The Unbeing of the Overreacher: Proteanism and the Marlovian Hero

Author(s): Arthur Lindley

Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 84, No. 1 (Jan., 1989), pp. 1-17
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3731945
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JANUARY I989 VOL. 84 PART I

THE UNBEING OF THE OVERREACHER:

PROTEANISM AND THE MARLOVIAN HERO1

Students, we all grudgingly admit, are useful people, not least for the fact that they
have not quite learned not to ask naive questions or to have naive - unstructured,
'humanistic' - responses. When you teach them Marlowe, for example, they tend
to observe something that we specialists train ourselves not to observe: that his
characters are obnoxious to an astonishing degree and with astonishing frequency.
Nearly all of them - Theridamas as much as Tamburlaine, Mortimer as much as
Edward, Wagner as much as Faustus, Ithamore even more than Barabas
combine villainy and folly in equal and remarkableparts. Those who do not (Dido
and Zenocrate, for instance) are almost always in love with those who do. Even
Abigail loves her father, the sole sign that she actually belongs on Malta. Her death
in the arms of a lecherous friar seems designed, like so much in Marlowe, to leave us
poised between outrage and dismissive laughter. He is an extraordinarily discom-
forting writer.
I should like to start with this calculatedly naive response because it reminds us of
things commonly ignored or minimized in the critical literature. As anyone who has
addressed a Marlowe conference is liable to know, there is a remarkable (if slowly
declining) reluctance among specialists to acknowledge, for example, that Faustus is
an idiot and that the play relentlessly exposes his idiocy from line one onwards. The
sticking-point, of course, is that he is a 'tragic hero', but Marlowe nearly always uses
the word 'tragedy' provocatively, as when Machevill promises 'the tragedy of a
Jew IWho smiles to see how full his bags are cramm'd' (TheJew of Malta, Prologue,
11.30-3I).2 We need to retain a sense of the disorientation that such phrasing is
calculated to produce. At the same time, the naive response leads fairly directly to
issues that can be phrased in more respectable terms: why, for example, do these
plays and their protagonists so elaborately invite sympathy - soliloquy after
soliloquy, each one crammed with every conceivable rhetorical appeal - and so
violently discourage it - distancing irony piled upon distancing irony?A correlative
problem is the notorious difficulty of classifying the plays. If Faustus is a twit, what
then is Dr Faustus?One answer, of course, is slapstick tragedy, a term not always
treated with the seriousness it deserves.
A tragic plot, Marlowe knew as well as Hamlet, is ajoke with the safety catch off.
That is why Barabas's tragic fall is also a pratfall, the last of many he takes in the
course of the play. As actors know, there is a certain precise pitch at which you can
1 An earlierversion of this
paper was given at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. My
thanks to T. P. Matheson and Philip Brockbank. I should also acknowledge general debts to Harry
Levin's The Overreacher: A Studyof Christopher Marlowe(Cambridge, Massachusetts, I952) and Judith
Weil, Christopher Marlowe.Merlin'sProphet(Cambridge, 1977) whose influence on my reading of the plays
is so pervasive that I have not tried to acknowledge it in specific footnotes.
2 Line references to the
plays are to Christopher Marlowe, The CompletePlays, edited by J. B. Steane
(Harmondsworth, 1969). I have used the Penguin edition because it is the one most widely available and
frequently used. Since my argument does not depend on Steane's ordering of the plays or on his attempts
to meld the A and B texts of Dr Faustus,I have preferrednot to send readers to the library in search of
Brooke, Greg, and others. That the phrase 'the tragedy of a Jew' might have been regarded as a
'contradiction in terms' by an Elizabethan audience is suggested by Malcolm Kelsall, Christopher Marlowe
(Leiden, I981), p. I35.

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2 andtheMarlovianHero
Proteanism

play Tamburlaine straight. One decibel above or below and you topple into farce.
Indeed, you often seem directed to do so, as when he concludes thirty lines of
much-anthologized praise for Zenocrate by turning to an incredulous aide,
shrugging, and saying, 'Techelles, women must be flattered' (Tamburlaine, PartI,
2.I07); only, apparently, to reassert his love in the next line.3 We are, of course,
looking at a comic pattern. We all secretly know that the parts in Faustus's
pre-contract arguments with Mephostophilis should be played by Laurel and
Hardy, respectively. These manic-depressive swings-and-roundabouts - the
shortest of which is 'my girl! my gold!' - are in fact not only a favoured Marlovian
device but small models of how the plays themselves work: inflation of the
protagonist followed by immediate deflation followed by immediate reflation. This
is not only the essential Marlovian rhythm of action; it is the rhythm of Waitingfor
Godot.'We have kept our appointment', says Vladimir. 'How many can boast as
much?' 'Billions', replies Estragon. The parallel, I should like to suggest, is not
coincidental, but it reflects a fundamental similarity of vision and purpose.4
This pattern of rapidly-alternatingseduction and repulsion of the audience can be
explained in a number of ways. Constance Kuriyama, for example, explains it
psychologically in terms of the fundamental conflicts of an unresolved, ambivalent,
homosexual author whose protagonists act out an obsessive pattern of extravagant
adolescent rebellion and retributive parental humiliation.5 This reading has the
unfortunate side-effect of turning Ferneze into Barabas's father, to the dismay of
both parties. More important, it subordinates a conscious perception of the external
world to an unconscious internal drive. I want to offer a less Freudian, possibly less
contentious version, one which begins with the fact that each of Marlowe's 'heroes'
is based on a well-established, immediately recognizable stock type of villainy: the
Jew, the Machiavell, the pagan tyrant descended from Herod of the mysteries, the
diabolical conjurer, the homosexual, the misruler, or of course the academic. Even
Dido has her more than tangential relation to the Temptress and Aeneas carries
remnants of his medieval reputation as one of the types of the Betrayer. As most
readers will have noted, the protagonists of the mature plays tend to combine at least
two stock types of villainy, even while the plays subvert our moral responses to these
types. If Tamburlaine is Herod, he is also Miles Gloriosus. In the simplest instance,
'Barabas' is juxtaposed not with Christ but with Ferneze. The villainy is there, but
the evaluative context has been removed.
As may already be clear, I view Marlowe as a grand obsessive, continually
circling the same set of related problems. These can be, and have been, described in
a variety of ways: as problems of unresolved (Edipal rebellion (Kuriyama), as
conflicts between imagination and reality (Altman), or even as a struggle between
Renaissance self-assertion and Christian submission (Ellis-Fermor and many
others).6 I would call them The Perils of Protean Personality. Under whatever label,
3Joel B. Altman, The TudorPlay of Mind (Berkeley, California, I978), p. 327, thinks that the 'she'
Tamburlaine really loves is his sword, a suggestion I might be tempted to use were I directing the play. I
find Altman's general discussion of invention v. reality in Marlowe (pp. 32 I-88) one of the best available.
4 This constant intrusion of the absurd on the would-be sublime is what causes Wilbur Sanders to

complain about 'Marlowe's fitful muse' in TheDramatistandtheReceived Idea:Studiesin thePlaysof Marlowe

and Shakespeare(Cambridge, 1968), p. 205. Not even Sanders, however, suggests that Marlowe's muse
deserted him between'my girl' and 'my gold', so there must be an explanation apart from fitfulness.
5 Constance B. Kuriyama, Hammeror Anvil: Psychological Patternsin ChristopherMarlowe'sPlays (New
Brunswick, NewJersey, I980).
6 See Una Ellis-Fermor, Christopher Marlowe(London, I927), pp. 6I-87.

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 ARTHUR LINDLEY 3
they remain constants: the frustrated aspirations made explicit in Faustus are
implicit in Tamburlaine, PartI or in Dido andAeneas.
Thus, in what follows, I have deliberately suppressed chronology. Interpretations
that depend on finding a radical change somewhere in Marlowe's career - a
religious conversion, for instance - seem to me a matter of finding a story in the
carpet where there is only a figure. Moreover, they depend on our pretending to
know what we do not know: the order of composition of the plays. We do not know,
for example, whether Tamburlaine, Part II was composed as a hasty sequel after the
success of Part I or whether Marlowe wrote the two together and sprang the second
one on his audience after they had fallen for the first. The latter possibility strikes me
as an eminently Marlovian device, but I cannot prove that it took place. Therefore, I
let it pass. In the same way, I prefer not to choose between Greg's order and
Steane's, on the grounds that both are necessarily conjectural.7
I have chosen instead to view the pattern as one would the figures in a carpet,
walking slowly around them, from right to left and then from left to right. If this
involves some element of repetition, of viewing the same conformationfrom different
angles, I can only plead that that is dictated by the product. The problem of creating
a self is inseparable from the creating of a world: neither Faustus nor Tamburlaine
(nor Edward, for that matter) can do one without doing the other. Defining the
nature of one's desires is inseparable from verifying the existence of a reality external
to the self. In what follows, then, I talk first about the conflicting traditions which
Marlowe combines in unstable synthesis; then about the prevalence of Proteanism
as a (the?) figure of evil in the English Renaissance; about the subversion of heroic
rhetoric in Marlowe; about the subversion of the heroic quest; and finally about the
quasi-absurdity of Marlowe's world. These topics necessarily overlap: problems of
personality with the rhetoric that expresses it with the purposes that define it. That,
however, is a linkage that Marlowe imposes. His vision, for all its focus on
contradictions, is remarkablyof a piece.
It is a fundamental and characteristic Marlovian tactic, for example, to
foreground simultaneously two opposing tendencies in a traditional Christian view
of evil: the sense of evil as tragic potency - the self undoing the self- and the sense
of it as comic impotency. This combination gives us Faustus, universal genius and
abject fool; Barabas, persecuted victim and monster; Tamburlaine, scourge of God
and victim of a fever. That traditional concept is the doctrine of privative evil, which
has its first Christian formulation by Origen in the late third century, is passed on to
St Augustine in the Confessions, and is reformulated, still as official doctrine, in the
Summaof Aquinas nearly a millennium later. It defines evil as literally non-being:
malumestnonens,an absence or lack of essence, soul.8 Evil has no reality;it is precisely
the diminution or deprivation of reality; thus, 'privative' evil. If God is defined as
ultimate or absolute being as well as absolute good, then by definition everything
antithetical to God must be unreal. 'I am what I am', says God. 'I am not what I
am', says Iago. If He is, then it is not. Thus, any commitment to the physical world,
to the flesh and/or the devil, is a commitment to the unreal, the illusory surface of
7 I
refer,of course,to Greg'slate dating of Dr Faustusin his parallel-texteditionof I950, and to
J. B. Steane'sconjecturalreordering
of theplays(withFaustus in themiddleof thecanon)in hisMarlowe:
A CriticalStudy(Cambridge,1964).
8 For a convenientsummaryof the historyof the doctrineand its tendencyto issue in comedy,see
CharlotteSpivack,TheComedy of EvilonShakespeare's
Stage(Rutherford,NewJersey,I978), especially
Chapters i and 2.

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4 Proteanism
andtheMarlovianHero

things, the world of fortune and transience. Faustus's desire to 'be on earth as God is
in the heavens', to reign over the elements, is the desire to be a lord of unreality,
closely comparable to Volpone's wilful substitution of gold for God. In both cases,
evil is folly. Volpone's materialism, like Iago's malice, is not merely a perversion but
the expression of a fundamental lack: an absence of spirit which expresses itself as a
lack of imagination (paradoxically combined with a superabundance of fantasy).
Like his uncle Barabas, Volpone can imagine endless permutations of himself (and
those most like himself, his victims), while being totally unable to imagine, or
'realize' in the Lawrentian sense, Celia. Volpone, like Barabas, is both prolifically
and aggressively thereand metaphysically absent at the same time. That is why his
vitality expresses itself in playing dead. That is why the plot turns on his ability to
declare himself legally non-existent. Similarly, Aquinas in the SummaTheologica
(Q. 48, art. 3) compares the absence of good to the absence of sight. Abigail learns to
'see the difference of things' (III.3.68); her father cannot.
Evil thus conceived exists both negatively and paradoxically. It is real phenomen-
ally in the sense of having effects, while being unreal essentially. If you prick it, it will
bleed. But it is matter turned away from life, being in motion toward non-being,
unconsciousness, mere materiality. Evil is thus a negative principle, something
which in its operations is very close to a death wish. One of the curiosities of this
doctrine is that it treats evil less as a moral than as a metaphysical matter. Evil is a
rejection by the soul of God conceived as a principle of reality. There is no absolute
necessity for any evil acts to follow from the refusal, since the essence of the malumis
in the turning away, in the preference for dark over light, shadow over substance.
Privative evil is first and last a crime of the self against the self, whatever external
actions may be by-products of that crime. Evil is primarily reflexive:Faustus can do
nothing to others remotely comparable to what he does to himself. Latent in the
doctrine, available for Marlowe's subversive exploitation, is a kind of de-
moralization of evil: the essence of the crime is internalized and separated from
external consequences.
Evil, then, becomes a form of suicide. In terms of privative evil denial of self and
denial of God are essentially the same act, but only the self can be the victim of that
act, one which derealizes both it and its world. When Faustus chooses to be a spirit
and not a man he acquires protean powers only at the cost of trapping himself in a
world of shadows. Privative evil is necessarily protean because it lacks essence. It can
exist only through appearances and those appearances are bound to no essential
core. Thus, privative evil is almost always comic: its acts rebound upon itself while,
paradoxically, there is no self there to be hurt. The Vice figure, the most famous
manifestation of privative evil, is polymorphous not only in his mimicry of human
fellowship and of his would-be victim but also in his degenerate, blurred form
(human overlaid with animal elements: tail, horns, hooves), and in his ontologically
ambiguous status. Is he external and 'real' or internal and 'subjective'? Like
Faustus, he is a spirit who only looks like a man. Like Faustus, the Vice represents
man in the process of derealizing himself, in an intermediate state between being
and non-being.
At the same time, the Vice embodies in his protean action a perception essential to
the behaviour of Marlowe's protagonists: that mimicry is a form of aggression.
When I play before you, I play upon you. My aim - whether I am Gaveston
working on Edward or Faustus working his various audiences- is to charm, to

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 ARTHUR LINDLEY 5

deceive, to ravish; in short, to take you over while appearing to serve you. The power
of protean, privative evil is its ability to embody imagination and desire. Fascinated
by the 'lovely boy in Dian's shape' (EdwardII, I.I.61), Edward will become the
Actaeon he is to watch in Gaveston's imaginary show. Acting is thus both hostile
and parasitic, the generation of shadows not only of fact but of the fantasies of others.
(Alexander and his paramour, typically, embody both historical fact and the
Emperor's fantasy.) Privative evil is necessarily protean; protean evil - that focal
figure of evil from Barabas to lago to Milton's Satan to Richardson's Lovelace -
manifests itself through acting.9 Small wonder that 'to entertain', as Gaveston
means to do with Edward or Barabas with Calymath, should have so sinister a
meaning in Marlowe's plays. Small wonder that the plays themselves should so
explicitly set out to play upon and puzzle their audiences.
Playing upon an audience in order to prey upon it is, of course, the Vice's
particular, ambiguous function. From the firecrackerson up, the Vice offersboth his
victims and the spectators threat disguised as entertainment. Like the Marlovian
protagonist, he entertains through mimicry to a sinister purpose. Lacking essential
reality, he must manifest himself phenomenally through performance, playing for
example the friendly adviser, as Mephostophilis disguises himself as a friar,
Faustus's confessor; and as Milton's Satan manifests himself to Eve by playing a
serpent who in turn plays a courtly lover. When Faustus asks the meaning of
Mephostophilis's first show, the devil replies, 'Nothing ... but to delight thy mind'
(Dr Faustus,1.5.83). It is, in the most literal sense, a distraction, drawing Faustus
away from his real concerns towards shadows of wealth. What LuciferoffersEve, by
the same token, are dreams, shadows of power and gratification, images of her
desire, which draw her away from the real power and satisfaction she already has.
The Vice literally has nothing to offer, but that nothing is the embodiment of
appetite and emptiness: 'Nought' is the name of one of the devils in Mankind.To be
evil, in a trope derived from this tradition, is to be 'naughty', a thing of nothing.
Fundamentally, the Vice appears to his human victim as evil imitating good, the
subhuman imitating the human, the unreal the real. Since his power to create
anything is as unreal as that of Mephostophilis, he appears to be powerful and is
revealed to be impotent (but only after impressing with the reality of his illusory
power). Titivillus enters roaring and scattering fireworks,only to depart beaten and
humiliated. The Vice is comic to the extent that he is vain and impotent, a painted
devil, but he is comic also because, lacking humanity, he is immune to genuine
suffering. (It is a characteristic Marlovian switch to make the pain of Mephosto-
philis the most real thing in Dr Faustus.)An exposer of human weakness who is
ultimately exposed himself, the Vice operates as both eironand bomolochos. At the
same time, his protean role-playing, his prankishness,his habit of establishing ironic
rapport with his audience at the expense of a victim who none the less represents
them, and his lack of explainable motive- the Vice's 'motive' for viciousness is, of
course, his name - all contribute to the characteristically English manifestation of
the Machiavel. The situation of the audience of the moralities, asked to identify with
both victim and practiser while detaching itself from both, is very close to the
situation Marlowe constructs for his audience. English Machiavels are experts in
self-defeat, bomolochoiwho imagine themselves to be eirons.D'Amville brains himself
9 See
my essay, 'Lovelace and the Self-Dramatizing Heroes of the Restoration', in The EnglishHero,
i66o-80oo, edited by Robert Folkenflik (London, 1982), pp. 195-204.

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6 andtheMarlovianHero
Proteanism
with his own axe, Barabas cooks in his own pot. This same combination of qualities
is readily apparent in Gaveston and in the later career of Mortimer as well as in
Kyd's Lorenzo and the most resolutely opaque, 'unmotivated' of Shakespearian
villains, Edmund and Iago. The glee with which Edmund tosses us the red herring of
his bastardy in lieu of a motive, Lady Macbeth's discarding of her sexual identity,
the final and impenetrable silences of Iago and Goneril, all reflect the tradition of
privative evil. They manifest the presence, that is to say, of absence, as does the
shiftiness of motive, that habit of reversing what had appeared to be fundamental
biases of character which is apparent, for example, in virtually all the characters of
EdwardII: in Gaveston, in Kent, or in Isabella, the devoted victim who turns
abruptly into the blood-stained adulteress.
The radical instability of such characters has recently been seized upon by both
Jonathan Dollimore and Simon Shepherd as evidence of Marlowe's proto-Marxian
disbelief in humanist conceptions of a stable, essential soul.10 It might be wiser,
however, to trace the quality backwards to an inherited tradition that defines evil in
terms of role-playing and disguise, in which spiritual essence is not so much an
illusion as something which can be abrogated or renounced. The devil is, after all,
the father of lies and thus, naturally enough, of theatre.
However, Marlowe also inherits an alternative tradition, one which helps to
account for his habitual subversive manipulation of the types of stock villainy. In
Pico della Mirandola's famous oration De hominisdignitateman's protean nature, far
from being a sign of his sinfulness, is instead a kind of mixed glory. In the Oration,
God tells Adam that 'constrainedby no limits, in accordance with thine own free will
... thou shalt ordain for thyself the limits ofthy nature. Thou shalt have the power to
degenerate into the lower forms of life .... Thou shalt have the power, out of thy
soul's judgement, to be reborn into higher forms, which are divine'.11 Man in this
definition is radically self-determined, equally capable of rutting like a beast or
reasoning like an angel. The human essence expresses its divinity in its fluidity, in
process. Man alone is outside the stable hierarchy of creation: a 'fourth circle',
outside but partaking of the vegetable, animal, and spiritual worlds. Man is not
merely multiplex, as Aquinas argued, but protean: a congeries of potential selves
directed by a will radically free to select its own form or forms in the process Stephen
Greenblatt has called 'Renaissance self-fashioning', Pico's version is, in short, the
protean Faustus we are told of at the beginning of the play - now physician, now
legalist, now demigod, now fool - but without the presumption of guilt. 'Who',
adds Pico, 'would not admire this chameleon?'12
It is equally possible to respond to formlessness as void, emptiness, and evil or as
capacity, fullness, and potential good. In fact, it is possible to respond to it in both
ways at once. Pico does it in the Oration; Hamlet does it all the time, most notably in
'what a piece of work is man', where the two responses are linked, Marlowe-fashion,
by a single 'but'. This ambivalence is one of the most pervasive in major Elizabethan
10See
Jonathan Dollimore, RadicalTragedy:Religion,IdeologyandPowerin theDramaof Shakespeare andhis
Contemporaries (Brighton, I984), especially Chapter 6, pp. o19-I9; Simon Shepherd, Marloweand the
Politicsof ElizabethanTheatre(Brighton, 1986), especially Chapter 3, pp. 72-109.
11Elizabeth Forbes's translation, in The Renaissance Philosophyof Man, edited by Ernest Cassiter and
others (Chicago, I948), p. 225.
12
Stephen Greenblatt quotes Philibert de Vienne's ThePhilosopher of theCourt( 547) in praise of Protean
man's ability to 'change and transform himself' (RenaissanceSelf-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare
(Chicago, i980), p. I64).

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 ARTHUR LINDLEY 7
writing. For Donne in the SongsandSonnets,man's (or more to the point woman's)
inconstancy is virtually the definition of sinfulness; even in the HolySonnetsthe most
terrifying of psychological states is the paralysed fixity of the sinful soul unable to
transform itself. To impose a radical, Marlovian simplification on material more
properly treated at book length by John Carey, one could say that for Donne (and
Marlowe) protean fluidity is what gets you damned, but inescapable fixity is the
punishment for being damned. Faustus, that most Marlovian of Marlovian
protagonists, displays this very doubleness: the apparent freedom of the man who
has 'legally' transformed himself into a spirit, and the unavoidable confinement of
slavery and despair. Seemingly at the other pole, Tamburlaine maintains his
identity by the maniacal pursuit of a single self-image to the exclusion of all
temptations to become human. While he does so, however, the terms that define that
self-image dissolve into ambiguity. In what sense is he the 'scourge of' (for?
against?) what god (Jove? Allah?Jehovah?)? The two protagonists are united, of
course, in the desire to make themselves lords of the elements, to create identity out
of a blind commitment to the illusory and insubstantial. The fools of unbeing, they
are the natural protagonists of slapstick tragedy.
Marlowe, I am suggesting, subverts his heroic characters in the act of creating
them. It is customary to talk of these Marlovian heroes in terms of their aspirations.
This has the effect of saying that their identities are fundamentally negative: each is
defined by that which he does not have. The Marlovian hero is a kind of subatomic
particle: energy moving swiftly enough to create the illusion of substantiality.
Faustus's aspirations - to godhead, immortality, untrammelled freedom - do not
merely reflect the qualities most lacking in himself;they are also the very opposites of
what he obtains in pursuit of them. Tamburlaine's enormous material power
coexists with his constant, obsessive sense of that ever-retreating power that lies
beyond it. In Part 11,he carries about with him the corpse of Zenocrate, the emblem
of his ultimate inability to control the physical world. The Guise speaks for them all:
'That like I best that flies beyond my reach' (The Massacreat Paris, 1.2.42).
Tamburlaine keeps discovering, always to his outrage, that to be 'the scourge of god'
is merely to be the instrument of something larger than yourself. It humiliates you
even as it glorifies you. When he is an outlaw, he dreams of being a king, when king,
of being an emperor; when emperor, of being a god. In his dying moments he is
preoccupied not only with storming the heavens but, more practically, with that
map which shows, more clearly and finally than anything else, what he has not
conquered. 'Give me a map; then let me see how much I Is left... IThat these, my
boys, may finish all my wants' (Tamburlaine, PartII, v.3. I24-26). I am that I lack.
The Marlovian hero tries to absorb the substantial world, the not-I. He wants,
like Tamburlaine, to reduce it to a map with his name on it. If he can incorporate it
into his imaginative order, impose his will upon it, he will have acquired a
substantial reality; he will have made himself tangible. (Thus the snake of
imagination swallows the pig of fact.) He will be 'on earth as Jove is in the heavens'.
The literal-mindedness of Tamburlaine and Faustus, their obsession with grapes
and crowns and gold, is a function of their need to make fantasy materially real so
that others must see and acknowledge it. They are engaged in a continuous creation
of emblems that will force others to endorse the reality of what the emblems imply (a
quintessentially literary activity, of course). One gains identity by affirmation.This
is to say that Tamburlaine does not exist without an audience, but by the same token

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8 Proteanism
andtheMarlovianHero
he does not exist with an audience. The theatrical self-consciousness of his
performance (costuming himself and setting his own stage to meet Theridamas;
serving constantly as his own presenter; arranging his power in tableaux) is all a
constant reminder of the actor within the role. The very reflexiveness of the
presentation reminds us of the unreality of what is being asserted as real. This, the
play keeps saying, is Alleyn imitating Tamburlaine, just as a famous advertising
slogan once told us that 'Dustin Hoffman is Tootsie', a similar example of
simultaneous affirmationand denial of the actor's presence. Even more than Alleyn,
it is the Scythian shepherd who imitates 'Tamburlaine'. Who/what is Tamburlaine?
A part playing a part: an illusion pursuing an illusion by means of illusion. Such a
being clearly needs help. Thus Tamburlaine's rule becomes a perpetual process of
demonstration and reaffirmation:see, I'm divine (aren't I driving this chariot pulled
by kings?); yes, you're divine (aren't you driving this chariot?) and so on.
Tamburlaine needs Theridamas to tell him he is there, just as he needs to kill in
order to know he is alive. In effect, he needs to have every speech countersigned by
witnesses. Early in Part ii he reminds his sons that he is 'the scourge and terrorof the
world'; Amyras and Celebinus solemnly announce that they, too, want to be 'the
scourge and terror of the world'. 'Be all a scourge and terror of the world', their
father replies, 'Or else you are not sons of Tamburlaine' (I. 4.58-64). Repeat the
magic formula enough times and it will come true. The moment Calyphas refuses to
repeat the formula, he induces murderous panic focused obsessively on the fear that
Calyphas is 'not my son' (Iv.I.9I). If your son is not your son, then your essence is
not your essence (and your wife may not be your wife). Everything begins to slip
back into otherness.
In this curiously infantile system, other people become accessories or reflections of
the self. Lacking essential identity, the heroic self continually seeks phenomenal
manifestations, as Tamburlaine tries to manifest himself through endless cere-
monial. If all these people are followers, there must be a leader. Every day is
coronation day (lest we forget, lest we forget). In other words, Tamburlaine is his
army, as Faustus is his shows, Barabas his wealth (his 'substance', as in 1.2.89), and
Edward his crown. 'But what arekings when regiment is gone I But perfect shadows
on a sunshine day?' (EdwardII, v. .26-27 (my italics)). 'Perfect' here carries its
literal sense of 'complete'; perfect shadows amount to a complete absence or
privation. A moment later, Edward is playing with giving away the crown and in
v.5.92-93 he is asking: 'Where is my crown? I Gone, gone! And do I remain alive?'
The answer, to be given in a moment, is 'No'. Without the symbol how shall we find
the thing symbolized? Like evil in the Thomistic formulation, you are real
phenomenally - you have effects - but you are not (or conceive yourself as not
being) real essentially. You may exercise Pico's freedom to ascend or descend the
hierarchy of forms, but, as Faustus finds, the more richly your forms proliferate, the
more starved becomes the will that directs them, the harder it becomes to find the
soul within the show. Freedom is conceived as exhilarating (each act a ravishment, a
little death), as illusory to the extent that apparently free will is governed by
obsession, and finally as annihilating: an investment of life in the acquisition of dead
matter. My crown is real, Edward assumes, but I am not; it confers reality on me;it
confers life, as gold seems to for Volpone.
As Marlowe subverts the reality of his heroes, he does something very similar to
their apparent goals. The Marlovian protagonist continually reinvents the tangible

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 ARTHUR LINDLEY 9
object of his aspiration, without necessarily realizing that he is doing so. 'Nature', as
we all know,
that fram'd us of four elements
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.
(Tamburlaine,Part II, 1. 7. i 8).

The tendency in trying to come to terms with this is to note the thunderingly positive
tone and summary sweep of the speech and to assume that it must therefore be an
authoritative and final statement of what Tamburlaine is. But, of course, everything
he says is thunderingly positive, and this speech, also of course, is a tissue offallacies.
Each element in nature, according to the Tamburlaine version, wars against every
other element. The appearance of naturanaturansis only an illusion created by a
stalemate in the strife of naturanaturata.This war of all against all is presented as a
permanent condition expressed by present participles like 'climbing' and 'moving',
a matter of struggle without closure, strife as its own reward, and thus as something
radically different from Tamburlaine's own ostensibly purposive struggle. We are
'to wear ourselves and never rest I Until we reachthe ripest fruit'. Not atypically, he
approaches a logical conclusion only to swerve away in the next line. If this version
of the state of nature teaches us anything, it is 'to war', not to seek a specific goal and
then stop.
The entire argument is based on a fallacy of personification which becomes a
fallacy of circularity: I behave like the elements because they behave like me. If we
for a moment ignore the fallacy, we are led to a still less tenable position. As
Tamburlaine's own death from an overdose of choler will prove, the war of the
elements must be a perpetual stalemate, otherwise nature destroys itself. What do
the elements strive for? A victory that is indistinguishable from death. They strive
for their own defeat.
Thus, far from subverting Elizabethan orthodoxy, as Shepherd and Dollimore
might wish, the illogic of the speech leads directly back to it. The movement of the
'restless spheres', as Faustus finds out, is in fact regulated and in the long run stable.
It is ordered, fixed movement, not rebellious energy. Again, it suggests the opposite
of the lesson Tamburlaine tries to draw. And the attainment of a crown, as he should
know, having just overthrown Mycetes and Cosroe, brings nothing like rest.
Tamburlaine's own kingship is a continual war of aggression-as-defence;even his
'truce with all the world' is an interval filled with the campaigns of his lieutenants.
At this moment, Tamburlaine himself, having attained his first crown, has no
intention of rest. He is instead psyching up the troops for the next campaign. That,
more than disinterested metaphysical speculation, is what the speech is really about.
Like the goals of Marlowe's other heroes, in fact, 'the sweet fruition of an earthly
crown' is a nonce symbol. It provides the illusion of an attainable end, the usual false

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IO Proteanism
andtheMarlovianHero
comfort of the obsessive. It is the warrior'sversion of the compulsive gambler's big
win that will allow him to quit. In very short order, crowns will become so devalued
that they can be distributed as party favours. It tells us something about the value of
an earthly crown that we cannot be sure whether Tamburlaine's 'course of crowns'
are real or pastry. Typically of Marlowe's heroes, he confuses symbol and substance,
just as Mycetes does when he tries to preserve his kingship by hiding his crown. Like
Faustus, Tamburlaine tries to place heavenly satisfaction, 'perfect bliss and sole
felicity', in an earthly, material, easily-transferable object, his own version of
'infinite riches in a little room'. The Marlovian protagonist obsessively seeks the
infinite in the finite, the absolute through the relative. Thus, as each nonce symbol is
attained, it turns out not to be the real thing and is devalued and discarded as the
imagination reinvents its object. The Helen who is to make Faustus immortal with a
kiss is forgotten entirely once he/she/it has been enjoyed, and is never mentioned
again. As Stephen Greenblatt puts it, the 'one critical link' between Marlowe's
protagonists is that 'they are using up experience' (p. I98). The tangible goals
experience can provide are valuable because they stand for something beyond
themselves, but contemptible and disposable because they cannot be that some-
thing. The true end, the thing these nonce symbols are meant to stand for, remains
both ineffable and unattainable, beyond not merely the treacheriesof possession but
those of expression: 'one grace, one wonder ... | Which into words no virtue can
digest' (Tamburlaine, PartI, v.2.I09-I). You can, briefly, have Zenocrate; you can
not have Beauty. When you have the (mere) woman, you alternate between deifying
her and regarding her as a source of effeminate pollution: the 'amorous' looks which
remind you that your sons are not exclusively yours (Tamburlaine, PartII, 1.4.2 I).
The analogue to Tamburlaine's subtly nebulous quest is Barabas's pursuit of
'vengeance': another ever-expanding, ever-eluding, imaginary goal.13 If a convent
full of nuns is not enough, how many would be? Both Tamburlaine and Barabas
achieve the appearance of sanity by substituting a finite object for an infinite:
'vengeance', a temporal misnomer for an eternal negative, a literally unquenchable
hostility that turns eventually to the destruction of one's own progeny. Where
Shakespearian villains (Goneril, Regan, Iago, Macbeth) seem to have been born
sterile, Marlovian heroes achieve sterility through the process of self-assertion.
If the reality of the goal is subverted, so is the quest for it. Typically, the temporal
goal of the Marlovian hero, while seeming to lead to the essential one, actually leads
away from it. Every step Edward tries to take towards freedom and sanctuary with
Gaveston leads towards prison and death. Every step Faustus takes towards
freedom and power is a further confinement, as the pursuit of absolute being leads
him to absolute destruction. Tamburlaine's own quest becomes a similarly rigid
confinement disguised as freedom. Trapped in the role of a man playing
'Tamburlaine', he cannot spare the Virgins of Damascus because the tents are now
black. If he makes a free choice, he violates the order of his ritual and thus destroys
the construct of his own identity. At the same time, he cannot stop fighting, because
his enemies will not stop 'managing arms against him'. Every victory creates new
enemies, yielding a war that is ultimately as inconclusive as that between the
elements. What first appears to be a barely qualified power fantasy turns out to be
13
Greenblatt, p. 217: 'The objects of desire, at first so clearly defined, so avidly pursued, gradually lose
their sharp outlines and become more and more like mirages ... the will exists, but the object of the will is
little more than an illusion.'

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 ARTHUR LINDLEY II

something close to actualized paranoia. As in the myth, Proteus can be trapped in a

form from which there is no escape. Not surprisingly, much of Tamburlaine's
rhetorical energy is devoted to foreclosing choice while seeming to assert it. If you are
sons of Tamburlaine, you mustbe 'the scourge and terrorof the world';otherwise you
must not exist. He does not choose to love Zenocrate. Given the fact of that love, he
devotes the famous soliloquy on beauty to disguising his enslavement as mastery,
reducing her from an unreachable muse to a glorified cheerleaderpaying the tribute
of her 'just applause' to his virtu.Given the domination of his nature by the element
of fire, he must assert simultaneously that his nature is the result of free choice and
that it is a natural inevitability. In the end, that element, chosen or not, destroys
him. The warring Nature that teaches 'us all to have aspiring minds' must in fact
virtually compel us to have them. If all nature is at war, how can we as objects of
nature be at peace? The intellectual problem is how to make that destructive
compulsion appear as freedom, even as the plays subvert the notion of freedom.
Clearly, every Marlowe play from Dido andAeneasto TheMassacreat Parisfocuses
on the self-destruction of its protagonist. Douglas Cole, in a widely-accepted
formulation, argues that tragedy in Marlowe is something personal to the
protagonists; 'it is not cataclysmic' and it is not primarily social.14But this implies a
moral distinction between hero and onlookers that the plays consistently obviate.
Heroic appetite is, after all, only appetite writ large. Theridamas admires kingship,
but he 'can live without it' (Tamburlaine, Part II, 1I.5.66). Charles the Emperor is
entranced with Faustus's shows, but only as a diversion (which is also how Aeneas is
entranced with Dido). The Scholars are awed by Helen, but, again, can live without
her. Where others accept more or less arbitrary limitations on their desires, the
protagonist does not, because the maintenance of desire is essential to his sense of
identity. He needs to have his cake and go hungry too. While the infinite degree of his
desire separates him from those around him, the kind of his desire links him to them.
He acts on their wish. Thus Marlowe at least partially subverts the apparent
difference between heroic and unheroic.
The correlative of this is that the Marlovian hero is both more and less
imaginative than his fellows. Like other fantasists he is remarkably attuned to the
worlds generated by his own mind while being remarkablyinsensitive to a world of
fact we are finally never allowed to think is unreal. Marlowe's is a world of rock, not a
world of dew. It does not yield, it does not vanish, and it does not respond. Except in
the minds of men, poetry makes nothing happen. Human reality can be reshaped to
the extent that those around you acquiesce in your fantasies. Callapine's army will
retreat at the mere sight ofTamburlaine, but Death will not. Indeed Death's action,
first retreating from Tamburlaine's glance and then sneaking back again (Tam-
burlaine,Part II, v.3.67-7I), mocks both the hero who imagines it and his human
enemies. Here and elsewhere, Marlowe insists on strict, literal, earthbound
limitations: twenty-four years is twenty-fouryears, to the minute, '. . . the clock will
strike, | The devil will come' (Dr Faustus,v.2.153-54). Death, we might say, is
regular as clockwork. The dying Faustus's eloquent attempt to talk Time into
stopping is the prototype of all Marlovian rhetorizing. Zenocrate's depressing
commonplaces come depressingly true:one doesgrow old, get sick, and die. She fares
'as other empresses' (Tamburlaine, PartII, II.4.42).
14 Marlowe(Princeton, NewJersey, 1962), p. 261.
SufferingandEvil in thePlaysof Christopher

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I2 andtheMarlovianHero
Proteanism
A process that necessarily accompanies the other subversions I have described in
each of the plays is the ritual destruction of poetry. While Tamburlaine talks (and
talks) Zenocrate dies. Repeatedly, the crucial lines are thuddingly, deflatingly literal
and prosaic: 'Ah, good my lord, be patient! She is dead', which is Theridamas's
response to Tamburlaine wounding the earth and threatening Jove (Tamburlaine,
Part II, II.4.II9). 'Nothing prevails', he adds helpfully. 'I think hell's a fable',
blusters Faustus, and we all know Mephostophilis's puncturing response. 'I view'd
your urine', says the Physician (Tamburlaine, PartII, v. 3.82) and proceeds to reduce
Tamburlaine's fiery spirit to the enflamed bowels from which it springs. Indeed, the
proleptic shadow of Swift's 'mechanical operation of the spirit' hangs over
Tamburlaine's entire career.
With remarkable consistency imaginative rhetoric is shown to be not a way of
penetrating reality but a way of evading or reshaping it. When Mephostophilis gives
Faustus the facts of cosmography, Faustus is comically outraged. 'These are
freshman's suppositions' (II.I.54-55). He innocently expects truth to be fantastic,
exotic: 'strange philosophy, . .. the secrets of all foreign kings' (. I.85-86). When
he asks for the secrets of nature (I.5) Mephostophilis hands him three textbooks
containing the sort of knowledge he hasjust renounced. At a minimum Tamburlaine
expects a bolt from the heavens; he gets a fever.
It cannot be said too strongly: the reality of Marlowe's world is prose. The lies
about it are in verse.15 You ask for colour, you get black-and-white. Poetic
imagination deceives precisely because it heightens and colours the facts, trans-
mutes them into myth; inflates the self; reshapes neutral events (the defeat of
Sigismund) into 'meaningful' patterns (the divine intervention Orcanes decides he
would like to believe in).16 The facts of Tamburlaine are that the cosmic revenge
tragedy demanded and predicted by character after character for ten acts never, in
any verifiable form, comes. Poeticjustice does not obtain, though Marlowe practices
upon us to make us think it does. Tamburlaine burns the Koran, Tamburlaine falls
sick and dies: post hoc, propterhoc. Then the Physician enters, talking of urine.
Typically, the Marlovian swing carries us towards a meaningful pattern, so that the
roundabout can carry us away from it. Slapstick tragedy operates at the expense of
its audience and their theocentric assumptions as well as the hero and his. (He is not
the only one subverted.) Here, unlike TheSpanishTragedy,there is no prologue in
hell; unlike TheRevenger's Tragedy,there is no monitory thunder. Tamburlaine's god,
unlike Antony's, is never heard to leave him because he has never been heard at all,
except in Tamburlaine's assertions.
The tongue, Marlowe constantly suggests, was given to man so that he could tell
lies with it. If language is power in Marlowe, it is primarily the power to deceive.
That is why 'poet' is another of his comic/sinister words. 'I must have wanton poets',
says Gaveston, to 'draw the pliant king which way I please' (EdwardII, I. .51,53).
The masque that Gaveston, a wanton poet himself, proceeds to conjure leads to the
destruction of Actaeon, Edward's own archetype, and Gaveston's bland comment
15Leo Kirschbaum discusses the 'dislocation between verbal
potency and accomplishment' in Tam-
burlaine(ThePlaysof Christopher Marlowe)(New York, I962), p. 48; see also Altman.
16When Orcanes attributes his PartII, 11.3.28), Gazellus
victory to 'justice of... Christ' (Tamburlaine,
replies that "Tis but the fortune of the wars . .. I Whose power is often prov'd a miracle' (11.31-32).
Orcanes decides to honour Christ andMahomet anyway! Like the semiotician-detective in TheNameof the
Rose,he finds the pattern his mind wants to find. The misreading of signs is, of course, a major subject of
Marlowe's plays.

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 ARTHUR LINDLEY '3
that 'such things as these best please his majesty' (1.7). 'Sweet speeches . . .
pleasing shows' (1.56) mask death as pastoral, warning as entertainment. Where
they present truth at all it is in a form that will not be read or accepted. Indeed,
Marlowe's plays can be seen as a virtual catalogue of the abuses of art: as deception
or distraction or narcotic, the enactment of privative evil's world of shadows.
Gaveston, Barabas, Faustus, even Tamburlaine, are examples of the showman as
Vice, playing upon himself while playing upon his various audiences.
The fundamental drive of his poet-heroes is to turn reality into a manipulable
fiction. For example, love in Marlowe is always involved with domination; it occurs
between master and 'slave' (Edward and Gaveston, Jupiter and Ganymede,
Faustus and Mephostophilis, Tamburlaine and his captive Zenocrate), but it
reverses the social domination. The master falls in love with slavery as well as with
the slave. Thus, finding himself abased by love for Zenocrate, Tamburlaine must
cast the relationship into a form more suitable to his fiction of himself. He does this,
in the great soliloquy on beauty (Tamburlaine, PartI, .2.72-I27), by drawing a firm
line between essential Beauty, which is heavenly, ineffable, and unreachable, and its
representatives on earth, who are not only reachable but disposable. He has, after
all, just had a hundred of them put to death. He can then conflate the two, beginning
at the point where the earthly Zenocrate gives 'instructions' to the heavenly Beauty
(1.83), and proceeding through the lines about poets, where Beauty is at once
transcendent and subsumed (it 'hover[s] in their restless heads' (1.108; my italics) ),
until he arrives at the point where beauty is reduced to passive and applauding
spectatorship at his glory (11. 15-I 9).
Simply put, the speech is not about Zenocrate or about Beauty; it is about
Tamburlaine, as what speech of his is not? Its function is to restore him to a position
of centrality in his own mind, to convert beauty from a source of pain to a source of
applause, and to declare his own virtue (not hers or the poets') 'the sum of glory'
(1. 126). I take the notorious grammatical confusion about 'conceiving and subduing
both' as an enactment of his confused effort to assert mastery over whatever in the
speech (beauty, thought, self, other) threatens to escape his control. He has, after all,
just admitted a kind of defeat, neatly transferredfrom himself to poets, whose brains
(not his own exactly) finally cannot 'digest' essential beauty into words. He can then
push that failure further away by reminding himself of 'the terror of [his] name'
(1. 113) - an assertion of the power of a word following upon an admission of the
failure of words - and going on to reassure himself that even stooping to love is
proof of his Jupiter-like divinity (11.121-25). At the point where he has finally
assured himself that submission (love) is really assertion (conquest), that he will
'march in cottages' (1. I24) as if he were sacking them, he can afford to turn his
attention to whether Bajazeth has been fed. What Tamburlaine does to his enemies
is nothing compared with what he does to logic.17
The misuses of rhetoric are, in a way, the subject of all three of Tamburlaine's
great set speeches about Zenocrate. The first (Tamburlaine, Part I, 1.2.82-105) is
undercut by the addition of'women must be flattered';the second ('what is beauty')
covers the massacre of the Virgins with a show of concern for that other virgin,
Zenocrate; the third (Tamburlaine, Part II, II.4.1-38) attempts to deny the reality of
her death, which follows hard upon it. In all three cases, the rhetoric creates its own
17Fora somewhatsimilar
analysisof the speechas Tamburlaine's
snatchingof rhetoricalvictoryfrom
emotionaldefeat,seeAltman,pp. 330-33.

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I4 Proteanism
andtheMarlovianHero

reality in opposition to what the scene shows. Tamburlaine escapes from the scene of
Zenocrate's death into a fantasy of her entrance into heaven, in a speech addressed
to no one on stage and thus clearly designed to comfort himself, not her. While he
gives orders to heaven, the skies remain as silent as ever. That heaven is a mishmash
of Christian and pagan, without internal consistency even as fantasy. The woman
deified is the boy actor about to 'die' before us. The seductive rhetoric draws us into
the fantasy while virtually every literal aspect of the stage picture, including
Tamburlaine's unpersuaded auditors, pushes us away. The hero cheers himself up
as nature goes about its own (deadly) business. As Faustus acknowledges, all the
Marlovian hero's frantic and poetic activity is, in effect, a remedy against despair
and suicide: 'And long ere this I should have done the deed, | Had not sweet pleasure
conquered deep despair' (11. .24-25). The reality of the Marlovian world is death.
Everything else, literally and figuratively, is distraction and thus subject to
subversion.
In the process of self-distraction, the Marlovian protagonist is liable to look
singularly foolish, as when Tamburlaine bellows challenges at his two surviving
sons and the little piping voices answer back. Being unwilling to accept the
limitations of the physical world, the hero is remarkablyprone to being tripped up
by what is obvious to everyone around him. Thus the Guise imagines himself as
Caesar without remembering the most cautionary fact about Caesar: he went to the
Forum. At the same time, since the hero's appetite is self-generating and since its
objects are inherently substitutes of about equal (non-)value, the hero is also apt to
resemble a child in a sweet shop, spying out a new obsessional object as fast as the
previous one is exhausted. Edward, who has believed that he cannot live without
Gaveston, replaces him with Spenser, hardly even pausing for the requisite anguish.
And surely no character, not even Fanny Hill, was ever ravished quite so often as
Faustus and by quite so little. As the Evil Angel has learned, you do not even need to
give him wealth; saying the word will suffice (as it does at 1.5.23-24).
Finally, Marlowe half-subverts the very passions which seem to be the most real
thing in his world. Quite simply, in terms of the world of fact and in terms of his
ability to focus on or sustain interest in other people, the Marlovian hero is
astonishingly and infantilely fickle. Famously, Tamburlaine reacts to Zenocrate's
death by swearing he cannot live without her, wrapping the body in gold,
massacring the usual victims, proclaiming (again) his eternal devotion, and passing
without a blink into a lecture on fortification. This is not to say that the grief is not
'there', but only that it has no duration. It is coterminous with the rhetorical
performance which seems, inevitably, to have created it. The impression is of
intensity without extent. But if passion for a particular object is radically
foreshortened, passion per se is radically extended. While one minion replaces
another, the desire for a minion remains constant. 'The God thou servest is thine
own appetite' (Dr Faustus,1.5. I ). Faustus's crucial formulation divorces appetite
from its objects, making it curiously self-sufficient and solipsistic. Like those other
servants Gaveston, Mephostophilis, and Cupid, it is actually a master. When
Ferneze asks the Basso what brings him to Malta, the Basso replies, 'the wind that
bloweth all the world besides, | Desire of gold' (TheJew of Malta, 111.5.3-4), a phrase
which turns 'all the world' into human dust. It makes all these greedy strivers oddly
passive, something 'blown' by an impersonal force. The desire does not belong to
you, you belong to the desire. It is a wind that bloweth where it listeth, anywhere and

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 ARTHUR LINDLEY I5
nowhere, and it blows all the world together: Jew, Christian, and Turk without
distinction.
The effect of each of these plays is to reduce what appear to be fundamental
distinctions to mere labels, arbitrarily distinguishing people whose behaviour is
fundamentally the same:Jews, Turks, and Christians in TheJew of Malta;legitimate
and illegitimate rulers in Tamburlaine;homosexual tyrant and heterosexual in
Edward II; 'heroic' and unheroic in all the plays. The furious obsession with
self-definition which afflicts nearly all Marlowe's characters- they are united, if by
nothing else, in their desire to be separate - coexists with structures which obviate
differences, much as WaitingforGodotobviates distinctions between travelling and
waiting. The more the characters proclaim their differences, the more they are the
same thing.
A similarly reductive confusion operates within each one. Faustus's own language
relentlessly reduces his most idealistic posturing to cupiditasand cupiditasitself to
brute physical appetite. His imagination feeds, 'gluts', 'surfeits' him. The language
of consumption pervades the play from 'how am I glutted with conceit of this'
(1.I.77) to the 'surfeit of deadly sin that hath damned both body and soul'
(v.2.39-40). Naturally, the appearance of the Seven Deadly Sins 'feeds my soul'
(II. . I 77) and Helen will 'glut the longing of my heart's desire' (v. .89). But even
this reduction is a metaphor for something else: the desire, which is the natural
correlative of privative evil, to fill up one's emptiness. The most significant point
about his power fantasies is not that they all reduce to a norm defined by the most
material element but that they are so hopelessly incoherent. Typically, fame,
freedom, silk, secrets, and tropical fruit all jumble together in shapeless reveries
which do not end, but are interrupted, as they are by Valdes and Cornelius in
Scene 2.
Anything will serve as long as it creates the illusion of commitment. Inconstant as
he is, Faustus clings to the idea of having made an unbreakable contract: 'Now,
Faustus, must thou needs be damned.... What boots it then to think on God or
heaven?' (1.5.I,3; that is, before he has signed the contract). Manifestly, while
instructing himself to despair, he takes comfort in despair, since it conveys not
merely identity but quasi-heroic identity, from the height of which he can instruct
Mephostophilis in 'manly fortitude' (I.3.85). While appearing to seek freedom and
expansion, the Marlovian protagonist in fact seeks limitation in a form he can
disguise as aggrandisement:in the roles of damned sinner or mechanically inflexible
conqueror, of malevolent 'Jew' or homosexual outcast. Each role leads to what
Kuriyama calls 'this peculiarly Marlovian theme of being imprisoned in a
personality bent toward self-destruction'(p. 134). Each character turns himself into
a caricature, a suicidal travesty of a free self.
Of course, Marlowe's heroes are remarkablyunheroic. The most basic enterprise
of each play is the deconstruction of the concept of heroism, revealing it as the
half-comic and half-pathetic expression of a desire for grandeur, uniqueness, and
meaning. His subject is the egoistic imagination at desperate play in an apparently
silent world. Tamburlaine creates gods and nature in his own image; Faustus
disguises his bondage and cowardice as freedom and heroism; Edward, a moment
before his death, reinvents his lost kingship in the chivalric image of running at tilt in
France for Isabella's sake, an image that momentarily expunges virtually every fact
of his present situation, from puddle water to cuckoldry. Barabas and the Guise

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16 Proteanism
andtheMarlovianHero
invest themselves with a myth of Machiavellian omnicompetence which fatally
obscures the dangers around them. The tragicomic death of each is a typically
savage Marlovian unmasking.
What is Marlovian 'heroism', then, but a capacity for believing one's own
propaganda, the better to impose it on others?The only thing defeated more often in
Marlowe than heroic aspiration is common sense. Theridamas and Zenocrate are
always capable of deflating Tamburlaine's fantasies, but never capable of shaking
off their own addiction to them. The more serenely mad you are, the more likely it is
that you will carry all others with you. Blindness is power. Intermittently and very
much against his will, Faustus sees more than Tamburlaine, sees something beyond,
above, inimical to his myth of an all-powerful self. (That is one reason why he has
fewer followers.) Similarly, the weakness but also the dignity of Edward is his final
ability to see, dimly, the difference between self and myth: 'what are kings when
regiment is gone . .' - in the process of denying his specious glory, he also denies
his own existence. The sun king redefines himself as a shadow king. The reality he
discovers is his own privation. After Dido, however, no Marlovian protagonist is
granted even the heroism of Hedda Gabler or Miss Julie: to act on the discovery of
one's own nullity.
A correlative of this process is that no Marlovian protagonist has any lasting effect
on the world. A minimum of historical awareness tells the audience of Tamburlaine
that his empire vanishes almost as soon as he stops talking about it. Faustus cancels
himself: 'cut is the bough that might have grown full straight' - he is a possibility
that did not take place. Barabas's fear that he 'may vanish o'er the earth in air I And
leave no memory' (I.2.270-7I) comes approximately true as Malta resumes the
ordinary course of its corruption under the Governor it started with. The anti-social
fabric closes neatly with the death of the outsider. Dido goes out in a bloodbath she
has not intended, the suicides of Anna and Iarbus mocking her claims to uniqueness
of suffering, while Aeneas floats toward his destiny. Edward is supplanted and
revenged by the son whose existence he has barely noticed. At best he has played his
role in the fisher-king story whose hero must be the new Edward who replaces him.
As he feared (v.I.48), he dies and his name lives on. The Guise's sole Caesarian
achievement is to activate his antagonist, Navarre. Each of them, like their ancestral
Vices, is unmasked and dismissed. Each is a kind of gap in the proceedings of
history, a burp at the cosmic feast.
Slapstick tragedy is, after all, the only kind a Vice can star in. It is in the nature of
privative evil that it registers primarily as folly. Eliot was, of course, right to respond
to TheJew of Maltaas savage farce and to perceive that it is farce played out in a waste
land.18A morality play seen from the point of view of the Vice must be an exercise in
foredoomed, absurd activity: a matter of throwingfirecrackersat a castle. In the case
of Faustus, it is a matter of ascending on your dragon to the ninth sphere only to find
that you have, at the cost of your soul, purchased a considerably expanded cage. As
the walls of that cage become visible, so does the absurdity of the creature strutting,
Chauntecleer-like, within it, imagining himself a potentate. A nutshell, no matter
how large, will not make you a king of infinite space. To be a ruler of the elements, as
Faustus imagines himself, is only a grander form of being a lord of much dirt. As
their purposes are progressively revealed to be delusory and frustrating, as self

18 T. S. Eliot, 'The Blank Verse of Marlowe', in TheSacredWood(London, 1920; reprinted 1960), p. 92.

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 ARTHUR LINDLEY 17

dissolves into permutations of unreality, the protagonists' habitual exhortations to

themselves to 'be resolute' begin to sound like Pozzo's cry of'Onward!'. Like him
they stagger toward St Sauveur, undeterred by blindness or the fact that their wealth
is a bag of sand.
NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SINGAPORE ARTHUR LINDLEY

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