The Muses' Darling
Tamburlaine
a play by Christopher Marlowe, adapted and directed by
Michael Kahn, produced by the Shakespeare Theatre Company at
the Harman Center for the Arts, Washington, D.C.,October 30,
2007–January 6, 2008
Edward II
a play by Christopher Marlowe, directed by Gale Edwards,
produced by the Shakespeare Theatre Company at the Harman
Center for the Arts, Washington, D.C.,October 27,
2007–January 6, 2008
1.
"Danger's the chiefest way to happiness."
—Guise, The Massacre of Paris
The most outrageous of the great English dramatic poets,
his brilliant theater career and life came to a violent end
at the age of twenty-nine. He left seven plays, among them
Tamburlaine the Great, Parts I and II, The Jew of
Malta, Doctor Faustus, and Edward II, five
poems, and extensive translations of Ovid and Lucan. Not a
single one of his works survives in manuscript, and only one
was published during his lifetime. Christopher Marlowe's
contribution to dramatic literature was understood early. He
gave English theater a new voice by bringing blank verse
with its speech rhythms to the popular stage. He introduced
a cast of exotic characters never previously seen: a
Scythian warrior who conquers half of Asia, a German scholar
who sells his soul to the Devil, a gay English king who
falls in love with one of his male courtiers, a Maltese Jew,
and an African queen, all of whom must have astounded the
spectators with their physical appearance and their foreign
ways. Shakespeare, who was two months younger, worked for
the same theater company, and knew both his plays and poems,
wrote his own great plays after Marlowe's death.
Marlowe was an enigmatic figure with a reputation as a
homosexual and an atheist that has long outlived him. The
evidence of his impiety comes from passages in his plays and
from oral reports that have him blaspheming that Saint John
the Evangelist was a bedfellow to Christ and that the
archangel Gabriel was a pimp for the Holy Ghost. And yet,
despite his notoriety, we have little reliable information
about his life. He was born on February 26, 1564, in
Canterbury, the ancient spiritual capital of England and a
place of pilgrimage to the famous cathedral where Thomas à
Becket was assassinated in 1170. The son of a poor shoemaker
whose parents were farmers, Marlowe grew up among dark,
narrow streets smelling of the nearby cattle market and the
butcher's stalls where the animals were slaughtered. There
were eight other children. A diligent student, he won a
scholarship at the age of fourteen to the prestigious King's
School in Canterbury and, a year later, to Corpus Christi
College, Cambridge, where he was to receive both a BA and an
MA degree.
While still at the university, he found patronage and
employment as a government spy in the shady world of
Elizabethan politics. When Cambridge threatened to withhold
his master's degree in 1587 because of his frequent absences
from classes, the Queen's Privy Council, the highest and
most powerful government institution, wrote to say that he
had done her majesty "good service" and deserved to be
awarded his degree. It appears that he was recruited by Sir
Francis Walsingham, the head of Elizabeth's spy network, and
most likely used first as a courier to France and the Low
Countries before becoming an informer about the political
and religious views among the circles of Englishmen living
and studying abroad. Whatever duties he actually performed
for his spymasters, Marlowe began to live a complex double
life in a world in which secrecy, duplicity, betrayal, and
danger were the rule and where he, like everyone else, had
to pretend to be what he was not.
The world of espionage and intrigue Marlowe entered was
already a kind of theater with a vast cast of characters
that came from some of the most distinguished families in
England, and included diplomats of several countries, war
profiteers, spies on various payrolls, ambitious military
men, assassins, torturers, itinerant clergymen, and
small-time crooks, all caught in the maze of interlocking
plots to either defend or depose the Queen. The arts of
cunning and deceit were required for agents to survive.
Greedy for honor and profit is how they were described by
one suspicious spymaster.
Everyone took bribes so that most professions of loyalty
were suspect. There were informers even in colleges. We
don't know whether Marlowe betrayed someone at Cambridge,
but it's not farfetched to suppose that the rumors of some
such possibility first caught the attention of his future
employers, as they would have in the Soviet Union and other
such regimes. With the Protestant–Catholic struggle
consuming the politics of the day, there was need for men
who could pass themselves off as modest scholars and poets
while disguising their true motives. Marlowe, for his part,
must have observed his employers and their other agents. In
his plays he is fascinated by the lust for power, the sham
morality of the powerful, and the fate of the innocent whose
lives are sacrificed in the name of some cause or some man's
ambition in the centuries-old tragicomic play we call
history.
In 1589 Marlowe was charged with murder and sent to
Newgate Prison, but released two weeks later after another
man was found guilty. On other occasions, he was arrested
for street-fighting, and he was deported from the
Netherlands for counterfeiting gold coins. At the time of
his death, in a tavern brawl in May 1593, he was about to be
indicted and most likely sent to prison after his former
roommate, the dramatist Thomas Kyd, confessed under torture
that a document full of blasphemies in his possession was
the work of Marlowe. As for his death, there are strong
reasons to believe that it was the result of political
intrigue. The coroner's inquest states that the dispute was
about who should pay the bill, that the murder weapon, which
belonged to his friend Ingram Frizer, was first wrenched by
Marlowe from its owner and then turned against him in
self-defense by Frizer, who stabbed him above the right eye.
All of this begins to sound implausible after we learn that
one of the four men present was a senior intelligence
operative who watched all this without attempting to break
up the fight and that Marlowe was buried two days later in
an unmarked grave while the killer shortly afterward
received a pardon from the Queen.
Most scholars believe that Marlowe
translated Ovid's Amores in 1584–1585 while he was
still at Cambridge. His decision to make the first
translation of these poems, universally regarded as
pornographic, into English was an act of uncommon gall. His
translations were subsequently banned by the censors and the
book was publicly burned in 1599. Ovid's poems were not only
erotic; they were scandalous in other ways. He treats all
received ideas with irreverence. As his great
twentieth-century translator, Peter Green, said:
He could, by turns and without effort, assume the roles,
or masks (personae), of devoted lover, social
butterfly, avuncular rake, cynical Don Juan, literary
gossip and praeceptor (as a change from
desultor) amoris.[1]
Marlowe treated Ovid as a contemporary, someone who felt
about the world as he did. He not only reproduced his
astonishing conversational fluency, he also innovated by
translating the unrhymed Latin distiches into heroic
couplets.
If Spencer was regarded as the English Virgil, Marlowe
identified himself with his opposites, with poets who mocked
imperial Rome. As David Quint has written:
There are two rival traditions of epic: the first is
associated with Virgil and the epics of the imperial
victors, and the second is associated with Lucan and the
epics of the defeated. The victors experience history as
a coherent, end-directed story, and the losers
experience history as contingency and open-endedness.[2]
Marlowe's finest poem, Hero and Leander
(1592–1593), is another erotic narrative in the manner of
Ovid, while his plays, whose plots deal with mad ambition
and its consequences, owe much to Lucan, whom he also
translated. These two anti-imperial Roman poets both paid
dearly in the end for having a big mouth; and this may have
been the case with Marlowe himself.
2.
When it was first performed in London in 1587,
Tamburlaine the Great was such a huge success that
Marlowe had to write a sequel. It was unlike any play
previously produced on the Elizabethan stage. Marlowe, as
T.S. Eliot said, got into blank verse the melody of Edmund
Spenser and freed it from the rhymed couplets of Henry
Howard Surrey. Already in the prologue to Part I, we hear a
confident new voice. The author blows his own trumpet while
making fun of his contemporaries' mechanical rhythms
("jigging") and their simplistic rhymes:
From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,
We'll lead you to the stately tent of war,
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine
Threat'ning the world with high astounding terms
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.
View but his picture in this tragic glass,
And then applaud his fortunes as you please.
The theater will be like a looking glass he will hold
before the spectators so that they may see themselves for
what they are. Unlike his didactic contemporaries, he will
pass no judgment on the action. The play will be a place
where an uncensored view of life is presented and not a
pretext for an object lesson in morality. Marlowe knew that
what he was about to show was bound to astonish. The plot of
Tamburlaine the Great was based on the life of the
fourteenth-century Tartar ruler Timur (1336–1405). After
ascending to the throne in Samarkand in 1369, he subjugated
most of Persia, Georgia, and all the states between the
Indus and the lower Ganges (1398).
Timur seized Damascus and Syria from the
Mameluke sultan of Egypt, then defeated the Turks at Angora
(1402), taking Sultan Beyazid prisoner. Even by the cruel
standards of warfare in his time, Timur's military campaigns
were famous for their savagery. "Drown them all, man, woman,
and child./Leave not a Babylonian in the town," Tamburlaine
advises one of his generals in the play. Timur destroyed
Delhi, slaughtered 80,000 of its inhabitants, and built
pyramids out of their skulls. He died while leading an army
of 200,000 men to invade China.
In the Elizabethan period his conquests were well known,
and many versions of his life were available. Marlowe, who
read both Latin and French, knew several of them. Among
Protestants, Timur, a Muslim, was regarded as an agent of a
wrathful God sent to defeat the Turkish sultan. Marlowe's
play chronicles the many battles he fought, the countries he
subjugated, the kings he slew, and the innocents he
slaughtered. The Shakespeare Theatre Company production in
Washington, D.C., brilliantly condenses the two original
plays, each containing five acts, into a fast-paced,
visually spectacular, lavishly costumed two-act play.
Tamburlaine the Great is a story of a Scythian shepherd
who with fixity of purpose, brutality, and what his enemies
describe as his "dreaming prophecies" makes himself into one
of the great conquerors in history. "Our souls," Tamburlaine
believes,
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.
"A god is not so glorious as a king," one of his
followers assures him.
I think the pleasure they enjoy in heaven
Cannot compare with kingly joys in earth.
Despite more violence than a Tarantino movie, the play at
times borders on farce. Jones, the first publisher of
Tamburlaine, admits omitting some comic scenes which he
regarded as being inappropriate in so "honorable and stately
a history." In Elizabethan times, as we know, tragedies were
performed in the course of an afternoon's entertainment,
which included the appearance of clowns, jugglers, and men
performing feats of strength. Some of that spirit is in
Michael Kahn's inventive production, making the play both
exhilarating and disconcerting to watch. When Tamburlaine
feasts, he has the defeated Turkish sultan brought in a cage
to watch him and be fed table scraps. After he conquers
Babylon, he has his chariot drawn by the three captured
Turkish kings. Throughout the play, Tamburlaine and his
henchmen get their laughs by humiliating or torturing
someone.
Marlowe makes his audience uncomfortable. Who are these
high-spirited, honey-tongued psychopaths who spout great
poetry and kill thousands with a smile? We used to dismiss
them as barbarians. Today, watching the play, we are not in
a position to feel so morally superior. The same countries
and cities Tamburlaine lays waste are still with us today,
and so are men who take pleasure in destruction. In the most
shocking scene of the play, Tamburlaine burns the Muslim
holy books and defies Mohammed to strike him down for doing
so, and then mocks him when he does not.
No wonder Marlowe's contemporaries saw the play, which in
its full version is no kinder to Christians, as an atheist
manifesto. "What can be smashed should be smashed; what will
stand the blow is good; what will fly into smithereens is
rubbish," is how the Russian critic Dmitri Pisarev defined
nihilism in the mid-nineteenth century. Marlowe had the same
disdain for tradition and authority as Pisarev, but he
understood better what the full consequences of such beliefs
are.
Playing Tamburlaine in Washington, Avery Brooks, with his
good looks and his rich baritone, is a striking presence on
the stage. He boasts:
I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains
And with my hand turn Fortune's wheel about,
And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere
Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome.
Even in the rare moments when he shows affection for his
long-suffering wife, Zenocrate, the daughter of the Egyptian
ruler, whom he had abducted and raped—though she has come to
love him—he is scary. We know that what he loves more than
any single human being is war, and what he loves about war
is carnage. Other conquerors in history had their court
intellectuals, theologians, and poets justify their
slaughter of the innocent, but not this Scythian who knows
he is alone against the whole world. As he explains to his
son, Calyphas, who happens to have a moral sense and whom he
despises as a coward:
Villain, art thou the son of Tamburlaine
And fear'st to die, or with a curtle-axe
To hew thy flesh and make a gaping wound?
Hast thou beheld a peal of ordnance strike
A ring of pikes, mingled with shot and horse,
Whose shattered limbs, being tossed as high as heaven,
Hang in the air as thick as sunny motes,
And canst thou, coward, stand in fear of death?
Hast thou not seen my horsemen charge the foe,
Shot through the arms, cut overthwart the hands,
Dyeing their lances with their streaming blood,
And yet at night carouse within my tent,
Filling their empty veins with airy wine
That, being concocted, turns to crimson blood,
And wilt thou shun the field for fear of wounds?
His son does not reply, but tells his two brothers, when
they try to rouse him from bed, so he may join them and
their father in some battle:
I know sir, what it is to kill a man.
It works remorse of conscience in me.
I take no pleasure to be murderous,
Nor care for blood when wine will quench my thirst.
Shortly after, his father, finding Calyphas unprepared
for battle, stabs and kills him in front of his brothers,
telling them:
...Since I exercise a greater name,
The scourge of God and terror of the world,
I must apply myself to fit those terms,
In war, in blood, in death, in cruelty,
And plague such peasants as resist in me
The power of heaven's eternal majesty....
Ransack the tents and the pavilions
Of these proud Turks, and take their concubines.
Make them bury this effeminate brat,
For not a common soldier shall defile
His manly fingers with so faint a boy.
Tamburlaine, who starts out vowing to overthrow the gods,
is defeated finally by his "servant death," who previously
used to wait on him and do his will. It first turned on him
when it took away his wife, Zenocrate. Even as he himself
falls ill, he continues to see it as his slave, "the ugly
Monster Death,/Shaking and quivering, pale and wan for
fear," as he aims at him "his murdering dart." Death is
tear-thirsty, says one of his generals. Standing with his
sons on a huge map of the world laid out on the palace
floor, and pointing to them all the countries he has
conquered and still hopes to conquer, Tamburlaine drops
dead.
Is Tamburlaine a tragic figure? No, although Marlowe's
beautiful poetry makes us believe that against our better
judgment. Here is the monster in a lyrical mood as his wife
lies dying:
Black is the beauty of the brightest day!
The golden ball of heaven's eternal fire,
That danced with glory on the silver waves,
Now wants the fuel that inflamed his beams,
And all with faintness and for foul disgrace
He binds his temples with a frowning cloud,
Ready to darken earth with endless night.
Being a long, two-part play with a large cast,
Tamburlaine has not had many revivals. In Tyrone
Guthrie's 1959 production, Donald Wolfit portrayed him as a
barbaric, frightening, and increasingly insane hero. An
earlier adaptation by Basil Ashmore had him as a Hitler
figure. In Keith Hacks's 1972 version for the Edinburgh
Assembly Hall and Glasgow Citizen's Theater, the set
featured corpses on gallows and wheels. Terry Hand's 1993
production at the Barbican in London also emphasized cruelty
and blood. The temptation to turn the play into Grand
Guignol is understandable, though, I believe, unnecessary,
and Michael Kahn's production in Washington on the whole
avoided it. Marlowe's words alone are eloquent enough. He
wants us to take away from the play an understanding of the
kind of evil human beings are capable of as they wage war.
Preparing for battle, the Persian king, Mycetes, another
reluctant warrior in the play, laments:
Accurst be he that first invented war!
They knew not, ah, they knew not simple men,
How those were hit by pelting cannon-shot
Stand staggering like a quivering aspen-leaf.
3.
Edward the Second, The Troublesome Reign and
Lamentable Death of Edward the Second, King of England, with
the Tragical Fall of Proud Mortimer is Marlowe's last
play and with Doctor Faustus his most often performed
one. Divided into five acts, or more precisely into
twenty-six short scenes, it recounts the fate of a
fourteenth-century English king who loses his crown and life
over a male lover. Edward neglects his royal duties in order
to carry on with Piers Gaveston, a Frenchman his father
banished from the court and whom he brought back from exile
as soon as he became king. The powerful nobles and the
Church are appalled and united in their determination to get
rid of the upstart who is distracting the sovereign from
affairs of state. They loathe everything about him, starting
with his dapper look, his short Italian hooded cloak larded
with pearl, and his Tuscan cap. Enemies are threatening
England on all sides while their "brainsick" king dallies
about the palace with his lover's head resting on his
shoulder. The pretty boy taunts the trailing nobles:
Base leaden earls, that glory in your birth,
Go sit home and eat your tenant's beef,
And come not here to scoff at Gaveston,
Whose mounting thoughts did never creep so low
As to bestow a look on such as you.
It is bad enough that Gaveston is the King's lover, but
he, like Marlowe, is of humble origin. The more virulent the
opposition to him, the more Edward wants him. This genuinely
puzzles the nobles. "Why should you love him whom the world
hates so?" they ask the King. "Because he loves me more than
all the world," is his reply. To their horror, Gaveston
wants to turn the court into an unending bacchanal. At the
very opening of the play, he tells of the kind of amusements
he has planned for the King:
I must have wanton poets, pleasant wits,
Musicians that with touching of a string
May draw the pliant king which way I please.
Music and poetry is his delight;
Therefore I'll have Italian masques by night,
Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows;
And in the day, when he shall walk abroad,
Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad;
My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns,
Shall with their goat feet dance an antic hay.
Sometime a lovely boy in Dian's shape,
With hair that gilds the water as it glides,
Crownets of pearl about his naked arms,
And in his sportful hands an olive tree
To hide those parts which men delight to see,
Shall bathe him in a spring, and there hard by,
One like Actaeon peeping through the grove
Shall by the angry goddess be transformed,
And running in the likeness of an hart,
By yelping hounds pulled down and seem to die.
Such things as these best please his majesty....
In the Washington production, which is set in 1920s
England, his words come to life before our eyes as the
dignified court turns into a transvestite nightclub filled
with dancers. Things rapidly go downhill. The King locks up
the bishop of Coventry who objects, confiscates his lands,
and hands them over to Gaveston with several impressive
titles thrown in. Outraged, the nobles divide into two
parties, the smaller one siding with the King, the other,
led by Roger Mortimer, determined to depose him. After much
conniving with the help of the archbishop of Canterbury and
Queen Isabelle, they manage to separate Gaveston from Edward
and have him secretly killed. Civil war breaks out until the
King is forced to give up his throne. With all the
reversals, changing alliances, and frantic activity of the
participants in the conspiracy, the plot gets to be a bit
confusing until it becomes clear that Edward, who in the
meantime has been reduced to a pathetic, self-pitying
figure, is doomed.
Mortimer, his chief enemy, does not shirk
from murdering him or anyone who stands in his way. He is a
man much more driven by his inner demons than by practical
considerations. Queen Isabelle's story is different. Torn
between her sense of duty as a wife in the face of cruel
treatment by her husband, concerned about her young son's
future, she calculates that a dalliance with Mortimer and
siding with the conspirators won't hurt her or her son's
prospects.
Compared to Tamburlaine, Edward, Mortimer, and Isabelle
have rich inner lives. Their complexity as characters has
given much greater freedom to theater directors in how to
interpret the play. Gaveston, for example, has been played
as a "typical" Frenchman, impudent and frivolous in some
productions; "King Eddie's Whore," in Bertolt Brecht's 1924
adaptation; or wearing a white outfit in a 1989 production
that made the audience think of Elvis Presley, while his foe
Mortimer sported a Hitler moustache. Edward could be either
a decadent weakling or an anguished figure, a "lamb
encompassed by wolves."
Gale Edwards's decision to set the play in the Jazz Age
and have the cast dressed in evening clothes and military
uniforms of the period recalls Ian McKellan's film of
Richard III and has the feel of something already seen,
already done. Despite some excellent performances in the
large ensemble and several visually stunning scenes, the
production doesn't quite work for me. The idea of having the
ghost of Gaveston make its appearance as a white angel in a
gold shantung suit to hover over the King at the point of
his death is not only in poor taste, but undermines the
merciless logic and the shocking denouement of Marlowe's
play.
The ending is justly famous. Edward is kept in a dark
dungeon up to his knees in water "wherein the filth of all
the castle falls." As his life draws to an end, he is like a
man who has finally awakened from a dream:
Methinks I should revenge me of the wrongs
That Mortimer and Isabel have done.
But what are kings, when regiment is gone,
But perfect shadows in a sunshine day?
Unknown to him, Mortimer has summoned a hit man from
abroad who brags that he has learned his trade in Naples
where he was taught to poison flowers, pierce the windpipe
with a needle point, and take a quill and blow a little
powder into a sleeper's ear. In a mockery of his sexuality,
he kills Edward by inserting a red-hot poker into his anus.
After disposing of the King and attaining the power he
desired, Mortimer cannot stop killing, even when it is no
longer in his interest to do so. He ignores the pleas of
Edward III, the young heir to the throne, and murders his
uncle, the dead king's brother, whereupon the young king has
him arrested. "Weep not for Mortimer,/That scorns the world"
is his parting shot as he is being led away. The struggle
for power and the misuse of power, Marlowe makes clear,
often derive their momentum from hatreds and loves that have
little to do with whatever reasons and explanations the ones
in power deign to share with us.
The Shakespeare Theatre Company is to be praised for
putting on these two formidable plays and reminding us what
an irreverent, troubling, and brilliant poet and playwright
Marlowe still is.
Notes
[1] Ovid, The
Erotic Poems, translated by Peter Green (Penguin, 1982),
p. 65.
[2] The Cambridge
Companion to Christopher Marlowe, edited by Patrick
Cheney (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 121.