Greeks and Trojans on the Early Modern English Stage

Lisa Hopkins

• Publisher: Medieval Institute Publications
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501514500
• Subtopic: British Drama
• Index: Literature

No story was more interesting to Shakespeare and his contemporaries than that of Troy, partly because the story of Troy was in a sense the story of England, since the Trojan prince Aeneas was supposedly the ancestor of the Tudors. This book explores the wide range of allusions to Greece and Troy in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, looking not only at plays actually set in Greece or Troy but also those which draw on characters and motifs from Greek mythology and the Trojan War. Texts covered include Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Othello, Hamlet, The Winter's Tale, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Pericles and The Tempest as well as plays by other authors of the period including Marlowe, Chettle, Ford and Beaumont and Fletcher.

Part I: Wandering Trojans

Chapter 1 What’s Actaeon to Aeneas?

No playwright engaged more creatively or productively with the classical past than Christopher Marlowe. In Doctor Faustus, Marlowe’s hero remembers how he has “made blind Homer sing to me, / Of Alexander’s love and Oenone’s death,”¹ and Neil Rhodes argues that both Faustus and Tamburlaine are influenced by Greek literature in other ways too: “it is Xenophon and Lucian who can offer, at least in part, some explanation of the unusual mix of the heroic and the sceptical—or wonder and irony—that we find in Marlowe, especially in his two most popular plays, Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus”; for Rhodes, “The similarities between the main storylines of Tamburlaine and the Cyropaideia are fairly obvious.”² In Dido, Queen of Carthage a different Marlowe hero tells the tale of Troy himself, and does so in ways which were to prove hugely influential on later literature of the period. In this chapter, I examine how Marlowe yokes two ostensibly unconnected figures from classical mythology, the Trojan Aeneas and the Greek Actaeon, in such a way that the one is used to critically examine the other.

Aeneas was central to England’s image of both its past and its future, for his great-grandson Brutus was the legendary founder of Britain, and the translatio imperii which his bloodline embodied had supposedly brought the cultural authority of Troy to London. He was to be found everywhere, from public theatres to the walls of private houses: John Astington notes that “surviving titles of plays, now mostly lost, suggest that the most popular Troy-related subject was the legend of Dido and Aeneas” and that “In 1533 King Henry VIII acquired a set of five tapestries of The Story of Aeneas, all of which survive today at Hampton Court”;³ Henry VIII was particularly interested in Aeneas because his Welsh ancestry supposedly allowed him to claim direct descent from Camber, son of Aeneas’s great-great-grandson Locrine. Crucially for the early modern interest in travel and trade, descent from Aeneas was also seen as authorising the hoped-for onward trajectory of his bloodline into lands still being discovered. Not for nothing did the illustrations in Brandt’s Aeneid use Columbus’s ships as models for Aeneas’s,⁴ and Vassiliki Markidou notes that George Sandys “translated the first book of Virgil’s Aeneid while seeking preferment with the Virginia Company”;⁵ we also know that there was a copy of the Middle English prose Brut chronicle in the possession of the sixteenth-century explorer Armagill Waad, who was “hailed by his son as the ‘English Columbus.’”⁶ A number of writers of Marlowe’s time turned their attention to the supposed progeny of Aeneas as detailed in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain, including William Warner, author of Albions England, who along with Walter Warner the mathematician is one of the two candidates for the “Warner” whom Kyd named as the friend of Christopher Marlowe (and whose father went with Richard Chancellor to Russia in 1553 and died on one of William Towerson’s voyages to Guinea).⁷ Marlowe, however, eschews the “British History,” and I suggest that this, like his notable failure to engage in the predominantly heterosexual form of the sonnet, is a speaking silence. The second of the two myths I want to explore and to relate to the figure of Aeneas, that of Actaeon, is “commonly interpreted as a tale of forbidden knowledge,”⁸ but the horns with which Actaeon is associated also suggested cuckoldry. I shall argue that connecting Aeneas to Actaeon thus allows Marlowe to call into question the idea of patrilineal transmission which formed the basis both for the translatio imperii itself and for the cultural uses to which Marlowe’s England put it.

Aeneas’s status as ur-colonist meant that when he is remembered in early modern literature, it is often in conjunction with the New World.⁹ All of Marlowe’s plays are in a fundamental sense concerned with the difficulties of accommodating classical models and philosophies in a world trembling on the edge of modernity. It is therefore no coincidence that he regularly and insistently recalls Aeneas, who features in or is remembered in almost all his plays. Aeneas’s landfall in Africa is presented in Dido, Queen of Carthage as essentially a first contact narrative,¹⁰ and modernity for Marlowe is conditioned by the impact of the discovery not only of new lands but more fundamentally of the people who lived in them, who had bestowed exotic polysyllabic names on these strange territories and had devised for them complex cosmogonies and histories which might be quite independent of other traditions. According to the Baines Note, Marlowe’s personal scepticism about established teachings and beliefs was partly prompted by his encounter with representatives of an alternative belief system, presumably in the shape of two Native Americans named Manteo and Wanchese whom his friend Thomas Hariot brought back from the fledgling English colony in Roanoke. For many Elizabethans, both geography and cartography were easily assimilable within familiar paradigms. Sir Thomas Smith, writing in 1572 to his son who was about to depart for Ireland, advised that

For the first year there, and peradventure the second, ye shall do well to take one sure and convenient place to make a fort, as Byrso was to Dido, and Mons Aventinus to Romulus.¹¹

People, though, may not be so readily readable as replicas of classical originals, and the knowledge which Manteo and Wanchese seem to have offered Marlowe was impossible to reconcile with any existing belief system to which he had access. In his plays, his characters’ travels show them not a second Troy but a place which is wholly new, for the proper apprehension of which new paradigms must be deployed, and the focus on the motif of the first contact narrative, which throws emphasis onto the human rather than the cartographical, makes the story of Aeneas an apt and versatile trope for such encounters.

So what is he like, this figure who so insistently returns, Marlowe’s most indefatigable revenant? In fact the Aeneas Marlowe offers us is a character whom one might not be sorry never to see again. “Warlike Aeneas, and in these base robes?” asks Dido incredulously,¹² and if Marlowe’s original audience were expecting a pious epic hero, they might well be tempted to echo her. Bedraggled, bemused, and unable even to recognise his own mother, Marlowe’s Aeneas seems to consistently mistake or misunderstand his own destined trajectory, and to have no idea of the narrative with which Marlowe’s original audience would have been so easily familiar. The effect might have been one of history being made before us, but at times it actually comes closer to one of history being very nearly bungled before us, with echoes of the classic sci-fi paradox of the past going wrong when it is revisited. When Dido invites him into the cave he is comically slow to guess what she might have in mind; Achates, Ilioneus, Sergestus, and Cloanthus have all met one of Dido’s suitors at various national and international events, but Aeneas has never come across any of them (3.1.140–48); when he first has to sail away he seems quite ready to abandon Ascanius, despite the fact that the boy is central to the prophecy of the founding of Rome; and Marlowe denies him a single opportunity ever to do or say anything really impressive in front of us.

This inadequacy is most striking when Dido begs Aeneas to tell her what really happened at the end of the siege of Troy:

May I entreat thee to discourse at large,

And truly too, how Troy was overcome?

For many tales go of that city’s fall,

And scarcely do agree upon one point.

Some say Antenor did betray the town,

Others report ’twas Sinon’s perjury;

But all in this, that Troy is overcome,

And Priam dead. Yet how, we hear no news.

(2.1.106–13)

On the surface, the request is innocuous enough, but it raises a number of issues. Dido knows that Troy has fallen, and it is apparent elsewhere in the play that she is in touch with other parts of the Greco-Trojan world: she has portraits of people whom Aeneas’s followers recognise (3.1.140–46), and she appears also to have a visual representation of Priam himself (though it is not quite clear what exactly Aeneas is reacting to when he says “O, yet this stone doth make Aeneas weep!” [2.1.15]). She might therefore be expected to have access to reliable sources of information, but in fact she has heard a variety of mutually incompatible stories which “scarcely do agree upon one point.” Now, though, she is confident that she is about to find out what happened, for Aeneas is an eyewitness. Surely he can tell not only “at large” but “truly too” what caused Troy to fall—and yet in the same breath as Dido articulates this expectation she also implicitly acknowledges its potential fallacy, for the apparently innocuous addition of “too” to “truly” smuggles in an unsettling suggestion that what is told “at large” may not necessarily be told “truly.” Truth, it seems, has to be separately stipulated for.

When Aeneas does begin to reply, his first gambit is to declare explicitly that he is not doing so as himself: “Then speak, Aeneas, with Achilles’ tongue” (2.1.121). He tells us not what happened in Troy, which he could have seen, but what was said and done in the Greek camp, which he cannot possibly have been privy to, and his narrative is also inflected by hindsight, so that the first time Sinon is mentioned he is “false Sinon” (2.1.144), which would not have been what anyone in Troy would have thought at the time. Not until nearly fifty lines after he begins does he start to talk from personal experience, when he recounts the drawing in of the horse and adds “In which unhappy work was I employed” (2.1.169), and almost as soon as he has introduced the personal perspective he disables it again as he writes off himself and all Trojans as unconscious:

We banqueted, till, overcome with wine,

Some surfeited, and others soundly slept.

(2.1.178–79)

There is no indication of his authority for describing the actions of Sinon and the Greeks, as he immediately proceeds to do, until line 191:

Frighted with this confusèd noise, I rose,

And looking from a turret might behold

Young infants swimming in their parents’ blood …

(2.1. 191– 93)

Finally he has a bird’s-eye view, but he very soon ceases to be concerned with public events when “thinking to go down, came Hector’s ghost” (2.1.201), which apparently appears to him alone and gives him the convenient advice that he should run away. Though he assures us that he killed many Greeks before he did so, his own part in the narrative becomes strangely opaque as he passes over his mother’s miraculous abstraction of his person and moves swiftly on to telling Dido instead exactly what Pyrrhus did, although he himself was not present to see it. By contrast, he is notably reticent in explaining what happened to his wife Creusa, although he was present when she disappeared:

O there I lost my wife, and had not we

Fought manfully, I had not told this tale.

(2.1.270–71)

As he makes good his escape, he also manages to leave both Cassandra and Polyxena to their fates, though at least he knows what happened to them; in the case of Hecuba he is not even sure of that, though Achates has an idea.

All in all, it is difficult to suppose that Dido feels particularly edified by this narrative, and Aeneas emerges as a shabby figure, whose principal concern is to shift blame away from himself and who appears to have come out of the whole affair remarkably well. That does not mean, however, that no sympathy is evoked for the Trojans more generally. Ironically, Aeneas’s obviously partial and biased narration does not obscure what happened, but crystallises it into a series of vivid and terrifying vignettes, showing us frightened women and a helpless elderly man and offering us Creusa as a victim without a voice or even a story, so that we are forced to engage our imaginations if we want to consider what might have happened to her. Troy is lost, but the unexpected appearance of Hector’s ghost testifies to its continuing power to haunt, and the power of Marlowe’s evocation of it ensured that it had a literary tradition discrete from, but coexisting with, its cultural influence.

Despite Aeneas’s general unimpressiveness, this rather doleful revenant comes back and back, and he does so in ways which both differ from Marlowe’s other invocations of classical mythology and also serve to underline the association of Aeneas with the New World. In Tamburlaine the Great, allusions to the classical past are for the most part just so much baggage that the characters carry around with them, which prevents them from forging ahead in a new world bounded not by the Pillars of Hercules but by the trajectory “from Persepolis to Mexico” (3.3.255); knowledge from the old world cuts no ice in the face of Tamburlaine’s harder-headed practice of...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Wandering Trojans
• Chapter 2 Aeneas and the Voyagers
• Part II: The Ruins of Troy
• Chapter 4 Where Is Hector Now?
• Chapter 5 Making Troy New
• Part III: Striking Too Short at Greeks
• Chapter 7 Metatheatre and Metamorphosis in Thomas Tomkis’s Albumazar
• Part IV: Greece on the Edge
• Chapter 9 What Venus Did with Mars: Love and War in the Mediterranean
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index