9—
Tragedy, God, and Writing:
Hamlet, Faustus, Tamburlaine
Tennis Balls
"It is impossible to understand the concrete utterance without accustoming oneself to its values, without understanding the orientation of its evaluations in the ideological environment": so Mikhail Bakhtin.[1] My case on protestantism is not that writers were all Calvinists. Rather, this orthodoxy hugely influenced the ideological field within which they produced diverse relations—of incorporation, conformity, negotiation, disjunction, subversion, and opposition—between religious orthodoxy and other, divergent ideological formations. Theater may well have been at times a radical medium (and at other times not; there is no reason to expect stage writing, or any genre of it, to be harmonious in outlook).[2] The church perhaps encouraged dissident tendencies in drama by forbidding it to deal with religious matters: theater was driven into the arms of secularism, which was just about ready to receive it. And although the censor could delete "See, see where Christ's blood streams in the firmament" from Marlowe's Faustus, he could not so easily assess the general tendency of the action.
I argued in the previous chapter that parts of the classical corpus were authoritative yet potentially subversive. Seneca was the principal model for tragedy; he was taught in schools and universities, and his presence was consolidated by the collection of translations of his plays published as Seneca His Tenne Tragedies by Thomas Newton in 1581. Seneca's plays seem designed for recitation and quite unlike the busy plots of the popular theater; their biggest influence was on closet dramas written in and for the Inns of Court and universities. However,
the academic and popular traditions were not, initially, altogether separate. Gorboduc (1561), Tancred and Gismund (1568), and The Misfortunes of Arthur (1587–88) were played in the Inns and before the queen, but influenced popular theater; the French Senecan Robert Gamier was translated by both Thomas Kyd and the Countess of Pembroke (the former's Cornelia was printed in 1594, the latter's Antonius in 1592). G. K. Hunter disputes Seneca's importance on thematic grounds—because he believes that early modern drama is distinguished by a strong assertion of "the redeeming feature of a tragic existence: the gratuitous loyalties, the constancy under pressure, the renewed faith."[3] And this he does not find in Seneca. But this is to prejudge the issue; not all commentators on early modern plays have discerned such faith. Also, Hunter scarcely considers the Stoic motif in Senecan writings—I think because it might offer a more reasonable challenge to Christianity. However, as T. S. Eliot pointed out, Seneca's significance is indicated by the frequency with which early modern tragedies quote him for moral reflection.[4]
To some extent, Seneca's moral and philosophical writings could be reworked for Christianity. "If you read him thinking of him as a pagan, then he appears to have written like a Christian; but if you read him as a Christian then he appears to have written like a pagan," Erasmus remarked.[5] But the attitudes in Seneca's plays were an embarrassment. They represent the supernatural as fairy-tale spookiness, allow terrible violence by such as Atreus and Medea to go unpunished, offer to validate Stoic ethics entirely on rationalist grounds, and show humankind and the universe to be devoid of transcendent purpose. Thomas Newton felt it necessary to deny that they tend "sometime to the praise of ambition, sometime to the maintenance of cruelty, now and then to the approbation of incontinency, and here and there to the ratification of tyranny." John Studley even introduced his translation of Medea with the claim that it is "a small pearl of the peerless poet and most Christian ethnic Seneca, wherein no glutting but sweet delectation is offered unto the mind that doth hunger after virtue."[6] Philip Sidney worked harder at rendering Senecan tragedy acceptable. He said it is the form "that openeth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue; that maketh kings fear to be tyrants, and tyrants manifest their tyrannical humours; that, with stirring the affects of admiration and commiseration, teacheth the uncertainty of this world, and upon how weak foundations gilden roofs are builded."[7] Thus slanted, a Senecan action might allow a broadly Christian moral.
Fulke Greville, writing later, with considerably more modern tragedies in view, demystified the issue by abandoning the idealist attempt to see tragedy as a unitary category beyond history: he distinguishes ancient and modern tragedy. The former would certainly include Seneca's plays—it exemplifies "the disastrous miseries of man's life, where order, laws, doctrine and authority are unable to protect innocency from the exorbitant wickedness of power, and so, out of that melancholy vision, stir horror, or murmur against divine providence." Modern tragedy, conversely, is Christian, Greville says: it seeks "to point out God's revenging aspect upon every particular sin, to the despair or confusion of mortality."[8] In this view, modern tragedy retains the Senecan illustration of presumption and destructiveness in worldly affairs while asserting also the overarching control of providence.
There was, then, a sufficient protestant theory of tragedy; so, as recent commentators have remarked, reformers did not have to reject drama as in principle irreligious. John Bale was altogether ready to use it for protestant polemic in The Comedy of John the Baptist, The Tragedy of God's Promises to Men, and King Johan (all written in 1538—the last alludes to Henry VIII as a reforming monarch). Puritan attacks on the stage began with the public, commercial theater; the question, in the main, was not whether drama was irreligious as such, but whether such a disorderly and disreputable institution could be tolerated in the light of the high demands made by the protestant god. Phillip Stubbes exclaimed in The Anatomie of Abuses (1583): "Oh blasphemy intolerable! Are filthy plays and bawdy enterludes comparable to the word of God, the food of life, and life itself?"[9] Nor need we assume that the dire events and despairing attitudes in tragedies were inevitably in conflict with protestantism. Calvin did not hesitate to confront and appropriate what we might think of as a tragic universe:
Various diseases ever and anon attack us: at one time pestilencerages; at another we are involved in all the calamities of war. Frost and hail, destroying the promise of the year, cause sterility, which reduces us to penury; wife, parents, children, relatives, are carried off by death; our house is destroyed by fire. These are the events which make men curse their life, detest the day of their birth, execrate the light of heaven, even censure God, and (as they are eloquent in blasphemy) charge him with cruelty and injustice.
(Institutes 3.7.10)
Calvin is well aware that such a vision had inspired pagan tragedians: "I confess, indeed, that a most accurate opinion was formed by those
who thought, that the best thing was not to be born, the next best to die early" (3.9.4). But in his view they could not pass beyond this perception because they lacked the Christian revelation, which shows that "the hand of God is the ruler and arbiter of the fortunes of all, and, instead of rushing on with thoughtless violence, dispenses good and evil with perfect regularity" (3.7.10). The whole achievement of faith is to assert providence in the face of an apparently violent and arbitrary universe.
Yet the topic could not so easily be tidied away. The value of Senecan tragedy, despite assertions to the contrary, was that it facilitated engagements with religious unorthodoxy.[10] Plays such as King Lear and The White Devil seem to advance, yet at the same time to problematize, the protestant god. The violent, irrational, and yet fateful world they depict seems like the providential dispensation Calvin envisages, but with a scandalous excess. When Marlowe's Ferneze concludes The Jew of Malta by proclaiming "Now march away; and let due praise be given, / Neither to Fate nor Fortune, but to Heaven," he is invoking precisely the alternatives that protestantism was striving to suppress.[11] In Kyd's Spanish Tragedy (c. 1586), Revenge, in the manner of Tantalus and Megaera in Seneca's Thyestes, sponsors the action. Nonetheless, much of the play is phrased in specifically Christian terms. The two languages clash when Hieronimo assumes heavenly collaboration in revenging his son:
Why, then I see that heaven applies our drift,
And all the saints do sit soliciting
For vengeance on those cursed murderers.[12]
The play ends with a distribution of the characters in partly pagan and partly Christian terms: Hieronimo's friends will consort together happily in Proserpina's underworld, while his enemies, Revenge promises, will be punished in "deepest hell, / Where none but Furies, bugs, and tortures dwell" (4.5.27–28). This instance may be parody or happy confusion; in either event there is a break beyond—which is yet dependent upon—the terms of contemporary orthodoxy.
An interaction between protestant and Senecan views may be briefly illustrated by divergent deployments of the tennis balls trope. In the Institutes, Calvin acknowledges: "Occasionally as the causes of events are concealed, the thought is apt to rise, that human affairs are whirled about by the blind impulse of Fortune, or our carnal nature inclines us to speak as if God were amusing himself by tossing men up and down like balls" (1.17.1). The French is pelottes, and Thomas Norton's
translation of 1561 has "toss them like tennis balls." The protestant move was to disallow such a sentiment, as Sidney does by the way he frames it in the Arcadia : "The chief man they considered was Euarchus, whom the strange and secret working of justice had brought to be the judge over them. In such a shadow or rather pit of darkness the wormish mankind lives, that neither they know how to forsee nor what to fear, and are but like tennis balls, tossed by the racket of the higher powers."[13] In the manner of Calvin and his own Christianizing idea of tragedy, Sidney contains the tennis balls idea by relating it to "the strange and secret working of justice." However, in The Duchess of Malfi, providential care is far more difficult to discern. It seems that something like divine purpose may after all be working itself out when Bosola is inspired by the duchess's death to work for Antonio's safety and revenge, but then Bosola kills Antonio by mistake:
Antonio!
The man I would have sav'd 'bove mine own life!
We are merely the stars' tennis-balls, struck and banded
Which way please them.
At the end of the play Bosola finds no consolation, and says so with a reminiscence of Arcadia 's "shadow or rather pit of darkness":
O this gloomy world!
In what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness,
Doth womanish and fearful mankind live?[14]
Bosola, and Webster insofar as he allows the action of the play to endorse Bosola, is voicing just that view of life that Calvin and Sidney tried to repudiate; he takes up the protestant claim that even disastrous events are ordered by God, and shows the disasters but not the order.
A play such as The Duchess of Malfi suggests that the protestant god was not persuasive to all the people all the time. "Who will be able to bring himself to love God with all his heart when he created hell seething with eternal torments in order to punish his own misdeeds in his victims as though he took delight in human torments?" Erasmus asked.[15] The answer I suggested in chapter 7 is that the reprobate are created different, like cattle, and hence it is reasonable that their life chances should be different. However, not everyone today believes it right that cattle should be treated as they are, and not everyone in early modern England thought it fair that the doctrine of election allowed the reprobate no opportunity to avoid condemnation.
In 1587 Christopher Fetherstone's translation of William Lawne's Abridgement of Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion (1583) was published. This is, in fact, not a précis but a dialogue in which objections to the Institutes are raised and answered in Calvinist terms. Predestination is evidently an issue. The objector says it is "a fearful decree to inwrap so many nations together with their children being but infants, in eternal death, by the fall of Adam, without redemption, and that because it pleased God." The answer privileges the rigor of logic over the luxury of fellow-feeling (and is not, I think, easy to evade): "I grant: and yet no man can deny but that God knew before what end man should have before he created him." It is explained:
All are guilty: but the mercy of God relieveth and succoureth certain.
Objection. Let it succour all.
Answer. It is meet that by punishing he likewise show himself to be a just judge.[16]
It is important to keep in mind that Calvin, Lawne, and many others thought this an adequate reply. In the punitive outlook of many people in the sixteenth century, God was inseparable from justice, and justice from punishment. Yet the question was raised; concepts of good and justice were under contest. For some people Lawne's dialogue satisfactorily established a deity that others wanted to repudiate. The conflict manifests a society agitated by an ideological faultline.
The disturbance that protestant orthodoxy might produce is evident when Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy, discusses doubt about election as a cause of despair: "The more they search and read scriptures, or divine treatises, the more they puzzle themselves, as a bird in a net, the more they are entangled and precipitated into this preposterous gulf." The trouble, Burton says, is texts such as "Many are called, but few are chosen": "This grinds their souls; how shall they discern they are not reprobates?"[17] Against this, with the avowed intention of comforting the anxious, Burton places other texts: "God will that all men be saved, and come to the knowedge of the truth," Saint Paul writes.[18] But scriptural authority then appears in conflict with itself, as Burton notes with some unease: "Now there cannot be contradictory wills in God; he will have all saved, and not all; how can this stand together?" Our best chance, he suggests, is to bet on the favorable texts: we should "be secure then, believe, trust in him, hope well, and be saved" (pp. 420–21). Yet . . . —and at this point the characteristic indeterminacy of Burton's writing seems to match the characteristic instability of protestant doctrine—the prob-
lem does not go away. "This furious curiosity, needless speculation, fruitless meditation about election, reprobation, free will, grace, such places of scripture preposterously conceived, torment still," Burton says, "and crucify the souls of too many, and set all the world together by the ears." So much so that an alternative theology has appeared:
To mitigate those divine aphorisms (though in another extreme some), our late [i.e., recent] Arminians have revived that plausible doctrine of universal grace, which many fathers, our late Lutherans and modern papists do still maintain, that we have free will of ourselves, and that grace is common to all that will believe. Some again, though less orthodoxical, will have a far greater part saved than shall be damned (as Caelius Secundus stiffly maintains in his book De amplitudine regni coelestis, or some impostor under his name).
(p. 421)
It is not at first clear what the status is of Arminian ideas in this passage. Only "some" are "extreme" universal grace is "plausible" (meaning either "specious" or "agreeable")—it seems to have a lot of support. Burton goes on to expound Caelius at some length, pointing out that he too has juxtaposed Pelagian and predestinarian biblical texts, and that others also have said that pagans might be saved. So Burton arrives eventually at Caelius's vivid question: "How can he be merciful that shall condemn any creature to eternal unspeakable punishment, for one small temporary fault, all posterity, so many myriads for one and another man's [i.e., Adam's] offence?" (p. 423). It all seems at least open to discussion; but then, abruptly, Burton beats a total retreat: "These absurd paradoxes are exploded by our Church, we teach otherwise." And he restates as definitely as he can the orthodox belief in God's immutable, eternal, just decree whereby "all are invited, but only the elect apprehended" (p. 424). Surely we have Burton in a mood of vacillation. He is stirred by the problems but unwilling to repudiate the prevailing doctrine. The ensuing passage is altogether equivocal: Burton says he might have written more had not the Laudian articles of 1633 forbidden discussion in order to "avoid factions and altercations"; and quotes Erasmus (who of course had argued for free will) to the effect that the prevailing laws should be observed rather than "spread suspicions of the public authority."
That secular authority might come into question was the wider anxiety. The thought, often associated with Marlowe, that "the first beginning of religion was only to keep men in awe" was commonplace enough. Calvin, with typical ingenuity, acknowledges "that designing men have introduced a vast number of fictions into religion, with the
view of inspiring the population with reverence or striking them with, terror, and thereby rendering them more obsequious." But this, of course, is the other theologians—Calvin has the genuine article (he holds that rulers, even bad ones, exercise "an authority which God has sanctioned by the surest edicts").[19] However, the sheer dependence of Calvinism upon subservience to established authority was a weakness. Lawne makes a characteristic move when, pressed on election and reprobation, he falls back on this: "It is a point of bold wickedness even so much as to inquire the causes of God's will" (p. 222). The thought is from Saint Paul (Rom. 9:20), echoing Elihu's rebuke to Job (33:13), and was the cut-off point for Donne also: "But who am I, that dare dispute with thee / Oh God?" (Holy Sonnet 9).
Hobbes was to expose just these weaknesses. He remarks that the question of how God distributes prosperity and adversity was disputed by the ancients, and "hath shaken the faith, not only of the vulgar, but of philosophers, and what is more, of the saints, concerning divine providence." Hobbes observes that Job suffered notwithstanding his righteousness, and that God justified such affliction with "arguments drawn from his power"—such as "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?"[20] On such evidence, God's claim rests not on his love but on his power—and that, Hobbes concludes, is the only logical kind of deity. And so with civil authority, which religion was invoked to legitimate: if God is not good, only powerful, how could the king be better? Calvinism pointed the way to this conclusion, which deprived both the deity and monarchs of the justification of providential concern for their subjects.
I wish to discuss particularly three plays that focus the kinds of ideological complexity I have been noting—the juxtaposing of overlapping but competing discourses, the foregrounding of contradictions within Christianity, and the relation of such disruptions to the legitimizing of secular authority. Lastly, I address the scope of writing and politics in the early modern state. There are some dangers here; to be sure, plays are not prose tracts. Nevertheless, they are sited, necessarily though not passively, on the ideological terrain that constitutes the contemporary cultural possibilities. Prose tracts, as we have seen, are not straightforward either, but play texts do involve the further indeterminacy of performance. However, I have tried not so much to offer interpretations (though it is hard to avoid writing as if that were the goal) as to map the field within which certain plays might have made certain kinds of sense. All texts, I have already said, cannot but produce meaning in excess of any ideological project; this
may be specially true of plays, and specially in respect of religious ideas and attitudes in early modern England.
Hamlet's Special Providence
We defy augury. There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.
If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if
it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man, of
aught he leaves, knows aught, what is't to leave betimes? Let be.
(Hamlet 5.2.215–20)[21]
[God is] a Governor and Preserver, and that, not by producing a
kind of general motion in the machine of the globe as well as in each
of its parts, but by a special Providence sustaining, cherishing, super-
intending, all the things which he has made, to the very minutest,
even to a sparrow.
(Calvin, Institutes 1.16.1)
Fate guides us, and it was settled at the first hour of birth what
length of time remains for each. Cause is linked with cause, and all
public and private issues are directed by a long sequence of events.
Therefore everything should be endured with fortitude, since things
do not, as we suppose, simply happen—they all come.
(Seneca, De providentia 5.7)[22]
Seneca and Calvin both seem relevant when Hamlet says, "There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow." Indeed, rival views of the play have amounted to glosses on their divergent implications for its interpretation. A. C. Bradley recognizes Hamlet's phrasing as Christian but regards its tone and the play generally as pagan in tendency: Hamlet expresses "that kind of religious resignation which, however beautiful in one aspect, really deserves the name of fatalism rather than that of faith in Providence, because it is not united to any determination to do what is believed to be the will of Providence."[23] Roland Mushat Frye holds that these lines show Hamlet "relying upon an unmistakably Christian providence" and hence achieving true faith.[24] Roy W. Battenhouse agrees with Frye that the play has a Christian tendency, but also with Bradley that Hamlet's own attitude is un-Christian: "A biblical echo, the sparrow reference, when found in this upside-down context, alerts us to the tragic parody in Hamlet's version of readiness."[25] So Hamlet is either a pagan in a pagan play, a good Christian in a Christian play, or a reprobate in a Christian play.
A Senecan frame of reference seems appropriate in the first four acts of Hamlet, for the dialogue puts Stoic tranquility of mind firmly on the agenda. This is more the Seneca of the Moral Essays —the proponent of a calm, rationalist worldview that the plays invoke but
scarcely validate. For Hamlet, Stoicism is an ideal he hopes to see achieved. He values Horatio because he perceives in him "a man that Fortune's buffets and rewards / Hast ta'en with equal thanks;. . . not a pipe for Fortune's finger / To sound what stop she please. . . not passion's slave" (3.2.67–72). By subduing his emotions, Horatio is said to free himself from the effects of fortune and become the Stoics' wise and happy man. If Hamlet could do that then revenge might not be a problem. The principle of revenge was one issue between Stoicism and protestantism—it is raised in the Spanish Tragedy, where the Christian text "Vindicta mihi!" is juxtaposed with the Senecan injunction "Per scelus semper tutum est sceleribus iter: / Strike, and strike home, where wrong is offer'd thee."[26] Typically, in the provocative manner I have already observed in Kyd's play, Hieronimo chooses Seneca rather than the Bible. However, Hamlet's problem seems prior to such considerations: it is the achievement of a state of mind where he can act purposively at all, and especially upon the Ghost's allegations. Seneca declares: "The good man will perform his duties undisturbed and unafraid; and he will in such a way do all that is worthy of a good man as to do nothing that is unworthy of a man. My father is being murdered—I will defend him; he is slain—I will avenge him, not because I grieve, but because it is my duty."[27] This is the kind of mood Claudius recommends to Hamlet in respect of his grief for his father, but not what he achieves. His baiting of Claudius is all improvisation and he cannot follow it through; when he believes he has the evidence he has sought, he allows himself to be shipped to England.
It is quite appropriate, therefore, that Hamlet presents himself as a failed Stoic in his first exchange with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The dialogue here is in a mode of light-hearted philosophical banter (such as might have occurred when they were students), but the subtext is maneuvering to discover each other's purposes. Rosencrantz denies that Denmark is a prison; Hamlet replies, "Why, then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so" (2.2.249–50). This characteristically Stoic notion usually has a contrary import—that one can be happy and free if the mind chooses. So Rosencrantz should be amused, but he is determined to turn the discussion to ambition. Hamlet's response is more earnest: "O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams" (2.2.254–56). This also sustains a Senecan framework—the Chorus in Thyestes says: "It is the mind that only makes a king.. . . A king he is that feareth nought at
all. / Each man himself this kingdom gives at hand."[28] It is Stoic reluctance to live with the mind in chains that puts suicide on the agenda. Horatio, wanting to die with Hamlet, terms himself "more an antique Roman than a Dane" (5.2.346). To Seneca, it is indeed a "question" whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer or to make a dignified exit; death is always a way of escaping intolerable pressure, yet it is base to flinch: "The brave and wise man should not beat a hasty retreat from life."[29] Seneca's point is that it is superstitious and irrational to fear death or what might follow it, but just such anxieties preoccupy Hamlet, who again falls short of Stoic detachment.
For Seneca, the man who achieves Stoic mastery is godlike: "The wise man is next-door neighbour to the gods and like a god in all save his mortality. As he struggles and presses on towards those things that are lofty, well-ordered, undaunted, that flow on with even and harmonious current, that are untroubled, kindly, adapted to the public good, beneficial both to himself and to others, the wise man will covet nothing low, will never repine. "[30] Such presumption, of course, ran precisely counter to the protestant doctrine of human wretchedness. Henry Smith complained that the proud man "maketh himself equal with God, because he doth all without God, and craves no help of him."[31] But Hamlet is perplexed and disillusioned at the failure of the Stoic ideal in others and himself. Man is said to be "in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?" (2.2.306–8). Hamlet would like to believe that human reason is a godlike instrument by which people may act in the world:
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unus'd.
(4.4.36–39)
At issue here is optimistic humanism—the strand in Renaissance thought that exalted human capacity to achieve, through the exercise of rational powers, a moral stature that the incautious termed godlike. Neoplatonists had not even Seneca's ambivalence. "The soul desires, endeavors, and begins to become God, and makes progress every day.. . . Hence our soul will some time be able to become in a sense all things; and even to become a god," Ficino enthused.[32] Such an aspiration is at stake when Ophelia laments "that noble and most sovereign reason / Like sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh"
(3.1.159–60.) In the play this is not Hamlet's failure alone. In some ways he contrasts with the other young men, but Laertes is no more successful in establishing and pursuing rational purposes (he kills Hamlet but wishes he had not), and Fortinbras is elected king of Denmark (presumably) not because of the schemes of his father and himself but by default and by arriving at the right time. Even Horatio has to be dissuaded from suicide. At this point, Hamlet seems Calvinist rather than Senecan. Calvin termed "absurd" the Stoic hero "who, divested of humanity, was affected in the same way by adversity and prosperity, grief and joy; or rather, like a stone, was not affected by anything" (Institutes 3.8.9). Joseph Hall seems almost to take up Hamlet's speech:
There is nothing more wretched than a mere man. We may brag what we will; how noble a creature man is above all the rest; how he is the lord of the world, a world within himself, the mirror of majesty, the visible model of his Maker; but let me tell you, if we be but men, it had been a thousand times better for us to have been the worst of beasts.[33]
According to such an analysis, the failure of the Stoic ideal in Hamlet should cause no surprise.
The plausibility of the godlike Stoic hero is questioned also in John Marston's Antonio plays, which satirize positions like those taken up by characters in Hamlet . In Antonio and Mellida, Andrugio affects indifference to the loss of his kingdom but falls at once into a rage when it is mentioned: "Name not the Genoese; that very word / Unkings me quite, makes me vile passion's slave."[34] In Antonio's Revenge, Pandulpho for many scenes remains tranquil about the murder of his son, but suddenly declares, "Man will break out, despite philosophy.. . . I spake more than a god, / Yet am less than a man."[35] And in The Scourge of Villainy 4, Marston exclaims:
Peace Seneca , thou belchest blasphemy.
To live from God, but to live happily
(I hear thee boast) from thy Philosophy,
And from thy self , O raving lunacy![36]
Senecan attitudes were deeply incoherent. Miriam T. Griffin writes of "the schizophrenia endemic in Stoic philosophy, with its vision of the sapiens and its code of behaviour for the imperfectus ."[37] There was therefore a double dispute with protestantism. While the optimistic estimate of Man contradicts the doctrine of the "fall," Senecan pessimism about how the world goes contradicts the doctrine of provi-
dence. It is against Stoic fate or fortune that Calvin is arguing when he speaks of special providence and the fall of a sparrow—both in the quotation with which I began this section and during the supporting argument:
The Christian. . . will have no doubt that a special providence is awake for his preservation, and will not suffer anything to happen that will not turn to his good and safety.. . . Hence, our Saviour, after declaring that even a sparrow falls not to the ground without the will of his Father, immediately makes the application, that being more valuable than many sparrows, we ought to consider that God provides more carefully for us.
(Institutes 1.17.6)
In Calvin's Latin the words are usually singularis providentia ; his French has alternately la providence singulière and la providence spéciale ; the translation by Thomas Norton (1561) has both "singular providence" and "special providence." Jesus' remark about the sparrow was a favorite for arguing God's beneficent control of his creation. For instance, Arthur Golding repudiated both chance and natural causes when considering the earthquake of 1580: "Know we not (after so long hearing and pretelling of the Gospel) that a sparrow lighteth not on the ground without God's providence?"[38] Conversely, Erasmus, trying to establish free will against Luther, was obliged to take Jesus' saying as "hyperbole" (this latter tactic would wreak havoc if applied generally to the Bible).[39]
Upon his return from England, Hamlet seems to have abandoned his Stoic aspirations and become a believer in providence. Now sermon tags roll off his tongue—"There's a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will"; "even in that was heaven ordinant" (i.e., "directing, controlling": 5.2.10–11, 48); "There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow." This is very strong phrasing. In fact, in the first quarto Hamlet says, "theres a predestiuate prouidence in the fall of a sparrow." Even if that is no more than a faulty memorial reconstruction, it shows how one well-placed contemporary read the prince's thought: it is Calvinist.
Hamlet seems to have changed. To say this is to expect (but not necessarily to find) some continuity in his character. I argued in chapter 3 that many dramatis personae in Shakespearean plays are written, at least for some of the time, in ways that suggest that they have continuous subjectivities. This is not to suppose, in a Bradleyan or essentialist-humanist manner, that these dramatic personae are unified subjects, or independent of the multiple discursive practices of the
culture. Indeed, I have been trying to locate Hamlet at the intersection point of Senecan and Calvinist discourses, and it is in their terms that I perceive a break upon his return from England. (I do not say that these are the only relevant discourses; but they were powerful enabling systems through which, in some measure, subjectivities were constructed.) It is recognizing cues that some continuity in the character of Hamlet is to be expected that makes it possible to allege a break (as, for instance, Francis Barker does).[40]
At such a breaking point, readers and audiences may either declare the play incoherent or attempt to intuit an appropriate linking factor. If we do the former, we may either complain about artistic quality (as did T. S. Eliot) or triumphantly discover once more (with some poststructuralists) the twin instabilities of subjectivity and textuality. Wishing to push further than either of these, I try instead to envisage a linking factor through which an audience might (having in mind Hamlet's changed mode of utterance and the play so far) plausibly renew the sense of Hamlet as a continuous subjectivity. This, again, sounds Bradleyan but is in fact only a specially determined application of the process through which any story is understood. The mistake would be to efface the work required, and to imagine that one is uncovering the inner truth of Hamlet's character. I am observing that, as well as producing a breaking point, the text does suggest at least one plausible link.
This is Hamlet's awareness, which is in the dialogue, of the extraordinary turns events have taken—the appearance of the Ghost when Claudius seemed secure, the arrival of the Players prompting the test of the king, Hamlet's inspired discovery on the boat of the plot against his life, and then his amazing delivery from the pirates. The latter is so improbable, and unnecessary to the plot, as to suggest the specially intricate quality of divine intervention wherein even a sparrow's death is purposive. It is when explaining how he found Claudius's letter and changed it that Hamlet attributes events to "a divinity that shapes our ends"; and when describing how he was able to seal the altered instructions that he says heaven was "ordinant." The sequence seems to require the providential explanation; so the prince recognizes the folly and pretension of humanistic aspiration and the controlling power of God.
For so much strenuous narration to be necessary, and with such sudden consequences for character and theme, the play must be laboring at a particularly awkward ideological moment. The strain, it appears, is getting Hamlet to the point where he can express belief in
a special providence. This could produce a Christian moral such as Sidney might have approved. The "carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts" and "purposes mistook/ Fall'n on th'inventors' heads" (5.2.386,389– 90) are quite compatible with a violent and punitive deity. In Calvin's view, both believers and the wicked must expect such afflictions (for the former, "it is not properly punishment or vengeance, but correction and admonition"; for the latter, God is "confounding, scattering, and annihilating" his enemies [Institutes 3.4.31]). So we may envisage an Elizabethan audience not finding Hamlet sad and bleak (or even strangely uplifting in its sense of wasted human potential), but being satisfied by the working out of events in the providential manner described in the sermons they had heard. The same might be true of other tragedies. Yet all texts, I have said, produce meaning in excess of any ostensible ideological project. In Hamlet the difficulties emanate from the concept of special providence.
The problem, as in respect of Stoic theory earlier, is focused by Hamlet's state of mind. For as Bradley said, the tone and implication of the sparrow speech, however Christian its phrasing, are fatalistic. Of course, predestination means that individual actions can make no difference, but protestant sermonizers, always afraid of antinomianism, urged all the more that the believer should show his or her delight in God's will by cooperating as far and as eagerly as possible. As Henry Bullinger put it, though "men's affairs and state are wholly governed by God's providence, so yet that they must not therefore sit (as we say) with their hands in their bosoms idly, and neglect good means."[41] Hamlet believes that providence wants Claudius removed, and that he should do it. He rehearses the king's manifold crimes and asks:
is't not perfect conscience
To quit him with this arm? And is't not to be damn'd
To let this canker of our nature come
In further evil?
(5.2.67–70)
However, when he says, "The readiness is all," he means not for action but for death. He is not making a reverent general statement about the rightness of God's control of the world, but dismissing Horatio's very reasonable suspicion about the duel. He plays with Osric (this scene seems purposefully desultory), competes recklessly with Laertes, makes no plan against the king. The final killing occurs in a burst of passionate inspiration, and when Hamlet himself is, in effect, slain. He seems to have fallen into the fatalistic heresy of Lawne's objector,
who is made to ask: "If God have assigned the point and very time of our death, we cannot escape it: and therefore it is vain to use any circumspection." The Calvinist answer is that "the Lord has furnished men with the arts of deliberation and caution, that they may employ them in subservience to his providence, in the preservation of their life."[42] Hamlet manifests the tendency of the objector: he sees no point, now, in bothering. He acknowledges divine determination, but without enthusiasm. At this point the play turns back upon itself, retrieving the Stoicism that it has seemed to dismiss, for the tone and context of the speech and Hamlet's subsequent inactivity are more in keeping with the quotation from Seneca's De providentia that I presented initially: "It was settled at the first hour of birth what length of time remains for each.. . .Therefore everything should be endured with fortitude, since things do not, as we suppose, simply happen— they all come." So Hamlet: "If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.. . . Let be." Hamlet falls back upon the fatalism that often underlies the Stoic ideal of rational self-sufficiency.
There is no speech saying that Hamlet feels thus because he feels alienated from the protestant deity; probably that could have been said on a stage only by a manifest villain. But as members of an audience try to make sense of events in the play and Hamlet's responses to them, it may appear that the divine system revealed in the action is not as comfortable and delightful as protestants proclaimed. It makes Hamlet wonder and admire; temporarily, when he is sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths, it exhilarates him; but ultimately it does not command his respect. The issue in Stoicism, for Hamlet, is how the mind might free itself, for to him Denmark and the world are a prison. But protestantism offers no release from mental bondage, as William Perkins allows us to see in a revealing analogy:
God hath watch over all men by a special providence. The master of a prison is known by this to have care over his prisoners; if he send keepers with them to watch them and to bring them home again in time convenient: and so God's care to man is manifest in this, that when he created man and placed him in the world, he gave him conscience to be his keeper, to follow him always at his heels, and to dog him (as we say) and to pry into his actions, and to bear witness of them all.[43]
The governor of the prison may be divine and may appoint his keepers with special providential care, but it is still a prison, and Hamlet cannot be made to cooperate.
As I will argue of Marlowe's Faustus, Hamlet exploits the shared ground, the embarrassing overlap, between protestantism and the doctrines it seeks to repudiate. Hamlet's slide into Senecan fatalism is accomplished in the very teeth of orthodoxy, for, as I have shown, it is actually while repudiating Stoic thought that Calvin refers to special providence and the sparrow. His particular anxiety was that a predestinating god might sound merely like fate—an impersonal force operating only a crude mode of justice, indifferent to mankind; "Those who cast obloquy on this doctrine [of special providence], calumniate it as the dogma of the Stoics concerning fate" (Institutes 1.16.8). And that might lead to detachment, alienation, irresponsibility, antinomianism, disregard for authority, free-thinking, disorder, social disintegration. It is with such thoughts that Faustus finds his way to conjuring, and that Despayre drives Redcrosse to the brink of suicide in the Faerie Queene (1.9.37–54). It is the story Calvin has to suppress, and hence his insistence on the sparrow and God's intimate and personal concern at every point. But members of an audience watching Hamlet may come to feel that this Christianity cannot separate itself satisfactorily from a Stoic paganism that claims no divine revelation and no divine beneficence; that insofar as the protestant deity is distinguished by an intricate determination of human affairs, it is intrusive and coercive; and that such a tyrannical deity need inspire no more than passive acquiescence.
Reading Faustus's God
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus has afforded a marvelous interpretive challenge to Christian humanists who feel they should discover Marlowe to be endorsing a nice, decent kind of god."[44] However, my argument thus far should suggest another plausible Christian reading. Elizabethan orthodoxy would make Faustus's damnation more challenging than most modern readers might expect, by denying that Faustus had a choice anyway: it would regard Faustus, not as damned because he makes a pact with the devil, but as making a pact with the devil because he is already damned. "Before the foundations of the world were laid," it says in the seventeenth of the Thirty-nine Articles, "he hath constantly decreed by his counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen." And Faustus, an Elizabethan might infer from his blasphemous, dissolute, and finally desperate behavior, exemplifies the fate of the reprobate. The article continues: "So, for curious and carnal persons, lacking the Spirit of Christ, to have continually before their eyes the sentence of
God's predestination is a most dangerous downfall, whereby the devil doth thrust them either into desperation, or into wretchlessness of most unclean living, no less perilous than desperation." In Kyd's The First Part of Hieronimo (c. 1585), the villainous Lazarotto declares himself just such a person:
Dare I? Ha! ha!
I have no hope of everlasting height;
My soul's a Moor, you know, salvation's white.
What dare I not enact, then? Tush, he dies.[45]
That Faustus might be in such a condition is supported by Mephostophilis's claim:
'Twas I that, when thou were't i' the way to heaven,
Damm'd up thy passage; when thou took'st the book
To view the scriptures, then I turn'd the leaves
And led thine eye.
(5.2.86-89)
If Faustus was guided by Mephostophilis, the decision was God's. For protestant thought could not tolerate devils wandering round the world at whim: God does not just allow their activities, he contracts out tasks to them. They are "God's hang-men," King James wrote, "to execute such turns as he employs them in."[46] However, Calvin says, it is only the reprobate who are ultimately subject to them—God "does not allow Satan to have dominion over the souls of believers, but only gives over to his sway the impious and unbelieving, whom he deigns not to number among his flock" (Institutes 1.14.18). So Mephostophilis's intervention would be part of Faustus's punishment within the divine predetermination.
The issue is focused in Faustus's first speech when he juxtaposes two texts: "The reward of sin is death," and "If we say that we have no sin we deceive ourselves, and there is no truth in us." It appears that it has been arranged who shall sin and die; Faustus concludes:
Why then, belike we must sin, and so consequently die.
Ay, we must die an everlasting death.
What doctrine call you this? Che sera, sera.
What will be, shall be.
(1.1.40–46)
Christians who wish usually manage to evade this discouraging thought. Douglas Cole says Faustus's texts are "glaring half-truths, for each of the propositions he cites from the Bible is drawn from contexts and passages which unite the helplessness of the sinner with
the redeeming grace of God"; Cole's implication is that Faustus is so eager to damn himself that he disregards God's generous offers.[47] To be sure, "the wages of sin is death" continues: "but the gift of God is eternal life"; and the second quotation, about everyone sinning and dying, continues: "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." But Calvin uses the first text—all of it—to emphasize that salvation is entirely God's decision: the desert of all is death but some receive eternal life through "the gift of God" (Institutes 3.14.2 1). And Tyndale in his Exposition of the First Epistle of St John (1531) uses the second text to demonstrate that we have no say in the success of our confession: "our nature cannot but sin, if occasions be given, except that God of his especial grace keep us back: which pronity to sin is damnable sin in the law of God."[48] So God may indeed forgive us our sins if we repent, but some at least will be damned for sins to which they have, in their nature, a "pronity." Faustus's summary, "What will be, shall be," may be irreverent, but it is in the mainstream of Reformation thought. If he draws not comfort but blasphemy from his reading, that will perhaps be for the reason given by Tyndale in a rubric in the Prologue to the first edition of his Exposition of. . . John : "If God lighten not our hearts, we read the scripture in vain."[49]
If Faustus is damned from before the start (to pursue the hypothesis), what then of his efforts to repent? For modern readers and audiences who do not already know the story, there is a question: will he change or not? For Elizabethan orthodoxy the answer was the same again: repentance is not something for the individual to achieve, but a divine gift. "It is not in our powers to repent when we will. It is the Lord that giveth the gift, when, where, and to whom it pleaseth him," Phillip Stubbes declares.[50] So if Faustus does not have it, there is nothing he can do. Yet there are the injunctions of the Good Angel, which appear to represent, like the personifications in a morality play, a choice open to Faustus:
Good Angel: Faustus, repent; yet God will pity thee.
Bad Angel: Thou art a spirit [sc. devil]; God cannot pity thee.
Faustus: Who buzzeth in mine ears I am a spirit?
Be I a devil, yet God may pity me;
Yea, God will pity me if I repent.
Bad Angel: Ay, but Faustus never shall repent.
Exeunt Angels .
Faustus: My heart's so harden'd I cannot repent.
(2.2.12–18)
If Faustus's heart is hardened and he cannot repent, who has hardened it? This was a key question in the theology of election and reprobation. In Exodus (chapters 7–14) it is stated repeatedly that God hardens Pharoah's heart against the Israelites, so that he refuses to let them go despite divine smiting of the Egyptians with diverse plagues. This was taken as a paradigm of the way God treats the reprobate. Paul alludes to it when he confronts the question in the Epistle to the Romans: "Therefore hath he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth" (Rom. 9:18). Luther stressed this text, and Erasmus was obliged to admit that it appears to leave nothing to human choice.[51] For Calvin it was plain: "When God is said to visit in mercy or harden whom he will, men are reminded that they are not to seek for any cause beyond his will" (Institutes 3.22.11). Hence Donne's lines: "grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lack; / But who shall give thee that grace to begin?" (Holy Sonnet 4). And that is why Faustus can speak repentant words and it makes no difference. He actually calls upon Jesus: "Ah, Christ my saviour, my saviour, / Help to save distressed Faustus' soul." But the response is the entrance of Lucifer, Belzebub, and Mephostophilis: "Christ cannot save thy soul, for he is just," says Lucifer (2.2.83–85). Is this a devilish manipulation or a theological commonplace? It may be both—as Banquo says, instruments of darkness may tell us truths; it is the argument offered by Lawne's apologist for the Institutes .
Why then the appeals of the Good Angel? "What purpose, then, is served by exhortations?" Calvin asks himself. It is this: "As the wicked, with obstinate heart, despise them, they will be a testimony against them when they stand at the judgment-seat of God; nay, they even now strike and lash their consciences" (Institutes 2.5.5). On this argument, the role of the Good Angel is to tell Faustus what he ought to do but cannot, so that he will be unable to claim ignorance when God taxes him with his wickedness. This may well seem perverse to the modern reader, but is quite characteristic of the strategies by which the orthodox deity was said to maneuver himself into the right and humankind into the wrong. Perkins declares:
Now the commandment of believing and applying the Gospel, is by God given to all within the Church; but not in the same manner to all. It is given to the Elect, that by believing they might indeed be saved; God inabling them to do that which he commands. To the rest, whom God in justice will refuse, the same commandment is given not for the same cause, but to another end, that they might see how they could not believe, and by this means be bereft of all excuse in the day of judgment.[52]
Such doctrine was preached from almost every pulpit.
Faustus is amenable at every point, I think, to a determined orthodox reading. Yet the play might do more to promote anxiety about such doctrine than to reinforce it. For although I have felt it necessary to argue for the Reformation reading, Faustus is in my view entirely ambiguous —altogether open to the more usual, modern, free-will reading. The theological implications of Faustus are radically and provocatively indeterminate.
A good deal might depend on which version is being used, for many of the exchanges added in the B text seem to sharpen the theological polarity. They include the lines where Lucifer, Belzebub, and Mephostophilis gloat over Faustus (5.2.1–19), and the speeches where Mephostophilis says he led Faustus's eye when he read the Bible and where the Good and Bad Angels vaunt over Faustus (5.2.80–125). These additions enhance the impression that the Reformation god is at work; William Empson argues that they were demanded by the censor, who wanted it clear that Faustus must suffer and be damned for his conjuring. Empson calls them "the sadistic additions," finding their "petty, spiteful, cosy and intensely self-righteous hatred" untypical of Marlowe.[53] Given the intermittent nature of the evidence, Empson's theory must be regarded as a stimulating indication of the awkward status of orthodoxy in the play, rather than as right or wrong. In any event, what Empson does not quite take on board is that the B text adds also two major passages that are more sympathetic to Faustus: the kind and gentle exhortation of the Old Man (5.1.36–52), and the scene after Faustus's removal to hell in which the Scholars resolve to mourn and give him due burial (5.3). These passages plant in the play a moral perspective alternative to God's. The Old Man and the Scholars pray for Faustus right up to the end, though theologians like Tyndale say we should not pray for apostates—except for their destruction, "as Paul prayed for Alexander the coppersmith (the ii Timothy, the last), 'that God would reward him according to his works."'[54] The Old Man speaks
not in wrath,
Or envy of thee, but in tender love,
And pity of thy future misery.
(5.1.48–50)
Unlike in the A text at this point, the Old Man is far gentler than the Good Angel, who anyway has not visited Faustus for nine hundred lines and has only reproaches left to contribute (5.2.92–108; B text
only). The Scholars, in the face of the horrific evidence of Faustus's destruction ("See, here are Faustus' limbs, / All torn asunder by the hand of death" [5.3.6–7]), agree to hold a noble funeral. It is rather like the endings of Euripides' Hippolytus and Bacchae , where the gods stand aside after their disastrous intrusions upon human affairs and the people draw together in sorrow and compassion.
This is why I say the B text sharpens the theological polarity, whereas Empson says it is only more sadistic: both the Reformation god and a more genial alternative are presented more vividly. This produces the possibility, which would also fit the sense most readers have of Marlowe as an author, that at some stage at least the play was written to embarrass protestant doctrine. Richard Baines alleged that in order to persuade men to atheism, Marlowe "quoted a number of contrarieties out of the scripture,"[55] and the strenuous efforts of Christian humanist critics to tame the play to their kind of order suffice to make it worth considering whether Faustus dwells provocatively upon such contrarieties. However, as I have argued in earlier chapters, there need not have been a precise intention in either direction, and no version of the play may represent, or ever have represented, a single coherent point of view. Substantial texts are in principle likely to be written across ideological faultlines because that is the most interesting kind of writing; they may well not be susceptible to any decisive reading. Their cultural power was partly in their indeterminacy—they spoke to and facilitated debate. But whoever rewrote parts of Faustus , and from whatever motive, the revisions indicate an unease with Reformation theology and help to make plain the extent to which any extended treatment cannot but allow contradictions to be heard—by those situated to hear them.
A similar confusion appears in the text of Nathaniel Woodes's The Conflict of Conscience (1581), a play usually adduced to set off Marlowe's superior verse and humanity. It is based on the story of one Francesco Spiera, which was translated in 1550 and reissued in 1569–70 with a preface by Calvin. In Woodes's play, Philologus, despite good protestant beginnings, is tempted and indulges in worldly delights, and concludes that he is "reprobate" and cannot be saved: "I am secluded clean from grace, my heart is hardened quite."[56] But the play appeared in print in 1581 in two issues of the same quarto edition, and with two contrasting endings. In the first Philologus kills himself and is indeed damned; in the second, a joyful messenger reports that he renounced his blasphemies at the last moment. (Both versions are headed on the title page "An excellent new Commedie.")
Evidently someone involved in the publication was worried. The two endings of The Conflict of Conscience correspond to the main alternatives in the Christian dilemma: either God must know who is to be damned and therefore, since he created everyone, must be responsible for people going to hell; or God has set the world going but has left it to myriad individual people to decide how it will all turn out. In the former version it is hard to discern his goodness; in the latter, he may be good but is disconcertingly impotent (perhaps rather than paring his fingernails, as James Joyce has it, he is gnawing them in suspense). Historically, each of these two theologies has fed on the inadequacy of the other. And so with the predestinarian and free-will readings of Faustus . In Marlowe's play they are, in effect, simultaneously present, but they cannot be read simultaneously; instead they obstruct, entangle, and choke each other. In performance, one or the other may be closed down, but the texts as we have them offer to nudge audiences first this way then that, not allowing interpretation to settle. Faustus exacerbates contrarieties in the protestant god so that divine purposes appear not just mysterious but incoherent.
Even critics who believe Faustus is able to choose freely do not thereby prevent the play from provoking embarrassment about God. They cannot settle the point at which Faustus is irrevocably committed, and this is related to God's goodness—the later the decision, the more chance Faustus seems to have. Many theologians have held apostasy to be irrevocable—the "sin against the Holy Ghost," the one that cannot be forgiven. The homily "Of Repentance" declares, "they that do utterly forsake the known truth do hate Christ and his word, they do crucify and mock him (but to their utter destruction), and therefore fall into desperation, and cannot repent." Richard Hooker said the same.[57] If this is so, Faustus's fate is settled very early, and most of the play shows God denying him further chance to repent; the effect is quite close to a predestinarian reading. No doubt this is why others have maintained that Faustus's situation becomes irretrievable when he conjures; or when he signs; or when he rejects the Good Angel; or when he visits hell; or when he despairs; or when he consorts with Helen; or not until the last hour. Such interpretive scope hardly makes for a persuasive theology. It may lead to the thought that there is no coherent or consistent answer because we are on an ideological faultline where the churches have had to struggle to render their notions adequate. It may suggest not only that Faustus is caught in a cat-and-mouse game played by God at the expense of people, but also that God makes up the rules as he goes along.
Finally, Faustus disrupts any complacent view of orthodox theology through its very nature as a dramatic performance. Even for an audience that finds Faustus's blasphemy horrifying, an actor might very well establish a sufficient empathic human presence to make eternal damnation seem unfair. Faustus himself manifests at one point a morality provocatively superior to God's. Anticipating the terror of his last hour, he refuses the support of the Scholars: "Gentlemen, away, lest you perish with me" (there is no knowing what God might do)—"Talk not of me, but save yourselves and depart" (5.2.67–70). At this moment, when human companionship might be most desired, Faustus puts first his friends' safety. As with the Old Man and the Scholars, a generous concern for others is shown persisting in people beyond the point (whenever that is) where the Reformation god has decided that eternal punishment is the only proper outcome. It is one thing to argue in principle that the reprobate are destined for everlasting torment, but when Faustus is shown wriggling on the pin and panic-stricken in his last hour, members of an audience may think again. If this is what happened, for some at least, then there are two traps in the play. One is set by God for Dr. Faustus; the other is set by Marlowe, for God.
Legitimating Tamburlaine
In Tamburlaine as in Henry V (see chapter 6), martial endeavor and legitimate succession depend on the production of gender difference and the subordination of the female and the feminine. Throughout, the men collude in using as a marker of their competing virilities violence against the women they claim as "theirs." At the start Mikados' unfitness to rule is linked with unmanliness; Tamburlaine, meanwhile, is forcing Zenocrate. Like Henry V, he contrives to appear the irresistible wooer without sacrificing his martial stance: "Techelles, women must be flattered: / But this is she with whom I am in love" (1.2.107–8). In Henry V , banishment of the feminine and the female has to be repeated through the play; Tamburlaine, at the height of his achievement, seems to reclaim the feminine. He finds himself moved by Zenocrate's sympathy for her father, the Soldan, and attributes this in lofty "poetic" terms to her heavenly beauty. Such rapture is problematic:
But how unseemly is it for my sex,
My discipline of arms and chivalry,
My nature, and the terror of my name,
To harbour thoughts effeminate and faint!
However, it is all right, for beauty contributes to warrior culture:
Save only that in beauty's just applause,
With whose instinct the soul of man is touch'd,
And every warrior that is rapt with love
Of fame, of valour, and of victory,
Must needs have beauty beat on his conceits.
(1:5.1.174–82)
Actually, this appropriation occurs immediately after Tamburlaine has killed the innocent Virgins of Damascus and during the slaughter of the rest of the people of Damascus, so he is scarcely succumbing to thoughts effeminate and faint. In fact, the only beneficiary of Tamburlaine's change of heart is the Soldan. The latter declares himself "pleas'd with this my overthrow" (5.1.480)—the fate of his people does not weigh with him—and the play ends with him sponsoring the marriage of Tamburlaine and Zenocrate. Tamburlaine's sudden sympathy for Zenocrate's father was not disinterested, then: it is the Soldan alone who can regularize this union. As in Henry V , negotiation with the female and the conquered is necessary to secure a legitimate line.
Yet Zenocrate's grief at the continual indiscriminate killing is vividly expressed, and in part 2 the effeminate returns to trouble Tamburlaine in the person of their son Calyphas, whom he murders. He orders that Turkish concubines
bury this effeminate brat;
For not a common soldier shall defile
His manly fingers with so faint a boy.
(2:4.1.160–62)
Afterwards, Tamburlaine adds, he wants the concubines brought to his tent. The story ends with his death; what does he die of?—where is the pain that prevents him standing? I would show him clutching his groin.
Tamburlaine's claim that his campaigns are divinely ordained is specially provocative because he takes it as license not just to be violent, cruel, and oppressive, as many magnates were, but to rise against established authorities. He does not, like Henry V, adduce legal pretexts, but only military conquest. This indifference to orthodoxy renders his enterprise fraught with religious disturbance. Cosroe demands:
What means this devilish shepherd to aspire
With such a giantly presumption,
To cast up hills against the face of heaven,
And dare the force of angry Jupiter?
(1:2.6.1–4)
But Tamburlaine says he is inspired by Jupiter's overthrow of his father: "What better precedent than mighty Jove?" he asks (1:2.7.17). The questions seem to invite audience speculation.
Many critics have felt that the plays work to ratify at least some of Tamburlaine's presumption at least some of the time. Roma Gill says in her edition that for most of part 1, Tamburlaine is "superhuman in his relentless ambition, and this sets him beyond considerations of ordinary morality."[58] Members of an Elizabethan audience would not necessarily have rejected this, despite the homilies and other exhortations to respect established authority. They might have been excited by Tamburlaine's indifference to the ideology of hierarchy and deference, and even by his disregard for ethical injunctions (which somehow always seem designed more for ordinary people than for rulers).
That some such response was conceivable is suggested by Machiavelli, who tells how Giovampagolo Baglioni of Perugia had in 1505 the opportunity to seize his enemy, Pope Julius II, together with all his cardinals, but shrank from such a bold deed. However, Machiavelli says, thoroughly "evil deeds have a certain grandeur and are open-handed in their way": Giovampagolo might have defied the whole church on earth, and thus "would have done a thing the greatness of which would have obliterated any infamy and any danger that might arise from it."[59] On this assumption, people might have been impressed by the panache with which Tamburlaine carries off his impertinent intrusions upon established power. His "giantly presumption" (Cosroe's phrase just quoted) suggests another Senecan model: the Herculean, godlike hero. Seneca's Hercules is sexually voracious and given to random violence, but he is a demigod and destined for heaven. In Hercules furens , Juno makes him mad, so that he kills his wife and children, but no criticism of him is ventured; he is "of mind unsound to see, / But yet full great." Finally Hercules kills himself, declaring:
Forbear, forbear to moan for me, for virtue opened hath
To me the passage to the stars, and set me in the path
That guides to overlasting life.[60]
Such classical precedent might authorize Tamburlaine's amoral aspiration. His foreignness complicates the question, for it seems that early modern English people did not easily identify with Spaniards,
Italians, Turks, and Moors. However, Marlowe, here as elsewhere, throws into confusion such identifications, inhibiting any simple perception of the outsider. Tamburlaine, a Scythian shepherd, is not a notorious threat as the Turks were, is twice said to favor Christians, and behaves more honorably than the Christians of Hungary.
If members of an Elizabethan audience viewed Tamburlaine's audacity as somehow exhilarating, the political implications would be uncertain. It may be that respect for conventional pieties and authorities would be undermined. However, it is also feasible that Tamburlaine would be regarded principally as a more adventurous kind of magnate, in which case his bold stance might add credibility to the conspicuous violence and display customarily exercised by the nobility, and hence encourage deference. Simon Shepherd suggests that audiences might have associated Tamburlaine with contemporary hopes for a heroic "new man" who would defeat Spaniards, Turks, and the rest; such audiences would then have found themselves caught between the success and the cruelty of Tamburlaine, who turns out to be all too like the order he overthrows.[61] Probably there is no deciding between the exciting and the presumptuous readings of Tamburlaine's career (though this is the kind of issue upon which criticism has liked to exercise itself). Both responses may well have occurred; we should be investigating the way the text is set up to license such divergent possibilities.
From a Christian humanist point of view, the best move is to present Tamburlaine as vicious and disruptive of a divinely inspired order, but as ultimately involved in ratifying and restoring that order. In this vein, Roy W. Battenhouse argues that Elizabethans would see Tamburlaine as a divine agent ("scourge of God") but as acting nevertheless on his own responsibility.[62] By such an argument, God is exculpated yet remains somehow in control; the play seems to show the punishment of sinful passion within a providentially governed universe; and "order" wins out all round. However, I have maintained, that position is not coherent and was not orthodox. Protestant doctrine could not allow that Tamburlaine might be acting on his own initiative: it held that God does not merely permit violent and arbitrary magnates, he produces them to serve his purposes. "Vile monster, born of some infernal hag, / And sent from hell to tyrannize on earth," the governor of Babylon calls Tamburlaine (2:5.1.110–11), and in the protestant scheme of things the Scythian shepherd might well be that. But he would still be an instrument "of Divine Providence, being employed by the Lord himself to execute the judgments which he has resolved to inflict."[63]
Once again, we do not have to assume that orthodoxy was necessarily persuasive in stage performances of this text. Recent critics are surely right to say that the Tamburlaine plays systematically tease an audience with the prospect of ethical and political closure, thereby calling into question the patterns to which they allude.[64] An evident aspect of this, which has been well noticed, is the disorderly concatenation of classical, Christian, and Islamic religious terminology. Within and alongside that disturbance, Tamburlaine's god is strikingly like that of the protestants:
There is a God, full of revenging wrath,
From whom the thunder and the lightning breaks,
Whose scourge I am, and him will I obey.
(2:5.1.181–83)
This is the god of Bishop Joseph Hall, for instance when the Phil istines are destroyed: "Every man was either dead, or sick: those that were left living, through their extremity of pain envied the dead; and the cry of their whole cities went up to heaven. It is happy that God hath such store of plagues and thunderbolts for the wicked: if he had not a fire of judgment, wherewith the iron hearts of men might be made flexible, he would want obedience and the world peace."[65] This god was adduced continually to legitimize the violence of the ruling elite. Lancelot Andrewes explained, justifying Essex's attack on Ireland in 1599: "God stirreth up the spirit of princes abroad to take peace from the earth, thereby to chasten men by paring the growth of their wealth with his 'hired razor'; by wasting their strong men, the hand of the enemies eating them up; by making widows and fatherless children, by other like consequents of war."[66] (I illustrate from Andrewes because he is often presented as a Christian humanist—T. S. Eliot selected him for special approval.) Thus regarded, Tamburlaine and his consequents of war are not so excessive. Or, again, Cornwall putting out Gloucester's eyes and Regan killing his servant are not outrages of a kind that challenges any theodicy or any theory of obedience to rulers, but the kind of thing God arranged for rulers to do in order to pare the growth of our wealth. To a protestant, Gloucester's blinding may have served him right—Edgar, after all, says as much to Edmund:
The Gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us.
The dark and vicious place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes.[67]
Notice the plague there: it was a common analogue for the activities of God and great magnates (plagues upon the Egyptian people ac-
companied the dispute between God and Pharaoh in which the latter's heart was hardened; and I have just quoted Hall rejoicing at God's "store of plagues" when the Philistines were defeated). This was because all three (plague, God, and magnates) worked through violent intrusions upon the lower orders and, concomitantly, all three both challenged and required the Reformation doctrine of providence. By stretching the idea of divine goodness, they provoked the typical Reformation response. Preaching during the epidemic of 1603, Andrewes felt obliged to insist that plague derives from God's care for people: "the plague is a thing causal, not casual; comes not merely by chance but hath somewhat, some cause that procureth it. Sure if a sparrow 'fall not to the ground'. . . "—the trope is familiar. As with today's AIDS "plague," the neatest technique of control and legitimation blames the victim: "So our inventions beget sin, sin provokes the wrath of God, the wrath of God sends the plague among us," Andrewes explained.[68] Plague actually did afflict mainly the people who usually lost out and who usually were blamed when things went wrong. By the early seventeenth century, Paul Slack has shown, "plague was concentrated in clearly distinguishable areas of each town, in the fringe parishes which were chiefly, though not wholly, inhabited by the labouring poor." "It is exceptional," F. P. Wilson observes, "to find a victim of mark and memory in a London plague."[69] This was because the poor suffered overcrowding, unsatisfactory hygiene, bad housing, and rapid turnover of population, and because the better-off left town (Andrewes did not resign everything to God—at the height of the epidemic, he fled his deanery). The correlation between poverty and plague was commonplace by 1603, to the point where the disease was apprehended as an aspect of the general threat posed by the "poorer sort"—and with some reason, for serious outbreaks were accompanied by a collapse of social discipline, with drunkenness, looting, and sexual license. Some commentators actually welcomed plague as a way of reducing the numbers of masterless men and cleansing the body politic.[70] Such intricate incorporation of plague into themes of divine and princely rule indicates once more an anxiously aggressive ideology of social control.
Tamburlaine says God wants him to "plague such peasants as resist in me / The power of heaven's eternal majesty." As elsewhere in the plays, and this is my point, his rhetoric of divine legitimation is basically like that of other rulers:
Villains, these terrors and these tyrannies
(If tyrannies war's justice ye repute)
I execute, enjoin'd me from above,
To scourge the pride of such as Heaven abhors;
Nor am I made arch-monarch of the world,
Crown'd and invested by the hand of Jove,
For deeds of bounty or nobility;
But, since I exercise a greater name,
The scourge of God and terror of the world,
I must apply myself to fit those terms,
In war, in blood, in death, in cruelty,
And plague such peasants as resist in me
The power of heaven's eternal majesty.
(2:4.1.144–56)
These are the usual arguments, but with a provocative slant. Tamburlaine is explaining a specially nasty action (killing his "effeminate" son); he allows the word tyranny before repudiating it; explicitly disavows "deeds of bounty"; admits to "cruelty"; and acknowledges, virtually, that it is "peasants" who bear the brunt. Most notably, he implies that his divine mission obliges him to be more vicious than he otherwise might: "I must apply myself to fit those terms." It is "heaven's eternal majesty" that makes him thus. In Richard III , according to Tudor ideology, Richmond organizes an army so as to fight Richard III's army and thereby manifest God's marvelous providential care. When he claims to be God's minister in his prayer before the battle, Richmond's argument is very like Tamburlaine's:
O Thou, whose captain I account myself,
Look on my forces with a gracious eye;
Put in their hands Thy bruising irons of wrath
That they may crush down, with a heavy fall,
Th'usurping helmets of our adversaries;
Make us Thy ministers of chastisement,
That we may praise Thee in the victory![71]
The euphemisms here make Richmond's violence sound less immediate than Tamburlaine's—"bruising irons of wrath" seem epic rather than real weapons, "usurping helmets" seem scarcely to contain the heads of people. Where Tamburlaine's speech raises problems about God's chastising ministers, Richmond suppresses them.
Richard III works hard to convince us that the killing Richmond sponsors is in a good cause. But although the issue seems to be the diverse royal pedigrees of Tamburlaine, Cosroe, Richard, and Richmond, together with their respective hypocrisy and virtue, these texts cannot but allow the inference that the problem lies in political arrangements that place power in the hands of a few people who believe they justify their privilege by sending their subjects to war. Hamlet is not vicious like Cornwall and Tamburlaine (though he thinks he is
heaven's "scourge and minister" [3.4.177]), but he gives his dying voice to Fortinbras, who already has organized the killing of vastly more people on his Polish expedition than the Danish royal family manages among itself. Hamlet's advice derives, not from his moral qualities, but from his position in the state. Edward Bond's play Lear first showed me that although Cordelia in King Lear may be good and loving, she is nonetheless acting on the customary assumptions of the governing elite when she raises an army and invades.[72] Her soldiers doubtless endure their going hence even as their coming hither, though prematurely and without remark. Good people may work a bad system.
Tamburlaine's rhetorical performance tends to foreground such dissident thoughts, for it throws into relief the claim of all magnates to divine legitimation. "Jove himself will stretch his hand from heaven / To ward the blow, and shield me safe from harm," he says. Theridamus is impressed: "Not Hermes, prolocutor to the gods, / Could use persuasions more pathetical" (1:1.2.180–81, 210–11). Tamburlaine's rhetoric works. But when others—established monarchs—use the same rhetoric it fails. Tamburlaine does not, as the Soldan threatens, rue the day he "wrought such ignominious wrong / Unto the hallow'd person of a prince" (1:4.3.39–40); the Hungarian Christians are not vindicated in their belief that God wants them to be the scourge of pagans (2:2.1.51–63); Callapine is not succoured by Mahomet, whom the king of Amasia sees "Marching about the air with armed men, / To join with you against this Tamburlaine" (2:5.2.34–35). The effect of these rival claims is to prise apart the language of legitimacy and its users. Anyone can allege divine endorsement—Tamburlaine's way of putting it suggests as much: "I. . . am term'd the scourge and wrath of god" and will "write myself great lord of Africa" (1:3.3.44, 245; my emphases). But whether the language sticks will depend on the balance of forces on the ground (Tamburlaine wins because his followers are more committed). In some circumstances plausible deployment of the rhetoric of divine legitimation may tip the balance, but it is still only rhetoric. That is why Tamburlaine gives Mycetes back his crown (1:2.4): what counts is who wins the battle.
Althusser's distinction between ideological and repressive state apparatuses may encourage the thought that the repressive agencies are resorted to when ideology has failed to produce acquiescent subjects. However, the two are linked from the start, for a key ideological maneuver is the legitimation of state violence. The contradictions
inscribed in ideology produce very many confused or dissident subjects, and control of them depends upon convincing enough of the rest that such control is desirable and proper. Soldiers have to believe that they are different from terrorists, prison officers that they are different from kidnappers, judges that they are different from muggers; and most of us have to be persuaded to agree. Tamburlaine's assertions that his harsh regime is divinely required, and the mobility of such rhetoric of legitimation, expose the claims made generally by and on behalf of rulers.
The unstable relationship between ideology and military success in Tamburlaine lays bare the difficulty I identified in chapter 5, of maintaining the distinction between tyranny and lawful rule. Political theory and theodicy—necessarily both—are shot through with alarm that the distinction might be found inadequate, and have generated innumerable anxious attempts to stabilize it. No one in the governing elite was prepared to tolerate lower-class interference, but sometimes it was allowed that tyrannicide might be performed by lesser magistrates (this would include Hamlet, if Claudius is tyrannical enough).[73] Generally, such theories were endorsed by out-groups—by protestants in Catholic countries (the Dutch and Huguenots), and Catholics in protestant countries; it is a nice instance of the material basis of ideas. The distinction between tyranny and lawful rule occurred also, inevitably, in arguments about the reasonableness of the protestant deity: "To adjudge to destruction whom he will," says the objector to Calvin in Lawne's Abridgement, "is more agreeable to the lust of a tyrant, than to the lawful sentence of a judge" (p. 222). For Tamburlaine, "(If tyrannies war's justice ye repute)" is a parenthetical question whose validity he denies; he asserts that as God's agent he may kill whom he chooses. Lawne's orthodox response—"It is a point of bold wickedness even so much as to inquire the causes of God's will"— only restates the problem. Tamburlaine allows an audience to see this, and that the ultimate analogue for him is not the ruler but the god to whom all of them appeal—the monster who is said to legitimate it all.
Dramatists picked at the seam of the ill-fashioned garment of orthodoxy, and for a thoughtful audience it splits apart. To some commentators at least, the theaters seemed disruptive. Indeed, as Peter Womack has remarked, they were blamed, like the lower classes, for plague. "The cause of plagues is sin, if you look to it well: and the cause of sin are plays: therefore the cause of plagues are plays," one preacher declared.[74]
Tragedy and the Writer
Fulke Greville had a third theory of tragedy, as well as the ancient and modern discussed earlier: his own—and it is at least incipiently materialist. His plays, he says, aim "to trace out the highways of ambitious governors, and to show in the practice of life that the more audacity, advantage and good success such sovereignties have, the more they hasten to their own desolation and ruin."[75] While there is a trace here of the protestant scheme whereby events are supposed to arrive at an ultimate, intricate, and mysterious rightness, Greville's orientation is distinctly towards social process and political critique. The reason for the ruin of princes is their behavior within the system of rule they operate. David Norbrook observes that Greville, like the French radical Etienne de la Boétie, "was concerned not so much with the specific differences between tyrants and good kings, the conventional matter of political theory, as with the general phenomenon of obedience by the majority to one man or to a small ruling elite."[76] Thus Greville approaches a structural understanding of politics like that of Machiavelli and Bacon. Some plays present this line of thought alongside providentialism. In Shakespeare's Richard II, for instance, the king claims the support of a typically interventionist, punitive deity (note the plague again):
Yet know, my master, God omnipotent,
Is mustering in the clouds on our behalf
Armies of pestilence; and they shall strike
Your children yet unborn and unbegot.
However, later on Richard offers a sheerly practical, almost structuralist analysis of the specific political difficulties that Northumberland's relationship with Bolingbroke will produce:
thou shalt think,
Though he divide the realm and give thee half,
It is too little, helping him to all;
And he shall think that thou, which know'st the way
To plant unrightful kings, wilt know again,
Being ne'er so little urg'd, another way
To pluck him headlong from the usurped throne.[77]
Such empiricism is not necessarily at odds with the providential account of English history—God might be working through such political mechanisms. But in the light of Northumberland's analysis, Richard's armies of pestilence sound like a device to keep people in awe. As time passed many people would find the political, secular
explanation the more effective, and providentialism faded—it was the same with plague.[78]
George Puttenham's account of tragedy reaches the protestant conclusion that it shows "the just punishment of God in revenge of a vicious and evil life," but offers first a materialist theory comparable to Greville's. The falls of princes occur, Puttenham says, because of their "lusts and licentiousness of life," and the writing of tragedy is a consequence:
whereas before in their great prosperities they were both feared and reverenced in the highest degree, after their deaths when the posterity stood no more in dread of them, their infamous life and tyrannies were laid open to all the world, their wickedness reproached, their follies and extreme insolencies derided, and their miserable ends painted out in plays and pageants, to show the mutability of fortune, and the just punishment of God in revenge of a vicious and evil life.[79]
For Puttenham too, political critique is central to tragedies. And he adds a theory about the conditions in which they get written and take effect (which I take to be a distinctively cultural-materialist project). We cannot accept his argument on this literally—we have few plays evidently written after the deaths of princes to record their tyrannies. But the thought that tragedies make such reference as with impunity they can to actual political circumstances is to the point, and is sharpened by Puttenham's suggestion that monarchs may be "reverenced in the highest degree" only while people stand "in dread of them." In fact, comment on the fall of princes was never safe, for authorities tend to demand respect for authority in general and history was recognized as a powerful way of commenting on the present. Greville destroyed his Antonie and Cleopatra , he says, for fear that it be "construed or strained to a personating of vices in the present governors and government." And he wanted to write a history of the times of Queen Elizabeth but was prevented on the ground that "things done in that time. . . might perchance be construed to the prejudice of this."[80] This is what the writer Cremutius Corda is accused of in Ben Jonson's Sejanus (1603)—a play that, Dollimore observes, leaves unresolved a tension between secularist and providentialist worldviews.[81]
State intervention in writing was actually intermittent. I have argued that this volatile society produced "the writer" as a figure licensed and constrained in the task of confirming or changing the stories through which people conversed among themselves, and that
writers, as a category, might well find themselves situated at a point of conflicting affiliation and hence relative autonomy. Of course, such an elaborate system could not be held to a single political line. Diverse writers were diversely situated—as nobility or gentry; in universities or the church; under patronage of the court or a large house; in the market, at the theater or through printing; they were highly visible at court or in the pulpit, virtually anonymous as pamphleteers; women as well as men. The boundaries of expression were differently set for different groups and at different political conjunctures—the penalties for commenting on the queen's proposed marriage were not the same for Philip Sidney and John Stubbe (see chapter 4). The stage and publishing history of Sejanus illustrate an intricate negotiation of changing contexts within and around such a text, and a sequence of revision and commentary, disavowal, and discreet assertion.[82]
Annabel Patterson's argument that early modern England evolved, quite consciously, "a joint project, a cultural bargain between writers and political leaders" seems right. There were "conventions that both sides accepted as to how far a writer could go in explicit address to the contentious issues of his day, how he could encode his opinions so that nobody would be required to make an example of him." Such a system explains our perception of veiled allusions, for instance in Spenser's Shepheardes Calender .[83] For such allusions to have any purpose at all, people in the know must have been likely to recognize them, in which case, we might think, how could Spenser's indirection protect him? The answer is that manifest discretion protects the system by indicating that the boundaries are respected. Patterson suggests that this permissive scope functioned as a safety valve and an early version of the opinion poll (pp. 13–14). That perhaps makes it sound too amiable; this was a dangerous game, with extreme penalties if you got the balance of comment and deference wrong. In fact, the element of give-and-take probably made it more menacing, for you have to be far more careful about overstepping a mark that is not visible. Cremutius Corda in Sejanus evidently believes he can comment on the contemporary suppression of liberties by writing history, but the rules are changing and he is obliged to disavow any such intention (and it does not protect him). Margot Heinemann has shown how control of the stage tightened under King James as relations between Crown, aristocracy, gentry, and city became more unsettled (she instances Samuel Daniel's Philotas [1605], which comes from a political position close to Greville's). Some writers were situated almost like attendant lords in tragedies: solicited by factional and dynastic rivals to enter
the lists, then finding the stakes to be higher than they had imagined and their patrons all too ready to sacrifice them. Heinemann astutely suggests that prosecutions led "eventually to the Beaumont and Fletcher type of play, in which kings have wives, daughters and mistresses, favourites and rivals in love, but no subjects below the degree of nobility."[84]
Alongside the safety valve and opinion poll, we might discern an early version of the "open secret." The latter has been identified as the coercive mode imposed until recently upon most homosexuals in modern Western societies, whereby aberrant desire must not be allowed into the open, for that would grant it public status, yet must not become wholly invisible, for then it would no longer work as a stigmatizing mechanism controlling sexualities. The function of the secret, David A. Miller observes, "is not to conceal knowledge, so much as to conceal the knowledge of the knowledge."[85] The early modern political system held unspeakable political knowledge—of tyranny, corruption, hypocrisy, and incompetence—hovering on the boundary of visibility, so denying it the status of public utterance while keeping it within surveillance. It seems very like the situation in many tragedies. Hamlet's exile and death are arranged after his mousetrap play comments publicly, almost, on court scandal. Hippolito in Middleton's Women Beware Women says he would not mind Leantio having an affair with his sister if he observed "Art, silence, closeness, subtlety and darkness"; Leantio has to be killed because he is "An impudent daylight lecher!"[86] Disguise, madness, soliloquy, and aside are prominent formal devices in this drama because they are modes through which forbidden knowledge circulates without being allowed aloud. Everyone knows that the system is corrupt, but admitting to such knowledge may well be fatal.
Puttenham's idea of tragedy as the writer's opportunity at the fall of a repressive regime suggests a way of playing a little with the conclusion of Hamlet . For on Puttenham's theory, the likely tragic author after the reign of Claudius is Horatio. This is what Hamlet wants: "in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story" (5.2.353–54—rather as Greville tells Philip Sidney's story in the context of Elizabethan politics). Horatio is the obvious choice, for he is a scholar, an observer and given to poetic flourishes ("the morn in russet mantle clad / Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill" [1.1.171–72]); Hamlet coopts him as special adviser for the mousetrap play. Even before our text is ended, Horatio is preparing to present a version of it:
give order that these bodies
High on a stage be placed to the view,
And let me speak to th'yet unknowing world
How these things came about.
His interpretation is carefully vague about who is responsible for it all, and allows the protestant-providential reading:
So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forc'd cause,
And, in the upshot, purposes mistook
Fall'n on the inventors' heads.
(5.2.382–90)
After all, Fortinbras may not welcome too precise a critique of his predecessor. But he does appreciate immediately the value to the new regime of a speedy representation of the circumstances that have brought him to power: "Let us haste to hear it, / And call the noblest to the audience" (5.2.391–92), he says. Horatio agrees that there are pressing political reasons to do so:
But let this same be presently perform'd
Even while men's minds are wild, lest more mischance
On plots and errors happen.
Fortinbras adds his own stage directions: "Let four captains / Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage" (5.2.398–401). He thus recasts Hamlet as a soldier—like himself, of course—so that his own succession may seem to follow the better.
Perhaps Horatio will write it all up for the Players, who need some new material. If they survive, that is: audiences generally do not feel called upon to worry about what happens to the Players after Hamlet has used them (when Queen Anne's company upset King James, their royal protection was removed; on a further occasion "the King vowed they should never play more, but should first beg their bread").[87] But Horatio's will more likely be a closet drama, like Greville's, and the Players will develop their own version. Both will have to be discreet, for one oppressive system tends to be followed by another, and it never becomes altogether safe to discuss the contribution to human suffering of the ruling elite.
The displacement of such suffering onto supposed universal forces did not end with the decline of Calvinist providentialism. As Raymond Williams argued in Modern Tragedy (1966), it continued in the
essentialist-humanist notion of "tragedy" as an allegedly universal form embodying the specially noble experience of elite individuals who create their own doom within an overarching framework of mysterious inevitability. In this notion, the scope for structural analysis and political change is still effaced. Brecht in The Good Person of Szechwan offers a materialist response to both branches of the tragic tradition. Wang suggests to the gods that floods occur in the province annually because the people are not god-fearing. "Rubbish," the Second God replies. "Because they didn't look after the dam properly."[88]
A Brief Photo-Essay on Imperialism
Fig. 4.
"Neptune Resigning the Empire of the Seas to Britannia," by William Dyce, 1847.
As Prospero knew, if you invade islands, it helps if you can tell the story of your triumphs prominently and in style.
William Dyce's fresco "Neptune Resigning His Empire of the Seas to Britannia" was commissioned by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1846–47 for the staircase of their new Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Albert was sponsoring artistic and national traditions in England, as he had in Germany, and fresco was revived as the prestigious mode of Renaissance painting (compare certain deployments of Shakespeare).[1] The seascape and swirl of bodies in Dyce's fresco plainly recall Raphael's "Galatea," in which the sea nymph rides in a chariot drawn by vigorous dolphins, surrounded by semi-human naked figures disporting themselves amorously. Such precedent sanctioned the "un-Victorian" frivolity in Dyce's fresco—Albert "thought it rather nude; the Queen however, said not at all"; but nurserymaids and French governesses were said to be scandalized.[2]
Fig. 5.
Postcard on sale to tourists in Grenada, West Indies, 1984.
The juxtaposition of Dyce's exotic vision with a mural memorializing the intervention of the Airborne Division in Grenada in 1983 is, of course, unfair to the United States: there was ample self-righteousness in British imperial propaganda. The absence of humor should perhaps be credited to the immediacy of combat (the allusion to the fabled Greek valley of Tempe seems coincidence rather than witty juxtaposition). Dyce ventriloquizes Renaissance/classical myth; the interpretive question here is: Who speaks? The Airborne Division must have painted its own ensignia (there's more off to the left), and surely the fixation on the KGB is theirs. But who writes "thank you" to God and the USA?—the islanders may indeed have been thankful, but perhaps it seemed prudent, or just convenient, to speak for them.
The historical question that shines through Dyce's picture is whether we should deduce that camp undermined the British Empire, or that more unconventional humor and sexuality might have sustained it better. Even the lion, limp-pawed, looks unsure.