R e n a i s s a n c e D r a m a t i s t s

CHRISTOPHER

MARLOWE

Lisa Hopkins

enaissanceramatist

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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 DramatistLISA 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.

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.

Lisa Hopkins is Professor of English at Sheffield Hallam University.

Cover design: Cathy Sprent

Edinburgh University Press22 George SquareEdinburgh EH8 9LF

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ISBN 978 0 7486 2473 7

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Christopher Marlowe, Renaissance Dramatist

Titles in the SeriesChristopher Marlowe, Renaissance DramatistLisa HopkinsBen Jonson, Renaissance DramatistSean McEvoy

ForthcomingThomas Middleton, Renaissance DramatistMichelle O’CallaghanJohn Webster, Renaissance DramatistJohn Coleman

Christopher Marlowe,Renaissance Dramatist

Lisa Hopkins

Edinburgh University Press

© Lisa Hopkins,

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Contents

Acknowledgements viChronology vii

Marlowe’s Life and Death

The Marlowe Canon

Marlowe on Stage, –: Theatrical Contextsand Dramaturgical Practice

Marlowe as Scholar: Old and New Knowledges inthe Plays

Marlowe the Horizon-Stretcher: Daring God out ofHeaven and Conquering New Worlds

Critical Issues

Bibliography Index

Acknowledgements

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

Chronology

Plays and playwrights Theatre and politics

Shakespeare bornMarlowe born

Queen Elizabethexcommunicated by Pope Pius V

Jonson born Bartholomew’s EveMassacre in France

James Burbage opens The Theatre

Webster born (?)

Middleton born Last performance of miracleplays at Coventry

Kyd The Spanish Tragedy Mary Queen of Scots Marlowe Tamburlaine executed.

Rose Theatre opens

Marlowe Dr Faustus Defeat of Spanish Armada

Marlowe The Jew of Malta

Plays and playwrights Theatre and politics

Marlowe Edward II Azores expeditionMarlowe Massacre at ParisShakespeare Richard III

Marlowe killed Shakespeare The Taming of the Shrew

Shakespeare First of four bad harvestsTitus Andronicus

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

Jonson The Case is Altered Private Blackfriars theatreShakespeare The Merchant constructedof Venice

Shakespeare Julius Caesar Satires proscribed and burnt.Globe Theatre opens

Marston Antonio’s Revenge Fortune Theatre opens.Shakespeare Hamlet East India Company

founded.Children of the Chapel at the Blackfriars

Dekker Satiromastix Essex’s rebellion andJonson Poetaster execution.Shakespeare Twelfth Night Defeat of joint Irish/

Spanish army in Ireland

Jonson Sejanus Death of Elizabeth;Marston The Malcontent accession of James I.

Lord Chamberlain’s Men become The King’sMen

viii ,

Plays and playwrights Theatre and politics

Chapman Bussy D’AmboisShakespeare Measure forMeasure Shakespeare Othello

Middleton A Mad World, Gunpowder PlotMy MastersShakespeare King Lear

Jonson VolponeMiddleton Michaelmas TermMiddleton The Revenger’sTragedyShakespeare Macbeth

Shakespeare Antony andCleopatra

King’s Men lease theBlackfriars Theatre

Beaumont and FletcherThe Maid’s TragedyJonson The Alchemist

Dekker and Middleton Authorised Version of theThe Roaring Girl Bible publishedJonson CatilineShakespeare The Winter’s TaleShakespeare The Tempest

Webster The White Devil

Overbury scandal begins.Globe Theatre burns down

Jonson Bartholomew FairWebster The Duchess of Malfi

Middleton and Rowley A Fair Quarrel

ix

Plays and playwrights Theatre and politics

Jonson The Devil is an Ass Jonson Folio publishedMiddleton The WitchShakespeare dies

Webster Jonson made poet laureateThe Devil’s Lawcase

Thirty Years War begins

Middleton Women BewareWomen

Middleton and RowleyThe Changeling

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

Middleton A Game at Chess

James I dies; accession ofCharles I

Jonson The Staple of News

Middleton dies Failure of La Rochelleexpedition

Petition of Right

Buckingham assassinated.Beginning of Charles I’s personal rule

Ford ’Tis Pity She’s aWhore

Webster dies (?)Jonson The Magnetic Lady

Jonson dies

x ,

Marlowe’s Life and Death

Marlowe has suffered more than most authors from the attemptto read his works in simple biographical terms, as when, in

the middle of his discussion of Doctor Faustus, one of his recentbiographers suddenly asks ‘Was Marlowe impotent?’ on thegrounds that a number of his works are interested in unfulfilled sex-uality (Honan : –). The attempt to read Marlowe narrowlyin terms of his own biography has generated two principal prob-lems. In the first place, it has led to some very crude readings of hisplays as little more than personal wish-fulfilment – as LawrenceDanson observes, we mistake the situation if, when readingTamburlaine, ‘we assume that the Scythian shepherd is really onlythe Cantabrigian Marlowe in fancy-dress’ (Danson : ), andso regard the play as entirely uncritical of its hero, or if we seeFaustus as simply a self-portrait of Marlowe. The view that thisgave rise to, of Marlowe as an entirely solipsistic writer obsessedwith success at all costs, undoubtedly contributed to the long-heldview of him as decidedly inferior to Shakespeare and preventedattention being paid to the breadth and depth of Marlowe’s wide-ranging interests in the world around him, something which I willexplore further in Chapter . Secondly, the focus on Marlowe’s lifehas spawned an entirely spurious industry which attempts to provethat Marlowe did not in fact die at Deptford and actually wenton to write the works of Shakespeare. As it happens, however,Shakespeare and Marlowe are entirely distinct in style, and we

have, as will be discussed later, copious evidence of the details ofMarlowe’s death.

Partly because it has led to such abuses, some critics would arguethat we should not consider biography at all when looking atMarlowe’s works. Matthew Dimmock, discussing Tamburlaine theGreat, argues that ‘it seems increasingly important to look beyondbiographical distractions’ (Dimmock : ). Emily Bartels ismore confident that

Despite recent skepticism about the validity of assigning atext, and especially a play-text, to a single, identifiable author,I tend to believe that there was indeed an historical figure bythe name of Christopher Marlowe, who wrote what we knowas “Marlowe’s” plays and whose alienated subject position, ashomosexual, a spy, and a playwright at the least, affected them.

(Bartels : xvi)

Nevertheless, she concludes that ‘the Marlowe we can speak of withmost 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 wespeak or write about him, we are really referring to a constructcalled “Marlowe” ’. Specifically, Downie claims that ‘The recentspate of fictions published about Marlowe, in which category one isforced 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 numer-ous novelisations of Marlowe’s life are simply bizarre (see Hopkins). It is also true that Nicholl’s book, The Reckoning: The Murderof Christopher Marlowe, is written in an unusually lively style for abiographer (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, dyingfor a smoke’) (Nicholl : ). Nevertheless, Nicholl is scholarly,alert, and thoughtful and has made an enormous contribution toMarlowe studies, and it seems a pity to dismiss his serious engage-ment with Marlowe in this way, or even to speak of him in the samebreath as the authors of novelisations of Marlowe’s life, which are

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all too often ill-informed or salacious or both. The fact that somepeople who have written about Marlowe’s life have fictionalised ithardly means that everyone must have done so.

I believe that it is important for an understanding of Marlowe’scareer and achievements to have a grasp of the context in which hewrote and in which his works were first received, so attention to hisbiography certainly has its place in that. Moreover, Marlowe hadnot only an unusually interesting and eventful life, but also onewhich brought him into contact with a number of other peoplewho made a significant impact on history and literature. Finally,Marlowe himself was notably interested in stories about people’slives. The Tamburlaine the Great plays, Doctor Faustus, Edward II,and to only a slightly lesser extent The Jew of Malta all trace thecourse of an individual’s career over a considerable period of time,and David Riggs notes the degree of Marlowe’s investment in nar-ratives with a personal interest for him, saying of poetry that‘Marlowe lived by it. He formed strong personal attachments tostories about poverty, poetry and social mobility’ (Riggs : ),while Patrick Cheney points out that ‘Marlowe’s authorial imagi-nation is intriguingly biographical. In both poems and plays, heshows a fascination with the lives of famous historical figures’(Cheney : ). It seems, therefore, only reasonable to examinehim in the same light.

To begin at the beginning, then, Christopher Marlowe was chris-tened on February , in the church of St George the Martyrin Canterbury. (This was later bombed in the Second World Warand only the tower now survives.) As with many Elizabethans, wedo not know the date on which he was born, but babies were usuallychristened when they were only two or three days old, so it is afair bet that he had been born in the second half of February.This would make him an almost exact contemporary of WilliamShakespeare, who was christened on April , and again bornprobably two or three days before that (the birth date traditionallygiven for Shakespeare, April, is only a guess).

Marlowe, though, seems to have been a rather quicker starterthan Shakespeare, whose early years remain in many respects mysterious, and a little more is known of Marlowe’s early life thanof Shakespeare’s. His parents, John Marlowe, a cobbler, who had

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moved to Canterbury from the small Kent town of Ospringe, andKatherine Marlowe, née Arthur, who had come originally fromDover, had been married on May , and Marlowe was theirsecond child and first son. It is a testament to the high infant mor-tality of the time that in August , when Marlowe was four, hiselder sister Mary died at the age of only six; similarly, one brotherdid not live long enough to be named, a second, called Thomas, diedat only a few days old, and a third, also named Thomas, seems todisappear from history and may well also have died young. Anothersister, Joan or Jane, died aged thirteen either during or shortly aftergiving birth, having been married less than a year. (The Elizabethanage of consent was twelve for girls and fourteen for boys, so such anearly marriage was not particularly unusual.)

Three of Marlowe’s sisters, Margaret, Anne, and Dorothy, didsurvive to adulthood, and their subsequent lives shed some light onthe circumstances in which the young Marlowe grew up, for thesethree Marlowe daughters were without exception quarrelsome, liti-gious, and occasionally violent women: when Anne was fifty-fiveyears old, she fought a neighbour, armed with a staff and a dagger,and the following year she assaulted the same neighbour with asword and a knife. She was also reported to the ecclesiastical author-ities in as a scold and blasphemer. Marlowe’s father too seemsto have been of a quarrelsome temperament; he was certainly frequently involved in law suits. It is perhaps not surprising thatfrom at least the time he left Cambridge, Marlowe was regularlyinvolved in violence or in trouble with the law. He was arrested on September for his part in the killing of William Bradley byhis friend Thomas Watson, and on January for coining inFlushing in the Netherlands; on May he was bound over inthe sum of £ to keep the peace towards Allen Nicholls, Constableof Holywell Street, Shoreditch, and Nicholas Helliott, beadle, andto appear at the General Sessions in October; and on September he was arrested for fighting in the streets of Canterbury witha tailor named William Corkine. Perhaps it is not surprising eitherthat he ultimately died by violence.

However, Marlowe was also clever, and he seems to have distin-guished himself early in this respect, because on December he was admitted to a scholarship at the King’s School, Canterbury.

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Since Marlowe was then only six weeks short of fifteen, which wasthe cut-off date for eligibility for the scholarship, and since this wasunusually old to enter an Elizabethan grammar school, he may wellalready have been attending the school as a fee-paying pupil beforehe was awarded his scholarship; though no record survives of that,David Riggs points out that two years later John Marlowe told theprobate court dealing with the headmaster’s will that he had ‘pro-vided footwear and board for two boys who were Commonersentrusted to the Master’s care’, and suggests that he and the head-master might therefore have come to an arrangement aboutMarlowe’s schooling (Riggs : ). The King’s School stands inthe shadow of the ancient Canterbury Cathedral, the seat of thePrimate of England and the foremost religious site of the AnglicanChurch. Canterbury had been the home of Christianity in Englandsince St Augustine arrived there in , and the cathedral hadattracted many pilgrims and much wealth because it contained theshrine of St Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury whohad been murdered on the orders of Henry II in . The shrinehad been demolished during the Reformation, but the cathedralstill retained its prestige, and his education in its shadow may welllie at the heart of Marlowe’s fascination with ritual and ceremonyin his plays. Certainly there seem to be echoes of his Canterburydays in his later works: in The Jew of Malta, for instance, Barabassays to Ithamore of the poisoned porridge, ‘There’s a dark entrywhere they take it in’ (III, iv, ), and this clearly recalls the ‘darkentry’ 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 knownas 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 wereselected by the Archbishop’s son John, were essentially designed tobe held primarily by students intending to proceed to holy orders.Perhaps Marlowe did indeed, at that stage of his life, foresee a futurein the church, which could offer many opportunities to bright youngmen from poor backgrounds; perhaps, though, he was simply pre-pared to jump at any chance to secure a prestigious and lucrativescholarship to one of the two universities. Or there may also have

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been other factors at work which led him to change his mind: DavidRiggs suggests that ‘The ecclesiastical job market was fast becominga dubious proposition. Even with his Master’s degree, Marlowewould have to contend with the diminishing supply of vacantparishes and the late Elizabethan influx of gentlemen’s sons’ (Riggs: ). In the circumstances, someone who found he had a talentfor a different career might well decide to pursue that instead.

One of Marlowe’s principal areas of study at Cambridge was the-ology. Nina Taunton points out that

critics rarely fail to make the obvious connection betweenMarlowe’s scholarly habits of mind and the scholastic cur-riculum at Cambridge in their discussions of Doctor Faustus. . . the study of postgraduate theology . . . was after all themajor area of study at this level, and Marlowe spent four yearssteeped in its debates.

(Taunton : )

Taunton sees other aspects of the curriculum as equally influential,arguing that ‘[a] training in Aristotelian logic and rhetoric typicallyconditioned the framework of Marlowe’s plays’ (Taunton : )and that ‘the struggle for Faustus’ soul unfolds within the structureof scholastic debate’ (Taunton : ), while the

defense of Ramus in the core scene of The Massacre at Parisillustrates the French logician’s contribution to the training ofthe mind by combining logic with rhetoric in order to makedisputation the more effective in the art of practical thinking.

(Taunton : )1

In a particularly informative analysis of the curriculum Marlowewould have studied, David Riggs observes that ‘First- and second-year students concentrated on logic; advanced undergraduatesworked on moral and natural philosophy’ (Riggs : ). Ciceroand Aristotle featured prominently on the curriculum, and Riggscomments on the accuracy of the depiction of Leander in Hero andLeander arguing ‘like a bold sharp sophister’ (l. ), that is a secondyear undergraduate who is currently being taught the principles of

,

structured and persuasive argument; similarly Mortimer Seniorwarns Mortimer Junior in Edward II, ‘But nephew, do not play thesophister’ (I, iv, ) (Riggs : ). When Marlowe finished hisBA degree, he moved on to further study, towards a Master of Artsdegree. Riggs observes that ‘The Elizabethan MA programme

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Putative portrait of Christopher Marlowe, . © Corpus ChristiCollege Cambridge.

descended from the medieval quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry,astronomy and music) as it had been adapted to accommodate earlymodern state systems’ (Riggs : ). It included study ofoptics, Greek, philosophy and cosmography and retained astron-omy, but music had disappeared. Riggs also notes that ‘Althoughastrology had no formal place in the university curriculum, MAcandidates routinely studied it and kept notebooks of occult learn-ing’ (Riggs : ). Marlowe also deepened his acquaintancewith the classics, and he seems at some stage to have acquired someknowledge of anatomy and physiology.

Marlowe, however, was, like so many undergraduates before andsince, doing far more at Cambridge than simply studying. One ofthe conditions of the bestowal of the Parker scholarships was thattheir recipients were able to read music, sing, and, if possible, be‘such as could make a verse’, suggesting that Marlowe must alreadyhave had to demonstrate a talent for poetry. Amateur dramatic per-formances, usually in Latin, were also regular features of universitylife, so Marlowe would have been well aware of plays and acting(this would indeed already have been a feature of life at the King’sSchool). During his time at Cambridge, Marlowe may already havebeen at work on his translations of Ovid, and conceivably also ofLucan. Certainly he does not seem to have been devoting his fullattention to his official curriculum, since Roma Gill points tovarious egregious errors in his translation of the Elegies that do notspeak well for the degree of his attention to his official studies (Gill). In Ovid’s Elegies Book One, Elegy Eight, for instance, he mis-takenly substitutes the adjective canis, which has a long ‘a’ andmeans ‘white-haired’, for the noun canis, which has a short ‘a’ andmeans ‘dog’, while in Elegy One of Book Two, a line whose literaltranslation is ‘poetry bursts snakes apart and pulls out their fangs’appears in Marlowe’s version as the nonsensical ‘Snakes leap byverse from caves of broken mountains’. Some of the errors in trans-lation in these poems can be explained by the fact that Marlowe wasworking from poorer editions of the originals than we now possess,but some are simply howlers. It is also highly probable that he hadalready written one or both of Dido and the first part of Tamburlainewhile still at the university. Indeed Irving Ribner suggests thatTamburlaine springs naturally from this time at Cambridge, for it

,

coincided with a turning away from the theological studies towhich his Parker Foundation scholarship committed him . . .Tamburlaine stands in opposition to every religious principlewhich Anglicans like Matthew Parker revered. Marlowe’sturning away from theology must bear some relation to anabsorption with classical poetry which he seems to have devel-oped at Cambridge.

(Ribner : )

In particular, Ribner suggests, Tamburlaine is a scholar’s play in thatit exemplifies the ‘historical method’ and secular perspective of theRoman historian Polybius (Ribner : ), and indeed it seemsalmost certain that Tamburlaine the Great, Part One must have beenwritten while Marlowe was at university because it was acted almostas 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 takehis MA degree in , a problem arose. On June theQueen’s Privy Council drafted a letter to the Cambridge authoritiesordering them to stop making difficulties in the matter of confer-ring Marlowe’s degree. Unfortunately we only have the minutes ofthe meeting, which recorded what was going to be said in that letter,rather than the text of what actually was said, and the survivingdocument has many ambiguities:

Whereas it was reported that Christopher Morley was deter-mined to have gone beyond the seas to Reames and there toremain, their Lordships thought good to certify that he had nosuch intent, but that in all his actions he had behaved himselforderly and discretely, whereby he had done Her Majesty goodservice, & deserved to be rewarded for his faithful dealing. TheirLordships’ request was that the rumour thereof should beallayed by all possible means, and that he should be furthered inthe degree he was to take this next Commencement, because itwas not Her Majesty’s pleasure that anyone employed, as he hadbeen, in matters touching the benefit of his country, should bedefamed by those that are ignorant in th’affairs he went about.

(Acts of the Privy Council, June )

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However, two things seem to be relatively clear. The first is that theauthorities were reluctant to allow Marlowe to proceed to the degreebecause he had been away somewhere, hence presumably failingto fulfil the university’s strict residence requirements. The draftwording recorded in the Privy Council’s minute says that ‘it wasreported that Christopher Morley was determined to have gonebeyond the sea to Reames and there to remain’. Unfortunately, thisformulation is susceptible of two different interpretations, like theletter 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 thathe had indeed gone there but had not intended to remain there.

Fortunately there is not much doubt about what Marlowe wouldhave been doing in Rheims if he had in fact gone there, and thatgives us a pretty good clue to what this was all about. Since ,Rheims had been the home of the seminary to which young EnglishCatholic 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 FrenchKing, speaking of the Duke of Guise, asks,

Did he not draw a sort of English priestsFrom 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 theseminary was a treasonable act, since it implied an intention toreturn to England and proselytise on behalf of the forbidden reli-gion. Presumably the implication of the Privy Council’s letter isthat it had been erroneously rumoured that Marlowe was one ofthis ‘sort of English priests’.

Since we have the Privy Council’s assurance that this was not infact the case, two possibilities remain open: first, that the entireRheims story was a total red herring – or perhaps simply a misun-derstanding – and that Marlowe had actually been somewhere elseentirely; secondly, that Marlowe had in fact been to Rheims, but forcompletely the opposite purpose to the one he was accused of – not

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because he himself was a Catholic, but because he was spying onCatholics. If that were indeed the case, then, as Charles Nicholldescribes, there must inevitably have been treachery of a ratherdifferent sort involved:

The government described Marlowe’s service as ‘faithfuldealing’, but in the performance of it there must have beenmuch deception, much unfaithful dealing towards people withwhom he consorted day by day at Cambridge, people whoseviolent disaffection he in some measure shared. We do notknow what kind of pressure he was under, or how deeply hedamaged those he informed on, but in our estimation ofMarlowe we have to take on board the elements of falsehoodand coldness, the hidden left hand behind the velvet sleeve.

(Nicholl : )

William Empson suggested that such an experience is echoed inMarlowe’s work, most notably in Doctor Faustus: ‘To explain theoriginal story, Marlowe supposes a Middle Spirit who is a quislingor rather a double agent, professing to work for the devils, and actu-ally inducing them to grant their powers to Faust’ (Empson :). David Riggs, however, argues that Marlowe might well neverhave gone to Rheims at all, suggesting that a quite different desti-nation was in fact much likelier: Riggs’ contention is that ‘TheCouncillors who signed the letter of June had a motive forsending him to the Duke of Parma’s garrison at Brussels’, sincethey were trying to negotiate to avoid war. Riggs argues of Faustus’swish to chase the Prince of Parma that ‘whenever he wrote theselines, Marlowe was thinking about – and like – a recent graduatewho found himself in the Low Countries soon after Parma’s con-quest of Antwerp’ (Riggs : ). Unless new evidence emerges,however, we simply cannot know for sure where Marlowe had beenduring his absence from Cambridge.

Once the difficulties over the granting of his MA had successfullybeen resolved, Marlowe left Cambridge in for London. Hiscircle of acquaintance in London seems to have been wide. We knowthat his friends included Thomas Watson and Matthew Royden, bothpoets (the former was thought in his own day to be so distinguished

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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, orWilliam Warner, author of the long poem Albion’s England; ThomasNashe, who may or may not have co-written some of Marlowe’s plays;Thomas Kyd, the dramatist, who said around the time of Marlowe’sdeath that the two had roomed together; and Edward Blount,who posthumously dedicated Hero and Leander to Sir ThomasWalsingham of Scadbury in terms which clearly indicated that bothhe and Walsingham were on good terms with Marlowe.

In addition, Marlowe certainly knew the dramatist RobertGreene and the writer Gabriel Harvey, though he does not seem tohave been on friendly terms with either of them, and he may wellhave known Shakespeare, since they lived not far apart in Londonand worked in the same profession. He also seems to have associ-ated with Thomas Hariot, the great mathematician, and, perhapsthrough Hariot, he may well have known Sir Walter Ralegh.Christopher Devlin suggests that he may also have known the poetand Jesuit Robert Southwell (Devlin : ), who was later to bemartyred for his faith, and Marlowe himself, when he was arrestedfor coining in Flushing in January , told Sir Robert Sidneythat he was ‘very wel known both to the Earle of Northumberlandand my lord Strang[e]’ (Wernham : ). Henry Percy, th Earlof Northumberland, was a friend of Ralegh and Hariot, andFerdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, who was a noted patron ofactors, was related to John Poole, whom Marlowe met while inprison 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 con-stituted risky and sometimes violent company. It was while he wasin company with Watson that he was arrested over the death ofWilliam Bradley, with whom he and Watson had had a fight in aLondon street, and Watson also encouraged the delusional Londonwoman Anne Burnell to believe herself to be the daughter of theKing of Spain, which eventually resulted in her being whipped(Nicholl : –). It is also remarkable how many of these menwere associated with the embryonic English colonial enterprise,since Northumberland, Ralegh and Hariot were all involved in the

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attempt to establish an English colony in America, and Chapmanwas 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 andWanchese. The evidence that Marlowe knew Hariot personallyseems reasonably compelling, and certainly, as Park Honanremarks, ‘Marlowe appears to have known Harriot’s book [A briefeand true report of the new found land of Virginia ()], as well asJohn White’s American engravings for it in an edition of the textprinted two years later’ (Honan : ). I shall be suggesting inChapter that America is a topic of considerable importance inMarlowe’s work.

The general assumption is that Marlowe continued spying duringhis time in London, although there are no concrete indications of thisother than his links with known spies, his arrest for coining inFlushing in (and the fact that he escaped punishment for this)and the fact that one of the three men in the room when hedied, Robert Poley, was a senior intelligence officer. Marlowe diedon May , in circumstances which remain mysterious, in thehouse of Eleanor Bull, a widow with connections at court, atDeptford, near London. The events leading up to this were compli-cated, and it is not easy to understand their significance. During thenight of Saturday, May , a threat against ‘strangers’ – i.e. for-eigners – appeared on the wall of the Dutch Churchyard in BroadStreet. It was signed ‘Tamburlaine’ and also contained allusions totwo other Marlowe plays, The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris:

Ye strangers yt doe inhabite in this landeNote this same writing doe it vnderstandConceit it well for savegard of your lyvesYour goods, your children, & your dearest wivesYour Machiavellian Marchant spoyles the state,

Your vsery doth leave vs all for deadeYour Artifex, & craftesman works our fate,And like the Jewes, you eate us vp as bread

. . .

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Since words nor threates nor any other thingecanne make you to avoyd this certaine ill

Weele cutte your throtes, in your temples prayingNot paris massacre so much blood did spill

As we will doe iust vengeance on you allIn counterfeitinge religion for your flight

When ‘t’is well knowne, you are loth, for to be thrallyour coyne, & you as countryes cause to slight

With Spanish gold, you all are infectedAnd 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 sakeAnd wrong our gracious Queene & Subiects good

By letting strangers make our harts to akeFor which our swords are whet, to shedd their blood

And for a truth let it be vnderstoodeFly, 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 thesignature ‘per. Tamberlaine’ (i.e. ‘by Tamberlaine’), there is themention of a ‘Machiavellian Marchant’ in conjunction with ‘Jewes’,a clear pointer to The Jew of Malta, and to the ‘paris massacre’. Theidea of upstarts occupying the seats of nobles might also glance atEdward II. Marlowe’s name is thus drawn into the controversy overthe presence of ‘strangers’ in London. Charles Nicholl has recentlysuggested Richard Cholmeley, a man who is later mentioned ashaving been converted to atheism by Marlowe, as the most likelyauthor 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 ofevidence apparently incriminating Marlowe.

On or before May, Marlowe’s fellow dramatist Thomas Kydwas arrested in connection with this libel. Kyd seems to have beentortured (his death the following year may well have been the resultof his injuries) and was interrogated in particular about a hand-written transcript of part of a book alleged to be heretical which had

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been found in his lodgings, The Fal of the Late Arrian by JohnProctor. Possibly simply because he was seeking to exculpatehimself or possibly because he was telling the truth, Kyd said thatthis belonged to Marlowe.

On May the Privy Council issued a warrant to seek for Marloweat Scadbury, the Kent home of Sir Thomas Walsingham. Sir Thomaswas the nephew of the late Sir Francis Walsingham, the head of theprincipal Elizabethan intelligence network, and it was to him that thestationer Edward Blount later dedicated the posthumous publicationof Marlowe’s great poem Hero and Leander. On May Marlowe wasfatally stabbed by Ingram Frizer’s dagger; and, either on May or June, Richard Baines submitted what has become known as theBaines Note, a memorandum detailing Marlowe’s ‘monstrous opin-ions’, which was headed A ‘note containing the opinion of oneChristopher Marly concerning his damnable judgment of religion,and scorn of God’s word’. This listed a number of wildly provoca-tive things which Marlowe was alleged to have said:

That the Indians, and many authors of antiquity, haveassuredly written of above thousand years agone, whereasAdam is proved to have lived within six thousand years.

He affirmeth that Moses was but a juggler, and that oneHeriots [i.e. Thomas Hariot] being Sir Walter Raleigh’s mancan do more than he.

That Moses made the Jews to travel years in the wilder-ness (which journey might have been done in less than oneyear) ere they came to the promised land, to the intent thatthose who were privy to many of his subtleties might perish,and so an everlasting superstition reign in the hearts of thepeople.

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 andgross 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 knewhim and whence he came.

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That Christ deserved better to die than Barabas, and thatthe Jews made a good choice, though Barabas were both a thiefand a murderer.

That if there be any God or any good religion, then it is inthe Papists, because the service of God is performed withmore ceremonies, as elevation of the mass, organs, singingmen, shaven crowns, etc. That all Protestants are hypocriticalasses.

That if he were put to write a new religion, he would under-take both a more excellent and admirable method, and that allthe New Testament is filthily written.

That the woman of Samaria and her sister were whores andthat Christ knew them dishonestly.

That Saint John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ andleaned always in his bosom; that he used him as the sinners ofSodoma.

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 atimorous fellow in bidding men to be subject to magistratesagainst 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 inNewgate, who hath great skill in mixture of metals, and havinglearned some things of him, he meant through help of acunning stamp-maker to coin French crowns, pistolets, andEnglish shillings.

That if Christ would have instituted the sacrament withmore ceremonial reverence, it would have been in more admi-ration; that it would have been much better being adminis-tered 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 sug-gests as the author of the Dutch Church Libel] hath confessedthat he was persuaded by Marlowe’s reasons to become anatheist.

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This note is not necessarily reliable evidence, because RichardBaines was not a very trustworthy witness. In the first place, in, while at the English College at Rheims, he had been impris-oned by Cardinal Allen for double-dealing; in the second, he andMarlowe had been arrested together for coining in Flushing in and each had accused the other of being responsible, so there waslikely to be bad blood between them. Most of all, there is a strik-ingly close relationship between what Baines accuses Marlowe ofand what he had himself confessed to after his arrest in Rheims. AsRoy Kendall puts it, ‘the portrait Baines painted of Marlowe in was remarkably similar to the dark self-portrait(s) Baineshad painted ten years before when in prison in Rheims’ (Kendall: ).

Nevertheless, it seems unlikely that Baines would haveattempted to incriminate Marlowe in this way if the accusations hemade did not have some inherent credibility, and we do also knowfrom recent discoveries that the insinuation about coining and themention of ‘one Poole’ did have a solid basis in fact, since Marlowewas arrested for coining in Flushing in January and had beenin Newgate Prison at the same time as a known coiner named JohnPoole. I think, therefore, that it is worth paying serious attention toat least some of Baines’ accusations, especially since there appearsto be further evidence for the allegation that Marlowe said ‘That theIndians, and many authors of antiquity, have assuredly written ofabove thousand years agone, whereas Adam is proved to havelived within six thousand years’: there seems to be a glance at thisin Shakespeare’s As You Like It, where Rosalind asserts that ‘Thepoor world is almost six thousand years old’ in the midst of anumber of clear allusions to Marlowe (IV, i, –). It is also ofobvious interest that the dramatist of The Jew of Malta shouldbe supposed to have said that ‘Christ deserved better to die thanBarabas, and that the Jews made a good choice, though Barabaswere both a thief and a murderer’. Particularly suggestive too ishow many of these accusations have to do with America, as I shallexplore in more detail in Chapter .

There are two possible dates when the Baines Note could havebeen delivered. An annotation on the note itself gives two mutuallycontradictory pieces of information: that it was delivered three days

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before Marlowe died (i.e. May) and that it was delivered onWhitsun Eve (i.e. June). It really comes down to whether youthink that whoever made the annotation was more likely to remem-ber the date of a church festival (as Juliet’s nurse does in Romeo andJuliet) but be confused about when Marlowe died, or be sure whenMarlowe died but not so sure about when Whitsun Eve was; ulti-mately, we are forced back onto guesswork here.

One thing we can be clear about is that there were three othermen in the room when Marlowe died: Nicholas Skeres, IngramFrizer, and Robert Poley. Poley was a senior officer in the intelli-gence services. Frizer was the man of business of Marlowe’s friendSir Thomas Walsingham, with whom the Privy Council expectedto find Marlowe staying at Scadbury when they issued the warrantfor his arrest on May, and Frizer had been concerned in variousshady business dealings with the third man, Nicholas Skeres.According to the coroner’s report, it was Ingram Frizer who actu-ally wielded the knife which killed Marlowe, and indeed took thelead at every stage of the proceeding: according to the pardon whichwas issued to him after the event and which was so brilliantly dis-covered by Leslie Hotson,

after supper the said Ingram & Christopher Morley were inspeech & uttered one to the other divers malicious words forthe reason that they could not be at one nor agree about thepayment of the sum of pence, that is, le Reckoninge, there; &the said Christopher Morley then lying upon a bed in theroom where they supped, & moved with anger against the saidIngram ffrysar upon the words aforesaid spoken betweenthem, and the said Ingram then & there sitting in the roomaforesaid with his back towards the bed where the saidChristopher Morley was then lying, sitting near the bed, thatis, nere the Bedd, & with the front part of his body towards thetable & the aforesaid Nicholas Skeres & Robert Poley sittingon either side of the said Ingram in such a manner that thesame Ingram frrysar in no wise could take flight; it so befellthat the said Christopher Morley on a sudden & of his malicetowards the said Ingram aforethought, then & there mali-ciously drew the dagger of the said Ingram which was at his

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back, and with the same dagger the said Christopher Morleythen & there maliciously gave the aforesaid Ingram twowounds on his head of the length of two inches & of the depthof a quarter of an inch; whereupon the said Ingram, in fear ofbeing slain, & sitting in the manner aforesaid between the saidNicholas Skeres & Robert Poley so that he could not in anywise get away, in his own defence & for the saving of his life,then & there struggled with the said Christopher Morley toget back from him his dagger aforesaid; in which affray thesame Ingram could not get away from the said ChristopherMorley; and so it befell in that affray that the said Ingram, indefence of his life, with the dagger aforesaid to the value oftwelve pence, gave the said Christopher then & there a mortalwound over his right eye of the depth of two inches & of thewidth of one inch.

Many people have been sceptical about the details of this, andindeed the wound simply could not have caused instant death if itwas at the precise point on the skull where it was here said to havebeen, while Poley and Skeres’s protestations that they were merelyinnocent bystanders seem a little far-fetched. Nevertheless, the factthat the men had spent all day together before Marlowe died doesnot really suggest a premeditated killing; it perhaps indicates morenegotiations that had gone wrong, or, as they themselves say, anunexpected disagreement, in which Marlowe was outnumbered.

What caused the events surrounding Marlowe’s death is evenless easy to pin down than what actually happened. If Marlowe’sdeath was murder, he outraged so many norms that possible sus-pects proliferate. Smoker, coiner, homosexual, atheist, spy – whichone of these did society or the government finally find unaccept-able? Was he silenced before he could reveal something compro-mising about someone – Ralegh, Essex, Walsingham – with whomhe had been associating? Could this, for instance, have been a pre-liminary skirmish in the enquiry into Ralegh’s alleged atheismwhich was launched the year after Marlowe’s death? Was it just acoincidence that Marlowe’s death occurred the day after the execu-tion of John Penry, principal author of the religiously controversialMartin Marprelate tracts, which questioned the authority of the

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Church of England, and in the context of a general governmentclampdown on religious dissent? Or was it, as the three other menin the room unanimously averred, an accident which occurredduring a brawl of precisely the kind which we know Marlowe tohave been involved in on other occasions, and of which the imme-diate cause on this occasion was that he could not afford or did notwant to pay his share of the bill? And why was he in Deptford inthe first place – because it was free of the bubonic plague whichwas then raging through London, because it was convenient forScadbury, because Eleanor Bull’s house was a government safe-house, or because Deptford was a port – with departures forScotland being particularly common – and Marlowe was about totake ship for somewhere?

The question of what lay behind Marlowe’s death has been mostcomprehensively explored in Charles Nicholl’s The Reckoning,which situates Marlowe’s death squarely within the context of hisespionage work. However, perhaps it does not much matter whokilled Marlowe, because despite his own death, his works provedimmortal.2 Less than a month after his death, George Peele waspaid £ by the Earl of Northumberland, who may well have knownMarlowe personally, for his poem The Honour of the Garter, whichpraised both Marlowe and his friend Watson, who had died in late, and this was only the first of many tributes to his talent, manyof them personally affectionate in tone. As we shall see in laterchapters, Marlowe’s plays also continued to be acted and publishedfor many years after his death, and new editions and continued allu-sions to him made him a significant presence in the London liter-ary scene well into the s.

Though the question of the relationship between an author’s lifeand works is always, as we have already seen, a theoretically vexedone, the disputed facts of Marlowe’s life and death give rise to anumber of questions which one might want to see as bearing onthe reception and interpretation of his plays and poems. The firstof these is the question of whether or not he was homosexual.According to the Baines Note, Marlowe said that ‘all they that lovenot tobacco and boys are fools’ and put forward what we would nowterm a ‘queer reading’ of the life of Christ. For a number of criticsand adapters of Marlowe, the question of his sexuality has been a

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crucial issue. The director Derek Jarman chose to make a film ofEdward II because he saw Marlowe as an important member of acounter-cultural, alternative ‘great tradition’ of homosexual artistsincluding Shakespeare, Caravaggio, Bacon and, by implication,Jarman himself. Conversely, it is a remarkable phenomenon that anumber of those who claim, in the teeth of the evidence, thatMarlowe wrote the works of Shakespeare also claim with equalferocity that Marlowe was not and could not possibly have beenhomosexual.

So was Marlowe homosexual? In a technical sense, no: the word‘homosexual’ did not exist until the s, and a number of piecesof evidence suggest that people in the sixteenth century did notthink of a preference solely for men as a possible sexual identity.From a more practical, ‘commonsense’ position, though, theanswer to the question ‘Was Marlowe homosexual?’ is almost cer-tainly yes. It is rarely easy to get a reputation to stick if there is noevidence to support it, as has happened in this case, and those whoargue that Marlowe was not homosexual are all too often motivatedby a palpable distaste for the idea of homosexuality. No one whoknew Marlowe when he was alive contradicted the implication ofhomosexuality in the Baines Note; his name was never coupled withthat of a woman; to the best of our knowledge, which seems reliableon this point, he never wrote a sonnet, that classic form of hetero-sexual love poetry in the period; and both Hero and Leander andEdward II show a clear and open interest in homosexuality, whileparts of Tamburlaine the Great and The Massacre at Paris also cer-tainly 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 torecuperate a Marlowe who was straight. Whether you think anauthor’s personal sexual orientation should make a difference to theinterpretation of his works is of course quite another thing, butMarlowe’s reputation as homosexual has certainly been an impor-tant factor in the reception of his works in the centuries since hisdeath.

I would give a similar answer to the equally vexed question ofwhether or not Marlowe was an atheist: people thought he was, andthat matters in itself. It is often argued that it was conceptuallyextremely difficult to think in atheist terms in the sixteenth century

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(though if anyone could, Marlowe was surely the man). Certainlythere is ambiguity about what precisely the term ‘atheist’ may havemeant in the period, when it was quite likely to be used as a catch-all term of abuse for anyone who was not Protestant. Nevertheless,attempts to argue for an orthodox Marlowe are essentially as des-perate as arguments for a heterosexual one. Personally the thing Imost deplore is the fondness for tobacco, but there doesn’t seemmuch point in trying to argue that away either: this was a man whorebelled, who thought for himself, and who liked to shock.

NOTES

. See also Keefer : and Versfeld : .. For some of the tributes to Marlowe, see Riggs : –.

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The Marlowe Canon

Christopher Marlowe wrote seven major plays and two greatpoems, and also translated works by the Roman writers Lucan

and Ovid. This book is called Christopher Marlowe, RenaissanceDramatist, so I will naturally be concentrating primarily on theplays, but Marlowe was a writer who brought very much the samepreoccupations to all his works, and it will be impossible to considerthe plays entirely in isolation from the other works. I will, however,begin with the plays.

TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT

The seven plays that Marlowe certainly wrote are Tamburlaine theGreat, 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 tobe just one play, and you may sometimes see it referred to as a ten-act drama. However, there is no evidence that Marlowe hadintended 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 receivedWhen 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 ofhis source material in Part One. The historical event on which theend of Part One was based, the death of Beyajid (Marlowe’sBajazeth), occurred in , and the historical Timur the Lame, onwhom Marlowe based his Tamburlaine, died in . Consequently,when he came to write Part Two Marlowe was forced to seek outsidethe life-span of the historical Timur the Lame for events to fill hisplay. He took the story of Sigismund and Orcanes from accounts ofthe Battle of Varna, which did not take place until . He bor-rowed Tamburlaine’s military instructions to his sons from ThePractise of Fortification, by Marlowe’s fellow Walsingham agent PaulIve, and this is also only one of the many important scenes in whichMarlowe switches the focus decisively from the public events of thefirst play to the more private, family-oriented ones of the second,which are entirely his own invention and for which no source otherthan personal observation was needed. It looks, therefore, as thoughMarlowe had originally planned only one play, which would haveended in the marriage of Tamburlaine and Zenocrate, but, in thetrue style of Hollywood sequels, was prompted to write Part Two bythe success of Part One.

Marlowe based his play on the historical figure of Timur Leng orTimur the Lame, who was born in the Central Asian city ofSamarkand c. and became one of the most feared and success-ful warlords ever known. By , Timur had secured himself totalcontrol of what is now known as Turkistan; by , he was incontrol of all land east of the Euphrates; in he advanced beyondthe Euphrates; in he conquered and sacked the Russian citiesof Astrakhan, Sarai and Bolgar; in he invaded India; in hecaptured Aleppo and Baghdad; and in he captured SultanBeyajid I (Marlowe’s Bajazeth) at Angora. He is still a national heroin Uzbekistan; in his body was exhumed for a reverential exam-ination and in the th anniversary of his birth was widely cel-ebrated in Uzbekistan, with the events held in his honour including,improbably enough, a conference held by the Uzbek Women’sCommittee to celebrate his progressive attitude towards women.

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It will be immediately obvious that Marlowe made one very majorchange in adapting the story of the historical Timur for the stage: heabandoned any idea or suggestion of lameness. Indeed Marlowe’shero is distinguished by his physical perfection, as is spelled out for usin a long speech describing him by Menaphon (Part One, II, i, –).The loving detail lavished on the description of Tamburlaine’s personhere should alert us to the fact that there is more going on inMarlowe’s play than a simple transcription of the life of a historicalfigure: Marlowe is less interested in what actually happened to the realTimur than he is in creating the image of an invincible superman.

By a bizarre fluke, Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two is the onlyone of Marlowe’s works which can be securely dated. Marlowe leftCorpus Christi College, Cambridge at the end of March . On November of the same year, a Londoner called Philip Gawdywrote to his father that

My L. Admyrall his men and players having a devyse in therplaye to tye one of their fellowes to a poste and so to shoote himto deathe, having borrowed their callyvers one of the playershandes swerved his peece being charged with bullett missed thefellowe he aymed at and killed a chyld and a woman great withchyld forthwith, and hurt an other man in the head very soore.

E. K. Chambers took this to refer to the shooting of the Governorof Babylon in Tamburlaine, v. (Chambers : ); this idea hasnever been challenged and is now generally accepted. This seemstherefore to prove that the second part was already on the stage bymid-November , less than nine months after Marlowe leftCambridge. It therefore seems probable that Tamburlaine theGreat, Part One was already written by the time Marlowe arrived inLondon and that Part Two was written between March andNovember of that year.

DOCTOR FAUSTUS

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

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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 scholarwho, disillusioned with all conventional branches of study, turns tomagic and eventually decides to sell his soul to the devil. DoctorFaustus was informed by a number of different sources. Marloweseems, for instance, to have drawn on the story of the Italian lawyerFrancis Spira, who died in after despairing of the possibilityof salvation. Spira’s case grew out of the single most urgent issue forpost-Reformation Europe, which was whether the old Catholicismor the new Protestantism were the true and right religion whichcould guarantee a person entrance to heaven. Spira’s despairingreaction to this dilemma became internationally famous, inspiringmany accounts of his death including one published in Basle in with a preface by the Swiss theologian John Calvin. Marlowe mayalso have been inspired by the story of the German necromancerGeorge Sabellicus, who was reported in as terming himself‘the younger Faust’. Most important of all, though, was the publi-cation of the English Faust Book, a translation from the German ofthe accounts of the doings of a Dr Georg or Johann Faustus, whoseems to have been born near Heidelberg in around , studiedthere, and was reputed by many, including Martin Luther and hisfellow reformer Philip Melanchthon, to have sold his soul to thedevil and to perform magic.

The importance of the English Faust Book as a source also bearson the most important question about Doctor Faustus: when was itwritten? It used to be thought that the first and only edition of theEnglish Faust Book was not published until . This would havemeant that Doctor Faustus could not have been written before then,and many critics felt that this was right because they regardedDoctor Faustus as Marlowe’s best play and hence as likely to havebeen written later rather than earlier in his career. However, thereare also strong links between Doctor Faustus and Tamburlaine, andthere is increasing evidence that there was an earlier edition of theEnglish Faust Book which is now lost. The wording of the title pageof the edition seems to imply that there had been an earlierone, and on or around November , an inventory was takenof 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 DoctorFaustus to have been written earlier in Marlowe’s career, inwhich case it was probably the immediate successor to the twoTamburlaine plays. A final piece of evidence is adduced by ScottMcMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, in their analysis of the Queen’sMen play The Troublesome Reign of King John; they argue that thatplay refers to Doctor Faustus, and that ‘The references to Marlowemake it apparent that Dr Faustus was on the stage well before TheTroublesome Reign of King John was printed in ’ (McMillin andMacLean : ).

It is certainly the case that Doctor Faustus would have been amuch more urgent and contemporary play in than it would in, because was the year in which the Spanish Armada, ledby the Prince of Parma, attacked England, and Doctor Faustusactually refers to the Prince of Parma, saying that he will ‘chase thePrince of Parma from our land’ (I, i, ). By ‘our land’ Faustusmeans the Low Countries, but this would have been a powerfullyresonant battle-cry in England too in Armada year, when house-holders all along the Channel and the towns near it, includingMarlowe’s own father John in Canterbury, who is recorded ashaving a bow, a headpiece, a sword, a dagger, and a brown bill (ahalberd-like weapon), were readying themselves for invasion.

Even if the vexed question of its dating were to be finally anddefinitively solved, however, Doctor Faustus would still present animpenetrable mystery, because it exists in two different texts. Thefirst of these, known as the A Text, was published in , and thesecond, known as the B Text, in . Both thus date from afterMarlowe’s death, and both bear clear signs of having been alteredby someone other than Marlowe, since both contain lines whichrefer to events which happened after Marlowe’s death, whichMarlowe himself could not possibly have written. This has givenrise to a long and heated debate about whether we should read theA Text, the B Text, or both. There is no obvious answer to this. Myown preference is for the A Text, because it is earlier, shapelier andclearer, and it is certainly the one which, in my experience, worksbetter on the stage, but this is merely a personal preference.Moreover, the position is further complicated by the fact thatthe play may well have been censored, perhaps extensively. For

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instance, we know from the notebooks of the theatrical entrepre-neur Philip Henslowe that a dragon prop was needed for DoctorFaustus, but where in the play as we have it could this go? RogerSales suggests that ‘Mephostophilis appears first of all as an actor.He enters the “solitary grove” in the shape of a dragon, but isordered by Faustus to wear another costume’ (Sales : ), butWilliam Empson thinks rather that Faustus must have flown overRome on the dragon (Empson : ) – after all, Wagner tells usthat Faustus’ chariot was ‘Drawn by the strength of yoky dragons’necks’ (III, Chorus, ) – and argued that ‘the play was disrupted byan act of censorship. There is a real likeness to the ruin left by vol-canic action, where a specially hard pillar of rock often marks theplace where the hole used to be, through which the molten lavaforced its way’ (Empson : ). Empson also used the argu-ment about censorship to put forward a very surprising reading ofthe overall tonality of the play. He claimed that, because the censoronly saw the words of the script and had no idea of the tone in whichthey would be spoken or of any gestures which might accompanythem, the only parts which might have escaped him were a fewmoments where expression would have to be relied on to createmeaning:

The last two words of Faust are ‘Ah Mephastophilis’, and thecensor could not rule how the actor was to speak them. He diesin the arms of his deceitful friend with immense relief, alsogratitude, surprise, love, forgiveness, and exhaustion. It is thehappiest death in all drama.

(Empson : )

By definition, however, any such intention could leave no trace inthe written text, so this has to remain speculation.

The fact that what is arguably Marlowe’s most important worksurvives only in questionable form need not, though, be such a lossto literature as it first appears, because it can in fact guide us touncovering some of the play’s meanings and resonances. In the firstplace, what stands out in both texts is the general shape and con-ception of the play. Goethe said of Doctor Faustus ‘How greatly it isall planned!’, and that is indeed perhaps the most striking aspect of

the play: the story has a simplicity that is quite astonishing in itsstarkness. Whatever has happened to the text subsequently has in asense only helped to hone and strip it still further down to the bareessentials: Doctor Faustus sells his soul to the devil, fails to achieveor receive anything notable in return, and is ultimately damned. Inthe second place, the reason why Marlowe’s play was altered afterhis death is in itself extremely revealing. Essentially it was becausethe subject of Doctor Faustus was one so close to the central concernof the period: how to find the correct route to salvation now thatthere were two separate branches of Christianity to choose between(the technical term for these two subsections, Protestantism andCatholicism, is ‘confessions’ – not religions, since both were formsof Christianity). Moreover, Protestantism had subdivided withinitself into a number of different forms. The two most important ofthese were Lutheranism and Calvinism, and it is in fact possible toread the two texts of Doctor Faustus as each reflecting a different oneof these two theologies (Marcus ).

Broadly speaking, Lutheranism stressed the need for humans todevelop a personal relationship with God, without the intercessionof a priest, but assured its followers that if they did this they couldachieve salvation. Calvinism was a less optimistic and a less com-fortable theology. According to Calvinism, God had alreadydecided whether an individual would be saved (the term Calvinused for those saved was ‘the Elect’) or damned (for these the termwas ‘reprobate’) before that person had even been born, andnothing that an individual did during the course of his or her lifecould affect their ultimate spiritual destiny. This meant that therewas, in effect, no incentive to behave well in this life and no fear ofpunishment if one did not. The effects that this removal of bothcarrot and stick could have are neatly summed up in the title ofJames Hogg’s memoir of a Calvinist upbringing, Confessions of aJustified Sinner (). It was because Doctor Faustus spoke sodirectly to this issue that it continued to hold the stage and beupdated even after Marlowe’s death, for the crucial question iswhen is Faustus damned?

There are various possible answers to this. In dramatic terms, itis obviously all downhill from the moment Faustus does his dealwith the devil. Technically, Faustus could be damned when he

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kisses Helen of Troy, since she is not a woman but a succubus – anevil spirit in human form – so when he says ‘Her lips suck forth mysoul’ (V, i, ) he could be telling the literal truth. But from aCalvinist point of view, Faustus, if he is damned at the end, mustautomatically have been damned from the very beginning of theplay and never had any meaningful choice. Here we come to one ofthe 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 standardLutheran position: repentance is possible if the person chooses it.In the A text, however, the Good Angel’s words are ‘Never toolate, if Faustus can repent’ (II, ii, ), suggesting the Calvinist posi-tion that it may be impossible to repent because God may havechosen to withhold from the individual the grace that would enablehim or her to do so. (Claudius in Hamlet has a similar ‘Calvinistmoment’, 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 the-ological position of the time, and indeed the fact that both exist, andthat we must choose between them, forces us to share the choicethat every Renaissance Christian had to make between competingtheologies.

So if Doctor Faustus was altered after Marlowe’s death, which bitsof it did he write, and which did he definitely not? It is relativelyeasy to identify at least some bits of the play which Marlowe cannothave written. On February , nine months after Marlowe’sdeath, the Queen’s Jewish physician, Dr Rodrigo Lopez, wasarrested on charges of treason and attempted poisoning. Since histrial is referred to in the House-courser scene of Doctor Faustus –‘Mass, Doctor Lopus was never such a doctor’ (IV, i, –) – thisis clearly evidence of a posthumous addition to the play. (TheLopez affair also brought a new lease of life to The Jew of Malta,which became suddenly topical; it was acted three times in thethree weeks after Lopez’s execution.) The reference to Dr Lopezmay have been one of the ‘additions to Doctor Faustus’ for whichWilliam Birde and Samuel Rowley were paid £ by the theatricalentrepreneur Philip Henslowe on behalf of the Admiral’s Menon November . It has also been generally suspected that

Marlowe was not responsible for some or most of the comicscenes of the play, since comedy was not his forte (though ourview of Marlowe’s comic writing may be skewed by the fact that thepublisher of Tamburlaine, Richard Jones, by his own accountomitted some comic scenes which were originally in the play, andalthough David Bevington has offered some interesting specula-tion on what these missing comic bits of Tamburlaine might havebeen [Bevington : –; see also Melnikoff], it must remainspeculation).

THE JEW OF MALTA

The Jew of Malta probably dates from c. . This strange, mis-chievous play plays a typical Marlowe trick by taking as its protag-onist a character who was, in Renaissance terms, the ultimateoutsider, since he was a Jew. To the Renaissance mind, Jews wereanathema because they were considered responsible for thecrucifixion of Christ. The Jew of Malta alludes directly to this ideaby having its hero named Barabas. In the Bible, this was the nameof the murderer whom the Jews asked Pontius Pilate to releaseinstead of Jesus. Moreover, Marlowe’s Jew is certainly wicked. Hegives 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 beganTo practise first upon the Italian;There I enriched the priests with burials,And always kept the sexton’s arms in ureWith digging graves and ringing dead men’s knells:And after that I was an engineer,And in the wars ’twixt France and Germany,

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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 scrollHow 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 conventof nuns just to be revenged on his daughter Abigail for her conver-sion to Christianity. Moreover, though Barabas offers this accountas his own personal history, it is equally possible to read it as a kindof composite or representative overview of recent history and theways Jews might have become involved in it, and indeed Barabas hasbeen compared to a number of historical Jews, including DavidPassi and, most notably, João Micques, later known as Nassi, whowas called ‘The Great Jew’ and ultimately became Duke of Naxosand thus the only Jewish duke in Europe (Thomas and Tydeman: )

However, Marlowe does not seem to associate Barabas’ wicked-ness with his Jewishness. In the first place, Barabas speaks proudlyof his Jewish heritage in ways which are never connected with anyof the evil things he does. He refers, for instance, to how the Jewswere conquered by Titus and Vespasian, suggesting that Marlowehad an unusually sound grasp, for the period, of the nature ofJudaism and of Jewish history, just as in Tamburlaine the Great, PartTwo, he has Orcanes exhibit an unusually informed understandingof Islam for the period:

By sacred Mahomet, the friend of God,Whose holy Alcaron remains with us,

Whose glorious body, when he left the worldClosed in a coffin, mounted up the airAnd hung on stately Mecca’s temple roof . . .

(Part Two, I, i, –)

Here Marlowe clearly registers the crucial distinction betweenAllah, as God, and Mahomet, as his Prophet, which has eludedseveral later writers with only a shaky grasp of Islam, and also showssome knowledge of Islamic tradition. In the same way, Marlowegives Barabas a number of speeches which stress his pride in hisheritage and are underpinned by at least a basic knowledge ofJewish custom and tradition, such as

Some Jews are wicked, as all Christians are:But say the tribe that I descended ofWere 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 OldTestament, 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’stThe sons of Israel through the dismal shades,Light Abraham’s offspring, and direct the handOf Abigail this night

(II, i, –)

Finally, Marlowe remembers that for Jews redemption is still tocome:

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, –)

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Conversely, the play makes it abundantly clear that Jews do not byany means have a monopoly on wickedness. The Jew of Malta care-fully lines up representatives of all the three ‘religions of the book’,Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, and there is notably little tochoose between them. At the outset of the play, the ghost of NiccolòMachiavelli appears. Machiavelli, author of The Prince, was notori-ous throughout Europe for his amoral advocacy of the pursuit ofpower at all costs and his hero-worship of the murderous CesareBorgia, son of the corrupt Pope Alexander VI. English writerspunned on their pronunciation of his name to label him ‘Old Nick’and ‘Much-evil’. To have Machiavelli as one’s sponsor was thus abadge of shame, but this is the personage who appears at the begin-ning of the play to introduce us to Barabas. Or does he?

Above all, Machiavelli was interested in success, and Barabas isnot ultimately successful. Alone, unloved, having poisoned hisdaughter 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 sufferedonly a temporary setback and will ultimately be rescued andenabled to return to his place as heir to the Ottoman Empire, whileFerneze, the governor of Malta, has simultaneously seen off theTurkish 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 truethat he has also lost his son, but in a sense this serves only to under-line his status as paradigmatic representative of Christianity, a reli-gion which centres on a father’s sacrifice of his son for the generalgood.

Indeed to some extent The Jew of Malta can be seen as a pro-grammatic exploration of the relationship of Christianity toJudaism and Islam. When Katherine overhears her son Mathiastalking to Barabas, Barabas pretends that the subject of their con-versation was a commentary on the Macabees, and Mathias assuresher that ‘my talk with him was / About the borrowing of a book ortwo’ (II, iii, –). Given that Christianity shares the five booksof the Pentateuch with Judaism, this looks like a particularly sharpcomment on Marlowe’s part on the relationship of the play’sChristian 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 timeexcluded all Jews and Semites from membership of the Order. Wemight also note that the names of Mathias and Lodovico lookuncannily like the evangelists Matthew and Luke, and that Barabascompares Abigail to a light shining in the East, like the light whichguided the Magi to the infant Jesus, as if we were watching theemergence of a Christianity in a previously Jewish world.

As Marlowe’s reference to the knights shows us, a crucial factabout The Jew of Malta is that it is rooted in very specific histori-cal circumstances. In , the Turks laid siege to the island ofMalta. Initially, it seemed that the island must fall, but in fact itwithstood the Turkish attack for the entire summer, whereuponthe fleet sailed away unsuccessful. Marlowe’s play certainly recallsthis conflict, but it bears no relation to the actual facts of the siege,except insofar as it inverts them: the knights never collaboratedwith the Turks, and the Italian soldier Francisco Balbo diCorreggio, who served in the siege and published an account of itin , specifically says that in the Turkish expeditionary forcethere were ‘many Jewish merchants, who joined the expeditionwith a lavish supply of goods and money, so as to be able to pur-chase Christian slaves’ and that the Knights were given valuableinformation by ‘a friendly Moor’ (Balbi di Correggio : and), behaviour quite opposite to that of Marlowe’s Barabas andIthamore. Moreover, Marlowe’s account of events deliberatelyreaches out to invite us to register an entirely different religiousconflict when Ferneze says to Calymath, ‘Why, then the house wasfired, / Blown up, and all thy soldiers massacred’ (V, v, –),since the word ‘massacre’ was effectively synonymous with theSaint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris in August , beforewhich the word ‘massacre’ was unknown in the English language.(The first usage recorded by OED is in , referring specificallyto St Bartholomew’s Day.) As with Tamburlaine the Great before itand Edward II after it, then, The Jew of Malta takes a basically his-torical framework, but follows it only as far as suits Marlowe’s dra-matic purposes.

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THE MASSACRE AT PARIS

The use of the word ‘massacre’ brings us, of course, to The Massacreat Paris itself, another play which plays fast and loose with history.This strange play is one of the most puzzling in the canon. It seemsmuch too short for a Renaissance play, and takes a cartoon approachto both characterisation and storytelling: no sooner have we heard inthe opening scene of a forthcoming wedding than Queen Catherineannounces 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 itdescribes were wildly controversial and continued to have politicalrepercussions, there might have been heavy censorship at work.Certainly on July Sir Ralph Winwood, English ambassadorto Paris, wrote home to England complaining that Italian actors hadrepresented the queen on stage in Paris, and that the French author-ities were refusing to take any action on the grounds that ‘the Deathof 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 hadclearly reached Paris, where it had not been well received. The pos-sibility of censorship might perhaps be reinforced by the fact that in John Payne Collier announced that he had discovered a muchlonger version of a speech from the play. Unfortunately, Collier isknown to have forged many of the Elizabethan documents heclaimed to have discovered, but The Massacre at Paris certainly doesread like a garbled and truncated text, and there is nothing inher-ently implausible in the ‘Collier leaf ’.

The reason why the play was so controversial that it might havebeen censored was because the events it relates were, in essence,true. On August , the French princess Marguerite marriedHenri of Navarre at the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. Althoughking 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 onlysister of King François I. However, he was also a Huguenot (theFrench term for a Protestant), and this made him deeply unpalat-able to the majority of the French public, who were Catholic.

The wedding of Henri and Marguerite was designed partly as away to resolve these tensions, but it failed miserably. On Friday, August, only four days after the wedding, the noted HuguenotAdmiral Coligny was shot and wounded, precipitating theSt Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (Marlowe’s ‘massacre at Paris’).On Sunday, August Coligny was murdered in bed while recov-ering from his injuries. Many other prominent Huguenots were alsokilled and the King of Navarre himself was saved only by the inter-cession of his bride. Marlowe would have known all about this,because not only were Sir Francis Walsingham and Sir PhilipSidney in Paris at the time of the massacre, but a number of the per-secuted Huguenot party fled across the channel to Marlowe’s nativeCanterbury (including Cardinal Odet de Coligny, the Admiral’sbrother, who is buried in Canterbury Cathedral). Its mutilated statemakes it impossible to judge the artistic quality of The Massacre atParis’ representation of these events, but its political explosivenessis beyond question, not least because in the early s, whenMarlowe probably wrote it (it refers to the ‘bones’ of Pope Sixtus V[xxiv, ]), who died in August ), Henri IV, the Navarre of theplay, was still struggling to establish his authority and defeat theCatholic League.

DIDO, QUEEN OF CARTHAGE

Almost equally mysterious, and certainly equally political, is Dido,Queen of Carthage. This, perhaps the most neglected of Marlowe’splays, is actually one of the most interesting. It is not possible toestablish for certain at what stage of his career Marlowe wrote it,but all the signs are that it is early, probably even before Tamburlainethe Great, Part One, and one attractive possibility is that it maybelong to or and have been partly prompted by SirFrancis Drake’s sacking of the South American city ofCartagena, especially given that Francisco de Vitoria comparedEuropeans arriving in America to Trojans arriving in Carthage(Hulme : ). The title page says that Thomas Nashe collab-orated on Dido, Queen of Carthage. Nashe was certainly a friend ofMarlowe’s, and is often thought to have been responsible for the

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prose scenes of Doctor Faustus. However, Dido, Queen of Carthagebears no obvious traces of another hand, and it is possible thatNashe did no more for the play than prepare it for publication afterMarlowe’s death. It might also be worth noting that Nashe else-where accepts the alternative version of Dido as perpetually chaste(Purkiss : ), which might seem to make it improbable thathe would be partly responsible for the lustful Dido of Marlowe’splay.

Dido, Queen of Carthage focuses on a story which was exception-ally important to the English Renaissance, the story of the fall ofTroy and its aftermath. It is no exaggeration to say that for theRenaissance period this was in fact the story. It is the central mate-rial of both the Greek and Roman national epics, and it is also thestory which Hamlet asks the Player King to recite. The reason it wasso resonant for the Renaissance was that not only was it the centralstory 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 manykings to rule in Greece, had a beautiful wife, Helen. She wasabducted by Paris, one of the fifty sons of King Priam of Troy, whotook her back to Troy (in modern-day Turkey). The Greeks, led byMenelaus’s brother Agamemnon, the High King, laid siege to Troy,but the city held out for ten years, until the Trojan horse, contain-ing concealed warriors, was introduced into the city. Of the very fewTrojans who escaped the resulting slaughter, the most prominentwas the Trojan prince Aeneas, who escaped with his father Anchisesand 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 hisway there Aeneas got lost and landed instead in Africa, where he metDido, the widowed Queen of Carthage. This is where Marlowe’s playbegins, and it goes on to tell the classic story of how Dido fell in lovewith 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 hehas left Carthage, Aeneas does eventually arrive in Rome, where hedefeats the local prince Turnus to secure the hand of the princessLavinia. (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’sfirst 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 dynastywas disrupted once again when Aeneas’ great-grandson Brutusaccidentally killed his father Silvius after mistaking him for a stagwhile out hunting. Exiled from Rome for his act of parricide,Brutus was forced to flee, and wandered until he found an unin-habited island which he named after himself, Brutain – or, as itbecame better known, Britain. This is why the story is so importantto Renaissance England – it is our story, and the iconography of theTudor kings and queens made much of the fact that they originatedin Wales, and so claimed descent from King Arthur, who in turnwas supposed to be a descendant of Brutus. To the Renaissance, thiswas known as the story of the translatio imperii – literally the trans-lation of the empire, with the attendant cultural authority of firstTroy and then Rome, to its ultimate destination of Britain.

Given its cultural importance, Marlowe’s choice of an episodefrom this cycle is hardly surprising, but the particular episode hechooses is an interesting one. Focusing on Dido rather than Aeneasis not in itself without classical precedent – several classical tragedies,such as Euripides’s Medea and Sophocles’s Antigone, focused onwomen – but it also allowed Marlowe to make a much more contem-porary and sharply political point because the other name by whichDido was often known, Elissa, was so close to that of Elizabeth I, whowas 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 anunstable and unreliable victim of passion. A play that may to us ini-tially seem trapped in the very distant past, then, was to its originalaudience full of dangerous resonances in the present.

EDWARD II

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

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one contribution to the very popular genre of the history play. (Anindication of the genre’s popularity is that history plays make upalmost a third of the output of Marlowe’s exact contemporaryShakespeare.) However, Marlowe’s history play is, characteristi-cally, rather different from others of the genre. Most history playseither celebrated a strong king – Shakespeare’s Henry V is anobvious example – or pointed up the moral to be drawn from thereign of a less successful one (as in Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogyor his Richard II). Marlowe chose to dramatise the reign of one ofthe least successful kings in English history without presenting anyvery obvious moral. Edward II came to the throne in , on thedeath of his father, the strong and dynamic Edward I, who in thecourse of his long reign had finally succeeded in subduing the fierceresistance to English rule in Wales and stamping his authorityon the land through a huge chain of castles, in one of which,Caernarfon, Edward II was born. Edward II, however, had neitherthe ferocity nor the military skill of his father. To the total incom-prehension of his nobles, he preferred to spend his time in manualwork such as stonecarving, which was considered wholly unsuitablefor a king. Even more damagingly, he had male favourites, first aFrenchman of undistinguished birth called Piers Gaveston, andthen, after the rebellious nobles had executed Gaveston, Hugh LeDespenser. The king quite clearly preferred the company of boththese men to that of his wife, Isabella of France, although his mar-riage did produce a son, the future Edward III.

As a result of his unconventional behaviour and military inepti-tude, seen most notably in his disastrous defeat by the Scots at thebattle of Bannockburn, Edward had trouble with the baronsthroughout his reign, and his difficulties came to a head whenhis disaffected queen Isabella took a prominent baron, RogerMortimer, as her lover and helped lead the rebels. Edward wasdefeated and imprisoned at Berkeley Castle, where he died – mur-dered, according to the chronicler Raphael Holinshed, by means ofa red hot poker which was pushed up his anus, partly because thiswas a means of killing that left no visible mark on the corpse andpartly, perhaps, as ironic retribution for behaviour which we wouldnow call homosexual, though the term homosexuality did not enterthe English language until the s and the nature of Edward’s

relationship with his favourites is never actually spelled out eitherby the chroniclers or in Marlowe’s play. However, it seems clearenough what we should infer, especially when Gaveston declaresthat he proposes to entertain the king with the spectacle of ‘a lovelyboy’ who has ‘in his sportful hands an olive tree / To hide thoseparts which men delight to see’ (I, ii, , –). After Edward’sdeath, Isabella and Mortimer ruled the land in the name of Edwardand Isabella’s son the young prince Edward, now Edward III, untilhe declared himself of age to rule, executed Mortimer, and impris-oned Isabella for life for her part in the death of his father.

Marlowe sticks closely to these historical facts in his play, but histreatment of them conspicuously lacks the strong moral stancewhich playwrights normally brought to the depiction of unsuccess-ful kings. As so often in Marlowe’s plays, the moral seems unclearor irrelevant. Are we meant to condemn Edward for lovingGaveston? But the relationship seems one of the few genuinelywarm and loving ones in the play, as seen in lines such as ‘Whyshould you love him whom the world hates so?’ – ‘Because he lovesme more than all the world’ (I, iv, –). Edward and Gaveston atleast have more about them than the barons, who are portrayed asvacillating and ridiculous in exchanges such as ‘Ay, but how chancethis was not done before?’ – ‘Because, my lords, it was not thoughtupon’ (I, iv, –), and it is notable that Mortimer is associatedwith ‘the desert shore of that Dead Sea’ (II, iii, ) while Gavestonis much more dynamic and alive. Edward during his persecutiontakes on positively Christological overtones, with the false comfortof the channel water offered by the jailers (V, iii, –) parallelingthe offer of vinegar on a sponge to Christ, and Edward andGaveston’s relationship has certainly been one which modern pro-ductions have found themselves able to portray sympathetically. Wemight notice, too, that however much the barons and the queen areoffended by it, Edward’s son is not; indeed the relationship betweenhim and his father is one of the few other strong and affectionateones. Moreover, everything we know about Marlowe himself sug-gests that he too was homosexual, and he surely knew other menwho were too, so it does not seem likely that he supposed his entireaudience would automatically recoil in horror from the idea of twomen loving each other.

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The reason for the play’s ambiguous stance may well be to dowith the fact that once again, Marlowe is touching on politicallycontentious issues. Parallels could be drawn in at least two poten-tially dangerous directions. At one point, Mortimer and his unclehave a rather queasy conversation about why exactly Edward’sbehaviour is unacceptable, during which Mortimer Junior deniesthat it is the mere fact of the king’s having a male favourite whichoffends him:

Uncle, his wanton humour grieves not me,But this I scorn, that one so basely bornShould by his sovereign’s favour grow so pertAnd 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 courtWith base outlandish cullions at his heels,Whose proud fantastic liveries make such showAs if that Proteus, god of shapes, appeared.

(I, iv, –)

What Mortimer Junior objects to, it seems, is less the sexual aspectof the relationship than the disruption it causes to the establishedsocial hierarchy, and this was a complaint that, as Marlowe wassurely well aware, was also levelled at Elizabeth I’s predilectionfor favourites such as Sir Walter Ralegh, a man from a relativelyobscure family whom the queen’s favour, to the fury of those fromthe older aristocracy such as the Earl of Essex, had propelled togreat heights. Indeed Dennis Kay suggests that ‘When in the firstscene of the play Gaveston anticipates the performance of his newrole as royal favourite, he uses terms that explicitly echo the behav-iours and discourses of royal celebration under Elizabeth’ and that‘The mythological entertainments he imagines, with Italianmasques and water pageants . . . are wholly characteristic ofElizabethan shows’ (Kay ).

Secondly, the idea of a king loving other men found an evencloser parallel in the behaviour of James VI of Scotland, son ofMary, Queen of Scots and heir presumptive to the throne of

England. (He did eventually succeed as James VI and I after thedeath of Elizabeth in .) James had recently become extremelyattached to his cousin the Earl of Lennox, in the first of many rela-tionships which were almost certainly homosexual in nature.Marlowe, who was said by Thomas Kyd at the time of his deathto have been planning to follow his friend Matthew Royden toScotland, would surely have been aware of this, especially since, asConstance Brown Kuriyama points out, Sir Francis Walsingham,who may have been Marlowe’s employer and whose cousinSir Thomas he certainly knew, ‘himself traveled to Scotland for apersonal confrontation with James in September , in which,very like Edward’s barons, he lectured James on his errors withbrutal frankness’ (Kuriyama : ). Marlowe might perhapshave thought that a play about a homosexual king would be a goodway to advertise his talents to the man who seemed likely to be thenext king of England, but at the same time he would have knownthat the subject needed very careful handling.

Politics were not the only factor which may have borne onMarlowe’s composition of the play, however. Shortly before it wasacted, he seems to have fallen out with his previous patron, LordStrange, 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 famousactor of his day, to play the hero. Marlowe’s awareness of this mayperhaps explain why Edward lacks the stature and dynamism ofTamburlaine, the Guise, Barabas or Doctor Faustus, and why heindeed seems to be virtually displaced as hero by Mortimer halfwaythrough the play. It is one of the sad ironies characteristic ofMarlowe’s career that Edward II, which is the one Marlowe playwhich does not seem to be incomplete, textually mangled, or possi-bly of joint authorship, should nevertheless still not be able to showus 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

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Warburton recorded among the playscripts which were used to linepie-dishes by his cook, Betsy, ‘The Mayden Holaday by Chris.Marlowe’, and in David Erskine Baker in his Companion tothe Playhouse declared that Marlowe and Day co-authored TheMaiden’s Holiday. However, nothing further is known of this and,whatever The Maiden’s Holiday was, there seems no reason tosuppose that Marlowe had any connection with it. It is also oftensaid that Marlowe wrote a lost play on the history of the Albanianpatriot George Scanderbeg, but the only evidence for this is GabrielHarvey’s reference to ‘a Scanderbegging wight’ in ‘Gorgon’, whichCharles Nicholl has convincingly suggested actually refers to PeterShakerley (Nicholl : –).

More credibly, Marlowe is sometimes thought to have con-tributed to Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays, though the evi-dence is inconclusive. Perhaps the most interesting of the playssometimes ascribed to Marlowe is Arden of Faversham, a livelydomestic tragedy based on a true story and set in the town ofFaversham, not far from Canterbury. However, apart from thelocal connection and a few phrases found in both Arden ofFaversham and Edward II, which could as easily be the result ofborrowing as of shared authorship, there is no evidence for theattribution.

THE POEMS

What Marlowe certainly did write in addition to the seven knownplays is poetry. Most Renaissance dramatists wrote poetry as well asplays, for two principal reasons. First, writing plays was a precari-ous way of making a living because the theatres would be closed atthe first sign of plague, whereas poems could be printed, sold, orsubmitted to a patron at any time. Secondly, classical authors hadvalued the epic above all literary forms, and had developed thenotion of an appropriate writing career which began with experi-mentation in lesser poetic forms and culminated in the writing ofan epic. In England, Marlowe’s near-contemporary Spenser wastrying to produce just such an epic in the shape of his ultimatelyunfinished The Faerie Queene, and we know that Marlowe read this

even before it was first published in because he quotes from itin Tamburlaine, acted in . Marlowe himself, however, showedno interest in producing an original epic poem (though Tamburlainehas some epic features, and he did embark on a translation ofLucan’s Pharsalia). Nor, even more surprisingly, did he ever, to thebest of our knowledge, write a sonnet, the staple form of mostRenaissance poets, and indeed Patrick Cheney has recently arguedin his book Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession that Marlowe deliber-ately constructed his poetic career in opposition to the acceptedmodel, patterning himself on the subversive and licentious Romanpoet Ovid rather than Ovid’s more pious and civic-minded con-temporary Virgil.

What Marlowe did write were a group of other poems. One ofthese was a Latin elegy for a judge who had been on the benchduring his acquittal in the Bradley case, of which GeorgiaE. Brown argues that ‘ “On the Death of Sir Roger Manwood”(probably written in ) is Marlowe’s least read poem, which isunfortunate because it is an excellent example of the way Marloweuses classical culture to undermine the social and political author-ity classicism is supposed to uphold’ (Brown : ). Muchbetter known are a short lyric poem, ‘The Passionate Shepherd tohis Love’, and a possibly unfinished epyllion (the technical termfor an erotic poem shaped like a short epic), Hero and Leander.Both these last are significant not only in their own right but also interms of their place in the wider literary culture of the day. ‘ThePassionate Shepherd to his Love’ is a delicate pastoral lyric cast inthe voice of a shepherd, a favourite persona of Elizabethan pastoralpoetry because of its connotations of rural innocence and overtonesof the Good Shepherd Jesus. The poem is so short that I can quotethe whole of it:

Come live with me, and be my love,And we will all the pleasures proveThat valleys, groves, hills and fields,Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks,Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks

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By shallow rivers, to whose fallsMelodious 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 woolWhich 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 singFor 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 toshare his life in the country by singing the praises of a simple rusticexistence. He does this by painting the countryside in improbablyrosy terms, and this point was soon seized on by the queen’sfavourite Sir Walter Ralegh, who knew many of Marlowe’s friendsand probably Marlowe himself. Ralegh’s ‘The Nymph’s Reply tothe 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 moveTo live with thee and be thy love.

(Marlowe : )

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

Marlowe himself as a ‘dead shepherd’ before quoting from Hero andLeander, and in The Merry Wives of Windsor, which is delicatelypoised on the fringes of town and country and in which ParsonEvans quotes from ‘The Passionate Shepherd’. Lastly, Marlowehimself recurs to ‘The Passionate Shepherd’ when he has Ithamorequote from it in The Jew of Malta (IV, ii, –).

Hero and Leander was even more influential: in his RemainsConcerning Britain, William Camden, contending that RenaissanceEnglish literature was the equal of its classical models, wrote ‘Willyou reade Virgill? take the Earle of Surrey, Catullus? Shakespeareand Marlowes fragment, Ovid? Daniell, Lucan? Spencer, Martial?Sir John Davies and others’ (Camden : ). By ‘Marlowes frag-ment’ he meant Hero and Leander, and he compares it not only withShakespeare’s Venus and Adonis but with the great Roman love poetCatullus. Marlowe’s sophisticated and irreverent poem tells a storycelebrated since antiquity, of the handsome youth Leander and thebeautiful maiden Hero, who lived in the twin cities of Sestos andAbydos, which faced each other across the stretch of sea known asthe Hellespont, which divided Greece from Asia Minor. Leander,inflamed by love for Hero after catching sight of her in the templeof Venus, swam the Hellespont and Hero admitted him to her bed-chamber, where the two made love. On a subsequent visit, however,he drowned.

As usual, Marlowe’s retelling of events contains a twist – or inthis case, possibly two. In the first place, the poem comes to anabrupt end in the middle of the story, just after Hero and Leanderhave consummated their love. The last lines certainly do not giveany particular sense of closure:

By this Apollo’s golden harp beganTo 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, –)

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This is followed by the words Desunt nonnulla, which is Latin for‘Not a little is lacking’. It looks as though Marlowe was killed beforehe could finish it, but some critics have argued that he deliberatelyhalted the narrative there in a piece of typically Marlovian non- conformity (Campbell ). Secondly, even though he does notdescribe Leander’s eventual drowning, Marlowe has already hintedat a motivation for it which is certainly not part of the original story,when the god Neptune encounters Leander on his swim and isinstantly 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 wideAt every stroke, betwixt them would he slideAnd 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 pryUpon 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. AfterMarlowe’s death, George Chapman wrote a continuation, andHero and Leander is also clearly in dialogue of some kind withShakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, though it is not clear which camefirst. It is Hero and Leander which Shakespeare quotes in As YouLike It, and it probably has a fair claim to being the work ofMarlowe’s which his contemporaries valued most.

THE TRANSLATIONS

Marlowe also produced two major translations of works by classi-cal writers. The first of these was of the provocatively erotic elegiesof the Roman poet Ovid. These were considered so risqué that notlong after Marlowe’s death the Bishop of London ordered his trans-lation to be publicly burnt, another Marlovian event referred to byShakespeare in As You Like It. The second translation was thealmost equally dangerous First Book of the epic poem Pharsalia, bythe Roman poet Lucan, nephew of Seneca, who had been forced bythe Emperor Nero to commit suicide at the age of twenty-seven.Pharsalia tells the story of the Civil War between Caesar andPompey, but its claim to fame is that, alone of classical epic poems,it makes no use of machinery – that is, direct intervention by thegods. The atheist perspective on events which this appears to implywas one which Marlowe himself would presumably have foundsympathetic. Like his plays, then, Marlowe’s poems and transla-tions can all be seen as daring, political, and edgy works, which col-lectively challenge Elizabethan orthodoxies on a wide range offronts.

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Marlowe on Stage, –:Theatrical Contexts andDramaturgical Practice

MARLOWE’S THEATRICAL CONTEXTS

Elizabethan playwrights wrote for conditions very different fromour own. Theatre, for the Elizabethans, was not, as now, some-

thing performed in darkened auditoria in front of a silent audiencewho have probably paid a fairly considerable sum for tickets, and maywell have got dressed up to come. Rather, it was acted in the open airand by natural light, with performances typically starting in the earlyafternoon and running for two or three hours. Props and scenery wereminimal, not least because the stage might have to be hurriedly clearedif the weather turned sufficiently unpleasant. Audiences were largeand not necessarily well behaved. On the plus side, however, they wereprobably likely to be more ready to be moved and involved by aspectsof Marlowe’s plays which we might now struggle to take seriously: afamous anecdote in William Prynne’s Histrio-Mastix describes

the visible apparition of the Devill on the Stage at the BelsavagePlay-house, in Queene Elizabeth’s dayes, (to the great amaze-ment both of the Actors and Spectators) whiles they were pro-phanely playing the History of Faustus (the truth of which Ihave 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, alwayswore a cross when he played the part in case the devil really didcome to get him.

As with so many other aspects of Marlowe’s career, imagining thetheatre for which he wrote has been made more difficult for us byShakespeare. Anyone who goes to London can now visit the verysuccessful reconstruction of the Globe Theatre on Bankside. Thisoffers a very good approximation of the experience of watching aShakespearean play in its original performance conditions, but infact it is not much help for Marlowe’s. The Globe opened in ;Marlowe died in , six years earlier. The theatre for whichMarlowe wrote was the Rose, whose foundations lie not far from thereconstructed Globe under Rose Court, at the end of SouthwarkBridge.

Though the Rose may perhaps have been in size, shape andgeneral atmosphere not unlike its eventual neighbour the Globe, itwas run on significantly different lines. Shakespeare was a ‘sharer’in the finances of his company, the King’s Men. Marlowe and hisfellow Rose playwrights, however, were entirely dependent on thegoodwill of Philip Henslowe, the theatrical entrepreneur whomanaged the theatre. We may tend to think of authors as lonegeniuses, but it is only a slight exaggeration to say that Hensloweand his stepson-in-law, the actor Edward Alleyn, played almost aslarge a part in the production of Marlowe’s plays as Marlowehimself did. (Here, Shakespeare can perhaps help us for once, sinceboth Henslowe and Alleyn feature in John Madden’s filmShakespeare in Love, as indeed does Marlowe himself.)

Alleyn in particular played a key part in Marlowe’s success, forhe 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 responsiblefor a considerable part of their impact. It is certainly noticeable thatafter Marlowe had apparently quarrelled with his previous patronLord Strange, and thus lost the services of Lord Strange’s Men, ofwhom Alleyn was the lead actor, he produced a very different kindof play in Edward II, which was written for Pembroke’s Men and,rather than one astonishing, larger-than-life hero, has two principal

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characters, Edward II and Mortimer, who could be said almost toshare the role of hero between them, with one rising as the otherfalls.1 Edward II also shows the marks of the switch of theatrecompany in other ways: at one point, a character actually says, ‘MyLord of Pembroke’s men, / Strive you no longer’ (II, vi, –),showing the extent to which playwrights were conscious of thematerial conditions for which they wrote.

That we should read in an extradiegetic self-consciousness hereseems confirmed by the fact that there appears to be another suchinstance in The Jew of Malta. On Saturday, February , TheJew of Malta played at the Rose. Henslowe did not mark it ‘ne’ (theabbreviation in his diary which is usually taken to stand for ‘new’),and that often indicated that it had been acted before. The takingswere nevertheless still shillings, making it the highest-grossingperformance 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, onTuesday April, Lord Strange’s Men acted a new play, Titus andVespasian, at the Rose, grossing the impressive sum of £ s. Titusand Vepasian was played again on Wednesday, May, grossing sd, and probably on Monday, May (there appears to be a confu-sion in Henslowe’s Diary), taking s. In between, The Jew of Maltahad appeared on Friday, May, grossing s. It was acted again onThursday, May, grossing s, and on Saturday, May, grossings, but these takings were far outshone by Titus and Vespasian’s£ on Monday, May. On their next appearances, Titus andVespasian grossed s on Wednesday, May and The Jew of Maltatook s on Tuesday, May. Thereafter Titus and Vespasian tooks on Tuesday, June, and The Jew of Malta s on Wednesday, June. Shortly afterwards plague suspended playing. It would bewrong to present Titus and Vespasian and The Jew of Malta as beinglocked in a head-to-head battle for takings – there were also otherplays being acted at the same time – but the proximity of these per-formances, and the superior takings of Titus and Vepasian, must atleast have given sharp new point and could even conceivablyhave prompted revision to The Jew of Malta, for in that playBarabas specifically refers to how ‘Titus and Vespasian conqueredus’ (II, iii, ).

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Even though good actors such as Alleyn were clearly crucial tothe success of a play, however, they did not operate in the ways wewould expect now. Theatres were only profitable when there wereactors in them performing for live audiences, so there was minimalrehearsal time, since that was a drain on resources. For instance, in, when Henslowe’s diary first begins to record details of the-atrical transactions and performances, Greene’s Friar Bacon andFriar 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 thewhole previous week, it was only on the Tuesday that the actorscould possibly have given any time or thought to preparing The Jewof 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 ofthem would have a copy of the whole script, since it would be fartoo time-consuming to have to write out numerous copies of theauthor’s original by hand. Instead each actor was given a copy of hisown part and the lines immediately before it, so he knew which cuesto 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 men-tioned above, all the performers were male, with boy actors playingthe female roles. Marlowe is often criticised for creating weakfemale roles, but it is worth bearing in mind that he knew that allhis female characters would be played by pre-pubescent boys withless experience than anyone else on the stage. Not until much later,in the second half of the s, did Shakespeare find a boy actorwho could carry such major roles as Rosalind, Viola and Beatrice.Moreover, one of Marlowe’s plays, Dido, Queen of Carthage, seemsto have been first performed by a company composed entirely ofchildren, and part of the irreverence of the play depends on thecomic effect of mighty gods and heroes being seen as literally cutdown to size. Finally, many actors were required to double, that is

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to play more than one part, further impeding their ability to engagewith and develop a role in the the way that a modern actor would belikely to attempt to.

It is because so many other people had a stake in Marlowe’s playsthat so few of them appear to have survived in the form in whichMarlowe wrote them. The Massacre at Paris was almost certainly avictim of the censor; Tamburlaine the Great was, according to itsprinter, published minus some ‘fond and frivolous jestures, digress-ing and (in my poor opinion) far unmeet for the matter’, whichhad formed part of the original performances; Doctor Faustus, as Idiscussed in Chapter , contains references to events which occurredafter Marlowe’s death; The Jew of Malta may well have beenreworked at some unidentifiable time between Marlowe’s death in and its first publication in . In each case, the tinkering, as Ihave argued in Chapter , bears powerful testimony to the continu-ing popularity, political explosiveness, and, in most cases, the contin-uing stageworthiness of Marlowe’s plays. In fact, the shortcomingsof Marlowe’s plays as stable literary texts are, by the same token, thestrongest possible testimony to his success as a man of the theatre.

One final thing to bear in mind in connection with Marlowe’stheatre is that it was an exceptionally unsafe profession. Accidentshappened: on Sunday, January , the collapse of somescaffolding at Paris Garden during a bearbaiting left a number ofspectators killed or injured, and, as we have already seen, thereappears to have been a fatal shooting accident during a performanceof Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two. Other things could also gowrong. The censor could intervene to insist that a play be rewrittenor to prevent its being staged at all, as seems to have happened in thecase of The Book of Sir Thomas More, written by Anthony Munday,Shakespeare, and others. The queen herself, or a great noble, couldtake offence at something that was said or implied by a play, as hap-pened in the case of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays, when the play-wright was forced to remove all reference to Falstaff’s original nameof Oldcastle after objections by Lord Cobham, who was connectedwith the historical Sir John Oldcastle. It is worth remembering thatmany playwrights of the period, including Marlowe himself, spenttime in prison (though in Marlowe’s case it was not, as far as weknow, as a direct result of anything he had written).

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Most dangerously of all, theatres brought together large groupsof people in close proximity, and thus encouraged the spread ofdisease. As a result, the first step taken by the authorities during anyof the frequent outbreaks of plague in London was invariably toclose the theatres, which would have no option but to send theiractors on a provincial tour or to remain dark until further notice. Itmay well be that it is to one such outbreak of plague that we oweMarlowe’s great poem Hero and Leander, and maybe his Lucantranslation too, since poetry could provide an income from sales andpatrons even when the theatres were closed.

MARLOWE’S DRAMATIC INHERITANCE

Although Marlowe was an exact contemporary of Shakespeare, heseems to have been a much quicker starter than Shakespeare. Bothparts of Tamburlaine the Great were on the stage by ; the earliestShakespeare play is hard to date, but is very unlikely to have beenearlier than the beginning of the s. Marlowe is, therefore, pri-marily influenced not by Shakespeare’s increasingly innovative prac-tice but by the much older traditions of late medieval, mid-Tudor,and early Elizabethan stages, as well as by what the Renaissanceknew – or thought it knew – about ancient Greek and Roman theatre.Marlowe also inherited ideas about tragic form and literary aesthet-ics from other literary genres, most notably Sir Philip Sidney’sApology for Poetry. Sidney was a major figure of the day – poet,courtier, diplomat, soldier, and heir to the Earl of Leicester, thefavourite of Queen Elizabeth – and he and Marlowe shared an inter-esting network of connections: Sidney’s father-in-law, Sir FrancisWalsingham, was probably Marlowe’s employer in his secret servicework; Sidney’s brother, Sir Robert Sidney, was the Governor ofFlushing who arrested Marlowe for coining (another Low Countrieslink); and it has been suggested that Marlowe may at some point havebeen a member of the literary circle surrounding ‘Sidney’s sister,Pembroke’s mother’, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, to whom TheCountess of Pembroke’s Arcadia was dedicated and to whom Marloweseems to have dedicated the posthumous publication of his friendThomas Watson’s Amintae Gaudia. Sidney’s work is, however, very

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different from Marlowe’s. For Sidney the historian is ‘loaden with oldmouse-eaten records, authorizing himself (for the most part) uponother histories, whose greatest authorities are built upon the notablefoundations of hearsay’ (Sidney : ). Sidney here is deliberatelycontrasting poetry with history to argue that the strength of poetrylies precisely in its freedom to tell lies. Thus liberated from the mun-danity of history, it can conceptualise man at his noblest, offeringmodels for imitation and so uplifting human thought. History, on theother hand, is tied to actuality, and since it cannot therefore performthe role of providing noble and inspiring examples, the implication isthat it has in fact no function at all. Sidney actually seems to be inaccord with the school of thought that recycled past history for itscontemporary lessons, in that he agrees that the past teaches clearlessons about human behaviour; however, since his notion of per-fectibility demands that we relinquish old patterns in favour of themore inspiring ideals provided by imaginary heroism, he can granthistory no didactic role except, by implication, a negative one.Marlowe, by contrast, has no interest in didacticism: indeed ThomasHealy declares that ‘Marlowe’s drama is a sustained assault on pre-conceptions about a didactic role for literature’ (Healy : ).

Another area of disagreement between Marlowe and Sidneywould seem to be the related question of realism. Sidney praisesThomas Sackville’s and Thomas Norton’s play Gorboduc, but con-demns it for failing to observe the classical unities of time, place andaction:

But if it be so in Gorboduc, how much more in all the rest? whereyou shall have Asia of the one side, and Afric of the other, andso many other under-kingdoms, that the player, when hecometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else thetale will not be conceived . . . While in the meantime twoarmies fly in, represented with four swords and buckram, andthen 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 ‘abruptmid-change scenes in location’ as ‘characteristic of Marlowe’

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(Thomson : ). In Tamburlaine the Great Part One, Cosroeannounces in the first scene,

The plot is laid by Persian noblemenAnd captains of the Median garrisonsTo 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, butMarlowe is not remotely embarrassed by that – such considerationsare immaterial to his dramaturgical concerns. Similarly in EdwardII the king declares at III, i, that he will promote Spencer’s fatherto the earldom of Wiltshire, and barely a hundred lines later, whilewe are still in the same scene, a herald brings the barons’ demandthat ‘from your princely person you remove / This Spencer’ (III, i,–); again, we are to understand events as unfolding emble m -atically rather than realistically. In similar vein, Leslie Thomsonfurther suggests that ‘If Faustus were taken off through the samespace from which he had originally and then repeatedly entered, thiswould conflate his study with hell and act as a reminder of why hehas been “in hell” spiritually from the start’ (Thomson : );this would make it apparent that stage space as well as stage time isbeing used suggestively and expressionistically rather than literally.Thomson also sees something similar happening in Tamburlaine:

Each of the two majestic entrances of Tamburlaine in hischariot would have been instantly recognizable as an emblem-atic “triumph” of conquest, an image explicitly and ironicallychanged to a triumph of death in the final scene whenTamburlaine is unable to stand and the chariot becomes anecessity.

(Thomson : )

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For Thomson, ‘Marlowe’s directions demonstrate his strong inter-est in the visual and the importance of that dimension to the struc-ture of his plays’ (Thomson : ). They also, though, beartestimony to his closeness to a conception of drama which was fluidand expressionist rather than tied to rules of realism.

Marlowe was also influenced by the de casibus (literally ‘offalls’) tradition of narrative best exemplified in The Mirror forMagistrates, which first appeared in and was regularlyreprinted until . Originally intended to carry on the traditionbegun in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, the first edition of this told thestories of nineteen people (most of them involved in the Wars of theRoses) who rose to great heights and then fell disastrously, its moralbeing essentially that what goes up must come down, and that weare all subject to the turns of Fortune’s wheel. This idea is directlyechoed in Mortimer Junior’s speech at the end of Edward II:

Base Fortune, now I see that in thy wheelThere 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 itseffect partly on the frustration of audience expectation that asimilar pattern will unfold there, and indeed Tamburlaine hasopenly inverted the morality pattern when he claims that ‘I hold theFates bound fast in iron chains, / And with my hand turn Fortune’swheel about’ (I, ii, –).

Marlowe was also susceptible to other influences. The title ofDavid Bevington’s influential From Mankind to Marlowe (first pub-lished in ) postulated a link between Marlowe’s drama and themedieval morality play. There is certainly something in this: manyof Marlowe’s plays do indeed have elements of the morality play.Bevington observes that

we . . . find in both parts of Tamburlaine a sequence ofepisodes strikingly reminiscent of the moral play and the

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mid-century hybrid chronicle. It is hardly necessary to pointout that Tamburlaine has an episodic linear structure, for thefact has long been known and almost universally deplored . . .A study of Tamburlaine’s structure in relation to that of itshomiletic predecessors, however, reveals the inner logic andconsistency of its ‘primitive’ form.

(Bevington : )

Bevington notes that, in accordance with the tradition of writing forsmall casts,

with each new incident in the life of his hero Marlowe sup-presses one group of supporting roles in order to introduceanother. In addition, following the model of Cambises andplays of its type, Marlowe retains a few central charactersthroughout the work in order to provide a continuity of nar-rative.

(Bevington : )

He compares Tamburlaine’s three supporting lords with the groupsof threesomes in moralities (Bevington : ). Finally, DavidRiggs points out that Tamburlaine’s vision of Death (V, iii, –)‘recalls the coming of death in homiletic morality plays likeEveryman’ (Riggs : ), while Stephen Greenblatt argues that‘Tamburlaine repeatedly teases its readers with the form of the cau-tionary tale, only to violate the convention’ (Greenblatt : ).

Nor is the appropriation of a morality structure confined toTamburlaine. In The Jew of Malta, Bevington notes that Barabas ‘isin part a lifelike Jewish merchant caught in a political feud on Malta,and in part an embodiment both of the morality Vice and of theunrepenting protagonist in homiletic “tragedy” ’ (Bevington :), and though he thinks Edward II the least like the moralitydrama, he finds elements there too (Bevington : ). Mostnotably, he observes that ‘The debt of Faustus to the morality haslong been acknowledged – the spiritual conflict, the Good and EvilAngels, the seven Deadly Sins’ (Bevington : ), while ParkHonan suggests that in Doctor Faustus Marlowe ‘reaches back toCanterbury’s electioneering or moral plays for somewhat grotesque

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emblems which he now transforms’ (Honan : ). Ironically,of course, the evocation of the morality structure in Doctor Faustusserves only to point up how far Marlowe’s drama has come from thespiritual certainties which underpinned the morality plays: inEveryman, God himself appears onstage. In Doctor Faustus, onlythe Devil does, and God’s throne is empty.

Marlowe also, however, owed much to more recent drama. Whileat Cambridge, he would almost certainly have seen, and might evenhave taken part in, a number of plays. Most notably, the playwrightThomas Kyd, author of The Spanish Tragedy, by his own accountshared rooms with Marlowe two or three years before his death.Marlowe and Kyd have much in common as playwrights. Kyd’smasterpiece The Spanish Tragedy – the one play we can be sure hewrote – was produced in the mid-to late s, probably around thesame time as Marlowe was launching his career with Tamburlaine,and shares with Marlowe’s drama the use of classical mythology, afondness for lengthy speeches, and the use of a chorus, as well as asavage irony and sophisticated self-reflexivity.2 Finally, ScottMcMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean argue that Marlowe waseffectively at war with another theatre group, the Queen’s Men:declaring that ‘The cultural contest was under way in , and asfar as we know Marlowe launched it’, they identify the Queen’sMen play The Troublesome Reign of King John as offering a pious,patriotic corrective to the aspiring mind of Tamburlaine and thedespair of Faustus. This, however, was a war which Marlowe wondecisively, since it ended with the Queen’s Men losing their place inthe 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 hisplays come alive. The title page of Dido, Queen of Carthage recordsthat 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

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to act on the Renaissance stage. A culture that was in many waysstill predominantly oral saw nothing odd in even young childrenbeing able to memorise large chunks of verse, or in some casesprose, and the practice in public speaking and self-presentation wasvalued.

However valuable the experience for the performers, though, itmust inevitably have had some drawbacks for the audience. Both theemotional and the vocal range of the child performers were subjectto insuperable limitations: to write a play and confine yourself onlyto unbroken child voices is a little like writing an opera where allthe parts are to be sung by sopranos. The child actors’ ability toperform certain physical skills and feats will also have beenrestricted. Finally, a playwright might well feel constricted as tosubject matter and choice of language, since he might feel obligedto keep within the bounds of what is suitable for young children toknow and say.

In typical Marlowe fashion, Dido, Queen of Carthage shows itselfaware of these restrictions, but indifferent to them. Instead ofkeeping to topics of which child performers would have personalexperience, Marlowe centres the play on love and war, two areas ofwhich they could have none. In the first few lines of the play, hetouches on at least two topics which we would now think whollyunsuitable for a play for children, paedophilia and domestic vio-lence, as Jupiter invites Ganymede to ‘play with me’ (I, i, ) andGanymede describes how Jupiter’s wife Juno ‘reached me such arap for that I spilled / As made the blood run down about mine ears’(I, i, –). Additionally, rather than adjust the age range of his char-acters to fit that of his performers, he goes out of his way to put onstage the widest possible variety of ages, from the small Ascanius toDido’s aged nurse; this last, moreover, is a character whomMarlowe himself added to the traditional story, almost as if hedeliberately wanted someone very old whom it would be particu-larly difficult for a young boy to act. Additionally, although all theperformers were young boys, one of them has to represent thegoddess Venus, queen of love and beauty – so not even just awoman but a particularly beautiful and shapely woman (Marlowewill play the same game in Doctor Faustus, where a young boy hasto represent Helen of Troy), while another has to be the great

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warrior Aeneas, and a third to take the part of Jupiter, mightiest ofall the gods. The actors are also required to rise to prodigious featsof memory in order to recall the exceptionally long speeches: in II,i, for example, Aeneas speaks forty lines, then, after one line fromDido, another forty-three, and before the scene is over a furtherforty-four.

Marlowe also introduces other complications. Although all thechild performers were likely to have been of roughly the same age,Marlowe repeatedly scripts scenes which demand a significantdifference in size, since they rely on one character either carryinganother (as is repeatedly done to Ascanius and Cupid) or havinganother sit on his or her lap, as Ganymede does on Jupiter’s. It is ofcourse the crowning irony that although this scene may look like acharming and happy bit of typical family life, it actually representsan older man and his toyboy, hardly, one would have thought, a suit-able subject for representation by children.

Marlowe is not, however, simply being wilful in writing in sucha way. When he invites us to see Ganymede not just as a child butas an object of desire, he may well be drawing attention not so muchto any private predilection as to a general property of theatre at thetime, if Lisa Jardine’s influential argument that boy actors werealways eroticised is correct (Jardine : –) – and Jardine’s casederives some considerable support from the fact that the Latin play-wright William Gager felt obliged specifically to deny that plays areoccasions for immoral pleasure in cross-dressing:

I haue bene often mooved by our playes to laughter, and some-time to teares: but I can not accuse either my selfe, or anyother, of any such beastlie thought stirred vp by them.

(qtd Rainoldes : )

Whatever his own intent, Gager’s denial is effective confirmationthat some people might indeed imagine that ‘beastlie thoughts’would be aroused. Moreover, when Marlowe asks his child per-formers to act gods, goddesses, and heroes, the effect is in fact notto stretch the children hopelessly beyond their range but, on thecontrary, to reveal the basic childishness of the gods, goddesses andheroes in question. Finally, the limited range of the performers’

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voices ironically chimes with the limited range of actions andresponses exhibited by the characters in this play: people repeat theactions of carrying children, falling in love, and, finally, throwingthemselves into a pyre with an insistence that deliberately comescloser to comedy than tragedy, and the discrepancy between theactual size of the children and the supposed stature of the charac-ters they play is part of the effect.

Dido, Queen of Carthage has not been much performed. On therare occasions when it has been staged in recent years, however, thelogic 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 hisdeath. It had been originally intended that all the parts should betaken by pupils, echoing the original performance conditions, but alate indisposition on the part of one of the leading ladies meant thatVenus had to be replaced at the last moment by a professionalactress. Far from being a problem, this in fact proved to be excep-tionally interesting, since it revealed the significant differencewhich even a slight variation in size could make to the dynamics ofthe play’s relationships. To have a Venus who was taller than Aeneaswas funny; it would, perhaps, be even more so to have a Dido whowas (as in Shakespeare’s poem Venus and Adonis, where there is acomic disparity between the big, aggressive Venus and the smaller,shy Adonis). Equally, a play which makes so much of relative ageand relative status has sharp resonance in the context of a secondaryschool, a place where status is so dependent on age.

The most recent professional production in the UK, atShakespeare’s Globe in summer , directed by Tim Carroll,was also very illuminating about the dynamics of the play. With acast of only five, three of whom took several parts each, it was setin a children’s playground, with a set made up of a sandpit andslide, which both allowed for ease of movement and also functionedas an emblem of a precipitous descent, visible throughout, while itsgods and goddesses, although played by adult actors, were infan-tilised by wearing shoes that were far too big for them. Again, apoint was neatly made: what hope is there for humans, when thegods we have imagined for ourselves are so pitiful? The play wasmost recently performed in the US by the American Repertory

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Theatre at the Loeb Drama Center in March (see Henderson).

The Massacre at Paris

Despite its brevity and obvious incompleteness, The Massacre atParis has received two professional stagings, the first directed byPhilip Prowse at the Glasgow Citizens’ Theatre in and thesecond, directed by Paul Marcus, as part of the Royal ShakespeareCompany’s Youth Festival at The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon in October . (The latter was chiefly memorable for ahilarious scene in which a dummy representing Coligny was thrownfrom an upper railing.) There have also been amateur performancesby the Marlowe Society and at Marlowe’s old college, CorpusChristi, and a read-through of the play as part of the InternationalMarlowe Conference at Cambridge in July . What such stagings and demi-stagings tend to reveal is the raw energy ofMarlowe’s play, but they also accentuate its incompleteness andbrevity.

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Dido, Queen of Carthage, Shakespeare’s Globe, June

Edward II

Although it was not performed in the US until (and then onlyin an all-female student production), there have been severalnotable productions of Edward II in the UK. Joan Littlewooddirected 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 concen-trate on the play’s politics rather than its personal element, and twoyears later John Harrison did it at Birmingham Repertory Theatre.Frank Dunlop directed Bertolt Brecht’s adaptation at the NationalTheatre in (see Willis ); in this, Gaveston’s name ischanged 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 inwhich commoners comment on what is happening, and in one ofmany interpolated references to Ireland, Baldock betrays the kingbecause ‘My mother in Ireland wants bread to eat’ (Brecht :). The Brecht adaptation was also staged by the Bush TheatreCompany in and at the Roundhouse in . Toby Robertsondid the Marlovian original for the Prospect Theatre Companyin (see Stewart : –), and it also appeared at theEdinburgh Lyceum in , directed by Stephen MacDonald, atthe Bristol Old Vic in , directed by Richard Cottrell, from theCompass Theatre Company on a touring production during and , and at the Manchester Royal Exchange, directedby Nicholas Hytner, in . Gerard Murphy, himself a fineDr Faustus at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon in ,directed it for the Royal Shakespeare Company in with SimonRussell Beale in the title role; in this production, as Roger Salescomments, the line ‘Come fellows, it booted not for us to strive’ (,i, ) directly preceded the interval ‘and so made this statement intomore of a question for the spectators. Would they have tried toprotect Gaveston?’ (Sales : ). There were particularlymemorable productions directed by Michael Grandage at theSheffield Crucible, with Joseph Fiennes playing Edward, in ,and by Timothy Walker at Shakespeare’s Globe in , thesecond of which had an all-male cast, and so nicely revealed the

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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 maleIsabella but not for him to kiss the equally male Gaveston. Otherthings also emerged from these productions: at the Crucible, LloydOwen’s Mortimer proved magnificently what a strong role this isand how closely it rivals the predominance of Edward (a commentsboard placed in the theatre foyer for the duration of the run sprouteda sign saying ‘Mortimer for King’), while at the Globe, the factthat Liam Brennan’s Edward was simultaneously appearing asBolingbroke in Richard II pointed up the parallels between the twoplays. The other thing that staging tends to reveal most stronglyabout this play is the possibilities for doubling and the resonancesthese may generate: one US production, for instance, had the sameactor as Gaveston, the mower, and Lightborn on the grounds thatall in one way or another betray the king.

Edward II has been filmed three times. (In addition, DeborahWillis suggests that we should read Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, too,as ‘a homophobic retelling of the Edward II story’, and also pointsto its presence in Sidney Lumet’s The Deadly Affair [Willis: ].) The first filmed version, made in , was directed byRichard Marquand and Tony Robertson and starred Ian McKellenas Edward and Timothy West as Mortimer. The second, directedby Bernard Sobel, was made in , and was in French. The third,filmed by Derek Jarman in , is both the most interesting andthe most controversial, and is the subject of a book by Jarman, QueerEdward II, as well as being still available on video (and on DVD inan Italian-packaged version, Eduardo II). For David Hawkes, thisfilm not only retells Marlowe but offers a wide-ranging critique ofthe norms of heterosexist cinema:

Jarman’s treatments of Marlowe’s Edward II andShakespeare’s The Tempest call attention to these plays’ med-itations on identity, sexuality and history. He also employsthese themes as vehicles for his critiques of the narrative con-ventions and gender constructions inculcated by the cinema.

(Hawkes : )

For many critics, this film is doubly important, both for what it tellsus about Marlowe and also for what it tells us about Jarman. Colin

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MacCabe says of Jarman’s approach that ‘Edward II is . . . unques-tionably his most autobiographical work in what has been a consis-tently autobiographical œuvre’ (MacCabe : ), while JonathanRomney observes that ‘this film is partly recognisable as Marloweand 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 agay love affair and get it commissioned. Find a dusty old play andviolate it’ (Jarman : ), and Jarman certainly does not hesitateto do things that might be construed by purists as violation. Theepigraph continues, ‘The best lines in Marlowe sound like popsongs and the worst, well, we’ve tried to spare you them’ (Jarman: ), and Gaveston exclaims,

As for the multitude, that are but sparksRaked up in embers of their poverty.Fuck them!

Other textual alterations also occurred. Jarman notes that ‘Nigelcomes up with this great Jacobean line “Girlboy”. We add it’, andobserves of Lightborn (played by his companion) that ‘Kev, deliv-ering his lines in Geordie, changes the words to fit. Ears became“lugs”, mouth becomes “gob” ’ (Jarman : ), and Gavestontoo says ‘gasped’ with a flat northern ‘a’. Isabella pointedly asks: ‘Isit not queer that he is thus bewitched?’ and ‘Mortimer Junior’ looksthe 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 fatherhad escaped from Berkeley Castle, to Corfe, and from there toAvignon, where he was received by Pope Urban XXII, andfrom there he made his way to North Italy, to become a hermitliving a life of prayer.

(Jarman : )

However it is not easy to guess this from the film itself, perhapsbecause Jarman was too ill to film the scene himself; perhaps the

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biggest hint is the prominence given to the last line, ‘or if I live, letme forget myself ’, suggesting that Edward might be able to surviveunder a new identity. Even this, however, has been more cynicallyread by J. Horger, who writes that ‘Jarman offers a “happier” endingthat includes the evolution of a love affair between Edward and hiswould-be assassin, Lightborn. As a result, Edward II, though stilldeposed, continues living a life of homosexual gratification, no wiserfor the experience’ (should he be?) and further assumes – though sofar as I know without warrant – that Jarman is ‘Perhaps alluding tothe controversy over President Kennedy’s mysterious murder’(Horger : and ), something which seems unlikely in thecontext of the film’s loudly UK-based setting. For Bette Talvacchia,though,

The unspeakably savage execution of Edward as offered inMarlowe’s drama – impalement on a red hot poker – is per-formed in a dream sequence, and in this way acknowledged asa possible outcome . . . The alternative ending is well-servedby the duplicitous language that Marlowe gives to Lightbornin the play, where his slippery assurances could be those ofeither a saviour or an assassin. In Jarman’s version, compas-sion wordlessly wins.

(Talvacchia : )

For Susan Bennett,

Edward II is a hopeful film. Its insistence on a future thatmight emerge at the interstices of transgression, dissidenceand desire confronts the shortcomings of its own historicalmoment not, in the end, by looking back but by resolutelylooking forward and with some pleasure to all the dangers, tothe inevitable and costly conflicts, and, finally, to death.

(Bennett : )

It is Jarman’s illness – AIDS, from which he died three yearslater – that lies at the heart of this film; indeed Colin MacCabe callsit ‘Jarman’s deathwork’ (MacCabe : ). In Queer Edward II,Jarman compares Edward I’s pharmacopoeia with his own, and

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sharp ironies play around Gaveston’s dismissive remark that ‘Thereare hospitals for men like you’ (Jarman : ) and the fact thatSpencer smokes. Consequently Jarman is at pains to stress the con-temporary and recent parallels and resonances of the story. Heobserves that ‘Ken, my ghost, pushed me to update the script to thenineties instead of dithering. I insisted that the clothes were not fan-tasies, a leather jacket from Lewis Leathers, a T-shirt, nothing fancy.Just like Tennessee Williams’ (Jarman : ), and his commentson the filming process are interspersed with more general ones aboutthe contemporary gay scene and other cultural issues. One of themany sideswipes at Cliff Richard is followed by the declaration that‘[Ian] McKellen’s knighthood is more shocking; wining and diningin the erroneous belief that his honour improves our [gay men’s] situation’ (Jarman : ); Jarman says of the confrontationbetween the police and OutRage in the film that ‘The scene resem-bles 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. Hisuse of OutRage and his own very public homosexuality certainlymake it clear that homosexuality is not to be demonised, as doesthe weirdness of the straight sex in the film, not least Mortimer’sleopardskin and his night with three booted women, a sceneJonathan Romney classes as ‘well-worn British cinema shorthandfor Establishment hypocrisy’ (Romney : ); Rowland Wymercalls Mortimer and Isabella ‘joyless exemplars of a deadening het-erosexuality’ (Wymer : ). Equally the fact that Gaveston’sand Edward’s parting is played against a background of AnnieLennox’s soulful rendition of ‘Every time we say goodbye’ certainlyadds pathos to the relationship. However, Jarman observes in QueerEdward II that ‘Not all gay men are attractive. I am not going tomake this an easy ride. Marlowe didn’t’. What is clear, however, isthat his particular targets are the church and the army, as prime rep-resentatives of ‘official’ culture; as Kate Chedgzoy puts it, ‘The ideathat, in Jarman’s words, “the whole of the modern British state isfounded on the repression of homosexuality” was to become crucialto his interpretation of Marlowe’s Edward II’ (Chedgzoy :). Jarman writes,

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I felt we should change the Rome to Canterbury, or York.

Then decided to leave it as it is, the Roman church has agreater congregation than the Church of England.

Marlowe’s atheism is his joy. He would have had no problemputting on a condom.

(Jarman : and )

In the film itself, we hear the order ‘Take this fucking priest to theTower’; Gaveston has to run the gauntlet of two rows of spittingclergymen; and Mortimer Junior wears army uniform throughout,with what Colin MacCabe terms ‘the dress and bearing of an SASofficer in Northern Ireland’ (MacCabe : ) (John Orr com-ments on ‘Jarman’s love-hate relationship towards the British Armyuniforms of the twentieth century, a fetish source of fear and attrac-tion he may well have inherited from his childhood in the domesticquarters of an army barracks he thought of more as prison than ashome’) [Orr : ]), and he is backed by a chorus accompaniedby baying hounds, clearly representing the huntin’, shootin’ andfishin’ 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 orig-inal play, most notably in the repeated use it makes of the visual motifof slopes, with their clear connotations of metaphorical as well asliteral descent: the throne stands at the top of a slope, and Isabellawalks down a suicidally steep one. Its use of the throne is alsoemblematic: Deborah Willis points to the importance of ‘the imageof the throne, to which Jarman’s camera repeatedly returns asdifferent individuals occupy it’ (Willis : ). The film’s ownmoral values, however, are less clear. Most complex is the film’s treat-ment of its Isabella. Initially Jarman considered having a boy playIsabella, but in the event the role went to his muse and friend, TildaSwinton. Swinton’s Isabella is a creature of appearances, conceivedof, according to Swinton herself, ‘as a composite of MargaretThatcher, 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 hisminions is that they ‘jest at our attire. ’Tis this that makes me impa-

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tient’ (a line which is in fact spoken by Mortimer Junior in the play[I, iv, ]). She is also, however, vampiric. Jarman notes in QueerEdward II that ‘we start the shoot at Bray – home of HammerHorror’ (Jarman : ), and particularly of Dracula, which isevoked when Isabella bites Kent to death, and also in the scene inwhich Mortimer Junior is in bed with three Gothic-clad girls.

The stress on the figure of the queen may arise because Jarmanhimself is filming in a society presided over by a queen, ElizabethII – certainly the line that we so ironically hear in the background,‘The king’s life is drawing peacefully to a close’, was the wording ofthe announcement of the death of the queen’s father George VI in – as well as by the fact that, as Bette Talvacchia points out, ‘Itis very significant for the symbolic system of Edward II thatEngland’s recent past has been so affected by a female embodimentof patriarchal control’, Margaret Thatcher, whose governmentpassed the Section legislation outlawing the ‘promotion’ ofhomosexuality (Talvacchia : ). Susan Bennett notes that

When Edward is persuaded to sign the order which effectsGaveston’s deportation from England, the close-up shotreveals not any royal insignia but the logo of Britain’s present-day rulers, the House of Commons, and the charter is visiblydated . . . In this social index, Jarman deftly draws intoframe the recent signing of Britain’s pernicious Section ofthe Local Government Act, which denies public money to anyproject that might be identified with what is defined by thatSection as the promotion of homosexuality.

(Bennett : )

However, it is easy to see why Jarman’s Edward II has often beeninterpreted as hostile to women in general rather than just to femalesymbols of government; Susan Bennett comments simply that‘Derek Jarman’s film remake of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward IIis breathtakingly misogynistic’ (Bennett : ) while BetteTalvacchia writes that

at this point in the struggle to dismantle the cultural signs ofa mythologized Woman, it is difficult to override a dominant

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reading with a qualified contextualization embedded in anindividual discourse. In other words, I do not interpretJarman’s intention to be misogynistic, although I believe thatin its reception the image will overwhelmingly be construedin terms of misogyny.

(Talvacchia : )

Tracy Biga comments of Jarman’s work in general, ‘Women’s sex-uality becomes emblematic of Heterosoc [Jarman’s term for thehomophobic Establishment] – violent, destructive and unsympa-thetic’ (Biga : ), though Kate Chedgzoy offers a more recu-perative reading when she comments that ‘Like many gay filmdirectors, Jarman has often been accused of misogyny in the repre-sentation of female roles . . . Such criticisms sometimes appear tobe generated by a confusion of Jarman’s critique of what has beencalled compulsory heterosexuality with an attack on individual het-erosexual women’ (Chedgzoy : ).

Doctor Faustus

Doctor Faustus has been by far the most often produced of Marlowe’splays, partly because it can be put on with a small cast (albeitwith much doubling): at the Liverpool Playhouse in , forinstance, there were only seven actors, and all except Faustus andMephistopheles played several parts, while the Contact TheatreCompany stripped it down to eight, none of whom doubled. It canalso be done with relatively few ‘special effects’, since any poverty ofstaging can so easily be made to seem part of the general tawdrinessand unimpressiveness of what Faustus sells his soul for, and if donewithout an interval, as at the Liverpool Playhouse, the A text cancome in at a taut and gripping hour and forty minutes. There wereat least fifty productions in the UK alone in the last century, includ-ing Royal Shakespeare Company stagings in , , , and; more recently, – saw four within the UK. An adaptationof the play by the noted scholar Nevill Coghill was filmed in ,with Richard Burton both directing and starring as Faustus and histhen wife Elizabeth Burton appearing as Helen of Troy, whose rolewas inevitably given somewhat more prominence than usual.

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Doctor Faustus on stage rarely fails to be an interesting experi-ence. Whether a company stresses the medieval heritage of the play,as in the Medieval Players’ staging as filmed for the OpenUniversity, or its contemporary resonances, as in the LiverpoolPlayhouse’s staging with its echoes of Buffy the VampireSlayer, this is a play which can work on many levels. Here too dou-bling can be very interesting: Mephistopholis, for instance, hassometimes doubled the Old Man, while the use of an all-male cast,a regular feature of productions of this play, underlines the decep-tiveness of the Helen figure whom Faustus so vainly pursues.

The Jew of Malta

The Jew of Malta has received few professional stagings. Its bumperyear was , the quatercentenary of Marlowe’s birth, when therewere three productions: at the Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury; at theVictoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent; and by the Royal ShakespeareCompany, directed by Clifford Williams, in Stratford-upon-Avonand London. Twenty years after that it was directed by PeterBenedict at the Donmar Warehouse, and in at the SwanTheatre, Stratford. In Michael Grandage directed IanMcDiarmid in a fine production at the Almeida Theatre. Therewere also four productions in the United States in the twentiethcentury, and in Theatre for a New Audience performed it intandem with The Merchant of Venice, with F. Murray Abraham asShylock and Barabas. Perhaps inevitably, productions of the playoften succumb to the temptation of overemphasising the comic ele-ments. This works well in the theatre, but does have the effect ofmarginalising the pathos of Abigail, and of definitively brandingthe 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 chal-lenge. Its two parts make it unappealing to modern theatre-goers,so the two are often compressed into one, as by Tyrone Guthrie atthe Old Vic in ,3 or at the National Theatre in where it

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was suggested that ‘the onset of Tamburlaine’s final illness is purelycoincidental’ (Sales : ), or by Terry Hands for the RSC in, with Antony Sher in the title role. Sher replaced the statureand stateliness of Edward Alleyn, the original Tamburlaine, withsheer physical energy, swinging Tarzan-like across the stage to givea powerful sense of Tamburlaine’s charisma and dynamism.

The most recent major revival was directed by David Farr, firstat the Bristol Old Vic and then at the Barbican, in October andNovember , with Greg Hicks as Tamburlaine. This collapsedPart One (which took us up to the interval) and Part Two into oneslick, smooth-running production which came in at two hours fiftyminutes, including the interval. Much of this rapidity was due tothe director’s smart segueing between scenes; typically, a group ofcharacters finishing their scene would fall silent and immediately beplunged into darkness, while the lights seamlessly picked out adifferent group, already onstage, who immediately started speaking,in what was virtually a visual demonstration of Bevington’s pointabout successive groups of characters being ‘suppressed’. Theresult was to counteract the static and repetitive feel of many ofthese scenes with a sense of paciness and drive.

Farr’s was a very Brechtian production. The similarities betweenMarlowe and Brecht have often been commented on, and indeedMichael Hattaway opined in that ‘it is no accident that anumber of notable productions of Marlowe have occurred at thetime when Brecht has been coming into his own on the Englishstage’ (Hattaway : ). There was a stark set of metal polesand rows of clothes hanging from rails for characters to don anddoff outfits – and hence roles – onstage. The horse-kings strainedand sweated as they pulled the chariot round and round the stage,and the closing tableau was accompanied by bloodstained whiteoutfits, representing all the dead of the plays, which descendedfrom on high and hovered above the characters’ heads. Those whowere not acting often sat by the side of the stage, and the brainingof Bajazeth (played by Jeffery Kissoon, who had previously playedTamburlaine 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 charac -teristically stood in three-quarters profile, as if only temporarily

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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 insuitably splendid style.

Apart from the cuts, which included the Prologue, the King ofArabia episode, almost the entirety of the Sigismund / Orcanesplot, and the speech of Tamburlaine’s doctor, Farr was generallyfaithful to the text, but there were one or two changes. Zenocrate’s‘rape’ by Tamburlaine became her ‘use’, which was a good ideasince the use of the word ‘rape’ in its sense of abduction rather thanviolation can only confuse modern audiences, and Tamburlainedied romantically sighing ‘Zenocrate’ rather than declaring that‘For Tamburlaine, the scourge of God, must die’. More con-tentiously, Tamburlaine burned not the Qur’an but ‘the works ofthe prophets’, a decision which outraged the Times reviewer, whocomplained that

Audiences at the Barbican in London did not see the Koranbeing burnt, as Marlowe intended, because David Farr, whodirected and adapted the classic play, feared that it wouldinflame passions in the light of the London bombings . . .Members of the audience also reported that key references toMuhammad had been dropped, particularly in the passagewhere Tamburlaine says that he is ‘not worthy to be wor-shipped’

(Alberge )

Taking up the cause, the Times leading article in the same issuefurther fulminated that

to rewrite -year-old texts because they may not perfectlyreflect contemporary concerns is a dangerous precedent. It istherefore with a sense of unease that we report the tweakingof Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great in order toprotect Islamic sensibilities.

. . .And where does it lead? Shakespeare would need a thoroughoverhaul. No more references to ‘the Turk’. Shylock could bemade less Jewish, or demand a mere drop of blood.

. . .

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The other worry is more serious. The Muslim Council ofBritain, with admirable common sense, cannot understand thefuss about Marlowe’s depiction of the burning of the Koran.But there will be wild voices in some Muslim communities whowill greet the compromise with glee and seek to leverage it.4

The allusion in the final paragraph is to the statement by InayatBunglawala, the media secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain,who commented that ‘In the context of a fictional play, I don’t thinkit will have offended many people’ (qtd Alberge ). The direc-tor himself replied (choosing the liberally-minded Guardian as amore 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 petroldrum – but I wanted to make it very clear that his act was agiant two fingers to the entire theological system, not [a] pieceof Christian triumphalism over the barbarous Turk. So, in ourproduction, Marlowe’s ‘heap of superstitious books’ were thebooks of all religions.

Indeed he maintained that his version of the play was moreprovocative than the original, since it allowed the audience to seethat ‘Tamburlaine is positing what Marlowe could never have pro-posed at that time without literally risking his neck. He is propos-ing atheism’ (Farr ). However, one can see something of whyFarr might have felt the need to be cautious in Jeff Dailey’sjustification for why, when he directed Part Two in at theAmerican Theatre of Actors in New York City, he did it withoutcuts: ‘Tamburlaine’s burning of the Koran is a sign of Christianpower and victory. Mahomet does nothing to prevent it, althoughchallenged by Tamburlaine to do so’. For Dailey, ‘the amount oftime that elapses between the burning and the illness’ onset, whichmay not be apparent to readers, is critical to interpreting this scene’,and thus ‘The theme of the sub-plot is not an anti-Christianmessage, but rather a moral one’ (Dailey ). If that is what theQur’an-burning scene can be perceived as meaning, Farr was wiseto avoid it. It is also not unreasonable to suggest, as Farr implies,

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that Marlowe would really have chosen to have the Bible burnedonstage if he could have got away with it, and picked the Qur’an asthe next best thing rather than in its own right.

Farr added a further innovation in that Tamburlaine alsovomited copiously (and convincingly) on stage, assigning an actualphysical cause for his death in a way the text signally fails to do. Theactual staging of the burning was one of the few spectacular effects,with an onstage incinerator visibly ablaze. The burning of thebodies of Olympia’s son and husband was also accompanied by asubstantial conflagration, though generally the ethos was verymuch one of poor theatre. Not so much a change but a deviationfrom what might have been expected was the fact that the map wasvisibly not the Ortelius one which we know Marlowe to have had inmind, but looked to be a much more large-scale and localised imageof the areas with which Tamburlaine is most closely associated.

It is not easy to like Tamburlaine, and this production did noteven try: there was no real sense of passion between Tamburlaineand Rachael Stirling’s austere, distant Zenocrate in her nun-likewhite gown, and only the most fleeting sense of camaraderiebetween him and his sheepskin-clad lieutenants, who served mainlyas 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 abrief bid for individuality even if not for likeability by smoking onstage. However, this submerging of the personal only enhanced theBrechtian sense of scope and sweep. Marlowe’s play may no longerbe possessed of the same urgent energies with which, a year beforethe Armada, it spoke to nervous English audiences, but itsamenability to the Brechtian paradigm and the controversy sparkedby the changes clearly showed that it still has many others.

Finally, it is worth noting that Marlowe himself appears directlyor indirectly in a number of films. In Richard Loncraine’s RichardIII, Marlowe’s lyric ‘The Passionate Shepherd’ is sung at theoutset, alerting the viewer to the queer reading of the text to follow,and in John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love, Rupert Everett’sMarlowe, though mysteriously uncredited, is an important charac-ter in the development of the young Shakespeare. Marlowe alsovery nearly had another existence on the screen: the stage name

,

originally proposed by Columbia Pictures for the actress eventuallyknown as Kim Novak was ‘Kit Marlowe’. Even without that,though, Marlowe and his plays have had an impressive career onstage and screen.

NOTES

. Though see Knutson for a counter-argument that EdwardII 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’sat the National Theatre –, with Albert Finney, and TerryHands’ RSC production in –, starring Antony Sher, seeFuller .

. Ironically, the online version of the article is immediately followed by advertisements for two Muslim dating agencies anda Bible video.

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Marlowe as Scholar: Old andNew Knowledges in the Plays

Christopher Marlowe spent by far the greater part of his life informal education, and what he learned informs his plays at every

level. To a very considerable extent, Marlowe presented himself as ascholar-dramatist, and his plays offered their audiences knowledge aswell as entertainment. In the opening scene of Doctor Faustus, DoctorFaustus runs through in turn each branch of knowledge currentlyavailable. Beginning with the study of Aristotle, a staple of the university undergraduate curriculum, he moves through Galen, thetheorist of medicine, Justinian, who wrote on the law, and finallydivinity. Each of these, in turn, he finds wanting. His judgement mayhave paralleled Marlowe’s own: familiar with what was offered byCambridge, Marlowe showed no known signs of regret at moving onfrom it in , and there is no evidence that he ever visited it again.Nevertheless, his connection with it proved useful throughout whatremained of his short life. To be a Master of Arts of either universityassured a man the status of a gentleman, even if he was being arrestedat the time: it was on this basis that Marlowe could assure Sir RobertSidney, after his arrest in Flushing, that he was a scholar, and securefor himself a more favourable hearing than he could otherwise haveexpected to obtain, and, although there is no direct record of it, hisstatus as MA may well have proved similarly helpful during hisvarious other brushes with the law.

Marlowe’s status as a Cambridge Master of Arts also broughthim a peer group, the so-called University Wits, a group loosely

consisting of John Lyly (like Marlowe, a former pupil of the King’sSchool, Canterbury), Thomas Lodge, Robert Greene, ThomasNashe, and George Peele. Shakespeare’s lack of qualifications formembership of this group was raised at the outset of his career byGreene’s notorious references to him in his Greene’s Groatsworth ofWit, and might well have cost him dearer than it did. Marlowe wasvery much on the fringes of it, but his undoubted right to belongunderpinned his self-presentation as scholar-dramatist (it was, afterall, as ‘scholar’ that he described himself to Sir Robert Sidney whenhe was arrested in Flushing). I will discuss four different aspects ofMarlowe’s self-presentation as scholarly dramatist: his deploymentof classical allusion, and his interests in geography, medicine, andcosmology. 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 univer-sity education and is a favoured tactic of Marlowe’s. Marlowe is,however, not using classical allusion simply as a badge of learning: asRoma Gill observes, ‘the difference between Marlowe and the usualrun of poets who speak of Achilles’ bravery and Penelope’s fidelity,is that Marlowe expects the reader [/] listener [/] spectator to supplythe context of his allusion’ (Gill –: ).1 There is no work of hisin which reference to the classics is not important, and in many it iscentral. 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 Aeneidthat it has sometimes been described as a translation of it. The effectof the play depends heavily on the audience recognising the variousdeities and knowing what their characteristics and attributes are,so that they can notice that in every case, Marlowe has deployedthese 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 inanyone’s welfare but his own. Venus is the goddess of love andbeauty, assisted by her son Cupid, but his primary efforts in the playare spent on the aged and ugly old Nurse; Juno is the goddess ofmatrimony 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. Jupitersays 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 familylife: a man with a boy on his lap. However, not only does the imageactually mean to prove something very different from that – indeedin many ways its antithesis – but every classical reference in thisspeech points us to conflict within the family: Saturn was Jupiter’sown father, whom Jupiter killed; Hercules is Jupiter’s son by one ofhis numerous infidelities with mortal women, and what Jupiterrelates here is a tale of how he himself harmed Juno, who was bothhis sister and his wife, for harming his son by one of his many mis-tresses. The whole neatly strikes the keynote for the story of strifeand squabbling between the gods which is to follow, in which theauthority and status of the classical pantheon is comprehensivelyundermined and some of the central figures of the most prestigiousclassical 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 unimpeachablyGreek name underscores the original meaning of the word ‘barbar-ian’ as one who does not speak Greek, and made a noise which theGreeks thought was no better than ‘bar, bar’, and it thus sets in traina sustained series of ironic playing with the question of who is trulybarbarous. Ironically, the ‘barbarous’ Tamburlaine will very soonprove himself completely at home in deploying the discourse ofGreek 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 Meanderabout the details of the classical legend of the dragon’s teeth (II, ii,–). At once we see that expected polarities here, typically forMarlowe, have been reversed.

The importance of classical culture is again evident whenMycetes almost immediately afterwards terms Meander ‘a Damonfor thy love’ (I, i, ), alluding to the classical friendship of Damonand Pythias. Soon after, though, Mycetes adjures Meander toreturn ‘smiling home, / As did Sir Paris with the Grecian dame’ (I,i, ), thus figuring his friend as a Trojan rather than a Greek, andMenaphon’s advice to Cosroe to invade Greece is coupled withan invocation of the Persian Cyrus (I, i, ), who made war onGreece, a subtle reminder that those who are so anxious to labelTamburlaine as a barbarian are in fact the literal descendants ofthose to whom that term was once most accurately applicable. Thesame game is played when the Soldan of Egypt enters saying‘Methinks we march as Meleager did’ (IV, iii, ): the Soldan isEgyptian, but he lays claim to the cultural authority of ancientGreece, 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 asTurnus, the first, defeated lover of Aeneas’ bride Lavinia, withwhose death Virgil’s Aeneid ends. This image doubly encodes awave 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 con-quest of the island and the metaphorical conquest of its literary alle-giances by classical learning. To cast the ‘barbarous’ Tamburlaineas an Aeneas overpowering the King of Arabia’s Turnus is, onceagain, to show us a sharply focused image of the Scythian savagewhom this play forces us to see not as an Other but in a ‘tragicglass’ – that is, a mirror.

Doctor Faustus

For all its conspicuous modernity in so many other ways, DoctorFaustus too is heavily influenced by the classical. It is framed by achorus who could have stepped straight off the classical stage, wherea chorus characteristically represents a mediating point between theaudience and the protagonist. The Greek chorus comments dispas-sionately on the protagonist, and rarely becomes involved in theevents of the play – indeed in some ways it is almost as if the chorusis occupying a slightly different plane of the stage, since we alwaysknow that they will ultimately prove immune from even the worstdisasters which befall the characters. In Doctor Faustus, the Chorusat first ironically seems explicitly to deny the importance of the clas-sical, 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 ormythology. However, at the beginning of Act Three Wagner, hereeffectively 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 shock-ingly, defused by recasting his assault as being against the Greekgod Jove, who dwelt on Olympus, and whom the audience couldcomfortably accept as a myth, rather than against the Christian Godwhom they were all expected to accept as omnipotent and omni-scient. Finally, the closing Chorus definitively inserts events withina classical framework with the pronouncement that ‘burnèd isApollo’s laurel bough’ (Epilogue, ). It is also, of course, notablethat Doctor Faustus’s ultimate desire is, typically for a man of theRenaissance, 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 theGreeks to take revenge by starting the Trojan War. For Faustus, theclassical world is both the ultimate prize and the direct cause ofdestruction, and his attraction to it provides a powerful emblem forthe opposing tug between the twin forces of Christian and classicalwhich configured the Renaissance. At the same time, though, theplay’s references to the classical world subtly remind us that theChristian belief system against which Faustus sins is not the onlyone ever to have held sway over people’s imaginations, and so mayperhaps prompt us to see the play’s apparently solid moral stance asprovisional rather than absolute: after all, as Faustus reminds us inhis closing speech, if Pythagoras’s idea of metempsychosis weretrue rather than the Christian belief system, he would have nothingto fear.

The Jew of Malta

The Jew of Malta has fewer classical references than most Marloweplays, but one of those it does have is enormously significant. WhenBarabas declares that he has ‘But one sole daughter, whom I hold asdear / As Agamemnon did his Iphigen’ (I, i, –), he ironically

foreshadows exactly what is going to happen: like the Greek generalAgamemnon, who led the Greek armies in the Trojan war, he willkill his daughter, and perhaps he too, like Agamemnon, can be seenas doing so in what he perceives as an act of putting wider culturaland national interests before his own personal ones, since his motivefor killing Abigail is that she has abandoned Judaism and convertedto Christianity. Once again, as in Tamburlaine the Great where thecounsellor on whom Mycetes relies has his instability marked by thename ‘Meander’, the mere use of a classical name can create ripplesof meaning. It is notable, too, that when Barabas seeks to do wicked-ness, he finds a classical precedent readily at hand, as he proposesto 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 poolBreak from the fiery kingdom.

(III, iv, –)

What the classical world has taught this student of it is infanticideand murder. Later, when Ithamore deploys it, classical allusion isdebased even further to a simple language of seduction: ‘I’ll bethy Jason, thou my golden fleece’ (IV, ii, ) he meaninglesslypromises Bellamira, before making the ludicrous mistake of refer-ring to ‘Dis above’ (IV, ii, ) (Dis being the presiding deity ofthe underworld). In this respect, Marlowe’s Malta may remind usof T. S. Eliot’s waste land: it is composed of half-rememberedscraps of a once great but now debased culture. As in Dido, Queenof Carthage, where the gods have been reduced to children, petti-ness and triviality are all that is left of what was once serious;and as in Doctor Faustus, the deployment of classical referencesmay also be working to wider effect. Historically, Malta in classicaltimes had been the scene of the shipwreck of St Paul, one of thegreatest of the Apostles (and the one mentioned in the BainesNote). Paul preached of hope, faith, and charity, but it would behard to think of three values more comprehensively absent from theMalta of Marlowe’s play. Perhaps the debasement of classicalculture and learning which the play shows so clearly should alert us

,

to the possibility that much the same thing is implied aboutChristianity too, though inevitably in a more delicate and circum-spect manner.

The Massacre at Paris

In The Massacre at Paris, despite the mutilation of the text, anumber of classical references survive. The Guise, despite his self-proclaimed 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 beginningof this passage; it concludes with the idea of a fury, one of theErinyes who, in classical mythology, pursue murderers, particularlythose who have killed members of their own family, an ironicallyappropriate allusion in a play in which one character, the QueenMother, plots the murders of a son, a son-in-law, and a cousin.Guise also makes alleged disrespect for the classics the pretext forhis killing of Ramus, the scholar who had challenged the authorityof 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 argumentumCannot serve, sirrah. Kill him.

(ix, –)

Equally, Guise compares himself with one of the great names of theclassical past. Warned of his death, the Guise declares ‘Yet Caesarshall go forth’ (xxi, ), before concluding ‘Thus Caesar did goforth, and thus he died’ (xxi, ), and just before that he has insistedon 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 verywell to use classical ideas and rhetoric too.

Edward II

In his first significant speech in Act One, scene one, Gaveston pro-poses 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 treeTo 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 hartBy yelping hounds pulled down and seem to die.

(I, i, –)

For Gaveston, classical mythology provides both a precedent forand a grammar of homosexuality, and so it does again when Edwardsays 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 ofclassical culture’s authorisation of homosexuality, as we see whenMortimer 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 mythologyoffers a discourse which the play finds very useful indeed.

The Poems

Although this is a book about Marlowe’s plays, it is impossible todiscuss the role of classical allusions in Marlowe without referringalso to his poems. Two of these, All Ovids Elegies and Lucans FirstBook, are translations of classical works, and Hero and Leanderdraws on a classical poem and is set firmly in the classical world.Once again, though, Marlowe is far from pious in his depiction ofthese repositories of cultural capital. Marlowe may well have chosenthe Lucan to translate partly or wholly because it was the only clas-sical epic to lack intervention by the gods, and because of its clearlyrepublican sympathies; in both respects, it tilted against the mosttreasured ideologies of Elizabethan England. His translations ofOvid 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 theBishop of London six years after Marlowe’s death. Finally, in Heroand Leander Marlowe draws on the strong association of classicalGreek culture with institutionalised same-sex relationships to rep-resent Neptune’s desire for Leander as the ultimate cause of hisdrowning, so that, as in Edward II, classical culture is seen as autho-rising or at least normalising homosexuality. In the poems, then, wesee even more clearly than in the plays how Marlowe plunders clas-sical mythology primarily to suit himself, and to make it mean whathe wants it to mean.

GEOGRAPHY

Marlowe, however, was interested in new knowledges as well as oldones. In the Tamburlaine plays in particular, Marlowe demonstratesconspicuous familiarity with the Dutch mapmaker AbrahamOrtelius’ atlas Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, and colonisation and theconquest of new lands are central themes in all his plays. This sectionwill trace the extent to which Marlowe’s plays reveal his knowledgeof the latest understandings of the world. First, though, it is impor-tant to understand the imperatives that configured geographicalexploration 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 ofthe principal goal of Elizabethan travellers, wealth. Gold, and evenmore so silver, were to be found in South America, which men likeSir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Ralegh were trying to wrest fromthe control of Philip of Spain; spices came from the Spice Islandsof Indonesia, and the attempt to find an easier passage to them thanthe perilous one around the bottom of Africa was what spawned thesearch for a north-west passage around the top of Canada or anorth-east one round Russia. These priorities are closely reflectedin Marlowe’s works.

Perhaps the location with the most enduring fascination forMarlowe is the East, the scene of the two Tamburlaine the Greatplays, but he is also fascinated by the idea of America, the mostexciting arena for contemporary exploration, which recurs insis-tently in the Baines Note. At the end of the two Tamburlaine theGreat plays, Marlowe’s thoughts clearly turn to America. In his lastgreat speech, Tamburlaine declares:

Look here, my boys, see what a world of groundLies westward from the midst of Cancer’s lineUnto 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 beholdAs much more land which never was descried,Wherein are rocks of pearl that shine as brightAs all the lamps that beautify the sky:And shall I die, and this unconquerèd?

(V, iii, –)

A glance at Abraham Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, whichMarlowe is known to have used, enables us to track the trajectory ofTamburlaine’s thought very precisely here and makes it quite clearthat it is to South America that his thoughts are turning, both onaccount of its own ‘Inestimable drugs and precious stones’ and alsobecause Ortelius shows it as offering virtually a land passage to thestill undiscovered southern continent, which is what really firesTamburlaine’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 howideas about new lands intersected with ideas about old ones in theEnglish Renaissance mind – indeed Margo Hendricks suggests it isdirectly prompted by the sack of Cartagena, in South America, in, from which Drake was returning when he brought Hariotback to England from Roanoke with the two Native AmericansManteo and Wanchese (Hendricks : ), since the parallelbetween Carthage and Cartagena was one often drawn, and theexploration of the New World was seen very much in terms of thenarratives provided by the old. Dido, Queen of Carthage certainlyfocuses on the origins of the supposed translatio imperii by whichimperial power was allegedly transferred from Troy and thence toRome and ultimately to England, which provided the ideologicaljustification for Elizabethan pretensions to empire. When Aeneasfirst arrives in Carthage, he asks a rather surprising question:‘Where am I now? These should be Carthage walls’ (II, i, ). WhenAchates 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 verypertinent 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 conductWe might sail back to Troy, and be revengedOn these hard-hearted Grecians which rejoiceThat 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 hererecalls about him is that of his carving of Gallathea, a statue sobeautiful that Pygmalion prayed it might come to life, which it dulydid. Thus Aeneas recalls two very different and indeed almost com-plementary legends about people and stones. In one, that of Niobe,a woman is turned into stone for grief; in the other, that ofPygmalion, a woman was turned out of a stone for love. One tookplace in Greece, the other is associated here, through Dido, withCarthage. For Aeneas, however, both seem to blur together in thismoment. He looks at a stone which reminds him of Niobe, andremembers Pygmalion; he looks at Carthage, and thinks of Troy.The twin speeches function as a powerful emblem of how new landscan only ever be understood, for the Renaissance mind, in terms ofthe old, as when ‘In , George Clifford, the Earl of Cumberland,“built the greatest Fleet of shipping that ever any subject did”’ tosail to America, according to Aubrey, who adds, ‘The Armada of theArgonauts was but a trifle to this’ (qtd Rukeyser : ). In avery real sense, then, the process of exploring the New World isseen as intimately linked to and fundamentally rooted in the old.

As well as being glanced at in Doctor Faustus – indeed Marlowe’sfriend and possible collaborator Thomas Nashe referred to the playas ‘Faustus: studie in indian silke’ (Kocher : ) – Americafigures in other plays too. It would naturally have been impossiblefor it to have been mentioned in Edward II, which is set in a periodwhich 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 mayperhaps be something of a dog that doesn’t bark. Barabas looksentirely to the past, comparing, with savage irony, his love forAbigail to that felt by Agamemnon for his daughter Iphigenia,whom he sacrificed at Aulis. In this (as also in his stage-managerrole, when he is seen busy with a hammer [V, v, s.d.]) he echoesAeneas, while his very name is emblematic of another aspect of thepast, the inaugural moment of Christianity. This, perhaps, is onereason why he is doomed: he is oriented wholly on the past, whereasAmerica represents the future.

Another area of interest for Marlowe is the Low Countries. Theserepresented one of the most important locations for ElizabethanEngland, and much of Elizabeth’s foreign policy was concentratedon them. This was because of the troubled religious and political sit-uation of the Netherlands, which had been inherited by the CatholicHabsburg rulers of Spain but where the population was inclined toProtestantism. Elizabeth I supported the Protestant cause and sentan army under the Earl of Leicester to assist the Dutch, leading tofrequent comings and goings between England and the Netherlandsin this period and the presence in London of a number of Dutchrefugees, which gave rise to tensions with Londoners and much anti-immigrant feeling. Marlowe refers several times to the Netherlands.Sir John of Hainault appears as a character in Edward II, while in TheJew of Malta Ithamore refers to the poisoned porridge as ‘a drenchto poison a whole stable of Flanders mares’ (III, iv, –), with aclear glance at Henry VIII’s famously insulting dismissal of Anne ofCleves as a ‘Flanders mare’ which invites us to register the importantrole the Low Countries had played in the development of the EnglishReformation. Similarly, Barabas notes that Antwerp is one of theplaces 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 Netherlandsfigure among a number of modern locations remembered in theplay: ‘In Act V, Tamburlaine’s order to kill every man, womanand child at Babylon reflects the fate of the Dutch town of Naardenin the poet’s own youth’ (Honan : ). Doctor Faustus in particular seems to be informed by language, ideas, and a world-view derived from the Spanish wars in the Low Countries, as seenmost clearly when Faustus declares that if he succeeds in raisingspirits,

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 warThan 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) willinevitably have sharpened his interest. He may well have travelledelsewhere too. Park Honan writes rather airily that ‘It is not certainwhether or when Marlowe, in a bright doublet, sailed through theParis embassy, but there are signs that he delivered and picked upletters there. For one thing, he became familiar with the Frenchcapital; he depicts Paris with easy confidence’ (Honan : ).Honan further suggests that ‘In Paris . . . Marlowe seems to haveabsorbed a French view of the Tartar warrior, Timur or Tamerlane,or at least he offers a more nearly French than English idea of thehero in both parts of Tamburlaine’; if this were indeed the case, hewould 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, ques-tions of religious belief are insistently linked with questions ofgeography. In The Massacre at Paris, the Guise twice insists that hisefforts on behalf of the Catholic League are directly funded bySpain from its New World profits. He says first that

For this, from Spain the stately CatholicsSends 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 IndiansTo 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 pre-vious certainties, religious ones among them. The exploration ofAmerica was conducted along religiously demarcated lines: WilliamStrachey in The Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania spoke ofhow the Indians planned

to break into our Plantations with acts of hostility (as mostdespightfully did Pedro Melendes, their Admirall, into theFrench-Colonie . yeares since in Noua Francia who rasedtheir fort, and hung vp the common Soldiers . . . and wroughtover them disdeignefull Inscriptions in Spanish, importing, Idoe not this as vnto Frenchmen, but as vnto Lutherans.

(Strachey : )

More profoundly, however, it was, in a sense, the discovery of Americathat had precipitated the great crisis of faith which ultimately pro-duced the Reformation, since the failure of the Bible to mention theNew 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, howthese 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 con-sidering the whole world, so many yeares, (by all knowledgreceaved), was supposed to be only conteyned and circum-scrybed in the discovered and travelled Bowndes of thosethree . . . as also to question how yt should be, that they (ifdescended from the people of the first creation) shouldmaynteyne so generall and grosse a defection from the trueknowledg of God, with one kynd, as yt were of rude andsavadge life, Customes, manners, and Religion,? yt being to begraunted, that with vs (infallably) they had one, and the samediscent and begynning from the vniversall Deluge, in the scat-tering of Noah his children and Nephewes, with their famelies(as little Colonies) some to one, some to other borders of theEarth to dwell?

(Strachey : )

Similarly, William Lisle asked in his translation of Du Bartas,

But all this other world, that Spaine hath new found outBy 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’tNor Persians, nor Greeks, nor Romans euer wist,Or inckling heard thereof, whose euer-conquering hoastsHaue spred abroad so far and troad so many coasts?

(Lisle : ll.–)

The recourse to the theologically safer ground of the discourse of theclassical, which Christianity had already theorised, does not quitemask the fact that the orthodox answer to ‘How was’t inhabited?’ –that is, by the descendants of Noah – is conspicuously absent. Itseems clear here that the new understanding of the physical worldhas cast those growing doubts on the understanding of the spiritualworld which are ultimately to prove the cause of Faustus’ downfall.

America is certainly associated with unbelief by Richard Baines inthe Baines Note. It is remarkable how many of the allegations madeabout 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, whereasAdam is proved to have lived within six thousand years’. That thisrefers to the myths of origin of Native Americans is confirmed bythe direct mention of Hariot in the next of Baines’ allegations:‘He [Marlowe] affirmeth that Moses was but a juggler, and that oneHeriots being Sir Walter Raleigh’s man can do more than he’.Moreover, one of the most distinctive products of America is twicementioned, first in the notorious ‘That all they that love not tobaccoand boys are fools’ and second in ‘That if Christ would have insti-tuted the sacrament with more ceremonial reverence, it would havebeen in more admiration; that it would have been much better beingadministered in a tobacco pipe’. For Marlowe, therefore, knowledgeof geography gives access to the contours of the next world as well asthe present one – and as the present one expands, the imaginativespace allotted to the next one visibly shrinks and withers.

MEDICINE

As well as ideas associated with geography, Marlowe was also inter-ested in scientific thought; indeed David Riggs calls him ‘better atexpressing scientific ideas in poetic language than any English poetsince Chaucer’ (Riggs : ). In Tamburlaine the Great, PartOne, 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 isfounded upon a firm physiological basis, and he is the first dramatist

,

to show an interest in and a knowledge of the construction of thehuman body’ (Camden : ), in lines such as those in whichCosroe, 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’, MatthewGreenfield observes that

Few writers have tried harder than Christopher Marloweto find language for the representation of physical pain.Wounded characters in Marlovian drama often speak vividlyand compellingly about what they feel. What they feel,though, includes not just agony but also a stranger response tosevere physical trauma: they develop an uncanny knowledgeof what is happening inside their bodies, including the preciseanatomy of their injuries and the physiology of the onset ofdeath.

(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 ofanatomical knowledge is the new commitment in the early modernperiod to the dissection of human bodies’, and that this leadsthe establishment of ‘one of the fundamental transactions ofMarlovian drama: a physical wound can be converted into theatri-cal power’ (Greenfield : –). Thus Tamburlaine exhortinghis youngest son to kill a man orders him to ‘cleave his pericranionwith thy sword’ (Part Two, I, iii, ), and describes his soldiersdrinking as ‘Filling their empty veins with airy wine / That, beingconcocted, turns to crimson blood’ (Part Two, III, ii, –).Perhaps most striking of all is Olympia’s husband’s description ofhis own death:

A deadly bullet gliding through my sideLies heavy on my heart; I cannot live.I feel my liver pierced, and all my veinsThat there begin and nourish every part,Mangled and torn, and all my entrails bathedIn 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 adetailed diagnosis of his condition (Part Two, V, iii, –), but itperhaps is that the King of Soria curses Tamburlaine in remarkablymedicalised terms:

May never spirit, vein, or artier feedThe 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 almostexactly fulfilled, allowing for two possible explanations of the directcause of Tamburlaine’s death: one which proposes that there is adivine overseer who causes Soria’s curse to be fulfilled, and anotherwhich sees humans in wholly physical and material terms, sincewhat Soria utters here is in fact less a pious hope than an analysis ofTamburlaine’s ‘sanguine’ temperament (that is, one in which bloodis the one of the four humours which predominates) which is, in theterms of its day, scientific, and a prediction of its inevitable self-combustion.

COSMOLOGY

Marlowewasalsovery interested inwhathappened in thesky, an inter-estwhichhemaypartlyhavederivedfromHariot,whodidaveryaccu-rate drawing of the moon (Rukeyser : ). Caroline Spurgeoncontrasted him strongly with the nature-loving Shakespeare:

,

with Marlowe, images drawn from books, especially the clas-sics, and from the sun, moon, planets and heavens far out-number all others . . . Indeed this imaginative preoccupationwith the dazzling heights and vast spaces of the universe is,together with a magnificent surging upward thrust and aspi-ration, the dominating note of Marlowe’s mind. He seemsmore familiar with the starry courts of heaven than with thegreen fields of earth, and he loves rather to watch the move-ments 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 waxas red as blood’ (Part One, IV, ii, ) may, it has been suggested,derive from a display of the Northern Lights visible from Canterburyin November , when Marlowe was ten. This interest in the skyis particularly prominent in the earlier part of his career: Dido inDido, 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 twoparts 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 neo- platonic philosophy (Mebane : ).

Faustus’ interest in astronomy, in particular, goes much beyondanything suggested in the sources, and also takes us very near toMarlowe’s studies at Cambridge and to urgently contemporarydebates in which people who seem to have been members of his owncircle were participants. Francis R. Johnson says that

the playwright has characteristically transformed the ignorantjumble of wholly unscientific astronomical lore of Chapters

and of the Faust Book. He raises, instead, problems inspiredby the disagreement among the astronomical textbooksthen current at Cambridge, and has the answers given byMephistophilis accord with the doctrine expounded by theunconventional rather than the more orthodox authorities.

(Johnson : )

Nevertheless, Faustus is notably not particularly satisfied withMephistopheles’ responses, reminding us that in this as in everyother respect, this play is far more interested in the questions it asksthan in any possible answers to them, which it exposes as always pro-visional and partial. This may, perhaps, explain why Marlowe sur-prisingly ignores the new theory of Copernicus that the earth orbitedthe sun rather than vice versa, though some critics have argued thatthis may be because there was in fact less tension between thenew Copernican model and the old Ptolemaic one than is sometimessupposed: Katherine Eggert remarks that ‘Giordano Bruno saw nocontradiction between accepting Copernicus’s concept of the helio-centric universe and adapting the Copernican diagram into a mysti-cal, hermeticist-kabbalistic scheme of an infinite number of infiniteworlds’ (Eggert : ). Along similar lines, David Riggs declaresthat ‘The celebrated clash between Ptolemy’s geocentric universeand Copernicus’s heliocentric alternative obscures the fact thatCopernicus vindicated Ptolemy’s way of doing mathematical astron-omy’ (Riggs : ), while John Gillies argues that

Tamburlaine’s cosmos is always the old cosmology associatedwith the name of Ptolemy of Alexandria, in which a station-ary earth is represented as encased in roughly nine layers ofconcentric ‘spheres,’ each the circular track of a heavenly bodyor bodies around the earth . . . Typically, Tamburlaine invokesthis traditional cosmic architecture only to usurp it. This ismore dangerous than his geographic expansionism not justbecause there was no ideological counterpart to the new geog-raphy in terms of which it might seem legitimate, but becausethe Ptolemaic cosmos was regularly invoked as a model of theElizabethan social order.

(Gillies : )

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On different lines, Park Honan dismisses the question entirely bydeclaring that

Marlowe had little chance to hear of Copernicus’s new ideathat the earth revolves round the sun – no widely used text-book discussed it. A few up-to-date texts briefly denouncedthe heliocentric hypothesis. But – far from crediting Ptolemy’sidea of an earth-centred universe – Marlowe expresses a scep-tical cosmology, which he may take from Agostino Ricci, aconverted Spanish Jew (whose brilliant work is Augustini Ritiide motu octavae sphaerae), though similar ideas were expressedby Oronce Finé, of the Collège de France.

(Honan : )

Most simply, William Empson declares that reference toCopernicus must have been censored from Dr Faustus (Empson: –). In a way, Empson’s simple confidence, even though itmay be mistaken, is perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the rep-utation Marlowe had succeeded in establishing for himself: so com-pletely did he claim the role of scholar-dramatist for himself thatwhere Marlowe and contemporary authorities are at odds, a criticof Empson’s stature instinctively looks for a way for Marlowe to bein the right.

NOTE

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

Marlowe the Horizon-Stretcher: Daring God out ofHeaven and Conquering NewWorlds

Marlowe does not only rely on existing knowledge, but is alsointerested in questioning, charting and stretching the fron-

tiers of what is known, practised, believed and expected. Thischapter will explore this aspect of his dramaturgy. It will fall intofour sections: formal experimentation, the question of religiousbelief (which focuses principally on the Tamburlaine the Greatplays), Marlowe’s exploration of extreme psychological states, andhis transgressive heroes.

FORMAL EXPERIMENTATION

Marlowe was above all an innovator. Matthew Dimmock suggeststhat Zabina in Tamburlaine the Great, Part One is ‘perhaps thefirst Ottoman woman on the stage’ (Dimmock : ), whileStephen Greenblatt points to the way in which, unlike his prede-cessors and contemporaries,

From his first play to his last, Marlowe is drawn to the idea ofphysical movement, to the problem of its representationwithin the narrow confines of the theater. Tamburlaine almostceaselessly traverses the stage, and when he is not actually on

the move, he is imagining campaigns or hearing reports ofgrueling 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 contempo-raries’ plays did not. In The Massacre at Paris, the King of Franceappears when he has just ‘Mounted his royal cabinet’ (xxi, ) –that is, on the toilet. This irreverent tableau is characteristic ofMarlowe’s scatological humour: Roger Sales points out that ‘Theoutcasts in The Jew of Malta surprise the city by entering itthrough the sewers’, and that ‘Edward II places a monarch in aspace that was associated with grotesque characters who threat-ened order and stability’ (Sales : ). Marie Rutkoski arguesthat this interest in the lower bodily stratum is in fact so pervasivein Edward II that it extends even to the improbable figure ofMortimer:

As Mortimer Jr. considers exactly what he will do to PrinceEdward’s buttocks, his self-styled role as a schoolmaster couldhave elicited thoughts of sodomy for an Elizabethan audienceand elicits such thoughts in us when we view Mortimer Jr.’swords as a foreshadowing of Edward’s death.

(Rutkoski : )

Similarly in Tamburlaine the Great, Part One, Mycetes’ attempt atsolemnity in ‘Well, here I swear by this my royal seat’ is crudelypunctured by Cosroe’s schoolboy punning, ‘You may do well to kissit then’ (I, i, –). This irreverence is also typical of Marlowe’sinventive and iconoclastic approach to stagecraft and visualimagery, 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 wouldnow call paedophilia rather than a happy family scene, or the antic-ipation of Brechtian techniques in the use of people as horses inTamburlaine the Great, Part Two.

Marlowe’s irreverence is particularly marked in the staging ofdeath. At the end of Dido, Queen of Carthage, not one but three

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people cast themselves into a fire; in The Jew of Malta, someone isboiled alive on stage; in Tamburlaine the Great, Part One, two peoplebrain themselves on the bars of a cage, while in Part Two, Olympiaburns the bodies of her husband and son, before later cutting herown throat. All of these posed considerable staging challenges, asdid the shooting of the Governor of Babylon, as was so clearlydemonstrated when it went wrong in the performance that PhilipGawdy saw. Here, actual physical harm certainly ensued; it wouldnot be surprising if it had also done so during the scene whenTamburlaine is being pulled by the four kings, which imposesserious physical strains on the actors. Even if there were no acci-dents, though, these are all odd, challenging, and unusual ways fordeath to occur on the Elizabethan stage. In the first place, shootingin itself was a highly unusual form of onstage death, partly becauseof the danger of accident and partly because its unheroic, arbitrarynature makes it much less dramatic than single combat with swords.Secondly, even when Marlowe’s characters die by more conven-tional means, they do so in ways that challenge the limits of the-atrical illusionism: it is easy enough to stab yourself in the armpitand pretend it is the chest, but it is difficult to imagine how Olympiacould convincingly stab herself in the throat, or set fire to thecorpses of her husband and son, or how Zabina and Bajazeth couldappear to have their brains dashed out. Finally, Marlowe also likesto tread a disturbingly fine line between pathos and comedy in hisstaging of death, as we see when Barabas plunges into the cooking-pot or when the dignity of Dido’s suicide is undermined as twomore people join her in the flames.

Most famously, Marlowe was verbally innovative. Ben Jonsonjustifiably referred to ‘Marlowe’s mighty line’ as the distinguishingfeature of his verse, and it is verbal style on which Shakespearehomes in both in his many echoings of Marlowe and in his most sustained piece of commentary on him, when Hamlet says to thePlayer King,

I heard thee speak me a speech once, but it was never acted, orif it was, not above once – for the play, I remember, pleased notthe million, ’twas caviare to the general. But it was, as Ireceived it – and others, whose judgments in such matters

,

cried in the top of mine – an excellent play, well digested in thescenes, 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 swordTh’unnerved father falls. Then senseless Ilium,Seeming to feel this blow, with flaming topStoops to his base, and with a hideous crashTakes prisoner Pyrrhus’ ear. For lo, his sword,Which was declining on the milky headOf 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 stormA silence in the heavens, the rack stand still,The bold winds speechless, and the orb belowAs hush as death, anon the dreadful thunderDoth rend the region; so after Pyrrhus’ pauseAroused vengeance sets him new awork,And never did the Cyclops’ hammers fallOn Mars’s armour, forg’d for proof eterne,With less remorse than Pyrrhus’ bleeding swordNow falls on Priam.Out, out, thou strumpet Fortune! All you godsIn general synod take away her power,Break all the spokes and fellies from her wheel,And bowl the round nave down the hill of heavenAs low as to the fiends.

(II, ii, –)

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The speech on which Shakespeare is musing here seems to be fromDido, Queen of Carthage, the play of Marlowe’s which he remem-bered 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 onceHe ripped old Priam; at whose latter gaspJove’s marble statue gan to bend the brow,As loathing Pyrrhus for this wicked act.Yet he, undaunted, took his father’s flagAnd 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 speechhere: the fact that it was about Pyrrhus; the idea of Priam fallingfrom the ‘wind’ of the sword alone; the immobility of Pyrrhus; andthe protracted death of Priam. (The idea of forgetting one’swant of hands may also have been influential in Titus Andronicus.)Shakespeare seems to be suggesting that, in the case of sensitivespectators, the Marlovian line could have a powerful, indeedalmost hypnotic, effect, though his own variations in line lengthand frequent use of the caesura also imply a critique of the ‘mightyline’ as monotonous and inflexible. Even if the implications of the

,

borrowing are not wholly positive, however, it is worth notingthat Shakespeare never engaged as closely as this with the styleof any other of his contemporaries; even though his last playsimitate something of the plotting and modality of Beaumont andFletcher, his use of language is poles apart. For Marlowe alonedoes Shakespeare profess admiration both here and elsewhere, asin As You Like It, where the jokes about ‘elegies on brambles’ (III,ii, –) and ‘honest Ovid’ (III, iii, ) appear to allude to therecent public burning of Marlowe’s pioneering translation ofOvid’s Elegies and the reference to the saw of a dead shepherdclearly points us to ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’.Marlowe also influenced many others of his contemporaries, as isseen in works like Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, which offers aclear imitation – even if a pale one – of the rhetoric of Tamburlaine,while Jasper Fisher’s Fuimus Troes also clearly alludes toTamburlaine:

In Eldol’s reign, the earth and sky were filledWith 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 moreinfluential or more often imitated than Tamburlaine, and the area inwhich later playwrights try hardest – and for the most part mostunsuccessfully – to imitate Marlowe is invariably the sweep andrhetorical force of the ‘mighty line’.

‘RIDE AGAINST THE CITY OF THE GODS’

The thing for which Marlowe was most notorious in his own timewas his alleged atheism. In , two stories were recorded on theauthority of an elderly Canterbury man with Cambridge connec-tions. First the man, Simon Aldrich, recounted that

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Marlo who wrot Hero & Leander was an Atheist: & had writa booke against the Scripture; how that it was al one man’smaking, & would haue printed it but could not be suffered. Hewas the son of a shomaker in Cant. He [Aldrich] said hee wasan excellent scoller & made excellent verses in Lattin & diedaged about ; he was stabd in the head with a dagger & dyedswearing.

(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 downuppon his knees & pray heartily that that Deuil would come,that he might see him (for hee did not beleiue that there was aDeuil) Mr Ald: sayd that hee was a verie good scholler, butwould neuer haue aboue one booke at a time, & when hee wasperfect in it, hee would sell it away & buy another: he learndall Marlo by heart & diuers other bookes: Marlo made him anAtheist. This Fineaux was faine to make a speech uppon Thefoole 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 excel-lent composition then a beast, & thereby could speake; butaffirmed that his soule dyed with his body, & as we remembernothing before wee were borne, so we shall remember nothingafter wee are dead.

(Eccles : )

This used to be identified as Thomas Fineux, who matriculatedat Corpus Christi in the Easter Term of , but ConstanceKuriyama has recently suggested that it might in fact have been hisyounger brother John, who was an exact contemporary of SimonAldrich (Kuriyama : ). Whatever the precise identity of MrFineux, however, the drift of the story told about him is quite clear:Marlowe, according to Aldrich, did not believe in God, and directlyor indirectly influenced others not to believe either.

Other evidence points in the same direction. The Baines Note isheaded ‘A note containing the opinion of one Christopher Marly

,

concerning his damnable judgment of religion, and scorn of God’sword’, and contains numerous alleged blasphemies which Bainesclearly expected people to find credible as utterances of Marlowe’s,and in Thomas Beard’s Theatre of God’s Judgements alleged ofMarlowe’s death that

It so fell out that in London streets, as he purposed to stab onewhom he ought a grudge unto with his dagger, the other partyperceiving, so avoided the stroke that withal catching hold ofhis wrist, he stabbed his own dagger into his own head, in suchsort that notwithstanding all the means of surgery that couldbe 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, acci-dentally stabbing oneself in the head, particularly in the region ofthe eye, was a death that was considered particularly appropriate foran atheist, since it pointed up his moral and spiritual blindness. Alsopertinent is Robert Greene’s comment in the preface to Perimedesthe Blacksmith:

I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragicalbuskins, every word filling the mouth like the fa-burdenof Bow Bell, daring God out of heaven with that atheistTamburlan, or blaspheming with the mad priest of the sun.But let me rather pocket up the ass at Diogenes’s hand thanwantonly set out such impious instances of intolerable poetry,such mad and scoffing poets that have prophetical spirits as arebred 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 isMarlowe who is meant. (The ‘mad priest of the sun’ is generallysupposed to be Giordano Bruno.) Presumably Greene is respond-ing to lines such as that in which Tamburlaine declares that ‘A godis not so glorious as a king’ (Part One, II, v, ) or threatens to make

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war upon the gods, and indeed to his resolutely worldly perspectiveas a whole. Whatever Marlowe’s personal beliefs actually were,then, there can be no doubt about what the public perception ofthem was.

In his plays, Marlowe is particularly prone to provocative juxta-positions of allegedly opposed religious systems, particularly inTamburlaine Part Two, where religious affiliation first starts toemerge as a serious issue in Marlovian drama. Here there is a headymixture of references to various religious systems. Christianity isalluded to, as in the three kings who acclaim Tamburlaine or whenTamburlaine, having cut his arm, mentions India, the country ofwhich 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 aspectsof the iconography of Christ . . . The Christian resonances are blas-phemous but not frivolous; they underline Tamburlaine’s convic-tion of the sacredness of his person’ (Greenfield : ). Equally,though, the plays show increasing interest in Islam, about which, aswe have seen, Marlowe is unusually well informed for the period.Although Tamburlaine dismisses the power of Mahomet, Amasiadeclares that he actually sees him, albeit in a guise which eerilymingles Islam with classical mythology:

Fear not, my lord, I see great MahometClothèd in purple clouds, and on his headA chaplet brighter than Apollo’s crown,Marching about the air with armèd menTo join with you against this Tamburlaine.

(Part Two, V, ii, –)

The fact that Tamburlaine dies shortly after burning the Qur’ancould well suggest that Amasia’s confidence in Muhammad isjustified, if Stephen Greenblatt is right to suggest that we are invitedto perceive a causal link between the two events: ‘Tamburlaine fallsill, and when? When he burns the Koran!’ (Greenblatt : ).

This mischievous engagement with Islam, which would havebeen anathema in the period, is of a piece with Marlowe’s generallyirreverent attitude to religion. What is particularly interesting

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is that contrary to the promise of eternal life found in bothChristianity and Islam, death in Marlowe is final: although Aeneasin Dido, Queen of Carthage says that Hector’s ghost warned him toflee 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, noparticular reason to believe that Aeneas is telling the truth). Thereare also sarcastic little moments such as that in Dido, Queen ofCarthage when the goddess Juno says ‘God wot’ (III, ii, ), sound-ing for all the world like an Elizabethan housewife, but not remotelylike a classical goddess, or the fact that, as S. Britton pointed out inthe nineteenth century,

A review of his leading characters shows a series of colossalfigures living without religion and generally defying it, whilethe course of events exhibits the gods as powerless to interfere,or interfering only, as in the case of Faustus, with cruel malig-nity . . . The only exception is ‘Dido,’ where the deities thatMarlowe and all his contemporaries knew to be fabulous areactive, effectual, and reverently obeyed controllers of destiny.

(qtd MacLure : )

In the Tamburlaine the Great plays, moreover, there are two strikingaspects to Marlowe’s representation of the repeated acts of violencein the play: the extent to which religious iconography and ideologyaccrue to depictions of violence and the fact that staging vio-lence also often involves Marlowe in a ‘fastforwarding’ approachwhich brings him eerily close to his own time. This is because forMarlowe, religion, at least as he sees it practised in contemporaryEurope, is violence. What is particularly striking about Marlowe,moreover, is that it is not any specific individual creed or confessionthat is indicted: all manifestations of religious beliefs are equallyliable to find themselves in his sights, as is suggested by his habit ofjuxtaposing apparently different ones.

For the first point, the extent to which religious iconography andideology accrue to depictions of violence and episodes leading upto violence, I want to turn first to turn to the episode of the Virginsof Damascus, towards the end of Part One. In her only utterance,the Second Virgin says,

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Then here, before the majesty of heavenAnd holy patrons of Egyptia,With knees and hearts submissive we entreatGrace to our words and pity to our looks,That this device may prove propitious,And through the eyes and ears of TamburlaineConvey events of mercy to his heart;Grant that these signs of victory we yieldMay bind the temples of his conquering headTo hide the folded furrows of his browsAnd shadow his displeasèd countenanceWith 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 virginmight well seem to evoke the idea of the Blessed Virgin Mary andher role as intercessor with Christ, something which might be rein-forced by the mention of Egypt, where the holy family fled after themassacre of the innocents. ‘Grace’ is a word whose connotationsare primarily Protestant – it is particularly important in Calvinistthought – while the other echoes of religion are associated princi-pally with Catholicism; however, both are equally cheapened here bythe fact that they will actually lead up to the death of the virgins.Indeed Tamburlaine’s whole career of destruction can be seen to bestructured around ironic inversions of religious iconography: theonstage tearing off of his shepherd’s weeds to reveal the armour canbe read as an unsettling riff on the Transfiguration, when Jesus’ gar-ments are revealed to be miraculously white; Tamburlaine’s descrip-tion of his soldiers drinking as ‘Filling their empty veins with airywine / That, being concocted, turns to crimson blood’ (Part Two,III, ii, –) could be read as a blasphemous parody of the consub-stantiation of the Eucharist, where the wine represents the blood ofChrist; and as Bajazeth comments, his military successes areattended with signs of Christian celebration:

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Now will the Christian miscreants be glad,Ringing with joy their superstitious bellsAnd making bonfires for my overthrow.

(Part One, III, iii, –)

Finally, Zenocrate’s sarcophagus will be carried beforeTamburlaine like the Ark of the Covenant in all his later campaigns.The Jew of Malta, of course, is even more reliant on such ironicallusions and inversions: as Julia Reinhard Lupton points out, ‘Theappropriation of Barabas’s property and its conversion to a nunneryrecalls [a] familiar typological theme, the transformation of theSynagogue into the Church’ (Lupton : ).

The link between violence and religion in Marlowe’s plays ishardly surprising given what we know or can deduce of Marlowe’sown personal history. He grew up in Canterbury, a city whose veryfabric had been torn apart by the iconoclasm which had destroyedthe -year-old shrine of St Thomas Becket a generation beforeMarlowe’s birth. He may well have spent at least some of his uni-versity years spying on young men who were being groomed forhorrific martyrdom in the name of religion. He knew Francis Kett,a fellow of his own college, Corpus Christi, who died in Norwichfor his faith, and probably several others who died in similar cir-cumstances on both sides of the religious divide. Barabas’ remarkin The Jew of Malta that ‘religion / Hides many mischiefs from sus-picion’ (I, ii., –) would have been dangerously close to home.

This topicality is also a contributory factor in a second notablefeature of the Tamburlaine plays, the way in which staging violencetypically often involves Marlowe in a ‘fastforwarding’ approachwhich brings him eerily close to his own time. There are numerousinstances of this. The Orcanes / Sigismund material is completelyanachronistic, deriving from events which occurred a generationlater than the story of Tamburlaine himself. When Zenocratetries to convince Tamburlaine that their sons are suitably martial,she describes something which sounds very like an Elizabethantournament:

This lovely boy, the youngest of the three,Not long ago bestrid a Scythian steed,

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Trotting the ring, and tilting at a glove,Which when he tainted with his slender rod,He reined him straight and made him so curvetAs 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 suicideis an Elizabethan mode of transport rather than a medieval one.Tamburlaine’s use of gold in combat has been related to Sir WalterRalegh (Burgess : ), and certainly there seem to besome definite similarities between Tamburlaine and the notoriousconquistador Lope de Aguirre, of whom Ralegh gave the first writtenaccount in English, in The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and BewtifulEmpire of Guiana. (Charles Nicholl comments on how in theaccounts of Ralegh’s adventuring ‘[t]he exotic syllables roll out likesome lost line from Marlowe’s Tamburlaine’ (Nicholl a: ).1

Like Tamburlaine, though for different reasons, Lope de Aguirrekilled one of his own children: in he killed his daughter, Elvira,to prevent her being captured – in which he exactly foreshadows themotives of Olympia in Tamburlaine the Great, Part Two – and, likeTamburlaine, he signed himself ‘Wrath of God’. Finally Nick deSomogyi, commenting on the contemporaneity and cosmopoli-tanism 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 playsthat

written within two years of Leicester’s expeditionary forcereaching the continent, by an author with known connectionsin military intelligence, their soldier-hero . . . wages war byinstructively commanding the modern technologies prosely-tized by [the military theorist] Thomas Hood.

(De Somogyi : )

And Anthony Miller comments that

The Turks who are Tamburlaine’s major antagonists are, onoccasion, unmistakably early modern Turks. There is mention

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of Turkish slaughters ‘through the midst of Varna andBulgaria’ (Part II, II.i.) and Orcanes is ‘he / That with thecannon shook Vienna walls’ (Part II, I.i.–). Marlowe isremembering the Turkish victory at Varna in and thesiege of Vienna in .

(Miller : )

It seems, then, that in episodes focusing either on the personal vio-lence 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’stime 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 thisunconquerèd?’ speech, to South America as a whole. South Americawas Ralegh’s own dream destination, and also that to which SirFrancis Drake had already sailed in to sack Cartagena, anepisode which Margo Hendricks has suggested as the inspiration forMarlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage (Hendricks : ),2 and onthe way back from which Drake picked up the stranded Roanokecolonists, including Marlowe’s friend Thomas Hariot. The his tori-cal Timur the Lame died in , years before Columbus discovered America; Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, however, has theimagination of a conquistador or an English sea-dog. Both the NewWorld and the circle of Sir Walter Ralegh seem, then, to be closeindeed to the conception of Tamburlaine.

Other contemporary echoes also abound in Marlowe’s represen-tation of violence. Richard Wilson has compared Tamburlaine’sarsenal to that of Ivan the Terrible, and it certainly seems significantthat Tamburlaine is referred to as ‘the rogue of Volga’ (Part One,IV, i, ) and that there are a number of strongly marked parallelsbetween Tamburlaine and Ivan the Terrible – both killed theirsons, both lost beloved wives whose memories were subsequentlyfetishised, and the English envoy Jerome Horsey directly comparedIvan to a Scythian: ‘ “This Heliogabalus,” as Horsey reportedhim . . . was “a right Scythian” ’ (Wilson : and ).

Tamburlaine proves to be even more of Marlowe’s time than ofhis own when he delivers to his three sons advice based not on anyreceived wisdom of his own time but on a manuscript by Marlowe’s

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contemporary (and fellow-spy) Paul Ive. Its inappropriateness tothe context is highlighted by the fact that so much of it is concernedwith defence (Part Two, III, ii, –), whereas Tamburlaine’s ownwars are entirely offensive; this is in fact conspicuously not histori-cally authentic advice but Elizabethan realpolitik. Tamburlaine’sopponents, by contrast, identify themselves with the antiquatedworld 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 anancient Greek and a Tamburlaine equipped like Ivan the Terribleis perhaps best compared to the moment in Raiders of the Lost Arkwhen Indiana Jones, confronted by a man twirling a sword, pulls outa gun and shoots him.

I think the reason that Marlowe’s imagery of violence is simulta-neously religious and modern is that, for Marlowe, religion, atleast as he sees it practised in contemporary Europe, is violence, anidea encapsulated in the phrase which resonates through theTamburlaine plays, ‘the scourge of God’. There is a particularly res-onant phrase in the Baines Note, where it is claimed ‘That the firstbeginning of Religioun was only to keep men in awe’. If Baines isright about Marlowe’s stated beliefs, Marlowe is subscribing to anessentially Machiavellian concept of religion, and one which pre-sents religious ideology as the ultimate form of terrorism, since itsaim, like that of terrorism, is to manipulate behaviour by creating amass fear and panic based on something which may or may nothappen.

Tamburlaine himself may seem synonymous with terror, but heis in fact merely a particularly striking instance of this powerful ide-ological mechanism, and the Tamburlaine plays themselves formboth a preamble to and a telling diptych with what was almost cer-tainly their immediate successor, Doctor Faustus, in which religion’stechnologies of terror will come directly to the fore, as DoctorFaustus vows that

,

I’ll levy soldiers with the coin they bringAnd chase the Prince of Parma from our land,And reign sole king of all our provinces;Yea, stranger engines for the brunt of warThan was the fiery keel at Antwerp’s bridgeI’ll make my servile spirits to invent.

(I, i, –)

Here, Faustus makes explicit the way in which spirits provide dis-tinctly material aid, in the form indeed of actual matériel, and thewar which he is remembering here, the Spanish campaign againstthe Protestant Netherlands, was fought wholly in the name of reli-gion. In the Tamburlaine the Great plays, the point is not so obvi-ously or openly made, but it is, perhaps, all the more subtle for that.As Tamburlaine tells Bajazeth,

Legions of spirits fleeting in the airDirect our bullets and our weapons’ pointsAnd make your strokes to wound the senseless air

(Part One, III, iii, –)

Bajazeth will soon learn to his cost that no enemy is more danger-ous than the one who believes this.

Tamburlaine’s own principal weapons are words. This is madeplain 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 forcefullybrought home to us on virtually every continent in recent years: astate of terror is typically maintained by a climate of constant whis-pers, rumours, and recollection which need be punctuated onlyintermittently by actual physical violence in order to maintaintheir hold over the collective imagination. This is exactly howTamburlaine works. On only one occasion do we see him actuallykill someone, and that is his own son; the only other act of violence

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he personally undertakes is likewise directed into his own familygroup rather than outwards at society at large, since it is the cuttingof his own arm. His effect on the audience is thus created primar-ily by terror rather than actual violence, and in this the relationshipof the audience to Tamburlaine’s actual victims is to some extentanalogous to the relationship of global news watchers to the report-ing 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 notthe TV news bulletin, but the hellfire sermon. Tamburlaine worksby first threatening, and, if that fails, inflicting horrific violence.His method is fully described when the Messenger tells theSoldan,

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 crestA snowy feather spangled white he bears,To signify the mildness of his mindThat, 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 bethe worse for you’, and as David Riggs points out, the technique isdirectly derived from a religious source: ‘The sequence of white,red and black followed by slaughter recalled the four horsemen ofthe Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation, where white, red and

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black riders precede the “pale horse” bearing Death’ (Riggs :). Such an exhibition of power is usually needed only once toproduce future conformity enforced not by actual violence but bythe fear of violence. Marlowe appears, from all the evidence wehave, to have worked as an agent for a state apparatus whichenforced religious conformity first by threats and in the last resortby displays of public and spectacular violence, and it is, I think,the mechanics of such a state apparatus that he is exploring inthe Tamburlaine the Great plays. It is no wonder that the phrase‘scourge of God’, which Marlowe applies to Tamburlaine, is so del-icately ambiguous; even Marlowe could hardly have dared to saywhat he really meant.

MARLOVIAN PSYCHOLOGY

Marlowe is distinguished among his contemporaries by his interestin unusual states of mind, especially sadism, masochism andmadness. In Doctor Faustus, Faustus’s hearing of voices which noone else can hear might now look to us like schizophrenia, whileZabina in Tamburlaine the Great certainly goes mad before she dies.We might equally wonder about Tamburlaine himself whenhalfway through Part Two he cuts his own arm for the edificationof 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 woundAs great a grace and majesty to meAs 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 robeThat late adorned the Afric potentateWhom 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,

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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 posedof the onstage as much as the offstage audience. What are we tothink of a wound, especially such a wound as this? One thing wemight think is that what Tamburlaine does comes eerily close towhat we now call self-harm, especially since, despite his threat to doso, he does not actually cut the arm of either boy but directs his vio-lence exclusively against himself. In a recent study of self-harm,Jennifer Harris notes that ‘The Bible is littered with references tosuch behavior: “If your hand is your undoing, cut it off . . . ” ’(Harris : ), and points out that such injunctions have oftenbeen regarded as instrumental in prompting the urge to self-harm.Tambulaine the Great is littered with biblical allusions, and in PartOne of the play, Bajazeth, in the presence of Tamburlaine, has apos-trophised

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 manycritics have pointed out, unclear, what is clear is that he has beenexposed here to the idea that to mutilate one’s own body can be anact of piety.

In fact by the time he actually cuts his own arm, Tamburlaine hasalready shown himself to be fixated both with arms in general andwith the idea of violence against them in particular. The word ‘arm’is for him a portentous and polyvalent one. Power in these plays isstrongly associated with arms, as when Frederick speaks of God andthe ‘jealous anger of His fearful arm’ (Part Two, II, i, ), and centralto Tamburlaine’s sense of his own identity is a view of himself as apractitioner of ‘arms’: he speaks of ‘My discipline of arms andchivalry’ (Part One, V, i, ), and concomitantly regards it as hisbusiness to ensure that no one else presumes to know about arms inthis military sense, calling Bajazeth, Zabina and the King of Arabia

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All sights of power to grace my victory;And such are objects fit for Tamburlaine,Wherein as in a mirror may be seenHis honour, that consists in shedding bloodWhen men presume to manage arms with him.

(Part One, V, i, –)

Similarly Tamburlaine tells Almeda that ‘So, sirrah, now you are aKing, 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 militarismbut the reality of vulnerable and potentially shameful human flesh.Suggestively, this is most clearly revealed in his scornful dismissalof 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 describesTamburlaine himself in terms which draw attention to the vulner-ability of his arms:

His arms and fingers long and sinewy,Betokening valour and excess of strength:In every part proportioned like the manShould make the world subdued to Tamburlaine.

(Part One, II, i, –)

It is presumably for this reason that the most monstrous part ofTamburlaine’s humiliation of Bajazeth is couched precisely interms 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

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carbonadoes, and eat them’ (Part One, IV, iv, –). Equally, hiseventual recuperation of two of his three sons centres on an alteredunderstanding 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 hasbeen introduced by Tamburlaine apostrophising the picture ofZenocrate 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 thisbehaviour only after the death of Zenocrate, and in a scene in whichhe has entered preceded by a portrait of her, and that this is, more-over, one of the only two times when we see him use actual violenceon stage, the other occasion being the murder of his own son. Itmight well seem suggestive that Tamburlaine’s violence on bothoccasions should be directed either against himself or against amember of his family. Finally, Nick de Somogyi reminds us thatcentral to Marlowe’s conception of the character of Tamburlaine isa profound silence about a physical disability that elsewhereattracted a great deal of attention:

the ‘Crippell Emperour’ was a military role with many prece-dents. Chief among these was the figure included by Baconamong the ‘Lame men’ he cited; whose story was told inGeorge Whetstone’s English Myrror, A Regard WhereinAl Estates May Behold the Conquests of Envy (); andwhose exemplary soldiership was dramatized by ChristopherMarlowe: Tamburlaine, the Scourge of God – known tohistory as Timur the Lame.

(De Somogyi : )

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Conceivably one reason for this silence is in fact because Marlowewishes to displace Tamburlaine’s area of vulnerability to a part ofthe body which has special resonance for him.

Tamburlaine’s cutting of his own arm, then, is an act with anumber of resonances. One way of beginning to unpick its meaningmight be to note a strikingly similar episode in the play which nowseems almost certain to have followed directly after Tamburlaine theGreat, 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 dayGreat Lucifer may claim it as his own,And then be thou as great as Lucifer.

(Cutting his arm) Lo, Mephistopheles, for loveof thee,I cut mine arm, and with my proper bloodAssure 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 withFaustus’s, calling both self-mutilation (Shephard : ), and wedo have one crucial piece of evidence that hurting one’s ownarms was both a recognised behaviour pattern and a sign ofmental instability in early modern England. In King Lear, Edgardeclares,

The country gives me proof and precedentOf Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,Strike in their numb’d and mortified bare armsPins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;

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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 placesof his native flesh, especially in his armes, which paine hee gladlyputs 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 yearsafter Marlowe’s death, but it does indicate that the idea of attack-ing one’s own arms because of mental distress is not an exclusivelymodern one.

Could either the magician Dr Faustus or the invincible militarymachine that is Tamburlaine really be susceptible to mental dis-tress? Actually one might well want to turn that question on itshead: could one either wish to become a magician or function as aninvincible military machine if one were not suffering some form ofmental distress? Obviously it is a question of at least two paradigmshere: what we now know about the mental health difficulties towhich soldiers and former soldiers might be particularly prone(Dr Faustus, though not a soldier, is acutely conscious of living in awar zone and has plans for military action), and what Marlowemight have known or thought. As it happens, there is a fair degreeof overlap between the two. Since Vietnam, it has been impossibleto ignore the potential trauma of veterans in the modern world; andon the early modern stage, the mental health of soldiers, especiallythose who have returned from combat, is often suspect (indeedNick de Somogyi reads Shakespeare’s Ancient Pistol as a victim ofpost-traumatic stress disorder [De Somogyi : ]). CertainlyAnthony Babington traces the origins of first recognition of whatwe now call shell-shock to a period not long after Tamburlaine andPistol:

Early in the seventeenth century European physicians becameaware of an illness affecting soldiers on campaign, whichcaused them ‘to sink into a state of deep despair’. It was

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especially prevalent among Spanish soldiers conscripted forservice in the Netherlands during the Thirty Years War.

(Babington : )

At the point when they cut their arms, Tamburlaine is a bereavedand insecure man and Dr Faustus one trafficking with spirits, and Ithink Marlowe is letting us glimpse here some of the psychologicaltoll that a career of conquest and meddling with magic respectivelyhave taken of them.

MARLOWE’S TRANSGRESSIVE HEROES

The ideological transgression which I have suggested is concealedin the Tamburlaine plays’ depiction of violence leads us directly tothe question of Marlowe’s consistently transgressive central char-acters. The typical Marlovian hero is defiant in two ways. In the firstplace, 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 followsher own desires rather than marry where the interests of herkingdom dictate; Dr Faustus refuses to stay in the social position towhich the lowliness of his parents should have consigned him;Barabas fights against his allotted position of outcast to attempt toseize power. At the same time, they are also transgressive in anotherway, in that the very act of casting these people as heroes threatensthe values of Marlowe’s own society.

Dido, Queen of Carthage

It is not only Marlowe’s main characters that threaten establishedvalues. 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,

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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 confusionover the details of possibly the most famous story ever told, andwhat that subtext is can be guessed by turning to anotherRenaissance play, William Alexander’s Jvlivs Caesar, where Juno,describing the aftermath of the fall of Troy, says,

And yet two traitors who betrayd the restO! 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 tospeak 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 anobvious suspect for the role of its betrayer might well be at work inDido, Queen of Carthage too. Certainly Marlowe’s Aeneas is notablyunheroic. He cuts an unimpressive figure – the typical reaction to hisappearance onstage is an expression of incredulity that this can reallybe Aeneas – and he is laughably slow to realise what Dido is suggest-ing when she invites him to follow her into the cave; indeed it lookslike a direct reflection on this when Antonio in The Duchess of Malfi,finding himself placed in very similar circumstances, is anxious thatthe Duchess should not think him too stupid to understand what she

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is suggesting. When Dido shows pictures of her various suitors,Aeneas’s companions recognise men they met in Aetolia, Athens, andat the Olympic Games, but the less sophisticated Aeneas can identifyonly one, who had visited Troy; the impression is that his compan-ions 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 engagedin a task associated with workmen, but, as Roma Gill pointed out,foreshadows the villainous Barabas when he enters ‘with a hammerabove’ (V,v, s.d.); her comment on this is that ‘Marlowe delights inhumiliating his heroes – not humiliating them, so much as cuttingthem down to size’ (Gill –: ).

One reason for Marlowe to ridicule Aeneas is that, unusually, itis not actually Aeneas who is the eponymous hero of this story, butDido. Marlowe’s decision to have a female hero was not withoutclassical precedent, but it was highly unusual in ElizabethanEngland. It was surely prompted by the fact that there was a queenon the throne, but the play’s portrayal of its queen regnant is notexactly flattering, and disaster overtakes her in the end. Moreover,Dido was not just female, but foreign – a woman of Phoeniciandescent ruling as a queen in Africa. In this, too, she fundamentallytransgresses norms.

For an Elizabethan audience, it would have been obvious that thecharacter of Dido could be seen as reflecting on the real-lifeElizabeth. Aeneas had been used to figure Elizabeth (who accord-ing to the myth of the translatio imperii was directly descended fromhim) in the Sieve Portrait of Elizabeth, commissioned apparentlyby Sir Christopher Hatton in a self-conscious attempt to stopElizabeth becoming a second Dido by marrying her foreign suitorthe Duke of Alençon, and ‘William Alabaster’s Elisaeis (an imita-tion of the Aeneid with Elizabeth, rather th[a]n Aeneas, as its hero’clearly equates the two (Freeman : ). However, Marlowefocuses not on Aeneas but on Dido, and not only does Iarbas saythat he will make ‘all the woods “Eliza” to resound!’ (IV, ii, ),taking advantage of the fact that Dido’s other name in classicalmythology was Elissa, but it is highly likely that anyone costuminga fictional queen for a theatrical part would inevitably have beeninfluenced by the kind of thing the real queen was known to wear,so Dido’s visual style might well recall Elizabeth’s. Finally Marlowe

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has Dido die in a fire, instead of stabbing herself as in so manyother versions of the story, most notably Virgil’s. This, togetherwith the fact that Dido’s Phoenician nationality gives her the name‘Phoenissa’, irresistibly associates her with the phoenix imagerybeloved of Queen Elizabeth I. The ideological damage done to theimage of the queen is clear: she may boast herself to have the heartand stomach of a king, but she is, ultimately, reducible to the bodyof a weak and feeble woman – who, to add insult to injury, is in thiscase played by a child – and as the play proceeds first to systemati-cally humiliate and then ultimately to kill its fictional queen, itcould hardly be thought to be endearing itself to its real one.

Tamburlaine the Great

Tamburlaine the Great transgresses on every conceivable level. Inthe first place, he is a Scythian, and Scythians were considered theepitome of savagery. Nevertheless, the Prologue clearly states thatTamburlaine in some sense mirrors his audience, rather thandiffering from them: ‘View but his picture in this tragic glass’(Prologue, ). Secondly, Tamburlaine is a shepherd, and so a figureof particularly important and highly specific connotations for theElizabethans, as explored in the many pastoral romances such asSir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia and indeedin Marlowe’s own most famous lyric ‘The Passionate Shepherd tohis Love’. Shepherds abound in Elizabethan literature, figuringpeace and plenty, rural innocence, nurturing, harmony, andfreedom from care. Sir Philip Sidney, son-in-law of Sir FrancisWalsingham, a crucial figure in the Elizabethan intelligencenetwork, and cousin-in-law of Marlowe’s friend Sir ThomasWalsingham, cast himself in court tournaments and in his ownArcadia as Philisides, ‘The Shepherd Knight’; Marlowe himselfwas posthumously figured by Shakespeare as the ‘dead shepherd’whose brutal slaying haunts As You Like It. However, Tamburlaineturns the meanings and resonances of shepherds entirely on theirheads. It may seem a long way from the battlefields of Tamburlainethe Great to the lyricism of the pastoral: indeed, as Louis Montrosenotes, the critic Hallett Smith ‘characterises “the central meaning”of Elizabethan pastorals as “the rejection of the aspiring mind”

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which so precisely distinguishes Tamburlaine’ (Montrose :). Nevertheless, one of Marlowe’s major sources for the play wasFortescue’s The Forest, a translation from the Spanish of PedroMexia’s Silva de Varia Lection, a title which prominently fore-grounds the idea of the pastoral, and once Marlowe’s play had pop-ularised the story, references to Tamburlaine as ‘the Scythianshepherd’ abound. There is, therefore, a particular kind of ironyplaying around Marlowe’s consistent depiction of Tamburlaine asan anti-shepherd, preying on his neighbours ‘like a fox in harvesttime’, as Mycetes has it (Part One, I, i, ) and ‘Threat’ning theworld with high astounding terms’ (Part One, Prologue, l. ) insteadof singing the pastoral songs of the shepherd. At the same time,moreover, Tamburlaine offers an equally ironic fit with two of theother stereotypes of the shepherd: he is a lover, and when he insiststhat he is a lord, he reminds us of how many of the apparentlysimple shepherds of Elizabethan literature turn out to be princes indisguise. In this context, too, Tamburlaine’s war on religion takeson new and richly ironic meaning, since the good shepherd was oneof the standard metaphors for Christ.

Finally, Tamburlaine is a warrior, and yet several critics have sug-gested that there is something curiously effeminate about him. ParkHonan sees the reference to Pylades and Orestes towards the begin-ning of Part One as ‘announc[ing] a homosocial ideal’ (Honan :), but it could easily bear a rather different interpretation, andSara Munson Deats in particular sees Tamburlaine’s masculinity asembattled rather than secure: ‘in his effort to perform masculinityand fashion himself in the heroic mode, Tamburlaine progressivelyexaggerates . . . highly valued masculine traits while rejecting allleavening femininity’ (Deats : ), while Anthony Miller sug-gests that ‘At the moment when he takes possession of Zenocrate ashis most precious trophy, Tamburlaine exchanges places with her’(Miller : ). Tamburlaine himself worries about whether hisdevotion to Zenocrate impairs his manhood, and his markedanxiety about the behaviour of his three sons might perhaps reflectconcerns about his own virility. He comes from Scythia, whichwas the original haunt of the Amazons, and Ann Rosalind Jonesand Peter Stallybrass have recently pointed to the classical traditionof regarding Scythians as effeminate and prone to impotence and

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possibly pederasty; Herodotus recounted how they succumbed to‘ “the Scythian disease,” defined as “the atrophy of the male organsof generation, accompanied by the loss of masculine attributes” ’(Jones and Stallybrass : ). Moreover, at least one characterin the play, Mycetes, speaks in terms which openly suggest the pos-sibility 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 linesas these that ‘Mycetes is discernibly enamored of Meander’(Kuriyama : ), and John Cutts suggests that Mycetes is infact a mirror-figure for Tamburlaine: ‘[t]o put Mycetes andTamburlaine together and alone off the battlefield invites scrutiny’(Cutts : –). It is also possible in production for the actorplaying Mycetes to double Calyphas; thus although the play appar-ently sets up Mycetes and Tamburlaine as polar opposites, theremight be an uncanny suggestion that there is something of Myceteswithin Tamburlaine’s own family.

Even more suggestive is the fact that Tamburlaine, almost uniquelyamong male characters in Renaissance drama, is the subject of a longand 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 bearOld Atlas’ burden; ’twixt his manly pitchA pearl more worth than all the world is placed,Wherein by curious sovereignty of artAre fixed his piercing instruments of sight,Whose fiery circles bear encompassèdA heaven of heavenly bodies in their spheresThat guides his steps and actions to the throneWhere honour sits invested royally;Pale of complexion – wrought in him with passion,

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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 hairWrappèd 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 manShould make the world subdued to Tamburlaine.

(Part One, II, i, –)

John Cutts points to various suggestions here which work to femi-nise Tamburlaine. He is compared to Achilles, who notoriouslydressed 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 ide-alised mistress of the Petrarchan sonnet – Cutts points out thatTamburlaine’s arms, in the original and octavos, are not‘sinewy’ (l. ) but ‘snowy’, and again, it was common in sonnetsfor women to be praised for the whiteness of their skin. Finally, SaraMunson Deats argues that ‘Even though Tamburlaine woosZenocrate with admitted flattery (I..–), he reserves his mosteloquent persuasions for Theridamas’, though she also notes thatthis is to some extent conventional in that ‘In foregroundingmale bonding (whether homosocial or homoerotic) and objectify -ing women, Tamburlaine conforms to the masculine ideal of theperiod’ (Deats : ). Nevertheless, the overall impression iscertainly of a central character who is conspicuously failing to tickthe boxes we would expect of a conventional hero.

Doctor Faustus

Doctor Faustus is perhaps the most interesting of Marlowe’s trans-gressive heroes, because Marlowe goes to such lengths to exculpatehim from at least some of the accusations which might have fallento his charge. In the original versions of the story, which Marlowe

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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” ’ (qtdKeefer : xxvi). Marlowe, however, allows no hint of this to per-colate through to his text, and is indeed at pains to identifyFaustus’s erotic instincts as almost aggressively heterosexual, andfocused exclusively on Helen of Troy. If anything, Marlowe couldbe seen as deliberately dislocating the idea of sodomy away fromFaustus himself. The critic William Empson saw the devils in theplay as sodomites (Empson : ), and in this context, it mightalso be worth noting that Faustus’s association with America mightalso serve to flag the issue, because America, as Park Honan pointsout, was associated with sodomy, since the Indians’ supposed practice of this was often used to justify enforced conversion toChristianity: ‘The sodomite might be thought of as a devil, aheretic, an Italian, or a Turk or an African, or even linked withHarriot’s New World savages, to justify violence against Roanoke’sIndians’ (Honan : ). Insofar as this might serve to remindus of the possibility of sodomy, though, it equally serves firmly toassociate it with characters other than the hero himself.

Moreover, as a Protestant German doctor with Low Countriesaffinities and a declared opponent of the Prince of Parma and theSpanish, Faustus represents many things that the English admiredand valued. He might indeed look unnervingly similar to an actualEnglishman, Dr John Dee, Elizabeth I’s astrologer, whom she hadconsulted 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 notablebenefactions to humanity as a whole:

Are not thy bills hung up as monuments,Whereby whole cities have escaped the plagueAnd thousand desp’rate maladies been eased?

(I, i, –)

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

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plague, which probably killed at least eleven thousand people.Faustus’s casual rejection of his own medical skills must haveshocked many spectators’ (Sales : ), but at the same timethis would have served to establish him as a figure of considerableachievement and potential. When he achieves power, he does littlethat is evil – the horse courser was warned, and the Old Man assuresus that his soul is safe – and some things which the audience is likelyto have approved of, such as gratifying a pregnant woman and hum-bling the Pope. Perhaps most troublingly, there are suggestions inthe text that he did not really have any control over his own fate, if‘melting heavens conspired his overthrow’ (Prologue, ). In someways, then, Doctor Faustus is both the most admirable and the mostpitiable of Marlowe’s heroes – and yet Marlowe, with typical per-versity, apparently sets him up simply for us to condemn, callinginto 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 thedifference is that Barabas is thoroughly realised as an anti-hero. AsI have already suggested, the contrast between him and Faustus canbe clearly seen in the difference between what Faustus says he hasdone 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 manyformal affiliations with morality plays, Doctor Faustus’s strongassociations with the real historical figure of Dr Faust and hisvarious idiosyncrasies make him an individual rather than aneveryman. Barabas, by contrast, is an emblematic figure as muchas an individual, for the story which the play tells clearly presentshim as embodying the Jewish heritage from which Christianityoriginated. In naming his hero Barabas, after the criminal whomthe Jews asked Pontius Pilate to free instead of Christ, Marlowe

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uses his character to ask awkward questions whose repercussionsspread out far beyond the play itself, in something of the samespirit of mockery and irreverence as animates a more modernstory of an alternative Christ figure, Monty Python’s The Life ofBrian (which in fact contains what might well look like an allusionto The Jew of Malta when Eric Idle on the cross says ‘Nothing willcome from nothing’, which so closely echoes Barabas’ ‘Of naughtis nothing made’ [I, ii, ]). In a play which features a repre -sentation of each of the three religions of the book, Judaism,Christianity, and Islam, we may well find ourselves inclined towonder how different they really are: Ithamore can seamlesslyreplace Abigail as Barabas’s heir, Abigail can convert from onereligion to another, and back again, and the Friars are falling overthemselves to welcome Barabas into the Catholic church. IndeedArata Ide notes that ‘in the s Jewish stereotypes were oftenapplied to Catholic priests and conspirators’ (Ide : ) so‘Around , when Marlowe presumably wrote The Jew ofMalta, we can assume that Barabas could have reminded the audi-ence of a party of rebellious Catholics who had captured the imag-ination of English people throughout the s’ (Ide : ).The disturbing question the play poses, then, is if we dislikeBarabas, who or what else must we dislike?

The Massacre at Paris

The Guise is unusual in many ways among Marlowe’s heroes. Theapparently mutilated nature of the play as we have it means that hispart is smaller and less impressive than that of any other ofMarlowe’s protagonists. Also unusual is the fact that he is vulnera-ble: Marlowe, who was at pains to suppress any mention of the his-torical Timur’s lameness, has given considerable prominence to thefact that Guise is a cuckold. Finally, he dies much earlier in the playthan any other of Marlowe’s heroes. Nevertheless, he still makesmuch the biggest impact of any character in this fragmented play,and once again we see the characteristic Marlovian manœuvre ofmaking the most calculating of his characters also the most charis-matic, and the focus of dramatic interest.

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Edward II

The breach between Marlowe and Lord Strange which Kydreported to the Privy Council meant that for what was almost cer-tainly his last play, Edward II, Marlowe no longer had access to theservices of Lord Strange’s Men, and this has often been thought tobe reflected in the altered structure and weighting of that play, withMortimer claiming the attention as much as Edward does. Edwardalso represents something of a departure for Marlovian dramaturgyin that although what he does may be misguided, it is far from clearthat it is wrong, not only by our standards but quite possibly byMarlowe’s too. Quite apart from the question of what Marlowe’sown sexual preferences may have been, there is that very strikingspeech by Mortimer Senior which openly acknowledges the exis-tence 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 looksmuch more like the typical flawed Marlovian hero: his meteoric riseparallels Tamburlaine’s, and his contempt for those weaker or lesscunning than himself echoes that of Guise and Barabas. Gaveston toohas something of the superb contempt which characterises the typicalMarlovian hero. Once again, then, Marlowe’s real dramatic energyfinds itself gravitating to the most manipulative and contemptuouscharacter onstage, even if he is not the official hero. In this as in somany other things, it is transgression which really fuels his plays.

Hero and Leander

Even more than Tamburlaine the Great, Hero and Leander offers us amale character whose body is the object of homoerotic description.

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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 stroveTo please the careless and disdainful eyesOf 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 theblood of her rejected suitors. Marlowe, however, lingers lovingly onimagining Leander naked, and as adhering entirely to the highlyvalued 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 surpassedThe white of Pelops’ shoulder. I could tell yeHow smooth his breast was, and how white his belly,And whose immortal fingers did imprintThat heavenly path with many a curious dintThat runs along his back, but my rude penCan hardly blazon forth the loves of men,Much less of powerful gods: let it sufficeThat my slack muse sings of Leander’s eyes,Those orient cheeks and lips, exceeding hisThat leapt into the water for a kissOf 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.

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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 hiscourtship of Hero and equally slow-witted in his exchange withNeptune – but ‘in his looks were all that men desire’, a formulationwhich slyly insinuates that Marlowe is not alone in his tastes butthat he is writing for a community of the like-minded and is notafraid to say so. With this final addition to what, in Elizabethanterms, would have seemed more like a rogues’ gallery than a collec-tion of suitable heroes for literature, Marlowe reveals more clearlythan ever a poetic and dramatic aesthetic which radically trans-gresses established norms.

NOTES

. See also Cartelli .. On the tendency to imagine Spain as England’s Carthage, see

Miller : .

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Critical Issues

The major critical issues associated with Marlowe have typically focused on his relationship to Shakespeare – too

often construed as one of simple inferiority; the relationship ofhis life, and his apparent religious beliefs (or lack of them), to hisworks; his reputation as overreacher; and the allegations that hecannot create female characters and that even his male charactersare merely himself in disguise, as when Constance Kuriyamasimply declares that ‘Marlowe may well have chosen to writeabout the massacre because he identified with the Guise’(Kuriyama : ). This chapter will explore these and attemptto offer a more balanced account of the scale of Marlowe’sachievement.

There is an unusual amount of early comment on Marlowe, begin-ning with Robert Greene’s observations in Perimedes the Blacksmith,which condemned Marlowe as an atheist. Rather different reserva-tions were expressed by Ben Jonson, who declared in ‘Timber, orDiscoveries’ that

The true Artificer will not run away from nature, as hee wereafraid 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 fromall humanity, with the Tamerlanes, and Tamer-Chams of thelate Age, which had nothing in them but the scenicall strutting,

and furious vociferation, to warrant them to the ignorantgapers.

(MacLure : )

For Jonson, the concern is not the distance between Tamburlaineand God but the distance between Tamburlaine and real humans.Jonson, like Greene, acknowledges the rhetorical power and dra-matic force of Marlowe’s style, but thinks that his characters are toomuch larger than life. If the role of drama is, as Hamlet says, to holdthe mirror up to nature, then, for Jonson, Marlowe’s drama fails.

Although Marlowe was referred to in the Prologue to TheJew of Malta as ‘the best of poets in that age’, his reputation fellaway sharply after the Civil War. Doctor Faustus was acted only in arewritten and wholly farcical version, and a writer who published aplay called Tamerlane in claimed, when challenged, never tohave known that there had been an earlier version, or to have metanyone else who had heard of it either. Many of the comments onMarlowe in the years that followed were wildly misinformed:Theophilus Cibber in had Marlowe dying in a fight over a mis-tress and doubted his alleged atheism, declaring that

For my part, I am willing to suspend my judgment till I meetwith some other testimony of his having thus heinously offendedagainst his God, and against the best and most amiable systemof Religion that ever was, or ever can be: Marloe might possiblybe inclined to free-thinking, without running the unhappylengths that Mr. Wood tells us, it was reported he had done.

(MacLure : )

Similarly James Broughton in argued that the allegations ofMarlowe’s atheism were unreliable because they originated from aPuritan; Broughton saw them as part of a general war waged by reli-gion on theatre (MacLure : ). For both the devoutly ortho-dox Cibber, so innocently convinced that the Church of Englandoffered ‘the best and most amiable system of religion that ever was,or ever can be’, and the more quietly proper Broughton, an accusa-tion of atheism represented a terrible calumny from which theyindignantly defend Marlowe.

There is also no sense in these years that Marlowe might havehad a topical or satirical purpose: Thomas Warton in quotesan earlier author, whom he names only as ‘Ashby’, as declaring that‘It seems somewhat remarkable that Marlow, in describing the plea-sures which Gaveston contrived to debauch the infatuated Edward,should exactly employ those which were exhibited before the sageElizabeth. But to her they were only occasional and temporaryrelaxations’ (MacLure : ). Clearly neither Ashby nor Wartonhad ever contemplated the possibility that Marlowe might havebeen interested in deliberately associating Elizabeth I with EdwardII, 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 nowunderstand as the distinctive elements of Marlovian drama: CharlesLamb 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 thatit was anything more than a pleasant burlesque of MineAncient’s [Pistol in the Henry IV plays]. But I assure myreaders that it is soberly set down in a Play which theirAncestors took to be serious.

(MacLure : )

Here we have one of the most distinguished literary critics ofthe age cheerfully admitting that not only had he not believed inthe existence of probably the most famous passage in Marloweuntil he actually saw it, but that when he did so, he was distinctlyunimpressed.

Indeed Tamburlaine the Great, the play on which both Greeneand Jonson commented in the thirty or so years after it was writtenand which spawned a whole host of lookalikes in the s, rarelyimpressed in the nineteenth century. Although the great Germanpoet Goethe was much struck with Doctor Faustus, and modelled hisown play Faust on it, the general consensus in the nineteenthcentury was that Edward II was by far Marlowe’s best play, princi-pally on the grounds of its characterisation; in fact, in a rareinstance of Marlowe being rated higher than Shakespeare, it wasoften held to be better than Richard II. Marlowe’s reputation in

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general underwent something of a renaissance in this period, somuch so that Thomas Dabbs has argued that ‘Marlowe was origi-nally invented by Victorian scholars, critics, and educators and thenhanded on to us’ (Dabbs : ), but they did not always perceivehim in the same ways as we now might.

For one thing, Marlowe was felt to be an unusually monologicdramatist: H. N. Hudson commented in that ‘the persons allspeak from one brain, the hero talking just like the others, onlymore so’ (MacLure : ). For another, in the nineteenthcentury, Marlowe was often compared with Shelley, since both werereputed to be atheists and both died young, and partly becauseShelley was a poet, it was often as a poet above all that Marlowe toowas received. Even the great character critic A. C. Bradley, writingin , talked first about Marlowe’s style, and used that as agateway to thinking about his characters:

‘Lift upward’ Marlowe’s style was at first, and so itremained . . . The expression ‘lift upwards’ applies also, in asense, to most of the chief characters in the plays . . . A vol-canic self-assertion, a complete absorption in some one desire,is their characteristic. That in creating such charactersMarlowe 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 tobecome common currency against Marlowe: ‘no humour or tender-ness relieves his pathos; there is not any female character in his playswhom we remember with much interest; and it is not clear that hecould have produced songs of the first order’ (MacLure : ).Marlowe, then, is not lyrical, not comic, and not good at creatingwomen. These were all charges which were to be many times repeated.It is also highly significant for the development of critical ideas aboutMarlowe that these were all charges that could not be brought againstShakespeare. This was partly responsible for the fact that Marlowewas increasingly constructed in opposition to Shakespeare.

As the twentieth century progressed, critical interest in Marlowegrew. In Harry Levin’s influential book Christopher Marlowe:

The Overreacher, doing what it said on the tin, argued that ‘His heroesmake their fortunes by exercising virtues which conventional moral-ity might well regard as vices. For the most part, they are self-mademen; and, to the extent that they can disregard the canons of good andevil, they are supermen’ (Levin : ). , the quatercentenaryof Marlowe’s birth, saw a particularly strong outbreak of interest inhim, with a special issue of the Tulane Drama Review entirely devotedto Marlowe and the publication of J. B. Steane, Marlowe: A CriticalStudy and of Clifford Leech’s Marlowe: A Collection of CriticalEssays, the first book of essays devoted to Marlowe. Not everyone,though, was converted. In Wilbur Sanders’s book The Dramatistand the Received Idea: Studies in the Plays of Marlowe and Shakespeareopened by arguing against historicist readings, but this turned out tobe only so that he could adduce some ‘simple commonsense’ onesfocusing on ‘The serious limitations of Marlowe’s conception of thehuman’ (Sanders : ) and declaring that

With . . . the life-denying stoic abdication of the human, weare 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) wonder-ing whether he is not also a man-degrader.

(Sanders : )

For Sanders, the key to Marlowe’s ‘failure’ proves ultimately to liesquarely in his homosexuality:

It was known before the age of psychoanalysis that misan-thropy was the uneasy bedfellow of self-contempt and guilt,and I am making no revolutionary proposal if I suggest thatthere is a strange congruency in the fates of Edward, thedabbler in sodomy, and of Faustus, the religious sceptic, whichmight be accounted for as a neurotic desire for symbolic pun-ishment and expiation.

(Sanders : –)

Twelve years later, Constance Brown Kuriyama further developedthis line in her book Hammer or Anvil: Psychological Patterns in

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Christopher Marlowe, in which she too argued that Marlowe wasdriven by a need to punish himself for his sexual ‘deviance’. ForKuriyama, Marlowe’s œuvre can be read as a prolonged coming toterms with who and what he was. Initially, as she sees it, this is gestured at only obliquely; thus in Tamburlaine the Great, ‘Theplay . . . depicts recurrent attacks from behind. It is indeed impor-tant . . . to remember that Marlowe composed the play with a mapin front of him’ (Kuriyama : ), and

Experience is rendered in rigid either / or terms that all seemultimately related to a basic preoccupation with sexual iden-tity. Uneasiness about defining and regulating one’s relation-ship to women is as conspicuous as uncertainty about one’srelationship to the gods. An increasingly strident insistence onpower and potency coexists with (and all but drowns out) apervasive anxiety, a fear of being somehow maimed, overpow-ered, or killed.

(Kuriyama : )

For Kuriyama, at the emotional heart of Tamburlaine is Marlowe’sdesire to avoid castration. It is as a symbolic escape from the fear ofcastration that she sees the omission of Tamburlaine’s lameness(Kuriyama : ), while another metaphor for castration isalso gestured at only to be denied: ‘Instead of being blinded,Tamburlaine has “piercing instruments of sight” which are repeat-edly mentioned’ (Kuriyama : –). As for Tamburlaine’sapparent passion for Zenocrate, that is in fact merely a front, sinceKuriyama observes that Zenocrate ‘is first described . . . in literallyfrigid imagery of ice and snow’ (Kuriyama : ). As Marlowemoves through his career, ‘In Doctor Faustus . . . we have stillanother version of the same pathological and destructive father–sonrelationships that characterize Tamburlaine’ (Kuriyama :). Finally, in Edward II, Kuriyama sees acceptance, but is accep-tance of a qualified and alarming nature:

What we seem to have . . . in Edward II is the fullest expres-sion of Marlowe’s reluctant self-acceptance . . . What isperhaps most striking about Edward II is the fact that

Marlowe no longer seems to be groping for a way out, eitherthrough hyperbolical aggression as in Tamburlaine, throughthe stalling device of the bargain as in Doctor Faustus, orthrough regression as in The Jew of Malta. He takes it forgranted that Edward is doomed, and that all struggle is futile.

(Kuriyama : –)

For Kuriyama as for Sanders, then, the apparent historical fact ofMarlowe’s homosexuality means that all he can aspire to, in art andin life, is a gracious acceptance of inevitable doom and defeat.

In the late twentieth century, criticism of Marlowe was revolu-tionised by several new approaches which were very different fromwhat had gone before. In , Stephen Greenblatt publishedhis influential book Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More toShakespeare, which paid attention to the ways in which Renaissancecharacters and authors fashioned for themselves identities whichthey were not born with. Sara Munson Deats testifies to the con-tinuing influence of Greenblatt’s ideas and terminology when shewrites that ‘In the latter scenes of Part I and throughout Part II,Tamburlaine ceases his fluctuation between the first and thirdperson pronouns when addressing himself, perhaps an indicationthat the conqueror has fashioned the persona of his aspirations andthat his future has become his present’ (Deats : ).

In , Simon Shepherd announced in the foreword of his bookMarlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (a title that wouldhave been unthinkable not so very much earlier) that

as I write, the National Union of Mineworkers has been hero-ically pursuing its just struggle for six months; and whileI worked on the book it seemed that the age of the first Elizabethin all its brutalities was all too like the age of the second.

(Shepherd : ix–x)

For Shepherd, then, Marlowe was what Jan Kott had declaredShakespeare to be in his book Shakespeare Our Contemporary:someone who spoke in a particularly urgent way to the concerns ofthe present rather than those of the past. Though Shepherdwas attentive to the context in which Marlowe wrote, declaring that

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‘I want to get away from traditional author-centred approaches, withtheir not always useful ideas of intention and biography, etc. So theearlier sections of the book try to lose Marlowe’s works within awider context’ (Shepherd : xviii), there is a sense throughoutthe book that a critic living in an age when it is possible to talk openlyof homosexuality, atheism and dissidence is much better placedto understand Marlowe than his own contemporaries could everhave been. Shepherd takes some unexpected tacks in his approachto Marlowe: the first chapter, ‘Language and Power’, begins byadumbrating the campaign against Puritanism conducted by‘Archbishop Whitgift, a sort of sixteenth-century Norman Tebbitt’(a Conservative politician of the period) and then announces ‘Thischapter seeks to connect these campaigns and debates with the playsin that it describes tensions within the plot situations betweenspeech, writing and silence’ (Shepherd : –). The secondchapter, ‘Form and Disorder’, focuses more conventionally on theconditions of the Elizabethan theatre and the way they inflectMarlowe’s writing, and the third, ‘Making Persons’, also stays onrelatively familiar ground, looking at Marlowe’s characterisationand announcing its aim as ‘to describe some of the devices whichindicate subjectivity and then to discuss the values carried by thesedevices’ (Shepherd : ). The fourth, ‘Messengers, Prophets,Scholars’ argues more unusually that these characters, who makefrequent though apparently peripheral appearances withinMarlowe’s plays, ‘embody and clarify specific aspects of the struc-ture of Elizabethan social relations’ (Shepherd : ). The fifthfocuses on ‘Turks and Fathers’ and surprisingly argues thatboth represent rule, while the final one, ‘ “Women” and Males’,announces its intention as ‘to speak of Marlowe’s treatment ofgender and of sodomy’ (Shepherd : ), with the invertedcommas around ‘women’ clearly signalling Shepherd’s awareness ofthe difficulties of representing women in an all-male theatre.

Other contexts for understanding Marlowe also began tobe adduced. In Roger Sales’ volume on Marlowe in theMacmillan guides to drama series, the first half of the book is a ‘lifeand times’ section which opens with Ralegh, and Sales then goes onto relate Tamburlaine to the Elizabethan massacre of the indigenousIrish at Smerwick:

The Tamburlaine plays have often been associated withElizabethan colonial expansion, although the appropriatecontext has been taken to be the Americas rather than Ireland.It is nevertheless dangerous to see them as just promotingElizabethan dreams of empire. Such dreams are disturbed bythe presence of Tamburlaine himself. He casts off his Scythian‘weeds’, puts on a suit of armour and then sets about colonisingthe world using many of [Ralegh’s half-brother Sir Humphrey]Gilbert’s tactics. It is as if a person pulling the Bridewell dung-cart suddenly becomes the beadle in charge of it.

(Sales : )

Sales further suggests that Zenocrate’s picture ‘is hung up outsideTamburlaine’s tent to give him an added military advantage, inmuch the same way as Sir Humphrey Gilbert lined up headsoutside his own tent’ (Sales : ). Sales also points out theextent to which Marlowe’s plays challenge accepted orthodoxies,observing of Tamburlaine’s praise of Zenocrate when he first meetsher that ‘It is meant to ambush those spectators who believe thatScythians, or members of any other wandering tribe, are incapableof controlling their sexual desires’ (Sales : ) and slylyobserves that in the death scene of Edward II ‘the royal monopolyon violence is challenged’ (Sales : ). The Marlowe of Sales’saccount thus begins to emerge as the heterodox subversive that weare now likely to think of Marlowe as being.

That subversive image was further cemented in with thepublication of Emily C. Bartels’s book Spectacles of Strangeness:Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe. Bartels began by announcingthat

The key question underlying this book is why ChristopherMarlowe, the sixteenth century’s most important playwrightafter Shakespeare, chose to bring ‘the alien’ to center stage ineach of his plays . . . The question, though investigated herein terms of Marlowe, turns us to the larger issue of why thealien was such a vital and appealing subject on the Renaissancestage and within Renaissance society more generally.

(Bartels : xiii)

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She suggests that a large part of the answer to this question is that‘An important part of the support for English superiority and dom-ination was the insistence on the otherness of the other and on whathad been or were becoming stereotypical demonizations of suchfigures as the Turk, the Moor, or the Oriental barbarian’ (Bartels: xiv). Bartels declares that ‘My approach has clearly beenshaped by new historicist criticism, but in arguing that Marlowe’splays are finally subversive my book offers an important exceptionto the new historicist tendency’ (Bartels : xv), though she isalso influenced by postcolonial theory, and draws on an importantconcept from it, that of the subaltern, when she announces that

Neither my study nor Marlowe’s plays attempt to recuperatethe ‘subaltern’ voice; instead their focus is on the means ofappropriation that silence and occlude that voice, creating inits stead an other who speaks of and for Europe. Though sucha project can only tell half the story, that half is vital to ourunderstanding of the cultural and cross-cultural transactionsthat defined the early modern state.

(Bartels : )

She argues that ‘Marlowe’s plays, in bringing alien types to centerstage, subversively resist . . . exploitation and expose the demo-nization of an other as a strategy for self-authorization and self-empowerment, whether on the foreign or the domestic front’(Bartels : xv), and compares him to Reginald Scot, the con-temporary writer on witchcraft who was similarly inclined to lookfor socially produced rather than supernatural causation for appar-ent phenomenon of witchcraft. What Bartels finds much less easyto 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 criticshave often concluded) but because they are two-dimensionaland contradictory, because they reinscribe a differencethat they simultaneously resist . . . His plays demonstatehow ‘the ideology of what women should be . . . originates inthe man’ and how women are fetishized beneath the male gaze.

Yet Marlowe also participates in that subjugation andobjectification.

(Bartels : )

For Bartels, ‘Even as Marlowe exposes male dominance as maledominance, he presents women who, despite initial acts of resis-tance, are willingly complicitous in enforcing its terms, and whoare unaware of or indifferent to the limitations that we see in theircircumscribed situations’ (Bartels : ).

The territory broached by Sales and Shepherd has been muchexplored since, with notable studies including Sara MunsonDeats’s Sex, Gender, and Desire in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe(), which includes a chapter entitled ‘The Rejection of theFeminine in Doctor Faustus’, something which is an obvious fact ofthe play but to which critics would once never have dreamed ofpaying attention, and the collection of essays which Deats subse-quently co-edited with Robert A. Logan, Marlowe’s Empery:Expanding His Critical Contexts. This contains chapters includingRick 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 itwould once never have occurred to anyone to consider.

In , Darryll Grantley’s and Peter Roberts’s collectionChristopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture includedessays on ‘Visible Bullets: Tamburlaine the Great and Ivan theTerrible’, ‘ “At Middleborough”: Some Reflections on Marlowe’sVisit to the Low Countries in ’, ‘Marlowe’s Massacre at Parisand the Reputation of Henri III of France’ and ‘Marlowe and theNew World’, all of them clearly situating Marlowe as an author withan eye very firmly fixed on the wider world. A rather differentemphasis was introduced by Paul Whitfield White’s collectionMarlowe, 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, andRenaissance Homoeroticism’, while Avraham Oz’s collectionMarlowe: Contemporary Critical Essays reprinted a number ofessays including ‘Economic and Ideological Exchange in Marlowe’s

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Jew of Malta’, by David H. Thurn, and the editor’s own ‘Faces ofNation and Barbarism: Prophetic Mimicry and the Politics ofTamburlaine the Great’, both of which see Marlowe as an authorwith a quintessentially modern perspective very like our own, andspeaking to issues which are if anything even more relevant to usthan they were to his original audience. The continuing influenceof Greenblatt was attested to by the fact that two of the essays inOz’s collection, those by Michael Hattaway and JonathanDollimore, have the word ‘subversion’ in the title. The range of pos-sible critical contexts for Marlowe was widened still further whenthe first ever companion volume to Marlowe, edited by PatrickCheney, appeared in . This included an introduction entitled‘Marlowe in the twenty-first century’, and along with the expecteddiscussions of the individual plays and poems, on Marlowe’s life,and on his texts, also had chapters on markedly more contemporaryapproaches such as ‘Marlowe and the politics of religion’,‘Geography and identity in Marlowe’, and ‘Marlowe’s men andwomen: gender and sexuality’.

Most recently, this newly emerging critical debate has itselfbeen challenged. In his introduction to a collection of essays entitled Constructing Christopher Marlowe, J. T. Parnell declaresthat ‘the contributors to Constructing Christopher Marlowe areunited in their rejection of biographical approaches and their attention to more nuanced and flexible readings of Marlowe’s textsand culture’ (Parnell : ). Parnell has little time for previouscritics:

Apparently sensitive to questions of performance and audi-ence response, critics such as Greenblatt, James Shapiro,Thomas Cartelli, and Emily Bartels paradoxically move, intheir zeal to access Renaissance “realities”, further and furtheraway from the particularities of Marlowe’s texts and “thepraxis of theatre” ’. Thus when Greenblatt alludes to theRSC’s production of The Jew of Malta to demonstratethe audience’s complicity in Marlowe’s dismantling of moralvalues, he tellingly ignores the fact ‘that Marlowe never wrotea scene showing the nuns dying’.

(Parnell : )

In the same volume, Janet Clare directly challenges prevailing his-toricist wisdom when she argues that

In considering the aesthetics of violence developed byMarlowe in the new secular drama of the s, I will arguethat we benefit from looking beyond the period to the writingsof Antonin Artaud on theatre formulated in a collection ofessays published in .

(Clare : )

Similarly Lukas Erne in a recent article takes issue with what havebecome two central tenets of Marlovian criticism. First, he disputesthe traditional view that Marlowe could not write comedy, and sug-gests indeed that the celebrated line in the Prologue of Tamburlainethe Great, Part One, ‘From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits’refers not to previous plays (specifically, Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean suggested, those of the Queen’s Men) (McMillin andMacLean : ) but actually to the Mycetes scenes of this one(Erne : –), and is thus foregrounding the comic element ofthe play. Secondly, he castigates those of us who have understoodMarlowe as homosexual, arguing that ‘The only evidence the bio-graphical record contains to support such a view is Marlowe’s flippantstatement, according to the Baines note, “that all they that loue notTobacco & Boies were fooles” ’ (Erne : ). For Erne, we shouldnot rely on what we think we know of Marlowe’s life to understandhis works, because the biographical evidence is fundamentally unre-liable and is a hindrance to the production of intelligent criticism ofthe plays: ‘Once we stop pretending we know Marlowe once and forall, Marlowe studies may well have exciting times ahead’ (Erne :). One might, however, observe that we do not need to rely solelyon the biographical record for evidence of a homoerotic sensibility inMarlowe’s plays: quite apart from the fact that Edward’s baronsclearly do not regard his relationship with Gaveston as one of simplefriendship, there is also the line in Hero and Leander, ‘For in his lookswas all that men desire’, which certainly seems to speak clearlyenough of at least an understanding of the fact that men can love andwant other men, and the stress on King Henry’s fondness for hisminions in The Massacre at Paris (xiv, –).

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Different critical approaches have inevitably found some ofMarlowe’s works of greater interest than others. Roger Sales’ volume on Marlowe in the Macmillan guides to drama series, forinstance, begins by announcing that ‘This short study concentrateson the five plays by Marlowe that are most frequently studied andperformed’, thus excluding Dido, Queen of Carthage and TheMassacre at Paris (Sales : xi). Just as Doctor Faustus has beenthe most produced of the plays, so it has been the most writtenabout. Dido, Queen of Carthage and The Massacre at Paris, by con-trast, have attracted few article-length studies and no book-lengthones. Tamburlaine the Great, which perhaps made the greatestimpression on Marlowe’s contemporaries, has also impressedmodern critics less, whereas The Jew of Malta has excited some verysophisticated analyses and both Edward II and Hero and Leanderhave been the focus of much criticism interested in sex and gender.The Lucan translation has been generally neglected, but a notableexception to this is Patrick Cheney’s book Marlowe’s CounterfeitProfession, which sees it as central to Marlowe’s œuvre.

From this necessarily brief survey of the critical history of theplays, a number of recurring issues emerge. First, it is generallyalleged that Marlowe cannot create female characters. Secondly, heis often accused of not being able or willing to write comedy. Partlyas a concomitant of this, he is seen as a writer whose drama is essen-tially monologic, sounding only one note and with characters whoare 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 isdrawn to the style of the speech rather than to the personality of thecharacter speaking’ (Logan : ). Most of all, he is, in all theserespects, frequently identified as inferior to Shakespeare.

WOMEN

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

Marlowe is not Thomas Middleton, whose Jacobean tragedies suchas Women Beware Women and The Changeling have sometimes ledhim to be called a ‘women’s dramatist’. On the other hand, Marloweis not Middleton in another way too, because though Middleton’swomen are indeed much more at the centre of his plays, and domuch more than Marlowe’s, what they do is almost invariablywicked. In Marlowe, by contrast, women may do less, but they arerarely incriminated in the way that Middleton’s women are, nor aretheir roles always as simple as they may appear. Joanna Gibbs,arguing that ‘For all the apparent compulsion of . . . evidence forthe prosecution, Marlowe seems nevertheless concerned at crucialpoints in the plays to complicate any simple reduction of women topositions of servility’ (Gibbs : ), declares:

If Marlowe’s women are all immersed in cultural and politicalmechanisms which function to sustain male power, then theplaywright also seems determined to elaborate on the partic-ularities of women’s encounters with sexist social structures.Differentiating between women – some of whom seek subver-sively to reinscribe themselves within patriarchy while othersacquiesce to it, or simply misunderstand it and suffer accord-ingly – Marlowe does more than reduce women to apoliticalvessels of feeling who are nothing but adjuncts of his malecharacters. If we dispense with the notion that the plays arenecessarily informed by binary divisions between male andfemale spheres and gender roles, we can recognise the extentto which Marlowe’s women share with his men a motivationthat is as much political as emotional.

(Gibbs : )

Marlowe’s women may, then, deserve more attention than they havepreviously been paid.

Dido, Queen of Carthage

The obvious exception to the argument that women are habituallymarginalised in Marlowe is of course Dido, Queen of Carthage,which is one of the very few plays of the period to have an

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eponymous heroine. Indeed Dido, Queen of Carthage includes anunusually large number of female characters for Marlowe, and theyall have important roles to play. The goddesses Venus and Junoarrive in the play bringing with them clearly formulated sets ofexpectations about what they represent and how they are likely toact, and, typically, Marlowe subverts these. Venus is the goddess oflove and beauty, yet in this play we see her principally in the roleof worried mother and doting grandmother. Juno is the goddess ofmarriage and childbearing, yet she wants to thwart a potential mar-riage and harm a child. Both these goddesses thus contributeimportantly to the play’s generally irreverent and iconoclastic toneand its apparent scepticism about the value even if not the existenceof the gods.

Equally important, and in equally unexpected ways, are Dido’stwo close female associates, her sister Anna and the Nurse. Annadoes not only prove the confidante figure so beloved of classicaltheatre, she also modifies that function in important ways, becausewhile the confidante usually offers a contrast to the main character,Anna repeats Dido in a number of ways, most noticeably in herunrequited love and in her suicide. The Nurse too echoes her mis-tress in the way she falls in love, and the fact that technically speak-ing she and Dido are in love with two brothers, since both Cupidand Aeneas are sons of Venus, makes her in a way almost as much asister of Dido as Anna is.

I think these parallels work in two principal ways. First, thesetwo sets of parallels do undoubtedly work to reduce Dido’s impor-tance, and above all the effect of her status as a queen, reducing herto the same level as other women. Marlowe’s Dido could in differentways look like both Elizabeth I (because of her other name of Elissa)and Mary, Queen of Scots (because of her reckless willingness tosacrifice political power for love) and Marlowe might well havewanted to tilt at both these figures. Indeed the fact that aspects ofboth are suggested could well be seen as a deliberate way of allow-ing him to have his cake and eat it. Dido, Queen of Carthage mightwell have been written somewhere around the time of the trial andexecution of Mary, Queen of Scots for conspiring against ElizabethI, so a glance at Mary would be perfectly in keeping with politi-cal orthodoxy. Indeed Deanne Williams, arguing that the play

‘dramatizes the symbolic relationship between Elizabeth’s virginityand her political power’, declares that ‘By depicting Dido as a neg-ative example of enslavement by erotic love and the desire for mar-riage, Dido, Queene of Carthage offers a sophisticated theatricalcompliment to the queen’ (Williams : –). However, it ishard to believe that Marlowe would have had much time for ‘thecult of Elizabeth’, most notably exemplified in Edmund Spenser’sThe Faerie Queene (and though the first six books of The FaerieQueene were not published until we know that Marlowe hadread it before then, because he quotes from it in Tamburlaine theGreat, which was on the stage in ). As Patrick Cheney has bril-liantly analysed, Marlowe modelled himself in his capacity as publicwriter on the questioning and cynical Ovid rather than the sagepanegyrist Virgil whom Spenser took as his model, and Dido, Queenof Carthage could well be seen as providing the same sort of scepti-cal counter to Spenser as Ovid does to Virgil. Equally, DonaldStump directly relates Marlowe’s Dido to Elizabeth’s proposedmarriage to the French Duke of Alençon (Stump : ), whichcaused a dramatic fall in her popularity. It seems far more likely thatthe original audience would have perceived criticism of Elizabethrather than compliment to her.

Insofar as the comparison with Anna and the Nurse reducesDido from a queen to a woman, though, it also allows us to see thathuman women in this play act, as a group, rather better than eithergoddesses or human men. Aeneas certainly lies to Dido when hesays 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 withhim and then brutally callous when he leaves her. The women, bycontrast, act in every case solely out of love, and this is, as we shallsee, a surprisingly consistent element in Marlowe’s creation offemale characters.

Tamburlaine the Great

Love is certainly the keynote of Zenocrate’s character. Having, toeveryone’s surprise including apparently her own, fallen in love

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with her captor Tamburlaine, Zenocrate first suffers a crisis abouther sense of her own unworthiness and then struggles to reconcileTamburlaine to others whom she loves or pities, starting with herfather and her former suitor Arabia and culminating in herdeathbed attempt to mediate between him and Calyphas. Love isequally the motivating force of Zabina, who may be proud but is anunfailingly supportive wife to Bajazeth, and of Olympia, who ismotivated in everything she does by love and loyalty to herdead husband and son. Moreover, Olympia is accorded an honourwhich none of the male characters are, in that she is allowedthe unique privilege of standing as a structural comparator toTamburlaine, in that both kill their sons. Finally, Sara MunsonDeats 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 towomen of many eras – the disparity between the female’s self-image and the distorted perception of her by masculine associates’(Deats : ).

Doctor Faustus

Technically speaking there are no female characters at all in DoctorFaustus apart from the Duchess of Vanholt, since both Helen ofTroy and Alexander’s paramours are represented by spirits, and yetthe most famous lines of the play are associated with a woman –‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?’ (V, i, ). DoctorFaustus reveals perhaps more clearly than any other Marlowe playan extremely important aspect of the way in which female charac-ters could work on the English Renaissance stage and indeed inEnglish Renaissance culture as a whole: they provided the aptestand most readily understood way of symbolising ideals and abstrac-tions. Partly because so many abstract nouns in Latin are female(victoria, iustitia), allegory has always found female characters gristto 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 howuseful it could be in general. In Doctor Faustus, Helen of Troy sym-bolises both beauty and the goal of the ultimate and most culturally

prestigious quest narrative of Marlowe’s age, the Troy story. TheDuchess of Vanholt, meanwhile, with her request for grapes, mightwell hint at recalling the Blessed Virgin Mary, who while pregnanthad desired cherries, which were miraculously given to her, asrecalled in the medieval Cherry Tree Carol.

The Jew of Malta

Abigail too can be seen as alluding to the Blessed Virgin Mary, aswe have seen in Chapter , and she, as much as Zenocrate orOlympia, is motivated entirely by love, first for her father and thenfor Mathias. She is also the only person in the play who does notseek to use religion, or indeed anything else, for her own ends.When the Friar laments that she has died while still a virgin, we maywell feel that she has in fact had a lucky escape from this calculat-ing society where everyone has their price. The inclusion of Abigailin this most cynical of all his plays could well be seen as Marlowe’sone concession to the idea of a better nature, though equally we seethat such a nature would be one which could not survive in theworld as it is.

The Massacre at Paris

The Massacre at Paris offers unquestionably the wickedest ofMarlowe’s female characters. Catherine de Medici orders the poi-soning not only of her fellow queen Jeanne d’Albret but of her ownson Charles when he displeases her. Marlowe’s audience wouldhave had no trouble believing this because it was precisely whatthe real Catherine de Medici was supposed to have done. Bythe same token, though, they would have been surprised to find thatCatherine’s daughter Marguerite de Valois, the Margaret of theplay, was not represented as they had expected her to be. Despite thefact that she is French and Catholic, and that her historical coun-terpart was notorious for her many affairs, Margaret, like so manyof Marlowe’s women, is fundamentally loving, both to her husbandand to her mother-in-law. Once again, a woman behaves well andoffers some hope for at least a possible future.

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Edward II

This is of course not the case in Edward II, where Isabella takes alover, 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 every-thing Jarman hated about ‘heterosoc’, the society predicated oncompulsory heterosexuality and the demonisation of homosexual-ity. However, Jarman was only able to achieve this effect by ignor-ing entirely the other woman in the play, Edward’s niece andGaveston’s wife, Margaret de Clare. Like Dido, Zenocrate, Abigail,and Margaret in The Massacre at Paris, Margaret de Clare is awoman defined primarily by love. She does not seem remotely dis-turbed by Gaveston’s closeness to her uncle; instead, she simplylooks forward to her marriage to her ‘first love’ (II, i, ), her ‘sweetGaveston’ (II, i, ).

No one could say that Marlowe offers powerful role models forwomen or displays a profound insight into female psychology. If, bysome freak of chance, every line of his plays had vanished exceptthose which deal with women, it seems safe to say that he wouldrapidly have been consigned to the dustbin of history. But that doesnot mean that female characters have no part to play in his dramaticuniverse, nor that he was a misogynist. For Marlowe, women func-tion symbolically, and are interesting not for ‘who they are’, to usea modern term he could never have understood, but for what theycan be made to represent. Perhaps, indeed, they are not so differentfrom his male characters in this. Marlowe’s heroes have immensedramatic vitality, but they are not realistic in our sense of theterm, and Marlowe might well have seen no reason why they shouldbe so. The fact that Marlowe’s women work in primarily allegoricalways might in fact serve to alert us to the idea that his men may doso 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 repre-senting not one individual but a number of separate ideas.

Dido, Queen of Carthage

Aeneas, for instance, is not just an individual but the personificationof a crucially important idea for Elizabethan culture, the translatioimperii. According to the influential legendarium compiled byGeoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, Aeneas’sgreat-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 notonly the foundational legend of ‘British’ culture, but also the funda-mental authorisation for Britain to go on and conquer other coun-tries: thus for Thomas Smith, who sponsored a colony in Ireland, ‘theEnglish were like the Romans for their aim was to civilize the Irishjust as the Romans had civilized the ancient Britons’ (Fitzpatrick–: ). The significance of Aeneas is perhaps never moreclearly demonstrated than when in The Tempest, a play profoundlyinfluenced by the discourses of English colonialism, Ferdinandquotes Aeneas’s first words on landing in Africa: Ferdinand’s ‘Mostsure, the goddess’ (I, ii, ) is a direct translation of Aeneas’s ‘O deacerte’ in the Aeneid. At the same time, though, Aeneas was also impor-tant at home, because he was supposedly an ancestor of Elizabethherself; hence his appearance as an important part of her iconogra-phy in the Sieve Portrait. The story of Dido and Aeneas is thus notin 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 oneShakespeare refers to most, echoing it across a range of genres andthroughout his career in plays including As You Like It, A MidsummerNight’s Dream, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest.

Tamburlaine the Great

Tamburlaine the Great is, if anything, an even more colossal figurethan Aeneas, and in fact invites us to read allegorically when he notonly kills Calyphas but castigates him:

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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 discov-ery playing cards during the battle does indeed make him look forall the world like an emblematic representation of idleness, apersonification of a vice in the same way as the Seven Deadly Sinsin Doctor Faustus are.

If Tamburlaine himself is viewed in allegorical terms, it is quiteclear what he represents: invincibility. No one can defeat him untilhe dies, and it hardly matters for this purpose whether the imme-diate cause of that death is natural causes or divine intervention. Weare, perhaps, not particularly interested nowadays in what makes forinvincibility, and obviously techniques of warfare have in any casemoved on immeasurably since Marlowe’s day. However, whenTamburlaine the Great was first played on the London stage in ,England was imminently expecting an invasion from the SpanishArmada, and in Part Two, Tamburlaine’s enemy Callapine is explic-itly identified with such a force as the Armada, when he promisesAlmeda,

A thousand galleys, manned with Christian slaves,I freely give thee, which shall cut the StraitsAnd 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 seemedurgently interesting and useful, and the weaknesses ofTamburlaine’s various opponents might also have seemed wellworth analysis.

Doctor Faustus

Of all Marlowe’s heroes, Doctor Faustus is the most recognisablymore than just an individual. As a play which so obviously draws onthe tradition of the morality play, with its central everyman figure,

it is not surprising that Doctor Faustus has been identified as ‘thespiritual biography of an age’ (Sanders : –), with its heroas a representative rather than an individual figure. In a periodwhich faced the agonising dilemma of which of the two confessions,Catholic and Protestant, to choose, Doctor Faustus’s indecisiontouched a culturally crucial chord; even the two texts in which theplay survives, and the difficulties of choice they present, are aptlyemblematic of the difficulties of choice presented to an entireculture.

The Jew of Malta

By contrast with Doctor Faustus, Barabas represents not a choicebetween positions but one entrenched position. He is the embodi-ment of the Jewishness which turned away from the claim of JesusChrist to be the Messiah and continued to wait; indeed, as we sawin Chapter , Marlowe is in fact unusually sensitive to what beingJewish might mean. Barabas is clearly proud of his faith when hetells Lodowick that ‘unto us the promise doth belong’ (II, iii, ),and yet at the same time he is also a blasphemous, inverted Christfigure (he even has a ‘resurrection’). On an island governed byknights who present themselves as guardians of Christianity buttake their name from Jerusalem, Barabas forces us to think aboutwhat exactly Christianity owes to Judaism, and to what extent it isdifferent – or are all the religions of the book, as Orcanes inTamburlaine the Great, Part Two suggests when he calls on Christ(Part Two, II, ii, –), not the polar opposites as which they werepresented but somehow akin underneath, an idea which would at astroke remove the ideological justification for the wars and alliancesby which Renaissance Europe was configured?

The Massacre at Paris

In a way, The Jew of Malta tells us what to look for in The Massacreat 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 FranceTo view this land and frolic with his friends.

(Prologue, –)

Before Barabas, then, the Guise was the original embodiment ofMachiavellianism, the political philosophy that shocked and fasci-nated the sixteenth century in equal measure. Although the frag-mentary state of The Massacre at Paris makes it difficult for us to seewhat the architecture of the play must once have been, it clearlyoffered a series of representations of different styles of rule and pre-sumably an opportunity of evaluating their relative success: didMachiavelli really offer the best recipe for rule?

Edward II

Edward II openly encourages us to read things as other than theyare. When Gaveston is recalled from Ireland, the king orders a tour-nament to celebrate, and asks the lords what devices they will bearat 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 upAnd 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 fowlThat seizeth it. This fish, my lord, I bear;The motto this: Undique mors est.

(II, ii, –)

These may sound like simple iconographical descriptions, butEdward 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 libellingAgainst the Earl of Cornwall and my brother?

(II, ii, –)

There is, it seems, no such thing as simple iconographical descrip-tion; we must read or watch cunningly, to see not how things appearbut what they represent underneath.

It is not difficult to work out what Edward II itself might repre-sent: Marlowe has chosen as his hero the only king of England whowas generally identified as homosexual. Modern historians mightbe tempted to make similar suggestions about Richard I andperhaps William Rufus, but in Marlowe’s day, it was only EdwardII who could be so thought of, and Marlowe stresses the fact asmuch as he could given the conditions of the theatre for which hewrote. This is undoubtedly why Edward II is the play of Marlowe’swhich has spoken most clearly to recent theatre and film directors,and though its appeal in this respect depends on understanding itin not entirely historical terms as a ‘gay play’ in the same way thata modern play might be, this does no violence to Marlowe’s text andliberates many of its most intense theatrical energies.

Of course one of the reasons for the vitality of Edward II maywell be that Marlowe himself was probably homosexual. However,he was not Jewish; he was not a world conqueror; he is hardly likelyto have attempted to sell his soul to a devil in whom he apparentlydid not believe; and he was neither an African queen nor a Trojanemigré explorer. Marlowe did not, in short, write plays only todisplay his own personality over and over again. He wrote them toexamine 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 crucialaspect of its historical moment.

,

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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, ChristopherDido, Queen of Carthage, ,

–, , –, –, ,–, , –, , ,–, –,

Doctor Faustus, , , , , –,–, , , –, –, ,–, –, , –, ,–, , –, –,–, , –, –

Edward II, , , , , ,–, –, –, –,–, –, , , ,, –, , , ,–

Hero and Leander, , , , ,, –, , –, ,–, –

The Jew of Malta, , , –, ,–, , –, , , –,–, –, , , ,–, , , , ,

Lucan, , , , , ,

The Massacre at Paris, , ,–, , –, , , –,, , , –, –,–, –

‘On the Death of Sir RogerManwood’,

Ovid’s Elegies, , , –,

‘The Passionate Shepherd tohis 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,