll levy soldiers with the coin they bring And chase the Prince of Parma from our land, And reign sole king of all our provinces; Yea, stranger engines for the brunt of war Than was the fiery keel at Antwerp’s bridge I’ll make my servile spirits to invent.

(I, i, –)

Here, Faustus makes explicit the way in which spirits provide distinctly material aid, in the form indeed of actual matériel, and the war which he is remembering here, the Spanish campaign against the Protestant Netherlands, was fought wholly in the name of religion. In the Tamburlaine the Great plays, the point is not so obviously or openly made, but it is, perhaps, all the more subtle for that. As Tamburlaine tells Bajazeth, Legions of spirits fleeting in the air Direct our bullets and our weapons’ points And make your strokes to wound the senseless air (Part One, III, iii, –) Bajazeth will soon learn to his cost that no enemy is more dangerous than the one who believes this. Tamburlaine’s own principal weapons are words. This is made plain from the outset of the play, when the Prologue declares that you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine: Threat’ning the world with high astounding terms. (Part One, Prologue, –) The link between terrorism and rhetoric has been all too forcefully brought home to us on virtually every continent in recent years: a state of terror is typically maintained by a climate of constant whispers, rumours, and recollection which need be punctuated only intermittently by actual physical violence in order to maintain their hold over the collective imagination. This is exactly how Tamburlaine works. On only one occasion do we see him actually kill someone, and that is his own son; the only other act of violence

  ,   he personally undertakes is likewise directed into his own family group rather than outwards at society at large, since it is the cutting of his own arm. His effect on the audience is thus created primarily by terror rather than actual violence, and in this the relationship of the audience to Tamburlaine’s actual victims is to some extent analogous to the relationship of global news watchers to the reporting of an atrocity: nothing has actually happened to us personally, but terror has nevertheless been produced. For Marlowe, I suggest that the operative comparison was not the TV news bulletin, but the hellfire sermon. Tamburlaine works by first threatening, and, if that fails, inflicting horrific violence. His method is fully described when the Messenger tells the Soldan, Pleaseth your mightiness to understand, His resolution far exceedeth all: The first day when he pitcheth down his tents, White is their hue, and on his silver crest A snowy feather spangled white he bears, To signify the mildness of his mind That, satiate with spoil, refuseth blood. But when Aurora mounts the second time, As red as scarlet is his furniture; Then must his kindled wrath be quenched with blood, Not sparing any that can manage arms, But if these threats move not submission, Black are his colours, black pavilion, His spear, his shield, his horse, his armour, plumes, And jetty feathers menace death and hell, Without respect of sex, degree or age, He razeth all his foes with fire and sword. (Part One, IV, i, –) This translates very simply as ‘Do what I tell you now, or it will be the worse for you’, and as David Riggs points out, the technique is directly derived from a religious source: ‘The sequence of white, red and black followed by slaughter recalled the four horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation, where white, red and

  -  black riders precede the “pale horse” bearing Death’ (Riggs : ). Such an exhibition of power is usually needed only once to produce future conformity enforced not by actual violence but by the fear of violence. Marlowe appears, from all the evidence we have, to have worked as an agent for a state apparatus which enforced religious conformity first by threats and in the last resort by displays of public and spectacular violence, and it is, I think, the mechanics of such a state apparatus that he is exploring in the Tamburlaine the Great plays. It is no wonder that the phrase ‘scourge of God’, which Marlowe applies to Tamburlaine, is so delicately ambiguous; even Marlowe could hardly have dared to say what he really meant.

MARLOVIAN PSYCHOLOGY

Marlowe is distinguished among his contemporaries by his interest in unusual states of mind, especially sadism, masochism and madness. In Doctor Faustus, Faustus’s hearing of voices which no one else can hear might now look to us like schizophrenia, while Zabina in Tamburlaine the Great certainly goes mad before she dies. We might equally wonder about Tamburlaine himself when halfway through Part Two he cuts his own arm for the edification of his sons, telling them as he does so that A wound is nothing, be it ne’er so deep, Blood is the god of war’s rich livery. Now look I like a soldier, and this wound As great a grace and majesty to me As if a chair of gold enamellèd, Enchased with diamonds, sapphires, rubies, And fairest pearl of wealthy India, Were mounted here under a canopy, And I sat down, clothed with the massy robe That late adorned the Afric potentate Whom I brought bound unto Damascus’ walls. Come boys, and with your fingers search my wound, And in my blood wash all your hands at once,

  ,   While I sit smiling to behold the sight. Now, my boys, what think you of a wound?

(III, ii, –)

This is a good question, and one which we might well think is posed of the onstage as much as the offstage audience. What are we to think of a wound, especially such a wound as this? One thing we might think is that what Tamburlaine does comes eerily close to what we now call self-harm, especially since, despite his threat to do so, he does not actually cut the arm of either boy but directs his violence exclusively against himself. In a recent study of self-harm, Jennifer Harris notes that ‘The Bible is littered with references to such behavior: “If your hand is your undoing, cut it off . . . ” ’ (Harris : ), and points out that such injunctions have often been regarded as instrumental in prompting the urge to self-harm. Tambulaine the Great is littered with biblical allusions, and in Part One of the play, Bajazeth, in the presence of Tamburlaine, has apostrophised Ye holy priests of heavenly Mahomet, That, sacrificing, slice and cut your flesh (Part One, IV, ii, –) Although Tamburlaine’s own religious affiliations are, as many critics have pointed out, unclear, what is clear is that he has been exposed here to the idea that to mutilate one’s own body can be an act of piety. In fact by the time he actually cuts his own arm, Tamburlaine has already shown himself to be fixated both with arms in general and with the idea of violence against them in particular. The word ‘arm’ is for him a portentous and polyvalent one. Power in these plays is strongly associated with arms, as when Frederick speaks of God and the ‘jealous anger of His fearful arm’ (Part Two, II, i, ), and central to Tamburlaine’s sense of his own identity is a view of himself as a practitioner of ‘arms’: he speaks of ‘My discipline of arms and chivalry’ (Part One, V, i, ), and concomitantly regards it as his business to ensure that no one else presumes to know about arms in this military sense, calling Bajazeth, Zabina and the King of Arabia

  -  All sights of power to grace my victory; And such are objects fit for Tamburlaine, Wherein as in a mirror may be seen His honour, that consists in shedding blood When men presume to manage arms with him. (Part One, V, i, –) Similarly Tamburlaine tells Almeda that ‘So, sirrah, now you are a King, you must give arms’ (Part Two, III, v, ), and the ‘horses’ that they have been subjected by ‘this unconquered arm of mine’ (Part Two, IV, iii, ). At the same time, though, he is also uneasily aware that the word ‘arm’ denotes not only an abstract and all-conquering militarism but the reality of vulnerable and potentially shameful human flesh. Suggestively, this is most clearly revealed in his scornful dismissal of his own three sons: Their fingers made to quaver on a lute, Their arms to hang about a lady’s neck, Their legs to dance and caper in the air, Would make me think them bastards, not my sons, But that I know they issued from thy womb (Part Two, I, iii, –) It also clearly finds expression, though, when Theridamas describes Tamburlaine himself in terms which draw attention to the vulnerability of his arms: His arms and fingers long and sinewy, Betokening valour and excess of strength: In every part proportioned like the man Should make the world subdued to Tamburlaine. (Part One, II, i, –) It is presumably for this reason that the most monstrous part of Tamburlaine’s humiliation of Bajazeth is couched precisely in terms of violence against arms, when he says ‘Take it up, villain, and eat it, or I will make thee slice the brawns of thy arms into

  ,   carbonadoes, and eat them’ (Part One, IV, iv, –). Equally, his eventual recuperation of two of his three sons centres on an altered understanding of the purpose and potential of their arms: Well, lovely boys, you shall be emperors both, Stretching your conquering arms from east to west. (Part Two, I, iii, –) Both the ‘strong’ and the ‘shameful’ meanings of arms seem to converge in the scene of Tamburlaine’s self-mutilation. It has been introduced by Tamburlaine apostrophising the picture of Zenocrate with Thou shalt not beautify Larissa plains, But keep within the circle of mine arms (Part Two, III, ii, –) Moreover, it might be worth noting that Tamburlaine exhibits this behaviour only after the death of Zenocrate, and in a scene in which he has entered preceded by a portrait of her, and that this is, moreover, one of the only two times when we see him use actual violence on stage, the other occasion being the murder of his own son. It might well seem suggestive that Tamburlaine’s violence on both occasions should be directed either against himself or against a member of his family. Finally, Nick de Somogyi reminds us that central to Marlowe’s conception of the character of Tamburlaine is a profound silence about a physical disability that elsewhere attracted a great deal of attention: the ‘Crippell Emperour’ was a military role with many precedents. Chief among these was the figure included by Bacon among the ‘Lame men’ he cited; whose story was told in George Whetstone’s  English Myrror, A Regard Wherein Al Estates May Behold the Conquests of Envy (); and whose exemplary soldiership was dramatized by Christopher Marlowe: Tamburlaine, the Scourge of God – known to history as Timur the Lame. (De Somogyi : )

  -  Conceivably one reason for this silence is in fact because Marlowe wishes to displace Tamburlaine’s area of vulnerability to a part of the body which has special resonance for him. Tamburlaine’s cutting of his own arm, then, is an act with a number of resonances. One way of beginning to unpick its meaning might be to note a strikingly similar episode in the play which now seems almost certain to have followed directly after Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two, Doctor Faustus:  . . . But, tell me, Faustus, shall I have thy soul? And I will be thy slave, and wait on thee, And give thee more than thou hast wit to ask.  Ay, Mephistopheles, I’ll give it thee.  Then stab thine arm courageously, And bind thy soul that at some certain day Great Lucifer may claim it as his own, And then be thou as great as Lucifer.  (Cutting his arm) Lo, Mephistopheles, for love of thee, I cut mine arm, and with my proper blood Assure my soul to be great Lucifer’s. Chief lord and regent of perpetual night, View here the blood that trickles from mine arm, And let it be propitious for my wish. (A Text, II, i, –) Alan Shephard compares Tamburlaine’s arm-cutting with Faustus’s, calling both self-mutilation (Shephard : ), and we do have one crucial piece of evidence that hurting one’s own arms was both a recognised behaviour pattern and a sign of mental instability in early modern England. In King Lear, Edgar declares, The country gives me proof and precedent Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices, Strike in their numb’d and mortified bare arms Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;

  ,   And with this horrible object, from low farms, Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes, and mills, Enforce their charity. Poor Turlygood! poor Tom! That’s something yet: Edgar I nothing am. (II, iii, –) The Arden edition of King Lear cites Dekker’s Bellman of London () of an Abraham man: ‘You see pinnes stuck in sundry places of his native flesh, especially in his armes, which paine hee gladly puts himselfe to . . . onely to make you beleeve he is out of his wits. He calls himselfe by the name of Poore Tom’. This is fifteen years after Marlowe’s death, but it does indicate that the idea of attacking one’s own arms because of mental distress is not an exclusively modern one. Could either the magician Dr Faustus or the invincible military machine that is Tamburlaine really be susceptible to mental distress? Actually one might well want to turn that question on its head: could one either wish to become a magician or function as an invincible military machine if one were not suffering some form of mental distress? Obviously it is a question of at least two paradigms here: what we now know about the mental health difficulties to which soldiers and former soldiers might be particularly prone (Dr Faustus, though not a soldier, is acutely conscious of living in a war zone and has plans for military action), and what Marlowe might have known or thought. As it happens, there is a fair degree of overlap between the two. Since Vietnam, it has been impossible to ignore the potential trauma of veterans in the modern world; and on the early modern stage, the mental health of soldiers, especially those who have returned from combat, is often suspect (indeed Nick de Somogyi reads Shakespeare’s Ancient Pistol as a victim of post-traumatic stress disorder [De Somogyi : ]). Certainly Anthony Babington traces the origins of first recognition of what we now call shell-shock to a period not long after Tamburlaine and Pistol: Early in the seventeenth century European physicians became aware of an illness affecting soldiers on campaign, which caused them ‘to sink into a state of deep despair’. It was

  -  especially prevalent among Spanish soldiers conscripted for service in the Netherlands during the Thirty Years War. (Babington : ) At the point when they cut their arms, Tamburlaine is a bereaved and insecure man and Dr Faustus one trafficking with spirits, and I think Marlowe is letting us glimpse here some of the psychological toll that a career of conquest and meddling with magic respectively have taken of them.

MARLOWE’S TRANSGRESSIVE HEROES

The ideological transgression which I have suggested is concealed in the Tamburlaine plays’ depiction of violence leads us directly to the question of Marlowe’s consistently transgressive central characters. The typical Marlovian hero is defiant in two ways. In the first place, they all defy the norms and values of their own societies. Tamburlaine refuses to accept his allotted role of a shepherd; Edward II refuses to bow to the heterosexual norm; Dido follows her own desires rather than marry where the interests of her kingdom dictate; Dr Faustus refuses to stay in the social position to which the lowliness of his parents should have consigned him; Barabas fights against his allotted position of outcast to attempt to seize power. At the same time, they are also transgressive in another way, in that the very act of casting these people as heroes threatens the values of Marlowe’s own society. Dido, Queen of Carthage It is not only Marlowe’s main characters that threaten established values. In Dido, Queen of Carthage, Dido says to Aeneas, May I entreat thee to discourse at large, And truly too, how Troy was overcome? For many tales go of that city’s fall, And scarcely do agree upon one point. Some say Antenor did betray the town,

  ,   Others report ’twas Sinon’s perjury; But all in this, that Troy is overcome, And Priam dead. Yet how, we hear no news.

(II, i, –)

There seems to be a subtext at work in Dido’s sudden confusion over the details of possibly the most famous story ever told, and what that subtext is can be guessed by turning to another Renaissance play, William Alexander’s Jvlivs Caesar, where Juno, describing the aftermath of the fall of Troy, says, And yet two traitors who betrayd the rest O! that the heaven on treason sometime smiles! Though having worst deserv’d, did chance the best, More happy th[a]n at home in their exiles. (I, –) These two traitors are Antenor and Aeneas, and Juno goes on to speak of how Then false Aeneas, though but borne t’obey, Did (of a fugitive) become a King: And some of his neere Tibers streames that stay, Would all the world to their obedience bring. Their ravenous Eagles soaring o’re all lands, By violence a mighty prey have wonne

(I, –)

The idea that Aeneas’s ‘lucky’ escape from Troy makes him an obvious suspect for the role of its betrayer might well be at work in Dido, Queen of Carthage too. Certainly Marlowe’s Aeneas is notably unheroic. He cuts an unimpressive figure – the typical reaction to his appearance onstage is an expression of incredulity that this can really be Aeneas – and he is laughably slow to realise what Dido is suggesting when she invites him to follow her into the cave; indeed it looks like a direct reflection on this when Antonio in The Duchess of Malfi, finding himself placed in very similar circumstances, is anxious that the Duchess should not think him too stupid to understand what she

  -  is suggesting. When Dido shows pictures of her various suitors, Aeneas’s companions recognise men they met in Aetolia, Athens, and at the Olympic Games, but the less sophisticated Aeneas can identify only one, who had visited Troy; the impression is that his companions have travelled, but he has not (III, i, –). When he enters ‘drawing the platform of the city’ (V, i, s.d.), he is not only engaged in a task associated with workmen, but, as Roma Gill pointed out, foreshadows the villainous Barabas when he enters ‘with a hammer above’ (V,v, s.d.); her comment on this is that ‘Marlowe delights in humiliating his heroes – not humiliating them, so much as cutting them down to size’ (Gill –: ). One reason for Marlowe to ridicule Aeneas is that, unusually, it is not actually Aeneas who is the eponymous hero of this story, but Dido. Marlowe’s decision to have a female hero was not without classical precedent, but it was highly unusual in Elizabethan England. It was surely prompted by the fact that there was a queen on the throne, but the play’s portrayal of its queen regnant is not exactly flattering, and disaster overtakes her in the end. Moreover, Dido was not just female, but foreign – a woman of Phoenician descent ruling as a queen in Africa. In this, too, she fundamentally transgresses norms. For an Elizabethan audience, it would have been obvious that the character of Dido could be seen as reflecting on the real-life Elizabeth. Aeneas had been used to figure Elizabeth (who according to the myth of the translatio imperii was directly descended from him) in the Sieve Portrait of Elizabeth, commissioned apparently by Sir Christopher Hatton in a self-conscious attempt to stop Elizabeth becoming a second Dido by marrying her foreign suitor the Duke of Alençon, and ‘William Alabaster’s Elisaeis (an imitation of the Aeneid with Elizabeth, rather th[a]n Aeneas, as its hero’ clearly equates the two (Freeman : ). However, Marlowe focuses not on Aeneas but on Dido, and not only does Iarbas say that he will make ‘all the woods “Eliza” to resound!’ (IV, ii, ), taking advantage of the fact that Dido’s other name in classical mythology was Elissa, but it is highly likely that anyone costuming a fictional queen for a theatrical part would inevitably have been influenced by the kind of thing the real queen was known to wear, so Dido’s visual style might well recall Elizabeth’s. Finally Marlowe

  ,   has Dido die in a fire, instead of stabbing herself as in so many other versions of the story, most notably Virgil’s. This, together with the fact that Dido’s Phoenician nationality gives her the name ‘Phoenissa’, irresistibly associates her with the phoenix imagery beloved of Queen Elizabeth I. The ideological damage done to the image of the queen is clear: she may boast herself to have the heart and stomach of a king, but she is, ultimately, reducible to the body of a weak and feeble woman – who, to add insult to injury, is in this case played by a child – and as the play proceeds first to systematically humiliate and then ultimately to kill its fictional queen, it could hardly be thought to be endearing itself to its real one. Tamburlaine the Great Tamburlaine the Great transgresses on every conceivable level. In the first place, he is a Scythian, and Scythians were considered the epitome of savagery. Nevertheless, the Prologue clearly states that Tamburlaine in some sense mirrors his audience, rather than differing from them: ‘View but his picture in this tragic glass’ (Prologue, ). Secondly, Tamburlaine is a shepherd, and so a figure of particularly important and highly specific connotations for the Elizabethans, as explored in the many pastoral romances such as Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia and indeed in Marlowe’s own most famous lyric ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’. Shepherds abound in Elizabethan literature, figuring peace and plenty, rural innocence, nurturing, harmony, and freedom from care. Sir Philip Sidney, son-in-law of Sir Francis Walsingham, a crucial figure in the Elizabethan intelligence network, and cousin-in-law of Marlowe’s friend Sir Thomas Walsingham, cast himself in court tournaments and in his own Arcadia as Philisides, ‘The Shepherd Knight’; Marlowe himself was posthumously figured by Shakespeare as the ‘dead shepherd’ whose brutal slaying haunts As You Like It. However, Tamburlaine turns the meanings and resonances of shepherds entirely on their heads. It may seem a long way from the battlefields of Tamburlaine the Great to the lyricism of the pastoral: indeed, as Louis Montrose notes, the critic Hallett Smith ‘characterises “the central meaning” of Elizabethan pastorals as “the rejection of the aspiring mind”

  -  which so precisely distinguishes Tamburlaine’ (Montrose : ). Nevertheless, one of Marlowe’s major sources for the play was Fortescue’s The Forest, a translation from the Spanish of Pedro Mexia’s Silva de Varia Lection, a title which prominently foregrounds the idea of the pastoral, and once Marlowe’s play had popularised the story, references to Tamburlaine as ‘the Scythian shepherd’ abound. There is, therefore, a particular kind of irony playing around Marlowe’s consistent depiction of Tamburlaine as an anti-shepherd, preying on his neighbours ‘like a fox in harvest time’, as Mycetes has it (Part One, I, i, ) and ‘Threat’ning the world with high astounding terms’ (Part One, Prologue, l. ) instead of singing the pastoral songs of the shepherd. At the same time, moreover, Tamburlaine offers an equally ironic fit with two of the other stereotypes of the shepherd: he is a lover, and when he insists that he is a lord, he reminds us of how many of the apparently simple shepherds of Elizabethan literature turn out to be princes in disguise. In this context, too, Tamburlaine’s war on religion takes on new and richly ironic meaning, since the good shepherd was one of the standard metaphors for Christ. Finally, Tamburlaine is a warrior, and yet several critics have suggested that there is something curiously effeminate about him. Park Honan sees the reference to Pylades and Orestes towards the beginning of Part One as ‘announc[ing] a homosocial ideal’ (Honan : ), but it could easily bear a rather different interpretation, and Sara Munson Deats in particular sees Tamburlaine’s masculinity as embattled rather than secure: ‘in his effort to perform masculinity and fashion himself in the heroic mode, Tamburlaine progressively exaggerates . . . highly valued masculine traits while rejecting all leavening femininity’ (Deats : ), while Anthony Miller suggests that ‘At the moment when he takes possession of Zenocrate as his most precious trophy, Tamburlaine exchanges places with her’ (Miller : ). Tamburlaine himself worries about whether his devotion to Zenocrate impairs his manhood, and his marked anxiety about the behaviour of his three sons might perhaps reflect concerns about his own virility. He comes from Scythia, which was the original haunt of the Amazons, and Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass have recently pointed to the classical tradition of regarding Scythians as effeminate and prone to impotence and

  ,   possibly pederasty; Herodotus recounted how they succumbed to ‘ “the Scythian disease,” defined as “the atrophy of the male organs of generation, accompanied by the loss of masculine attributes” ’ (Jones and Stallybrass : ). Moreover, at least one character in the play, Mycetes, speaks in terms which openly suggest the possibility of male male–desire: Full true thou speakest, and like thyself, my lord, Whom I may term a Damon for thy love (Part One, I, i, –) Constance Brown Kuriyama argues on the basis of such lines as these that ‘Mycetes is discernibly enamored of Meander’ (Kuriyama : ), and John Cutts suggests that Mycetes is in fact a mirror-figure for Tamburlaine: ‘[t]o put Mycetes and Tamburlaine together and alone off the battlefield invites scrutiny’ (Cutts : –). It is also possible in production for the actor playing Mycetes to double Calyphas; thus although the play apparently sets up Mycetes and Tamburlaine as polar opposites, there might be an uncanny suggestion that there is something of Mycetes within Tamburlaine’s own family. Even more suggestive is the fact that Tamburlaine, almost uniquely among male characters in Renaissance drama, is the subject of a long and detailed physical description, when Menaphon says that he is Of stature tall, and straightly fashionèd, Like his desire, lift upwards and divine; So large of limbs, his joints so strongly knit, Such breadth of shoulders as might mainly bear Old Atlas’ burden; ’twixt his manly pitch A pearl more worth than all the world is placed, Wherein by curious sovereignty of art Are fixed his piercing instruments of sight, Whose fiery circles bear encompassèd A heaven of heavenly bodies in their spheres That guides his steps and actions to the throne Where honour sits invested royally; Pale of complexion – wrought in him with passion,

  -  Thirsting with sovereignty, with love of arms; His lofty brows in folds do figure death, And in their smoothness amity and life; About them hangs a knot of amber hair Wrappèd in curls, as fierce Achilles’ was, On which the breath of heaven delights to play, Making it dance with wanton majesty; His arms and fingers long and sinewy, Betokening valour and excess of strength: In every part proportioned like the man Should make the world subdued to Tamburlaine. (Part One, II, i, –) John Cutts points to various suggestions here which work to feminise Tamburlaine. He is compared to Achilles, who notoriously dressed as a woman to escape having to go to fight in Troy. Moreover, quite apart from the fact that this is technically a ‘blazon’ – a description of physical beauties, associated with the idealised mistress of the Petrarchan sonnet – Cutts points out that Tamburlaine’s arms, in the original  and  octavos, are not ‘sinewy’ (l. ) but ‘snowy’, and again, it was common in sonnets for women to be praised for the whiteness of their skin. Finally, Sara Munson Deats argues that ‘Even though Tamburlaine woos Zenocrate with admitted flattery (I..–), he reserves his most eloquent persuasions for Theridamas’, though she also notes that this is to some extent conventional in that ‘In foregrounding male bonding (whether homosocial or homoerotic) and objectifying women, Tamburlaine conforms to the masculine ideal of the period’ (Deats : ). Nevertheless, the overall impression is certainly of a central character who is conspicuously failing to tick the boxes we would expect of a conventional hero. Doctor Faustus Doctor Faustus is perhaps the most interesting of Marlowe’s transgressive heroes, because Marlowe goes to such lengths to exculpate him from at least some of the accusations which might have fallen to his charge. In the original versions of the story, which Marlowe

  ,   would certainly have known, Dr Faustus is a sodomite. ‘In May  the city council of Nuremberg refused a safe-conduct to “Doctor Faustus, the great sodomite and necromancer” ’ (qtd Keefer : xxvi). Marlowe, however, allows no hint of this to percolate through to his text, and is indeed at pains to identify Faustus’s erotic instincts as almost aggressively heterosexual, and focused exclusively on Helen of Troy. If anything, Marlowe could be seen as deliberately dislocating the idea of sodomy away from Faustus himself. The critic William Empson saw the devils in the play as sodomites (Empson : ), and in this context, it might also be worth noting that Faustus’s association with America might also serve to flag the issue, because America, as Park Honan points out, was associated with sodomy, since the Indians’ supposed practice of this was often used to justify enforced conversion to Christianity: ‘The sodomite might be thought of as a devil, a heretic, an Italian, or a Turk or an African, or even linked with Harriot’s New World savages, to justify violence against Roanoke’s Indians’ (Honan : ). Insofar as this might serve to remind us of the possibility of sodomy, though, it equally serves firmly to associate it with characters other than the hero himself. Moreover, as a Protestant German doctor with Low Countries affinities and a declared opponent of the Prince of Parma and the Spanish, Faustus represents many things that the English admired and valued. He might indeed look unnervingly similar to an actual Englishman, Dr John Dee, Elizabeth I’s astrologer, whom she had consulted about the most auspicious date for her coronation. Certainly, in noteworthy contrast to another Marlovian hero, Barabas, as well as to Tamburlaine’s career of mass destruction, Faustus’s catalogue of his achievements so far includes some notable benefactions to humanity as a whole: Are not thy bills hung up as monuments, Whereby whole cities have escaped the plague And thousand desp’rate maladies been eased?

(I, i, –)

As Roger Sales observes, ‘The first recorded performances of Doctor Faustus took place just after London had been stalked by the

  -  plague, which probably killed at least eleven thousand people. Faustus’s casual rejection of his own medical skills must have shocked many spectators’ (Sales : ), but at the same time this would have served to establish him as a figure of considerable achievement and potential. When he achieves power, he does little that is evil – the horse courser was warned, and the Old Man assures us that his soul is safe – and some things which the audience is likely to have approved of, such as gratifying a pregnant woman and humbling the Pope. Perhaps most troublingly, there are suggestions in the text that he did not really have any control over his own fate, if ‘melting heavens conspired his overthrow’ (Prologue, ). In some ways, then, Doctor Faustus is both the most admirable and the most pitiable of Marlowe’s heroes – and yet Marlowe, with typical perversity, apparently sets him up simply for us to condemn, calling into question the very concept of a tragic hero. The Jew of Malta In some ways, Barabas seems to be a similar case to Faustus, but the difference is that Barabas is thoroughly realised as an anti-hero. As I have already suggested, the contrast between him and Faustus can be clearly seen in the difference between what Faustus says he has done and what Barabas says he has done: As for myself, I walk abroad o’ nights, And kill sick people groaning under walls: Sometimes I go about and poison wells . . .

(II, iii, –)

Another very interesting difference is that, despite the play’s many formal affiliations with morality plays, Doctor Faustus’s strong associations with the real historical figure of Dr Faust and his various idiosyncrasies make him an individual rather than an everyman. Barabas, by contrast, is an emblematic figure as much as an individual, for the story which the play tells clearly presents him as embodying the Jewish heritage from which Christianity originated. In naming his hero Barabas, after the criminal whom the Jews asked Pontius Pilate to free instead of Christ, Marlowe

  ,   uses his character to ask awkward questions whose repercussions spread out far beyond the play itself, in something of the same spirit of mockery and irreverence as animates a more modern story of an alternative Christ figure, Monty Python’s The Life of Brian (which in fact contains what might well look like an allusion to The Jew of Malta when Eric Idle on the cross says ‘Nothing will come from nothing’, which so closely echoes Barabas’ ‘Of naught is nothing made’ [I, ii, ]). In a play which features a representation of each of the three religions of the book, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, we may well find ourselves inclined to wonder how different they really are: Ithamore can seamlessly replace Abigail as Barabas’s heir, Abigail can convert from one religion to another, and back again, and the Friars are falling over themselves to welcome Barabas into the Catholic church. Indeed Arata Ide notes that ‘in the s Jewish stereotypes were often applied to Catholic priests and conspirators’ (Ide : ) so ‘Around , when Marlowe presumably wrote The Jew of Malta, we can assume that Barabas could have reminded the audience of a party of rebellious Catholics who had captured the imagination of English people throughout the s’ (Ide : ). The disturbing question the play poses, then, is if we dislike Barabas, who or what else must we dislike? The Massacre at Paris The Guise is unusual in many ways among Marlowe’s heroes. The apparently mutilated nature of the play as we have it means that his part is smaller and less impressive than that of any other of Marlowe’s protagonists. Also unusual is the fact that he is vulnerable: Marlowe, who was at pains to suppress any mention of the historical Timur’s lameness, has given considerable prominence to the fact that Guise is a cuckold. Finally, he dies much earlier in the play than any other of Marlowe’s heroes. Nevertheless, he still makes much the biggest impact of any character in this fragmented play, and once again we see the characteristic Marlovian manœuvre of making the most calculating of his characters also the most charismatic, and the focus of dramatic interest.

  -  Edward II The breach between Marlowe and Lord Strange which Kyd reported to the Privy Council meant that for what was almost certainly his last play, Edward II, Marlowe no longer had access to the services of Lord Strange’s Men, and this has often been thought to be reflected in the altered structure and weighting of that play, with Mortimer claiming the attention as much as Edward does. Edward also represents something of a departure for Marlovian dramaturgy in that although what he does may be misguided, it is far from clear that it is wrong, not only by our standards but quite possibly by Marlowe’s too. Quite apart from the question of what Marlowe’s own sexual preferences may have been, there is that very striking speech by Mortimer Senior which openly acknowledges the existence of many distinguished precedents for what Edward is doing: The mightiest kings have had their minions: Great Alexander loved Hephaestion, The conquering Hercules for Hylas wept, And for Patroclus stern Achilles drooped. And not kings only, but the wisest men.

(I, iv, –)

To have a male favourite is, then, by no means a sign of wickedness, weakness, or folly. In many ways, indeed, it is Mortimer who looks much more like the typical flawed Marlovian hero: his meteoric rise parallels Tamburlaine’s, and his contempt for those weaker or less cunning than himself echoes that of Guise and Barabas. Gaveston too has something of the superb contempt which characterises the typical Marlovian hero. Once again, then, Marlowe’s real dramatic energy finds itself gravitating to the most manipulative and contemptuous character onstage, even if he is not the official hero. In this as in so many other things, it is transgression which really fuels his plays. Hero and Leander Even more than Tamburlaine the Great, Hero and Leander offers us a male character whose body is the object of homoerotic description.

  ,   Hero, the lead female, is described entirely in terms of her clothes, which are, moreover, comically conceived: The outside of her garments were of lawn, The lining purple silk, with gilt stars drawn; Her wide sleeves green, and bordered with a grove, Where Venus in her naked glory strove To please the careless and disdainful eyes Of proud Adonis that before her lies. Her kirtle blue, whereon was many a stain, Made with the blood of wretched lovers slain . . . (Sestiad I, –) Hero must have cut a pretty odd figure if her skirt is covered in the blood of her rejected suitors. Marlowe, however, lingers lovingly on imagining Leander naked, and as adhering entirely to the highly valued norm of the classical male nude: His body was as straight as Circe’s wand; Jove might have sipped out nectar from his hand. Even as delicious meat is to the taste, So was his neck in touching, and surpassed The white of Pelops’ shoulder. I could tell ye How smooth his breast was, and how white his belly, And whose immortal fingers did imprint That heavenly path with many a curious dint That runs along his back, but my rude pen Can hardly blazon forth the loves of men, Much less of powerful gods: let it suffice That my slack muse sings of Leander’s eyes, Those orient cheeks and lips, exceeding his That leapt into the water for a kiss Of his own shadow, and despising many, Died ere he could enjoy the love of any. Had wild Hippolytus Leander seen, Enamoured of his beauty had he been; His presence made the rudest peasant melt, That in the vast uplandish country dwelt.

  -  The barbarous Thracian soldier, moved with nought, Was moved with him, and for his favour sought. Some swore he was a maid in man’s attire, For in his looks were all that men desire. (Sestiad I, –) Leander may not be very worldly-wise – he is comically inept in his courtship of Hero and equally slow-witted in his exchange with Neptune – but ‘in his looks were all that men desire’, a formulation which slyly insinuates that Marlowe is not alone in his tastes but that he is writing for a community of the like-minded and is not afraid to say so. With this final addition to what, in Elizabethan terms, would have seemed more like a rogues’ gallery than a collection of suitable heroes for literature, Marlowe reveals more clearly than ever a poetic and dramatic aesthetic which radically transgresses established norms.

NOTES

. See also Cartelli . . On the tendency to imagine Spain as England’s Carthage, see Miller : .

 

Critical Issues

he major critical issues associated with Marlowe have typically focused on his relationship to Shakespeare – too often construed as one of simple inferiority; the relationship of his life, and his apparent religious beliefs (or lack of them), to his works; his reputation as overreacher; and the allegations that he cannot create female characters and that even his male characters are merely himself in disguise, as when Constance Kuriyama simply declares that ‘Marlowe may well have chosen to write about the massacre because he identified with the Guise’ (Kuriyama : ). This chapter will explore these and attempt to offer a more balanced account of the scale of Marlowe’s achievement. There is an unusual amount of early comment on Marlowe, beginning with Robert Greene’s observations in Perimedes the Blacksmith, which condemned Marlowe as an atheist. Rather different reservations were expressed by Ben Jonson, who declared in ‘Timber, or Discoveries’ that

T

The true Artificer will not run away from nature, as hee were afraid of her; or depart from life, and the likenesses of Truth; but speake to the capacity of his hearers, and though his language differ from the vulgar somewhat; it shall not fly from all humanity, with the Tamerlanes, and Tamer-Chams of the late Age, which had nothing in them but the scenicall strutting,

   and furious vociferation, to warrant them to the ignorant gapers. (MacLure : ) For Jonson, the concern is not the distance between Tamburlaine and God but the distance between Tamburlaine and real humans. Jonson, like Greene, acknowledges the rhetorical power and dramatic force of Marlowe’s style, but thinks that his characters are too much larger than life. If the role of drama is, as Hamlet says, to hold the mirror up to nature, then, for Jonson, Marlowe’s drama fails. Although Marlowe was referred to in the  Prologue to The Jew of Malta as ‘the best of poets in that age’, his reputation fell away sharply after the Civil War. Doctor Faustus was acted only in a rewritten and wholly farcical version, and a writer who published a play called Tamerlane in  claimed, when challenged, never to have known that there had been an earlier version, or to have met anyone else who had heard of it either. Many of the comments on Marlowe in the years that followed were wildly misinformed: Theophilus Cibber in  had Marlowe dying in a fight over a mistress and doubted his alleged atheism, declaring that For my part, I am willing to suspend my judgment till I meet with some other testimony of his having thus heinously offended against his God, and against the best and most amiable system of Religion that ever was, or ever can be: Marloe might possibly be inclined to free-thinking, without running the unhappy lengths that Mr. Wood tells us, it was reported he had done. (MacLure : ) Similarly James Broughton in  argued that the allegations of Marlowe’s atheism were unreliable because they originated from a Puritan; Broughton saw them as part of a general war waged by religion on theatre (MacLure : ). For both the devoutly orthodox Cibber, so innocently convinced that the Church of England offered ‘the best and most amiable system of religion that ever was, or ever can be’, and the more quietly proper Broughton, an accusation of atheism represented a terrible calumny from which they indignantly defend Marlowe.

  ,   There is also no sense in these years that Marlowe might have had a topical or satirical purpose: Thomas Warton in  quotes an earlier author, whom he names only as ‘Ashby’, as declaring that ‘It seems somewhat remarkable that Marlow, in describing the pleasures which Gaveston contrived to debauch the infatuated Edward, should exactly employ those which were exhibited before the sage Elizabeth. But to her they were only occasional and temporary relaxations’ (MacLure : ). Clearly neither Ashby nor Warton had ever contemplated the possibility that Marlowe might have been interested in deliberately associating Elizabeth I with Edward II, or that he might ever have regarded her as anything less than ‘sage’. Indeed for a long time there was little sense of what we now understand as the distinctive elements of Marlovian drama: Charles Lamb wrote in  of the ‘Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia’ speech in Tamburlaine the Great (Part Two, IV, iii, –), Till I saw this passage with my own eyes, I never believed that it was anything more than a pleasant burlesque of Mine Ancient’s [Pistol in the Henry IV plays]. But I assure my readers that it is soberly set down in a Play which their Ancestors took to be serious. (MacLure : ) Here we have one of the most distinguished literary critics of the age cheerfully admitting that not only had he not believed in the existence of probably the most famous passage in Marlowe until he actually saw it, but that when he did so, he was distinctly unimpressed. Indeed Tamburlaine the Great, the play on which both Greene and Jonson commented in the thirty or so years after it was written and which spawned a whole host of lookalikes in the s, rarely impressed in the nineteenth century. Although the great German poet Goethe was much struck with Doctor Faustus, and modelled his own play Faust on it, the general consensus in the nineteenth century was that Edward II was by far Marlowe’s best play, principally on the grounds of its characterisation; in fact, in a rare instance of Marlowe being rated higher than Shakespeare, it was often held to be better than Richard II. Marlowe’s reputation in

   general underwent something of a renaissance in this period, so much so that Thomas Dabbs has argued that ‘Marlowe was originally invented by Victorian scholars, critics, and educators and then handed on to us’ (Dabbs : ), but they did not always perceive him in the same ways as we now might. For one thing, Marlowe was felt to be an unusually monologic dramatist: H. N. Hudson commented in  that ‘the persons all speak from one brain, the hero talking just like the others, only more so’ (MacLure : ). For another, in the nineteenth century, Marlowe was often compared with Shelley, since both were reputed to be atheists and both died young, and partly because Shelley was a poet, it was often as a poet above all that Marlowe too was received. Even the great character critic A. C. Bradley, writing in , talked first about Marlowe’s style, and used that as a gateway to thinking about his characters: ‘Lift upward’ Marlowe’s style was at first, and so it remained . . . The expression ‘lift upwards’ applies also, in a sense, to most of the chief characters in the plays . . . A volcanic self-assertion, a complete absorption in some one desire, is their characteristic. That in creating such characters Marlowe was working in dark places, and that he developes [sic] them with all his energy, is certain. (MacLure : ) Bradley also adumbrated a number of the charges which were later to become common currency against Marlowe: ‘no humour or tenderness relieves his pathos; there is not any female character in his plays whom we remember with much interest; and it is not clear that he could have produced songs of the first order’ (MacLure : ). Marlowe, then, is not lyrical, not comic, and not good at creating women. These were all charges which were to be many times repeated. It is also highly significant for the development of critical ideas about Marlowe that these were all charges that could not be brought against Shakespeare. This was partly responsible for the fact that Marlowe was increasingly constructed in opposition to Shakespeare. As the twentieth century progressed, critical interest in Marlowe grew. In  Harry Levin’s influential book Christopher Marlowe:

  ,   The Overreacher, doing what it said on the tin, argued that ‘His heroes make their fortunes by exercising virtues which conventional morality might well regard as vices. For the most part, they are self-made men; and, to the extent that they can disregard the canons of good and evil, they are supermen’ (Levin : ). , the quatercentenary of Marlowe’s birth, saw a particularly strong outbreak of interest in him, with a special issue of the Tulane Drama Review entirely devoted to Marlowe and the publication of J. B. Steane, Marlowe: A Critical Study and of Clifford Leech’s Marlowe: A Collection of Critical Essays, the first book of essays devoted to Marlowe. Not everyone, though, was converted. In  Wilbur Sanders’s book The Dramatist and the Received Idea: Studies in the Plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare opened by arguing against historicist readings, but this turned out to be only so that he could adduce some ‘simple commonsense’ ones focusing on ‘The serious limitations of Marlowe’s conception of the human’ (Sanders : ) and declaring that With . . . the life-denying stoic abdication of the human, we are very near to grasping the central failure of Edward II. Wilson Knight has observed that ‘Marlowe, like Tamburlaine, is a king-degrader’; but Edward II sets me (for one) wondering whether he is not also a man-degrader. (Sanders : ) For Sanders, the key to Marlowe’s ‘failure’ proves ultimately to lie squarely in his homosexuality: It was known before the age of psychoanalysis that misanthropy was the uneasy bedfellow of self-contempt and guilt, and I am making no revolutionary proposal if I suggest that there is a strange congruency in the fates of Edward, the dabbler in sodomy, and of Faustus, the religious sceptic, which might be accounted for as a neurotic desire for symbolic punishment and expiation. (Sanders : –) Twelve years later, Constance Brown Kuriyama further developed this line in her book Hammer or Anvil: Psychological Patterns in

   Christopher Marlowe, in which she too argued that Marlowe was driven by a need to punish himself for his sexual ‘deviance’. For Kuriyama, Marlowe’s œuvre can be read as a prolonged coming to terms with who and what he was. Initially, as she sees it, this is gestured at only obliquely; thus in Tamburlaine the Great, ‘The play . . . depicts recurrent attacks from behind. It is indeed important . . . to remember that Marlowe composed the play with a map in front of him’ (Kuriyama : ), and Experience is rendered in rigid either / or terms that all seem ultimately related to a basic preoccupation with sexual identity. Uneasiness about defining and regulating one’s relationship to women is as conspicuous as uncertainty about one’s relationship to the gods. An increasingly strident insistence on power and potency coexists with (and all but drowns out) a pervasive anxiety, a fear of being somehow maimed, overpowered, or killed. (Kuriyama : ) For Kuriyama, at the emotional heart of Tamburlaine is Marlowe’s desire to avoid castration. It is as a symbolic escape from the fear of castration that she sees the omission of Tamburlaine’s lameness (Kuriyama : ), while another metaphor for castration is also gestured at only to be denied: ‘Instead of being blinded, Tamburlaine has “piercing instruments of sight” which are repeatedly mentioned’ (Kuriyama : –). As for Tamburlaine’s apparent passion for Zenocrate, that is in fact merely a front, since Kuriyama observes that Zenocrate ‘is first described . . . in literally frigid imagery of ice and snow’ (Kuriyama : ). As Marlowe moves through his career, ‘In Doctor Faustus . . . we have still another version of the same pathological and destructive father–son relationships that characterize Tamburlaine’ (Kuriyama : ). Finally, in Edward II, Kuriyama sees acceptance, but is acceptance of a qualified and alarming nature: What we seem to have . . . in Edward II is the fullest expression of Marlowe’s reluctant self-acceptance . . . What is perhaps most striking about Edward II is the fact that

  ,   Marlowe no longer seems to be groping for a way out, either through hyperbolical aggression as in Tamburlaine, through the stalling device of the bargain as in Doctor Faustus, or through regression as in The Jew of Malta. He takes it for granted that Edward is doomed, and that all struggle is futile. (Kuriyama : –) For Kuriyama as for Sanders, then, the apparent historical fact of Marlowe’s homosexuality means that all he can aspire to, in art and in life, is a gracious acceptance of inevitable doom and defeat. In the late twentieth century, criticism of Marlowe was revolutionised by several new approaches which were very different from what had gone before. In , Stephen Greenblatt published his influential book Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare, which paid attention to the ways in which Renaissance characters and authors fashioned for themselves identities which they were not born with. Sara Munson Deats testifies to the continuing influence of Greenblatt’s ideas and terminology when she writes that ‘In the latter scenes of Part I and throughout Part II, Tamburlaine ceases his fluctuation between the first and third person pronouns when addressing himself, perhaps an indication that the conqueror has fashioned the persona of his aspirations and that his future has become his present’ (Deats : ). In , Simon Shepherd announced in the foreword of his book Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (a title that would have been unthinkable not so very much earlier) that as I write, the National Union of Mineworkers has been heroically pursuing its just struggle for six months; and while I worked on the book it seemed that the age of the first Elizabeth in all its brutalities was all too like the age of the second. (Shepherd : ix–x) For Shepherd, then, Marlowe was what Jan Kott had declared Shakespeare to be in his  book Shakespeare Our Contemporary: someone who spoke in a particularly urgent way to the concerns of the present rather than those of the past. Though Shepherd was attentive to the context in which Marlowe wrote, declaring that

   ‘I want to get away from traditional author-centred approaches, with their not always useful ideas of intention and biography, etc. So the earlier sections of the book try to lose Marlowe’s works within a wider context’ (Shepherd : xviii), there is a sense throughout the book that a critic living in an age when it is possible to talk openly of homosexuality, atheism and dissidence is much better placed to understand Marlowe than his own contemporaries could ever have been. Shepherd takes some unexpected tacks in his approach to Marlowe: the first chapter, ‘Language and Power’, begins by adumbrating the campaign against Puritanism conducted by ‘Archbishop Whitgift, a sort of sixteenth-century Norman Tebbitt’ (a Conservative politician of the period) and then announces ‘This chapter seeks to connect these campaigns and debates with the plays in that it describes tensions within the plot situations between speech, writing and silence’ (Shepherd : –). The second chapter, ‘Form and Disorder’, focuses more conventionally on the conditions of the Elizabethan theatre and the way they inflect Marlowe’s writing, and the third, ‘Making Persons’, also stays on relatively familiar ground, looking at Marlowe’s characterisation and announcing its aim as ‘to describe some of the devices which indicate subjectivity and then to discuss the values carried by these devices’ (Shepherd : ). The fourth, ‘Messengers, Prophets, Scholars’ argues more unusually that these characters, who make frequent though apparently peripheral appearances within Marlowe’s plays, ‘embody and clarify specific aspects of the structure of Elizabethan social relations’ (Shepherd : ). The fifth focuses on ‘Turks and Fathers’ and surprisingly argues that both represent rule, while the final one, ‘ “Women” and Males’, announces its intention as ‘to speak of Marlowe’s treatment of gender and of sodomy’ (Shepherd : ), with the inverted commas around ‘women’ clearly signalling Shepherd’s awareness of the difficulties of representing women in an all-male theatre. Other contexts for understanding Marlowe also began to be adduced. In Roger Sales’  volume on Marlowe in the Macmillan guides to drama series, the first half of the book is a ‘life and times’ section which opens with Ralegh, and Sales then goes on to relate Tamburlaine to the Elizabethan massacre of the indigenous Irish at Smerwick:

  ,   The Tamburlaine plays have often been associated with Elizabethan colonial expansion, although the appropriate context has been taken to be the Americas rather than Ireland. It is nevertheless dangerous to see them as just promoting Elizabethan dreams of empire. Such dreams are disturbed by the presence of Tamburlaine himself. He casts off his Scythian ‘weeds’, puts on a suit of armour and then sets about colonising the world using many of [Ralegh’s half-brother Sir Humphrey] Gilbert’s tactics. It is as if a person pulling the Bridewell dungcart suddenly becomes the beadle in charge of it. (Sales : ) Sales further suggests that Zenocrate’s picture ‘is hung up outside Tamburlaine’s tent to give him an added military advantage, in much the same way as Sir Humphrey Gilbert lined up heads outside his own tent’ (Sales : ). Sales also points out the extent to which Marlowe’s plays challenge accepted orthodoxies, observing of Tamburlaine’s praise of Zenocrate when he first meets her that ‘It is meant to ambush those spectators who believe that Scythians, or members of any other wandering tribe, are incapable of controlling their sexual desires’ (Sales : ) and slyly observes that in the death scene of Edward II ‘the royal monopoly on violence is challenged’ (Sales : ). The Marlowe of Sales’s account thus begins to emerge as the heterodox subversive that we are now likely to think of Marlowe as being. That subversive image was further cemented in  with the publication of Emily C. Bartels’s book Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe. Bartels began by announcing that The key question underlying this book is why Christopher Marlowe, the sixteenth century’s most important playwright after Shakespeare, chose to bring ‘the alien’ to center stage in each of his plays . . . The question, though investigated here in terms of Marlowe, turns us to the larger issue of why the alien was such a vital and appealing subject on the Renaissance stage and within Renaissance society more generally. (Bartels : xiii)

   She suggests that a large part of the answer to this question is that ‘An important part of the support for English superiority and domination was the insistence on the otherness of the other and on what had been or were becoming stereotypical demonizations of such figures as the Turk, the Moor, or the Oriental barbarian’ (Bartels : xiv). Bartels declares that ‘My approach has clearly been shaped by new historicist criticism, but in arguing that Marlowe’s plays are finally subversive my book offers an important exception to the new historicist tendency’ (Bartels : xv), though she is also influenced by postcolonial theory, and draws on an important concept from it, that of the subaltern, when she announces that Neither my study nor Marlowe’s plays attempt to recuperate the ‘subaltern’ voice; instead their focus is on the means of appropriation that silence and occlude that voice, creating in its stead an other who speaks of and for Europe. Though such a project can only tell half the story, that half is vital to our understanding of the cultural and cross-cultural transactions that defined the early modern state. (Bartels : ) She argues that ‘Marlowe’s plays, in bringing alien types to center stage, subversively resist . . . exploitation and expose the demonization of an other as a strategy for self-authorization and selfempowerment, whether on the foreign or the domestic front’ (Bartels : xv), and compares him to Reginald Scot, the contemporary writer on witchcraft who was similarly inclined to look for socially produced rather than supernatural causation for apparent phenomenon of witchcraft. What Bartels finds much less easy to recuperate, though, is Marlowe’s representation of women: More problematic are Marlowe’s representations of women, not because they are one-dimensional and wooden (as critics have often concluded) but because they are two-dimensional and contradictory, because they reinscribe a difference that they simultaneously resist . . . His plays demonstate how ‘the ideology of what women should be . . . originates in the man’ and how women are fetishized beneath the male gaze.

  ,   Yet Marlowe also participates in that subjugation and objectification. (Bartels : ) For Bartels, ‘Even as Marlowe exposes male dominance as male dominance, he presents women who, despite initial acts of resistance, are willingly complicitous in enforcing its terms, and who are unaware of or indifferent to the limitations that we see in their circumscribed situations’ (Bartels : ). The territory broached by Sales and Shepherd has been much explored since, with notable studies including Sara Munson Deats’s Sex, Gender, and Desire in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (), which includes a chapter entitled ‘The Rejection of the Feminine in Doctor Faustus’, something which is an obvious fact of the play but to which critics would once never have dreamed of paying attention, and the collection of essays which Deats subsequently co-edited with Robert A. Logan, Marlowe’s Empery: Expanding His Critical Contexts. This contains chapters including Rick Bowers’ ‘Hysterics, High Camp, and Dido Queene of Carthage’ and Randall Nakayama’s ‘ “I know she is a courtesan by her attire”: Clothing and Identity in The Jew of Malta’, again topics which it would once never have occurred to anyone to consider. In , Darryll Grantley’s and Peter Roberts’s collection Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture included essays on ‘Visible Bullets: Tamburlaine the Great and Ivan the Terrible’, ‘ “At Middleborough”: Some Reflections on Marlowe’s Visit to the Low Countries in ’, ‘Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris and the Reputation of Henri III of France’ and ‘Marlowe and the New World’, all of them clearly situating Marlowe as an author with an eye very firmly fixed on the wider world. A rather different emphasis was introduced by Paul Whitfield White’s  collection Marlowe, History, and Sexuality, which included essays by Lisa S. Starks on ‘ “Won with thy words and conquered with thy looks”: Sadism, Masochism, and the Masochistic Gaze in  Tamburlaine’ and by Mario DiGangi on ‘Marlowe, Queer Studies, and Renaissance Homoeroticism’, while Avraham Oz’s  collection Marlowe: Contemporary Critical Essays reprinted a number of essays including ‘Economic and Ideological Exchange in Marlowe’s

   Jew of Malta’, by David H. Thurn, and the editor’s own ‘Faces of Nation and Barbarism: Prophetic Mimicry and the Politics of Tamburlaine the Great’, both of which see Marlowe as an author with a quintessentially modern perspective very like our own, and speaking to issues which are if anything even more relevant to us than they were to his original audience. The continuing influence of Greenblatt was attested to by the fact that two of the essays in Oz’s collection, those by Michael Hattaway and Jonathan Dollimore, have the word ‘subversion’ in the title. The range of possible critical contexts for Marlowe was widened still further when the first ever companion volume to Marlowe, edited by Patrick Cheney, appeared in . This included an introduction entitled ‘Marlowe in the twenty-first century’, and along with the expected discussions of the individual plays and poems, on Marlowe’s life, and on his texts, also had chapters on markedly more contemporary approaches such as ‘Marlowe and the politics of religion’, ‘Geography and identity in Marlowe’, and ‘Marlowe’s men and women: gender and sexuality’. Most recently, this newly emerging critical debate has itself been challenged. In his introduction to a collection of essays entitled Constructing Christopher Marlowe, J. T. Parnell declares that ‘the contributors to Constructing Christopher Marlowe are united in their rejection of biographical approaches and their attention to more nuanced and flexible readings of Marlowe’s texts and culture’ (Parnell : ). Parnell has little time for previous critics: Apparently sensitive to questions of performance and audience response, critics such as Greenblatt, James Shapiro, Thomas Cartelli, and Emily Bartels paradoxically move, in their zeal to access Renaissance “realities”, further and further away from the particularities of Marlowe’s texts and “the praxis of theatre” ’. Thus when Greenblatt alludes to the RSC’s  production of The Jew of Malta to demonstrate the audience’s complicity in Marlowe’s dismantling of moral values, he tellingly ignores the fact ‘that Marlowe never wrote a scene showing the nuns dying’. (Parnell : )

  ,   In the same volume, Janet Clare directly challenges prevailing historicist wisdom when she argues that In considering the aesthetics of violence developed by Marlowe in the new secular drama of the s, I will argue that we benefit from looking beyond the period to the writings of Antonin Artaud on theatre formulated in a collection of essays published in . (Clare : ) Similarly Lukas Erne in a recent article takes issue with what have become two central tenets of Marlovian criticism. First, he disputes the traditional view that Marlowe could not write comedy, and suggests indeed that the celebrated line in the Prologue of Tamburlaine the Great, Part One, ‘From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits’ refers not to previous plays (specifically, Scott McMillin and SallyBeth MacLean suggested, those of the Queen’s Men) (McMillin and MacLean : ) but actually to the Mycetes scenes of this one (Erne : –), and is thus foregrounding the comic element of the play. Secondly, he castigates those of us who have understood Marlowe as homosexual, arguing that ‘The only evidence the biographical record contains to support such a view is Marlowe’s flippant statement, according to the Baines note, “that all they that loue not Tobacco & Boies were fooles” ’ (Erne : ). For Erne, we should not rely on what we think we know of Marlowe’s life to understand his works, because the biographical evidence is fundamentally unreliable and is a hindrance to the production of intelligent criticism of the plays: ‘Once we stop pretending we know Marlowe once and for all, Marlowe studies may well have exciting times ahead’ (Erne : ). One might, however, observe that we do not need to rely solely on the biographical record for evidence of a homoerotic sensibility in Marlowe’s plays: quite apart from the fact that Edward’s barons clearly do not regard his relationship with Gaveston as one of simple friendship, there is also the line in Hero and Leander, ‘For in his looks was all that men desire’, which certainly seems to speak clearly enough of at least an understanding of the fact that men can love and want other men, and the stress on King Henry’s fondness for his minions in The Massacre at Paris (xiv, –).

   Different critical approaches have inevitably found some of Marlowe’s works of greater interest than others. Roger Sales’  volume on Marlowe in the Macmillan guides to drama series, for instance, begins by announcing that ‘This short study concentrates on the five plays by Marlowe that are most frequently studied and performed’, thus excluding Dido, Queen of Carthage and The Massacre at Paris (Sales : xi). Just as Doctor Faustus has been the most produced of the plays, so it has been the most written about. Dido, Queen of Carthage and The Massacre at Paris, by contrast, have attracted few article-length studies and no book-length ones. Tamburlaine the Great, which perhaps made the greatest impression on Marlowe’s contemporaries, has also impressed modern critics less, whereas The Jew of Malta has excited some very sophisticated analyses and both Edward II and Hero and Leander have been the focus of much criticism interested in sex and gender. The Lucan translation has been generally neglected, but a notable exception to this is Patrick Cheney’s book Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession, which sees it as central to Marlowe’s œuvre. From this necessarily brief survey of the critical history of the plays, a number of recurring issues emerge. First, it is generally alleged that Marlowe cannot create female characters. Secondly, he is often accused of not being able or willing to write comedy. Partly as a concomitant of this, he is seen as a writer whose drama is essentially monologic, sounding only one note and with characters who are not fully differentiated from each other and, in the last analysis, sound like Marlowe himself; as late as , Robert Logan declares ‘As is so often the case with Marlowe, our immediate attention is drawn to the style of the speech rather than to the personality of the character speaking’ (Logan : ). Most of all, he is, in all these respects, frequently identified as inferior to Shakespeare.

WOMEN

The first of the weaknesses thus identified, that Marlowe cannot create women characters, is perhaps the easiest to address. It is true that it is unusual – though not unknown – for a female character to be the main focus of dramatic interest in a scene by Marlowe.

  ,   Marlowe is not Thomas Middleton, whose Jacobean tragedies such as Women Beware Women and The Changeling have sometimes led him to be called a ‘women’s dramatist’. On the other hand, Marlowe is not Middleton in another way too, because though Middleton’s women are indeed much more at the centre of his plays, and do much more than Marlowe’s, what they do is almost invariably wicked. In Marlowe, by contrast, women may do less, but they are rarely incriminated in the way that Middleton’s women are, nor are their roles always as simple as they may appear. Joanna Gibbs, arguing that ‘For all the apparent compulsion of . . . evidence for the prosecution, Marlowe seems nevertheless concerned at crucial points in the plays to complicate any simple reduction of women to positions of servility’ (Gibbs : ), declares: If Marlowe’s women are all immersed in cultural and political mechanisms which function to sustain male power, then the playwright also seems determined to elaborate on the particularities of women’s encounters with sexist social structures. Differentiating between women – some of whom seek subversively to reinscribe themselves within patriarchy while others acquiesce to it, or simply misunderstand it and suffer accordingly – Marlowe does more than reduce women to apolitical vessels of feeling who are nothing but adjuncts of his male characters. If we dispense with the notion that the plays are necessarily informed by binary divisions between male and female spheres and gender roles, we can recognise the extent to which Marlowe’s women share with his men a motivation that is as much political as emotional. (Gibbs : ) Marlowe’s women may, then, deserve more attention than they have previously been paid. Dido, Queen of Carthage The obvious exception to the argument that women are habitually marginalised in Marlowe is of course Dido, Queen of Carthage, which is one of the very few plays of the period to have an

   eponymous heroine. Indeed Dido, Queen of Carthage includes an unusually large number of female characters for Marlowe, and they all have important roles to play. The goddesses Venus and Juno arrive in the play bringing with them clearly formulated sets of expectations about what they represent and how they are likely to act, and, typically, Marlowe subverts these. Venus is the goddess of love and beauty, yet in this play we see her principally in the role of worried mother and doting grandmother. Juno is the goddess of marriage and childbearing, yet she wants to thwart a potential marriage and harm a child. Both these goddesses thus contribute importantly to the play’s generally irreverent and iconoclastic tone and its apparent scepticism about the value even if not the existence of the gods. Equally important, and in equally unexpected ways, are Dido’s two close female associates, her sister Anna and the Nurse. Anna does not only prove the confidante figure so beloved of classical theatre, she also modifies that function in important ways, because while the confidante usually offers a contrast to the main character, Anna repeats Dido in a number of ways, most noticeably in her unrequited love and in her suicide. The Nurse too echoes her mistress in the way she falls in love, and the fact that technically speaking she and Dido are in love with two brothers, since both Cupid and Aeneas are sons of Venus, makes her in a way almost as much a sister of Dido as Anna is. I think these parallels work in two principal ways. First, these two sets of parallels do undoubtedly work to reduce Dido’s importance, and above all the effect of her status as a queen, reducing her to the same level as other women. Marlowe’s Dido could in different ways look like both Elizabeth I (because of her other name of Elissa) and Mary, Queen of Scots (because of her reckless willingness to sacrifice political power for love) and Marlowe might well have wanted to tilt at both these figures. Indeed the fact that aspects of both are suggested could well be seen as a deliberate way of allowing him to have his cake and eat it. Dido, Queen of Carthage might well have been written somewhere around the time of the trial and execution of Mary, Queen of Scots for conspiring against Elizabeth I, so a glance at Mary would be perfectly in keeping with political orthodoxy. Indeed Deanne Williams, arguing that the play

  ,   ‘dramatizes the symbolic relationship between Elizabeth’s virginity and her political power’, declares that ‘By depicting Dido as a negative example of enslavement by erotic love and the desire for marriage, Dido, Queene of Carthage offers a sophisticated theatrical compliment to the queen’ (Williams : –). However, it is hard to believe that Marlowe would have had much time for ‘the cult of Elizabeth’, most notably exemplified in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (and though the first six books of The Faerie Queene were not published until  we know that Marlowe had read it before then, because he quotes from it in Tamburlaine the Great, which was on the stage in ). As Patrick Cheney has brilliantly analysed, Marlowe modelled himself in his capacity as public writer on the questioning and cynical Ovid rather than the sage panegyrist Virgil whom Spenser took as his model, and Dido, Queen of Carthage could well be seen as providing the same sort of sceptical counter to Spenser as Ovid does to Virgil. Equally, Donald Stump directly relates Marlowe’s Dido to Elizabeth’s proposed marriage to the French Duke of Alençon (Stump : ), which caused a dramatic fall in her popularity. It seems far more likely that the original audience would have perceived criticism of Elizabeth rather than compliment to her. Insofar as the comparison with Anna and the Nurse reduces Dido from a queen to a woman, though, it also allows us to see that human women in this play act, as a group, rather better than either goddesses or human men. Aeneas certainly lies to Dido when he says that he did not intend to sail away and leave Ascanius behind (he does not know that Venus has substituted Cupid for Ascanius) and he may well be lying too in his description of the fall of Troy. He is first ridiculously slow to understand that Dido is in love with him and then brutally callous when he leaves her. The women, by contrast, act in every case solely out of love, and this is, as we shall see, a surprisingly consistent element in Marlowe’s creation of female characters. Tamburlaine the Great Love is certainly the keynote of Zenocrate’s character. Having, to everyone’s surprise including apparently her own, fallen in love

   with her captor Tamburlaine, Zenocrate first suffers a crisis about her sense of her own unworthiness and then struggles to reconcile Tamburlaine to others whom she loves or pities, starting with her father and her former suitor Arabia and culminating in her deathbed attempt to mediate between him and Calyphas. Love is equally the motivating force of Zabina, who may be proud but is an unfailingly supportive wife to Bajazeth, and of Olympia, who is motivated in everything she does by love and loyalty to her dead husband and son. Moreover, Olympia is accorded an honour which none of the male characters are, in that she is allowed the unique privilege of standing as a structural comparator to Tamburlaine, in that both kill their sons. Finally, Sara Munson Deats remarks on Zenocrate’s ‘important role as ethical antagonist’ and argues that ‘Although it fails to explode gender stereotypes, Tamburlaine I comments tacitly on a phenomenon familiar to women of many eras – the disparity between the female’s selfimage and the distorted perception of her by masculine associates’ (Deats : ). Doctor Faustus Technically speaking there are no female characters at all in Doctor Faustus apart from the Duchess of Vanholt, since both Helen of Troy and Alexander’s paramours are represented by spirits, and yet the most famous lines of the play are associated with a woman – ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?’ (V, i, ). Doctor Faustus reveals perhaps more clearly than any other Marlowe play an extremely important aspect of the way in which female characters could work on the English Renaissance stage and indeed in English Renaissance culture as a whole: they provided the aptest and most readily understood way of symbolising ideals and abstractions. Partly because so many abstract nouns in Latin are female (victoria, iustitia), allegory has always found female characters grist to its mill, and though Marlowe might have disliked the kind of allegory used for the service of the state that Spenser was peddling, his years of study of the classics had clearly shown him how useful it could be in general. In Doctor Faustus, Helen of Troy symbolises both beauty and the goal of the ultimate and most culturally

  ,   prestigious quest narrative of Marlowe’s age, the Troy story. The Duchess of Vanholt, meanwhile, with her request for grapes, might well hint at recalling the Blessed Virgin Mary, who while pregnant had desired cherries, which were miraculously given to her, as recalled in the medieval Cherry Tree Carol. The Jew of Malta Abigail too can be seen as alluding to the Blessed Virgin Mary, as we have seen in Chapter , and she, as much as Zenocrate or Olympia, is motivated entirely by love, first for her father and then for Mathias. She is also the only person in the play who does not seek to use religion, or indeed anything else, for her own ends. When the Friar laments that she has died while still a virgin, we may well feel that she has in fact had a lucky escape from this calculating society where everyone has their price. The inclusion of Abigail in this most cynical of all his plays could well be seen as Marlowe’s one concession to the idea of a better nature, though equally we see that such a nature would be one which could not survive in the world as it is. The Massacre at Paris The Massacre at Paris offers unquestionably the wickedest of Marlowe’s female characters. Catherine de Medici orders the poisoning not only of her fellow queen Jeanne d’Albret but of her own son Charles when he displeases her. Marlowe’s audience would have had no trouble believing this because it was precisely what the real Catherine de Medici was supposed to have done. By the same token, though, they would have been surprised to find that Catherine’s daughter Marguerite de Valois, the Margaret of the play, was not represented as they had expected her to be. Despite the fact that she is French and Catholic, and that her historical counterpart was notorious for her many affairs, Margaret, like so many of Marlowe’s women, is fundamentally loving, both to her husband and to her mother-in-law. Once again, a woman behaves well and offers some hope for at least a possible future.

   Edward II This is of course not the case in Edward II, where Isabella takes a lover, colludes in the murder of her husband and brother-in-law, and disregards the feelings and wishes of her son. In Jarman’s film, as have seen, the vampiric Isabella becomes the person of everything Jarman hated about ‘heterosoc’, the society predicated on compulsory heterosexuality and the demonisation of homosexuality. However, Jarman was only able to achieve this effect by ignoring entirely the other woman in the play, Edward’s niece and Gaveston’s wife, Margaret de Clare. Like Dido, Zenocrate, Abigail, and Margaret in The Massacre at Paris, Margaret de Clare is a woman defined primarily by love. She does not seem remotely disturbed by Gaveston’s closeness to her uncle; instead, she simply looks forward to her marriage to her ‘first love’ (II, i, ), her ‘sweet Gaveston’ (II, i, ). No one could say that Marlowe offers powerful role models for women or displays a profound insight into female psychology. If, by some freak of chance, every line of his plays had vanished except those which deal with women, it seems safe to say that he would rapidly have been consigned to the dustbin of history. But that does not mean that female characters have no part to play in his dramatic universe, nor that he was a misogynist. For Marlowe, women function symbolically, and are interesting not for ‘who they are’, to use a modern term he could never have understood, but for what they can be made to represent. Perhaps, indeed, they are not so different from his male characters in this. Marlowe’s heroes have immense dramatic vitality, but they are not realistic in our sense of the term, and Marlowe might well have seen no reason why they should be so. The fact that Marlowe’s women work in primarily allegorical ways might in fact serve to alert us to the idea that his men may do so too.

MEN

As we have seen, Marlowe’s heroes have too often been seen as representing simply variants of himself. Yet they can readily be

  ,   understood as working in an entirely different way, and as representing not one individual but a number of separate ideas. Dido, Queen of Carthage Aeneas, for instance, is not just an individual but the personification of a crucially important idea for Elizabethan culture, the translatio imperii. According to the influential legendarium compiled by Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, Aeneas’s great-grandson, Brutus, was the founder of Britain: his sons Locrine, Camber and Albanact ruled over the kingdoms of Logres (England), Cambria (Wales) and Albania (Scotland) respectively. This was not only the foundational legend of ‘British’ culture, but also the fundamental authorisation for Britain to go on and conquer other countries: thus for Thomas Smith, who sponsored a colony in Ireland, ‘the English were like the Romans for their aim was to civilize the Irish just as the Romans had civilized the ancient Britons’ (Fitzpatrick –: ). The significance of Aeneas is perhaps never more clearly demonstrated than when in The Tempest, a play profoundly influenced by the discourses of English colonialism, Ferdinand quotes Aeneas’s first words on landing in Africa: Ferdinand’s ‘Most sure, the goddess’ (I, ii, ) is a direct translation of Aeneas’s ‘O dea certe’ in the Aeneid. At the same time, though, Aeneas was also important at home, because he was supposedly an ancestor of Elizabeth herself; hence his appearance as an important part of her iconography in the Sieve Portrait. The story of Dido and Aeneas is thus not in any sense the story of individuals but rather an epic narrative, many times retold, with profound repercussions and implications. It is not surprising that, of all Marlowe’s plays, this is the one Shakespeare refers to most, echoing it across a range of genres and throughout his career in plays including As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. Tamburlaine the Great Tamburlaine the Great is, if anything, an even more colossal figure than Aeneas, and in fact invites us to read allegorically when he not only kills Calyphas but castigates him:

   Image of sloth and picture of a slave, The obloquy and scorn of my renown!

(Part Two, IV, i, –)

For Tamburlaine, Calyphas is the ‘image of sloth’, and his discovery playing cards during the battle does indeed make him look for all the world like an emblematic representation of idleness, a personification of a vice in the same way as the Seven Deadly Sins in Doctor Faustus are. If Tamburlaine himself is viewed in allegorical terms, it is quite clear what he represents: invincibility. No one can defeat him until he dies, and it hardly matters for this purpose whether the immediate cause of that death is natural causes or divine intervention. We are, perhaps, not particularly interested nowadays in what makes for invincibility, and obviously techniques of warfare have in any case moved on immeasurably since Marlowe’s day. However, when Tamburlaine the Great was first played on the London stage in , England was imminently expecting an invasion from the Spanish Armada, and in Part Two, Tamburlaine’s enemy Callapine is explicitly identified with such a force as the Armada, when he promises Almeda, A thousand galleys, manned with Christian slaves, I freely give thee, which shall cut the Straits And bring armadoes from the coasts of Spain, Fraughted with gold of rich America. (Part Two, I, ii, –) The recipe for invincibility in leaders might well have seemed urgently interesting and useful, and the weaknesses of Tamburlaine’s various opponents might also have seemed well worth analysis. Doctor Faustus Of all Marlowe’s heroes, Doctor Faustus is the most recognisably more than just an individual. As a play which so obviously draws on the tradition of the morality play, with its central everyman figure,

  ,   it is not surprising that Doctor Faustus has been identified as ‘the spiritual biography of an age’ (Sanders : –), with its hero as a representative rather than an individual figure. In a period which faced the agonising dilemma of which of the two confessions, Catholic and Protestant, to choose, Doctor Faustus’s indecision touched a culturally crucial chord; even the two texts in which the play survives, and the difficulties of choice they present, are aptly emblematic of the difficulties of choice presented to an entire culture. The Jew of Malta By contrast with Doctor Faustus, Barabas represents not a choice between positions but one entrenched position. He is the embodiment of the Jewishness which turned away from the claim of Jesus Christ to be the Messiah and continued to wait; indeed, as we saw in Chapter , Marlowe is in fact unusually sensitive to what being Jewish might mean. Barabas is clearly proud of his faith when he tells Lodowick that ‘unto us the promise doth belong’ (II, iii, ), and yet at the same time he is also a blasphemous, inverted Christ figure (he even has a ‘resurrection’). On an island governed by knights who present themselves as guardians of Christianity but take their name from Jerusalem, Barabas forces us to think about what exactly Christianity owes to Judaism, and to what extent it is different – or are all the religions of the book, as Orcanes in Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two suggests when he calls on Christ (Part Two, II, ii, –), not the polar opposites as which they were presented but somehow akin underneath, an idea which would at a stroke remove the ideological justification for the wars and alliances by which Renaissance Europe was configured? The Massacre at Paris In a way, The Jew of Malta tells us what to look for in The Massacre at Paris: Albeit the world think Machevill is dead, Yet was his soul but flown beyond the Alps;

   And now the Guise is dead, is come from France To view this land and frolic with his friends. (Prologue, –) Before Barabas, then, the Guise was the original embodiment of Machiavellianism, the political philosophy that shocked and fascinated the sixteenth century in equal measure. Although the fragmentary state of The Massacre at Paris makes it difficult for us to see what the architecture of the play must once have been, it clearly offered a series of representations of different styles of rule and presumably an opportunity of evaluating their relative success: did Machiavelli really offer the best recipe for rule? Edward II Edward II openly encourages us to read things as other than they are. When Gaveston is recalled from Ireland, the king orders a tournament to celebrate, and asks the lords what devices they will bear at it. Mortimer says he will have A lofty cedar tree, fair flourishing, On whose top branches kingly eagles perch, And by the bark a canker creeps me up And gets unto the highest bough of all. The motto: Æque tandem.

(II, ii, –)

Lancaster adds, My lord, mine’s more obscure than Mortimer’s: Pliny reports there is a flying fish, Which all the other fishes deadly hate, And therefore, being pursued, it takes the air; No sooner is it up, but there’s a fowl That seizeth it. This fish, my lord, I bear; The motto this: Undique mors est.

(II, ii, –)

  ,   These may sound like simple iconographical descriptions, but Edward immediately takes them to mean something quite different: Proud Mortimer! Ungentle Lancaster! Is this the love you bear your sovereign? Is this the fruit your reconcilement bears? Can you in words make show of amity, And in your shields display your rancorous minds? What call you this but private libelling Against the Earl of Cornwall and my brother? (II, ii, –) There is, it seems, no such thing as simple iconographical description; we must read or watch cunningly, to see not how things appear but what they represent underneath. It is not difficult to work out what Edward II itself might represent: Marlowe has chosen as his hero the only king of England who was generally identified as homosexual. Modern historians might be tempted to make similar suggestions about Richard I and perhaps William Rufus, but in Marlowe’s day, it was only Edward II who could be so thought of, and Marlowe stresses the fact as much as he could given the conditions of the theatre for which he wrote. This is undoubtedly why Edward II is the play of Marlowe’s which has spoken most clearly to recent theatre and film directors, and though its appeal in this respect depends on understanding it in not entirely historical terms as a ‘gay play’ in the same way that a modern play might be, this does no violence to Marlowe’s text and liberates many of its most intense theatrical energies. Of course one of the reasons for the vitality of Edward II may well be that Marlowe himself was probably homosexual. However, he was not Jewish; he was not a world conqueror; he is hardly likely to have attempted to sell his soul to a devil in whom he apparently did not believe; and he was neither an African queen nor a Trojan emigré explorer. Marlowe did not, in short, write plays only to display his own personality over and over again. He wrote them to examine some of the central cultural and religious issues of his day, and each of these plays has its finger firmly on the pulse of a crucial aspect of its historical moment.

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  Thomson, Leslie (), ‘Marlowe’s Staging of Meaning’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, , –. Urry, William (), Christopher Marlowe and Canterbury, London: Faber. Versfeld, Martin (), ‘Some Remarks on Marlowe’s Faustus’, English Studies in Africa, , –. Vitkus, Daniel (), Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean –, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Wernham, R. B. (), ‘Christopher Marlowe at Flushing in ’, English Historical Review, , –. Williams, Deanne (), ‘Dido, Queen of England’, English Literary History, , –. Willis, Deborah (), ‘Marlowe Our Contemporary: Edward II on Stage and Screen’, Criticism, ., –. Wilson, Richard (), ‘Visible Bullets: Tamburlaine and Ivan the Terrible’, English Literary History, ., –. Wymer, Rowland (), Derek Jarman, Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Index

Alleyn, Edward, , , ,  Baines, Richard, , ,  Bartels, Emily, , – Bennett, Susan, ,  Bevington, David, , –,  Biga, Tracey,  Brown, Georgia,  Camden, Carroll, – Chambers, E. K.,  Chapman, George, ,  Chedgzoy, Kate, ,  Cheney, Patrick, , , , ,  Clare, Janet,  Cutts, John, – Dailey, Jeff,  Danson, Lawrence,  De Somogy, Nick, , ,  Deats, Sara Munson, , , , ,  Dimmock, Matthew, ,  Downie, J. A., 

Eggert, Katherine,  Elizabeth I, , , –, , , –,  Empson, William, , , ,  Erne, Lukas,  Essex, earl of, ,  Frizer, Ingram, , – Gibbs, Joanna,  Gill, Roma, , ,  n,  Gillies, John,  Greenblatt, Stephen, , , , ,  Greene, Robert, , , , , – Greenfield, Matthew, ,  Hariot, Thomas, –, , , , , ,  Hattaway, Michael,  Hawkes, David,  Healy, Thomas, 

  ,   Hendricks, Margo, ,  Henslowe, Philip, , , – Honan, Park, , , –, , , ,  Ide, Arata,  James VI and I, – Jardine, Lisa,  Jarman, Derek, , –,  Johnson, Francis, – Jones, Ann Rosalind, – Jonson, Ben, , – Kay, Dennis,  Kendall, Roy,  Kuriyama, Constance, , , , , – Kyd, Thomas, , –, , ,  Levin, Harry, – Logan, Robert, ,  Lupton, Julia R.,  MacCabe, Colin, –,  Maclean, Sally, , ,  McMillin, Scott, , ,  Marlowe, Christopher Dido, Queen of Carthage, , –, , –, –, , –, , –, , , –, –,  Doctor Faustus, , , , , –, –, , , –, –, , –, –, , –, , –, , –, –, –, , –, –

Edward II, , , , , , –, –, –, –, –, –, , , , , –, , , , – Hero and Leander, , , , , , –, , –, , –, – The Jew of Malta, , , –, , –, , –, , , –, –, –, , , , –, , , , ,  Lucan, , , , , ,  The Massacre at Paris, , , –, , –, , , –, , , , –, –, –, – ‘On the Death of Sir Roger Manwood’,  Ovid’s Elegies, , , –,  ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’, –, , ,  Tamburlaine the Great, , , –, –, , –, , –, , , , , –, , –, –, –, , –, , –, –, , –, –, –, , –, –, –, – Miller, Anthony, –,  Minshull, Catherine,  Montrose, Louis, – Nashe, Thomas, , –, ,  Nicholl, Charles, , , , , , 

  Orr, John,  Parnell, J. T.,  Poley, Robert, , – Poole, John, , – Ralegh, Walter, –, , , , , , , –, – Ribner, Irving, – Riggs, David, , –, , , , , – Romney, Jonathan, , – Royden, Matthew, ,  Rutkoski, Marie,  Sales, Roger, , , , –, –, ,  Sanders, Wilbur, , ,  Shakespeare, William, , , , , , , , –, , –, , , , , –, –, –, , , –, , 

Shephard, Alan,  Shepherd, Simon, –,  Sidney, Philip, –,  Sidney, Robert, , ,  Skeres, Nicholas, – Spenser, Edmund, –, – Spurgeon, Caroline, – Stallybrass, Peter, – Strange, Lord, , , ,  Stump, Donald,  Talvacchia, Bette, , – Taunton, Nina,  Thomson, Leslie, – Walsingham, Thomas, , , –, ,  Watson, Thomas, , –, ,  Williams, Deanne, – Willis, Deborah,  Wilson, Richard,  Wymer, Rowland, 