Elizabethan Drama
Beyond New Historicism: Marlowe's unnatural histories and the
melancholy
properties of the stage Drew Milne The tradition of the dead
generations weighs
like a nightmare on the minds of the living. [1] There is
no document of culture
which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
And just as such a
document is not free from barbarism, barbarism also taints
the process of
transmission ... [2] Recent critical discussions of
Elizabethan drama, above all
of Shakespeare, have centred around `new
historicism', a trend consolidated in
critical anthologies.[3] New
historicism is characterised by an interest in the
historicity of texts and
the textuality of history, and by affinities with
theoretical projects
concerned with power, identity and the construction of
subject positions.
Despite important political differences, new historicism has
been linked with
what has become known as `cultural materialism'.[4] Many of the
political
differences stem from the uneasy relation of new historicism, and of
cultural
materialism, to the Marxist conception of history or historical
materialism,
differences which this essay seeks to accentuate. Raymond Williams
is often
claimed as a major precursor of cultural materialism, but interest
in
institutions, discursive practices and subject positions suggests the
different
legacy of Althusser's attack on humanism and the influence of
Foucault. New
historicism, by contrast, shows scant regard for Marxism while
being especially
indebted to Foucault's version of Nietzsche's will to power
and perspectival
historicism, despite important critiques of Foucault's
work.[5] The Althusserian
approach is more overtly committed to the
possibility of political change but
tends towards a similarly theoreticist,
even formalist reduction of history. The
possibility of resisting power and
the power of ideology marks the decisive
conflict in these different
assimilations of history to culture. New
historicism, lost in proliferating
examples of contingent but seemingly
inescapable discourses of power, seems
at best to expand the archive of wry
smiles at the ruses of history and
power. As an academic guise in which to
rework the glories of the past
without pausing too long over the enormity of the
history surveyed, the
reproduction of literary history now lies in the hands of
those who can offer
few reasons for continuing to produce the object of
critique. Sinfield
suggests that, `New historicists, therefore, like their
colleagues, are
sustaining many of the old routines while knowing, really, that
their
validity has evaporated.'[6] As such, new historicists could be described
as
reformists who do not believe in progress. If we are to awake from
the
nightmare of history, perhaps such historicism should be left alone to
dull the
air with discoursive moans, as Aeneas puts it in Marlowe's Dido,
Queen of
Carthage. The persistent naturalisation of suffering in history
should be
resisted if the process of transmitting historical documents is not
to further
the process. Herein lies the need to offer estranging perspectives
on
Elizabethan drama and the intervening historical gulf. One aspect of
the
difficulty is the continuing investment in naturalising both the language
and
dramaturgy of Elizabethan drama within a literary tradition dominated
by
Shakespeare and the Shakespeare industry. This essay seeks to provide
an
estranging perspective through a reading of new historicist accounts of
Marlowe.
Focussing on Tamburlaine, I hope to suggest some different
approaches with
regard to the melancholy dramatisation of history as a scene
of unnatural
events, by drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin and Franco
Moretti.[7] A
distinctive and estranging approach to dramatising the enormity
of history is
evident in the prevalence of violence, murder and arbitrary
death in Elizabethan
drama itself. This prevalence has long been seen as
excessive, a mark of
something unnatural in its historical imaginary, without
being understood.
History in Elizabethan drama is, as title-pages
characteristically predict,
lamentable. The structure of effects suggested by
drama as an occasion for
melancholic lamentation helps to contextualise the
roles of Tamburlaine, Barabas
and Guise in Marlowe's plays, where it seems
particularly in-appropriate to
reduce their dramatic ambivalence to the need
to identify with a central
protagonist or autonomous `character'. As David
Bevington suggests: `The
well-known type of "Lamentable Tragedy, Mixed Full
of Pleasant Mirth"
... traces its origins to the view that vicious behavior
is at once funny and
terrifying as a spectacle, admirable and yet grotesque,
amusing but also
edifying as a perverse distortion of moral behavior.'[8]
Elizabethan drama, par-ticularly
Marlowe's, dramatises the contradictions
of seeing history as a record of divine
providence in which the world is the
theatre of divine judgment. The prologue to
the first part of Tamburlaine
invites audience and reader to `View but his
picture in this tragicke glasse,
/ And then applaud his fortunes if you
please.'[9] Indeed the play seems to
relish the ambivalent moral possibilities
of melancholy pleasure in lamenting
a world without divine providence. In this
theatre history is both unnatural
and inhuman. Violent suffering without end or
grace goes against the notion
of a fall from a greater nature or the prospect of
a redeemed nature to come.
History is then seen as the non-identity of nature
with itself, unnatural
forces struggling with natural ones. Unnatural forces,
however, must also be
seen as emerging from nature, while the dramatisation of
history in terms of
human agency suggests that unnatural acts are an aspect of
human nature for
which no secular concept of wordly evil is adequate. In
Elizabethan drama
the stage is not so much beyond good and evil as caught in an
attempt to
develop a secular concept of evil. The resources for such a concept
are
figurative rather than conceptual, resorting to melancholy in face of
the
unthinkably arbitrary and violent prevalence of suffering. Benjamin's
account is
helpful here. The contemplation of lamentable stories of death by
unnatural
causes finds its aesthetic purpose in allegories of unholy dying,
allegories in
which history is a fallen nature, a world of evil without the
consolations of
natural justice. On such an unnaturally cruel and violent
stage dominated by
seemingly arbitrary and unreliable powers, the possibility
that evil might be
recognisable without theology is consoling. Indeed it is
the reduction of
history to worldly evil which makes it possible to stage
history as a state of
unnatural nature that can be lamented. The mirror of
magistrates becomes a wheel
which needs to be reinvented because it never
quite comes full circle, notably
in the lurching rhythms of the failure of
poetic justice at the end of King
Lear. Hence, although a fashion for
stage violence can be traced from Cambises
and Gorboduc to The Spanish
Tragedy, its historical significance is complicated.
Thus it is difficult
to understand why Tamburlaine was so popular, even to the
extent of imitation
in The First part of the Tragical raigne of Selimus.
Tamburlaine's simple
linear plot seems to offer little more than a violent
pageant of power and
destruction enlivened by occasional striking tableaux. This
taste for horror
in aesthetic form has remained unexplained in its more specific
historical
manifestations, and in general, perhaps because it reflects but fails
to
explain the nightmare of history. In rethinking this nightmare, much of
the
critical verve of new historicism is derived from the historicisation, if
not
critique, of humanist or idealist conceptions of subjectivity in the
reception
and critical transmission of Elizabethan drama. There is a danger
in
assimilating the different approaches associated with new historicism to
one
paradigm, but the centrality of conceptions of subjectivity is
evident.
Catherine Belsey, while developing an attack on liberal
humanism, seeks `to
chart in the drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries the eventual
construction of an order of subjectivity which is
recognizably modern.'[10] This
finds its strategic justification in the need
to displace the largely romantic
and post-romantic conceptions of the subject
dominant in the modern reception of
Shakespeare and so-called Renaissance
drama more generally. Jonathan Dollimore
describes the task as `a critique of
the way literary critics have reproduced
Renaissance drama in terms of a
modern depoliticized subjectivity, and an
attempt to recover a more adequate
history of subjectivity'.[11] Dollimore
argues that Elizabethan tragedy
itself challenged Christian essentialism and in
the process decentred `Man';
but he also highlights the danger of anachronism:
the incorrect procedure is
that which insists on reading the early seventeenth
century through the grid
of an essentialist humanism which in historical fact
post-dates it and in
effect only really emerges with the Enlightenment; in other
words, what makes
a materialist analysis of subjectivity in that period seem
inappropriate is
itself a thoroughly anachronistic perspective.[12] Nevertheless
there are
striking similarities between Dollimore's account of Tamburlaine and
the
persistent Nietzschean romanticism which marks previous critical accounts
of
Marlowe. Hazlitt says of Marlowe that: `There is a lust of power in
his
writings, a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness, a glow of the
imagination,
unhallowed by anything but its own energies.'[13]; while Helen
Gardner argues
less effusively that: `The first part of Tamburlaine glorifies
the human will:
the second displays its inevitable limits.'[14]; and Harry
Levin offers the
following stirring formulation of Marlowe's Barabas: `His
will to power is
gratified less by possession than by control. In this he
does not resemble the
conqueror so much as he adumbrates the capitalist; and
Marlowe has grasped what
is truly imaginative, what in his time was almost
heroic, about business
enterprise.'[15] This Nietzschean aesthetic of the
will to power and primitive
accumulation, in which naked ambition and the
arbitrary amassing of power and
wealth is celebrated as the legitimate
aspiration of human energy, finds
surprising echoes in Dollimore's account of
Tamburlaine: With his indomitable
will to power and warrior prowess,
Tamburlaine really does approximate to the
self-determining hero bent on
transcendent autonomy . . . exclusion may be the
basis not just of
Tamburlaine as fantasy projection but Tamburlaine as
transgressive text: it
liberates from its Christian and ethical framework the
humanist conception of
man as essentially free, dynamic and aspiring. [16] In
Dollimore's
argument these terms are ambivalent rather than celebratory, but
seem to
preclude the more Brechtian possibility that Marlowe does not in the
end
intend sympathy with Tamburlaine. Perhaps, like Mother Courage, Marlowe
intended
a sense that the passage of war and destruction might be understood
as the
responsibility of a badly motivated human agent, such that
Tamburlaine's
exploits are an occasion for reflective lamentation, rather
than Nietzschean
identification with a superman. The central hermeneutic
difficulty, however, is
that the attempt to historicise anachronistically
imputed conceptions of
subjectivity relies on claiming that more recent
conceptions of decentred
subjectivity are not similarly anachronistic, an
objection which could also be
extended to Brecht's plays. Much depends on
whether we applaud the fortunes seen
in the `tragicke glasse' of Tamburlaine
as a stage on which the will to power is
enacted, or whether we prefer to
steel ourselves against the figurative idealism
which lurks in such mirrors
of nature. If we applaud the fortunes of Tamburlaine
then we identify with
that difference of nature from itself which produces the
spectacle of
history, thus naturalising Tamburlaine's will to power. If we do
not identify
with Tamburlaine's struggle for power as something natural then we
have to
lament the spectacle of unnatural history or find a perspective from
which to
understand it differently. Thus the focus on subjective agency,
individual
will or dramatic identity tends to abstract from history to highlight
the
ideological forms which transcend the historical gulf between modern
and
pre-modern fictions of society. A materialist account of subjectivity
may
restore individuals to history, but the political relevance of
theoretical
hindsight is mortgaged to the reception history it seeks to
displace. In other
words, by making subjectivity such a central analytical
tool new historicism
succeeds in decentring subjects, showing how such
subjects were never centred,
but obscures the historical and cognitive
significance of the different terms in
which Elizabethan drama dramatised
history. As Moretti argues, taking up
Benjamin's account of allegory:
`allegory is not a subjective deception to which
someone might be imagined to
hold the semantic key, but the objectively
deceptive condition of the nature
of history by which everyone is ultimately
betrayed.'[17] Moreover,
subjectivity in Elizabethan drama is invariably a
chimera given the
persistent ambivalence of theatricality. Kastan and
Stallybrass, for
example, suggest that `Acting itself threatens to reveal the
artificial and
arbitrary nature of social being.'[18] The nature of social
being, however,
is not arbitrary save in constructions which make being the
ground of
historicity. Human history cannot be understood in terms of a history
of
human subjectivity without reference to the nature against which
it
struggles, and that nature is itself historical.[19] The history of
subjectivity
is never the same as the history of subjects as objects in human
attempts to
dominate nature. The thought that the antagonistic domination of
human nature
and the struggle to dominate nature itself might be superseded
and shown to be
neither natural nor contingently historical, is perhaps what
Marx meant by the
pre-history of human society. If there is an affinity
between modern conceptions
of decentred subjectivity and pre-modern
Elizabethan drama, it may be that both
Elizabethan dramatisations of
history and contemporary historicism collapse
history, indeed naturalize it
in terms of a drama of subjective wills. Stephen
Greenblatt's Renaissance
Self-Fashioning (1980), an important text in the
emergence of new
historicism, provides exemplary instances of these
difficulties. In his
introduction Greenblatt concedes the risk of anachronism,
and comments on his
small group of chosen texts that: `It is we who enlist them
in a kind of
historical drama'.[20] Greenblatt provocatively suggests a
dramatised analogy
with Nietzsche's conception of the will to power in the very
title of the
chapter `Marlowe and the Will to Absolute Play'. Such anachronism
is
significant insofar as the naturalization of history as power suggested
by
Nietzsche, and also in Foucault's work, is a historically determinate
attempt to
understand social process in terms of illusory subject positions.
As Greenblatt
explains in his epilogue: Whenever I focused sharply upon a
moment of apparently
autonomous self-fashioning, I found not an epiphany of
identity freely chosen,
but a cultural artifact. If there remained traces of
free choice, the choice was
among possibilities whose range was strictly
delineated by the social and
ideological system in force. (p. 256) Hence
Greenblatt describes Marlowe's plays
by explicitly evoking Marx's The
Eighteenth Brumaire: `Marlowe's protagonists
rebel against orthodoxy, but
they do not do so just as they please; their acts
of negation not only
conjure up the order they would destroy, but seem at times
to be themselves
conjured up by that very order.' (p. 210) The subtle
difference, however, is
the shift to a more structuring account of `order', and,
more fundamentally,
the stress on the dramatic protagonist as the interpretative
key, despite
arguing that it is the social order which fashions such
protagonists.
Consequently, Greenblatt's approach needs to be understood as both
a sketch
of the development of human autonomy in the Renaissance, what might be
called
a romanticist reading of the early modern period, and the historicisation
of
such autonomy as being illusory: `Marlowe's heroes must live their lives
as
projects, but they do so in the midst of intimations that the projects
are
illusions.' (p. 213) Accordingly, in a move which has become
characteristic of
new historicism, Greenblatt prefaces his account of
self-fashioning in Marlowe's
plays with an anecdotal historical analogue for
the contemporary `system' of
power. This analogue juxtaposes Marlowe's plays
with the `casual, unexplained
violence' in an English merchant's tale of a
voyage in 1586 to Sierre Leone,
suggesting an historical 'matrix' of the
relentless power-hunger of Tudor
absolutism, and in particular the
acquisitive energies of English merchants,
entre-preneurs, and
adventurers.(p. 194) In some respects this echoes what might
be called the
old historicist account of L.C.Knights in Drama and Society in the
Age of
Jonson (1937), which examines the social and economic bases
of
Elizabethan-Jacobean culture in rather more detail. But Greenblatt
does not
relate nascent English capitalism and colonialism to the specific
religious and
political conflicts dramatised in Tamburlaine. Rather, he
deploys history as
`matrix' in a more metaphorical analogy between the
dynamic political geography
of merchant capital and the theatrical
representation of space. Just as merchant
capitalism seeks to reduce
geographical differences to an expression of its
power, so, for Greenblatt,
Marlowe uses theatrical power to represent different
spaces: 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 ... (p. 195) On this basis Marlowe's
dramatisation of
the history of Tamburlaine is seen by Greenblatt as
Tamburlaine's will to
power in the occupation of theatrical space. Just as
Elizabethan
dramatists breezily rewrite historical source materials, so
Greenblatt
breezily rewrites Tamburlaine in terms which implicitly argue the
perspicuity
of Deleuze and Guattari: `Tamburlaine is a machine, a desiring
machine that
produces violence and death.' (p. 195) Hence the terms of
Tamburlaine's
dynamic occupation of stage space are further abstracted from
Marlowe's
theatrical allegory of history, and dramatised in Greenblatt's
anachronistic
allegory: `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.' (p. 196)
While
Greenblatt's analogue indicates the dialectical relation between
culture and
barbarity suggested by Walter Benjamin, he does not use it to
examine specific
power struggles in history, but rather as an anecdotal
allegory to suggest the
historicity of power. Greenblatt's conception of
theatricality is nevertheless a
sophisticated one. This is salutary amid the
prevalent reluctance to recognize
the centrality of theatre and theatricality
for Elizabethan drama, a reluctance
which reflects the dominance of
print-culture perspectives on drama and more
recent attempts to conceive
history as a form of textuality. However, his
account of theatricality risks
remaining immanent within the metaphors generated
by theatricality in
Marlowe's plays. Comparing `the violence of Tamburlaine and
of the English
merchant' (p.197) this leads Greenblatt into an alarming
aestheticisation of
their respective representations and experiences of stage
space and
geography: 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. (p.197) There is something
chilling
in these lines, not least in the trans-formation of violence into
formal
patterns and the assimilation of human suffering - `to burn a town' - to
the
perspective of the violent protagonist. For Greenblatt the structure
of
limits give shape but no escape: `in Marlowe's ironic world, these
desperate
attempts at boundary and closure produce the opposite effect,
reinforcing the
condition they are meant to efface.' (p. 198) The key
anachronism is the
suggestion of ironic and implicitly inescapable reversals
of power. Marlowe's
plays fails to give such intelligible shape or indeed
another moral scheme by
which to understand the spectacle of violence because
the dramatic presentation
is not restricted to the self-fashioning of the
protagonist: we also see the
victims. In the fifth act of Tamburlaine 1, for
example, Tamburlaine sacks the
town of Damascus and kills all of its
inhabitants, save the father of Zenocrate,
Tamburlaine's wife-to-be. The
play offers the Brechtian possibility that the
audience need not identify
with Tamburlaine by offering perspectives on
Tamburlaine's victims
through Bajazeth, Zabina and, most importantly, Zenocrate.
Amid the death
of Damascus, so to speak, and reports of the speared and
slaughtered
carcasses of the virgins unsuccessfully sent by Damascus to
intercede with
Tamburlaine, the audience also sees the laments and then suicides
of
Bajazeth, Emperor of the Turks, and Zabina his wife, having had enough
of
being paraded as Tamburlaine's symbolic slaves. As Zabina puts it, `Then
is
there left no Mahomet, no God, / No Feend, no Fortune, nor no hope of end
/ To
our infamous monstrous slaveries?' (Pt.1: V.i.239-241) An audience might
more
easily identify with such a lament than with a man who has killed a
town. The
laments of Bajazeth and Zabina are highly charged and, juxtaposed
with the
slaughtered virgins, their self-fashioned deaths suggest the
extremes of the
social scale to suffer at the hands of Tamburlaine.[21] Their
deaths are
immediately followed by the entrance of Zenocrate who laments the
sack of her
home town by her supposed lover: Zenocrate. Wretched Zenocrate,
that livest to
see, Damascus walles di'd with Egyptian blood: Thy Fathers
subjects and thy
countrimen. Thy streetes strowed with dissevered jointes of
men, And wounded
bodies gasping yet for life.... Ah, Tamburlaine, wert thou
the cause of this
That tearm'st Zenocrate thy dearest love? Whose lives
were dearer to Zenocrate
Than her own life, or ought save thine owne
love. (Pt. 1, V.i.319-323, 334-5)
Coming after Bajazeth and Zabina,
Zenocrate reminds the audience of the
slaughter of Damascus, and highlights
the depth of Tamburlaine's rejection of
the natural pity which might be
associated with love. But if this isn't enough
to suggest that we might
identify with the victims of Tamburlaine, Zenocrate
then turns to see the
`bloody spectacle' of Bajazeth and Zabina: `Behold the
Turke and his
great Emperesse./ Ah Tamburlaine, my love, sweet Tamburlaine, /
That
fights for Scepters and for slippery crownes' (Pt.1, V.i.354-6).
This
suggests the way in which the play might be read as the tragedy of
Bajazeth and
Zabina, their history as moral exemplum in the mirror of
magistrates tradition.
However, despite the efforts of Zenocrate and
Anippe, her maid, to summon the
wheel of fortune scheme this serves instead
to highlight the dramatic
ambivalence of Tamburlaine's unstopped rise to
power. Roy Battenhouse offers the
most sustained attempt to reinscribe
Tamburlaine in a moral scheme, focussing in
particular on the end of part 2,
and reading the play in terms offered by
Tamburlaine's final words, as
the story of a `Scourge of God' (Pt.2: V.iii.258),
but this reading has to
work against the grain of Marlowe's more ambivalent
moral and theological
implications. History itself, as Battenhouse concedes,
makes his case hard to
sustain: The tradition of Tamburlaine's peaceful and
natural death being thus
firmly established, we must recognize that Marlowe's
opportunities to make of
the history an example of God's punishing of sin were
definitely limited. The
histories were attributing to this Scythian scourge a
long life of unobscured
glory - a career which looked like a blasphemous
challenge to the Puritan
dogma of Providence. [22] The approach suggested by
Greenblatt is more
convincing in this respect: `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.' (p. 202) Part 1, in
particular, ends with
Tamburlaine triumphant, crowning Zenocrate queen of Persia
and talking of
marriage rites to come, presenting the melancholy spectacle of
inhuman,
ruthless violence and tyranny unpunished. Indeed the audience are
encouraged
to view this spectacle with horror and amazement. For most of act
five of
part 1 Tamburlaine is identified with death, entering as the stage
direction
puts it: `all in blacke, and verie melancholy' (Pt.1: V.i.inter 63-4).
In
one of Marlowe's finest theatrical touches he shows the horror
of
Tamburlaine's power through the rhetoric of allegorical reference to
his sword
as he claims that death is his servant and dismisses the virgins
sent by
Damascus to intercede with him: Tamburlaine: Virgins, in vaine ye
labour to
prevent That which mine honor sweares shal be perform'd: Behold my
sword, what
see you at the point. 1. Virgin: Nothing but feare and fatall
steele my Lord.
Tamburlaine: Your fearfull minds are thicke and mistie
then, For there sits
Death, there sits imperious Death, Keeping his
circuit by the slicing edge. But
I am pleasde you shall not see him
there: He now is seated on my horsmens
speares, And on their points his
fleshlesse bodie feeds. Techelles, straight goe
charge a few of them To
charge these Dames, and shew my servant death, Sitting
in scarlet on their
armed speares. (Pt. 1: V.i.106-118) Tamburlaine's sword is
more than an
object of fear and potentially fatal steel, becoming an allegory in
which the
stage property is an object of melancholic perception, a figure of
death.
Benjamin comments that `once human life has sunk into the merely
creaturely,
even the life of apparently dead objects secures power over it.'[23]
And
while the fatal power of swords as objects is evident, the importance of
the
stage property here is the significance of this sword as an object
of
contemplation into which history has been metonymically distilled.
The
illumination of the fateful qualities of the most trivial stage property,
such
as a handkerchief or a glove, reveal such props to be objects, often
poisonous
ones, which signify the fateful arbitrariness of objective history.
Indeed the
relation between protagonists and the fateful objects with which
they identify
is a central dramaturgical part of the opening of many of
Marlowe's plays: a
letter for Gaveston; Faustus and books; Barabas and heaps
of gold. The
significance of this is highlighted by the insignificance of
such stage props in
classical drama. As Benjamin argues: `In moral examples
and in catastrophes
history served only as an aspect of the subject matter of
emblematics. The
transfixed face of signifying nature is victorious, and
history must, once and
for all, remain contained in the subordinate role of
stage-property.'[24]
Similarly, sovereignty is given allegorical
representation in the metonymical
form of sceptres and what Zenocrate calls
`slippery crownes'. All through
Tamburlaine crowns are the sad
allegorical tokens of earthly power, but they
become melancholic properties
rather than moral exempla precisely when
providential schemes of history as
morality fail. Melancholic because the
allegory of the objective world such
stage props signify is one in which the
dramatisation of history as evil
recoils from the realisation that there is no
evil in nature, only a
subjective understanding with no correlative in reality.
A striking
passage from Plotinus's third century Enneads suggests the
possibility of
seeing the enormity of history as the pleasurably lamentable work
of a
dramatic artist, while suggesting also the risks of failing to recognise
the
possible barbarity of neo-Platonist attempts to figure life as play, and
so
reduce the historical world to a phenomenon secondary to
subjective
understanding: Murders, death in all its guises, the reduction and
sacking of
cities, all must be to us just such a spectacle as the changing
scenes of a
play; all is but the varied incident of a plot, costume on and
off, acted grief
and lament. For on earth, in all the succession of life, it
is not the Soul
within but the Shadow outside of the authentic man that
grieves and complains
and acts out the plot on this world stage which men
have dotted with stages of
their own constructing. All this is the doing of
man knowing no more than to
live the lower and outer life, and never
perceiving that, in his weeping and in
his graver doings alike, he is but at
play; to handle matters austerely is
reserved for the thoughtful: the other
kind of man is himself a futility. Those
incapable of thinking gravely read
gravity into frivolities which correspond to
their own frivolous Nature.[25]
Murder, death in all its guises, and the
reduction and sacking of cities are
the spectacles and changing scenes of
Marlowe's unnatural histories,
especially in Tamburlaine and The Massacre at
Paris. The resort to
theatrical melancholy need not collapse the world of
suffering into a
frivolous nature which corresponds to that melancholy, as
though the sacking
of cities were frivolous. Nevertheless, the dramatisation of
such history as
a pageant of power invariably threatens to be caught in a figure
which
naturalises history as play. Plotinus reminds us that some of the
relevant
figures are not as historically specific as they at first seem. The
important
difference is that Elizabethan drama, and in particular tragedy,
registers an
essential inhumanism, notably in the melancholic, metonymical
significance of
crowns, swords and other often poisonous stage properties
whose seemingly modest
objectivity overcomes the best efforts of human
subjects. Moreover the drama
suggests an unfathomably lamentable quality in
the struggle between natural and
unnatural forces, precisely because without
eschatology or a modern idea of
natural history, history is reduced to an
allegory of natural forces. Thus the
understanding of Elizabethan drama would
be furthered by examining the relation
between nature, history and
theatricality, so as to reveal its truth as a
cognitive framework which has
become historically alienated from the barbarity
it sought to understand.
Elizabethan drama attempts to stage history as nature;
not nature in the
modern sense, but rather an unnaturally horrific and
lamentable allegory of
nature as history. Decoding the history in this nature
involves recognizing
the way this allegorical staging of history helps us
understand the necessity
for historical distanciation, particularly from any
attempt to displace the
horror in its allegory of natural history with new
allegories of the
historicity of power and subjectivity. In short, the effort to
rethink
Elizabethan drama might restore a sense of the unnatural histories
which
divide and rule our historical differences. Rather than rethinking such
history
in `our' own natural interests, such documents might be blasted out
of their
continuity and given a sense of unrelenting strangeness rather than
strained
relevance. The hermeneutic shibboleths of power, subjectivity and
identity may
also have to give way to the rejection or at least melancholic
recognition of
the essential inhumanism of a world without grace whose
historical nature is a
nightmare from which we are yet to
awake.
Bibliography
[1] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte, trans. B. Fowkes,
Surveys from Exile: Political Writings, vol.
2, ed. D. Fernbach (Harmondsworth,
1973). [2] W. Benjamin, 'Uber den
Begriff der Geschichte', Illuminationen, ed.
S.Unseld (Frankfurt am Main,
1977), p. 254; translation amended from 'Theses on
the Philosophy of
History', Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London, 1973), p.
258. [3]
See New Historicism and Renaissance Drama, eds. Richard Wilson
and
Richard Dutton (London and New York, 1992); and Staging the
Renaissance:
Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (New
York and London, 1991),
eds. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass. [4]
See Jonathan Dollimore,
'Introduction: Shakespeare, cultural materialism
and the new historicism',
Political Shakespeare: New essays in cultural
materialism, eds. Jonathan
Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester,
1985); Jonathan Dollimore, Radical
Tragedy (London, 1989), especially the
preface to the second edition; and Alan
Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural
Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading
(Oxford, 1992). [5] See
Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-structuralist
Thought and the
Claims of Critical Theory (London, 1987); and Jürgen Habermas,
The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence
(Cambridge,
Mass. and Cambridge, 1987). [6] Sinfield, Faultlines, p. 287.
[7] Walter
Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John
Osborne (London, 1977);
and Franco Moretti, 'The Great Eclipse: Tragic Form
as the Deconsecration of
Sovereignty', Signs Taken For Wonders, trans.
David Miller (London, 1983).
Benjamin's work has had surprisingly little
resonance in studies of Elizabethan
and Jacobean drama. Helpful discussions
of Benjamin's work on 'Trauerspiel' and
drama are provided by Charles Rosen,
'The Ruins of Walter Benjamin', On Walter
Benjamin, ed. Gary Smith
(Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1988), pp. 129-5; and
Rainer Nägele,
Theater, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of
Modernity
(Baltimore and London, 1991). [8] David M. Bevington, From 'Mankind'
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Marlowe (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), p. 161. [9] Tamburlaine, Part 1,
The
Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, 2 vols., ed Fredson Bowers
(Cambridge,
1973), vol. 1, p. 79. References to this edition hereafter in
main text. [10]
Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy (London, 1985),
p. 4. [11] Dollimore,
Radical Tragedy, preface to second edition, p.
xxviii. [12] Radical Tragedy, p.
155. [13] William Hazlitt, from Lectures
on the Dramatic Literature of the Age
of Elizabeth, quoted from Critics on
Marlowe, ed. Judith O'Neill (London, 1969),
p.17. [14] Helen Gardner, 'The
Second Part of Tamburlaine the Great', Critics on
Marlowe, p. 42. [15]
Harry Levin, `The Jew of Malta: Poor Old Rich Man', Critics
on Marlowe, p.
51. [16] Radical Tragedy, p. 112. [17] Franco Moretti, Signs
Taken For
Wonders, p. 78. [18] Staging the Renaissance, p. 9. [19] See
T.W.Adorno,
'The Idea of Natural History.' trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor, Telos, 60
(Summer,
1984), 111-124. [20] Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance
Self-Fashioning:
From More to Shakespeare (Chicago & London, 1980),
p. 6. References
hereafter included in the main text. [21] On these laments
and lament generally
see Wolfgang Clemen's neglected English Tragedy Before
Shakespeare, trans.
T.S.Dorsch (London, 1961), esp. ch. 14, `The Dramatic
Lament and Its Forms', pp.
211-252; and ch. 15, `The Pre-Shakespearian
Dramatic Lament', pp. 253-286. [22]
Roy W. Battenhouse, Marlowe's
Tamburlaine: A Study in Renaissance Moral
Philosophy (Vanderbilt,
Nashville, 1941; revised edition 1964), p. 144. [23]
Benjamin, The Origin
of German Tragic Drama, p. 132. [24] Benjamin, pp. 170-1.
[25] Plotinus, The
Six Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna & B.S.Page (Chicago,
1952),
III.ii.15, p. 90