New Find for Marlowe and Faustus?

I like to start each day by reading a scholarly article that is somewhat related to what I am working on. For my Ben Jonson chapter, I am doing reading on works about secrecy, and I came across in an article by Carlo Ginzburg, titled “The Theme of Forbidden Knowledge in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” (in Past & Present 73 (1976): 28-41), a poem in Alciati’s famous emblem-book, Emblemata, that could relate to another famous dramatist I am writing about for my dissertation, Christopher Marlowe. Alciati’s Emblemata was perhaps the most famous emblem book of the early modern era, published in multiple languages over a hundred-year period. The particular poem I am intrigued by is “In Astrologos,” which accompanies a woodcut of the fall of Icarus from the sky. 

 Combined, these form an emblem (above) warning against seeking the forbidden. “In Astrologos” addresses Icarus, “Icare per superos qui raptus et aera, donec / In mare praecipitem cera liquata daret. / Nunc te cera eadem fervensque resuscitat ignis, / Exemplo ut doceas dogmata certa tuo. / Astrologus caveat quicquam praedicere, praeceps / Nam cadet impostor dum super astra uehit.” A rough translation is, “Icarus, you who were snatched from the air by the gods and sent precipitously into the sea after your wax melted, now that same wax and burning fire revive you, so that you may teach certain truths with your example. The advanced astrologer should beware whatever he predicts, for the imposter falls while he is borne above the stars.”

This brings to mind two Marlovian moments. The first is the end of Doctor Faustus, where the scholar realizes that he does indeed have to fulfill his obligation to the devil and be taken to hell. In a last-gasp attempt to avoid the lake of fire, he tries anything: repeating an Ovidian tag (if any divine author should be appealed to in the Marlovian universe, he is the one), calling on God, and absurdly trying to jump up to heaven:

This is from the 1604 A-Text, courtesy of EEBO

What strikes me about his attempts is that they show him to be an "impostor." He recites a line from Ovid’s Amores, which reads in Ovid “O lente currite noctis equi!” (1.13.40). Marlowe’s straightforward translation of that line in the Elegies reads, “stay night and runne not thus.” It is spoken by a lover who wants the night to last longer. Faustus has good reason to use this line. Magicians should be able to do exactly this: manipulate nature, especially the moon. The Ovidian persona in the Amores claims his songs will “Carmina sanguineae deducunt cornua lunae / Et reuocant niueos solis euntis equos” “Verses deduce the horned bloudy moone / And call the sunnes white horses backe at noone” (2.1.23-4). But, as A. R. Sharrock has persuasively argued (“The Drooping Rose: Elegiac Failure in Amores 3.7.” Ramus 24.2 (1995): 152-180), the Amores is predicated on failure. That particular line in Ovid is what the narrator thinks Dawn herself would say if she were in his place. Ovid implies that even Dawn would not be able to stop the coming of, well, the dawn. The line is really about helplessness. One would expect an experienced reader like Faustus to have read Ovid better. Marlowe here ironizes Faustus, and furthers the irony by having the scholar not only use a spell that has been hopelessly ineffective for thousands of years—he also commits a cardinal sin among magicians and says it incorrectly! He adds an extra “lente,” invalidating an already powerless spell. I think it is significant that Marlowe’s ironic portrayal—almost a satire of astrologers and magicians and the like—comes right before the famous question, “who pulls me down?” This line alludes to Marlowe’s translation of the Amores, where, at the end of book 1 he transforms Ovid’s  

               This comes from a 1675 edition, ex typographia Societatis Stationariorum

into a bold, combative affirmation of the persona’s verbal powers:

So, the Latin line “Nam cadet impostor dum super astra uehit” relates to both Doctor Faustus, presented as an “impostor” at the end of Marlowe’s eponymous play, and to the persona of the Amores. It suggests that Marlowe interpreted the narrator of the Amores as an "impostor," and I think the real upshot from all this is that we have another piece of evidence that Marlowe mocks his narrator in the Elegies. This argument, that Marlowe does not identify with the Ovidian persona but in a way undercuts his bombast and hilariously hyperbolic boasts, is not a new interpretation—many have made this argument (M. L. Stapleton has done so most recently in his excellent Marlowe’s Ovid: The Elegies in the Marlowe Canon). What I am asking is whether this more firmly connects Faustus to the persona in the Elegies and if this suggests that traces of this Ovidian persona are more pervasive in Marlowe’s other plays than scholars have previously acknowledged. Although many have noted that Marlowe does not identify with his persona in the Elegies, even more have made the opposite argument—and the same goes for the Tamburlaine plays, Faustus, and other works. This find could possibly help to wrest the scholarly consensus free from readings that see Marlowe in his protagonists and do not see the many shades of irony, mockery, and (quasi-)satire that distinguish Marlowe from his protagonists.

Canon Confidential Time:

I knew this one was coming. Yes, Marlowe was a spy. Everyone knew that already, so this one is the least interesting entry in Canon Confidential. I'll have more surprising entries on authors you never thought were spies coming up soon.

Considering How My Dissertation-Writing Time is Spent and "Ladie Astrey"

As a new semester begins, and as I have no classes to teach (since I have been awarded a Ballard-Seashore Fellowship), I thought I would take a moment to reflect on the process of writing a dissertation chapter (since I am starting to write one today—that’s the last parenthetical (Maybe)). I like to think of writing a chapter in geologic terms. A chapter is a creation, after all, and, not to be too grandiose about my own work, but its magnitude resembles the earth itself. Its development resembles the history of the earth. For example, a lot of stuff happens before the actual writing. It is mainly gathering all the disparate elements of a chapter into one place. All the dusty books on the topic once scattered throughout the library, through a gravitational process of selection, recalling, and making some poor undergrad get my books for me, slowly converge on my place of study and revolve around me (not literally. Well, sometimes it seems like it). It is a process of accretion, and takes what feels like eons. 

Once a sufficient amount of information has accumulated, I feel a core of knowledge has been obtained. 

Then, a new phase begins: the rapid-fire flow of ideas to write about. These ideas just bubble up to the surface, erupting like so many volcanoes (I’m thinking of that scene from The Tree of Life here--5 minutes in). 

Once I have settled on a cool idea, everything starts to solidify, and I develop a thin outline. When I get a first draft done, I promptly (prematurely) send off to my committee who slices it up like moon from earth. 

Once the dust settles after that, the chapter is more focused, and I can get into revisions. The argument flourishes with nuance, crackling with wit and verve, evolving in sophistication and sustaining greater and more compelling argumentative life. Then, when I feel I’ve read it so much that it’s a dinosaur, I send it off to my committee again …

Canon Confidential Time:

“Ladie Astrey” was the famous personification of justice in Ovid’s Metamorphoses who fled the earth during the brutality and carnage of the Iron Age. In Arthur Golding’s translation she is the “last of heavenly virtues, from this earth in slaughter drownèd passed” (1.169-70). The original Latin is “virgo caede madentis / ultima caelestum terras Astraea reliquit,” and Golding seems to misread uirgo, maiden, as uirtus, virtue, but it still works (1.149-50 in Ovid). Astraea, or Lady Justice, shares her name with an unlikely author, Aphra Behn. She used it as her code name when she worked as an agent for the Crown during the Restoration. Behn got her start during the Interregnum, likely as a copyist for noted spymaster Thomas Killigrew, who went on to become one of Charles II’s preferred courtiers. During his reign she traveled to Dutch-held Suriname with her family and immediately got involved with the unsavory character William Scot, the son of Thomas Scot, who was executed for regicide. William was a person the Crown was anxious to keep eyes on. She is referred to as Astrea by other spies on Suriname and in correspondence from Antwerp, another home of exiled relatives of regicides. After getting fed up with spy work, Behn from Antwerp “passed” to England. She chose to keep the name Astrea as her nom de plume, smoothly transitioning from spy to writer as she translated her espionage experience into plays about slavery, rebellion, intrigue, romance, and kings. She was a wildly successful playwright (the theater was likely a good fit for her because the theater is a world of surveillance, with spectators spying from behind the fourth wall, spying occurring onstage to further the plot, and actors going about their business in their various disguises—it’s like what Spottswoode somewhat reductively says to Gary in Team America: World Police, “That’s all spying is: acting”).  Her time as a spy furnished her with not only plots and counterplots to write about, but also a unique perspective on justice and its relationship to the practices of spying and slavery.  

“Avert Your Liking A More Worthier Way”

After a long hiatus over the summer break, I thought that I, too, would weigh in on the recent comments made by Ira Glass on Twitter about the relative quality of Shakespeare’s plays, specifically King Lear. When I graduated from college, I went to see a performance of Lear (because of what I am going to say, I am withholding the name of the theatrical company and its location). When Lear came out onstage at the end with his murdered daughter in his arms, I did not hear gasps. I heard laughter. The same thing happened when I saw Oedipus Rex at the same theater—howls of laughter at the end. Oedipus was so upset that clawed his own eyes out, people! How could two of the most tragic plays in, well, the known body of European literature, be laughed at? Who knows why those people laughed? Maybe they were nervous laughers. Maybe philistines. Maybe the productions were bad (I personally thought both were excellent). No matter what, when people see a production of a play by Shakespeare or Sophocles, they expect it to be the greatest because they have been told their whole lives (and by the program) that it is. It’s like when a friend tells you to go see a movie because it’s the greatest movie he’s ever seen. Inevitably, it will never live up to the expectations, as apparently was the case with Ira Glass.

I have seen other productions of the same plays when the more “appropriate” gasps were heard in the conclusions, but these two performances were unforgettable, and I immediately thought of them when I read about Ira Glass's interpretation of Shakespeare:   

Ira Glass, hero of every ninth-grader suffering through Romeo and Juliet. I already hopped on that crowded anti-Ira bandwagon on Twitter. I don’t want to hate the hater here. Plus, I think the lesson to take from this is pedagogical. Ira Glass has been compared to a “millennial filling out a teacher evaluation.” This insightful comparison helps us to see how to get students to feel like Shakespeare is meaningful, and that does not mean making Shakespeare relatable. Even the type of art that the kids nowadays like is “not relatable.” 

Who can relate to a middle-aged Chemistry teacher with lung cancer and the world’s biggest chip on his shoulder? What Breaking Bad has that King Lear does not is access to our cultural codes of emotion. Lear cannot express his “noble anger” or his “sovereign shame” by looking off-camera with a pouty or angry look on his face, which helped make Walter White and other heroes/heroines of this golden age of TV such round characters. So much emotion is communicated without words. Imagine how popular that show would be if Walter White’s speech followed the Senecan model.

So what is the answer? It is not making Shakespeare new or “relatable.” Ironically, this whole relatability craze is related to the way we teach Shakespeare. He expresses universal themes, after all, and appeals to people across time and space. This leads audiences to think that he should be relatable. But, the onus is not on someone who died 450 years ago. It is on us, the instructors. Students should be given access to Elizabethan and Jacobean cultural codes of emotion—he did not write in an “unemotional” time—and be shown the Shakespearean equivalent of the Walter-White stare. Instead of telling students to appreciate Shakespeare because they’re supposed to and because he comes to you as a brilliant author who already knows how you feel (because he is a genius), perhaps we should focus on his role as an entertainer—you know, before he was a genius or a fraud or a poor actor who surely couldn’t’ve written the plays. I don’t mean we should reductively focus on his status as an actor (try to get through Anonymous if you want to see how that argument plays out). 

I mean, did they only cast Bret Michaels look-alikes for Anonymous?

Shakespeare was a writer, sharer (that is, part owner), actor, and all-around man of the theater deeply involved in multiple aspects of the work his company did. He was a very successful entertainer in his day. He managed to convince many thousands of Londoners for two decades that he didn’t “suck.” Maybe knowing him better will help us “relate” to Shakespeare. True, this is not as easily done in performance as in the classroom, and it won't reform all of those nervous, confused laughers or the puerile, irascible viewers. Still, this will make for a far more rewarding educational and, maybe, theatrical experience. Don't blame Ira Glass. Blame the way he was taught Shakespeare. Instructors have to fight against the deeply ingrained, almost unconscious cultural forces that subtly work on students and warp the ways we interpret and see Shakespeare, whose work is now, more than ever, worth understanding, precisely because of the ways his responses to surveillance can inform our own (see my previous--and, most likely, future--posts on this blog for more on that last point).

Canon Confidential Time:

Frenchman Pierre Boulle worked as a rubber planter in French Indochina in the 1930s. When World War II started, he worked for the Free French and as a British undercover operative in China, Burma, and Vietnam. His experiences and training in how to blow up a bridge and evade or kill guards perhaps inspired his two best-known books, The Bridge over the River Kwai and The Planet of the Apes. Overall, his sense of the morally ambiguous motives driving men to do desperate acts of faith, valor, and duty was informed by his experience as a spy employed by overtly principled but covertly unscrupulous governments  (see this great article on the BBC).