The Edge of Christendom on the Early Modern Stage

Lisa Hopkins

• Editore: Medieval Institute Publications
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781501514173
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Geschichte
• Categoria: Europäische Geschichte der Renaissance

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the edges of Europe were under pressure from the Ottoman Turks. This book explores how Shakespeare and his contemporaries represented places where Christians came up against Turks, including Malta, Tunis, Hungary, and Armenia. Some forms of Christianity itself might seem alien, so the book also considers the interface between traditional Catholicism, new forms of Protestantism, and Greek and Russian orthodoxy. But it also finds that the concept of Christendom was under threat in other places, some much nearer to home. Edges of Christendom could be found in areas that were or had been pagan, such as Rome itself and the Danelaw, which once covered northern England; they could even be found in English homes and gardens, where imported foreign flowers and exotic new ingredients challenged the concept of what was native and natural.

Part One: The Edge and the Centre

Chapter 1 “All places shall be hell that are not heaven”: The Edge of Rome

In his The Totall discourse, of the rare adventures, and painefull peregrinations of long nineteene yeares travailes from Scotland, to the most famous kingdomes in Europe, Asia, and Affrica, William Lithgow notes that when the town of Otranto was taken by the Turks in 1481, this “involved all Italy in such a feare, that for a whole yeare, and till the expulsion of the Turkes, Rome was quite forsaken.”¹ Rome might be the notional centre of Christendom, but this chapter discusses a group of plays which individually and collectively relegate Rome to the periphery by foregrounding forms of belief either different from or actively antithetical to Roman Catholicism. I start with three plays associated with Wittenberg, the home of Protestantism: Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman (which as well as registering the advent of Protestantism also suggests the continued pull of paganism). I then move on to Macbeth, which both incriminates Catholic political practices and smuggles in reminders of the more Celtic forms of Christianity which had shaped Scotland’s past, as well as once more gesturing at paganism. Finally I turn to Antony and Cleopatra, which stands Rome on its head both temporally and spatially by systematically contrasting Rome with Egypt but suggesting that it is Egypt which has the less worldly values and a closer connection to the numinous. I argue that Antony and Cleopatra and Macbeth are in dialogue, and that between them they, like the Wittenberg plays, trouble the sense of Rome’s centrality and of the cultural importance which it ascribed to itself. Collectively these five plays tell one story, which marginalises Rome and suggests that, in religious terms at least, Europe no longer has a centre, and that any part of it can thus potentially be an edge zone.

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

After the angre Greekes had ruinated the chiefest Cittie in Phrigia, and turned King Priams glorious buildinges to a waste and desolate wildernes, Duke Aeneas exempted from his natiue habitation, with manie of his distressed countrimen (Pilgrims) wandered the world to some happie region, where they might erect the Image of their late subdued Troy.³

Since Seaven Champions tells the story of seven saints and saints are by definition Christian, it is surprising to find them rubbing shoulders with Aeneas, and it is also a bit unexpected to find Aeneas’s followers described as pilgrims, even given that Goran Stanivukovic argues that there is an archaising pull inherently at work in the romance genre: “in prose romances of the period … the Christian knights’ travels and adventures, sometimes crowned with marriage to one of the Levantine princesses, have more to do with the fictionalized discursive ‘conquests’ of the territories of old Christianity and the lands in which the Crusaders displayed their heroic skills and virtues than with the imagined strategies, or projections, of colonizing those lands, or with trade.”⁴ Even these wild anachronisms are as nothing, though, compared to what is to come when Sabra, daughter of King Ptolemy of Egypt and wife of St. George, gives birth to triplet sons called Guy, Alexander, and David (she is attended in her confinement by “Proserpine the Fayrie Queene”).⁵ Guy, who is to be a soldier, is sent to Rome; Alexander, who is to be a prince, is “sent to the rich plentifull Country of England, being the pride of Christendome for all delightfull pleasures”; and David, who is to be a scholar, is sent “to the Uniuersity of Wittenberg, beeing thought at that time to bee the excellentst place of learning, that remayned throughout the whole world.”⁶ The actual name of the University of Wittenberg was the Leucorea, whose origin-word is the Greek for white (leucos), but the English pun is always on Wittenberg; in Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller the Duke of Saxony is welcomed to Wittenberg with a speech which includes the words “Wit is wit” and “With all the wit I have,”⁷ and even though the point there is that the speaker has a very poor wit, it is the pun which gives impetus to the irony. Wittenberg is a place where wit is to be expected; for Johnson, it is “the excellentst place of learning, that remayned throughout the whole world,” and in 1589, Henry Cavendish’s servant Fox, accompanying his master overland to Constantinople, observed that “Wyttenburg ys a veary fayr toune and hathe ii great colligys in yt whyche doe contayne in ether of them a thowsand studyents.”⁸

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 ...