Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1991 Self and Power: Political Reconstruction in the Drama of Christopher Marlowe. Patricia A. Brown Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Brown, Patricia A., "Self and Power: Political Reconstruction in the Drama of Christopher Marlowe." (1991). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 5169. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/5169 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. 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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. SELF AND POWER: POLITICAL RECONSTRUCTION IN THE DRAMA OF CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Patricia A. Brown B.A., Louisiana State University, 1978 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1981 August 1991 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Preface This dissertation explores what it means to say that Marlowe's work is "political." How does power work in his plays? His drama does not conform very closely to the "Elizabethan world picture," nor is it as radically subversive as New Historicist critics would read it. Between Tillyard and Greenblatt, then, lies a political interpretation of Marlowe's theater as a challenge to authority. Tamburlaine, Faustus, and the other protagonists are not merely overaspiring villains, nor are they just Machiavellian politicians making it in a wcrld of realpolitik. Stephen Greenblatt's essay on Marlowe in Renaissance Self-Fashioning argues that Marlowe was radically challenging Tudor hegemony. Greenblatt was influenced by the theories of Michel Foucault, who suggested that power is a circulating function of politics. If, following Foucault's idea, power were flowing differently among the characters of these plays, then their playwright might be challenging the prevailing, Christian providentialist structure of Renaissance England as well as its pragmatic, even ii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. subversive Italian-realist opposite. Foucault, who deliberately opposes humanism, is a connection from Greenblatt into political theory. Two other twentieth- century theorists, Hannah Arendt and Roberto Unger, also critique power but from within the same context of Western libera!-humanist tradition in which Marlowe wrote. They study the history of politics and sovereignty and the conceptualization of the hitman subject. Throughout this dissertation, I am in a dialogue of theory and drama. The ways in which Foucault, Arendt, and Unger discuss politics have led me to formulate some ideas about political expression differently from the providentialist viewpoint of Tillyard and the paradoxically subversive view of Greenblatt. Marlovian heroes seem to create varying challenges to existing structures of religious and political authority. The combinations of self and power I find in Marlowe's theater represent a mode of dissent relevant to political life in Marlowe's time and in o u r s . iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Table of Contents Preface ii Abstract v Chapter 1 Political Marlowe 1 Chapter 2 A Parade of Rings 35 Chapter 3 Lords of House 84 Chapter 4 Among Peers 134 Chapter 5 “Resolve Me of All Ambiguities" 183 Conclusion Mo Soft Parade_________________________________________ 239 Bibliography 261 Vita 280 iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Abstract Christopher Marlowe created Renaissance drama as we think of it today. Marlowe’s princely protagonists are studied here not as sovereigns responsible for the general well-being of their subjects, but as ambitious characters who use power to control their personal environment. Seen from this viewpoint, the dramatic function of the central characters is either to develop a new stance toward the idea of public authority or to refashion an old one. Instead of attending to governance, they attempt to encompass all existence within themselves: Tamburlaine the world conqueror; Edward and Dido, public rulers whose private relationships transform their public positions; the Guise and his hypocrisy of public religion and private vengeance; Barabas and the uses of power and wealth in The Jew of Malta: Faustus, whose supernatural aspirations contain both hell and (he thinks) heaven in its scope. Zn creating a new politics (and new politicians), Marlowe's texts fuse private life and governing structures by personifying those structures. The ruler becomes the representative political ''man" looking for a way to integrate the facets of his character into a v Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. holistic human existence. The failure of central authority in these plays to be entirely orthodox or successfully hegemonic suggests that an inclusive politics of power could increase the ability of the characters to succeed by making their aspirations cooperative instead of competitive. Marlowe's drama emphasizes self-actualization (one could even say self- dramatization) without explicit moral judgments. The work of three twentieth-century political thinkers provides the theoretical coherence for this view of politics as a possible means to self- actualization or humanization: Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Roberto Mangabeira Unger. Arendt surveys the deterioration of the Greek idea of the polls into a separation of the public and private realms of existence. Foucault's investigations support a view of the moral neutrality of power. Unger argues that domination is the one form of human action which does not increase human actualization. Because Marlovian protagonists are unconventional figures, ambitious for power, they offer various challenges to the traditional structure of authority. vi Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chapter 1 Political Marlowe I "There is a conjunction of these two things, political power and philosophical intelligence."1 With these words Socrates, that famous questioner executed for subversive teaching, asserts the importance of politics in human activity. More than two thousand years later, German cultural critic Predric Jameson argues in The. Political Pnconscious for "the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts" (17). This connection between politics and literature is particularly relevant to the dramatic works of Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe; "young Kit," the bad boy of early Renaissance literature, innovative master of the "mighty line"; performer of some secret service for Queen Elizabeth's government; accused by his friend Thomas Kyd and reported by others to have held unorthodox