©2012 Marcie Bianco ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE SPIRIT OF MARLOWE: CREATING AN ETHICS ON THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE STAGE by MARCIE BIANCO A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English written under the direction of Professor Henry S. Turner and approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May, 2012 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Spirit of Marlowe: Creating an Ethics on the English Renaissance Stage By MARCIE BIANCO Dissertation Director: Professor Henry S. Turner The Spirit of Marlowe examines the ethics produced through performance in the plays of Christopher Marlowe. It contends that Marlowe’s contribution to the “Golden Age” of the English Renaissance lies in the ethics created on his stage—it is an ethics indebted to and conversant with those prominent in early modern England, but it is markedly “alien” to it; as I will elaborate throughout this dissertation, it has noticeable affinities with the philosophies of Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Deleuze. A Marlovian Ethics refuses the moralistic strictures of those contemporary ethics that prescribe modes of living; rather, in Spinozist-like fashion, value is attributed a posteriori to the affects that are produced by actions and interactions between bodies. From Dido to the Duke of Guise, Marlowe’s characters seek an ethics of abundance and excess: to become more than, or better than, oneself seems to be the foundational premise of their ethics. The objective of always becoming more than, or better than, one’s current self is indicative of the significance of how the idea of creation, of creativity, undergirds a Marlovian Ethics. As I will demonstrate in my readings of his plays, a Marlovian Ethics is established through various modes of creation: transformation; appropriation, or imitation; destruction, in Deleuzian terms of ii territorialization/deterritorialization; pleasure, conceptually akin to Deleuzian desire; and critique. Marlowe’s understanding of the theater as an apparatus conducive to the construction of an ethics entails a similar understanding of the creative potential of bodies and of spaces: actions build, they create—and create through destruction as well— performance. There is a momentum that characterizes his plays that demonstrates this sense of constant creation—the “ceaseless movement”—of characters and their surroundings, of plot and emotion. In sum, there are three central objectives of this dissertation: 1) to articulate the ethics immanent within Marlowe’s plays, thereby 2) depicting how Marlowe is philosophically aligned with the “bastards” of philosophy, from Lucretius to Deleuze; and finally 3) to evaluate Marlowe’s plays in order to reveal their value as a “minor literature” alongside the academic industry of Shakespeare. iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my committee—Richard Dienst, Elizabeth Grosz, Ron Levao, and Henry S. Turner—for their graciousness in serving on my committee and for dedicating their time to reviewing my work. Credit is due especially to Elizabeth Grosz, who has informed and inspired my thinking more than any living scholar, and to Henry S. Turner for his meticulous attention to countless drafts. A sincere and heartfelt thanks to you all. This dissertation is dedicated to my lovely puppies, Deleuze and Marlowe, who have imbued my life with infinite sweetness and light. iv Table of Contents Abstract of the Dissertation ii Acknowledgements iv Table of Contents v Introduction: The Spirit of Marlowe 1 Chapter 1: Queer Imitatio in Dido: The Plane of Marlovian Ethics 28 Chapter 2: The Magic of Time in Doctor Faustus 72 Chapter 3: Tamburlaine: Making Spaces, Making Ethic 121 Chapter 4: Edward II and the Place of Politics in a Marlovian Ethics 171 Chapter 5: Affective Instrumentality in The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at 224 Paris Bibliography 278 v 1 The Spirit of Marlowe: Introduction The work was good, but dangerous…. They knew he was great, but they feared the intensity of his gift, and also what his subject matter might reveal about themselves.1 This is the spirit of Marlowe. Patti Smith’s observation about Robert Mapplethorpe, who was a master of S&M and erotic photography, also bespeaks the force of Christopher Marlowe, whose plays are filled with black humor, homoeroticism, and are blatantly, and anachronistically, devoid of “political correctness.” The perceived danger of Marlowe’s plays lies in the magnitude of their affective potentiality; they are defined by their audacity and recklessness, not by their measured constraint. As Smith intimates, how Marlowe’s plays affect their audiences says more about the audiences than about the plays themselves. The Spirit of Marlowe is a study of the ethics produced through performance in Marlowe’s plays: to contend that Marlowe’s contribution to the “golden age” of the English Renaissance lies in a timeless, or “untimely,” ethics because it resonates with those ethics conceived by more “modern” figures such as Nietzsche and Deleuze. Philosophical in scope, the objectives of this dissertation are to extract and articulate the ethics performed in Marlowe’s plays and, in turn, to formulate the conceptual tools necessary in order to contextualize a Marlovian Ethics not only in juxtaposition to contemporary ethics of the English Renaissance but also in relation to a range of extant philosophies of ethics—all distinguished by their advancement of materialist philosophy, 1 Patti Smith, Just Kids (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 199. 2 and all notorious for their unorthodox and eccentric perspectives on how to live one’s life well. Therefore, the aim of each chapter is to develop a tenet—a philosophical concept, and the correlative theatrical or performative techne—of what I am calling a “Marlovian Ethics.” In imagining and conceptualizing a “Marlovian Ethics,” my dissertation will demonstrate the extent to which Marlowe’s drama is iconoclastic and, arguably, how it has contributed to both the development of drama and, more significantly, to understandings about life and how to live life well. A Marlovian Ethics is one that boldly positions itself as an alternative to the more traditional ethical philosophies extant in early modern England. The unconventional ethical positions created in his plays are eccentric and markedly different from pre- eminent modes of conduct and decorum advanced by popular humanist texts during the sixteenth-century in England, even though this ethics itself is founded upon these very same humanist texts that Marlowe read throughout his grammar school and Cambridge University education. The ethics of the English Renaissance correlated with the culture of humanism that sought to recuperate classical values. Robin H. Wells explains, “[i]n its broadest since, Renaissance humanism was a literary culture that concerned itself with the question of how to promote civilized values and at the same time guard against the barbarism to which the baser side of human nature always to lead.”2 Thus, he maintains, “[t]he ruling ambition of the humanists was to recover the values of classical civilization.”3 Classical values connote a classical, “civilized” ethics—a lifestyle that enacts and promotes those values. Ethics, then, for ardent English humanists, was 2 Robin H. Wells, Shakespeare’s Humanism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 7. 3 Ibid. 3 essentially understood as moral philosophy. Through an appropriation of classical sources, above all, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and his Politics and Cicero’s De Officiis, as well as the work of Christian writers such as Augustine and Aquinas, poets and scholars looked to reintroduce ethical ideas about how man could attain the supreme good of “happiness” (eudaimonia) through fashioning himself as a virtuous, civic- minded, member of society. One of the period’s most famous examples, Ben Jonson, whose pedantry effortlessly extended to the realm of ethics, championed classical, civic- minded values through the study of poetry in his Discoveries: “[poetry] offers to mankind a certain rule, and pattern of living well, and happily.”4 Jonson, like his contemporaries who esteemed literary study (and especially the study of rhetoric), comprehended the ethical import of poetry like his humanist peers. My impetus in this dissertation similarly seeks to extract and elevate the ethics at work in Marlowe’s theatrical poetry—an ethics that, clearly, Jonson would not approve. The humanist philosophy of ethics developed throughout the sixteenth-century in England is cloaked in moral righteousness and given a sympathetic and “admirable” face in prominent personages of the time, with Sir Philip Sidney arguably being the most notable figure of Marlowe’s period. A courtly gentleman, soldier, and poet, Sidney’s humanism consisted of an amalgamation of a Christianized Aristotelian, Ciceronian, and Platonic ethics, which could be condensed into the simple category of a Christian moral philosophy.5 This philosophy advocated an ethics of contemplation; man’s aim was to 4 Ben Jonson, Timber, or Discoveries, in Ben Jonson: Selected Works, ed. D. McPherson (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), 405. 5 “In 1579, when Sidney was only twenty-five, Edmund Spenser addressed him as the ‘president,’ that is the perfect union, ‘of nobles and of chivalry’” (cited in W.A.