The Complete Plays (2 page)

This learned heterodoxy has obvious relevance to the plays: Dr Faustus, having ‘commenced' (1.3) and been ‘graced' (Prologue, 17) like a Cambridge graduate, is a scholar who punningly bids ‘Divinity, adieu!' (1.50) and makes a pact with the devil; and Machevil, in the prologue to
The Jew of Malta
, has to stop himself delivering an atheist lecture to the audience. More importantly, Marlowe's learning gets into the very fabric of his astonishing poetry. Consider his most famous lines, Faustus' address to the shade of Helen of Troy:

This hymn of sexual desire conceals learned ironies in its dense classical allusions. The opening questions come from Lucian's
Dialogues of the Dead
, in which a visitor to the underworld, seeing Helen's no-longer-recognizable skull, asks: ‘And is this what those thousand ships sailed for from all over Greece? Is this why all those Greeks and barbarians were killed? And all those cities sacked?'
⁵
Marlowe turns this into part of an oddly humanistic sexual fantasy, the necrophiliac equivalent of the scholar's desire to revive the classical past. Faustus has earlier produced Helen as an erotic after-dinner show for his scholars; now, to take his mind off his imminent damnation, he becomes her lover, repeatedly kissing her and crooning her name. Helen haunted Marlowe's imagination. What fascinated him was the destructiveness of her beauty: men died and cities burned for it. And to complete the fantasy of being a modern Paris, strutting in triumph over the heroes of antiquity, Faustus includes the destruction of his own city: ‘Instead of Troy shall Wittenberg be sacked'. The later mythological allusions are similarly fraught with dangerous beauty. ‘Hapless Semele' would admit the god's sexual approach only if he came in all his glory; she was consumed by his lightning. Yet the ‘thousand stars', their number matching the ships, are alight with natural beauty (starlight often ignites Marlowe's poetry), and the eye catches the flash of sunlight on water in the otherwise unknown conjunction of the sun-god Apollo and the liquefied Arethusa. Moreover, the beauty of these heavenly bodies – uncertainly gods or planets – is male beauty, and the uncertainty in Faustus' imagining of ravishment plays back over the speech as a whole. The initial
question –
was
this the face? – is only half-rhetorical: this is not Helen but a boy-actor and, more darkly, a succubus (an evil spirit in female form) who ‘sucks forth [his] soul' in ways that are indistinguishably erotic and terrifying.

The self-destructive desire in these lines is a central preoccupation of all Marlowe's plays.
Dido, Queen of Carthage
, possibly the earliest and perhaps co-written with his younger Cambridge contemporary Thomas Nashe, is an adaptation of Virgil's narrative in the
Aeneid
of Dido's tragic passion for the Trojan exile Aeneas. It was performed, its title-page tells us, by the boy-actors of the Chapel Children's company. These two aspects of the play – its closeness to the most prestigious of Latin texts and its performance by boys – are in tension throughout the action. On the one hand, it is a learned play, full of direct translations of Virgil's most famous lines: when Aeneas asks his divine mother, disguised as a huntress, ‘But what may I, fair virgin, call your name' (1.1.188), he is translating Virgil's ‘
o quam te tnemorem virgo
?'; his speeches describing the fall and burning of Troy are bravura versions of the great narrative of
Aeneid
II; and at key moments of Act 5, the play simply quotes Virgil's Latin directly. On the other hand, the action is frequently mock-heroic, the
Aeneid
in falsetto voices. The opening scene sets the tone, beginning not with grand heterosexual passion but with the pederastie Jupiter ‘
dandling
GANYMEDE
upon his knee
' (0.2SD). The ambivalence of the posture, an erotic game with a child, is present too in the opening line in his sexual invitation (‘Come, gentle Ganymede, and play with me'); and the Ganymede to whom the god's bribes are offered is detectably a tarty, petulant Elizabethan page-boy. This scene is not in Virgil. It owes much to Lucian, and fits well the horrified description of the boy-actors' repertoire in
The Children of the Chapel Stripped and Whipped
(1569): ‘Even in her Majesty's chapel do these pretty upstart youths profane the Lord's day by the lascivious writhing of their tender limbs, and gorgeous decking of their apparel, in feigning bawdy fables gathered from the idolatrous heathen poets.'
⁶
Jupiter's sexual wheedling – an extended version of Marlowe's famous lyric ‘The Passionate
Shepherd to his Love' (‘Come live with me, and be my love')
⁷
– is the first of many such invitations. Marlowe multiplies and complicates the love-affairs, and his characters express their desires in ways that are persistently and disturbingly linked with children. The principal changes to Virgil are in the boy-parts of Ascanius and Cupid. Venus abducts Ascanius with sticky promises of ‘sugar-almonds, sweet conserves, / A silver girdle and a golden purse' (2.1.305–6) so that Cupid can take his place and cause Dido to fall for Aeneas. When she does, she offers (‘Conditionally that thou wilt stay with me') to refit his ships with erotically luxurious

and promises Achates a sailor-suit that will allure the nymphs and mermaids, ‘So that Aeneas may but stay with me' (132). Everyone is turned on, including the old Nurse, who invites Cupid to her

The cumulative effect is to drive the play away from epic and towards comedy – the comedy of John Lyly, whose
Gallathea
(1583–5), also written for boy-actors, makes much of the havoc wreaked by Cupid in disguise.

Yet
Dido
is tragedy, not comedy, a generically labile play in which love is funny but dangerous, its menace signalled by constant reminders of Helen and the fall of Troy. When Cupid snuggles up to Dido and sings a song on her knee in order to get close enough to touch her with his infatuating golden arrow, the dialogue itself glitters ominously:

DIDO

CUPID

To keep Aeneas, Dido is even prepared to copy ‘that ticing strumpet' (2.1.300):

Dramatic irony works here much as it does in Shakespeare's
Troilus and Cressida
: Aeneas won't be true, but will leave in the ships Dido has given him; and Carthage, of course, will be sacked in the wars with Rome which she calls down at the end of the play. Fire is everywhere – even the most woodenly Elizabethan line, ‘Gentle Achates, reach the tinder-box' (1.1.166), has a spark in it – and the flames of love at once recall the firing of Troy and point forward to the fire in which Dido immolates herself. Dido's funeral pyre, fuelled by the tokens of Aeneas' love, is both a solemn sacrifice and a faintly comic hecatomb. Its arch solemnity is typical of the play as a whole; like the rest of the play, its erotic and ironic force are still underrated.

Tamburlaine the Great
was Marlowe's first big hit. Written for adult players, it too is a striking instance of Renaissance neo-classicism. This may surprise us in a history-play about a fourteenth-century Asiatic conqueror, but part of Tamburlaine's significance to the Elizabethans was the coincidence of his conquests with the European Renaissance: ‘During [his] reign began the restitution of learning and of the arts.'
⁸
Hence the hero praises his wife by claiming that if Zenocrate had lived

Tamburlaine
's poetry of wealth and power – what Ben Jonson called ‘Marlowe's mighty line'
⁹
– has in fact less affinity with Homer than with the war-poetry of Lucan's
Pharsalia
(Marlowe translated its first book, and Tamburlaine alludes in Part One 3.3 to the battle that gives the poem its title). Jonson more sourly complained of the plays' ‘scenical strutting, and furious vociferation',
¹⁰
and modern audiences also sometimes feel wearied by what can seem a formless action driven on by rant.

But
Tamburlaine
is not one play, but two. Part One, which its original running-title called
The Conquests of Tamburlaine the Scythian Shepherd
, is about the unstoppable rise of its hero from poverty and obscurity to ‘The sweet fruition of an earthly crown' (2.6.69). It has an exceptionally clear five-act structure (roughly one per conquest), and its action was originally diversified by comic scenes which the printer cut because he thought them ‘a great disgrace to so honorable and stately a history' (‘To the Gentlemen Readers', 16–17). Nonetheless, it begins with comic bathos: Persia, whose past kings ‘triumphed over Afric, and the bounds / Of Europe' (1.1.9–10) is now ruled by the effete Mycetes; in the first scene, the crown passes with comic rapidity to his ambitious brother Cosroe, who promises the rebels they will ‘triumph over many provinces' (173). Into this power-vacuum, in Acts 1 and 2, comes Tamburlaine, a passionate shepherd – Marlowe emphasizes his humble origins, just as he exaggerates Aeneas' destitution in
Dido
– whose invitation to love (‘Disdains Zenocrate to live with me?…', 1.2.82–105) is an astonishing offer of barbaric splendour. He even uses the display of his treasure as a military tactic. He briefly supports Cosroe, until the usurper unintentionally fuels his desire to ‘ride in triumph through Persepolis', then turns on ‘this triumphing king' (2.5.49, 87) and, at the end of Act 2, hymning ‘aspiring minds' (2.6.60) over Cosroe's expiring body, he plucks the crown from his corpse and puts it on. Thereafter, each act ends with a coronation.

We
see
few battles. Instead the play feels like a triumphal pageant, and the idea of the Roman triumph is deep in its structure. Roman triumphal processions were celebrations of
victory, elaborate street-theatre which displayed the triumphator's glory in plundered spoils and the marching bodies of enslaved captives. Their fascination for Renaissance artists is apparent in Petrarch's allegorical
Trionfi
(1356–74); in Edmund Spenser's
The Faerie Queene
(1590–96); and most memorably in Mantegna's
Triumphs of Caesar
(1486–92), now at Hampton Court and well known in the sixteenth century through reproduction in woodcuts and engravings.
Tamburlaine
's catalogues of names, its exhibitions of wealth and its stage-pageantry bring the triumph to the London stage.

Yet Tamburlaine's triumphs over his enemies increasingly seem the ceremonious exultations of sadism. The defeated Bajazeth is put in a cage and ‘in triumph drawn' (4.2.86); Tamburlaine, who has felt the ‘thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown' (2.6.52), feasts while his prisoner starves, and torments him with the strange confection of
‘a second course of crowns'
(4.4.110SD). Zenocrate, herself part of the spoils of war, is increasingly used to register the horror of Tamburlaine's atrocities. Her pity for his victims prompts his one soliloquy (‘Ah, fair Zenocrate, divine Zenocrate…', 5.1.135–90); but it is a rapturous contemplation of her suffering beauty – her crying excites him – as a force
almost
powerful enough to restrain him. The whole play ponders the connection of beauty and pain in his question, ‘What is beauty, saith my sufferings, then?' (1.160). Its ending is disconcerting. Zenocrate has drawn the traditional warnings about ‘fickle empery' and ‘earthly pomp' (1.352–3) from the fall of Bajazeth and his wife; now, with their corpses and her sometime fiancé's still on stage, she is enthroned and crowned. This extraordinary tableau has been compared to the amoral triumph of the lovers at the end of Monteverdi's opera
L'Incoronazione di Poppea
(1642).
¹¹
It is at once an emblem of victory and a warning of the brutality and transience of power.

To some, Part Two seems just more of the same. But the effect may be deliberate. The hero is a murderous automaton, compulsively repeating what the play's running-title calls
The Bloody Conquests of Mighty Tamburlaine
. And there are differences. Tamburlaine is offstage for most of the first two acts. He is older; his conquests are now an empire; attention shifts to
some extent to his heirs and a new generation of antagonists. The play opens on the banks of the Danube, where the Muslim world meets Christendom, and is set against a backdrop of geopolitical conflicts. (Tellingly, the ringing place-names are now more precise: Marlowe was using an atlas.
¹²
) The conflicts are at once religious and territorial, and the play is not on the Christian side. The perfidious Christians are overrun by a pious Muslim who calls on Christ; the God he reveres is one ‘that sits on high and never sleeps, / Nor in one place is circumscriptible' (2.2.49–50). Beyond the vast Asiatic spaces over which the action is fought out, there is a vaster spiritual dimension.