SOURCE: "Marlowe and the Will to Absolute Play," in his Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, The University of Chicago Press, 1980, pp. 193-221.

On 26 June 1586 a small fleet, financed by the Earl of Cumberland, set out from Gravesend for the South Seas. It sailed down the West African coast, sighting Sierra Leone in October, and at this point we may let one of those on board, the merchant John Sarracoll, tell his own story:

The fourth of November we went on shore to a town of the Negroes, … which we found to be but lately built: it was of about two hundred houses, and walled about with mighty great trees, and stakes so thick, that a rat could hardly get in or out. But as it chanced, we came directly upon a port which was not shut up, where we entered with such fierceness, that the people fled all out of the town, which we found to be finely built after their fashion, and the streets of it so intricate that it was difficult for us to find the way out that we came in at. We found their houses and streets so finely and cleanly kept that it was an admiration to us all, for that neither in the houses nor streets was so much dust to be found as would fill an egg shell. We found little in their houses, except some mats, gourds, and some earthen pots. Our men at their departure set the town on fire, and it was bumt (for the most part of it) in a quarter of an hour, the houses being covered with reed and straw.¹

This passage is atypical, for it lacks the bloodbath that usually climaxes these incidents, but it will serve as a reminder of what until recently was called one of the glorious achievements of Renaissance civilization, and it will serve as a convenient bridge from the world of Edmund Spenser to the world of Christopher Marlowe.

What is most striking in Sarracoll's account, of course, is the casual, unexplained violence. Does the merchant feel that the firing of the town needs no explanation? If asked, would he have had one to give? Why does he take care to tell us why the town burned so quickly, but not why it was burned? Is there an aesthetic element in his admiration of the town, so finely built, so intricate, so cleanly kept? And does this admiration conflict with or somehow fuel the destructiveness? If he feels no uneasiness at all, why does he suddenly shift and write not we but our men set the town on fire? Was there an order or not? And, when he recalls the invasion, why does he think of rats? The questions are all met by the moral blankness that rests like thick snow on Sarracoll's sentences: "The 17th. day of November we departed from Sierra Leona, directing our course for the Straits of Magellan."

If, on returning to England in 1587, the merchant and his associates had gone to see the Lord Admiral's Men perform a new play, Tamburlaine the Great, they would have seen an extraordinary meditation on the roots of their own behavior. For despite all the exoticism in Marlowe—Scythian shepherds, Maltese Jews, German magicians—it is his own countrymen that he broods upon and depicts. As in Spenser, though to radically different effect, the "other world" becomes a mirror.² If we want to understand the historical matrix of Marlowe's achievement, the analogue to Tamburlaine's restlessness, aesthetic sensitivity, appetite, and violence, we might look not at the playwright's literary sources, not even at the relentless power-hunger of Tudor absolutism, but at the acquisitive energies of English merchants, entrepreneurs, and adventurers, promoters alike of trading companies and theatrical companies.

But what bearing does Marlowe actually have on a passage like the one with which I opened? He is, for a start, fascinated by the idea of the stranger in a strange land. Almost all of his heroes are aliens or wanderers, from Aeneas in Carthage to Barabas in Malta, from Tamburlaine's endless campaigns to Faustus's demonic flights. From his first play to his last, Marlowe is drawn to the idea of physical movement, to the problem of its representation within the narrow confines of the theater. Tamburlaine almost ceaselessly traverses the stage, and when he is not actually on the move, he is imagining campaigns or hearing reports of grueling marches. The obvious effect is to enact the hero's vision of a nature that "Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds" and of the soul that "Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest" (I Tam 2.6.871, 877). But as always in Marlowe, this enactment, this realization on the level of the body in time and space, complicates, qualifies, exposes, and even mocks the abstract conception. For the cumulative effect of this restlessness is not so much heroic as grotesquely comic, if we accept Bergson's classic definition of the comic as the mechanical imposed upon the living. Tamburlaine is a machine, a desiring machine that produces violence and death. Menaphon's admiring description begins by making him sound like Leonardo's Vitruvian Man or Michelangelo's David and ends by making him sound like an expensive mechanical device, one of those curious inventions that courtiers gave to the queen at New Year's: a huge, straight, strongly jointed creature with a costly pearl placed between his shoulders, the pearl inscribed with celestial symbols. Once set in motion, this thing cannot slow down or change course; it moves at the same frenzied pace until it finally stops.

One further effect of this unvarying movement is that, paradoxically, very little progress seems to be made, despite fervent declarations to the contrary. To be sure, the scenes change, so quickly at times that Marlowe seems to be battering against the boundaries of his own medium: at one moment the stage represents a vast space, then suddenly contracts to a bed, then turns in quick succession into an imperial camp, a burning town, a besieged fortress, a battlefield, a tent. But then all of those spaces seem curiously alike. The relevant contrast is Antony and Cleopatra where the restless movement is organized around the deep structural opposition of Rome and Egypt, or I Henry IV where the tavern, the court, and the country are perceived as diversely shaped spaces, spaces that elicit and echo different tones, energies, and even realities. In Tamburlaine Marlowe contrives to efface all such differences, as if to insist upon the essential meaninglessness of theatrical space, the vacancy that is the dark side of its power to imitate any place. This vacancy—quite literally, this absence of scenery—is the equivalent in the medium of the theater to the secularization of space, the abolition of qualitative up and down, which for Cassirer is one of the greatest achievements of Renaissance philosophy, the equivalent then to the reduction of the universe to the coordinates of a map.³

Give me a Map, then let me see how much
Is left for me to conquer all the world,
That these my boys may finish all my wants.
(2 Tam 5.3.4516-18)

Space is transformed into an abstraction, then fed to the appetitive machine. This is the voice of conquest, but it is also the voice of wants never finished and of transcendental homelessness. And though the characters and situations change, that voice is never entirely absent in Marlowe. Barabas does not leave Malta, but he is the quintessential alien: at one point his house is seized and turned into a nunnery, at another he is thrown over the walls of the city, only to rise with the words, "What, all alone?" Edward II should be the very opposite; he is, by his role, the embodiment of the land and its people, but without Gaveston he lives in his own country like an exile. Only in Doctor Faustus does there seem to be a significant difference: having signed away his soul and body, Faustus begins a course of restless wandering, but at the close of the twenty-four years, he feels a compulsion to return to Wittenberg.⁴ Of course, it is ironic that when a meaningful sense of place finally emerges in Marlowe, it does so only as a place to die. But the irony runs deeper still. For nothing in the covenant or in any of the devil's speeches requires that Faustus has to pay his life where he originally contracted to sell it; the urge is apparently in Faustus, as if he felt there were a fatality in the place he had undertaken his studies, felt it appropriate and even necessary to die there and nowhere else. "O would I had never seen Wittenberg," he despairingly tells his friends. But the play has long before this exposed such a sense of place to radical questioning. To Faustus's insistent demands to know the "where about" of hell, Mephistophilis replies,

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd
In one self place, for where we are is hell,
And where hell is, must we ever be.
(567-69)

By implication, Faustus's feeling about Wittenberg is an illusion, one of a network of fictions by which he constitutes his identity and his world. Typically, he refuses to accept the account of a limitless, inner hell, countering with the extraordinary, and in the circumstances, ludicrous "I think hell's a fable." Mephistophilis's quiet response slides from parodic agreement to devastating irony: "Aye, think so still, till experience change thy mind."⁵ The experience of which the devil speaks can refer not only to torment after death but to Faustus's life in the remainder of the play: the half-trivial, half-daring exploits, the alternating states of bliss and despair, the questions that are not answered and the answers that bring no real satisfaction, the wanderings that lead nowhere. The chilling line may carry a further suggestion: "Yes, continue to think that hell's a fable, until experience transforms your mind." At the heart of this mental transformation is the anguished perception of time as inexorable, space as abstract. In his final soliloquy, Faustus's frenzied invocation to time to stop or slow itself gives way to horrified clarity: "The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike" (1460). And his appeal to nature—earth, stars, air, ocean—at once to shield him and destroy him is met by silence: space is neutral and unresponsive.

Doctor Faustus then does not contradict but rather realizes intimations about space and time in Marlowe's other plays. That man is homeless, that all places are alike, is linked to man's inner state, to the uncircumscribed hell he carries within him. And this insight returns us to the violence with which we began, the violence of Tamburlaine and of the English merchant and his men. It is not enough to say that their actions are the expression of brute power, though they are certainly that, nor even that they bespeak a compulsive suspicion and hatred that one Elizabethan voyager saw as characteristic of the military mind.⁶ For experiencing this limitlessness, this transformation of space and time into abstractions, men do violence as a means of marking boundaries, effecting transformation, signaling closure. To burn a town or to kill all of its inhabitants is to make an end and, in so doing, to give life a shape and a certainty that it would otherwise lack. The great fear, in Barabas's words, is "That I may vanish o'er the earth in air, / And leave no memory that e'er I was" (1.499-500). As the town where Zenocrate dies burns at his command, Tamburlaine proclaims his identity, fixed forever in the heavens by his acts of violence:

Over my Zenith hang a blazing star,
That may endure till heaven be dissolv'd,
Fed with the fresh supply of earthly dregs,
Theat'ning a death and famine to this land.
(2 Tam 3.2.3196-99)

In this charred soil and the blazing star, Tamburlaine seeks literally to make an enduring mark in the world, to stamp his image on time and space. Similarly, Faustus, by violence not on others but on himself, seeks to give his life a clear fixed shape. To be sure, he speaks of attaining "a world of profit and delight, / Of power, of honor, of omnipotence" (83-84), but perhaps the hidden core of what he seeks is the limit of twenty-four years to live, a limit he himself sets and reiterates.⁷ Time so marked out should have a quality different from other time, should possess its end: "Now will I make an end immediately," he says, writing with his blood.

But in Marlowe's ironic world, these desperate attempts at boundary and closure produce the opposite effect, reinforcing the condition they are meant to efface. Tamburlaine's violence does not transform space from the abstract to the human, but rather further reduces the world to a map, the very emblem of abstraction:

I will confute those blind Geographers
That make a triple region in the world,
Excluding Regions which I mean to trace,
And with this pen reduce them to a Map,
Calling the Provinces, Cities and towns
After my name and thine Zenocrate.
(1 Tam 4.4.1715-20)

At Tamburlaine's death, the map still stretches out before him, and nothing bears his name save Marlowe's play (the crucial exception to which we will return).⁸ Likewise at his death, pleading for "some end to my incessant pain," Faustus is haunted by eternity: "O no end is limited to damned souls" (1458).

The reasons why attempts at making a mark or an end fail are complex and vary significantly with each play, but one critical link is the feeling in almost all Marlowe's protagonists that they are using up experience. This feeling extends to our merchant, John Sarracoll, and his men: they not only visit Sierra Leone, they consume it. Tamburlaine exults in just this power to "Conquer, sack, and utterly consume / Your cities" (2 Tam 4.2.3867-68). He even contrives to use up his defeated enemies, transforming Bajazeth into his footstool, the kings of Trebizon and Soria into horses to be discarded, when they are broken-winded, for "fresh horse" (2 Tam 5.1.4242). In a bizarrely comic moment, Tamburlaine's son suggests that the kings just captured be released to resume the fight, but Tamburlaine replies, in the language of consumption, "Cherish thy valor still with fresh supplies: / And glut it not with stale and daunted foes" (2 Tam 4.1.3761-62). Valor, like any appetite, always demands new food.

Faustus's relationship to knowledge is strikingly similar; in his opening soliloquy he bids farewell to each of his studies in turn as something he has used up. He needs to cherish his mind with fresh supplies, for nothing can be accumulated, nothing saved or savored. And as the remainder of the play makes clear, each of these farewells is an act of destruction: logic, medicine, law, and divinity are not so much rejected as violated. The violence arises not only from the desire to mark boundaries but from the feeling that what one leaves behind, turns away from, must no longer exist; that objects endure only for the moment of the act of attention and then are effaced; that the next moment cannot be fully grasped until the last is destroyed. Marlowe writes in the period in which European man embarked on his extraordinary career of consumption, his eager pursuit of knowledge, with one intellectual model after another seized, squeezed dry, and discarded, and his frenzied exhaustion of the world's resources.⁹

Lo here my sons are all the golden Mines,
Inestimable drugs and precious stones,
More worth than Asia and the world beside,
And from th'Antartic Pole, Eastward behold
As much more land which never was descried,
Wherein are rocks of Pearl that shine as bright
As all the Lamps that beautify the Sky,
And shall I die, and this unconquered?
(2 Tam 5.3.4544-51)

So fully do we inhabit this construction of reality that most often we see beyond it only in accounts of cultures immensely distant from our own: "The Nuer [writes Evans-Pritchard] have no expression equivalent to 'time' in our language, and they cannot, therefore, as we can, speak of time as though it were something actual, which passes, can be wasted, can be saved, and so forth. I do not think that they ever experience the same feeling of fighting against time or of having to co-ordinate activities with an abstract passage of time because their points of reference are mainly the activities themselves, which are generally of a leisurely character.… Nuer are fortunate."¹⁰ Of course, such a conception of time and activity had vanished from Europe long before the sixteenth century, but English Renaissance works, and Marlowe's plays in particular, give voice to a radically intensified sense that time is abstract, uniform, and inhuman. The origins of this sense of time are difficult to locate with any certainty. Puritans in the late sixteenth century were already campaigning vigorously against the medieval doctrine of the unevenness of time, a doctrine that had survived largely intact in the Elizabethan church calendar. They sought, in effect, to desacramentalize time, to discredit and sweep away the dense web of saints' days, "dismal days," seasonal taboos, mystic observances, and folk festivals that gave time a distinct, irregular shape; in its place, they urged a simple, flat routine of six days work and a sabbath rest.¹¹ Moreover, there seem, in this period, to have been subtle changes in what we may call family time. At one end of the life cycle, traditional youth groups were suppressed or fell into neglect, customs that had allowed adolescents considerable autonomy were overturned, and children were brought under the stricter discipline of the immediate family. At the other end, the Protestant rejection of the doctrine of purgatory eliminated the dead as an "age group," cutting off the living from ritualized communion with their deceased parents and relatives.¹² Such changes might well have contributed to a sense in Marlowe and some of his contemporaries that time is alien, profoundly indifferent to human longing and anxiety. Whatever the case, we certainly find in Marlowe's plays a powerful feeling that time is something to be resisted and a related fear that fulfillment or fruition is impossible. "Why waste you thus the time away?" an impatient Leicester asks Edward II, whose crown he has come to fetch. "Stay a while," Edward replies, "let me be king till night" (2045), whereupon, like Faustus,¹³ he struggles vainly to arrest time with incantation. At such moments, Marlowe's celebrated line is itself rich with irony: the rhythms intended to slow time only consume it, magnificent words are spoken and disappear into a void. But it is precisely this sense of the void that compels the characters to speak so powerfully, as if to struggle the more insistently against the enveloping silence.

That the moments of intensest time-consciousness all occur at or near the close of these plays has the effect of making the heroes seem to struggle against theatrical time. As Marlowe uses the vacancy of theatrical space to suggest his characters' homelessness, so he uses the curve of theatrical time to suggest their struggle against extinction, in effect against the nothingness into which all characters fall at the end of a play. The pressure of the dramatic medium itself likewise underlies what we may call the repetition compulsion of Marlowe's heroes. Tamburlaine no sooner annihilates one army than he sets out to annihilate another, no sooner unharnesses two kings than he hitches up two more. Barabas gains and loses, regains and reloses his wealth, while pursuing a seemingly endless string of revenges and politic murders, including, characteristically, two suitors, two friars, two rulers, and, in effect, two children. In Edward II the plot is less overtly episodic, yet even here, after spending the first half of the play alternately embracing and parting from Gaveston, Edward immediately replaces the slain favorite with Spencer Junior and thereby resumes the same pattern, the willful courting of disaster that is finally "rewarded" in the castle cesspool. Finally, as C. L. Barber observes, "Faustus repeatedly moves through a circular pattern, from thinking of the joys of heaven, through despairing of ever possessing them, to embracing magical dominion as a blasphemous substitute."¹⁴ The pattern of action and the complex psychological structure embodied in it vary with each play, but at the deepest level of the medium itself the motivation is the same: the renewal of existence through repetition of the self-constituting act. The character repeats himself in order to continue to be that same character on the stage. Identity is a theatrical invention that must be reiterated if it is to endure.

To grasp the full import of this notion of repetition as self-fashioning, we must understand its relation to the culturally dominant notion of repetition as a warning or memorial, an instrument of civility. In this view recurrent patterns exist in the history of individuals or nations in order to inculcate crucial moral values, passing them from generation to generation.¹⁵ Men are notoriously slow learners and, in their inherent sinfulness, resistant to virtue, but gradually, through repetition, the paradigms may sink in and responsible, God-fearing, obedient subjects may be formed. Accordingly, Tudor monarchs ordered the formal reiteration of the central tenets of the religious and social orthodoxy, carefully specifying the minimum number of times a year these tenets were to be read aloud from the pulpit.¹⁶ Similarly, the punishment of criminals was public, so that the state's power to inflict torment and death could act upon the people as an edifying caution. The high number of such executions reflects not only judicial "massacres"¹⁷ but the attempt to teach through reiterated terror. Each branding or hanging or disemboweling was theatrical in conception and performance, a repeatable admonitory drama enacted on a scaffold before a rapt audience. Those who threatened order, those on whose nature nurture could never stick—the traitor, the vagabond, the homosexual, the thief—were identified and punished accordingly. This idea of the "notable spectacle," the "theater of God's judgments," extended quite naturally to the drama itself, and, indeed, to all of literature which thus takes its rightful place as part of a vast, interlocking system of repetitions, embracing homilies and hangings, royal progresses and rote learning.¹⁸ It is by no means only timeservers who are involved here; a great artist like Spenser, as we have seen, embraces his participation in this system, though, of course, that participation is more complex than most. In Spenser's rich and subtle version of the civilizing process, the apparent repetitions within each book and in The Faerie Queene as a whole serve to initiate hero and reader alike into the nuances of each of the virtues, the complex discriminations that a humane moral sensibility entails, while, as we have seen, the shifting resolutions of analogous problems help to shore up values that are threatened by the shape of a prior resolution. The heroes' names and the virtues they embody both exist prior to the experiences chronicled in their books and are fully established by means of those experiences; Spenserean repetition expresses that which is already in some sense real, given by the power that exists outside the poem and that the poem celebrates.

Marlowe seems to have regarded the drama's participation in such a system—an admonitory fiction upholding a moral order—with a blend of obsessive fascination and contemptuous loathing. Tamburlaine repeatedly teases its audience with the form of the cautionary tale, only to violate the convention. All of the signals of the tragic are produced, but the play stubbornly, radically, refuses to become a tragedy. "The Gods, defenders of the innocent, / Will never prosper your intended drifts" (I Tam 1.2.264-65), declares Zenocrate in act 1 and then promptly falls in love with her captor. With his dying breath, Cosroe curses Tamburlaine—a sure prelude to disaster—but the disaster never occurs. Bajazeth, the king of Arabia, and even Theridamas and Zenocrate have powerful premonitions of the hero's downfall, but he passes from success to success. Tamburlaine is proud, arrogant, and blasphemous; he lusts for power, betrays his allies, overthrows legitimate authority, and threatens the gods; he rises to the top of the wheel of fortune and then steadfastly refuses to budge. Since the dominant ideology no longer insists that rise-and-decline and pride-goes-before-a-fall are unvarying, universal rhythms, we undoubtedly miss some of the shock of Tamburlaine's career, but the play itself invokes those rhythms often enough to surprise us with their failure to materialize.

Having undermined the notion of the cautionary tale in Tamburlaine, part 1, Marlowe demolishes it in part 2 in the most unexpected way—by suddenly invoking it. The slaughter of thousands, the murder of his own son, the torture of his royal captives are all without apparent consequence; then Tamburlaine falls ill, and when? When he burns the Koran! The one action which Elizabethan churchmen themselves might have applauded seems to bring down divine vengeance.¹⁹ The effect is not to celebrate the transcendent power of Mohammed but to challenge the habit of mind that looks to heaven for rewards and punishments, that imagines human evil as "the scourge of God." Similarly, in Doctor Faustus, as Max Bluestone observes, the homiletical tradition is continually introduced only to be undermined by dramatic spectacle,²⁰ while in Edward II Marlowe uses the emblematic method of admonitory drama, but uses it to such devastating effect that the audience recoils from it in disgust. Edward's grisly execution is, as orthodox interpreters of the play have correctly insisted, iconographically "appropriate," but this appropriateness can only be established at the expense of every complex, sympathetic human feeling evoked by the play. The audience is forced to confront its insistence upon coherence, and the result is a profound questioning of the way audiences constitute meaning in the theater and in life.²¹

There is a questioning too of the way individuals are constituted in the theater and in life. Marlowe's heroes fashion themselves not in loving submission to an absolute authority but in self-conscious opposition: Tamburlaine against hierarchy, Barabas against Christianity, Faustus against God, Edward against the sanctified rites and responsibilities of kingship, marriage, and manhood. And where identity in More, Tyndale, Wyatt, and Spenser had been achieved through an attack upon something perceived as alien and threatening, in Marlowe it is achieved through a subversive identification with the alien.…

Marlowe stands apart then from both orthodoxy and skepticism; he calls into question the theory of literature and history as repeatable moral lessons, and he calls into question his age's characteristic mode of rejecting those lessons. But how does he himself understand his characters' motivation, the force that compels them to repeat the same actions again and again? The answer, as I have already suggested, lies in their will to self-fashioning. Marlowe's heroes struggle to invent themselves; they stand, in Coriolanus's phrase, "As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin" (5.3.36-37). Shakespeare characteristically forces his very Marlovian hero to reach out and grasp his mother's hand; in Marlowe's plays, with the exception of Dido Queen of Carthage, we never see and scarcely even hear of the hero's parents. Tamburlaine is the son of nameless "paltry" Scythians, Faustus of "parents base of stock" (12), and Barabas, so far as we can tell, of no one at all. (Even in Edward II, where an emphasis on parentage would seem unavoidable, there is scant mention of Edward I.) The family is at the center of most Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as it is at the center of the period's economic and social structure,³⁴ in Marlowe it is something to be neglected, despised, or violated. Two of Marlowe's heroes kill their children without a trace of remorse; most prefer male friendships to marriage or kinship bonds; all insist upon free choice in determining their intimate relations. Upon his father's death, Edward immediately sends for Gaveston; Barabas adopts Ithamore in place of Abigail; Faustus cleaves to his sweet Mephistophilis; and, in a more passionate love scene than any with Zenocrate, Tamburlaine wins the ardent loyalty of Theridamas.

The effect is to dissolve the structure of sacramental and blood relations that normally determine identity in this period and to render the heroes virtually autochthonous, their names and identities given by no one but themselves. Indeed self-naming is a major enterprise in these plays, repeated over and over again as if the hero continues to exist only by virtue of constantly renewed acts of will. Augustine had written in The City of God that "if God were to withdraw what we may call his 'constructive power' from existing things, they would cease to exist, just as they did not exist before they were made."³⁵ In the neutrality of time and space that characterizes Marlowe's world, this "constructive power" must exist within the hero himself; if it should fail for an instant he would fall into nothingness, become, in Barabas's words, "a senseless lump of clay / That will with every water wash to dirt" (1.450-51). Hence the hero's compulsion to repeat his name and his actions, a compulsion Marlowe links to the drama itself. The hero's re-presentations fade into the reiterated performances of the play.

If Marlowe's protagonists fashion themselves, they are, as we have seen, compelled to use only those forms and materials produced by the structure of relations in their particular, quite distinct worlds. We watch Tamburlaine construct himself out of phrases picked up or overheard: "And ride in triumph through Persepolis" (I Tam 2.5.754) or "I that am term'd the Scourge and Wrath of God" (I Tam 3.3.1142). Like the gold taken from unwary travelers or the troops lured away from other princes, Tamburlaine's identity is something appropriated, seized from others.³⁶ Even Edward II, with his greater psychological complexity, can only clothe himself in the metaphors available to this station, though these metaphors—the "Imperial Lion," for example—often seem little applicable. And the most haunting instance in Marlowe of this self-fashioning by quotation or appropriation occurs in Doctor Faustus, when the hero concludes the signing of the fatal deed with the words "Consummatum est" (515).

To unfold the significance of this repetition of Christ's dying words, we must restore them to their context in the Gospel of John:

After this, Jesus knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the Scripture might be fulfilled, saith, I thirst. Now there was set a vessel full of vinegar: and they filled a sponge with vinegar, and put it upon hyssop, and put it to his mouth. When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished [Consummatum est]: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost.

(19:28-30)³⁷

As it is written in psalm 69, "and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink," so it is fulfilled; Christ's thirst is not identical to the body's normal longing for drink, but an enactment of that longing so that he may fully accomplish the role darkly prefigured in the Old Testament. The drink of vinegar is the final structural element in the realization of his identity. Faustus's use of Christ's words then evokes the archetypal act of roletaking; by reenacting the moment in which Christ acknowledges the fulfillment of his being, the magician hopes to touch upon the primal springs of identity itself. But whatever identity Faustus can thereby achieve is limited to the status of brilliant parody. His blasphemy is the uncanny expression of a perverse, despairing faith, an appropriation to himself of the most solemn and momentous words available in his culture to mark the decisive boundary in his life, an ambiguous equation of himself with Christ, first as God, then as dying man.

"Consummatum est" is the culmination of Faustus's fantasies of making an end, and hence a suicide that demonically parodies Christ's self-sacrifice. But in the Gospel, as we have seen, the words are a true end; they are spoken at the moment of fulfillment and death. In Doctor Faustus they are rather a beginning, spoken at the moment Faustus is embarking on his bargain. Unlike Christ, who is his own transcendent object, and whose career is precisely the realization of himself, Faustus, and all of Marlowe's self-fashioning heroes, must posit an object in order to exist. Naming oneself is not enough; one must also name and pursue a goal. And if both the self and object so constituted are tragically bounded by the dominant ideology against which they vainly struggle, Marlowe's heroes nevertheless manifest a theatrical energy that distinguishes their words as well as their actions from the surrounding society. If the audience's perception of radical difference gives way to a perception of subversive identity, that too in its turn gives way: in the excessive quality of Marlowe's heroes, in their histrionic extremism, lies that which distinguishes their self-fashioning acts from the society around them. The Turks, friars, and Christian knights may all be driven by acquisitive desire, but only Barabas can speak of "Infinite riches in a little room," only he has the capacity for what one must call aesthetic experience:

Bags of fiery Opals, Sapphires, Amethysts,
Jacinths, hard Topaz, grass-green Emeralds,
Beauteous Rubies, sparkling Diamonds,
And seld-seen costly stones.…
(1.60-63)

Similarly, Theridimas may declare that "A God is not so glorious as a King," but when he is asked if he himself would be a king, he replies, "Nay, though I praise it, I can live without it" (I Tam 2.5.771). Tamburlaine cannot live without it, and his reward is not only "The sweet fruition of an earthly crown" but what Plato's rival Gorgias conceives as "the magic violence of speech."³⁸

It is this Gorgian conception of rhetoric, and not the Platonic or Aristotelian, that is borne out in Marlowe's heroes. For Gorgias man is forever cut off from the knowledge of being, forever locked in the partial, the contradictory, and the irrational. If anything exists, he writes, it is both incomprehensible and incommunicable, for "that which we communicate is speech, and speech is not the same thing as the things that exist."³⁹ This tragic epistemological distance is never bridged; instead, through the power of language men construct deceptions in which and for which they live. Gorgias held that deception—apate—is the very essence of the creative imagination: the tragic artist exceeds his peers in the power to deceive. Such a conception of art does not preclude its claim to strip away fraud, since tragedy "with its myths and emotions has created a deception such that its successful practitioner is nearer to reality than the unsuccessful, and the man who lets himself be deceived is wiser than he who does not."⁴⁰ In The Jew of Malta Barabas the deceiver gives us his own version of this aesthetic: "A counterfeit profession," he tells his daughter, "is better / Than unseen hypocrisy" (1.531-32). In the long run, the play challenges this conviction, at least from the point of view of survival: the Governor, who is the very embodiment of "unseen hypocrisy" eventually triumphs over the Jew's "counterfeit profession." But Marlowe uses the distinction to direct the audience's allegiance toward Barabas; to lie and to know that one is lying seems more attractive, more aesthetically pleasing, and more moral even, than to lie and believe that one is telling the truth.…

Man can only exist in the world by fashioning for himself a name and an object, but these, as Marlowe and Montaigne understood, are both fictions. No particular name or object can entirely satisfy one's inner energy demanding to be expressed or fill so completely the potential of one's consciousness that all longings are quelled, all intimations of unreality silenced. As we have seen in the controversy between More and Tyndale, Protestant and Catholic polemicists demonstrated brilliantly how each other's religion—the very anchor of reality for millions of souls—was a cunning theatrical illusion, a demonic fantasy, a piece of poetry. Each conducted this unmasking, of course, in the name of the real religious truth, but the collective effect upon a skeptical intellect like Marlowe's seems to have been devastating. And it was not only the religious dismantling of reality to which the playwright was responding. On the distant shores of Africa and America and at home, in their "rediscovered" classical texts, Renaissance Europeans were daily confronting evidence that their accustomed reality was only one solution, among many others, of perennial human problems. Though they often tried to destroy the alien cultures they encountered, or to absorb them into their ideology, they could not always destroy the testimony of their own consciousness. "The wonder is not that things are," writes Valery, "but that they are what they are and not something else."⁴⁸ Each of Marlowe's plays constitutes reality in a manner radically different from the plays that preceded it, just as his work as a whole marks a startling departure from the drama of his time. Each of his heroes makes a different leap from inchoate appetite to the all-consuming project: what is necessary in one play is accidental or absent in the next. Only the leap itself is always necessary, at once necessary and absurd, for it is the embracing of a fiction rendered desirable by the intoxication of language, by the will to play.

Marlowe's heroes must live their lives as projects, but they do so in the midst of intimations that the projects are illusions. Their strength is not sapped by these intimations: they do not withdraw into stoical resignation or contemplative solitude, nor do they endure for the sake of isolated moments of grace in which they are in touch with a wholeness otherwise absent in their lives. Rather they take courage from the absurdity of their enterprise, a murderous, self-destructive, supremely eloquent, playful courage. This playfulness in Marlowe's works manifests itself as cruel humor, murderous practical jokes, a penchant for the outlandish and absurd, delight in role-playing, entire absorption in the game at hand and consequent indifference to what lies outside the boundaries of the game, radical insensitivity to human complexity and suffering, extreme but disciplined aggression, hostility to transcendence.

There is some evidence, apart from the cruel, aggressive plays themselves, for a similar dark playfulness in Marlowe's own career, with the comic (and extremely dangerous) blasphemies, the nearly overt (and equally dangerous) homosexuality—tokens of a courting of disaster as reckless as that depicted in Edward or Faustus. In the life, as in the plays, the categories by which we normally organize experience are insistently called into question—is this a man whose recklessness suggests that he is out of control or rather that he is supremely in control, control so coolly mocking that he can, to recall Wyatt, calculate his own excesses? What little we know about Marlowe's mysterious stint as a double agent in Walsingham's secret service—it seems that he went to Rheims in 1587, perhaps posing as a Catholic in order to ferret out incriminating evidence against English Catholic seminarians—and what little we can gather from the contents of the Baines libel suggests, beyond estrangement from ideology, a fathomless and eerily playful self-estrangement. The will to play flaunts society's cherished orthodoxies, embraces what the culture finds loathsome or frightening, transforms the serious into the joke and then unsettles the category of the joke by taking it seriously, courts self-destruction in the interest of the anarchic discharge of its energy. This is play on the brink of an abyss, absolute play.

In his turbulent life and, more important, in his writing, Marlowe is deeply implicated in his heroes, though he is far more intelligent and self-aware than any of them. Cutting himself off from the comforting doctrine of repetition, he writes plays that spurn and subvert his culture's metaphysical and ethical certainties. We who have lived after Nietzsche and Flaubert may find it difficult to grasp how strong, how recklessly courageous Marlowe must have been: to write as if the admonitory purpose of literature were a lie, to invent fictions only to create and not to serve God or the state, to fashion lines that echo in the void, that echo more powerfully because there is nothing but a void. Hence Marlowe's implication in the lives of his protagonists and hence too his surmounting of this implication in the creation of enduring works of art. For the one true goal of all these heroes is to be characters in Marlowe's plays; it is only for this, ultimately, that they manifest both their playful energy and their haunting sense of unsatisfied longing.

Notes

¹ "The voyage set out by the right honourable the Earle of Cumberland, in the yere 1586.… Written by M. John Sarracoll marchant in the same voyage," in Richard Hakluyt, ed., The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, 12 vols. (Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons, 1903-5), 11:206-7. On the English in Sierra Leone prior to this voyage, see P. E. H. Hair, "Protestants as Pirates, Slavers, and Proto-missionaries: Sierra Leone 1568 and 1582," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 21 (1970), pp. 203-24. On the region in this period, see Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800 (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1970).

² At the opening of Tamburlaine there is a wry reminder of how exotic Europe would appear to a Persian: "Europe, where the Sun dares scarce appear, / For freezing meteors and congealed cold" (1 Tam 1.1.18-19). Quotations of Marlowe's plays with the exception of Doctor Faustus, are modernized from The Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910). Quotations of Doctor Faustus are modernized from the A text of W. W. Greg's Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus" 1604-1616: Parallel Texts (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1950). My own reading of the play supports recent arguments for the superiority of the A text; see Fredson Bowers, "Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: The 1602 Additions," (Studies in Bibliography 26 [1973], 1-18) and Constance Brown Kuriyama (English Literary Renaissance 5 [1975], 171-97).

On the relationship of Spenser and Marlowe, see Douglas Bush, "Marlowe and Spenser," Times Literary Supplement, 28 May 1938, p. 370; T. W. Baldwin, "The Genesis of Some Passages which Spenser Borrowed from Marlowe," English Literary History 9 (1942), pp. 157-87, and reply by W. B. C. Watkins in ELH 11 (1944), 249-65; John D. Jump, "Spenser and Marlowe," Notes and Queries 209, new ser. 11 (1964), pp. 261-62. See also Georg Schoeneich, "Der literarische Einfluss Spensers auf Marlowe" (Diss., Halle, 1907).

³ See Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1963), esp. chap. 1, "Nicholas Cusanus." In Doctor Faustus Marlowe plays upon the residual religious symbolism of the Elizabethan stage (though this is more true of the B text than the A text), but he does so only to subvert it, locating hell psychologically rather than spatially.

On maps in Marlowe, see Ethel Seaton, "Marlowe's Map," Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association 10 (1924), pp. 13-35; Donald K. Anderson, Jr., "Tamburlaine's 'Perpendicular' and the T-in-O Maps," Notes and Queries 21 (1974), pp. 284-86.

⁴ Here, as elsewhere in my discussion of Doctor Faustus, I am indebted to conversations with Edward Snow and to his essay, "Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and the Ends of Desire," in Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, ed. Alvin B. Keman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 70-110.

⁵ The agreement depends, in part, on the pun on Aye/I (the latter is the reading of the A and B texts). "Experience" may also have the sense of "experiment," as if Faustus's whole future were a test of the proposition that hell is a fable.

⁶ See Richard Madox's Diary for 14 December 1582: "Although the soldiers are strong and sufficiently courageous, they are utterly inept at trading and the exploring of unknown lands. Because, indeed, being always among enemies and in a hostile place, they believe they are [here] exposed to the usual dangers; for this reason they can never enter into dealings with others without suspicion. Suspicion, however, breeds hatred and hatred open war, and thus those they ought to attract and attach to themselves by human kindness and clemency, they frighten off by impudence and malice, and in this way all love perishes. Especially because of ignorance of languages, each is a barbarian to the other" (An Elizabethan in 1582, ed. Donno, p. 186). In the light of this passage, perhaps the odd conjunction of admiration and destructiveness in Sarracoll's account may be traced to the difference between the merchant's view of the town and the view (and consequent actions) of the soldiers who were with him.

⁷ Snow, "Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and the Ends of Desire," p. 101.

⁸ The futility of naming cities after oneself was a commonplace in the period; see, for example, Ralegh's History of the World (1614):

This was that Seleucia, whereto Antigonus the great who founded it, gave the name of Antigonia: but Seleucus getting it shortly after, called it Seleucia; and Ptolemie Evergetes having lately won it, might, if it had so pleased him, have changed the name into Ptolemais. Such is the vanity of men, that hope to purchase an endless memorial unto their names, by works proceeding rather from their greatness, than from their virtue; which therefore no longer are their own, than the same greatness hath continuance. (V, v, 2, p. 646)

⁹ The cutting edge of this career was the conquest of the New World where fertile lands, rich mines, and whole peoples were consumed in a few generations. It is estimated that the Indian population of New Spain (Mexico) fell from approximately 11 million in 1519 to approximately 1.5 million in 1650, and there are similarly horrifying figures for Brazil. In 1583 a Jesuit, Jose de Anchieta, observed of the latter that "the number of people used up in this place from twenty years ago until now seems a thing not to be believed" (quoted in Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System [New York: Academic Press, 1974], 80, n. 75); appropriately, it is on this great enterprise (among others) that the dying Tamburlaine, with infinite pathos, reflects.

¹⁰ E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1940), p. 103; quoted in E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present 38 (1967), p. 96.

¹¹ 'See Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), p. 621; likewise, Christopher Hill, Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England, 2d ed. (New York: Schocken, 1967), chap. 5.

¹² See Natalie Zemon Davis, "Some Tasks and Themes in the Study of Popular Religion," in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, eds. Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), pp. 307-36. I am also indebted to Professor Davis's essay, "Ghosts, Kin and Progeny: Some Features of Family Life in Early Modern France," Daedalus 106 (1977), pp. 87-114.

¹³ On time in Doctor Faustus, see Max Bluestone, "Adaptive Time in Doctor Faustus," in From Story to Siege: The Dramatic Adaptation of Prose Fiction in the Period of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries [Studies in English Literature, n. 70] (The Hague: Mouton, 1974), pp. 244-52; David Kaula, "Time and the Timeless in Everyman and Dr. Faustus," College English 22 (1960), pp. 9-14.

¹⁴ C. L. Barber, "'The form of Faustus' fortunes good or bad,'" Tulane Drama Review 8 (1964), p. 99.

¹⁵ For a typical expression of this view, see Ralegh's History: "The same just God who liveth and governeth all things for ever, doth in these our times give victory, courage and discourage, raise and throw down Kings, Estates, Cities, and Nations, for the same offences which were committed of old, and are committed in the present: for which reason in these and other the afflictions of Israel, always the causes are set down, that they might be as precedents to succeeding ages" (II, xix, 3, pp. 508-9).

¹⁶ See, for example, the Edwardian proclamations: #287 and #313, in Tudor Royal Proclamations, 1:393-403, 432-33.

¹⁷ This characterization of the period's legal procedure is Christopher Hill's: "The Many-Headed Monster in Late Tudor and Early Stuart Political Thinking," in From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation: Essays in Honor of Garrett Mattingly, ed. Charles H. Carter (New York: Random House, 1965), p. 303. Hill's view is close to Thomas More's in Utopia: Thieves "were everywhere executed, … as many as twenty at a time being hanged on one gallows" (Utopia, p. 61). Statistics are inexact and inconsistent, but, for example, 74 persons were sentenced to death in Devon in 1598, and the average number of executions per year in London and Middlesex in the years 1607-1616 was 140 [Douglas Hay, "Property, Authority and the Criminal Law," in Hay et al., Albion's Fatal Tree (New York: Random House, 1975), p. 22n].

¹⁸ The Mirror for Magistrates is typical for its tireless repetition of the same paradigm of retributive justice, while both tragedy and comedy are quite characteristically conceived by Sidney, in the Apology for Poetry, as warnings and lessons. This conception continues to dominate sociological theories of literature; see, for example, Elizabeth Burns, Theatricality (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 35.

¹⁹ On English Renaissance attitudes toward the Koran, see Samuel C. Chew, The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1937), esp. pp. 434ff.

²⁰ Max Bluestone, "Libido Speculandi: Doctrine and Dramaturgy in Contemporary Interpretations of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus," in Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama, ed. Norman Rabkin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 82.

²¹ There is perceptive exploration of this aspect of Marlowe's work by J. R. Mulryne and Stephen Fender, "Marlowe and the 'Comic Distance,'" in Christopher Marlowe: Mermaid Critical Commentaries, ed. Brian Morris (London: Ernest Benn, 1968), 49-64.

³⁴ See C. L. Barber, "The Family in Shakespeare's Development: The Tragedy of the Sacred," a paper delivered at the English Institute, September, 1976; also Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (New York: Scribner's, 1965).

³⁵The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 1972), II, xii, 26, p. 506. See Georges Poulet, Studies in Human Time, trans. Elliott Coleman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956), p. 19.

³⁶ Cf. Julian Pitt-Rivers, "Honour and Social Status": "The victor in any competition for honour finds his reputation enhanced by the humiliation of the vanquished.… It was believed at one time in Italy by the common people that one who gave an insult thereby took to himself the reputation of which he deprived the other. The Church of England hymn puts the pont succinctly:

Conquering Kings their titles take
From the foes they captive make"
(In J. G. Peristiany, ed., Honour and Shame, p. 24.)

³⁷ The Vulgate is worth quoting for its subtle play on consummo: "Postea sciens lesus quia omnia consummata sunt, ut consummaretur Scriptura, dixit: Sitio. Vas ergo erat positum aceto plenum; illi autem spongiam plenam aceto hyssopo circumponentes obtulerunt ori eius. Cum ergo accepisset Iesus acetum, dixit, Consummatum est. Et inclinato capite, tradidit spiritum."

³⁸ See Mario Untersteiner, The Sophists, trans. Kathleen Freeman (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954), p. 106. Untersteiner's account of the place of tragedy in Gorgias has considerable resonance for a student of Marlowe:

If Being and knowledge are tragic, life will be tragic. The most universal form of art will be that which by means of "deception" can give knowledge of the tragic element revealed by ontology and epistemology. The perfect form of art will be, therefore, tragedy, which, better than any other manifestation of poetry, achieves a penetrating understanding of the irrational reality, by means of that "deception" which favours an irrational communicability of that which is not rationally communicable: the effect of this conditional knowledge of the unknowable and of this partial communication of the incommunicable is pleasure.

(Pp. 187-88)

³⁹ Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948), p. 129.

⁴⁰ Untersteiner, p. 113. See Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, "Gorgias, Aeschylus, and Apate," American Journal of Philology 76 (1955), pp. 225-60.

⁴⁷ Erich Auerbach, Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968 ed.), p. 311. The relevance of this passage to the present context was suggested to me by my colleague Paul Alpers.

⁴⁸ Paul Valery, Leonardo Poe Mallarme, trans. Malcolm Cowley and James R. Lawler (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972) [vol. 8 of The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, ed. Jackson Mathews, Bollingen Series 45], p. 93.