Carnival and Literature in Early Modern England

Jennifer C. Vaught

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317169659
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Literatura
• Categoria: Crítica literaria medieval y moderna temprana

Carnival and Literature in Early Modern England explores the elite and popular festive materials appropriated by authors during the English Renaissance in a wide range of dramatic and non-dramatic texts. Although historical records of rural, urban, and courtly seasonal customs in early modern England exist only in fragmentary form, Jennifer Vaught traces the sustained impact of festivals and rituals on the plays and poetry of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English writers. She focuses on the diverse ways in which Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, Dekker, Jonson, Milton and Herrick incorporated the carnivalesque in their works. Further, she demonstrates how these early modern texts were used-and misused-by later writers, performers, and inventors of spectacles, notably Mardi Gras krewes organizing parades in the American Deep South. The works featured here often highlight violent conflicts between individuals of different ranks, ethnicities, and religions, which the author argues reflect the social realities of the time. These Renaissance writers responded to republican, egalitarian notions of liberty for the populace with radical support, ambivalence, or conservative opposition. Ultimately, the vital, folkloric dimension of these plays and poems challenges the notion that canonical works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries belong only to 'high' and not to 'low' culture.

Chapter 1
Grotesque Imperialists, Alien Scapegoats, and Feasting in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice

In Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta Marlowe appropriates a rich abundance of elite and popular, festive materials related to carnival. Carnivalesque figures and motifs in these two plays include saucy servants and tricksters; parodies of religious or other sacred or secular authority figures; grotesque processions and magical spectacles; and a cannibalistic feast. Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, which exhibits a number of intertextual connections to The Jew of Malta, also displays carnivalesque elements such as masking and crossdressing, violent anti-alien sentiments, and threats of cannibalism. In Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, and The Merchant of Venice Marlowe and Shakespeare dramatize poignantly the oppression of the folk and the abuse of ethnic and racial minorities. Both playwrights evoke sympathy for their Jewish protagonists—Barabas and Shylock—because of their mistreatment as alien scapegoats. Later theatrical productions of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century England and Europe feature the carnivalesque, trickster figure of the puppet commonly found in popular theater and other forms of mass entertainment. This folkloric figure was often appropriated in puppet play versions of the Faust myth performed in elite theater locales and largely served to amass wealth for the upper and middle ranks, furthering the economic divide between those of higher and lower stations. Marlowe and Shakespeare, by contrast, intermingle elite and popular elements throughout their carnivalesque works for largely republican and egalitarian purposes.1

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In Doctor Faustus, a play based on a folk legend, Marlowe tends to appropriate a diverse variety of carnivalesque materials in subversive ways.2 This play revolves around Faustus’s pact with Mephistopheles in which he sells his soul to the devil in exchange for 24 years of hedonistic delight. During this period of liberty, Faustus acts as if he were participating in a festive celebration of excess. The opening Chorus states that the tragical history focuses neither on war, love, nor public displays of glory:

Not marching now in the fields of Trasimene

Where Mars did mate the Carthaginians,

Nor sporting in the dalliance of love

In courts of kings where state is overturned,

Nor in the pomp of proud audacious deeds,

Intends our muse to dault his heavenly verse … (Chorus 1–6; my emphasis)3

Carnivalesque celebrations in Elizabethan England often involved the temporary “overturn[ing]” of the authority of aristocratic rulers and the upper ranks and frequently included parodies of Catholic rituals or ceremonies. The playwright’s very mentioning of this kind of overturning, if only to negate it, indirectly associates Doctor Faustus with radical discourse or events that do “overturn” the existing social and economic hierarchy and undermine sacred or secular figures or institutions, at least for the duration of a holiday. As the Chorus further reports, Faustus is “glutted more with learning’s golden gifts” and “surfeits upon cursed necromancy” (24–5). Later, the magician confesses in similarly excessive terms, “How am I glutted with conceit of this!” when contemplating the Jove-like dominion and power the black arts would grant him (I.i.80). Faustus’s gluttony for knowledge and sovereignty befits the pronounced oral, gastronomical dimension of Marlowe’s play in which the playwright figuratively devours carnivalesque motifs characteristic of popular folk culture.

For 24 years after signing the pact with Mephistopheles Faustus’s hedonistic and rebellious behavior depicts him as a carnival participant.4 Like a Lord of Misrule elected to lead the holiday festivities, he performs the role of master until the end of the play when the servant Mephistopheles and the other devils hurl him into a hell mouth, a savagely violent, cannibalistic motif. Though Faustus is seduced by the notion that his powers of black magic appear limitless, his reign as a magician is in fact ephemeral. Similarly, a Lord or Lady of Misrule relinquishes his or her authority at the end of a festive occasion. Faustus envisions elevating other scholars to his own grand level by having spirits “fill the public schools with silk,/Wherewith the students shall be bravely clad” (92–3). The poor scholars’ temporary elevation in social rank is standard fare during a carnival period when the low are commonly made high. In this particular case transgressive Faustus violates sumptuary laws that prohibited lower-ranking figures from wearing silk.

Marlowe’s depiction of Faustus’s carnivalesque, excessive appetite for material goods as ultimately vacuous functions as a critique of English imperialism, a way in which the play imaginatively challenges a dominant economic practice in early modern England and Europe. He is tempted by the Evil Angel’s misleading promise that magic will make him “on earth as Jove is in the sky,/Lord and commander of these elements” (I.i.78–9). He further imagines gaining imperial dominion by commanding legions of spirits:

I’ll have them fly to India for gold,

Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,

And search all corners of the new-found world

For pleasant fruits and princely delicates …

I’ll levy soldiers with the coin they bring

And chase the Prince of Parma from our land,

And reign sole king of all our provinces; … (84–7, 94–6)

Faustus exhibits regal, aristocratic tastes for luxurious and costly material goods that are largely imported. He desires “gold” imported from India, “orient pearl” from the Far East, and “fruits” and other delicacies from the “new-found world” of America. Marlowe exposes Faustus’s vice of succumbing to his base and voracious appetites for such refined commodities as well as his hunger for territorial aggression and domination. Parallels between him and imperial rulers and wealthy subjects, who zealously devour foreign lands and expensive imports, suggest that the playwright parodies the material greed of the upper and middle ranks through this trickster’s voracious lust for relatively empty pleasures.5

Faustus’s temporary reign through magic allows him to command those represented as “exotic,” “other,” or “strange” in the play as well as dominate their territories and consume their natural resources, Marlowe’s further critique of Eurocentric imperialism and its culturally exploitative dimension. As the magician Valdes exclaims to Cornelius and Faustus,

As Indian Moors obey their Spanish lords,

So shall the subjects of every element

Be always serviceable to us three. (123–5)

These three magicians envision acting as masters with servants that they control and exploit. Faustus enjoys a carnivalesque, liminal time and space of seemingly unrestricted freedom and power as such a master. During his reign of misrule, he perpetuates rather than provides release from, or clarification of, the inequities of racial discrimination.6 Like the “Spanish lords” who coerced obedience from “Indian Moors” in early modern Europe, he and his devilish accomplices will enslave other “subjects” from exotic lands through black magic. In Faustus’s opening reverie he imagines using “coin” from the spirits he summons both to “levy soldiers” and to “chase the Prince of Parma from our land,” the commanding ruler of the Spanish Armada in 1588 (94–5). In this way he fulfills the far-reaching ambitions of imperial England, which not only exploited weaker nations and peoples but also defeated European countries similarly hungry and thirsty for global dominance.7 The playwright’s depiction of Faustus as a tyrannical fool vulnerable to Mephistopheles’ trickery, however, implicitly challenges the authority of imperialists and upper-ranking, wealthy consumers that the magician’s self-indulgent reveries bring to mind and parody.

Marlowe presents greed among rulers and subjects as one of the many diseases plaguing the body politic in Doctor Faustus. The protagonist temporarily fulfills the economic fantasies of early modern rulers, aristocrats, and merchants as a result of the excess coin and imported goods the demonic spirits give him. Yet his foolishness of sacrificing his soul for material wealth exposes the hollowness of his and other imperialists’ and consumers’ worldly ambitions. As Valdes promises Faustus with respect to the spirits he will command with black magic, “From Venice shall they drag huge argosies,/And from America the golden fleece/That yearly stuffs old Philip’s treasury” (132–4). He will thereby control international trade routes and treasuries through his devilish arts. Faustus’s desires for such power and money are imperialistic and self-serving and from a moral standpoint the offspring of pride and gluttony. Marlowe’s exposé of Faustus’s greedy desires reveals the grotesque underbelly of imperialistic nations largely defined by their accumulation of luxury goods and by their figurative devouring of human resources, including slaves, from foreign lands.8 Close to the time that Marlowe wrote Doctor Faustus, Elizabeth I sought political and fiscal power over Philip II of Spain by defeating the Spanish Armada in 1588.9 The playwright mocks Faustus’s excessive materialism characteristic of rulers and the upper ranks by subjecting his foolishness to ridicule by Wagner, Robin the clown, and the servant Rafe and by making a spectacle of his dismemberment by a hoard of devils at the end of the play.

Servants in Doctor Faustus underscore the social and economic injustices that the wealthy elite inflicted upon poor commoners in early modern England, a carnivalesque critique of the status quo befitting a republican dramatist like Marlowe advocating liberty.10 During the Elizabethan period, improvising clowns often voiced the grievances of the lower ranks and were frequently allied with radical impulses for popular rebellion.11 In a slapstick scene Wagner and Robin jest about their lack of income bordering on poverty, yet better culinary taste than their master, Faustus. Wagner insults his cohort Robin in food-related terms that intertwine the stableman’s lowly status with his base eating habits: “Alas, poor slave, see how poverty jesteth in his nakedness! The villain is bare and out of service, and so hungry that I know he would give his soul to the devil for a shoulder of mutton, though it were blood raw” (I.iv.6–9). Here Wagner foreshadows and parodies Faustus’s eternally damning bargain with Mephistopheles in the next scene.12 Robin replies, “How? My soul to the devil for a shoulder of mutton, though ’twere blood raw? Not so, good friend. By’r Lady, I had need have it well roasted, and good sauce to it, if I pay so dear” (10–12). He is more hesitant to exchange his soul for a “shoulder of mutton,” a perversion of the Lamb of God, than Faustus will be in his efforts to gain 24 years of hedonistic pleasures through his bloody pact with Mephistopheles. Robin’s swearing “by’r Lady” in defense of his discriminating palate for fine cuisine mingles “the Virgin Mary” with profane street talk, adding to the carnivalesque, perverse dimension of the play. In this scene food provides a key ingredient for Wagner’s and Robin’s undermining of Faustus’s gluttonous ambitions to become godlike.

Robin’s invoking of the Virgin Mary in this farcical context adds to Marlowe’s festive mockery of religious authorities, Catholic or Protestant, throughout Doctor Faustus. Earlier, Wagner mocks Puritanism when he exclaims to two Scholars, “Thus, having triumphed over you, I will set my countenance like a precision and begin to speak thus” (I.ii.24–6). A “precision” refers to a Puritan with over-exact speech and dress. Near the beginning of the play Marlowe parodies Catholic rituals customarily performed by a priest through the black magic incantation Faustus delivers in Latin: “By Jehovah, Gehenna, and the holy water that I now sprinkle, and by the sign of the cross that I now make” (I.iii.19–21).13 The protagonist indulges in anti-Catholic satire when he orders Mephistopheles, “Go, and return an old Franciscan friar;/That holy shape becomes a devil best” (25–6). Such parodies of religious figures were an integral part of carnivalesque festivities in early modern England and Europe. The anti-Catholic masque performed before Elizabeth I on Twelfth Night in 1559 that featured a number of satirical hybrid figures—crows as cardinals, asses as bishops, and wolves as abbots—is in keeping with the rampant spirit of misrule in Marlowe’s morality play.14

Using carnivalesque, debasing rhetoric, Wagner and Robin focus on tangible matters of brute economics and the physical body, issues central for the abject and suffering lower ranks in Doctor Faustus. Their comic banter provides a social critique of the grim living and working conditions for the poor in early modern England. When Wagner commands Robin to serve him in “beaten silk and stavesacre,” his jesting wordplay is suggestive of a master who beats his servant with “staves” (I.iv.16). Their subsequent conversation about “knave’s acre,” which refers to Robi...