The Elizabethans

by Wilson, A. N.

  Absolutely no biographical evidence exists that could furnish psychological explanations for the Marlowe phenomenon – and perhaps such explanations are always inadequate, even when they have data upon which to feed. The records in Canterbury supply abundant evidence of the father’s pugnacious, quarrelsome nature. Marlowe himself may, or may not, have been the precocious writer or pot-boy cited as a witness at a Canterbury ‘victualling house’ when one John Roydon committed a sexual assault on a serving girl, but this is the sort of boyhood we should expect for Marlowe, before his cleverness was trained at the King’s School and got him to Cambridge.

  As a student, he favoured the randy Ovid and the rebellious Lucan – he wrote translations of both. It appears (and this again seems so modern) that even while he was at Cambridge he had somehow been enlisted in political ‘affaires’. In mid-1587 we find Christopher Morley on his way to Reims, working as one of Walsingham’s spies, and posing as a recusant and would-be priest. How was he enlisted? One of his fellow agents, Richard Baines, quoted him as saying that ‘all they that love not tobacco and boies were fooles’.18 One of his Cambridge acquaintances, Thomas Fineux of Hougham, near Dover, attested that ‘Marlowe made him an atheist’. Walsingham would have seen that Marlowe’s lack of religious belief would have made him a very useful spy, when it came to posing as a Catholic: he need have no scruples that would interfere with his work. Perhaps the love of boys played a part in the story – either that Marlowe was involved with a world of homosexual spies, or that he had made himself open to blackmail.

  Nobody knows exactly when Marlowe wrote The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. It seems to be an early work, perhaps from 1588–9.19 Clearly, on the heavily censored London stage, Marlowe could not be blatantly atheistical. Equally clearly, the ‘hellish fall’ of Dr Faustus, which the Chorus, at the end of the play holds up as an object-lesson in the consequences of seeking forbidden knowledge, is thrilling to both author and audience. We are as far as possible, in this play, from the medieval miracle plays in which Heaven and Hell are realities. Marlowe’s Faustus is a rootless sensualist who comes unstuck. But though some members of the audience might have shuddered, as they would at a genuinely religious medieval cycle, the sophisticates among Marlowe’s first audience would read all the signals. F.S. Boas, Marlowe’s biographer, observed that:

  Marlowe must have recognised in Faustus his own counterpart. The Canterbury boy through the bounty of Archbishop Parker had reached Cambridge to qualify himself there for the clerical career. His studies had earned him the Bachelor’s and the Master’s degrees, but he had turned his back on the Church, and on arrival in London had gained a reputation for atheism. Similarly, Faustus through the bounty of a rich uncle had been sent to Wittenberg to study divinity, and had obtained with credit his doctorate in the subject. But his interests lay elsewhere, and he had turned secretly to the study of necromancy and conjuration.20

  Faust is a mythic character who haunts the sixteenth century, and who finds his most eloquent incarnation in Marlowe’s tragi-farce. Luther, in his Table-Talk, had spoken of Faust, the arrogant scholar-turned-necromancer, accompanied by a dog who was really the Devil. These early Protestant accounts of Faust speak of him having died when the Devil decided to wring his neck. Goethe’s Faust is the spokesman of the Enlightenment free-thinker, led eternally onwards to greater intellectual and sexual satisfaction by his having cast aside dogmatic restraints. He is not damned: one of many factors that makes Gounod’s rendering so ludicrous. For Luther and the other Reformers, however, Faust is a terrible warning of what happens to the unbaptised imagination. He deliberately lays aside divine knowledge and goes it alone in quest of knowledge-as-power. The ‘original’ or ‘real’ Faust appears to have been born at the little town of Kindlingen and to have studied at Krakow. Marlowe, by the time he had picked up on the legend, makes him a mainstream German: ‘Of riper years to Wertenberg he went . . .’

  It is astounding how fast the Faust story turned into legend, passing in oral tradition through Poland, France, Holland and England during the 1580s and 1590s. It was very much a current piece of popular lore when Marlowe first saw his play performed. It draws, consciously or otherwise, on many stories circulating in Europe about men selling themselves to Satan in exchange for immortality or secret knowledge. Luther’s horror of the story – and Luther, who was very superstitious, would almost certainly have believed that the Devil could pop up and strangle his adepts on Earth – was based on the fear that in starting (in effect) the Reformation, he had begun something unstoppable, and something that would ultimately rebound against the pure word of God. Among intellectuals, as we have already noticed in our considerations of Dr Dee, the belief in magic was widespread. Marlowe probably did dabble in Satanism, and probably did express atheistic beliefs.

  What he achieved in the theatre, however, was sheer thrill. It is neither more nor less ‘deep’ than a Graham Greene novel:

  I do repent; and yet I do despair:

  Hell strives with grace for conquest in my breast . . .

  Such thrills, which are achieved largely through Marlowe’s superb gifts of rhetoric, in the drama of Faustus, first grabbed the public attention in his bombastic tour de force, the Tamburlaine plays.

  Greek tragedy began as part of religious ceremonial, plumbing deep familial, psychological fears. Tragedy in the English theatre had different wellsprings and found very different settings in which to expand and explore its own possibilities. It exploited the combined skills of travelling, vagabond-actors, singing-boys and comedians. It was staged for mobs hungry for sensation in new, purpose-built – with an emphasis on the built, the enclosed – arenas. In a violent, crowded city, it projected fantasies of power and violence and madness, which drowned the fears and sorrows of its audience with melodramatic horrors, exciting not so much the Fear and Pity that Aristotle had looked for in the poetic masterpieces of Euripides, as the sensationalism of the circus combined with the irrationality of nightmare. A favoured theme was revenge.

  Theirs was a society that depended for its very preservation on the failure to finish what later psychiatric theory would call ‘unfinished business’. There were so many stories in individual English lives at this date that cried for vendetta: the Catholics who resented losing position or land or money for the sake of faith; the old families yielding place to new money; the burgeoning petty-bourgeois Puritan-leaning class of merchants and tradesmen whose voice was unheeded in Church and state, as well as the thousand private causes for resentment in family feuds, street violence or rivalries, commercial or amorous. The law, with a justice so rough that our sensibility could hardly deem it justice at all, cut off a hand here, hanged a miscreant there; disembowelled a traitor, mangled a heretic, whipped a petty-criminal within inches of his life. In this world the story of the lurid murder, revenged after a convoluted story by killings no less bloody, was just what the collective psyche seemed to require.

  Thomas Kyd (1558–94) was a pupil of Mulcaster’s, and a contemporary of Spenser’s, at the Merchant Taylors’ School. His short life followed the pattern of nihilistic disillusion that can be found in the writings of Greene and Nashe or inferred from the death of Marlowe, and which seems to have been almost a sine qua non for theatrical poets: he was arrested on 12 May 1593, and when his rooms were searched, papers were found that allowed his prosecutors to accuse him of atheism. (The purport of these documents seems in fact to have been a rather mild form of Unitarianism.21) He was tortured and died not long afterwards:

  What outcries pluck me from my naked bed,

  And chill my throbbing heart with trembling fear,

  Which never danger yet could haunt before? . . .

  The audiences of Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy enjoyed the gruesome killing of Horatio, the father – Hieronimo – going mad with grief, the staged ‘play within a play’ that helps to unmask the murderers, and the suicide of heroine and hero. The enthusiasm of the crowds for this extraordinary play would not have
been lost on the fledgling dramatist Ben Jonson, who probably contributed some lines to it, or on another young man who had come up to London from Stratford-on-Avon, perhaps as a travelling player. This would have been in the late 1580s, and Shakespeare had left a Stratford in which he could still keenly remember the death of one Katherine Hamlett by drowning;22 she was disinterred when it was feared she died by suicide – one of the many ingredients in his brain, presumably, together with the influence and excitement of Kyd’s tragedy, that would one day fructify as his own complicated revenge-drama.

  But if Kyd gave the crowds an intoxicating cocktail of poetry and gore, moral outrage fulfilled by violence, the emergence of Marlowe as tragedian was indeed a pyrotechnic fizz in the London sky. Tamburlaine gives voice to every mob’s basest political fantasy: namely, that waiting among the crowds at any historical juncture is some Rienzi or Hitler who, regardless of lowly origins, and in defiance of any moral or social convention, can seize pure, naked, delectable power. Those who had felt the charm of Queen Elizabeth I precisely because, and not in spite of, the fact that many denounced her as a bastard; those who loved the piratical side of her nature, and cheered home the looted Spanish gold on Drake’s or Hawkins’s ships, or gathered excitedly to watch bears baited or papists disembowelled – all these would be enraptured by the story of a Scythian shepherd-robber’s aggrandisement, set to a verse the like of which had never been heard in English:

  Now hang our bloody colours by Damascus,

  Reflexing hues of blood upon their heads,

  While they walk quivering on their city-walls,

  Half-dead for fear before they feel my wrath.

  Then let us freely banquet, and carouse

  Full bowls of wine unto the god of war,

  That means to fill your helmets full of gold,

  And make Damascus’ spoils as rich to you

  As was to Jason Colchos’ golden fleece . . .

  Marlowe himself, in his The Massacre at Paris – about St Bartholomew’s Day, 1572 – was fully aware that there was nothing even the most sensation-hungry theatrical impresario could put on stage at the Rose or the Theatre that could match the drama of what was happening to England itself. The dramatists knew that there were rich mines to be plundered from native soil. This applied both to the small-town murder story, such as the 1585(?) Arden of Faversham (an anonymous play, which has been attributed variously to Kyd, Marlowe and Shakespeare, not in any of the three cases entirely convincingly), and to such historical dramas as the anonymous Troublesome History of John, King of England (1587?).

  Clearly, in a world where an ill-judged comment in a political pamphlet could result in author and printer having hands chopped off, any written work that reflected on the current political scene needed to be crafted with great caution. The Tudor dynasty had emerged with dubious legality from a painfully protracted civil war. Anyone with political and historical intelligence in the 1580s knew that the drama of England itself, its evolution as a state, grew out of these civil wars and the contemporary wars with France in the reign of Henry VI. These problems in turn evolved from the succession-wrangles consequent upon Henry Bolingbroke having seized power from Richard II in 1399.

  It was fascinating material for stage-drama: yet dangerous, for one of the repeated and demonstrable truths of English history in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was that no one holds power without consent; that even the most popular or absolute of monarchs can find power slipping, or being grabbed, from their fist. That is a story which all mobs, and no monarchs or tyrants, want to hear.

  It is very unlikely that the play we often refer to as Henry VI Part I was the work of one hand. Authorship of plays was not, especially in the early days of the purpose-built theatres, displayed on billboards, nor did authors retain any rights in material that they would have sold outright to the impresario. Only later, in the unusual situation of an author publishing his play, do we get a sense of authorship in this modern sense. In any case, the first Henry VI play in chronological terms is unlikely to have been the first to have been performed. The First Part of the Contention of the two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster with the Death of the Good Duke Humphrey is what we call Henry VI Part II. Unlike Part I, which seems to have been a heavily collaborative work (scholars detect in it the hands of Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene, Marlowe and George Peele), Part II was largely Shakespeare’s own work.

  Whatever work Shakespeare (1564–1616) had previously done in the theatre, as an actor and as a collaborative playwright contributing to others’ work, it is in the plays about Henry VI – whatever title you give them – that he emerges as a figure in the London theatre. When Shakespeare was in his mid-to-late twenties, Henry VI Parts II and III were complete. Robert Greene denounced the new arrival, with a clear parody of one of Shakespeare’s lines in the play. ‘For there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.’

  Here we have an obvious reference, by an envious, dying man (Greene died on 3 September 1592) to a new star. The ‘Tygers heart’ reference is to Henry VI Part III, Act I, Scene 4. The captive Duke of York stands, humiliated, on a molehill wearing a paper crown and being taunted by the terrifying Queen Margaret. She waves a napkin stained with the blood of York’s son:

  Where are your mess of sons to back you now?

  The wanton Edward, and the lusty George?

  And where’s that valiant crook-back prodigy,

  Dickie your boy, that with his grumbling voice

  Was wont to cheer his dad in mutinies?

  Or, with the rest, where is your darling, Rutland?

  Look, York: I stained this napkin with the blood

  That valiant Clifford, with his rapier’s point

  Made issue from the bosom of the boy . . .

  There had never been writing like this in the English theatre before, and the intimacy of the language – ‘cheer his dad’ – immeasurably adds to the menace and the torture. And here were the Kings and Queens of England, and the cartels of aristocrats who vied for power in the previous century and steeped the country in anarchy and blood, brought alive, in a language that is both realistic (to that degree demotic) and vividly poetic. More than any of the other dramatists, Shakespeare wrote evermore challenging roles for the boy actors playing formidable women. Queen Margaret is the first of them – a great line that will include Cleopatra, Goneril and Regan, Lady Macbeth and Gertrude. Margaret is denounced by York as the ‘she-wolf of France’ and as ‘O, tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide’. So we can have no doubt that the University Wits, of whom Greene was one, saw Shakespeare the man of Stratford as an upstart. Greene’s ‘upstart Crow’ joke is a reference to the Aesop fable in which the crow dresses in the brighter plumage of other birds. Poor Greene, only in his early thirties, was living in abject poverty as the lodger of a poor shoe-maker when he met his end. None of his Cambridge friends came near him in his dejection and sickness. (It appears to have been some sort of food poisoning – he fell ill after a dinner of pickled herring and Rhenish wine.)

  Shakespeare’s histories still work on the stage. The Henry VI plays have enjoyed a number of revivals in England in recent years. Can we hope to reconstruct what the original audiences made of them, or whether the cycle of English history plays – written by Shakespeare and others – conveys some overall shared political viewpoint? Probably not. It is no longer fashionable to suppose that Shakespeare set out to write a National Epic, in which the chronicles of Hall and Holinshed come to life as stage plays. But, as at other periods of history – one thinks of the Soviet theatre, or of the life of the theatre in Paris during the German occupation – the theatre is a flexibly creative outlet for political dissent.

  The Henry VI plays, in particular, do not provide us with a homogeneous or obvious pol
itical message. They are not, as earlier generations of critics wanted to say, a finished piece of propaganda for the Tudor dynasty, or upholders of the Tudor myth, or even a consistent defence of privilege against the mob. On the contrary, in Henry VI Part II, for example, the rebellion of Jack Cade is viewed as a prelude to the anarchy that is going to engulf the whole of England during the Wars of the Roses. But Cade is not viewed as inferior to the aristocrats, whose behaviour is in many ways like his. Indeed, Cade inverts the chivalric code by asserting, ‘The proudest peer in the realm shall not wear a head on his shoulders, unless he pay me a tribute; there shall not a maid be married, but she shall pay to me her maidenhead ere they have it . . .’23 This droit de seigneur is no more than the medieval aristocracy demanded of the English people. Cade is not seen by Shakespeare as less noble than the murderous York family, the bloodthirsty Queen Margaret; or as more of an anarchist than Hotspur and Owain Glyndŵr and the ‘rebels’ of later plays. ‘What, Buckingham and Clifford, are ye so brave? And you, base peasants, do ye believe him?’24

  There is a deep-seated radicalism in the very idea of depicting English history as a stage play, and Shakespeare is by no means the arch-conservative, afraid of taking away ‘degree’, whom an earlier generation saw. By ‘radicalism’, however, I do not mean that Shakespeare – once thought to be right-wing – was really left-wing. I mean that he saw down to the roots of the political realities of his day, more intelligently and more subversively than that. Watching the history plays now is to feel what an extraordinarily explosive, changeable and dangerous period the later years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign were. By looking back at the previous century, when contention about the Crown and the succession were the causes of civil war, the London audiences were looking at their own age – in which Ireland was, as ever, in a state of semi-anarchy and hostility to England; when, behind the doll-like figure of the ageing queen and her court of senescent sycophants, lurked the spectre of the Succession Question. London, in particular, where these plays were staged, was a place where we can meet factions just as likely to tear one another apart as the factions depicted in Shakespeare’s sixteenth-century reconstructions. There were the Roman Catholics hoping for Elizabeth to be replaced by – whom? Arbella Stuart? There were the extreme radicals who wanted the Reformation to be finished. There were the merchants of the City, the money-men who were not sufficiently represented in the seats of power, and who would, together with the Puritans, come to see Parliament as the setting for challenging the royal prerogative. The struggles that turned into the English Civil War all lay ahead, but we can see them at work in Elizabethan London and we can read prophetic meditations upon the issues of that war in Shakespeare’s plays. And we can also read his monumental distaste for politics, his assertion of the personal above the collective. By far the most sympathetic, as well as memorable, figure in all the history plays was not a king or a queen or a noble warrior, but a fat old man who wanted to waste his time (and everyone else’s) in whorehouses and taverns, undermining a prince not for reasons of political anarchy, but because he loved young men and mischief and drink.