РефератыИностранный языкElElizabethan Drama Essay Research Paper Beyond New

Elizabethan Drama Essay Research Paper Beyond New

Elizabethan Drama Essay, Research Paper


Beyond New Historicism: Marlowe’s unnatural histories and the melancholy


properties of the stage Drew Milne The tradition of the dead generations weighs


like a nightmare on the minds of the living. [1] There is no document of culture


which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a


document is not free from barbarism, barbarism also taints the process of


transmission … [2] Recent critical discussions of Elizabethan drama, above all


of Shakespeare, have centred around `new historicism’, a trend consolidated in


critical anthologies.[3] New historicism is characterised by an interest in the


historicity of texts and the textuality of history, and by affinities with


theoretical projects concerned with power, identity and the construction of


subject positions. Despite important political differences, new historicism has


been linked with what has become known as `cultural materialism’.[4] Many of the


political differences stem from the uneasy relation of new historicism, and of


cultural materialism, to the Marxist conception of history or historical


materialism, differences which this essay seeks to accentuate. Raymond Williams


is often claimed as a major precursor of cultural materialism, but interest in


institutions, discursive practices and subject positions suggests the different


legacy of Althusser’s attack on humanism and the influence of Foucault. New


historicism, by contrast, shows scant regard for Marxism while being especially


indebted to Foucault’s version of Nietzsche’s will to power and perspectival


historicism, despite important critiques of Foucault’s work.[5] The Althusserian


approach is more overtly committed to the possibility of political change but


tends towards a similarly theoreticist, even formalist reduction of history. The


possibility of resisting power and the power of ideology marks the decisive


conflict in these different assimilations of history to culture. New


historicism, lost in proliferating examples of contingent but seemingly


inescapable discourses of power, seems at best to expand the archive of wry


smiles at the ruses of history and power. As an academic guise in which to


rework the glories of the past without pausing too long over the enormity of the


history surveyed, the reproduction of literary history now lies in the hands of


those who can offer few reasons for continuing to produce the object of


critique. Sinfield suggests that, `New historicists, therefore, like their


colleagues, are sustaining many of the old routines while knowing, really, that


their validity has evaporated.’[6] As such, new historicists could be described


as reformists who do not believe in progress. If we are to awake from the


nightmare of history, perhaps such historicism should be left alone to dull the


air with discoursive moans, as Aeneas puts it in Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of


Carthage. The persistent naturalisation of suffering in history should be


resisted if the process of transmitting historical documents is not to further


the process. Herein lies the need to offer estranging perspectives on


Elizabethan drama and the intervening historical gulf. One aspect of the


difficulty is the continuing investment in naturalising both the language and


dramaturgy of Elizabethan drama within a literary tradition dominated by


Shakespeare and the Shakespeare industry. This essay seeks to provide an


estranging perspective through a reading of new historicist accounts of Marlowe.


Focussing on Tamburlaine, I hope to suggest some different approaches with


regard to the melancholy dramatisation of history as a scene of unnatural


events, by drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin and Franco Moretti.[7] A


distinctive and estranging approach to dramatising the enormity of history is


evident in the prevalence of violence, murder and arbitrary death in Elizabethan


drama itself. This prevalence has long been seen as excessive, a mark of


something unnatural in its historical imaginary, without being understood.


History in Elizabethan drama is, as title-pages characteristically predict,


lamentable. The structure of effects suggested by drama as an occasion for


melancholic lamentation helps to contextualise the roles of Tamburlaine, Barabas


and Guise in Marlowe’s plays, where it seems particularly in-appropriate to


reduce their dramatic ambivalence to the need to identify with a central


protagonist or autonomous `character’. As David Bevington suggests: `The


well-known type of "Lamentable Tragedy, Mixed Full of Pleasant Mirth"


… traces its origins to the view that vicious behavior is at once funny and


terrifying as a spectacle, admirable and yet grotesque, amusing but also


edifying as a perverse distortion of moral behavior.’[8] Elizabethan drama, par-ticularly


Marlowe’s, dramatises the contradictions of seeing history as a record of divine


providence in which the world is the theatre of divine judgment. The prologue to


the first part of Tamburlaine invites audience and reader to `View but his


picture in this tragicke glasse, / And then applaud his fortunes if you


please.’[9] Indeed the play seems to relish the ambivalent moral possibilities


of melancholy pleasure in lamenting a world without divine providence. In this


theatre history is both unnatural and inhuman. Violent suffering without end or


grace goes against the notion of a fall from a greater nature or the prospect of


a redeemed nature to come. History is then seen as the non-identity of nature


with itself, unnatural forces struggling with natural ones. Unnatural forces,


however, must also be seen as emerging from nature, while the dramatisation of


history in terms of human agency suggests that unnatural acts are an aspect of


human nature for which no secular concept of wordly evil is adequate. In


Elizabethan drama the stage is not so much beyond good and evil as caught in an


attempt to develop a secular concept of evil. The resources for such a concept


are figurative rather than conceptual, resorting to melancholy in face of the


unthinkably arbitrary and violent prevalence of suffering. Benjamin’s account is


helpful here. The contemplation of lamentable stories of death by unnatural


causes finds its aesthetic purpose in allegories of unholy dying, allegories in


which history is a fallen nature, a world of evil without the consolations of


natural justice. On such an unnaturally cruel and violent stage dominated by


seemingly arbitrary and unreliable powers, the possibility that evil might be


recognisable without theology is consoling. Indeed it is the reduction of


history to worldly evil which makes it possible to stage history as a state of


unnatural nature that can be lamented. The mirror of magistrates becomes a wheel


which needs to be reinvented because it never quite comes full circle, notably


in the lurching rhythms of the failure of poetic justice at the end of King


Lear. Hence, although a fashion for stage violence can be traced from Cambises


and Gorboduc to The Spanish Tragedy, its historical significance is complicated.


Thus it is difficult to understand why Tamburlaine was so popular, even to the


extent of imitation in The First part of the Tragical raigne of Selimus.


Tamburlaine’s simple linear plot seems to offer little more than a violent


pageant of power and destruction enlivened by occasional striking tableaux. This


taste for horror in aesthetic form has remained unexplained in its more specific


historical manifestations, and in general, perhaps because it reflects but fails


to explain the nightmare of history. In rethinking this nightmare, much of the


critical verve of new historicism is derived from the historicisation, if not


critique, of humanist or idealist conceptions of subjectivity in the reception


and critical transmission of Elizabethan drama. There is a danger in


assimilating the different approaches associated with new historicism to one


paradigm, but the centrality of conceptions of subjectivity is evident.


Catherine Belsey, while developing an attack on liberal humanism, seeks `to


chart in the drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the eventual


construction of an order of subjectivity which is recognizably modern.’[10] This


finds its strategic justification in the need to displace the largely romantic


and post-romantic conceptions of the subject dominant in the modern reception of


Shakespeare and so-called Renaissance drama more generally. Jonathan Dollimore


describes the task as `a critique of the way literary critics have reproduced


Renaissance drama in terms of a modern depoliticized subjectivity, and an


attempt to recover a more adequate history of subjectivity’.[11] Dollimore


argues that Elizabethan tragedy itself challenged Christian essentialism and in


the process decentred `Man’; but he also highlights the danger of anachronism:


the incorrect procedure is that which insists on reading the early seventeenth


century through the grid of an essentialist humanism which in historical fact


post-dates it and in effect only really emerges with the Enlightenment; in other


words, what makes a materialist analysis of subjectivity in that period seem


inappropriate is itself a thoroughly anachronistic perspective.[12] Nevertheless


there are striking similarities between Dollimore’s account of Tamburlaine and


the persistent Nietzschean romanticism which marks previous critical accounts of


Marlowe. Hazlitt says of Marlowe that: `There is a lust of power in his


writings, a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness, a glow of the imagination,


unhallowed by anything but its own energies.’[13]; while Helen Gardner argues


less effusively that: `The first part of Tamburlaine glorifies the human will:


the second displays its inevitable limits.’[14]; and Harry Levin offers the


following stirring formulation of Marlowe’s Barabas: `His will to power is


gratified less by possession than by control. In this he does not resemble the


conqueror so much as he adumbrates the capitalist; and Marlowe has grasped what


is truly imaginative, what in his time was almost heroic, about business


enterprise.’[15] This Nietzschean aesthetic of the will to power and primitive


accumulation, in which naked ambition and the arbitrary amassing of power and


wealth is celebrated as the legitimate aspiration of human energy, finds


surprising echoes in Dollimore’s account of Tamburlaine: With his indomitable


will to power and warrior prowess, Tamburlaine really does approximate to the


self-determining hero bent on transcendent autonomy . . . exclusion may be the


basis not just of Tamburlaine as fantasy projection but Tamburlaine as


transgressive text: it liberates from its Christian and ethical framework the


humanist conception of man as essentially free, dynamic and aspiring. [16] In


Dollimore’s argument these terms are ambivalent rather than celebratory, but


seem to preclude the more Brechtian possibility that Marlowe does not in the end


intend sympathy with Tamburlaine. Perhaps, like Mother Courage, Marlowe intended


a sense that the passage of war and destruction might be understood as the


responsibility of a badly motivated human agent, such that Tamburlaine’s


exploits are an occasion for reflective lamentation, rather than Nietzschean


identification with a superman. The central hermeneutic difficulty, however, is


that the attempt to historicise anachronistically imputed conceptions of


subjectivity relies on claiming that more recent conceptions of decentred


subjectivity are not similarly anachronistic, an objection which could also be


extended to Brecht’s plays. Much depends on whether we applaud the fortunes seen


in the `tragicke glasse’ of Tamburlaine as a stage on which the will to power is


enacted, or whether we prefer to steel ourselves against the figurative idealism


which lurks in such mirrors of nature. If we applaud the fortunes of Tamburlaine


then we identify with that difference of nature from itself which produces the


spectacle of history, thus naturalising Tamburlaine’s will to power. If we do


not identify with Tamburlaine’s struggle for power as something natural then we


have to lament the spectacle of unnatural history or find a perspective from


which to understand it differently. Thus the focus on subjective agency,


individual will or dramatic identity tends to abstract from history to highlight


the ideological forms which transcend the historical gulf between modern and


pre-modern fictions of society. A materialist account of subjectivity may


restore individuals to history, but the political relevance of theoretical


hindsight is mortgaged to the reception history it seeks to displace. In other


words, by making subjectivity such a central analytical tool new historicism


succeeds in decentring subjects, showing how such subjects were never centred,


but obscures the historical and cognitive significance of the different terms in


which Elizabethan drama dramatised history. As Moretti argues, taking up


Benjamin’s account of allegory: `allegory is not a subjective deception to which


someone might be imagined to hold the semantic key, but the objectively


deceptive condition of the nature of history by which everyone is ultimately


betrayed.’[17] Moreover, subjectivity in Elizabethan drama is invariably a


chimera given the persistent ambivalence of theatricality. Kastan and


Stallybrass, for example, suggest that `Acting itself threatens to reveal the


artificial and arbitrary nature of social being.’[18] The nature of social


being, however, is not arbitrary save in constructions which make being the


ground of historicity. Human history cannot be understood in terms of a history


of human subjectivity without reference to the nature against which it


struggles, and that nature is itself historical.[19] The history of subjectivity


is never the same as the history of subjects as objects in human attempts to


dominate nature. The thought that the antagonistic domination of human nature


and the struggle to dominate nature itself might be superseded and shown to be


neither natural nor contingently historical, is perhaps what Marx meant by the


pre-history of human society. If there is an affinity between modern conceptions


of decentred subjectivity and pre-modern Elizabethan drama, it may be that both


Elizabethan dramatisations of history and contemporary historicism collapse


history, indeed naturalize it in terms of a drama of subjective wills. Stephen


Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), an important text in the


emergence of new historicism, provides exemplary instances of these


difficulties. In his introduction Greenblatt concedes the risk of anachronism,


and comments on his small group of chosen texts that: `It is we who enlist them


in a kind of historical drama’.[20] Greenblatt provocatively suggests a


dramatised analogy with Nietzsche’s conception of the will to power in the very


title of the chapter `Marlowe and the Will to Absolute Play’. Such anachronism


is significant insofar as the naturalization of history as power suggested by


Nietzsche, and also in Foucault’s work, is a historically determinate attempt to


understand social process in terms of illusory subject positions. As Greenblatt


explains in his epilogue: Whenever I focused sharply upon a moment of apparently


autonomous self-fashioning, I found not an epiphany of identity freely chosen,


but a cultural artifact. If there remained traces of free choice, the choice was


among possibilities whose range was strictly delineated by the social and


ideological system in force. (p. 256) Hence Greenblatt describes Marlowe’s plays


by explicitly evoking Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire: `Marlowe’s protagonists


rebel against orthodoxy, but they do not do so just as they please; their acts


of negation not only conjure up the order they would destroy, but seem at times


to be themselves conjured up by that very order.’ (p. 210) The subtle


difference, however, is the shift to a more structuring account of `order’, and,


more fundamentally, the stress on the dramatic protagonist as the interpretative


key, despite arguing that it is the social order which fashions such


protagonists. Consequently, Greenblatt’s approach needs to be understood as both


a sketch of the development of human autonomy in the Renaissance, what might be


called a romanticist reading of the early modern period, and the historicisation


of such autonomy as being illusory: `Marlowe’s heroes must live their lives as


projects, but they do so in the midst of intimations that the projects are


illusions.’ (p. 213) Accordingly, in a move which has become characteristic of


new historicism, Greenblatt prefaces his account of self-fashioning in Marlowe’s


plays with an anecdotal historical analogue for the contemporary `system’ of


power. This analogue juxtaposes Marlowe’s plays with the `casual, unexplained


violence’ in an English merchant’s tale of a voyage in 1586 to Sierre Leone,


suggesting an historical ‘matrix’ of the relentless power-hunger of Tudor


absolutism, and in particular the acquisitive energies of English merchants,


entre-preneurs, and adventurers.(p. 194) In some respects this echoes what might


be called the old historicist account of L.C.Knights in Drama and Society in the


Age of Jonson (1937), which examines the social and economic bases of


Elizabethan-Jacobean culture in rather more detail. But Greenblatt does not


relate nascent English capitalism and colonialism to the specific religious and


political conflicts dramatised in Tamburlaine. Rather, he deploys history as


`matrix’ in a more metaphorical analogy between the dynamic political geography


of merchant capital and the theatrical representation of space. Just as merchant


capitalism seeks to reduce geographical differences to an expression of its


power, so, for Greenblatt, Marlowe uses theatrical power to represent different


spaces: In Tamburlaine Marlowe contrives to efface all such differences, as if


to insist upon the essential meaninglessness of theatrical space, the vacancy


that is the dark sid

e of its power to imitate any place. This vacancy – quite


literally, this absence of scenery – is the equivalent in the medium of the


theater to the secularization of space … (p. 195) On this basis Marlowe’s


dramatisation of the history of Tamburlaine is seen by Greenblatt as


Tamburlaine’s will to power in the occupation of theatrical space. Just as


Elizabethan dramatists breezily rewrite historical source materials, so


Greenblatt breezily rewrites Tamburlaine in terms which implicitly argue the


perspicuity of Deleuze and Guattari: `Tamburlaine is a machine, a desiring


machine that produces violence and death.’ (p. 195) Hence the terms of


Tamburlaine’s dynamic occupation of stage space are further abstracted from


Marlowe’s theatrical allegory of history, and dramatised in Greenblatt’s


anachronistic allegory: `Space is transformed into an abstraction, then fed to


the appetitive machine. This is the voice of conquest, but it is also the voice


of wants never finished and of transcendental homelessness.’ (p. 196) While


Greenblatt’s analogue indicates the dialectical relation between culture and


barbarity suggested by Walter Benjamin, he does not use it to examine specific


power struggles in history, but rather as an anecdotal allegory to suggest the


historicity of power. Greenblatt’s conception of theatricality is nevertheless a


sophisticated one. This is salutary amid the prevalent reluctance to recognize


the centrality of theatre and theatricality for Elizabethan drama, a reluctance


which reflects the dominance of print-culture perspectives on drama and more


recent attempts to conceive history as a form of textuality. However, his


account of theatricality risks remaining immanent within the metaphors generated


by theatricality in Marlowe’s plays. Comparing `the violence of Tamburlaine and


of the English merchant’ (p.197) this leads Greenblatt into an alarming


aestheticisation of their respective representations and experiences of stage


space and geography: experiencing this limitlessness, this transformation of


space and time into abstractions, men do violence as a means of marking


boundaries, effecting transformation, signaling closure. To burn a town or to


kill all of its inhabitants is to make an end, and in so doing, to give life a


shape and a certainty that it would otherwise lack. (p.197) There is something


chilling in these lines, not least in the trans-formation of violence into


formal patterns and the assimilation of human suffering – `to burn a town’ – to


the perspective of the violent protagonist. For Greenblatt the structure of


limits give shape but no escape: `in Marlowe’s ironic world, these desperate


attempts at boundary and closure produce the opposite effect, reinforcing the


condition they are meant to efface.’ (p. 198) The key anachronism is the


suggestion of ironic and implicitly inescapable reversals of power. Marlowe’s


plays fails to give such intelligible shape or indeed another moral scheme by


which to understand the spectacle of violence because the dramatic presentation


is not restricted to the self-fashioning of the protagonist: we also see the


victims. In the fifth act of Tamburlaine 1, for example, Tamburlaine sacks the


town of Damascus and kills all of its inhabitants, save the father of Zenocrate,


Tamburlaine’s wife-to-be. The play offers the Brechtian possibility that the


audience need not identify with Tamburlaine by offering perspectives on


Tamburlaine’s victims through Bajazeth, Zabina and, most importantly, Zenocrate.


Amid the death of Damascus, so to speak, and reports of the speared and


slaughtered carcasses of the virgins unsuccessfully sent by Damascus to


intercede with Tamburlaine, the audience also sees the laments and then suicides


of Bajazeth, Emperor of the Turks, and Zabina his wife, having had enough of


being paraded as Tamburlaine’s symbolic slaves. As Zabina puts it, `Then is


there left no Mahomet, no God, / No Feend, no Fortune, nor no hope of end / To


our infamous monstrous slaveries?’ (Pt.1: V.i.239-241) An audience might more


easily identify with such a lament than with a man who has killed a town. The


laments of Bajazeth and Zabina are highly charged and, juxtaposed with the


slaughtered virgins, their self-fashioned deaths suggest the extremes of the


social scale to suffer at the hands of Tamburlaine.[21] Their deaths are


immediately followed by the entrance of Zenocrate who laments the sack of her


home town by her supposed lover: Zenocrate. Wretched Zenocrate, that livest to


see, Damascus walles di’d with Egyptian blood: Thy Fathers subjects and thy


countrimen. Thy streetes strowed with dissevered jointes of men, And wounded


bodies gasping yet for life…. Ah, Tamburlaine, wert thou the cause of this


That tearm’st Zenocrate thy dearest love? Whose lives were dearer to Zenocrate


Than her own life, or ought save thine owne love. (Pt. 1, V.i.319-323, 334-5)


Coming after Bajazeth and Zabina, Zenocrate reminds the audience of the


slaughter of Damascus, and highlights the depth of Tamburlaine’s rejection of


the natural pity which might be associated with love. But if this isn’t enough


to suggest that we might identify with the victims of Tamburlaine, Zenocrate


then turns to see the `bloody spectacle’ of Bajazeth and Zabina: `Behold the


Turke and his great Emperesse./ Ah Tamburlaine, my love, sweet Tamburlaine, /


That fights for Scepters and for slippery crownes’ (Pt.1, V.i.354-6). This


suggests the way in which the play might be read as the tragedy of Bajazeth and


Zabina, their history as moral exemplum in the mirror of magistrates tradition.


However, despite the efforts of Zenocrate and Anippe, her maid, to summon the


wheel of fortune scheme this serves instead to highlight the dramatic


ambivalence of Tamburlaine’s unstopped rise to power. Roy Battenhouse offers the


most sustained attempt to reinscribe Tamburlaine in a moral scheme, focussing in


particular on the end of part 2, and reading the play in terms offered by


Tamburlaine’s final words, as the story of a `Scourge of God’ (Pt.2: V.iii.258),


but this reading has to work against the grain of Marlowe’s more ambivalent


moral and theological implications. History itself, as Battenhouse concedes,


makes his case hard to sustain: The tradition of Tamburlaine’s peaceful and


natural death being thus firmly established, we must recognize that Marlowe’s


opportunities to make of the history an example of God’s punishing of sin were


definitely limited. The histories were attributing to this Scythian scourge a


long life of unobscured glory – a career which looked like a blasphemous


challenge to the Puritan dogma of Providence. [22] The approach suggested by


Greenblatt is more convincing in this respect: `Tamburlaine repeatedly teases


its audience with the form of the cautionary tale, only to violate the


convention. All of the signals of the tragic are produced, but the play


stubbornly, radically, refuses to become a tragedy.’ (p. 202) Part 1, in


particular, ends with Tamburlaine triumphant, crowning Zenocrate queen of Persia


and talking of marriage rites to come, presenting the melancholy spectacle of


inhuman, ruthless violence and tyranny unpunished. Indeed the audience are


encouraged to view this spectacle with horror and amazement. For most of act


five of part 1 Tamburlaine is identified with death, entering as the stage


direction puts it: `all in blacke, and verie melancholy’ (Pt.1: V.i.inter 63-4).


In one of Marlowe’s finest theatrical touches he shows the horror of


Tamburlaine’s power through the rhetoric of allegorical reference to his sword


as he claims that death is his servant and dismisses the virgins sent by


Damascus to intercede with him: Tamburlaine: Virgins, in vaine ye labour to


prevent That which mine honor sweares shal be perform’d: Behold my sword, what


see you at the point. 1. Virgin: Nothing but feare and fatall steele my Lord.


Tamburlaine: Your fearfull minds are thicke and mistie then, For there sits


Death, there sits imperious Death, Keeping his circuit by the slicing edge. But


I am pleasde you shall not see him there: He now is seated on my horsmens


speares, And on their points his fleshlesse bodie feeds. Techelles, straight goe


charge a few of them To charge these Dames, and shew my servant death, Sitting


in scarlet on their armed speares. (Pt. 1: V.i.106-118) Tamburlaine’s sword is


more than an object of fear and potentially fatal steel, becoming an allegory in


which the stage property is an object of melancholic perception, a figure of


death. Benjamin comments that `once human life has sunk into the merely


creaturely, even the life of apparently dead objects secures power over it.’[23]


And while the fatal power of swords as objects is evident, the importance of the


stage property here is the significance of this sword as an object of


contemplation into which history has been metonymically distilled. The


illumination of the fateful qualities of the most trivial stage property, such


as a handkerchief or a glove, reveal such props to be objects, often poisonous


ones, which signify the fateful arbitrariness of objective history. Indeed the


relation between protagonists and the fateful objects with which they identify


is a central dramaturgical part of the opening of many of Marlowe’s plays: a


letter for Gaveston; Faustus and books; Barabas and heaps of gold. The


significance of this is highlighted by the insignificance of such stage props in


classical drama. As Benjamin argues: `In moral examples and in catastrophes


history served only as an aspect of the subject matter of emblematics. The


transfixed face of signifying nature is victorious, and history must, once and


for all, remain contained in the subordinate role of stage-property.’[24]


Similarly, sovereignty is given allegorical representation in the metonymical


form of sceptres and what Zenocrate calls `slippery crownes’. All through


Tamburlaine crowns are the sad allegorical tokens of earthly power, but they


become melancholic properties rather than moral exempla precisely when


providential schemes of history as morality fail. Melancholic because the


allegory of the objective world such stage props signify is one in which the


dramatisation of history as evil recoils from the realisation that there is no


evil in nature, only a subjective understanding with no correlative in reality.


A striking passage from Plotinus’s third century Enneads suggests the


possibility of seeing the enormity of history as the pleasurably lamentable work


of a dramatic artist, while suggesting also the risks of failing to recognise


the possible barbarity of neo-Platonist attempts to figure life as play, and so


reduce the historical world to a phenomenon secondary to subjective


understanding: Murders, death in all its guises, the reduction and sacking of


cities, all must be to us just such a spectacle as the changing scenes of a


play; all is but the varied incident of a plot, costume on and off, acted grief


and lament. For on earth, in all the succession of life, it is not the Soul


within but the Shadow outside of the authentic man that grieves and complains


and acts out the plot on this world stage which men have dotted with stages of


their own constructing. All this is the doing of man knowing no more than to


live the lower and outer life, and never perceiving that, in his weeping and in


his graver doings alike, he is but at play; to handle matters austerely is


reserved for the thoughtful: the other kind of man is himself a futility. Those


incapable of thinking gravely read gravity into frivolities which correspond to


their own frivolous Nature.[25] Murder, death in all its guises, and the


reduction and sacking of cities are the spectacles and changing scenes of


Marlowe’s unnatural histories, especially in Tamburlaine and The Massacre at


Paris. The resort to theatrical melancholy need not collapse the world of


suffering into a frivolous nature which corresponds to that melancholy, as


though the sacking of cities were frivolous. Nevertheless, the dramatisation of


such history as a pageant of power invariably threatens to be caught in a figure


which naturalises history as play. Plotinus reminds us that some of the relevant


figures are not as historically specific as they at first seem. The important


difference is that Elizabethan drama, and in particular tragedy, registers an


essential inhumanism, notably in the melancholic, metonymical significance of


crowns, swords and other often poisonous stage properties whose seemingly modest


objectivity overcomes the best efforts of human subjects. Moreover the drama


suggests an unfathomably lamentable quality in the struggle between natural and


unnatural forces, precisely because without eschatology or a modern idea of


natural history, history is reduced to an allegory of natural forces. Thus the


understanding of Elizabethan drama would be furthered by examining the relation


between nature, history and theatricality, so as to reveal its truth as a


cognitive framework which has become historically alienated from the barbarity


it sought to understand. Elizabethan drama attempts to stage history as nature;


not nature in the modern sense, but rather an unnaturally horrific and


lamentable allegory of nature as history. Decoding the history in this nature


involves recognizing the way this allegorical staging of history helps us


understand the necessity for historical distanciation, particularly from any


attempt to displace the horror in its allegory of natural history with new


allegories of the historicity of power and subjectivity. In short, the effort to


rethink Elizabethan drama might restore a sense of the unnatural histories which


divide and rule our historical differences. Rather than rethinking such history


in `our’ own natural interests, such documents might be blasted out of their


continuity and given a sense of unrelenting strangeness rather than strained


relevance. The hermeneutic shibboleths of power, subjectivity and identity may


also have to give way to the rejection or at least melancholic recognition of


the essential inhumanism of a world without grace whose historical nature is a


nightmare from which we are yet to awake.


[1] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. B. Fowkes,


Surveys from Exile: Political Writings, vol. 2, ed. D. Fernbach (Harmondsworth,


1973). [2] W. Benjamin, ‘Uber den Begriff der Geschichte’, Illuminationen, ed.


S.Unseld (Frankfurt am Main, 1977), p. 254; translation amended from ‘Theses on


the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London, 1973), p.


258. [3] See New Historicism and Renaissance Drama, eds. Richard Wilson and


Richard Dutton (London and New York, 1992); and Staging the Renaissance:


Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (New York and London, 1991),


eds. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass. [4] See Jonathan Dollimore,


‘Introduction: Shakespeare, cultural materialism and the new historicism’,


Political Shakespeare: New essays in cultural materialism, eds. Jonathan


Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester, 1985); Jonathan Dollimore, Radical


Tragedy (London, 1989), especially the preface to the second edition; and Alan


Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading


(Oxford, 1992). [5] See Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-structuralist


Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London, 1987); and J?rgen Habermas,


The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge,


Mass. and Cambridge, 1987). [6] Sinfield, Faultlines, p. 287. [7] Walter


Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London, 1977);


and Franco Moretti, ‘The Great Eclipse: Tragic Form as the Deconsecration of


Sovereignty’, Signs Taken For Wonders, trans. David Miller (London, 1983).


Benjamin’s work has had surprisingly little resonance in studies of Elizabethan


and Jacobean drama. Helpful discussions of Benjamin’s work on ‘Trauerspiel’ and


drama are provided by Charles Rosen, ‘The Ruins of Walter Benjamin’, On Walter


Benjamin, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1988), pp. 129-5; and


Rainer N?gele, Theater, Theory, Speculation: Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of


Modernity (Baltimore and London, 1991). [8] David M. Bevington, From ‘Mankind’


to Marlowe (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), p. 161. [9] Tamburlaine, Part 1, The


Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, 2 vols., ed Fredson Bowers (Cambridge,


1973), vol. 1, p. 79. References to this edition hereafter in main text. [10]


Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy (London, 1985), p. 4. [11] Dollimore,


Radical Tragedy, preface to second edition, p. xxviii. [12] Radical Tragedy, p.


155. [13] William Hazlitt, from Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age


of Elizabeth, quoted from Critics on Marlowe, ed. Judith O’Neill (London, 1969),


p.17. [14] Helen Gardner, ‘The Second Part of Tamburlaine the Great’, Critics on


Marlowe, p. 42. [15] Harry Levin, `The Jew of Malta: Poor Old Rich Man’, Critics


on Marlowe, p. 51. [16] Radical Tragedy, p. 112. [17] Franco Moretti, Signs


Taken For Wonders, p. 78. [18] Staging the Renaissance, p. 9. [19] See


T.W.Adorno, ‘The Idea of Natural History.’ trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor, Telos, 60


(Summer, 1984), 111-124. [20] Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning:


From More to Shakespeare (Chicago & London, 1980), p. 6. References


hereafter included in the main text. [21] On these laments and lament generally


see Wolfgang Clemen’s neglected English Tragedy Before Shakespeare, trans.


T.S.Dorsch (London, 1961), esp. ch. 14, `The Dramatic Lament and Its Forms’, pp.


211-252; and ch. 15, `The Pre-Shakespearian Dramatic Lament’, pp. 253-286. [22]


Roy W. Battenhouse, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine: A Study in Renaissance Moral


Philosophy (Vanderbilt, Nashville, 1941; revised edition 1964), p. 144. [23]


Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 132. [24] Benjamin, pp. 170-1.


[25] Plotinus, The Six Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna & B.S.Page (Chicago,


1952), III.ii.15, p. 90

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