I want to start however not with a play at all but by revisiting Richard Johnson’s prose romance The Most Famous History of the Seaven Champions of Christendome, which I have already touched on in the introduction. Justin Kolb argues that “Spenser, Marlowe in Tamburlaine, and other writers of the period explored the Islamic challenge by displacing it into the space of romance and classical literature, containing it in an imaginative realm drawn from their syncretic humanist educations and constructed out of elements drawn from a wide span of history and literature.”² Johnson’s text uses that strategy too, and as a result it offers an intriguing collocation. As we have seen, the events it relates apparently begin at a time when

Though Wittenberg was later to feature in Hamlet and Hoffman, in 1596 Johnson could have found it in drama only in Doctor Faustus. This is almost certainly where he did in fact find it, because some aspects of Johnson’s romance are clearly influenced by Marlowe. Facing execution, the King of Morocco offers that he and some of his lords will “like bridled Horses drawe thee daylie in a siluer Charriot vp and downe the sercled earth,” but St. George is unmoved because “for seauen yeares I dranke the Channell water.”⁹ The first of these remarks echoes Tamburlaine, the second Edward II in his prison cell. The inhabitants of Tripoli turn on St. George and “made a massaker of his seruants” and one of Sabra’s babies “lay in his cradle smiling like Cupid vpon the happe of Dido, whome Venus changed into the liknes of Askanius”;¹⁰ “massaker” looks like a glance at The Massacre at Paris, and the story of Venus swapping Cupid and Ascanius is central to Dido, Queen of Carthage. Johnson, then, is interested in Marlowe, in Wittenberg, and in the tale of Troy, and for him the three are imaginatively connected. In the story told by Virgil, the translatio imperii transferred the cultural capital and divine authority of Troy to Rome. In the story told by Johnson, only one of the triplets goes to Rome, and even then apparently only for its military rather than its religious associations, since he is destined to be a soldier; the other two travel to destinations which Johnson’s audience would have understood as Protestant, including the very centre of Protestantism, Wittenberg.

Four or five years after Johnson wrote, Wittenberg registers in English literature again, when Hamlet is declared to have studied there, and five or six years after that a secondary character in Henry Chettle’s Hoffman, Prince Jerome of Heidelberg, is proud of his education: he declares “True, I am no fool, I have been at Wittenberg, where wit grows.”¹¹ Jerome does have some book-learning; he demands of his henchman Stilt, “My beard-brush and mirror, Stilt, that set my countenance right to the Mirror of Knighthood, for your Mirror of Magistrates is somewhat too sober” (2.1.36 – 39), before adding, “They say I am a fool, Stilt, but follow me. I’ll seek out my notes of Machiavel; they say he’s an odd politician” (2.1.68 – 70). However, Jerome also expresses a belief that learning is fundamentally unnecessary: “princes have no need to be taught” (2.1.17 – 18). The Wittenberg-educated Hamlet is also ambivalent about learning things: he is not ashamed to violate the first principle of sprezzatura by admitting to Horatio that he has practised fencing daily, but he regards it as beneath him to take care in handwriting until he suddenly discovers that it can actually be useful to do so. One might also observe that Faustus does not seem to value the education he received at university, and that it has not taught him such obvious things as not to sell your soul to the devil. For all the emphasis on its status as a place of learning, there seems to be a sense that Wittenberg is important not so much for what it teaches as for what it is, and what it was above all was an antithesis to Rome. Germany in general was traditionally seen as opposed to Rome: on 28 January 1574 Hubert Languet jokingly complained to Philip Sidney that “the Germans have plundered us poor Gauls of the empire which they declare that we never possessed. They say that the expedition of Godfrey of Bouillon to Jerusalem was theirs: and that the Greek and Latin writers, early and late, are talking nonsense when they say that the Gauls made so many irruptions into Italy, burned Rome, penetrated into Greece and even into Asia, since these all were undoubtedly Germans.”¹² In the case of Wittenberg in particular, one of the spurs which drove Luther to nail the ninety-five theses to the door of the Castle Church was outrage at the levy of a new tax designed to fund the rebuilding of St. Peter’s, and Luther’s friends the Cranach family deliberately created a new style of painting meant to rival and counter that of Rome.

I think that all the Wittenberg plays are troubled by this sense that the primary meaning of Wittenberg itself lies not in any positive values of its own but in the challenge it poses to Rome. This is particularly apparent in their attitudes to death and the afterlife. It is suggestive that all three Wittenberg plays feature a cliff or other sharp difference ...