Read The Complete Plays Online

Authors: Christopher Marlowe

The Complete Plays (3 page)

BOOK: The Complete Plays
8.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Tamburlaine too is seen against this background. His conquests continue, but are now vulnerable to irony. Callapine escapes his captivity by seducing his gaoler with an offer of a crown that parodies Tamburlaine's invitations to power; his idle and cowardly son is a damaging mockery of his killer-ethic; and, most importantly, he is helpless in the face of Zenocrate's death: his frustrated rant about invading Heaven and Hell to win her back is deflated by Theridamas's realism: ‘She is dead, / And all this raging cannot make her live' (2.4.119–20). Hitherto invulnerable, his wounding his own arm to teach his sons courage is also the self-mutilation of blocked grief. He cannot even bury her body, but drags it with him, burning towns as perverse monuments to her memory. There are more victories, but they are circumscribed by the increasingly persistent references to Heaven, Hell and death.

A nuclear scientist, watching the first atomic bomb explode, grimly applied to himself the words of a great Hindu god: ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'
13
Tamburlaine too identifies with death, and his terrible chariot drawn by captive kings belongs in the traditional Triumph of Death. The idea of earthly conquest is still strong towards the end of the play – in Babylon, where earlier conquerors ‘Have rode in triumph, triumphs Tamburlaine' (5.1.70) – but his march to Samarkand is cut short by his own death. Yet even here, Marlowe avoids conventional Christian moralizing. His final illness begins just after he has burned the Koran, an act which could be interpreted as a fatal defiance of divine power, except that he burns it in the
name of God (‘For he is God alone, and none but he', 5.1.201). And in the last scene, the crown with which he invests his son is the sign of a purely secular power. The play remains studiedly ambiguous about the religious meaning, if any, of ‘Tamburlaine, the scourge of God' (5.3.248).

Of Marlowe's own religious views, nothing certain can be known. The closest we come is the dubious record of ‘his damnable judgement of religion, and scorn of God's word' preserved in the ‘note' Richard Baines delivered to the Privy Council close to the time of Marlowe's death. Baines was a hostile and unreliable witness (he had been apprehended with Marlowe for counterfeiting in Holland; each accused the other of intending to desert to the Catholic enemy), and his note is an informer's delation. But it is the nearest thing we have to evidence and is reprinted at the end of this Introduction. The opinions it contains are clever and provocative. The religion of Moses was magical trickery, designed, like all religion, ‘only to keep men in awe'. The New Testament is ‘filthily written', its mysteries sexual scandals. The most entertaining blasphemy – ‘That St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom, and that he used him [note the ambiguity of the pronouns] as the sinners of Sodoma' – sounds like an accusation until you read the disarming sequel: ‘That all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools.'

More important, perhaps, to an understanding of the place of religion in Marlowe's plays is the context of Counter-Reformation Europe. ‘Atheism' in the sixteenth century did not preclude belief in God. It was what you accused someone else of. The unity of Christendom, at once political and religious, was split by a confessional division which turned each side's deepest spiritual convictions to derision. For Protestants, Catholicism was a murderous conspiracy to uphold the hegemony of Spain and the papacy; in Catholic eyes, Protestants were merely seditious heretics. Much of continental Europe was involved in religious wars. Marlowe knew this world – he had been in France as well as in Holland
14
– and it colours the mockeries and solemnities of the plays.

It is literally the setting of
The Massacre at Paris
, which
dramatizes the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre (1572) and its aftermath. The play opens with an ecumenical marriage, but within moments the cast is divided by the key ritual that separated Catholics from Protestants: the Catholics go to mass ‘to honour this solemnity' (which Catherine de Medici promises – aside – to ‘dissolve with blood and cruelty', 1.24–5), leaving the Protestants to express their satisfaction at the discomfiture of the Catholic leader the duke of Guise, and their hope of making the ‘Gospel flourish in this land' (56). Guise is a monster of politic atheism – ‘My policy hath framed religion. / Religion:
O Diabole!
' (2.62–3) – who engineers the massacre to further his own ambition for the crown. The killing is done with grim sacrilegious humour which ‘reproduces with remarkable accuracy forms of ritualized violence peculiar to the French religious wars':
15
Guise kills a preacher with a mockery of a Protestant sermon (‘“Dearly beloved brother” – thus 'tis written.
He stabs him
', 7.5); church-bells sound throughout. The play is virulently anti-Catholic; but, although the text in which it survives is too poor to make certain judgements, its satire seems also to cover the anti-Guisard backlash which follows. Anjou, who has gleefully joined in the killing, becomes king and coolly orders the deaths of the Catholic leaders, only to be slain himself by a treacherous friar. His death allows the Protestant Navarre to gain the throne; but one cannot be sure how complacently an Elizabethan audience would have heard the king's dying call on his minion to ‘slice the Catholics' (24.99), nor Navarre's promise to continue the cycle of violence through revenge. The play's very ‘orthodoxy' is disquieting.

In a sense, this is also true of
Doctor Faustus
. A dark Morality, the play ‘tells the world-story of a man who, seeking for all knowledge, pledged his soul to the devil, only to find the misery of a hopeless repentance in this world and damnation in the world to come'.
16
Marlowe's play should not be confused with later developments of the Faust-legend (‘the world-story'): it is a dramatization of the anonymous German
Faustbook
, which has been called ‘at once a cautionary tale and a book of marvels, a jest-book and a theological tract'.
17
Many of the play's least critically popular scenes are necessary, famous parts of the story
Marlowe took from the
Faustbook
, a distinctive product of post-Reformation Germany, with its anxieties about magic and religion, knowledge and salvation. This is the world in which the play, especially in its opening scenes, is quite precisely set: the unheroic, academic world of Wittenberg, Luther's own university, evoked by the technical language of ‘scholarism' (Prologue, 16) and theology which the characters speak. Faustus' ambitions too are localized: the desire to ‘be as cunning as Agrippa' (1.119) alludes ironically to Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, who explored the practice of learned magic in one book (
De Occulta Philosophia
, 1510, published 1533), and then renounced the follies of learning in another (
De Vanitate Scientiarum
, 1531); Faustus' wish to ‘chase the Prince of Parma from our land' (1.95) makes him a contemporary of Spain's wars in Northern Europe.

Faustus dreams of ‘omnipotence' and hopes ‘All things that move between the quiet poles [of the universe] / Shall be at my command' (1.56, 58–9); instead, he becomes, like Mephistopheles, ‘servant to great Lucifer' (3.41) and a stage-conjuror of a type familiar from other Elizabethan plays (such as the heroes of Robert Greene's
Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay
or Anthony Munday's
John a Kent and John a Cumber
, both
c.
1589). The story told in Marlowe's play, in fact, is well on the way to its ‘degeneration' in the next two centuries into the popular media of ballads, farces and puppet shows – the last being the form in which Goethe first knew it. Yet it is also a spectacle of damnation.

This makes it all the more disturbing that we do not know quite what we are seeing. Consider Faustus' first speech, his survey of the arts and decision to practise magic. The spatial setting, with Faustus turning the pages of books ‘
in his study
' (1.0SD), is exact. But is this happening in real time? Are we actually watching him make his fatal decision, or is the speech a symbolic condensation of a longer process? Is this the speech of a presenter in a Morality play, or of a character in a tragedy? The soliloquy bespeaks a character with an acute inner subjectivity (Faustus names himself obsessively throughout the play), but one who still receives the ministrations of good and evil
angels. The action here, like the play as a whole, is fascinatingly poised between older and still evolving dramatic forms.

There are comparable – fearful – uncertainties in Faustus' encounters with the devil. Mephistopheles is a new kind of devil, quiet, melancholy, menacing in the very honesty with which he explains his coming ‘to get [Faustus'] glorious soul'. And he brings a new, spatially disquieting Hell with him in his own ‘fainting soul': ‘Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.' At first he comes as a familiar ‘Devil'; later, he always accompanies Faustus in the guise of ‘an old Franciscan friar' (3.50, 84,78, 23SD, 26). Since Faustus wears the robes and cross of a Doctor of Divinity (‘a divine in show', 1.3), the stage is occupied – apparently – by two religious figures, both of whom (since Faustus bargains to ‘be a spirit in form and substance', 5.97) are in fact evil spirits. Wagner's mock-academic question about his master – ‘is not he
corpus naturale
?' (2.20–21) – thus has disturbing ironic force. What we see onstage may not be all that is there. Hence the stories of early performances of the play being disrupted by real devils: there is always the danger that a real spirit might answer the actor's summons.
Doctor Faustus
is a spiritual tragedy, a play centred on what cannot be staged, the invisible, immortal soul. Part of what is so disturbing about the pact that consigns in his own blood Faustus' soul to the devil is the ontological uncertainty over how exactly such material, corporeal forms, can bind the immaterial soul. Is it, in fact, the pact that damns Faustus? What does it mean to sell one's soul? Faustus gains no new knowledge: Mephistopheles's answers to his cosmological questions are freshman truisms, and Faustus is stupidly blind to the evidence of his own senses:

FAUSTUS
Come, I think hell's a fable.

…

MEPHISTOPHELES

But, Faustus, I am an instance to prove the contrary,
For I am damnèd and am now in hell. (5.129, 138–9)

Faustus lives for twenty-four years after he signs the pact, but in some sense he is already damned.

A witty student once remarked that the play has ‘a beginning, a muddle, and an end',
18
and Marlowe may not have written all its middle scenes. But there is a terrible bathos in Faustus' adventures. His journeys seem aimless; time is uncertain (the chronology shifts uneasily to the reign of Charles V) and empty, structured only by episodes of trickery. Elizabethan audiences probably enjoyed Faustus' pope-baiting as a liberating defiance of an exploded religious solemnity. Yet there is something troubling here. Magic, in sixteenth-century eyes, was an inverted religion, and, when Faustus and Mephistopheles are anathematized, though they ‘
beat the
FRIARS
,
and fling fireworks among them
' (8.99
SD
), they do also leave. It is not quite clear how much spiritual power the old religion still commands.

The clowning scenes too seem confused and irrelevant. One of their functions is parodic. Wagner is a sorcerer's apprentice whose taking Robin the Clown into his service reflects ironically on Faustus' ambiguous master-servant relationship with Mephistopheles. Faustus experiences his longings as appetites to be glutted, and thinks the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins ‘feeds [his] soul' (7.163): Hazlitt called it ‘a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness'.
19
The Clown's hunger is comparable (‘he would give his soul to the devil for a shoulder of mutton', 4.8–9), but more safely comic. The devils Robin and Rafe conjure up (remember that in the main plot Mephistopheles is free not to answer Faustus' summons) are as familiar as their lice. There is never a sense that their souls are in danger, the clowns are safe with these devils: they are the devils you know, and they play by the older rules. When Mephistopheles punishes them by turning them into animals, they look forward to satisfying their humble appetites: Robin will ‘get nuts and apples enow' as an ape; Rafe's head, as a dog, ‘will never be out of the pottage pot' (9.49, 51). Faustus' jokey adventures, by contrast, are pointless distractions from the appalling reality of his damnation, and, as the ‘fatal time' draws closer, they are full of grim anticipation: ‘What, dost think I am a horse-doctor?' he mockingly asks the Horse-courser, who later pulls off his leg in innocent anticipation of Mephistopheles's threats to dismember
him; and then immediately reels to a sudden apprehension of despair: ‘What art thou, Faustus, but a man condemned to die?' (11.30, 27–8, 29). The play's middle scenes accord with a contradictory Elizabethan aesthetic, violently juxtaposing the serious and the comic.

Its final scenes are highly concentrated. With Faustus' return to Wittenberg, space and time contract, and Marlowe exploits the audience's consciousness of the approaching end. Body and soul are again prominent. ‘Belly-cheer' at the scholars' feast and lust for Helen ‘glut the longing of [his] heart's desire' (13.6, 82), but we are watching a man lose his soul. The good and evil angels no longer appear, their allegorical contest replaced by one between Helen and Mephistopheles and the mysterious Old Man who suddenly materializes with each of Helen's appearances and calls on Faustus to repent. Helen takes both his soul and his bodily substance: Faustus is committing the sin of demoniality, carnal intercourse with an evil spirit (one of the play's editors thought this his unforgivable sin).
20
The Old Man draws attention to other body fluids, calling on Faustus to ‘drop blood, and mingle it with tears' (13.39) in a highly corporeal appeal to the redeemer whose blood Faustus will see streaming ‘in the firmament' in his last hour. Instead, Faustus again uses it to sign away his soul. The bodily and the spiritual are interfused. Faustus has taken a ‘surfeit of deadly sin that hath damned both body and soul', and when he finds himself unable to pray – ‘I would lift up my hands, but see, they hold them, they hold them' (14.75, 11–12, 31–2) – it is all the more disturbing that ‘they' are not, to our eyes, there.

BOOK: The Complete Plays
8.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

A Loving Scoundrel by Johanna Lindsey
Who Killed Palomino Molero? by Mario Vargas Llosa
The King’s Arrow by Michael Cadnum
White Tigress by Jade Lee
Daemon Gates Trilogy by Black Library
Keeping Victoria's Secret by Melinda Peters