The Complete Plays (4 page)

When the Old Man dies, his body tormented but his soul untouched, he walks off the stage into another world (‘Hence, hell! For hence I fly unto my God', 13.118), and we are made acutely aware of that other world at the end of the play. As in the first scene, Faustus is alone in his study; but he ‘sees' Heaven and Hell. Time ‘really' passes in this scene's ‘one bare hour' – the clock strikes it – and beyond it, ‘perpetually' (14.63, 64), stretches damnation. Faustus' monologue is a frenzied attempt to stop the cosmic clock, but his magic is useless: ‘The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, / The devil will
come, and Faustus must be damned' (14.72–3). His punishment approaches with the inexorability of a natural law. His body does not ‘turn to air', nor his soul ‘into little waterdrops' (14.113, 115). The devils come and lead him out of sight.

His fall is as inevitable as the law of gravity. God seems not to act at all – perhaps the most fearful thing to its first audiences. In ancient tragedy, the gods destroy a mortal who offends them with his pride (
hubris
). Marlowe's application of this tragic model to the damnation of Faustus is not reassuring to a Christian audience.

‘Pythagoras'
metempsychosis
' (14.104), the transmigration of the soul, offers no escape in the harshly orthodox world of
Doctor Faustus
. At the start of
The Jew of Malta
, the soul of Machevil (Machiavelli's post-mortem name spells out his immorality as clearly as his claiming to ‘count religion but a childish toy', Prologue, 14), having transmigrated through the body of the duke of Guise, arrives to ‘present' (Prologue, 30) Barabas, who sits in his counting-house, like Faustus in his study, counting his wealth – ‘Infinite riches in a little room' (1.1.37). Thereafter, the soul is irrelevant to the material world of a play filled with jewels and gold. Malta itself is a little room, cramped and urban, a fortified Mediterranean island which draws Turks, Christians and Jews alike, all blown in by ‘The wind that bloweth all the world besides: / Desire of gold' (3.5.3–4). Religious differences here are harshly ethnic, territorial, not moral. The Knights of Malta sanctimoniously confiscate Barabas's wealth to buy off the Turks, and most of the action is taken up with his vengeance against Ferneze for this judicial theft. The play is largely a satire on Christian venality and hypocrisy. There is little poetry: ‘The Passionate Shepherd' reappears in parody-form in the mangled mythologies of the runaway slave Ithamore's invitation to the prostitute Bellamira:

The language is dominated by obliquities, puns and asides. It is a revenge-tragedy that tips over into farce, ‘the farce of the old English comic humour', in T.S. Eliot's inescapable formulation, ‘terribly serious even savage comic humour'.
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Barabas entirely dominates the plot, and he is something other than a vulgar anti-Semitic stereotype: he is a stereotype, a monster, in the making. Alone when he first appears, Barabas is consistently isolated. He feels no more solidarity with his fellow Jews than with ‘these swine-eating Christians, / (Unchosen nation, never circumcised…)' (2.3.7–8), and is unmoved by the Turkish threat: ‘Nay, let 'em combat, conquer, and kill all, / So they spare me, my daughter, and my wealth' (1.1.150–51). But the provisos make him vulnerable. Robbed of his wealth and his house, he becomes further desocialized. His soliloquies and snarling asides, besides being brilliant comic devices, are also the verbal tics of a man talking principally to himself. The complex satirical functions of his interactions are especially clear in 2.3, in which he lures his daughter's two Christian suitors, Lodowick and Mathias, into a murderous rivalry to be avenged on Lodowick's father. Barabas covers his asides to the audience with some invented Jewish ritual:

This enactment of Jewish separateness maliciously parodies the Christian fantasy of the
foetor Judaicus
, the ‘Jewish stench' supposedly given off by menstruating Jewish men, and neatly captures the mutual hostility of the two religions.
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Later in the scene, a respectable Christian matron conveniently illustrates the usual prejudice: ‘Converse not with him, he is cast off from heaven' (3.161). But this apartheid masks a secret commerce. Both groups, after all, have come to buy people at a Christianrun slave-market; the ‘diamond' Barabas discusses with Lodowick is his daughter. But in the complicated equivocations it is
not clear Lodowick knows they are talking about Abigall. The puns are Barabas's private joke.

Something odd happens to him in this scene. Many readers complain that his famous ‘confession' to Ithamore, a compound of familiar anti-Semitic fantasy – ‘As for myself, I walk abroad a-nights / And kill sick people groaning under walls' (3.177–8) – is both ethically and aesthetically offensive. Why should so secretive a character blurt out the truth? Is this earlier career not implausible? Exactly. As he talks with his newly purchased
alter ego
(‘we are villains both. / Both circumcisèd, we hate Christians both', 3.217–18), we watch Barabas being dehumanized,
becoming
the anti-Semitic mask he wears (‘O brave, master, I worship your nose for this!', 3.176). From now on, he is alienated even from Abigail – eventually, he kills her – and creates a mock-family by promising, falsely, to adopt Ithamore as his heir. There is a huge comic relish in his murder of a whole convent along with his daughter in an act of poisonous charity, and as his murderousness gets funnier, it gets steadily less and less human, as in his response to the passing bells that sound for the nuns (compare the bells in
The Massacre at Paris
):

He suffers a further symbolic loss of identity when he goes to poison Ithamore disguised as a French lutanist. And when he ‘dies', his dehumanization is completed by having his corpse thrown out over the city-walls like rubbish.

Those who deplore this un-charactering of Barabas also feel the play tails off in its later acts into unmotivated intrigue. Certainly,
The Jew of Malta
is Marlowe's only play to make such extensive use of intrigue, and its characters share Barabas's delight in ‘crossbiting' (4.3.13): Ithamore wonders,

This delight in symmetry is present in individual scenes – Shakespeare found the germ of
Romeo and Juliet
's balcony-scene in the antithetically constructed 2.1 – and in the plot at large. For the ending brings Barabas full circle. In the opening scenes, he had recognized the exclusion of the Jews from political power, and was content not only to leave such power to Christian ‘policy' (1.1.138), but to relish his own separation from the ‘polity'. At the end, when he is made governor, he rashly forgets Ferneze's unscrupulousness, and is therefore caught in his own trap, dropped into the burning cauldron he has prepared for the Turks. If this has the too-neat symmetry of poetic justice, it also makes Ferneze's closing
Te Deum
seem all the more ironic.

Edward the Second
too is markedly symmetrical. In charting the king's decline, from his coronation to abjection and murder, the play also frames the rise and fall of his lover Gaveston, in the first half, and, in the second, the rise and fall of his enemy Mortimer. Looked at more closely, its symmetries are those of irreconcilable conflict, the civil war that breaks out to the cries,

WARWICK

EDWARD

This pattern of verbal contest is everywhere. Characters measure lines like swords:

MORTIMER

EDWARD

The barons' hatred of Edward's love is less homophobia than class-antagonism. Gaveston is an upstart on whom the king showers favours at the expense of the old nobility. From his first appearance, he is a Marlovian overreacher, who, while Edward loves him, thinks himself

Unlike
Tamburlaine
, however, or Shakespeare's history-plays,
Edward the Second
is strikingly unceremonious. ‘Triumphs' here often mean ‘idle triumphs, masques, lascivious shows' (6.156), erotic courtly entertainments of the kind with which Gaveston intends to manipulate ‘the pliant king' (1.52), lavish tournaments without the substance of military power. Edward and Gaveston's love looks like a hopeless fantasy in the face of the barons' armed muscle:

EDWARD

Lay hands on that traitor Mortimer!

MORTIMER SENIOR

Lay hands on that traitor Gaveston!

[
They seize
GAVESTON
.]

KENT

Is this the duty that you owe your king?

WARWICK

We know our duties. Let him know his peers. (4.20–23)

This manhandling is symptomatic. In this brutally pragmatic world, physical proximity, bodily intimacy, is the key to political influence. Gaveston is exiled and returned; Edward embraces him and pushes Isabel his queen aside. The first half of the action is literally fought out over the possession of Gaveston's body, ‘That, like the Greekish strumpet [Helen], trained to arms / And bloody wars so many valiant knights' (9.15–16). When the barons get hold of him, they bundle him round the stage and the country, and then treacherously cut off his head. Beheadings and references to beheadings are unnervingly abundant. They point forward to the play's final tableau, in which Mortimer's head is placed on top of the coffin of the recently murdered king, whose own death – on a bed, with a red-hot spit forced up into his bowels – is an obscene parody of sexual penetration.

The middle scenes are confusing, filled with sudden shifts
of allegiance and unexpected reversals of fortune. Mortimer emerges as a full-blown Machiavellian and seduces the queen, who changes from wronged wife into her more historically traditional role of ‘she-wolf of France'. But the biggest changes are in Edward. Almost imperceptibly, as he is separated from Gaveston, his affections are transferred to the younger Spencer, to whom he is introduced, pointedly, on Gaveston's wedding-day, and with whom, rather than with Gaveston, he flees from Tynemouth. More importantly, he is now a pathetic victim, and it is his body that is moved passively about the stage. The people change but the roles remain the same, and the characters are increasingly aware of traditional patternings that give shape to the action. Mortimer's ascendancy is a familiar affair: Edward is his prisoner and he keeps control of the prince by physically abducting him from his uncle; Kent is dispatched in the usual way:

EDWARD III

My lord, he is my uncle and shall live.

MORTIMER

My lord, he is your enemy and shall die. (24.90–1)

Appropriately, Mortimer envisions his own career in the traditional, secular terms of the wheel of Fortune (26.59–63).

But there is something more eerie in the counterpointed scenes of Edward's fall. Disguised in a monk's habit and surrounded by other cowled figures, the king begins to contemplate his decline as an instance of the medieval genre of the Falls of Princes, his language too becoming momentarily archaic: ‘Whilom I was, powerful and full of pomp' (20.13). A play which opened with a fantasy of Renaissance courtly shows (‘Italian masques by night', 1.54) is becoming medieval. Its action fills with obscure atavistic menace. The mower who betrays Edward is only ‘A gloomy fellow in a mead below' (20.29) – but he is a Reaper, a figure of death touched in to the landscape. ‘The day grows old' (20.85) in the most ordinary sense, but the diurnal references are oddly insistent about the coming of night, and the emphasis returns when the king,
plunged into darkness in the closing scenes, tries, like Faustus, to hold back the end of the day:

His head brought low by uncrowning and unmanned by shaving, his deconsecrated body immersed in excrement and murderously violated through the anus, Edward's torments are physically appalling symbolic degradations. They suggest the torments of the damned, and his murderer is a kind of devil. ‘Lightborne' is a version of ‘Lucifer', and he shares the name with a fallen angel in the Chester Mystery plays. The closing scenes of this least providential of history-plays are full of a hellish fear that is made the worse by being so resolutely unreligious.

Modern criticism, concentrating on Marlowe's ‘subversiveness', sometimes makes him sound like Joe Orton in doublet and hose. To some Elizabethans, he was something more dangerous. Richard Baines's testimony against Marlowe includes the pious wish that ‘all men in Christianity ought to endeavour that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped'. Speculation continues that, when Marlowe was killed in Deptford in May 1593, that is exactly what happened.
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