Elizabethan Drama Essay, Research Paper
Beyond New Historicism: Marlowe’s unnatural histories and the melancholy
properties of the stage Drew Milne The tradition of the dead generations weighs
like a nightmare on the minds of the living. [1] There is no document of culture
which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a
document is not free from barbarism, barbarism also taints the process of
transmission … [2] Recent critical discussions of Elizabethan drama, above all
of Shakespeare, have centred around `new historicism’, a trend consolidated in
critical anthologies.[3] New historicism is characterised by an interest in the
historicity of texts and the textuality of history, and by affinities with
theoretical projects concerned with power, identity and the construction of
subject positions. Despite important political differences, new historicism has
been linked with what has become known as `cultural materialism’.[4] Many of the
political differences stem from the uneasy relation of new historicism, and of
cultural materialism, to the Marxist conception of history or historical
materialism, differences which this essay seeks to accentuate. Raymond Williams
is often claimed as a major precursor of cultural materialism, but interest in
institutions, discursive practices and subject positions suggests the different
legacy of Althusser’s attack on humanism and the influence of Foucault. New
historicism, by contrast, shows scant regard for Marxism while being especially
indebted to Foucault’s version of Nietzsche’s will to power and perspectival
historicism, despite important critiques of Foucault’s work.[5] The Althusserian
approach is more overtly committed to the possibility of political change but
tends towards a similarly theoreticist, even formalist reduction of history. The
possibility of resisting power and the power of ideology marks the decisive
conflict in these different assimilations of history to culture. New
historicism, lost in proliferating examples of contingent but seemingly
inescapable discourses of power, seems at best to expand the archive of wry
smiles at the ruses of history and power. As an academic guise in which to
rework the glories of the past without pausing too long over the enormity of the
history surveyed, the reproduction of literary history now lies in the hands of
those who can offer few reasons for continuing to produce the object of
critique. Sinfield suggests that, `New historicists, therefore, like their
colleagues, are sustaining many of the old routines while knowing, really, that
their validity has evaporated.’[6] As such, new historicists could be described
as reformists who do not believe in progress. If we are to awake from the
nightmare of history, perhaps such historicism should be left alone to dull the
air with discoursive moans, as Aeneas puts it in Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of
Carthage. The persistent naturalisation of suffering in history should be
resisted if the process of transmitting historical documents is not to further
the process. Herein lies the need to offer estranging perspectives on
Elizabethan drama and the intervening historical gulf. One aspect of the
difficulty is the continuing investment in naturalising both the language and
dramaturgy of Elizabethan drama within a literary tradition dominated by
Shakespeare and the Shakespeare industry. This essay seeks to provide an
estranging perspective through a reading of new historicist accounts of Marlowe.
Focussing on Tamburlaine, I hope to suggest some different approaches with
regard to the melancholy dramatisation of history as a scene of unnatural
events, by drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin and Franco Moretti.[7] A
distinctive and estranging approach to dramatising the enormity of history is
evident in the prevalence of violence, murder and arbitrary death in Elizabethan
drama itself. This prevalence has long been seen as excessive, a mark of
something unnatural in its historical imaginary, without being understood.
History in Elizabethan drama is, as title-pages characteristically predict,
lamentable. The structure of effects suggested by drama as an occasion for
melancholic lamentation helps to contextualise the roles of Tamburlaine, Barabas
and Guise in Marlowe’s plays, where it seems particularly in-appropriate to
reduce their dramatic ambivalence to the need to identify with a central
protagonist or autonomous `character’. As David Bevington suggests: `The
well-known type of "Lamentable Tragedy, Mixed Full of Pleasant Mirth"
… traces its origins to the view that vicious behavior is at once funny and
terrifying as a spectacle, admirable and yet grotesque, amusing but also
edifying as a perverse distortion of moral behavior.’[8] Elizabethan drama, par-ticularly
Marlowe’s, dramatises the contradictions of seeing history as a record of divine
providence in which the world is the theatre of divine judgment. The prologue to
the first part of Tamburlaine invites audience and reader to `View but his
picture in this tragicke glasse, / And then applaud his fortunes if you
please.’[9] Indeed the play seems to relish the ambivalent moral possibilities
of melancholy pleasure in lamenting a world without divine providence. In this
theatre history is both unnatural and inhuman. Violent suffering without end or
grace goes against the notion of a fall from a greater nature or the prospect of
a redeemed nature to come. History is then seen as the non-identity of nature
with itself, unnatural forces struggling with natural ones. Unnatural forces,
however, must also be seen as emerging from nature, while the dramatisation of
history in terms of human agency suggests that unnatural acts are an aspect of
human nature for which no secular concept of wordly evil is adequate. In
Elizabethan drama the stage is not so much beyond good and evil as caught in an
attempt to develop a secular concept of evil. The resources for such a concept
are figurative rather than conceptual, resorting to melancholy in face of the
unthinkably arbitrary and violent prevalence of suffering. Benjamin’s account is
helpful here. The contemplation of lamentable stories of death by unnatural
causes finds its aesthetic purpose in allegories of unholy dying, allegories in
which history is a fallen nature, a world of evil without the consolations of
natural justice. On such an unnaturally cruel and violent stage dominated by
seemingly arbitrary and unreliable powers, the possibility that evil might be
recognisable without theology is consoling. Indeed it is the reduction of
history to worldly evil which makes it possible to stage history as a state of
unnatural nature that can be lamented. The mirror of magistrates becomes a wheel
which needs to be reinvented because it never quite comes full circle, notably
in the lurching rhythms of the failure of poetic justice at the end of King
Lear. Hence, although a fashion for stage violence can be traced from Cambises
and Gorboduc to The Spanish Tragedy, its historical significance is complicated.
Thus it is difficult to understand why Tamburlaine was so popular, even to the
extent of imitation in The First part of the Tragical raigne of Selimus.
Tamburlaine’s simple linear plot seems to offer little more than a violent
pageant of power and destruction enlivened by occasional striking tableaux. This
taste for horror in aesthetic form has remained unexplained in its more specific
historical manifestations, and in general, perhaps because it reflects but fails
to explain the nightmare of history. In rethinking this nightmare, much of the
critical verve of new historicism is derived from the historicisation, if not
critique, of humanist or idealist conceptions of subjectivity in the reception
and critical transmission of Elizabethan drama. There is a danger in
assimilating the different approaches associated with new historicism to one
paradigm, but the centrality of conceptions of subjectivity is evident.
Catherine Belsey, while developing an attack on liberal humanism, seeks `to
chart in the drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the eventual
construction of an order of subjectivity which is recognizably modern.’[10] This
finds its strategic justification in the need to displace the largely romantic
and post-romantic conceptions of the subject dominant in the modern reception of
Shakespeare and so-called Renaissance drama more generally. Jonathan Dollimore
describes the task as `a critique of the way literary critics have reproduced
Renaissance drama in terms of a modern depoliticized subjectivity, and an
attempt to recover a more adequate history of subjectivity’.[11] Dollimore
argues that Elizabethan tragedy itself challenged Christian essentialism and in
the process decentred `Man’; but he also highlights the danger of anachronism:
the incorrect procedure is that which insists on reading the early seventeenth
century through the grid of an essentialist humanism which in historical fact
post-dates it and in effect only really emerges with the Enlightenment; in other
words, what makes a materialist analysis of subjectivity in that period seem
inappropriate is itself a thoroughly anachronistic perspective.[12] Nevertheless
there are striking similarities between Dollimore’s account of Tamburlaine and
the persistent Nietzschean romanticism which marks previous critical accounts of
Marlowe. Hazlitt says of Marlowe that: `There is a lust of power in his
writings, a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness, a glow of the imagination,
unhallowed by anything but its own energies.’[13]; while Helen Gardner argues
less effusively that: `The first part of Tamburlaine glorifies the human will:
the second displays its inevitable limits.’[14]; and Harry Levin offers the
following stirring formulation of Marlowe’s Barabas: `His will to power is
gratified less by possession than by control. In this he does not resemble the
conqueror so much as he adumbrates the capitalist; and Marlowe has grasped what
is truly imaginative, what in his time was almost heroic, about business
enterprise.’[15] This Nietzschean aesthetic of the will to power and primitive
accumulation, in which naked ambition and the arbitrary amassing of power and
wealth is celebrated as the legitimate aspiration of human energy, finds
surprising echoes in Dollimore’s account of Tamburlaine: With his indomitable
will to power and warrior prowess, Tamburlaine really does approximate to the
self-determining hero bent on transcendent autonomy . . . exclusion may be the
basis not just of Tamburlaine as fantasy projection but Tamburlaine as
transgressive text: it liberates from its Christian and ethical framework the
humanist conception of man as essentially free, dynamic and aspiring. [16] In
Dollimore’s argument these terms are ambivalent rather than celebratory, but
seem to preclude the more Brechtian possibility that Marlowe does not in the end
intend sympathy with Tamburlaine. Perhaps, like Mother Courage, Marlowe intended
a sense that the passage of war and destruction might be understood as the
responsibility of a badly motivated human agent, such that Tamburlaine’s
exploits are an occasion for reflective lamentation, rather than Nietzschean
identification with a superman. The central hermeneutic difficulty, however, is
that the attempt to historicise anachronistically imputed conceptions of
subjectivity relies on claiming that more recent conceptions of decentred
subjectivity are not similarly anachronistic, an objection which could also be
extended to Brecht’s plays. Much depends on whether we applaud the fortunes seen
in the `tragicke glasse’ of Tamburlaine as a stage on which the will to power is
enacted, or whether we prefer to steel ourselves against the figurative idealism
which lurks in such mirrors of nature. If we applaud the fortunes of Tamburlaine
then we identify with that difference of nature from itself which produces the
spectacle of history, thus naturalising Tamburlaine’s will to power. If we do
not identify with Tamburlaine’s struggle for power as something natural then we
have to lament the spectacle of unnatural history or find a perspective from
which to understand it differently. Thus the focus on subjective agency,
individual will or dramatic identity tends to abstract from history to highlight
the ideological forms which transcend the historical gulf between modern and
pre-modern fictions of society. A materialist account of subjectivity may
restore individuals to history, but the political relevance of theoretical
hindsight is mortgaged to the reception history it seeks to displace. In other
words, by making subjectivity such a central analytical tool new historicism
succeeds in decentring subjects, showing how such subjects were never centred,
but obscures the historical and cognitive significance of the different terms in
which Elizabethan drama dramatised history. As Moretti argues, taking up
Benjamin’s account of allegory: `allegory is not a subjective deception to which
someone might be imagined to hold the semantic key, but the objectively
deceptive condition of the nature of history by which everyone is ultimately
betrayed.’[17] Moreover, subjectivity in Elizabethan drama is invariably a
chimera given the persistent ambivalence of theatricality. Kastan and
Stallybrass, for example, suggest that `Acting itself threatens to reveal the
artificial and arbitrary nature of social being.’[18] The nature of social
being, however, is not arbitrary save in constructions which make being the
ground of historicity. Human history cannot be understood in terms of a history
of human subjectivity without reference to the nature against which it
struggles, and that nature is itself historical.[19] The history of subjectivity
is never the same as the history of subjects as objects in human attempts to
dominate nature. The thought that the antagonistic domination of human nature
and the struggle to dominate nature itself might be superseded and shown to be
neither natural nor contingently historical, is perhaps what Marx meant by the
pre-history of human society. If there is an affinity between modern conceptions
of decentred subjectivity and pre-modern Elizabethan drama, it may be that both
Elizabethan dramatisations of history and contemporary historicism collapse
history, indeed naturalize it in terms of a drama of subjective wills. Stephen
Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), an important text in the
emergence of new historicism, provides exemplary instances of these
difficulties. In his introduction Greenblatt concedes the risk of anachronism,
and comments on his small group of chosen texts that: `It is we who enlist them
in a kind of historical drama’.[20] Greenblatt provocatively suggests a
dramatised analogy with Nietzsche’s conception of the will to power in the very
title of the chapter `Marlowe and the Will to Absolute Play’. Such anachronism
is significant insofar as the naturalization of history as power suggested by
Nietzsche, and also in Foucault’s work, is a historically determinate attempt to
understand social process in terms of illusory subject positions. As Greenblatt
explains in his epilogue: Whenever I focused sharply upon a moment of apparently
autonomous self-fashioning, I found not an epiphany of identity freely chosen,
but a cultural artifact. If there remained traces of free choice, the choice was
among possibilities whose range was strictly delineated by the social and
ideological system in force. (p. 256) Hence Greenblatt describes Marlowe’s plays
by explicitly evoking Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire: `Marlowe’s protagonists
rebel against orthodoxy, but they do not do so just as they please; their acts
of negation not only conjure up the order they would destroy, but seem at times
to be themselves conjured up by that very order.’ (p. 210) The subtle
difference, however, is the shift to a more structuring account of `order’, and,
more fundamentally, the stress on the dramatic protagonist as the interpretative
key, despite arguing that it is the social order which fashions such
protagonists. Consequently, Greenblatt’s approach needs to be understood as both
a sketch of the development of human autonomy in the Renaissance, what might be
called a romanticist reading of the early modern period, and the historicisation
of such autonomy as being illusory: `Marlowe’s heroes must live their lives as