1

[Presented as a conference paper at the XXXII Colloque du Centre d'tudes

suprieures de la Renaissance (Universit de Tours, France, 29 June-8 July 1989),
this essay was first published in Spectacle et image dans l'Europe de la
Renaissance, ed. Andr Lascombes (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993), pp. 103-34.]

[Index: Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, Hermetism,

textual criticism]
[Date: 1993]

Self-Image and Spectacle in Tamburlaine

and Doctor Faustus

Michael H. Keefer

The spectacle is the existing order's uninterrupted

discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the
self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian
management of the conditions of existence.
Guy Debord, La socit du spectacle 1
Faust. What meanes this shew? speake
Mephostophilis.
Meph. Nothing Faustus but to delight thy mind,
And let thee see what Magicke can performe.
Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (B: 475-77)2
Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Exeter: Rebel Press, 1987), section 24.
My quotations from Doctor Faustus are from Marlowe's Doctor Faustus 16041616: Parallel Texts, ed. W. W. Greg (1950; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). They
are identified by the text from which they are drawn (A refers to the edition of 1604
and its reprints in 1609 and 1611, B to the substantially revised edition of 1616),
and by their line numbers in Greg's parallel-text edition. For a statement of the
principles governing my use of the A and B texts, and for analyses of the relative
authenticity of the two versions of the play, see my articles Verbal Magic and the
Problem of the A and B Texts of Doctor Faustus, Journal of English and Germanic
Philology 82 (1983): 324-46, and History and the Canon: The Case of Doctor
1
2

However one interprets Marlowes Doctor Faustus, the lines I

have quoted here come at a critical moment in the play. With a
resonant blasphemyConsummatum estFaustus has signed his pact
with Lucifer. But when his own blood appears to form an inscription on
the arm from which he has drawn it, he is reduced to a state of
dithering terror:
Homo fuge, whither should I flie?
If unto God hee'le throwe thee downe to hell,
My sences are deceiv'd, here's nothing writ:
O yes, I see it plaine, even heere is writ
Homo fuge ... (A: 518-19, B: 467-69)
My purpose in juxtaposing Faustuss anxious question and
Mephostophilis blandly reassuring answer about the meaning of this
show with Guy Debords diatribe against the non-stop electronicallymediated spectacle by means of which power is exercised and
maintained in our own social order is to highlight a tension, at once
ideological and formal in nature, in those tragedies of Christopher
Marlowe with which I will be concerned here. For although the
spectacle

which

Debord

wished

to

analyze

is

very

much

phenomenon of the electronic age, Elizabethan England was also, if in

a quite different manner, une socit du spectacleone in which
Faustus, University of Toronto Quarterly 56.4 (1987): 498-522, esp. 505-15, and my
edition of the play: Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus: A 1604-version edition
(Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1991), xi-xxii, lv-lxix. In all of my
quotations from Renaissance texts, u/v and i/j have been silently altered to conform
with modern usage.

3
power legitimized and reproduced itself through progresses, civic
processions and pageants, 3 through public rites of celebration and of
punishment, through an appropriation of the potentially subversive
popular forms of carnivalesque festivity 4, and finally through such
overtly fictive forms as the court masque and the various dramatic
genres which flourished on the public stage. But while the public
theatre undoubtedly served, on balance, to legitimize constituted
authority, its products amounted to something far removed from what
Debord naively calls a laudatory monologue. Dialogic in its very
form, the theatre also became a site of contestation, a public space in
which the pageants of authority could be interrogated (What meanes
this shew?), and in which its discourse could be represented as
traversed by contradictions and ambivalence.
By the early seventeenth century the genre of tragedy, as J. W.
Lever observed, had become one in which mans inborn freedom, his
natural state of equality, his right to rebel against tyrants, were
canvassed as vital issues. 5 Tragedy participated in what Franco
Moretti describes as the deconsecration of sovereignty; 6 and its

Louis Adrian Montrose remarks that Popular and liturgical ceremonial forms were
appropriated by the secular authorities; they were transformed into exclusive
celebrations of the monarchy or the urban elite. Such ceremonies of power and
authority are epitomized by the Queen's occasional summer progresses outside the
capital and her annual Accession Day ftes at Westminster; and by the annual
procession and pageant for the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London (The Purpose
of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology, Helios 5.7 [1980]: 59).
4 See Peter Stallybrass, 'Wee feaste in our Defense:' Patrician Carnival in Early
Modern England and Robert Herrick's 'Hesperides', English Literary Renaissance
16.1 (Winter 1986): 234-52.
5 J. W. Lever, The Tragedy of State: A Study of Jacobean Drama, intro. by Jonathan
Dollimore (2nd ed.; London and New York: Methuen, 1987), p. xix.
6 See Franco Moretti, The Great Eclipse: Tragic Form as the Deconsecration of
Sovereignty, in his Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary
Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs and David Miller (Revised ed.; London
and New York: Verso, 1988), pp. 42-82.
3

4
challenge to religious orthodoxy, Jonathan Dollimore has argued,
generate[d] other, equally important subversive preoccupations-namely a critique of ideology, the demystification of political and
power relations and the decentring of man. 7 But some two decades
earlier, at the moment when this genre was being shapedin reaction,
as the Prologue to the first of Christopher Marlowes Two Tragicall
Discourses of Mighty Tamburlaine, the Scythian Shepheard would have
it, to the jygging vaines of riming mother wits, / And such conceits as
clownage keeps in pay (lines 1-2) 8a deeply ambiguous subversion
of power and authority, both civil and religious, was already being
essayed. Marlowes 1 and 2 Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus are in a
sense totalitarian plays; they are (to borrow Debords words) portraits
of power in ... its totalitarian management of the conditions of
existence. But in another sense they give away the showin the
Tamburlaine plays, by exposing the scenicall

strutting, 9 the

manipulations of image and spectacle by which a would-be monologic

authority constructs and legitimizes itself; and in Doctor Faustus by
revealing what the puritan divine Thomas Beard was shortly to call
The Theatre of Gods Judgements to be an intolerable edifice. 10 In the
Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of
Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Brighton and Chicago: Harvester and Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1984), p. 4.
8 My quotations from Marlowe's plays, with the exception of Doctor Faustus, are
taken from The Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke (1910; rpt.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), and are identified by act, scene, and line numbers.
(Tucker Brooke's lineation is continuous throughout 1 and 2 Tamburlaine, and
elsewhere throughout each play.)
9 The words are Ben Jonson's, from his Discoveries : see Discoveries (1641),
Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden (1619), ed. G. B. Harrison
(London: Bodley Head, 1923), p. 33.
10 Orthodoxy has its revenges: Marlowe himself appeared as an exhibit in Beard's
The Theatre of Gods Judgements (1597). After recounting Marlowe's death in an
attempt to stab one whome hee ought a grudge unto, Beard adds: The manner of
his death being so terrible (for hee even cursed and blasphemed to his last gaspe,
7

5
lines which I have quoted as a second epigraph, Mephostophilis
attempts to close down Faustuss question as to what the demonic
spectacle which he has just witnessed means: Nothing Faustus, he
says, but to delight thy mind, / And let thee see what Magicke can
performe. As I shall argue, however, Doctor Faustus is not itself a
closed spectacle; the question What meanes this shew? resonates in
the theatre even after the last lines of its epilogue.

II

My approach here to Marlowe's 1 and 2 Tamburlaine and Doctor

Faustus will take the form of an exploration of certain aspects of the
relation between image and stage spectacle. Twenty years ago
Catherine Belsey offered a suggestive analysis of what she punningly
called "the subject of tragedy. My subject is also the subjector
rather, since dramatic spectacle and imagery are alike a matter of the
representation and self-presentation of human figures on stage, the
construction of an imaged subjectivity. I shall be concerned with three
closely-related aspects of the construction of subjectivity in these
plays: with the emblematic tableaux which are a prominent feature of
the stage-spectacle; with another kind of spectacle which, since it is a
matter of verbal imagery, I shall call virtual; and with the obsessive

and togither with his breath an oath flew out of his mouth) that it was not only a
manifest signe of Gods judgement, but also an horrible and fearefull terrour to all
that beheld him (qtd. from Marlowe: The Critical Heritage 1588-1896, ed. Millar
Maclure [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979], p. 42).

6
self-definitions

by

which

the

protagonists

contribute

to

their

constitution as subjects within the dramatic spectacle.

These Marlovian subjects invite one to construe them in what I
would suggest is a doubleperhaps also a duplicitousmanner. They
can be understood, in a Coleridgean sense, as active agents in whom
the self becomes a subject by the act of constructing itself objectively
to itselfand at the same time, in Catherine Belseys words, as
figures held in place in a specific discourse, of whom it can be said
that In so far as signifying practice always precedes the individual, is
always learned, the subject is a subjected being, an effect of the
meanings it seems to possess.11 As Belsey goes on to say, subjectivity
is discursively produced. But the discourse of drama is specular as well
as verbal. Subjectivity is also an effect of the dramatists specular
organizing of the gazethat of the spectators as well as that of the
stage figures, who construct themselves and are constructed through
their capacity to hold themselves and others up to inspection, and
through their function as spectacle (at once actual and imagined) in
the eyes of others. It is thus in large part through the interaction of
self-image and of spectacle (both actual and virtual) that the
doubleness of which I have spoken becomes evident.
The most obvious point of contact between image and spectacle
in these plays is provided by their recurrent emblematic tableaux
sights of power, as Tamburlaine calls them,

Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. George Watson (1956; rpt. London: Dent,
1971), ch. xii, p. 152; Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and
Difference in Renaissance Drama (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 5.
11

7
Wherein as in a mirrour may be seene,
His honor, that consists in sheading blood,
When men presume to manage armes with him.
(1 Tamb. V. ii, 2256, 2258-60)
Such moments occur also in Doctor Faustus, but as sights of what
Constance Brown Kuriyama, in a helpful portmanteau coinage, has
termed omnimpotence12: one thinks, for example, of the magus
gazing with horror at the bloody inscription on his own arm; or of the
terrifying appearance, in response to his appeal to Christ, of a
demonic trinity.
The imagery, here, is actual: we are looking at costumed bodies
on a material stage. But on another level, that of poetic imagery, one
can speak (misappropriating a term from optics) of virtual spectacle
of

representations

which,

for

all

their

vividness,

are

verbal

constructions alone, and are realized as spectacle only in the

imagination of the beholder. On this level, it is relevant to observe that
the poetic imagery of these plays insistently reflects, not the organic
components of the cosmos (where other Elizabethan writers found a
reservoir of social and behavioural norms, a structure of natural law
and natural morality), so much as its astronomical, elemental,
inorganic and daemonic constituents. This imagery thus contributes
both to the notorious interpretive reticence and ambivalence of the
dramatic spectacle, and also to ones sense of Marlowe himself as an
extremistas a writer, that is, who in giving voice to the discursive
extremes of his era never appears to suggest with any conviction the
Constance Brown Kuriyama, Hammer or Anvil: Psychological Patterns in
Christopher Marlowe's Plays (New Bunswick, N. J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 95,
110.
12

8
possibility of a centre which might give them coherence, and in which
they might meet and be reconciled. 13 Marlowes subjects move
through a polarized, de-centred world of warring elements, glittering
artifacts, and fetichized objects of desire, heaven and earth the
bounds of [their] delight (Dido, I. i, 31). The intermediate order of
organic nature, of normative analogies to organic processes, and of an
attendant network of natural law, is in most scenes conspicuously
absent.
As

Clifford

Leech

remarked,

drawing

attention

to

their

constructed rather than mimetic nature, Marlowes characters are

sick elementals on a rhetorical stage. 14 This hint can be
elaborated: Tamburlaine is sick because he is elemental; and Faustus,
because of the nature of his confinement Within the bowels of these
Elements, / Where we are torturd, and remaine for ever (B: 511-12).
And what Leech called a rhetorical stage is another way of talking
about that virtual spectacle the interaction of which with actual
spectacle contributes largely to the representation of subjectivity in
these plays.
I shall be also be concerned here with a related aspect of the
linkage between image and spectacleone which arises out of the
protagonists own language. Tamburlaine and Faustus (who are
Wilbur Sanders, in The Dramatist and the Received Idea: Studies in the Plays of
Marlowe and Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), criticized
Marlowe for lacking a firmly-grounded centre of consciousness from which to
conduct his exploration of human life (pp. 139-40)a remark which ignores the
possibility that Marlowe's writings may have been deliberately anti-foundationalist
and de-centred. The study which most adequately explores this possibility is Simon
Shepherd's Marlowe and the Politics of Elizabethan Theatre (Brighton: Harvester,
1986).
14 Clifford Leech, Christopher Marlowe: Poet for the Stage, ed. Anne Lancashire (New
York: AMS Press, 1986), p. 214.
13

9
themselves central stage images in the plays which bear their names)
are represented, and present themselves, in a succession of different
attitudes. We witness in both figures a process of rhetorical selffashioning. But how, and from what elements, do these images
construct themselves? A principal clue is provided by their obsessively
self-referential language.
Tamburlaine presents himself through third-person self-reference
as a talismanic object: his elemental constitution makes him an
operator of a kind of ambiguously astrological or daemonic magic for
which Marlowes principal source, I will suggest, lay in Ficinian
interpretations of the Hermetic Asclepius. The constitution of this
reified subjectivity is mirrored in the stage images, the sights of
power, to which Tamburlaine refers.
Faustus, in contrast, may experiment with a Tamburlainean
third-person rhetoric. But the habitual, indeed characteristic, mode of
speech by which his dramatic identity is constructed is second-person
self-address. The initial effect, of a split between the active self who
delivers the quasi-Agrippan declamatio invectica of the first scene,
and the passive silent self who in some sense stands in need of these
persuasions, quickly modulates into something rather different: a
Calvinistic trap of self-authenticating predication in which Faustuss
despairing self-definitions (What art thou

Faustus but a man

condemnd to die? [B: 1546]) are validated by the fact that he cannot
cease from making them. The mirror in this case is an internal one, of
a kind described by Fulke Greville in one of his Caelica poems as a
fatal mirror of transgression; and the magic involved is not

10
transitive, but subjective. 15 However, the sights of omnimpotence in
which this predicament is objectified are again directly linked to a
rhetorically-produced self-image. Here, as in Tamburlaine, the stage
spectacle corresponds to and is produced by the rhetoricallyconstructed self-image of the protagonist.

III

An interplay between what I have called actual and virtual

spectacle is one of the structural principles of the first part of
Tamburlaine the Great. Shortly after his first appearance on stage,
Tamburlaine reveals the warriors armour which has been concealed
beneath his shepherds garments:
Lie here ye weedes that I disdaine to weare,
This compleat armor, and this curtle-axe
Are adjuncts more beseeming Tamburlaine. (I. ii, 237-39)
The emblematic gesture, with its suggestion that Tamburlaine is no
more a protector of flocks and herds than his followers are the silly
country

Swaines

(243)

that

they

appear

to

be,

is

quickly

supplemented by Techelles with an explanatory simile which amounts

to another, virtual emblem:
As princely Lions when they rouse themselves,
Stretching their pawes, and threatning heardes of Beastes.

See Caelica, XCIX, in Selected Writings of Fulke Greville, ed. Joan Rees (London:
Athlone Press, 1973), p. 44.
15

11
So in his Armour looketh Tamburlaine:
Me thinks I see kings kneeling at his feet.... (248-51)
Shortly thereafter, Tamburlaine responds to Zenocrates and her
attendant lords pleas for their release with a speech which,
envisioning her in a position of power and authority, attended by a
hundred Tartars Mounted on Steeds, swifter than Pegasus, and
drawn by milke-white Hartes upon an Ivorie sled (289-90, 294),
obscures the fact of her captivity. But with the arrival of the Persian
general Theridamas, Zenocrate is made part of a quite different
tableau. Standing beside his three captives (whom one might imagine
to have remained in a suppliant posture), and backed by his
supporters, Tamburlaine declares: I hold the Fates bound fast in yron
chaines, / And with my hand turn Fortunes wheel about... (369-70).
Zenocrate has for the moment become an image of the forces over
which her captor claims mastery. And the treasure looted from her, the
golden wedges of which Tamburlaine has ordered to be laid out so
that

their

reflexions

may

amaze

the

Perseans

(335-36),

complements the image of himself as one who enjoys divine favour

and protection: See how [Jove] raines down heaps of gold in showers,
/ As if he meant to give my Souldiers pay (377-78).
Tamburlaines improvisations, which include a re-interpretation
of his initial gesture of self-revelation
Jove sometime masked in a Shepheards weed,
And by those steps that he hath scal'd the heavens,
May we become immortall like the Gods (I. ii, 394-96)
are of course brilliantly successful. The eloquence of a man who, to
the Persian court, was no more than a sturdie Scythian thiefe (I. i,

12
44) is now compared by the Persian king's chief captain to that of a
god: Not Hermes Prolocutor to the Gods, / Could use perswasions
more patheticall (I. ii, 405). (Hermes, one may want to recall, was
also the patron of thieves.) Tamburlaines reply, Nor are Apollos
Oracles more true, / Then thou shalt find my vaunts substantiall (40708), is at once another vaunt and an expression of the operative
principle of his rhetoric. He substantiates his vaunts, not as yet by
deeds, but by supplementing their virtual spectacle with the material
spectacle of staged tableaux. Thus the piled-up heaps of Zenocrates
gold, interpreted as evidence of divine favour, substantiate the
hyperbolic claim of the immediately preceding lines:
Draw foorth thy sword, thou mighty man at Armes,
Intending but to rase my charmed skin:
And Jove himselfe will stretch his hand from heaven,
To ward the blow, and shield me safe from harme.
(I. ii, 373-76)
When it comes to deeds, a similar interplay of actual and virtual
spectacle

is

evident.

The

farcical

battlefield

scene

in

which

Tamburlaine returns the crown, the emblem of sovereignty, to

Mycetes, the witty King of Persea (II. iv, 686), but only so that he can
wrest it from him again once his victim is properly hemd with armed
men (701), becomes a model for his treatment of Mycetess brother.
Having in the next scene invested Cosroe with the crown of Persia,
Tamburlaine is so struck by Menaphons exit lineAnd ride in triumph
through Persepolisthat he bids Cosroe return to war with us, / That
onely made him King to make us sport (II. v, 754, 805-06). The
imagined spectacle of a triumphant entry into the Persian capital is

13
the hinge which links Tamburlaines destruction of two kings, the regal
clown Mycetes and the king-for-a-day Cosroe, who is reduced by this
repetition of Tamburlaines gesture of giving and taking away to the
stature of a saturnalian mock-king.
But none of this should be taken to suggest that Marlowe is
inviting a moral condemnation of his protagonist. For even if the
playwright can be seen as foregrounding the verbal and specular
rhetoric by means of which Tamburlaine imposes himself, he is at the
same time engaged in a thoroughgoing mystification of authority. This
takes the form of a recurrent emphasis upon the subjecting power of
the heroic gaze, which exerts a projective power over what it beholds
and establishes its possessor as irresistible in a sense at once military
and erotic. Mycetes tells Theridamas: ... thy words are swords / And
with thy lookes thou conquerest all thy foes (I. i, 82-83). The first
encounter between this Persian hero and Tamburlaine is an erotic duet
in which, it would seem, their eye-beams (like those of Donnes lovers
in The Ecstasy) become twisted and entwined.

Standing face to

face, they construct one another through third-person address as

heroic objects of desire:
Ther. His looks do menace heaven and dare the Gods,
His fierie eies are fixt upon the earth,
As if he now devis'd some Stratageme:
Or meant to pierce Avernas darksome vaults,
To pull the triple headed dog from hell.
Tamb. Noble and milde this Persean seems to be....
With what a majesty he rears his looks....
(I. ii, 352-57, 360)

14
Tamburlaines strong enchantments overcome Theridamas, who is,
he confesses, Won with thy words, & conquered with thy looks (419,
423).
In the following scene this power of enchantment in one whom
Cosroe describes as the man of fame, / The man that in the forhead
of his fortune, / Beares figures of renowne and miracle (II. i, 456-58),
is explained by Menaphon in a bizarre literalizing of his masters
metaphor:
... twixt his manly pitch,
A pearle more worth, then all the world is plaste:
Wherein by curious soveraintie of Art,
Are fixt his piercing instruments of sight:
Whose fiery cyrcles beare encompassed
A heaven of heavenly bodies in their Spheares:
That guides his steps and actions to the throne,
Where honor sits invested royally.... (II. i, 465-72)
These qualities, it would seem, make it possible for Agydas to divine
from Tamburlaines wrathful eyes, That shine as Comets, menacing
revenge (III. ii, 1059), the inevitability of his own deathand they
enable Tamburlaine, shortly before his own death, to defeat a whole
army, Like Summers vapours, vanisht by the Sun (2 Tamb. V. iii,
4509), merely by showing his face.

IV

15
This strange figure whose eyes encompass a kind of celestial
microcosm would seem to be in some way related to that microcosmic
man whom Giovanni Pico della Mirandola described in his Heptaplus as
recapitulating, like the tabernacle of Moses, the entire structure of the
cosmos by which he is contained. There are, for Pico, three worlds: the
sublunary, the celestial, and the supercelestialand also a fourth
world in which are found all those things that are in the rest. As an
inverse metonymy of the universe, this fourth world, man, is thus in a
position to dominate the order of nature. 16
Marlowe appears to be making a defiantly secular appropriation
of Picos quasi-mystical ideas. But the soveraintie of Art which allows
Tamburlaine to satisfy his thirst for sovereignty may suggest that the
playwright also made use of other closely related materials in
constructing this virtual image of his protagonist.
Like other exponents of the Renaissance Hermetic-Cabalistic
tradition, Pico was intrigued by the teachings concerning human
dignity and spiritual rebirth or deification which recur in the writings
attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, among them the Asclepius.

17

The

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Heptaplus, in Cesare Vasoli, ed., Giovanni Pico della
Mirandola, Gian Francesco Pico, Opera omnia (2 vols.; 1557-1573; facsimile rpt.
Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1969), vol. 1, sig. A4 v: Est autem praeter tres quos
narravimus quartus alius mundus in quo & ea omnia inveniantur quae sunt in
reliquis, hic ipse est homo.... I have studied certain implications of this notion of
man as an inverse metonymy of the universe in The World Turned Inside Out:
Revolutions of the Infinite Sphere from Hermes to Pascal, Renaissance and
Reformation/Renaissance et Rforme 21 (1988): 303-13.
17 The importance of Pico's debt to this text can be quickly demonstrated. At the
outset of his famous Oration on the Dignity of Man, he proclaims the marvellous
nature of mankind, and quotes from Asclepius 6. (See Pico, De hominis dignitate,
Heptaplus, De ente et uno, ed. Eugenio Garin [Florence: Vallecchi, 1942], p. 102; and
Corpus Hermeticum, ed. A. D. Nock, trans. A. J. Festugire [4 vols.; 2nd ed.; Paris: Les
Belles Lettres, 1960], pp. 301-02.) But Pico then asks why we should not admire the
angels and the blessed choirs of heaven more than man. He answers this question
with his famous re-telling of the story of the creation, in which he identifies man's
divinely-accorded indeterminacy, his capacity for self-fashioning and deification, as
16

16
Hermetic Asclepius, however, also alludes to another kind of godmaking: Hermes claims that the power and force of man are
exemplified by his capacity to fashion animated statues which,
endowed with sense and spirit, can perform marvels, predict the
future, provoke and cure diseases, and apportion misery and
happiness to us according to our desserts. 18 These earthly gods, he
explains, are made by invoking demons or angels and introducing
them by means of sacred and divine rites into statues which already
incorporate certain natural virtues; the idols then have the power to
work both good and evil.19
Picos

older

contemporary

Marsilio

Ficino

(whose

Latin

translation of other Hermetic texts had prompted a surge of interest in

this wholly legendary Egyptian sage), understood the Asclepian
statue-making as a species of astrological magic, 20 and as being
the basis of his dignity. But this is little more than an expansion of the well-known
passage (Asclepius 5-6) from which he had quoted at the outset. Pico's handling of
the matter is thus duplicitous: he undoubtedly knew that the answer to the problem
posed for him by Hermes's celebration of human dignity is provided by Hermes
himself. But the manoeuvre allows him to put Hermes's words (or something very
like them) into the mouth of God himself.
18 Asclepius 23-24; Corpus Hermeticum vol. 2, pp. 325-26: Species vero deorum,
quas conformat humanitas, ex utraque natura conformatae sunt; ex divina, quae est
purior multoque divinior, et ex ea, quae intra homines est, id est ex materia, qua
fuerint fabricatae.... Statuas dicis, o Trismegiste? Statuas, o Asclepi. Videsne,
quatenus tu ipse diffidas? statuas animatas sensu et spiritu plenas tantaque
facientes et talia, statuas futurorum praescias eaque sorte, vate, somniis multisque
aliis rebus praedicentes, inbecillitates hominibus facientes easque curantes,
tristitiam laetitiamque pro meritis.
19 Asclepius 37, Corpus Hermeticum vol. 2, p. 347: ... proavi nostri ... invenerunt
artem qua efficerent deos. Cui inventae adiunxerunt virtutem de mundi natura
convenientem eamque miscentes, quoniam animas facere non poterant, evocantes
animas daemonum vel angelorum eas indiderunt imaginibus sanctis divinisque
mysteriis, per quas idola et bene faciendi et male vires habere potuissent.
20 Ficino derived authority from this statue-magic for the idea that, just as aerial
demons can be attracted into statues, so also stellar influences and spirits can be
drawn into material forms (see Ficino, De triplici vita [In agro Caregio, 1489], sig.
h7v, r1r-v). Brian Copenhaver remarks that he allowed the Asclepian statue-magic to
colour his interpretation of Plotinus's metaphysics (see Copenhaver, Astrology and
Magic, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt,
Quentin Skinner et al. [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988], pp. 275-79).

17
closely

related

to

Hermess

divinely-inspired

teachings

about

deification. On occasion, indeed, Ficino seems deliberately to be

obscuring any distinction between the two forms of god-makingas
when, in a commentary on the pseudo-Dionysiuss account of the
ascent to God, he describes the divine image in man as a statua Dei.21
Another Italian writer, Ludovico Lazzarelli, was more explicit still in
conflating Neoplatonic and Hermetic doctrines of deification with the
daemonic statues of Hermes. 22
That Marlowes representation of Tamburlaine as a daemonic
force draws upon notions such as these may be suggested by the
remarks of Tamburlaines enemies. Meander believes that
Some powers divine, or els infernall, mixt
Their angry seeds at his conception:
For he was never sprong of humaine race, (II. vi, 820-22)
and Ortygius is unsure whether he is a
... God or Feend, or spirit of the earth,
Or monster turned to a manly shape,
Or of what mould or mettel he be made.... (826-28)
But Tamburlaines trajectory is also determined by his elemental
composition. In contrast to Cosroe and his companions, all of whom
have suckt one wholsome aire / And with the same proportion of

Ficino, Opera omnia (2 vols.; Paris, 1641), Comm. in orationem Dionysii de

Trinitate, vol. 2, p. 7: Si fecit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam, certe est in
homine statua Dei, quamvis aditamentis abscondita.
22 A conflation of this kind is evident in Ludovico Lazzarellis Calix Christi et Crater
Hermetis, which was printed by Jacques Lefvre dtaples in his edition of the
Hermetic Pimander and Asclepius (Paris, 1505). For an account of Lazzarellis
conflation of these two forms of god-making into a Hermetic-Christian mystery of
spiritual rebirth, see D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to
Campanella (1958; rpt. Notre Dame: Notre Dame Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 67-71.
21

18
Elements, / Resolve... (II. vi, 836-38), Tamburlaine explains himself in
terms of elemental strife:
Nature that fram'd us of foure Elements,
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspyring minds.... (869-71)
He is, as Cosroe says, a fiery thirster after Soveraingtie (842).
Theridamas, drawing upon the same elemental analogy, declares any
man That mooves not upwards, nor by princely deeds / Doth meane
to soare above the highest sort to be "grosse and like the massie
earth (883-84, 882).
The predominance in Tamburlaine of the element of fire
accounts both for the terrour of his threatning lookes (2 Tamb. V. i,
4135), and for his uninterrupted victories and violent tyranny. He
himself describes his vermillion siege tents as threatening
... more than if the region
Next underneath the Element of fire,
Were full of Commets and of blazing stars,
Whose flaming traines should reach down to the earth....
(4199-4202)
His fiery nature, however, is also the principal cause of his death.
Sixteen lines after the end of the speech in which, ordering his men to
burn the Turkish Alcaron, / And all the heapes of supersticious bookes,
/ Found in the Temples of that Mahomet, / Whom I have thought a
God (4284-87), Tamburlaine challenges Mahomet to take vengeance
on him, and tells his soldiers to Seeke out another Godhead to
adore, / The God that sits in heaven, if any God (4311-12), the
Scourge of God feels himself distempered sudainly (4329).

19
Marlowe, the one-time theological student, has prepared the
moment carefully. Those in the audience who wish to see blasphemy
receive its due punishment are rewardedif, that is, they are willing to
accord divine status to the Prophet of Islam. But this notion of
retributive justice is promptly challenged by the purely naturalistic
explanation superimposed upon it by Tamburlaines doctor:
Your vaines are full of accidentall heat,
Whereby the moisture of your blood is dried,
The Humidum and Calor, which some holde
Is not a parcell of the Elements,
But of a substance more divine and pure,
Is almost cleane extinguished and spent....
(2 Tamb. V. ii, 4476-80).
The import of this medical jargon seems clear enough. Amyras
laments that heaven has consumed its choisest living fire (4644).
But the fiery Tamburlaine is, rather, a self-consuming artifact: the
immediate cause of his death is the inopportune arrival of Callapine
with yet another army, in the specular dispersal of which Tamburlaine
exhausts his martial strength (4512). Having established himself as
a reified subject in large part through his habit of third-person selfreference (... sooner shall the Sun fall from his Spheare, / Than
Tamburlaine be slaine or overcome [1 Tamb. I. ii, 371-72]), the
Scythian objectifies himself again in confessing his own mortality: ...
this subject not of force enough, / To hold the fiery spirit it containes, /
Must part... (2 Tamb. V. ii, 4561-62).

20
V

One

way

of

explaining

the

insistent

blasphemies

of

Tamburlaine in particular might be to suggest that Marlowe was

deploying a mystification of political tyranny in a kind of displaced
subversion of the increasingly evident religious tyranny of the Anglican
church.23 But

the

inexorable

rise

of

the

daemonic,

elemental

protagonist of these plays, culminating in his equally inevitable death,

is paralleled by the organization of actual and virtual spectacle in
these plays in a manner which may point to a less positive conclusion.
Acts Four and Five of 1 Tamburlaine are largely concerned with
the siege of Damascusand with the representation of a crescendo of
degradation and violence. This is organized in terms of the colours
white, red, and blackwhich signify that while on the first day of a
siege Tamburlaine will accept a peaceful submission, on the second
day surrender will be followed by the slaughter of any that can
manage arms (IV. i, 1429), and after that by the massacre of the
whole population. On the first day (so the messenger says),
Tamburlaine wears on his silver crest / A snowy Feather spangled
white ... / To signify the mildnesse of his minde (1422-24). In this
mood, with a speech that moves from hubris to bloody-mindedness
Archbishop Whitgift had since 1583 been enforcing uniformity within the Anglican
church. John Penry, brought before the Court of High Commission as a dissenter in
1588, was, he wrote in his Appellation (1589), threatned very bloodily and told by
Whitgift that ere you depart the court we will finde sufficient matter to emprison
you, and if you refuse the oath, to prison you shall goe (Albert Peel, ed., The
Notebook of John Penry 1593 [London: Royal Historical Society, 1944],
Introduction, p. xiii). Rearrested in March, 1593, Penry was hanged on May 29. (It
may be no more than coincidence that Christopher Marlowe appeared before the
Privy Council on May 20, four days before Penry's condemnation, and that he was
killed on May 30.)
23

21
(Now cleare the triple region of the aire, / And let the majestie of
heaven beholde / Their Scourge and Terrour treade on Emperours. / ....
/ Then when the Sky shal waxe as red as blood, / It shall be said, I
made it red my selfe [IV. ii, 1474-76, 1497-98]), Tamburlaine steps
over Bajazeth, his footstool, onto his throne.
He appears next, dressed al in scarlet (IV. iv, s. d.), in a
banquet scene which begins with bloody threats against the defenders
of Damascus and devolves into an exchange of cannibalistic taunts
and furious counter-curses with the caged and starving Bajazeth and
Zabina. Bajazeth tells Tamburlaine he could willingly feed upon thy
blood-raw hart (IV. iv, 1649-50); he is invited to pluck out his own
(twill serve thee and thy wife [1652]), to eat scraps from
Tamburlaines sword point, and to carve up his wife before she falls
into a consumption with freatting, and then she will not bee woorth
the eating (1688-90). How now Zenocrate, Tamburlaine asks his
own consort, dooth not the Turke and his wife make a goodly showe
at a banquet? (1696-97). Observing her response to be less than
animated, he offers music to cheer her upIf thou wilt have a song,
the Turke shall straine his voice (1702-03)but promptly dismisses
her request that he show mercy to her native land and to her fathers
city.
This sequence comes to a climax in a scene which begins with
another refusal of mercy. Tamburlaine, now all in blacke, and very
melancholy (V. ii, s. d.), responds to the belated but very eloquent
pleadings of the first of the virgins of Damascus with a sadistic lesson
in the workings of virtual spectacle:
Tam . Behold my sword, what see you at the point?

22
Virg . Nothing but feare and fatall steele my Lord.
Tam . Your fearfull minds are thicke and mistie then,
For there sits Death, there sits imperious Death,
Keeping his circuit by the slicing edge. (V. ii, 188993)
Virtual spectacle, however, is as subject to the rhetoricians whim as
defenceless women are to the mass-murderers. Having commanded
the virgins to visualize imperious Death seated on his sword-tip,
Tamburlaine at once declares that
... I am pleasde you shall not see him there,
He now is seated on my horsemens speares:
And on their points his fleshlesse bodie feedes. (1894-96)
As hhis monstrous play with words makes clear, the fleshless body of
this virtual image is about to substantiate itself in a phallic violation of
the virgins flesh:
Techelles, straight goe charge a few of them
To chardge these Dames, and shew my servant death,
Sitting in scarlet on their armed speares. (1897-99).
They will see Death feeding on the blazon of their own blood.
With Zenocrates semblables reduced to slaughtered carcases
(1912) and hoisted up onto the city walls, their murderer launches into
an impassioned apostropheinspired by the dishevelled beauty of his
beloved herself, who like to Flora in her mornings pride, / Shaking her
silver treshes in the aire, / Rainst on the earth resolved pearle in
showers (1921-23). He declares that Zenocrates sorrows, though
caused of course by his own refusal to call off the assault, lay more
siege unto my soule, / Than all my Army to Damascus walles (1936-

23
37). A dehumanizing aestheticism permits the roles of victor and
victim to be reversed: What is beauty saith my sufferings then?
(1941;

emphasis

added).

Ask

the

slaughtered

carcases

of

Damascus, would be one possible reply.

It could be said with some confidence that most contemporary
spectators and readers of the play would react in a similar manner to
the violent excesses of this sequence. But the rhetorical function of
Tamburlaines soliloquy appears to be to complicate, if not altogether
to block, such a response. If all the pens that ever poets held, / Had
fed the feeling of their maisters thoughts, / And every sweetnes that
inspird their harts... (1942-44): Tamburlaine is in full flight. Are we
likely to perceive this second use of a metaphor of feeding as tainted
by the first (which precedes it by less than fifty lines), or by the
Scythians cannibalistic taunts at his banquet? And if our answer to
this or similar questions about the inversions worked by the
aestheticism of Tamburlaines long soliloquy is an affirmative one, is
that because the play-text offers us a position from which to resist the
daemonic violence of his specular and spoken rhetoric, or is it rather
because we feel sufficiently alienated from this play to want to read it
against the grain? In the latter case, is that alienation an effect of the
text, or an effect rather of our historical distance from it?
I suspect that such matters as these are not capable of being
securely resolved. And yet the play-text may contain a clue as to the
anticipated response. The nearest approach to a critical perspective
upon Tamburlaines doings in this scene is provided by Zenocrate. But
although she reacts with horror to the accumulation of bloody
spectacle[s] (2121), she is also drawn into complicity with the man

24
who is responsible for them. Tamburlaines sights of power, the
corpses of his victims, grace [his] victory (2256); so also, in a
different manner, does Zenocrate, who consent[s] to satisfy (2281)
his wishes, and is crowned by him at the end of the scene. It is
arguable that this sequence (like the similarly constructed sequence of
the

siege

of

Babylon

and

the

conquerors

fatal

illness

in

Tamburlaine) is designed to draw the audience into a similar attitude

of complicity. Is Marlowe then exposing barbarism or participating in
it? The lapidary ironies of Hero and Leander reveal him as the most
exaggeratedly

civilized

of

the

Elizabethan

poets;

does

the

aestheticized savagery of the Tamburlaine plays make him also the

most grotesquely sadistic writer of his age?

VI

Doctor Faustus offers, in certain respects, a reversal of these

patterns. This play is masochistic rather than sadistic; its protagonist a
victim rather than a tyrant. Tamburlaine, I have argued, constructs
himself through an interplay of actual and virtual spectacle in which
he is made to appear, both by self-referential language and by quasichoric commentary, as an irresistible force, at once elemental and
daemonic. Faustus, in contrast, speaks not so much of himself as to
himself, and the actual and emblematic spectacle in Doctor Faustus
creates a recurrent impression of passivity, of a subject enclosed and
penetrated by the discourse of the Other. Faustus is a passive
spectator of the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins and of the other

25
daemonic images, Alexander the Great and Helen of Troy, summoned
up by Mephostophilis. He is, moreover, visually framed by the Good
and Evil Angels, whose words come to him as though from within. In
the first scene of the play, the persuasions of the Evil AngelGo
forward Faustus in that famous art, / Wherein all natures treasury is
containd: / Be thou on earth as Jove is in the skie (A: 106-08)are of
the same order as those which Faustus has already directed at himself,
and the same might be said of the Good Angels exhortations five
scenes later.
On the level of virtual spectacle, similar effects are evident, for
unlike the linear and projective imagery of the Tamburlaine plays, that
of

Doctor

Faustus

is

insistently

reflexive

and

circular.

As

Mephostophilis reminds his questioner, this centricke earth (B: 606)

is enclosed by larger structures:
As are the elements, such are the heavens,
Even from the Moone unto the Emp[y]riall Orbe,
Mutually folded in each others Spheares,
And jo[i]ntly move upon one Axle-tree.... (B: 607-10)
Faustuss visits to the papal and imperial courts are preceded by an
ascent into this structure:
From the bright circle of the horned Moone,
Even to the height of Primum Mobile:
And whirling round with this circumference,
Within the concave compasse of the Pole,
From East to West his Dragons swiftly glide.... (B: 785-89)
Another kind of circularity subsequently becomes apparent: Faustus
feels a need to return to his own starting-point, for

26
the restlesse course that time
doth runne with calme and silent foote,
Shortning my dayes and thread of vitall life,
Calls for the payment of my latest yeares,
Therefore sweet Mephastophilis, let us make haste to
Wertenberge.
(A: 1134-39)
Having completed the circuit of his travels, and that of his twenty-four
years, Faustus strives in his last hour to arrest the ever mooving
spheres of heaven (A: 1453). But he is compelled to admit that The
starres moove stil, time runs, the clocke wil strike, / The divel wil
come, and Faustus must be damnd (A: 1460-61).
It is, however, most distinctly through his habit of self-address
that Faustus creates an image of himself as a doomed man. Like
Tamburlaine, he regularly has his own name on his tongue. But the
Tamburlainean third person, by which the Scythian hero reifies himself
as an invincible talismanic object, is alien to Faustus. His initial efforts
in this mode may indeed seem promising (although one notices that
he works himself up to the third person through a preliminary selfaddress):
Is to dispute well Logickes chiefest end?
Affoords this Art no greater miracle?
Then read no more, thou hast attain'd that end;
A greater subject fitteth Faustus wit. (B: 37-40)
But when the proud display of his declaration to Mephostophilis
Learne thou of Faustus manly fortitude, / And scorne those joyes
thou never shalt possesse (A: 330-31)is promptly followed by an

27
offer to surrender his soul to Lucifer, the absurdity of this stance
becomes evident. A Tamburlainean rhetoric is clearly incompatible
with the predicament of one of whom we were told, before ever
clapping eyes on him, that His waxen wings did mount above his
reach, / And melting heavens conspirde his overthrow (A: 22-23).
Indeed, in contrast to Tamburlaines self-assurance, which is
solidly connected to the elemental constitution that makes his vaunts
substantial, Faustuss first soliloquy exposes a subtle division between
the speaking voice and the mute self which it so confidently
addresses: this rhetoric conveys the compound image of a man who is
at once the active, wilful subject addressing himself with such energy,
and the passive subject who in some manner stands in need of these
brash persuasions. As I have argued elsewhere, this first scene, in
which Faustus fulfils the intention announced in his opening lines, of
level[ling] at the end of every Art (A: 34), also manages to suggest
that

he

is

simultaneously

moving

towards

another

externally

determined endthat of the Calvinist reprobate. 24 The language with

which he tempts himself is also, it would appear, the language of a
daemonic Other.
Faustuss

habitual,

his

characteristic

mode

of

speech

is

apostrophic self-address: Settle thy studies Faustus... (A: 31); Now

Faustus must thou needes be damnd... (A: 438); what art thou
Faustus but a man condemnd to die? (A: 1169); Accursed Faustus,
where is mercie now? (A: 1329); Ah Faustus, / Now hast thou but one
See my article Misreading Faustus Misreading: The Question of Context, The
Dalhousie Review 65.4 (Winter 1985-86), 511-33. In the following three paragraphs I
am combining material first sketched out in this article (p. 515), in History and the
Canon, 513-14, and in Right Eye and Left Heel: Ideological Origins of the Legend of
Faustus, Mosaic 22.2 (Spring 1989), 82.
24

28
bare hower to live, / And then thou must be damnd perpetually... (A:
1450-52). This mode of self-address is, very largely, what constitutes
his dramatic identityand it does so in terms of an introjection of
eschatological awareness, an increasingly powerful recognition of what
is in store for him. At the same time as they enact a split between a
perverse wilfulness and a strangely passive selfhood, his selfreflections also construct a trap of self-authenticating predication. The
despairing self-definitions of Faustus would cease to be true if he could
only cease from making them; but conversely, he could only cease
from making them if they were not trueor rather, if he were not
constituted as a subject by this very pattern of apostrophic selfaddress.
This rhetorical pattern is the precise equivalent of Grevilles
fatal mirror of transgression: the tormented daemonic self-image
which this internal mirror offers bears the faithless down to
desperation.25 Faustuss rhetoric, moreover, produces a kind of
vertigo: he is pulled towards eternal torment by terror and disgust, as
well as by delightby the seven deadly sins, as well as by Helen of
Troy. An eschatological awareness burns up through even his most
fevered attempt at forgetfulness: Helens sweet imbracings are to

25

I am quoting from the first ten lines of Caelica XCIX, in Greville, pp. 43-44:
Down in the depth of mine iniquity,
That ugly centre of infernal spirits
Where each sin feels her own deformity
In these peculiar torments she inherits,
Deprived of human graces and divine,
Even there appears this saving God of mine.
And in this fatal mirror of transgression
Shows man, as fruit of his degeneration,
The error's ugly infinite impression,
Which bears the faithless down to desperation....

29
extinguish cleane (A: 1352) the motions of penitence and despair
that have wracked him, but the very language of the escapist fantasy
which he constructs around her expresses through its inversion of
gender and of subjection his actual relation to this spirit: Brighter art
thou then flaming Jupiter, / when he appeard to haplesse Semele...
(A: 1372-73).
Another more powerful inversion may suggest that the subject
constructed in the first part of the play is, in its last scene, being taken
apart before our eyes. Faustus in his first soliloquy aspired to beget in
himself the powers of a god: A sound Magician is a mighty god: / Here
tire my braines to get a Deity (A: 92, B: 89). He is alluding to that
deification or rebirth which so interested Renaissance magi like Ficino,
Pico, and Agrippa. 26 But in his last speech, in what sounds like a kind of
prayer, he cries:
You starres that raignd at my nativitie,
whose influence hath alotted death and hel,
Now draw up Faustus like a foggy mist,
Into the intrailes of yon labring cloude,
That when you vomit foorth into the ayre,
My limbes may issue from your smoaky mouthes,
So that my soule may but ascend to heaven.... (A: 1474-79)
He is reduced to an abject attempt to surrender his bodily integrity in
a disgusting reversal of birth; having once aspired to rend the
cloudes (A: 89), he now begs for physical dissolution in their entrails.

On this subject, see my article Agrippas Dilemma: Hermetic Rebirth and the
Ambivalences of De vanitate and De occulta philosophia, Renaissance Quarterly 41
(1988), 614-53.
26

30

VII

I have suggested that Marlowes 1 and 2 Tamburlaine leave

contemporary audiences and readers no secure way of determining
whether our recoil from the protagonist is a response intended by the
dramatist or merely an effect of our historical distance from him.
Doctor Faustus presents an analogous problem: is this play, as Leo
Kirschbaum insisted, wholly conventional in its Christian values
and ... in no sense iconoclastic, or is it rather, as Jonathan Dollimore
argues, subversive and radically interrogative? 27
It would be most interesting to know, in the case of Tamburlaine,
what exactly were those fond and frivolous Jestures, digressing (and
in my poore opinion) far unmeet for the matter, which the publisher
Richard Jones excised from the text, lest they proove a great disgrace
to so honorable & stately a historie.... One might surmise that, like
the Calyphas episode in 2 Tamburlaine IV. i, these passages would
have undermined the totalitarian fantasy which the honourable and
stately text we possess seems, for the most part, to legitimize. (There
may, that is to say, be a connection between Joness apparent
approval of the Scythian Shepheard ... that became so great a
Conqueror, and so mightie a Monarque, and his distinction between
the matter of worth which contributed to this image of Tamburlaine

Leo Kirschbaum, ed., The Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Cleveland and New York:
Meridian Books, 1962), Introduction, p. 102; Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy,
pp. 109-19.
27

31
and the graced deformities whichat the very leastmust have
deflected the audiences attention in other directions.) 28
In the case of Doctor Faustus, however, such speculations are
unnecessary: an analysis of its textual history makes it possible to
understand both this plays subversive qualities and the manner in
which these were suppressed by early seventeenth-century revisers
and by mid-twentieth-century textual critics. To state the matter as
briefly as possible: Marlowes play reverses the crushingly homiletic
orientation of its principal source, The Historie of the damnable life,
and deserved death of Doctor John Faustus (c. 1592)not indeed by
glorifying Faustus, whose pretensions are undermined through a
sequence of mordant ironies, but rather by insistently implying that
his wilfulness has itself been willed by higher powers. 29 The intimate
manner in which the protagonists damnation is unfolded makes a
detached judgment of him difficult, and the absence of that moralistic
authorial condemnation which in the prose Historie and its German
original had masked the issue of predestination puts into question the
nature of the divine power whose interventions shape the action. 30
This play proved disturbing: the revision to which the text was
Works, ed. Tucker Brooke, p. 7. It is of course possible that the material Jones cut
was not part of what Marlowe wrote, but rather gags interpolated by the actors. But
even if this were so, it would remain the case that the plays which London audiences
knew in the late 1580s contained a comic counterweight to tyranny that is lacking in
the published text. Which, in this instance, would be the original text: the one
which audiences had seen acted, or the one restored by Richard Joness editorial
attentions? The arguments of Jerome McGann in A Critique of Modern Textual
Criticism Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983), ch. 3, are relevant here.
29 See Paul R. Sellin, The Hidden God: Reformation Awe in Renaissance English
Literature, in Robert S. Kinsman, ed., The Darker Vision of the Renaissance
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1974), pp. 147-96, esp. 177-86; Robert G. Hunter,
Shakespeare and the Mystery of God's Judgements (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press,
1976), pp. 39-66; Martha Tuck Rozett, The Doctrine of Election and the Emergence of
Elizabethan Tragedy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 209-46.
30 See my analysis of the Good Angels lines in Misreading, 520-21.
28

32
subjected in 1602 turned it back, with a massive injection of
grotesqueries and of moralistic commentary, towards the homiletic
shape of the Faustbooks; and either at that point or in 1606, after the
Act of Abuses outlawed blasphemy on stage, the theological harshness
of the play was blunted by further revisions. 31 Mid-twentieth-century
textual critics, however, led by Leo Kirschbaum and Sir Walter Greg,
and motivated more by their commitment to a distinctly twentiethcentury liberal Christianity than by the textual evidence, argued that
the resulting form of the play was very close to the Marlovian original
which was thus not so much a tragedy as an orthodox morality play,
a Renaissance Everyman.32
A properly contextualized reconstruction of the textual history of
Doctor Faustus can help to restore a sense of the continuities which
existalongside all the differencesbetween this play and 1 and 2
Tamburlaine. The most basic of these resides in the playwrights
apparent determination to controvert, to subvert, or at the very least
to expose the tyrannical workings of that divine sovereignty which was
so central a feature of the Calvinist orthodoxy of Elizabethan England.
This narrative is based upon the following considerations. We possess two distinct
substantive texts of the play, first printed in 1604 and 1616 respectively. The 1616
text incorporates the revisions for which the theatrical entrepreneur Henslowe paid
in 1602; see Fredson Bowers, Marlowes Doctor Faustus: The 1602 Additions,
Studies in Bibliography 26 (1973), 1-18; Constance Brown Kuriyama, Dr. Greg and
Doctor Faustus : The Supposed Originality of the 1616 Text, English Literary
Renaissance 5 (1975), 171-97; and my article Verbal Magic. When the revised text
became available, the actors presumably discarded the text they had previously
been using, which would thus have become available for printing: this would explain
the entry in the Stationers Register in 1602, and the edition of 1604. (Only a single
copy of this edition survives; there may have been an earlier edition of the same
text in 1602 or 1603.) The evidence for the ideological orientation of what are
probably further (post-1606) revisions is discussed in my edition of Doctor Faustus,
pp. xlv-lxix.
32 The work of Greg, in particular, is analyzed in the articles cited in note 31; see
also Michael J. Warren, Doctor Faustus: The Old Man and the Text, English Literary
Renaissance 11 (1981), 111-47.
31

33
Whatever we make of their political orientation, it is clear that 1 and 2
Tamburlaine put into circulation a radically anti-theistic discourse:
Come let us march against the powers of heaven,
And set black streamers in the firmament,
To signifie the slaughter of the Gods. (2 Tamb. V. iii, 444042)
T. S. Eliot described the remodelling of this virtual image in Faustuss
last soliloquy as a triumphant success33:
O Ile leape up to my God: who pulles me downe?
See see where Christs blood streames in the firmament,
One drop would save my soule, halfe a drop, ah my Christ,
Ah rend not my heart for naming of my Christ,
Yet wil I call on him, oh spare me Lucifer!
Where is it now? tis gone.... (A: 1462-67)
One wonders whether Eliot appreciated the extent to which this
agonized vision, and Doctor Faustus as a whole, challenges the kind of
religious orthodoxy for which he himself became a spokesman.
Another kind of continuity resides in the manner in which, in
Doctor Faustus as in Tamburlaine, Marlowe manipulates the reponses
of his audience. I take just one example: the concluding chorus, which
most critics have understood as imposing an orthodox closure upon
the play. But listen to these lines:
Cut is the branch that might have growne ful straight,
And burned is Apolloes Laurel bough,
That sometime grew within this learned man:
T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (3rd ed., 1951; rpt. London: Faber and Faber, 1976), p.
122.
33

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Faustus is gone, regard his hellish fall,
Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise,
Onely to wonder at unlawful things,
whose deepenesse doth intise such forward wits,
To practise more than heavenly power permits. (A: 1510-17)
The last four lines consist of two syntactically parallel clauses. What is
there here to prevent a first-time listener from attaching the second of
these clauses to the same grammatical subject as the first (to Faustus,
that is, rather than to things)? The result would be a momentary
misconstrual of the retrospectively available sense of this passage
which may seem scarcely possible to anyone who already knows the
text. But a listener who, on first acquaintance with this forked path,
takes the wrong choice in construing it and finds herself in a cul-desac, can only correct her error by recognizing that such forward wits
are not to be identified with the wise. To conflate the two, even
momentarily, is to find oneself stumbling between the two stances
which these lines emphatically separatebetween a dangerous
empathy, scarcely avoidable after Faustuss last speech, with one
forward wit, and the negation of that empathy in a complacent selfidentification as one of the wise. But the contagious possibility of such
a conflation is built into the syntax of these closing lines. As a
deliberate trap, one wonders, or an accident of syntax?
To conclude my own text, I repeat Faustuss question: What
meanes this shew? It means, mon semblable, hypocrite auditeur, that
we are being manipulated by a master of dramatic spectacle and
poetic imagery. But to what extent we are being invited to challenge a
theological and political totalitarianism, and to what extent we are

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being manoeuvred into complicity with it, Marlowe leaves for us to
decide.