Christopher Marlowe: Ideology and Subversion1
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Christopher Marlowe: Ideology and Subversion1 ‘In Elizabethan and Jacobean drama ... there is almost no analysis of the particular society of the times’ ... the dramatists ‘believed in their own age... And, accepting their age, they were in a position to concentrate their attention ... upon the common characteristics of humanity in all ages, rather than upon the differences.’2 1. Subversion and Representation To begin from a moment in 1 Tamburlaine when Tamburlaine spectacularly violates an Egyptian and, presumably, an Elizabethan cultural practice or ideological code. A Messenger describes to the Soldan of Egypt the quaint and very theatrical device of Tamburlaine’s white, red, and black tents. The Soldan retorts: Merciless villain, peasant ignorant Of lawful arms or martial discipline! Pillage and murder are his usual trades – The slave usurps the glorious name of war. (1 Tamburlaine, 4.1.64-7)3 His outburst seems to be in excess of the facts until we reflect that, by constituting a new set of martial signals and abrogating to himself the meaning of language (usurping the ‘name of war’), Tamburlaine is in fact re-constituting the state, what the Elizabethans termed the ‘nation’.4 This immodest, audacious upstart is enhancing his absolute military authority over Asia by a process of totalisation, and the Soldan is offering a description not only of sedition but of 1 An early version of this paper was given as a lecture at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge on 12 May 1993 as part of the Corpus Marlowe Celebrations. I am grateful to the Master and Fellows for the invitation to this occasion. It was then published as Michael Hattaway, ‘Christopher Marlowe: Ideology and Subversion’, Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture, ed. Darryll Grantley and Peter Roberts, (Aldershot, 1996), 198-223, and reprinted in Reprinted in Avraham Oz, (ed.), Marlowe, New Casebooks, (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2003). 2 TS Eliot, ‘John Ford’ (1932) in Selected Essays, (London, 1951 edn), p. 202. 3 Quotations are taken from The Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Roma Gill, (Oxford, 1971). 4 As Leonard Tennenhouse writes, plays provided ‘a site where the iconography of state power was formulated in tension with various forms of representation that contested the ideology of the Renaissance court’ (Power on Display: the Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres, (London, 1986, p. 14). 2 subjection.5 (Tamburlaine, at this moment, is more revolutionary than, say, the Giant with the balances in The Faerie Queene (5.2.30-5) who has simply usurped the divine scales of justice.) From the obverse perspective, it is also a moment of social realism: the Soldan may be regarded as an analogue of the nobility of England, and Tamburlaine as a nightmare figure, one of the Elizabethan bogy-men, this one emblematised in the cruel Turk or Tartar.6 The old order dominated by the nobility has been subverted or ‘problematised’7 by what is not only a physical but a cultural invasion by Tamburlaine. Codes of war had once been chivalric honour codes, but more lately, of course, they had been used (as in Elizabeth’s Accession Day Tilts8) to sustain an aristocratic group which, as the quotation suggests, were no longer self-evidently the only hegemonic class. Tamburlaine’s new signs proclaim, in fact, a crisis for aristocracy, a triumph of absolutism over constitutionalism, the destruction of hereditary monarchy, and the destabilising of a stratified order of privilege by a new order of status based upon the personality or charisma of a buccaneer. The moment is related to a sequence near the beginning of the play, the famous stage image, or ‘Gestus’ as Brecht termed such a device, wherein Tamburlaine laid down his shepherd’s weeds: Lie here, ye weeds that I disdain to wear! This complete armour and this curtle-axe Are adjuncts more beseeming Tamburlaine. (1 Tamburlaine, 1.1.41-3) That too is an image not just of bravado but of political challenge: by his self- fashioning the shepherd Tamburlaine defies the sumptuary laws which 5 Compare Michel Foucault: ‘Rather than ask ourselves how the sovereign appears to us in his lofty isolation, we should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through the multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts etc. We should try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects.’ Michel Foucault, ‘Two Lectures’ Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon, (New York, 1980), pp.88, 97. 6 As, for example, in a text of 1590, Edward Webbe, Edward Webbe ... his Troublesome Travels, ed. Edward Arber, (London, 1868); see also Simon Shepherd, Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre, (New York, 1986), pp.1 42-77. 7 Moving laterally to material history, we might remind ourselves of how new military technology – a paraphrase of part of Paul Ive’s Practise of Fortification (London, 1589) – is rather self-consciously worked into 2 Tamburlaine, 3.2.54ff. 8 Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century, (London, 1975), pp. 88-111. 3 maintained what Shakespeare called ‘degree’ and we would call a status-system.9 That was the theory. The fact that these laws existed at all suggests how much the reach of the Elizabethan state exceeded its grasp. Repeated attempts by the Tudors to control the dress of their subjects suggest some degree of phobia on part of the political elite.10 Well might they fear: some of the most notorious transgressors of the sumptuary code were the players themselves, their own licensed servants.11 Tamburlaine’s dressing up draws attention to the ease and dangers of self-fashioning and social climbing, for both of which the stage provided a model. Moreover, he dreams of and creates an order where monarchical authority is sustained by no title, mystic corporation, or king’s ‘second body’, but solely by sagacity and material power: the nation and the prince become one:12 ‘But what are kings, when regiment is gone, But perfect shadows in a sunshine day’ (Edward II, 5.1.26-7). Tamburlaine, in fact, displays within the playhouse what had been carefully kept off-stage elsewhere, in that theatre of power that we know as the Elizabethan court, where elaborate rituals were deployed in order to imply that far more than might was needed to create right13. Marlowe, as we know, is rudely demystificatory: even Tamburlaine’s lieutenant Theridamus can, with no ceremony, take the crown from the regal Zabina and hand it to Zenocrate: ‘Here, madam, you are empress; she is none’ (3.3.227). Crowns are no longer sacral ‘ceremonies’ (objects) but, like the papier mâché circlets that rounded the temples of the common players, merely indices of power.14 9 Gaveston’s ‘cullions’ wear ‘proud fantastic liveries’ (Edward II, 1.2.409); see also Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Sumptuary Laws, or Laws for Moderating Expenses’, trans. John Florio, The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, 3 vols, (London, Everyman, 1910), i, 43, pp. 305-7. 10 N.B. Harte, ‘State control of dress and social change in pre-industrial England’, Trade, Government and Economy in Pre-Industrial England, ed. D.C. Coleman and A.H. John, 1976), 132-165. 11 See Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse, ed. Edward Arber, (London, 1868): ‘Overlashing in apparel is so common a fault that the very hirelings of some of our players ... jet under gentlemen’s noses in suits of silk’ (p.39). 12 Such a constitution is tersely described by Matrevis to Edward II: ‘The court is where Lord Mortimer remains.’ (5.3.60) and by Machiavel in The Jew of Malta: ‘Might first made kings, and laws were then most sure When, like the Draco’s, they were writ in blood.’ (Prologue, 20-1); compare too a line from Marlowe’s translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia: ‘Dominion cannot suffer partnership’ (93). 13 Recent writings on the relation between ritual and power are surveyed by David Cannadine, ‘Introduction: divine rights of kings’, Rituals of Royalty, ed. David Cannadine and Simon Price, (Cambridge, 1992), 1-19. 14 Witness a stage image from 1 Tamburlaine, 2.4.0SD: ‘To the battle, and Mycetes comes out alone with his crown in his hand, offering to hide it’; compare 4 It might, however, be claimed that Tamburlaine’s eponymous role as scourge or flail of God15, flagellum dei, does make him, like Shakespeare’s kings, ‘twin-born with greatness’. However, a theatre audience, denied a coronation sequence, would be keenly aware that he makes his way to power not by undergoing ritual sanctification or by the divine right of the pope16 but simply by killing kings. Therein lies a political challenge. Not only tyrants were associated with flails: theatre clowns probably bore them too, as we see in various engravings of the time. Marlowe himself was a man possessed of a dark élan, a savage jester who, as his table-talk reveals, scourged his auditors with outrageous aphorisms; in the texts he wrote, he was a mannerist who, in his prologues, drew attention to his outlandish and astounding rhetorical play. He adopts a position of sardonic detachment – bordering on contempt – from his creations, a stance which is like the position of a jester vis-à-vis his subjects:17 his co-author, Thomas Nashe, certainly occupied that role. In another play, The Jew of Malta, Barabas also functions as both jester and scourge.18 His role is as much that of the playhouse clown as the moral vice, wearing a bottle nose and red beard,19 confiding in his audience, adopting outrageous roles, plaguing and exposing the hypocrisy of the Christians.