Drama and the Succession to the Crown, 1561-1633

Lisa Hopkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409406471
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317148234
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism

The succession to the throne, Lisa Hopkins argues here, was a burning topic not only in the final years of Elizabeth but well into the 1630s, with continuing questions about how James's two kingdoms might be ruled after his death. Because the issue, with its attendant constitutional questions, was so politically sensitive, Hopkins contends that drama, with its riddled identities, oblique relationship to reality, and inherent blurring of the extent to which the situation it dramatizes is indicative or particular, offered a crucial forum for the discussion. Hopkins analyzes some of the ways in which the dramatic works of the time - by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster and Ford among others - reflect, negotiate and dream the issue of the succession to the throne.

Chapter 1
Christopher Marlowe and the Succession to the English Crown

In this chapter, I explore the representation of succession in the plays of Christopher Marlowe. Despite the fact that he himself died 10 years before the death of Elizabeth, that Marlowe should have felt an interest in questions of succession is unsurprising, given that the start of his writing career came shortly after the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, effectively because of her claim to the throne; moreover, there is clear evidence that, by the end of his writing career if not before, Marlowe had made the acquaintance of Robert Poley, who played a major part in the entrapment of Mary, and he also knew Sir Roger Manwood, who was one of the backers of a Christmas charade at the Inner Temple which bore on questions of the succession.1 It is also possible that Marlowe knew personally two other possible contenders for the succession: Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, who may well have been his early patron, and Arbella Stuart. In The Reckoning, his account of Marlowe’s death, Charles Nicholl quotes Bess of Hardwick’s letter to Lord Burghley concerning ‘One Morley, who hath attended on Arabella and read to her for the space of three year and a half’, that is between 1588 and 1592, and though Nicholl presents this as one of the false trails listed in his appendix, he also calls it ‘Perhaps the most fascinating trail, and the one I lingered over longest’.2 The reason Nicholl regretfully abandoned the idea was that the little evidence we have for Marlowe’s whereabouts during those years does indeed make it seem unlikely (though not impossible) that the Mr Morley who read to Arbella could have been Christopher Marlowe, but it might just be worth noting that that at least one of Arbella’s two surviving letters from this period comes from London, which would dispose of Nicholl’s worry about banishing Marlowe to Derbyshire for so long.3 Finally, towards the end of his life, Marlowe began to display clear signs of an interest in Scotland, home of the likeliest and indeed the eventual successor to the throne, James VI, son of Mary, Queen of Scots. Quite apart from Kyd’s declaration that Marlowe intended to join his friend Matthew Roydon at the court of James VI, there is Nicholl’s observation that Robert Poley, who was in the room with Marlowe when he died, was ‘an old Scottish hand’ who had made four separate visits to the Scottish court in the preceding year, one of them lasting two months.4 In the case of Marlowe, though, I suggest that the principal interest of his plays is in the question of succession in the abstract, that is, in the principles which govern it, rather than in any particular candidates, and that this should alert us to an important and ongoing aspect of the debate about the succession in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, which was that many commentators, especially those with legal training, were genuinely interested not only in who succeeded but in the question of on what basis they were doing so – not to mention the question of whether anyone ought to be succeeding to thrones at all, if Marlowe’s works, as Patrick Cheney has recently contended, ‘unmistakably participate in a cultural conversation, at once political and literary, that recent scholars describe as republican’.5

The question of succession in the abstract is explicitly raised at the outset of a work by a figure in whom Marlowe avowed an interest, Machiavelli’s The Prince, in which a significant part of the narrative is devoted to analysing the reasons why Machiavelli’s principal case study, Cesare Borgia, failed to inherit his father’s power and lost his position after his father’s death. The Prince begins by announcing that

All the states, all the dominions under whose authority men have lived in the past and live now have been and are either republics or principalities. Principalities are hereditary, with their prince’s family long established as rulers, or they are new … with hereditary states, accustomed to their prince’s family, there are far fewer difficulties in maintaining one’s rule than in new principalities; because it is enough merely not to neglect the institutions founded by one’s ancestors and then to adapt policy to events.6

The idea of a new ruler and the difficulties he faces in establishing his position dominates the Tamburlaine the Great plays and figures too in The Jew of Malta and to a lesser extent in The Massacre at Paris, which closes with power passing from one dynasty to another. Succession in general, though, is a recurring topic throughout Marlowe’s plays.

An interest in the question of succession certainly seems to be alluded to in Dido Queen of Carthage, with its interest in the possible marriage of a queen whom we are clearly invited to read in terms of the history and public persona of Elizabeth herself: Iarbas says that he will make ‘all the woods “Eliza” to resound!’ (IV.ii.10), taking advantage of the fact that Dido’s other name in classical mythology was Elissa. Marlowe also has Dido die in a fire, instead of stabbing herself as in so many other versions of the story, most notably Virgil’s. This, together with the fact that Dido’s Phoenician nationality gives her the name ‘Phoenissa’, irresistibly associates her with the phoenix imagery beloved of Queen Elizabeth I. That the story of Troy and Carthage also had a more general applicability in early modern England was later to be illustrated by the fact that Chapter 9 of Sir Henry Savile’s 1604 ‘Historicall collections left to be considered of, for the better perfecting of this intended union between England and Scotland …’ would be entitled ‘A form of union gathered out of Virgil’ and considers the union of the Latins and Trojans;7 this suggests that the pertinence of Marlowe’s play did not die with Marlowe himself, and perhaps offers a reason for the continuing hold of Dido, Queen of Carthage over the imagination of Shakespeare, not least in succession-related plays such as Hamlet and The Tempest. A similar elision of Elizabethan and Jacobean concerns may well be present in Edward II too, since the portrayal of a homosexual king seems to glance in the direction of James of Scotland; certainly Mark Thornton Burnett reads the play ‘through the lenses of the numerous tracts on the succession, published in the 1580s and 1590s, that swamped the literary marketplace. A key issue in these accounts is the problem of a dissatisfied and disgruntled noble faction’, and in some of them Elizabeth is openly compared to Edward II.8

Succession, and the English succession in particular, even seems to be alluded to in the apparently improbable context of The Jew of Malta, if I am right in thinking that that play can be seen as alluding to Lucas de Heere’s painting The Allegory of the Tudor Succession, c. 1572, which shows Henry VIII in the centre with Edward VI kneeling at his left hand while Philip and Mary, followed by Mars the god of war, enter from the right and Elizabeth, attended by the goddesses of peace and plenty, sweeps in from the left, nearest to the viewer. This painting records on the back that it was given by the Queen to Sir Francis Walsingham, and it bears around the frame the following verse:

A face of mvche nobillitye loe in a litle roome,

Fowr states with theyr conditions heare shadowed in a showe

A father more than valyant. A rare and vertvvs soon.

A zealvs davghter in her kynd what els the world doth knowe

And last of all a vyrgin qveen to Englands ioy we see,

Successyvely to hold the right and vertves of the three.9

Everything we know about Marlowe suggests that he may well have had a personal connection with Sir Francis Walsingham, since Marlowe seems to have been involved in espionage, which was principally directed by Walsingham.10 Constance Kuriyama has suggested that there may have been a friendship between Marlowe and Nicholas Faunt, one of Walsingham’s principal officers,11 and Marlowe certainly knew Walsingham’s young cousin Thomas, in whose house at Scadbury he seems to have been staying when he was arrested by the Privy Council in May 1593. It seems, therefore, that Marlowe could have seen the painting and read this verse. Moreover, Louis Montrose has pointed out that the painting came to renewed prominence ‘and a significantly wider potential spectatorship in the 1590s, when a copy updating the Queen’s costume was painted, and an engraving by William Rogers … was printed’,12 so though it is specifically the verses of the de Heere version to which I think Marlowe may have been alluding, his apparent evocation of the imagery of the painting would have been more generally recognizable.

Certainly a number of phrases in the verse are extremely suggestive of Marlowe. ‘In a little roome’ is directly echoed in The Jew of Malta (and was of course, courtesy of the reference in As You Like It to ‘a great reckoning in a little room’,13 to become effectively synonymous with the location of Marlowe’s own death), when Barabas speaks of the ‘Infinite riches in a little room’ constituted by jewels brought from far-flung lands.14 It is often suggested that the phrase evokes the iconography of the Blessed Virgin Mary,15 but the overlap with the language of the succession painting might well alert one to a parallel closer to home, with the jewel-loving, travel- and trade-sponsoring Queen Elizabeth. Directly after this, Barabas says:

Into what corner peers my halcyon’s bill?

Ha, to the east? Yes: see how stands the vanes! (I.i.39–40)

The east is the direction as that from which Elizabeth would be coming in the succession painting, if it were to be envisioned as a map. And in the context of The Jew of Malta, the painting’s phrase ‘A zealvs davghter in her kynd what els the world doth knowe’ becomes wildly provocative, especially since its language is directly echoed in Abigail’s reference to ‘The Abbess of the house, / Whose zealous admonition I embrace’ (III.iii.72–3), as too does the idea of virginity, emphasized when Bernardine laments that Abigail dies a virgin (III.vi.41), and the fact that Abigail, Elizabeth-like, plays off one suitor against the other.

Even more provocative in such a context is Barabas’s remark that

I must confess we come not to be kings.

That’s not our fault: alas, our number’s few,

And crowns come either by succession,

Or urged by force; and nothing violent,

Oft have I heard tell, can be permanent.

Give us a peaceful rule, make Christians kings,

That thirst so much for principality. (I.i.128–34)

The whole point of the succession painting is to praise the queen and laud the workings of divine providence which have finally brought her to her father’s crown; here the winning of a crown becomes either a freak of heredity or the mark of violence, and hence transitory. Moreover, in flat contradicti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Christopher Marlowe and the Succession to the English Crown
• 2 Romans and Fairies
• 3 Robin Hood and the King’s Two Bodies
• 4 Female Transmission, Female Taint
• 5 Antonios and Stewards
• 6 One King, Two Kingdoms?
• 7 John Ford and the 1630s
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Index