by David Riggs
8.3 ‘Universal apprehension’ from Everard Digby, Theoria Analytica, 1579.
Marlowe’s MA course, in Tamburlaine’s words, produced
souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world
And measure every wand’ring planet’s course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.
(1 Tamb, II.vii.21–29)
Divinity was a residual element in this course. The quantitative sciences were still generically religious forms of knowledge, just as they were for Ptolemy. Protestant academics clung to the idea that God is manifest in the orderly structure of the cosmos. In reply to natural philosophers who would ‘destroy the immortality of the soul and deprive God of his rights’, Calvin emphasizes the soul’s innate desire for celestial knowledge. In language that anticipates Tamburlaine’s oration, the theologian praises the ‘manifold nimbleness’ with which the soul ‘surveyeth heaven and earth’, its innate capacity to ‘measure the sky’ and ‘gather the number of the stars … with what swiftness or slowness they go their courses’. The soul ascends to the heavens because it wishes ‘to climb up even to God and to eternal felicity’, for man’s own ‘felicity … is that he be joined with God, and therefore it is the chief action of the soul to aspire thereunto’.
8.4 The Christian Philosopher contemplates the word and works of God. From George Hartgill, General Calendars, 1594.
So long as the path that ran from the created universe to God, the divine creator, remained open, the MA course could prepare Christian philosophers for a career in the Church. The Christian philosopher played a subordinate role, though, in the Elizabethan MA curriculum. Marlowe retraces Calvin’s account of the soul’s celestial journey until Tamburlaine reaches his ultimate destination, ‘The sweet fruition of an earthly crown’. Instead of seeking God in the heavens, Marlowe’s generation charted the earthly course of imperial conquest.
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Poets enjoyed a special place in the study of the heavens. Quintilian made astronomy a prerequisite for anyone who wants ‘to understand the poets’. Gabriel Harvey worried that his protégé Edmund Spenser lacked sufficient astronomical knowledge to be a major poet. ‘It is not sufficient, for poets, to be superficial humanists’, he noted; they had to be ‘curious universal scholars’ as well.
Virgil’s pastorals introduced schoolboys to Silenus, the Orphic bard who ‘sang how, through the vast void, the seeds of earth, and air, and sea, and liquid fire withal were gathered together; how from these elements all nascent things, yes all, and even the young globe of the world grew together’. Since schoolboys concentrated on grammar and vocabulary, they had little incentive to grasp what Silenus was saying. University-level texts were another matter. When Marlowe encountered this famous passage in Manutius’s standard edition of Virgil, the headnote informed him that Silenus’s song contained Epicurus’s opinion about the nature of things, and showed the way from the lesser genre of pastoral to the greater space of poetic fables. In his 1575 edition of the Eclogues, Joseph Scaliger quoted the Greek verses of Orpheus, the legendary bard who sang to Jason and the Argonauts about ‘the creation of the world, and the circuit of the sun and the moon’ and added a lengthy discussion of Epicurean physics, emphasizing the material basis of life: everything derives from material particles, everything will dissolve back into them.
Virgil’s best-known meditation on the poet and the cosmos occurs midway through his Georgics (ii.458–iii.48), where he begs the Muses to
take me to themselves, and show me heaven’s pathways, the stars, the sun’s many eclipses, the moon’s many labours; whence come tremblings of the earth, the force to make deep seas swell and burst their barriers …
Editors surrounded this passage too with quotations from poetic philosophies of nature. The model for Virgil’s journey along the pathways to heaven is Epicurus’s flight of the mind in Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, a journey that ends in the poet’s victory over the Olympian gods and goddesses. Virgil pays homage to Lucretius a few lines later, in his tribute to the one ‘who has succeded in learning the laws of nature’s working, has cast beneath his feet all fear and fate’s implacable decree, and the howl of insatiable Death’. Lucretius in turn salutes Epicurus, who ‘voyaged in mind throughout infinity’: ‘Therefore superstition in its turn lies crushed beneath his feet and we by his triumph are lifted level with the skies.’ By revealing the physical principles that permeate the universe, Epicurus liberated humanity from the fear of the gods and the spectre of divine punishment after death. That is why Manutius glosses the lines where Virgil worries that he will never reach ‘those regions of nature’ with the comment ‘if natural philosophy was not allowed’. Epicurus and Lucretius were primary sources for what the Romans referred to as ‘impiety’ and the Renaissance called ‘atheism’.
Although Virgil chose the path of Roman piety, Aeneas’s poet-companion ‘long-haired Iopas, once taught by mighty Atlas’, belongs to the line of Orpheus. Iopas ‘sings of the wandering moon and the sun’s toils; whence sprang man and beast, whence rain and fire’. Commentators on the Aeneid drew parallels between Iopas and Lucretius, Orpheus, Silenus and Ovid’s creation story. These elaborate circuits of cross-reference reinvigorated the classical myth of the poet-seer: all these Orphic bards had communed with the elemental forces of nature. Aeneas subsequently encounters Orpheus’s disciple Musaeus, the supposed author of the Greek source for Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, in the Elysian Fields, foremost among the ‘priests and pure, good bards, whose songs were meet for Phoebus’. Manutius calls Musaeus ‘the theologian after Orpheus’. The Roman poet-critic Horace revealed that Orpheus, the first poet, had conveyed divine wisdom from the gods and elevated the human race from savagery to civility.
Marlowe knew from grammar school that the ‘first’ poets had set the original standard of correct speech. Now he discovered that they had led humanity from nature to culture. George Puttenham’s Art of English Poetry explained that
forasmuch as [poets] were the first observers of all natural causes and effects in the things generable and corruptible, and from thence mounted up to search after the celestial courses and influences, and yet penetrated further to know the divine essences and substances separate … they were the first Astronomers and Philosophists …
Drawing on the Orphic model, Marlowe equips Tamburlaine with the intellectual credo of a poet-seer. Like Orpheus and his fellow singers, Marlowe’s hero begins with the story of creation (‘Nature that framed us of four elements’) and proceeds along heaven’s pathways, ‘still climbing after knowledge infinite’ (1 Tamb, II.vii.18, 24). He ‘knows the causes of things’ and conveys them to his rustic followers. In the fullness of time, at the end of Marlowe’s Second Part, Tamburlaine becomes the Epicurean poet-hero who ascends the heavens in order to conquer his fear of death.
Elizabethan poets and critics were fascinated by the idea that the ‘first’ poets had simultaneously invented metre, natural philosophy and theology. Master Norgate’s noontime class on Greek taught MA candidates to read Homer and Hesiod, the earliest poet of them all. Hesiod’s Theogony revealed the genealogy of the gods, beginning with the Nine Muses, the daughters of Zeus and Memory and the inspiration for Hesiod’s song. Hesiod’s genealogy is a rigorously mythopoeic creation narrative, with no godlike demiurge to set things right. The cosmos begins in the void and proceeds from there: ‘First came the Chasm, and then broad-breasted Earth [Ops] … Earth bore first of all one equal to herself, starry Heaven,’ Uranus, the original lord of creation and his siblings the Titans. Hesiod’s genealogy related that the abusive Uranus had been castrated by his son Cronus (Saturn), who was killed in turn by his son Zeus (Jupit
er).
Plato singles out the ‘precedent’ established by Saturn and Jupiter to clinch his argument that poets are liars who should be banished from the republic. He objects to Hesiod’s myth of originary patricide not simply because it is false; he further complains that the story is vile, defamatory and apt to corrupt impressionable young people. Indeed, it is the poets’
greatest lie about the things of greatest concernment, which was no pretty invention of him who told how Uranus did what Hesiod says he did to Cronus, and how Cronus in turn took his revenge, and then there are the doings and sufferings of Cronus at the hands of his son.
The false example of Cronus and Zeus, the Greek Saturn and Jupiter, teaches sons to revolt against their fathers. Homer’s depictions of the wars between the gods, Plato continues, make impressionable readers believe that civil strife is a divinely ordained form of life: ‘whatever opinions are taken into the mind at that age are wont to prove indelible and unalterable.’
Tamburlaine invokes this genealogy when he claims that the same acquisitive impulse which ‘caused the eldest son of heavenly Ops / To thrust his doting father from the chair’ prompted him to overthrow the king of Persia: ‘What better precedent than mighty Jove?’ (1 Tamb, II.vii.13–14, 17). Marlowe’s hero does not merely repeat the great lie – he lies about it! The eldest son of heavenly Ops was Titan, whose father Uranus was killed by his younger son Saturn. Jove was the youngest son of Ops and Saturn, the father whom Jove devoured in order to get rid of him once and for all. Every myth of origins comes down to a tangle of fictions. Plato was right – poetry trades in lies. That is the first thing that the Muses say to Hesiod, the first poet: ‘we know how to tell many lies that sound like truth, / but we know to sing reality, when we will.’
Hesiod and Ovid furnished Marlowe with an archaic model of universal history. The crux of this history was the lingering quarrel between Jupiter’s Olympian deities and Saturn’s vanquished siblings. The Titans lay imprisoned beneath Tartarus – the word meant both ‘hell’ and ‘central Asia’ – but still had the capacity to break loose in winds, earthquakes and storms. The mythical war between the Olympian gods and the Giants prolonged this primal struggle into the indefinite future. Ovid’s version of the Gigantomachy emphasizes the moral anarchy that ensues after Jupiter dethrones his father Saturn. Although Jove destroys the Giants, their blood mingles with Mother Earth to create a race ‘that eke against the Gods did bear a native spite’. The Titans rise again, this time to foil the Roman empire, in the imprisoned winds that Juno releases at the beginning of the Aeneid. Horace likens Jupiter’s conquest of the Giants to Augustus’s victory over the enemies of Rome and the establishment of universal order. Yet the Giants could never be vanquished once and for all.
The Titans retained the capacity to transcend their mythic status as cosmic losers. In Lucan’s Civil War, they personify the destructive and creative forces that bring the degenerate Roman republic to ruin. Marlowe, who may have begun translating Lucan around this time, incorporates this revisionist interpretation into Tamburlaine. The hero’s enemies refer to him as a ‘Tartarian thief’ and his men as a ‘Tartarian rout’ and ‘base born Tartars’. The king of Persia grasps the mythical dimension of this ethnic slur:
What means this devilish shepherd to aspire
With such a giantly presumption,
To cast up hills against the face of heaven
And dare the force of angry Jupiter?
But as he thrust them underneath the hills …
So will I send this monstrous slave to hell …
(II.vi.1–7)
Invoking the same myth, the godlike Tamburlaine likens his sword to a force of nature now unleashed, ‘a fiery exhalation / Wrapped in the bowels of a freezing cloud, / Fighting for passage’ (IV.ii.43–45). There is no resisting his elemental power. By the last act, when ‘Jove, viewing me in arms, looks pale and wan, / Fearing my power should pull him from the throne’ (V.i.453–54), Tamburlaine has reduced the Olympian gods to a state of abject fear.
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Marlowe’s work on astronomy and mythology prepared him for the occult science of astrology. Ptolemy defined this obscure sector of astronomy in a famous passage at the beginning of his treatise On Astronomical Prediction. Observing that the sun and the moon influence the climate and the weather, Ptolemy deduced that all heavenly bodies affect the life cycles of plants and animals. The inference made sense to anyone trained in qualitative physics. Since the planets and the stars embody the four primary qualities of heat, cold, humidity and dryness, they are bound to influence bodies made from the four elements of fire, air, water and earth. Yet the precise trajectories of starry influences proved notoriously difficult to calculate – far more so than predicting the tides, or foreseeing where the planets will be at a given point in time. When a BA at St John’s who took up astrology in 1582 ‘repaired to a man in Cambridge famous in this art’ and complained ‘how the uncertainty of the Rules in that Art, did now defeat his hopes’, the Astrologer replied that ‘the Rules of the Art were uncertain indeed, neither was there any cure for it’.
Although astrology had no formal place in the university curriculum, MA candidates routinely studied it and kept notebooks of occult learning. Oxford MA candidates in the 1580s disputed over ‘Whether astrological divination is credible’, ‘Whether there is any power of enchantment’ and ‘Whether gold can be made from baser metals’. Cambridge lacks a comparable register of theses for this period, but degree candidates at the Convocation in 1582 debated the import of a fifteenth-century German astronomer’s curiously prescient forecast that the ‘utter and final overthrow, and destruction of the whole world’ would occur in 1588, the eventual year of the Armada. A notable line of Elizabethan astrologers, including Gabriel Harvey’s younger brother Richard, held places on the college and university faculties.
Astrology was an important part of their students’ graduate training. The queen and her Councillors consulted great wizards like John Dee and Thomas Allen about the timing of state occasions and military engagements. Doctors used astrological tables to determine when to apply the appropriate remedies. Families employed scholars to cast the horoscopes of their children. Almanacs that featured ‘prognostications’ based on astrological reckoning were a major genre of Elizabethan literature: over six hundred of them had been published by 1600, a figure that put the wizards in competition with the Bible. Astrologers had a well-deserved reputation for atheism and idolatry. Since they ‘thought it was a fine thing to be of Gods Counsel, to foreknow secrets’, the art implied ‘contempt of the Providence of God’. Although practitioners were liable to prosecution under the witchcraft statute of 1563, astrologers won preferment in the Church of England. The Earl of Leicester even offered to make Thomas Allen a bishop in return for his services as a wizard.
Richard Harvey’s Astrological Discourse upon the great and notable conjunction of the two Superior Planets Saturn & Jupiter, which shall happen the 28 day of April, 1583 marked a new level of audacity among the Cambridge astrologers. Harvey’s dedicatory letter to the Bishop of London concedes that ‘You may haply marvel what I mean … to deal my self in any such matter of astrology being shortly to profess divinity’, but adds that the Old Testament has its share of wizards. A Fellow of Pembroke College and university lecturer in philosophy, Harvey combined astrology with biblical exegesis, even casting the horoscope of Christ in order to predict the date of the Second Coming. In the meantime, he warned, the imminent conjunction of beneficent Jupiter and baleful Saturn, the very best and worst of all the planets, presaged a wonderfully strange alteration on 28 April 1583. Others were not so sure. The question ‘that we ought well to consider’, wrote Thomas Heath, was ‘whether Saturn in his malice and mischief, be able and of sufficient power to subdue the influence of Jupiter, and those good haps by him signified’. Heath thought it ‘very gross to conclude that Saturn should be so hateful, so hurtful, so despiteful or so malicious’.
Harv
ey’s rash forecast that the ‘conjunction shall be manifested to the ignorant sort by many fierce and boisterous winds’ became a celebrated test case of astrological prediction. The MA candidate William Perkins recalled that the ‘song for half a year was nothing else but the conjunction, the conjunction: the day being come what staring was there and gazing into heaven, to see the meeting of those two planets.’ When ‘Saturn and Jupiter proved honester men than all the World took them for,’ Nashe recalled, Harvey became a laughing-stock. The ‘whole University hissed’, while ‘Tarlton at the Theatre made jests of him’. After Harvey struck back at the ‘piperly Make-plays and Make-baits’ who made fun of him, Nashe left the astrologer to the ridicule of ‘our Poets and Writers about London’. One of these was Robert Greene, who took his MA shortly after the conjunction, and mocked Harvey in print. Another was Nashe’s friend ‘Kit Marlowe’, who ‘was wont to say that [Harvey] was an ass, good for nothing but to preach of the Iron Age’.
Marlowe shared Harvey’s fascination with astrology and social advancement. The upwardly mobile Tamburlaine’s eyes encompass ‘A heaven of heavenly bodies in their spheres / That guides his steps and actions to the throne’ (II.i.16–17); the stars that govern his nativity mark him out for greatness. The playwright, however, understood astrology in a metaphorical, rather than a literal, sense. Standing on the Elizabethan stage, beneath a raised canopy that bore the signs of the zodiac (Hamlet’s ‘majestical roof fretted with golden fire’), Tamburlaine reactivates astrology as dramatic poetry.
