Christopher Marlowe and the Failure to Unify

Andrew Duxfield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367880255
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317166504
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this sustained full length study of Marlowe's plays, Andrew Duxfield argues that Marlovian drama exhibits a marked interest in unity and unification, and that in doing so it engages with a discourse of anxiety over social discord that was prominent in the 1580s and 1590s. In combination with the ambiguity of the plays, he suggests, this focus produces a tension that both heightens dramatic effect and facilitates a cynical response to contemporary evocations of and pleas for unity. This book has three main aims. Firstly, it establishes that Marlowe's tragedies exhibit a profound interest in the process of reduction and the ideal of unity. Duxfield shows this interest to manifest itself in different ways in each of the plays. Secondly, it identifies this interest in unity and unification as an engagement in a cultural discourse that was particularly prevalent in England during Marlowe's writing career; during the late 1580s and early 1590s heightened inter-confessional tension, the threat and reality of foreign invasion and public puritan dissent in the form of the Marprelate controversy provoked considerable public anxiety about social discord. Thirdly, the book considers the plays' focus on unity in relation to their marked ambiguity; throughout all of the plays, unifying ideals and reductive processes are consistently subject to renegotiation with, or undercut entirely by, the complexity and ambiguity of the dramas in which they feature. Duxfield's focus on unity as a theme throughout the plays provides a new lens through which to examine the place of Marlowe's work in its cultural moment.

Chapter 1

Building a Statelier Troy:
Dido, Queen of Carthage

Dido, Queen of Carthage, like the later The Jew of Malta, is a play which makes use of its audience’s preconceptions and expectations, complicating them to create an atmosphere of moral ambiguity in which its numerous concerns are developed. Marlowe takes a story with which the educated members of the courtly audience would have been familiar: the portion of Virgil’s Aeneid (books One and Four) in which the hero, Aeneas, is temporarily distracted from his anointed task of re-establishing Troy in Italy by a love affair with a north-African queen. In Virgil’s epic order is restored when Aeneas comes to his senses and sets sail for Italy, leaving Dido to commit suicide, an unfortunate but necessary instance of collateral damage in the hero’s mission. Likewise, a generous portion of the audience would have been aware of the Galfridian tradition which held that the people of England were direct descendants from Aeneas through his great-grandson Brutus, who founded “Brutayne” after being banished from Italy for shooting his father in a hunting accident. There were plenty of reasons, then, for Elizabethan playgoers to expect an Aeneas with whom they could identify and whom they could admire. This chapter will explore Marlowe’s exploitation and subversion of these expectations, and the ambiguity this engenders, in detail. Against this background of moral ambiguity, I will argue, Dido explores the conflict between personal desire and social duty, not simply in the case of Aeneas, but also for Dido and the Olympian gods, and the reaction of individuals when that conflict is irreconcilable. It is by way of this concentration on incompatibility and conflict that Dido interrogates the concepts of authority and of authorization. Marlowe’s portrayal of the classical gods, in contrast to their representation in Virgil’s Aeneid, diminishes their authority, and, by extension, the perceived necessity of Aeneas’s journey. In doing so, it engages critically with a recurring discourse of authorization in which the legend of Dido and Aeneas is central. Just as Aeneas’s task is to create a new empire authorized both by divine sanction and by its direct association with ancient Troy, so the story itself, in its many guises, has been used to authorize various imperial enterprises, from those of Augustan Rome to those of the England of Elizabeth. This chapter will discuss the play’s interrogation of reductive tendencies, displayed both within the legend of Dido and in contemporary politics of empire, to seek authorization through association with and replication of history, both real and mythological. Furthermore, it will examine the application of this authorization to programmes of expansion which reproduce the familiar at the expense of diversity, with the overall aim of eliding the kind of incompatibilities that are dramatized in Marlowe’s play.

Moral Ambiguity

In re-telling the story of Aeneas’s sojourn at Carthage, Marlowe trades in a currency with which his audience, particularly if the play was performed for the educated elite at court,¹ would be very familiar. While there had been a medieval tradition, exemplified by Lydgate’s Troy Book, of representing Aeneas as a villain complicit in King Priam’s murder,² Marlowe’s play appears to adhere more closely to the version of events as told in The Aeneid, in the process automatically imbuing Aeneas with a Virgilian gravitas.³ The reading of Marlowe’s Aeneas as a grand epic hero and masculine exemplar was prevalent in much twentieth-century criticism of the play. J. B. Steane, writing in the mid-twentieth century, suggests that the celestial imagery of the play’s early Olympian scenes provides a “setting made for man: the magnificence which the world offers to the human being great enough to take it. Aeneas is such a man.”⁴ Steane’s enthusiastic (and distinctly gendered) account of Marlowe’s Aeneas implies the standard expectations of the hero of a Virgilian epic: a man great enough to bear the focus of a work of such great scope must be a great man indeed. For Irving Singer, an epic hero “must always be bigger than life, as a way of carrying the reader’s eye or the listener’s ear beyond the particularity of any single person, episode, or event.”⁵

On the face of it, there is good reason to afford Marlowe’s Aeneas the dignity of his Virgilian forebear. After all, in terms of plot, there are few differences between Marlowe’s account and Virgil’s; Aeneas arrives at Carthage, distraught at the sack of Troy, and is accommodated generously by Dido, with whom he shares a love affair, before being reminded of his higher purpose and setting sail for Italy. Meanwhile, Dido, unwilling to continue her life without him, commits suicide. Marlowe expands the involvement of Iarbas, inventing both his infatuation with Dido and Anna’s with him, creating for him an integral role in Aeneas’s departure.⁶ Marlowe also introduces the comic episode with Cupid and the octogenarian nurse, and amplifies the scale of the carnage at the play’s climax, but Aeneas’s actions are essentially the same here as they are in Virgil.

Notwithstanding this, the Aeneas we get is not the Aeneas we expect. Steane’s account of the play’s language and imagery as a setting made for a great man overlooks the fact that the play doesn’t even bear his name. This honour, of course, goes to its principal female character. Instead of being a man capable of bearing the weight of a great epic or tragedy, Marlowe’s Aeneas is weak-willed, indecisive, and a serial abandoner of women. It is not only in the title of the play that Dido enjoys precedence over Aeneas. Although she is the victim of an Olympian ruse at the hands of Juno and Venus, Dido takes action throughout the play, while Aeneas remains passive, even submissive. This tendency is glimpsed when he appeals to Dido to repair his fleet:

Yet, Queen of Afric, are my ships unrigg’d,

My sails all rent in sunder with the wind,

My oars broken, and my tackling lost,

Yea, all my navy split with rocks and shelves;

Nor stern nor anchor have our maimed fleet;

Our masts the furious winds struck overboard:

Which piteous wants if Dido will supply,

We will account her author of our lives.

(3. 1. 104–11)⁷

This account, one of many delivered by Aeneas regarding hardships he has encountered, culminates in a submission – perhaps rhetorical, but nonetheless prophetic – of his autonomy to Dido, who immediately responds by demanding he stay at Carthage. Similarly, Aeneas’s vacillations after embarking on a romantic relationship with Dido are indicative of a comically weak will. When he is first persuaded of his need to leave Carthage and seek out Italy, and shortly afterwards of the necessity of his staying, his decisions are presented as being made for, and not by, him. When apparently choosing to leave Dido without her knowledge, Aeneas provides the audience with his reasons for leaving:

Carthage, my friendly host, adieu,

Since destiny doth call me from the shore;

Hermes this night descending in a dream

Hath summon’d me to fruitful Italy;

Jove wills it so, my mother wills it so;

Let my Phoenissa grant, and I then go.

Grant she or no, Aeneas must away.

(4. 3. 1–7)

Aeneas appears to exhibit a moment of assertiveness here, but it is notable that everybody’s will but his own is alluded to in these lines. In case the point was missed, his total surrender to Dido when she catches him leaving, combined with his childlike refusal to accept responsibility for it, firmly re-establishes what Brian Gibbons calls his “pathological” passiveness:⁸

AENEAS: O princely Dido, give me leave to speak;

I went to take my farewell of Achates.

DIDO: How haps Achates bid me not farewell?

ACHATES: Because I fear’d Your Grace would keep me here.

DIDO: To rid thee of that doubt, aboard again:

I charge thee put to sea, and stay not here.

ACHATES: Then let Aeneas go aboard with us.

DIDO: Get you aboard, Aeneas means to stay.

AENEAS: The sea is rough, the winds blow to the shore.

DIDO: O false Aeneas, now the sea is rough,

But when you were aboard ’twas calm enough!

Thou and Achates meant to sail away.

AENEAS: Hath not the Carthage Queen mine only son?

Thinks Dido I will go and leave him here?

DIDO: Aeneas, pardon me, for I forgot

That young Ascanius lay with me this whole night.

(4. 4. 17–32)

The balance of power in this passage is firmly – comically even – in favour of Dido, whose remonstrations call to mind a stern schoolmistress administering discipline to errant pupils (a parallel which may be significant, given that the play was written for and acted by a boys’ company. I will return to this later). Yet Aeneas appears to be guilty of negligence as well as passivity, apparently having forgotten to take his son with him when making his escape. This oversight represents not only a neglect of his familial duty, but also of the divine quest that he claims necessitates his departure; Ascanius is a very necessary link in the ancestral chain that will lead to Augustus (and further on to Queen Elizabeth), a point which Hermes makes very clear when he reminds Aeneas whose prophecy it is that needs to be fulfilled:

Vain man, what monarchy expect’st thou here?

Or with what thought sleep’st thou in Libya shore?

If that all glory hath forsaken thee

And thou despise the praise of such attempts,

Yet think upon Ascanius’ prophecy

And young Iulus’ more than thousand years.

(5. 1. 34–9)

Indeed, it is Aeneas’s overlooked son, “bright Ascanius,” who, according to Jupiter’s declaration in the opening scene of the play, “Shall build his throne amidst those starry towers / That earth-born Atlas groaning underprops” (1. 1. 96–9). The son that Aeneas seems to have been either calculating or absent-minded enough to leave behind at Carthage is actually the focus of the prophecy to which he seems to attach such unlimited importance. It is because Dido believes this act of negligence is beyond his capabilities that she eventually acquiesces to his insistence that he hadn’t intended to leave. The audience knows better, however.

As well as lacking the kind of decisiveness the audience might have expected from a Virgilian hero, Marlowe’s Aeneas also proves to be a chivalric failure. We are given an early warning of Aeneas’s propensity to utterly fail women in his account to Dido of the sack of Troy, which details his inability to save firstly his wife Creusa, secondly Cassandra and thirdly Polyxena from the myrmidon horde (2. 1. 265–88). The account of the sack of Troy ominously prefigures the events that will transpire throughout the rest of the play; his ineptitude at performing the most fundamental of chivalric duties – the rescue of beleaguered females – is only further confirmed by his abandonment of Dido.⁹ On a lighter note, his failure to recognize Dido’s erotic advances in the cave scene provides another instance of comedy at his expense:

AENEAS: Why, what is it that Dido may desire

And not obtain, be it in human power?

DIDO: The thing that I will die before I ask,

And yet desir...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Building a Statelier Troy: Dido, Queen of Carthage
• 2 Reduced to a Map: Tamburlaine the Great, Parts One and Two
• 3 “Resolve me of all ambiguities”: Doctor Faustus
• 4 Individual and Multitude: The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at Paris
• 5 True Contraries: Edward II
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index