by David Riggs
The climactic acts of wanton violence disclose another eerie point of contact between the two plays. Hieronimo scripts his final murder scene ‘in unknown languages’ because he wants to ‘see the fall of Babylon, / Wrought by the heavens in this confusion’. The zenith of Tamburlaine’s war upon the world likewise comes with the destruction of Babylon. In biblical typology, this event prefigured the coming of Antichrist and the end of the world. For the spectators of 1587, confronting the imminent arrival of the Spanish Armada and the armies of the Pope, the fall of Babylon warned the English that they too lay in the path of divine vengeance.
Kyd too attracted imitators, who penned blank verse revenge plays, such as the anonymous Locrine, Soliman and Perseda and Shakespeare’s True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (an early version of Henry VI, Part Three), that revel in gratuitous cruelty and murder. There are, for example, twenty-eight killings in Soliman and Perseda. By 1589 Thomas Nashe was already complaining that ‘Seneca’s famished followers imitate the Kid in Aesop’ – a chimerical creature (Aesop’s Fables contain no such beast) who has been invented to ridicule his namesake Thomas Kyd. If you ask him nicely, Nashe remarks, Kyd ‘will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls of Tragical speeches’. Nashe’s put-down gives rise to the intriguing idea that Kyd wrote the lost source play for Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Nashe’s gibes appeared in a public letter ‘To the Gentlemen Students of Both Universities’ prefixed to Menaphon, a pastoral novel by Greene. Nashe wanted to show that he and Greene were upstanding men of letters rather than popular writers (which is what they were), so he adopts the stance of a university graduate with an exalted standard of literary correctness. Sarcastically remarking ‘how eloquent our gowned age has grown of late; so that every mechanical mate abhorreth the English he was born to’, Nashe attributes this deplorable trend ‘to the servile imitation of vain glorious Tragedians’. Worse than the players, though, are their poets, ‘their idiot Art-masters’,
who (mounted on the stage of arrogance) think to out-brave better pens with the swelling bombast of bragging blank verse. Indeed it may be the ingrafted overflow of some kill-cow conceit, that overcloyeth their imagination with a more then drunken resolution, being not extemporal in the invention of any other means to vent their manhood, commits the digestion of their choleric encumbrances to the spacious volubility of a drumming decasyllabon.
Despite Nashe’s hectoring tone, one can discern an intelligent, albeit harsh, response to the work of Marlowe and Kyd. These angry young poets imagine that they can outface their social and literary betters through the medium of blank verse. Having no other arena in which to display their manhood, they vent their anger in heavily accented ten-syllable lines. Nashe deplores their work because it is easy to imitate, and is, in fact, being imitated, not only by popular playwrights like Greene, Lodge and Peele, but also by the mechanical mates who paid their penny to hear it spoken. These were plays that Ben Jonson called ‘the Tamerlanes, and Tamer-Chams of the late Age, which had nothing in them but the scenical strutting, and furious vociferation, to warrant them to the ignorant gapers.’
Nashe’s letter to the Gentlemen Students seeks to reinstate the boundary between the learned élite and the popular writers (such as Kyd) ‘that never wore gown at university’. Nashe reserves his highest praise for erudite scholars like Erasmus who have made Greek literature available in Latin; Thomas Watson’s Latin translation of Sophocles’ Antigone rates a mention here. Nashe also admires, in rank order, neo-Latin poets, humanists who translate works from Latin into English and English poets writing in Latin metres. Descending to mainstream English poetry, he gives Spenser pride of place, but also informs the Gentlemen Students that George Peele, Thomas Achelley and Matthew Royden – known only for an elegy on Sir Philip Sidney – are ‘most able men to revive Poetry’. Peele, Royden and Achelley were among the five poets who composed puffs for Watson’s Hekatompathia. They appear to be a clique. Marlowe never joined it, and Kyd, to judge from Nashe’s ‘Letter,’ was actively being excluded in 1589.
The lowest species of literary life is the popular playwright. Among this motley crew, Nashe singles out ‘a sort of shifting companions’ that ‘leave the trade of Noverint [slang for scrivener] whereto they were born, and busy themselves with endeavours of art’. These English followers of Seneca ‘imitate the Kid’ who ‘forsook all hopes of life to leap into a new occupation’ and ‘intermeddle with Italian translations’. This upstart Senecan tragedian is Thomas Kyd, who really was born into the trade of scrivener, and had just translated two works into Italian. Not content to leave it at that, Nashe reports that after Kyd and his followers ‘bodge up a blank verse’, they ‘spend two or three hours turning over French Dowdie’ in ‘the inner parts of the City’. Put simply, they spend their idle hours leafing through French crap at the bookstalls in the churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral.
Why did Nashe have at Kyd? After all, Nashe refers approvingly to George Peele and ‘sundry other sweet Gentlemen I know’, despite the fact that they too have ‘Tricked up a company of taffeta fools [players] with their feathers [quills, pens]’. The simple answer is class: unlike Nashe, Peele, Greene and Marlowe, Thomas Kyd did not have a university degree to gentle his condition. Yet Kyd was close enough in age, status, talent and literary accomplishment to threaten Greene and Nashe’s precarious sense of gentility. Three years later, Greene would attack the upstart William Shakespeare on the same grounds. Kyd compounded the offence by winning fame and notoriety among the lewd multitudes who congregated at the theatres. Along with Marlowe, Kyd was the first English playwright to gain a wide following in the public playhouses. As a social conservative – recall his vitriolic feud with Gabriel Harvey – Nashe responded to Kyd’s popular ascendancy with ridicule and scorn. His attack on the vogue of ‘bragging blank verse’ also conveys disapproval for Marlowe’s popular appeal, if not for his work as such. But Nashe refrains from mentioning his friend and fellow graduate.
Greene, however, does refer to Marlowe in the text of Menaphon. Making fun of what he calls a ‘Canterbury tale’, Greene remarks that it was told by a ‘prophetical full mouth that as he were a Cobbler’s eldest son, would by the last tell where another’s shoe wrings’. Greene’s backhanded compliment takes a smack at the eldest son of the Canterbury cobbler John Marlowe. The would-be prophet’s shoe wrings by the last on which his father fashioned footwear. Like Kyd, the playwright has left the trade into which he was born, transgressing the limits of his birth and status.
The playwrights’ pupils, the mechanical mates who have grown eloquent of late, flourished in oral milieux where plebeian poets gave extempore renditions of Marlowe, Kyd and their imitators. In the space of twenty lines, Shakespeare’s Ancient Pistol alludes to Tamburlaine (‘Holla ye pampered jades of Asia’), The Spanish Tragedy (‘To Pluto’s damned lake, by this hand’), The Battle of Alcazar (‘Then feed and be fat, my fair Calipolis!’) and Locrine (‘to th’infernal deep, with Erebus and tortures vile also!’). While the evidence is literary, the joke presupposes a widely shared understanding of a real subculture. In one of Joseph Hall’s satiric sketches, the drunken poet who impersonates ‘the Turkish Tamburlaine’ inspires ‘the brave-minded hungry youth’ to ‘patch me up his pure Iambic verse’. George Wither depicts a similar gathering at which inebriated makers rehearse ‘Some fragments of their new created verse / With such a Gesture, and in such a Tone, / As if Great Tamburlaine upon his Throne’.
The mighty line imparted ‘a more than drunken resolution’. By the time Hall’s extemporizing poet is done, ‘his poor hearer’s hair quite upright sets’. His pupil, the brave-minded hungry youth, ‘ravishes the gazing scaffolders’. Wither’s well-lubricated maker contrives ‘To strike his hearers dead with admiration’. These vignettes reveal that the mighty line had a remarkable capacity to propagate itself in the playhouse and the tavern, the key sites of popular culture. The art of making ‘pure Iambic verse’, formerly the preserve of educated
scholars, had become available to any customer who could afford standing room in the yard or the price of a drink. That is why a social conservative like Nashe found Marlowe’s blank verse so disturbing: anyone could make it. ‘Shame that the muses should be bought and sold,’ Hall complained, ‘For every peasant’s brass on scaffold.’
Virtually all the contemporary allusions to Tamburlaine clustered around three notorious images: the caged emperor Bajazeth; the display of white, red and black colours on successive days to convey Tamburlaine’s orders for the citizens to evacuate a besieged town; and the team of captive kings drawing Tamburlaine’s chariot. These scenes show Tamburlaine at the top of his sadistic game, projecting enormous force in a confined theatrical space. Such moments captured the imagination of Pistol and the roaring boys, offering them a fantasy of absolute self-empowerment, unimpeded by social custom or religious belief.
From a religious standpoint, the same images evoked the terrifying operations of divine wrath. A preface written before March 1588 by one J. F., usually identified with the Puritan leader John Field, introduces a sermon by Edward Dering with an urgent plea for Church reform:
Surely, surely, if now it be neglected, let us not think long, to escape unpunished. It will be too late the third day to entreat for mercy. Tamerlane, God’s vengeance, when his black tents are once up, though we come out never so humbly with Laurel in our hands, beclad in white garments, yet will he not be entreated, but by the self same sins whereby we have offended, with the same we shall be punished.
Field could be drawing on a written source, but the detail of the laurel is unique to Marlowe’s play, which had not been printed yet. In the standard sources for this scene the supplicants bring olive branches, for peace. John Field, the prominent anti-theatrical writer, apparently refers to a live performance of Tamburlaine. Tamburlaine’s black tents signify what God will do if parliament declines to meet the Puritans’ demands ‘now’ before it is ‘too late’. The roaring boy and the militant Presbyterian both use Marlowe’s hero as a displaced image of violent agency. He is a veiled threat, a calamity waiting to happen.
The curious case of Mr Thomas Fineaux affords another glimpse of Marlowe’s growing notoriety. A native of Dover, Thomas Fineaux came up to Cambridge, where he enrolled at Corpus Christi, in the Easter term of 1587. He arrived just as Marlowe was leaving, but it is easy to imagine that these two Corpus men from Kent would have run into one another. The Canterbury antiquarian Simon Aldrich, a younger contemporary of Marlowe who spent many years as a scholar and Fellow at Cambridge, relates that ‘Marlowe had a friend named Phineaux, at Dover, who he made an Atheist; but who was made to recant and write a sermon on the text “The Fool hath said in his heart There is no God”.’
Aldrich adds that Fineaux made a speech on this passage from Psalm 13 ‘to get his degree’. Since Thomas Fineaux was due to get his degree in 1590, Aldrich’s story indicates that Marlowe’s hold over his young disciple began in the late 1580s, while Fineaux was an undergraduate at Corpus Christi. If so, Marlowe’s influence already extended beyond the mechanical mates who were swept away by Edward Alleyn’s performances. Fineaux, who ‘affirmed his soul died with his body & as we can remember nothing before we were born: so we shall remember nothing after’, had grasped the meaning of 2 Tamburlaine. Despite his command performance, the freethinking Thomas Fineaux never did receive his BA from Cambridge. Like his mentor, he showed little aptitude for the ministry.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘He is like Dr Faustus’
Greene’s jab at ‘Merlin’s race’ gestures in the direction of Dr Faustus, Marlowe’s tragedy about a magician who sells his soul to the devil. The late Elizabethan fascination with conjuror plays began shortly after Tamburlaine and persisted throughout Marlowe’s lifetime. Marlowe’s relationship to this vogue is a puzzle in his biography. Did he write Dr Faustus towards the beginning of his career or at the end of it? Did he start the trend or adapt to it?
From a biographical standpoint, the early date has much to recommend it. Marlowe altered his source to include a great deal of material drawn from university life, some of which pertains to Cambridge. The story of a recent graduate who must decide what to do with his life bore directly on Marlowe’s personal circumstances in 1587–88. Putting Dr Faustus in the late 1580s, next to The Jew of Malta (1589–91), brings out the parallels between his two close imitations of the morality play. Dr Faustus recalls the allegorical figure of Mankind choosing between his Good Angel and his Evil Angel – though Marlowe insinuates that Faustus has already been chosen for sin and damnation. The Jew stages the traditional battle of the vices and virtues – though the Christians in the Jew turn out to be disconcertingly vicious. This chronology lends an attractive symmetry to Marlowe’s career: he proceeds from heroic drama written in the classical style (Dido and Tamburlaine) to the native form of the morality play (Faustus and the Jew), to the new vernacular genre of the history play (Edward II and The Massacre at Paris).
Hard evidence for the date of Dr Faustus is elusive. Marlowe’s main source was P.F.’s translation of the German Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587) into the English Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr John Faustus. The question of when Marlowe wrote Dr Faustus turns on the related issue of when he first laid eyes on P.F.’s translation. This is a tricky matter. In May 1592, the yeoman printer Abel Jeffes went to the Stationers’ Company’s Court of Assistants and asserted that he held the copyright to P.F.’s Damnable Life. The basis for Jeffes’s claim is not given, but he almost certainly alleged that he had already published the book.
Jeffes was held in contempt of the court on another matter that summer, and could no longer seek its protection. Taking advantage of Jeffes’s predicament, Thomas Orwin printed The Damnable Life later in 1592. Although this is the sole surviving text of P.F.’s translation, the title page of Orwin’s edition states that it is ‘Newly imprinted and in convenient places imperfect matter amended’. This advertisement refers to an earlier edition, evidently the one printed by Jeffes. When the Court of Assistants finally did hear Jeffes’s case on 18 December they found in his favour. Finally, the estate of an Oxford student who died in 1589 included a copy of ‘Dr Faustus’; so Marlowe could have had access to Jeffes’s lost and undated edition of the Damnable Life by that point.
The evidence for an earlier date of 1588–90 largely consists of passages in the 1591 text of The Troublesome Reign of King John that echo the final soliloquy in Dr Faustus. One cannot be sure that the author of The Troublesome Reign lifted these lines from Marlowe. In the case of Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI and Marlowe’s Edward II, the one instance where the identity of the borrower can be decided on textual grounds, Marlowe was borrowing from Shakespeare. Still, the Prologue to The Troublesome Reign openly disapproves of Tamburlaine, and the passages that overlap with Dr Faustus exhibit the same anti-Marlowe bias. In his last soliloquy, Marlowe’s Faustus personifies the hardened sinner who cannot repent, try as he may. The Protestant hero King John echoes the sinner’s rhetoric of despair, but rises above it, like ‘the Kingly prophet David’, to prophesy the Tudor monarchy: ‘From out these loins shall spring a Kingly branch / Whose arms shall reach unto the gates of Rome.’
Finally, one wonders why P.F., Abel Jeffes and Christopher Marlowe would have waited five years to set Dr Faustus’s story before English audiences. Johann Spies’s 1587 edition of the German Historia von D. Johann Fausten instantly became an international bestseller and cultural phenomenon. The German text went through at least fourteen editions between 1587 and 1593. A group of students at Tübingen made a version in rhymed doggerel that appeared in 1588. There were early translations into Danish, Dutch, French and Czech. A ballad called ‘The Life and Death of the Great Conjuror Dr Faustus’ was entered in the Stationers’ Register in February 1589. Letters from English students at Wittenberg (1589) and Leipzig (1590) speak knowledgeably about Faustus’s story. Hugh Holland, writing in 1590, cites ‘Faustus’ in support of his claim that
‘many fabulous pamphlets are published’ concerning the flight of witches; Faustus’s attempt to fly at Venice had already become the stuff of legend. Small wonder that Jeffes and White wrangled over The Damnable Life; they sought the English rights to a myth in the making.
* * *
The historical Dr Georgius Faustus had begun conjuring spirits shortly before the Reformation, during the tolerant era of Pico della Mirandola and Cornelius Agrippa. A travelling German magician, he styled himself the ‘second magus’ and ‘younger Faustus’ in homage to Simon, the biblical Magus, and his double Faustus, the original ‘second magus’.
Simon the Magician had practised sorcery in the New Testament city of Samaria, where he notoriously offered the apostles Peter and John money if they would teach him how to channel the Holy Spirit through the laying on of hands. The apocryphal Acts of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul relates that Simon Magus established his own religion, used sorcery to rival the miracles of Jesus, travelled to Rome – where he performed tricks for the emperor Nero – and kept the reincarnated Helen of Troy for his consort. The magician even contrived his own resurrection, only to be dashed in pieces when St Peter ordered the demons that bore Simon aloft to ‘let him go’. Simon’s enduring legacy turned out to be Faustus, the disciple whom he transformed into his double. Faustus’s German Renaissance namesake George, the ‘younger Faustus’, proclaimed himself ‘second magus’ at the historic moment when Luther and his followers decided that all magicians were in league with the devil. The Lutherans took George Faust’s act in earnest, even giving him the apostolic name of John to underscore his corrupt biblical lineage.
