Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe

Mathew R. Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317008378
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Contending that criticism of Marlowe's plays has been limited by humanist conceptions of tragedy, this book engages with trauma theory, especially psychoanalytic trauma theory, to offer a fresh critical perspective within which to make sense of the tension in Marlowe's plays between the tragic and the traumatic. The author argues that tragedies are trauma narratives, narratives of wounding; however, in Marlowe's plays, a traumatic aesthetics disrupts the closure that tragedy seeks to enact. Martin's fresh reading of Massacre at Paris, which is often dismissed by critics as a bad tragedy, presents the play as deliberately breaking the conventions of the tragic genre in order to enact a traumatic aesthetics that pulls its audience into one of the early modern period's most notorious collective traumatic events, the massacre of French Huguenots in Paris in 1572. The chapters on Marlowe's six other plays similarly argue that throughout Marlowe's drama tragedy is held in tension with-and disrupted by-the aesthetics of trauma.

Chapter 1
Trauma, Faith, and Epic History in Dido, Queen of Carthage

This study begins with an examination of Marlowe’s reworking of Virgil’s epic, the Aeneid, as a trauma narrative. In Dido, Queen of Carthage, Marlowe responds to the composite and contradictory portrait of Virgil’s epic hero that literary tradition bequeathed him by representing Aeneas as an ethically ambivalent trauma survivor who is the unwilling agent of a historical process that is repetitive rather than linear and that refuses the redemptive closure found in Virgil’s narrative. “A man more memorable for kindness, suffering, and sorrow than for martial action,” Reuben Brower observes in his study Hero and Saint: Shakespeare and the Greco-Roman Tradition, “Aeneas is almost the only hero in ancient epic we might be tempted to call a saint” (85). According to Brower, “the prevailing view of heroic poetry among Renaissance critics was Virgilian, and the true epic hero was without question an Aeneas” (85). Sidney and Spenser bear Brower out in an English context. For both writers, Aeneas is the paradigmatic moral hero. “[I]n the most excellent determination of goodness, what philosopher’s counsel can so readily direct …a virtuous man in all fortunes, as Aeneas in Virgil?” (439–41), Sidney asks in The Defence of Poesy. No one, Spenser might answer, as he tells us in the letter to Ralegh prefixed to the first edition of The Faerie Queene that he has modeled his own moral hero, King Arthur, on “the person of Aeneas” (15) in whom Virgil had combined the examples of “a good gouernour and a vertuous man” (15) that Homer had separated out into the figures of Agamemnon and Ulysses. As Sidney concedes, however, Virgil’s moral hero was not the only version of Aeneas circulating in the Renaissance. Arguing that poetry is morally more efficacious than history, Sidney tells his reader that “if the question be for your own use and learning, whether it be better to have it set down as it should be, or as it was, then certainly is more doctrinable … the feigned Aeneas in Virgil than the right Aeneas in Dares Phrygius” (488–92), whose account of the Trojan war, accepted as history by writers like Chaucer and Lydgate, informed the medieval tradition of Aeneas as a traitor and coward. As previous studies of Marlowe’s play have shown, Marlowe too acknowledges both traditions.¹ Most recently, Emma Buckley has argued that in Dido, “Marlowe unravels an allusive tradition in Ovid [Heroides; Metamorphoses 13.623–14.582] which intimates that Aeneas is not only perfidious in his relationship with Dido, but also a betrayer of Troy and a traitor to his city” (130). Marlowe “complicates this tradition with another source that further undermines Virgilian auctoritas, slyly embedding the medieval ‘traitour’ Aeneas of Lydgate’s Troy Book into his play” (130). The relationship between the two traditions in Marlowe’s play is not, however, one of a sharp disjunction between seeming and being. Marlowe’s Aeneas is at once pious and false, and through this paradoxical figure Marlowe’s play explores the traumatizing structure of faith as Derrida describes it in The Gift of Death. Opposed to but not canceling the force of piety conceived of as adherence to tradition and universalizing ethics, faith must constantly be renewed through traumatic repetition, yet at the same time it functions as the foundational moment of a people, a nation, an empire and a tradition of piety or ethics of precisely the kind to which it is opposed.

As Derrida’s analysis of the relationship between faith and history will allow us to see, the Aeneid and Dido offer opposed perspectives on the trauma at the beginning of the epic history that both works narrate. Virgil’s epic proceeds from the perspective of empire and ethics. From this perspective, the trauma of Troy founds the collective “redemptive narrative” (La Capra, Writing History, Writing Trauma 179) of translatio imperii, the translation of empire from Troy to Rome, a narrative that ultimately “denies the trauma that brought it into existence” (LaCapra 179). As Elizabeth Bellamy documents, in the early modern period European nations appropriated the translatio imperii narrative for their own national histories, claiming Brutus, Paris, and other dispersed survivors of Troy’s fall as their founders and celebrating them in their national epics: “The Trojan disaster becomes a kind of fortunate fall … The translatio imperii is constituted within a vast temporality in which history advanced teleologically from Troy as its posited origin to the inexorable fulfillment of empire in the current Royal House” (23–4). Thus, in Elizabethan England’s national epic, it is “Brutus anciently deriu’d / From royall stocke of old Assaracs line [Assarac being the “legendary founder of Troy” (Roche 1130)]” (Faerie Queene II.x.9.6–7) who purges Albion of “hideous Giants” (II.x.7.8) and establishes the line of British monarchs that passes through Arthur and culminates in “my most dreaded Soueraigne” (II.x.1.8), Elizabeth.² The trauma of Troy provided early modern Europe as well as Virgilian Rome, then, with one of its collective myths of origin.

In contrast to Virgil’s epic and later translatio imperii narratives, Marlowe’s play foregrounds the trauma at the core of this myth of origin rather than seeking to cancel it out through redemptive narrative. Dido proceeds from the perspective of the moment of faith, with all its risks and uncertainties; from this perspective, translatio imperii registers not so much the transfer of power as the transmission of trauma, personal and historical. As Derrida argues, foundational historical moments are moments of uncertainty, anxiety, and trauma. Such moments, Derrida writes, are

tied to responsibility, to faith, and to the gift. To responsibility in the experience of absolute decisions made outside of knowledge or given norms, made therefore through the very ordeal of the undecidable; to religious faith through a form of involvement with the other that is a venture into absolute risk, beyond knowledge and certainty; to the gift and to the gift of death that puts me into relation with the transcendence of the other, with God as selfless goodness, and that gives me what it gives me through a new experience of death. (5–6)

The subject of faith is called or “roused” into responsibility by an absolute, inscrutable Other—God—who sees without being seen and commands without explanation, simply demanding that the subject respond (31). “God is himself absent, hidden and silent, separate, secret, at the moment he has to be obeyed,” Derrida writes, “God doesn’t give his reasons … Otherwise he wouldn’t be God, we wouldn’t be dealing with the Other as God or with God as wholly other” (57). This relationship with the absolutely Other is possible, Derrida argues, only because of the uniqueness death confers on each and every human being: “Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place … It is from the site of death as the place of my irreplaceability, that is, of my singularity, that I feel called to responsibility. In this sense only a mortal can be responsible” (41). The call of the absolutely Other is addressed to the individual in her or his singularity: to you and not anyone else. This singularity is bestowed by death: it is only because the individual is mortal, will die and can willingly die, that this particular individual is unique, and it is only by offering this gift of death in response to the call of the absolutely Other that the individual becomes absolutely responsible. Following St. Paul and Kierkegaard, Derrida characterizes the relationship of faith enabled by the gift of death as one full of fear and trembling: “We fear and tremble before the inaccessible secret of a God who decides for us although we remain responsible, that is, free to decide, to work, to assume our life and our death” (56).

Like Derrida, early modern Reformation theology emphasizes faith’s structure as an unmediated and fearful response to the call of the Other. Obedience to the call of God was a basic tenet of Reformation theology. One of the seven major Renaissance habits of thought listed by Deborah Shuger in her Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance is that “Both ethical and theoretical concerns are subordinate to the need for intimate contact with God. There is thus little emphasis on morality or natural theology” (12). This intimacy is constructed through the gift of the individual believer’s life and death in obedience to God: “We are not our own: therefore, so much as we may, let us forget ourselves and things that are our own. On the other side, we are God’s: therefore let us live and die to him” (279v), writes Jean Calvin in The Institution of Christian Religion. Even so, Calvin would not have completely agreed with Derrida’s description of faith. However Other God may be and however much he may demand obedience, faith for Calvin is based on knowledge, certainty, and a perception of God’s presence. “Now we shall have a perfect definition of faith,” asserts Calvin, “if we say, that it is a steadfast and assured knowledge of God’s kindness toward us, which being grounded upon the truth of the free promise in Christ, is both revealed to our minds, and sealed in our hearts by the Holy Ghost” (219v). “There is none (I say) faithful,” Calvin adds, “but he that leaning upon the assuredness of his own salvation, doth confidently triumph upon the Devil and death” (224v). Thus when Calvin discusses Paul’s injunction in Philippians to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (2:12), he minimizes both, arguing that “such fear he [Paul] meaneth as may make us more heedful, not such whereby we should be troubled and utterly fall” (228r). Nonetheless, as Calvin himself admits, such certainty and confidence were not every believer’s lot. Indeed, the Calvinist doctrines of predestination and election, so influential upon early modern English Protestant thought, could produce extreme uncertainty and feelings of alienation from God. Such feelings would have been a familiar part of Marlowe’s cultural milieu. David Webb writes that “Extended debate about Calvinism and Salvation was a feature of life in Cambridge when Marlowe was a student” (33), and David Riggs argues that the doctrines of predestination and election led English educational institutions such as Cambridge to teach their pupils that “most of them were predestined to sin and therefore could not experience the ecstatic ‘renning of the spirit’ that assured the fortunate few of their place among the elect” (25). Richard Hooker, a theologian more understanding of human weakness than Calvin, addresses these anxieties by arguing that faith is inevitably “mingled with fear and wavering” (1.2). Hooker’s subject of faith, then, is not the supremely confident believer described by Calvin but rather the believer who “striveth with himself to hope against all reason of believing, being settled with Job upon this unmoveable resolution, ‘Though God kill me, I will not give over trusting in him’” (1.3).

This subject of faith who offers the gift of her or his death in response to the call of the transcendent Other is not, Derrida argues, the subject of universalizing ethical codes, or the law. While the call of the Other is addressed to the individual in her or his particularity, ethical codes treat all subjects as identical and substitutable (62–3). The difference between the two results not only in conflict but ultimately in paradox. Derrida’s example is Kierkegaard’s “knight of faith,” Abraham. Called by God to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah, Abraham must become a murderer, in intention if not in actual fact, in order to respond faithfully to God. Following Kierkegaard, Derrida argues that at this moment Abraham experiences the ethical as a “temptation” (61), as a way to avoid the address of the Other. Yet even though Abraham resists this temptation, he can in no way suspend or mitigate the force of the ethical: “Abraham must assume absolute responsibility for sacrificing his son by sacrificing ethics,” Derrida writes, “but in order for there to be a sacrifice, the ethical must retain all its value; the love for his son must remain intact, and the order of human duty must continue to insist on its rights” (66). Consequently, “Abraham is thus at the same time the most moral and the most immoral, the most responsible and the most irresponsible of men” (72). Difficult though the subject of faith’s position may be, however, she or he is not a tragic hero. Kierkegaard makes this point more clearly and more emphatically than Derrida. “The genuine tragic hero sacrifices himself and all that is his for the universal” (122), Kierkegaard writes, while the subject of faith sacrifices the universal for the absolute. Crucially, because tragic heroes sacrifice themselves (and / or others) to preserve the universal, they can explain themselves: their actions are undertaken on behalf of general principles that can become the topoi of persuasive discourse. In contrast, the subject of faith’s actions resist generalization, explanation, even speech. “If [Abraham] were able to speak a common or translatable language,” Derrida comments, “if he were to become intelligible by giving his reasons in a convincing manner, he would be giving in to the temptation of ethical generality … He wouldn’t be Abraham any more, the unique Abraham in a singular relation with the unique God” (74). Although Derrida later suggests that faith “must be started over by each generation” (80) and therefore “describes the nonhistory of absolute beginnings” (80), the paradox, of course, is that through his insistence on his singularity Abraham becomes a historical figure, the father of a nation and a written ethical and religious tradition, precisely the forces opposed to the singularity and absolute responsibility of the subject of faith (80).

Nation and ethical and religious tradition constitute the perspective from which Virgil’s epic proceeds. Looking back from the time of Octavius Caesar, Virgil frames the events he narrates as the beginning of the inexorable historical process that leads not merely to the Roman Empire but more importantly to the establishment of universal Roman law and peace. In the poem’s first book, Virgil introduces only swiftly to contain the force that might disrupt Aeneas’ destiny: Juno’s wrath at the Trojans, of which we are provided with a demonstration, only to be told by Jupiter shortly thereafter that

To these [the Roman nation] I set no bounds, either in space or time;

Unlimited power I give them. Even the spiteful Juno,

Who in her fear now troubles the earth, the sea and the sky,

Shall think better of this and join me in fostering

The cause of the Romans, the lords of creation, the togaed people.

Thus it is written. (I.278–83)

Jupiter continues his prophecy up to Julius Caesar, after whose death and apotheosis “shall the age of violence be mellowing into peace: / Venerable Faith, and the Home, with Romulus and Remus, / Shall make the laws” (I.291–3). The poem concludes with the prophesied reconciliation of Jupiter and Juno, a reiteration of the destiny of Rome, which will “[surpass] all men, nay even the gods, in godliness” (XII.839), and the death of Turnus, the last obstacle in the way of the Trojan conquest of Latium. Though in proper epic fashion it begins in the middle of things, then, the Aeneid has a definite beginning and end.

From the beginning, as Troy is being destroyed, Aeneas is made to share the poem’s teleological perspective. On the night of Troy’s destruction, when the sounds of slaughter have not yet woken Aeneas, Hector appears to him in a dream and commands him to “save yourself from these flames” (II.289), for

… if strong right hands

Could save our town, this hand of mine would have saved it long ago.

Her holy things, her home-gods Troy commends to your keeping:

Take these as partners in your fate, for these search out

The walls you are destined to build after long roaming the seaways. (II.291–5)

Hector here addresses Aeneas as the bearer of the universal, the preserver of the Trojan piety that will ultimately constitute the foundation of Roman religion and law. The sacrifices Aeneas makes, here as he flees the impious destruction of Troy and elsewhere, he makes for the universal he bears. Virgil’s Aeneas, then, is a tragic hero, the moral hero of whom Sidney and Spenser speak, a pious man heroically confronting external impiety. Indeed, Hector and later Venus ensure that Aeneas does not experience his departure from Troy as ethical paradox or contradiction, contradiction between Aeneas’ duty to stay and defend Troy and his duty to leave and preserve its gods. Before Aeneas has the chance to buckle on his armour, Hector has informed him that his attempts to fulfill his duty and defend Troy will be futile. Similarly, in order to prevent Aeneas from continuing to fight against the Greeks, Venus shows him the gods, the “shapes of / Heaven’s transcendent will” (II.622–3), at work destroying Troy and tells him that “Jove supplies fresh courage and a victorious strength / To the Greeks, inciting the gods against the Trojan cause. / Escape then, while you may, my son, and end this ordeal” (II.617–19). Personal as well as political loss threatens to prevent Aeneas from leaving, especially the loss of his wife Creusa in the rush to escape the burning city. Yet here too Virgil’s Aeneas is preserved from experiencing the loss and his flight as an ethically contradictory sacrifice: as he is frantically searching for her, the ghost of Creusa appears to Aeneas to tell him that “These happenings are part of the divine / Purpose. It was not written that you should bring Creusa / Away with you; the great ruler of heaven does not allow it” (II.778–80). She then briefly sketches his future in “Hesperia” (II.782) where “a kingdom, a royal bride / Await you” (II.784–5). Like Hector, Creusa announces Aeneas’ election and foretells his ultimate triumph, if not over the devil and death then certainly over hostile gods and the slaughter that they have created in Troy. Because he is made to share the poem’s teleological perspective and because he is made fully aware of the presence of the gods in human history, then, Aeneas is able to negotiate the conflicting ethical demands imposed upon him. He is able to explain himself, to justify his actions—and this is precisely what he is doing in Books II and III of the Aeneid as he provides for Dido an account of Troy’s fall and his role in that fall.

In contrast to Virgil’s epic, Marlowe’s play presents two perspectives on the events it narrates and dramatizes, acknowledging but attempting to press beneath Virgil’s epic certitudes to uncover some sense of the human risk, incertitude, and sacrifice involved. If, as Bellamy has powerfully argued, the epic is “the narrative par excellence of the speaking subject’s inscription into the sociocultural” and historical, a genre whose “emphasis on moral conscience and ethical self- fashioning for its i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Trauma, Faith, and Epic History in Dido, Queen of Carthage
• Chapter 2 Trauma and Tragedy in Tamburlaine the Great Part One
• Chapter 3 Tamburlaine the Great Part Two and the Refusal of Tragedy
• Chapter 4 Tragedy and Psychopathology in The Jew of Malta
• Chapter 5 Pain, History, and Theater in Edward II
• Chapter 6 The Traumatic Realism of The Massacre at Paris
• Chapter 7 Doctor Faustus and the Fundamental Fantasy
• References
• Index