projects, but they do so in the midst of intimations that the projects are
illusions.’ (p. 213) Accordingly, in a move which has become characteristic of
new historicism, Greenblatt prefaces his account of self-fashioning in Marlowe’s
plays with an anecdotal historical analogue for the contemporary `system’ of
power. This analogue juxtaposes Marlowe’s plays with the `casual, unexplained
violence’ in an English merchant’s tale of a voyage in 1586 to Sierre Leone,
suggesting an historical ‘matrix’ of the relentless power-hunger of Tudor
absolutism, and in particular the acquisitive energies of English merchants,
entre-preneurs, and adventurers.(p. 194) In some respects this echoes what might
be called the old historicist account of L.C.Knights in Drama and Society in the
Age of Jonson (1937), which examines the social and economic bases of
Elizabethan-Jacobean culture in rather more detail. But Greenblatt does not
relate nascent English capitalism and colonialism to the specific religious and
political conflicts dramatised in Tamburlaine. Rather, he deploys history as
`matrix’ in a more metaphorical analogy between the dynamic political geography
of merchant capital and the theatrical representation of space. Just as merchant
capitalism seeks to reduce geographical differences to an expression of its
power, so, for Greenblatt, Marlowe uses theatrical power to represent different
spaces: In Tamburlaine Marlowe contrives to efface all such differences, as if
to insist upon the essential meaninglessness of theatrical space, the vacancy
that is the dark side of its power to imitate any place. This vacancy – quite
literally, this absence of scenery – is the equivalent in the medium of the
theater to the secularization of space … (p. 195) On this basis Marlowe’s
dramatisation of the history of Tamburlaine is seen by Greenblatt as
Tamburlaine’s will to power in the occupation of theatrical space. Just as
Elizabethan dramatists breezily rewrite historical source materials, so
Greenblatt breezily rewrites Tamburlaine in terms which implicitly argue the
perspicuity of Deleuze and Guattari: `Tamburlaine is a machine, a desiring
machine that produces violence and death.’ (p. 195) Hence the terms of
Tamburlaine’s dynamic occupation of stage space are further abstracted from
Marlowe’s theatrical allegory of history, and dramatised in Greenblatt’s
anachronistic allegory: `Space is transformed into an abstraction, then fed to
the appetitive machine. This is the voice of conquest, but it is also the voice
of wants never finished and of transcendental homelessness.’ (p. 196) While
Greenblatt’s analogue indicates the dialectical relation between culture and
barbarity suggested by Walter Benjamin, he does not use it to examine specific
power struggles in history, but rather as an anecdotal allegory to suggest the
historicity of power. Greenblatt’s conception of theatricality is nevertheless a
sophisticated one. This is salutary amid the prevalent reluctance to recognize
the centrality of theatre and theatricality for Elizabethan drama, a reluctance
which reflects the dominance of print-culture perspectives on drama and more
recent attempts to conceive history as a form of textuality. However, his
account of theatricality risks remaining immanent within the metaphors generated
by theatricality in Marlowe’s plays. Comparing `the violence of Tamburlaine and
of the English merchant’ (p.197) this leads Greenblatt into an alarming
aestheticisation of their respective representations and experiences of stage
space and geography: experiencing this limitlessness, this transformation of
space and time into abstractions, men do violence as a means of marking
boundaries, effecting transformation, signaling closure. To burn a town or to
kill all of its inhabitants is to make an end, and in so doing, to give life a
shape and a certainty that it would otherwise lack. (p.197) There is something
chilling in these lines, not least in the trans-formation of violence into
formal patterns and the assimilation of human suffering – `to burn a town’ – to
the perspective of the violent protagonist. For Greenblatt the structure of
limits give shape but no escape: `in Marlowe’s ironic world, these desperate
attempts at boundary and closure produce the opposite effect, reinforcing the
condition they are meant to efface.’ (p. 198) The key anachronism is the
suggestion of ironic and implicitly inescapable reversals of power. Marlowe’s
plays fails to give such intelligible shape or indeed another moral scheme by
which to understand the spectacle of violence because the dramatic presentation
is not restricted to the self-fashioning of the protagonist: we also see the
victims. In the fifth act of Tamburlaine 1, for example, Tamburlaine sacks the
town of Damascus and kills all of its inhabitants, save the father of Zenocrate,
Tamburlaine’s wife-to-be. The play offers the Brechtian possibility that the
audience need not identify with Tamburlaine by offering perspectives on
Tamburlaine’s victims through Bajazeth, Zabina and, most importantly, Zenocrate.
Amid the death of Damascus, so to speak, and reports of the speared and
slaughtered carcasses of the virgins unsuccessfully sent by Damascus to
intercede with Tamburlaine, the audience also sees the laments and then suicides
of Bajazeth, Emperor of the Turks, and Zabina his wife, having had enough of
being paraded as Tamburlaine’s symbolic slaves. As Zabina puts it, `Then is
there left no Mahomet, no God, / No Feend, no Fortune, nor no hope of end / To
our infamous monstrous slaveries?’ (Pt.1: V.i.239-241) An audience might more
easily identify with such a lament than with a man who has killed a town. The
laments of Bajazeth and Zabina are highly charged and, juxtaposed with the
slaughtered virgins, their self-fashioned deaths suggest the extremes of the
social scale to suffer at the hands of Tamburlaine.[21] Their deaths are
immediately followed by the entrance of Zenocrate who laments the sack of her
home town by her supposed lover: Zenocrate. Wretched Zenocrate, that livest to
see, Damascus walles di’d with Egyptian blood: Thy Fathers subjects and thy
countrimen. Thy streetes strowed with dissevered jointes of men, And wounded
bodies gasping yet for life…. Ah, Tamburlaine, wert thou the cause of this
That tearm’st Zenocrate thy dearest love? Whose lives were dearer to Zenocrate
Than her own life, or ought save thine owne love. (Pt. 1, V.i.319-323, 334-5)
Coming after Bajazeth and Zabina, Zenocrate reminds the audience of the
slaughter of Damascus, and highlights the depth of Tamburlaine’s rejection of
the natural pity which might be associated with love. But if this isn’t enough
to suggest that we might identify with the victims of Tamburlaine, Zenocrate
then turns to see the `bloody spectacle’ of Bajazeth and Zabina: `Behold the
Turke and his great Emperesse./ Ah Tamburlaine, my love, sweet Tamburlaine, /
That fights for Scepters and for slippery crownes’ (Pt.1, V.i.354-6). This
suggests the way in which the play might be read as the tragedy of Bajazeth and
Zabina, their history as moral exemplum in the mirror of magistrates tradition.
However, despite the efforts of Zenocrate and Anippe, her maid, to summon the
wheel of fortune scheme this serves instead to highlight the dramatic
ambivalence of Tamburlaine’s unstopped rise to power. Roy Battenhouse offers the
most sustained attempt to reinscribe Tamburlaine in a moral scheme, focussing in
particular on the end of part 2, and reading the play in terms offered by
Tamburlaine’s final words, as the story of a `Scourge of God’ (Pt.2: V.iii.258),
but this reading has to work against the grain of Marlowe’s more ambivalent
moral and theological implications. History itself, as Battenhouse concedes,
makes his case hard to sustain: The tradition of Tamburlaine’s peaceful and
natural death being thus firmly established, we must recognize that Marlowe’s
opportunities to make of the history an example of God’s punishing of sin were
definitely limited. The histories were attributing to this Scythian scourge a
long life of unobscured glory – a career which looked like a blasphemous
challenge to the Puritan dogma of Providence. [22] The approach suggested by
Greenblatt is more convincing in this respect: `Tamburlaine repeatedly teases
its audience with the form of the cautionary tale, only to violate the
convention. All of the signals of the tragic are produced, but the play
stubbornly, radically, refuses to become a tragedy.’ (p. 202) Part 1, in
particular, ends with Tamburlaine triumphant, crowning Zenocrate queen of Persia
and talking of marriage rites to come, presenting the melancholy spectacle of
inhuman, ruthless violence and tyranny unpunished. Indeed the audience are
encouraged to view this spectacle with horror and amazement. For most of act
five of part 1 Tamburlaine is identified with death, entering as the stage
direction puts it: `all in blacke, and verie melancholy’ (Pt.1: V.i.inter 63-4).
In one of Marlowe’s finest theatrical touches he shows the horror of
Tamburlaine’s power through the rhetoric of allegorical reference to his sword
as he claims that death is his servant and dismisses the virgins sent by
Damascus to intercede with him: Tamburlaine: Virgins, in vaine ye labour to
prevent That which mine honor sweares shal be perform’d: Behold my sword, what
see you at the point. 1. Virgin: Nothing but feare and fatall steele my Lord.
Tamburlaine: Your fearfull minds are thicke and mistie then, For there sits
Death, there sits imperious Death, Keeping his circuit by the slicing edge. But
I am pleasde you shall not see him there: He now is seated on my horsmens
speares, And on their points his fleshlesse bodie feeds. Techelles, straight goe
charge a few of them To charge these Dames, and shew my servant death, Sitting
in scarlet on their armed speares. (Pt. 1: V.i.106-118) Tamburlaine’s sword is
more than an object of fear and potentially fatal steel, becoming an allegory in
which the stage property is an object of melancholic perception, a figure of
death. Benjamin comments that `once human life has sunk into the merely
creaturely, even the life of apparently dead objects secures power over it.’[23]
And while the fatal power of swords as objects is evident, the importance of the
stage property here is the significance of this sword as an object of
contemplation into which history has been metonymically distilled. The
illumination of the fateful qualities of the most trivial stage property, such
as a handkerchief or a glove, reveal such props to be objects, often poisonous
ones, which signify the fateful arbitrariness of objective history. Indeed the
relation between protagonists and the fateful objects with which they identify
is a central dramaturgical part of the opening of many of Marlowe’s plays: a
letter for Gaveston; Faustus and books; Barabas and heaps of gold. The
significance of this is highlighted by the insignificance of such stage props in
classical drama. As Benjamin argues: `In moral examples and in catastrophes
history served only as an aspect of the subject matter of emblematics. The
transfixed face of signifying nature is victorious, and history must, once and
for all, remain contained in the subordinate role of stage-property.’[24]
Similarly, sovereignty is given allegorical representation in the metonymical
form of sceptres and what Zenocrate calls `slippery crownes’. All through
Tamburlaine crowns are the sad allegorical tokens of earthly power, but they
become melancholic properties rather than moral exempla precisely when
providential schemes of history as morality fail. Melancholic because the
allegory of the objective world such stage props signify is one in which the
dramatisation of history as evil recoils from the realisation that there is no
evil in nature, only a subjective understanding with no correlative in reality.
A striking passage from Plotinus’s third century Enneads suggests the
possibility of seeing the enormity of history as the pleasurably lamentable work
of a dramatic artist, while suggesting also the risks of failing to recognise
the possible barbarity of neo-Platonist attempts to figure life as play, and so
reduce the historical world to a phenomenon secondary to subjective
understanding: Murders, death in all its guises, the reduction and sacking of
cities, all must be to us just such a spectacle as the changing scenes of a
play; all is but the varied incident of a plot, costume on and off, acted grief
and lament. For on earth, in all the succession of life, it is not the Soul
within but the Shadow outside of the authentic man that grieves and complains
and acts out the plot on this world stage which men have dotted with stages of
their own constructing. All this is the doing of man knowing no more than to
live the lower and outer life, and never perceiving that, in his weeping and in
his graver doings alike, he is but at play; to handle matters austerely is
reserved for the thoughtful: the other kind of man is himself a futility. Those
incapable of thinking gravely read gravity into frivolities which correspond to
their own frivolous Nature.[25] Murder, death in all its guises, and the
reduction and sacking of cities are the spectacles and changing scenes of
Marlowe’s unnatural histories, especially in Tamburlaine and The Massacre at
Paris. The resort to theatrical melancholy need not collapse the world of
suffering into a frivolous nature which corresponds to that melancholy, as
though the sacking of cities were frivolous. Nevertheless, the dramatisation of
such history as a pageant of power invariably threatens to be caught in a figure
which naturalises history as play. Plotinus reminds us that some of the relevant
figures are not as historically specific as they at first seem. The important
difference is that Elizabethan drama, and in particular tragedy, registers an
essential inhumanism, notably in the melancholic, metonymical significance of
crowns, swords and other often poisonous stage properties whose seemingly modest
objectivity overcomes the best efforts of human subjects. Moreover the drama
suggests an unfathomably lamentable quality in the struggle between natural and
unnatural forces, precisely because without eschatology or a modern idea of
natural history, history is reduced to an allegory of natural forces. Thus the
understanding of Elizabethan drama would be furthered by examining the relation
between nature, history and theatricality, so as to reveal its truth as a
cognitive framework which has become historically alienated from the barbarity
it sought to understand. Elizabethan drama attempts to stage history as nature;
not nature in the modern sense, but rather an unnaturally horrific and
lamentable allegory of nature as history. Decoding the history in this nature
involves recognizing the way this allegorical staging of history helps us
understand the necessity for historical distanciation, particularly from any
attempt to displace the horror in its allegory of natural history with new
allegories of the historicity of power and subjectivity. In short, the effort to
rethink Elizabethan drama might restore a sense of the unnatural histories which
divide and rule our historical differences. Rather than rethinking such history
in `our’ own natural interests, such documents might be blasted out of their
continuity and given a sense of unrelenting strangeness rather than strained
relevance. The hermeneutic shibboleths of power, subjectivity and identity may
also have to give way to the rejection or at least melancholic recognition of
the essential inhumanism of a world without grace whose historical nature is a
nightmare from which we are yet to awake.
[1] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. B. Fowkes,
Surveys from Exile: Political Writings, vol. 2, ed. D. Fernbach (Harmondsworth,
1973). [2] W. Benjamin, ‘Uber den Begriff der Geschichte’, Illuminationen, ed.
S.Unseld (Frankfurt am Main, 1977), p. 254; translation amended from ‘Theses on
the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London, 1973), p.
258. [3] See New Historicism and Renaissance Drama, eds. Richard Wilson and
Richard Dutton (London and New York, 1992); and Staging the Renaissance:
Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (New York and London, 1991),