Marlowe's theater of night: Doctor Faustus and capital

ELH - English Literary History

Volumn 71, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 455-495

  Halpern, Richard ^a  

^a JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 60949855704     PISSN: 00138304     EISSN: 10806547     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/elh.2004.0026     Document Type: Review

References (82)

1. Philip Henslowe, Henslowe Papers: Being Documents Supplementary to Henslowe's Diary, ed. Walter W. Greg (London: A. H. Bullen, 1907), 72. Hereafter abbreviated H and cited parenthetically by page number in the text.
2. Robert Daborne, A Christian Named Turk, in Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England: Selimus, A Christian Turned Turk, and The Renegado, ed. Daniel J. Vitkus (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2000), 7.161-62, 194-95.
3. The English Faust Book, ed. John Henry Jones (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), 139-41.
4. This episode leaves a minute textual residue in the B-version, where Mephastophilis declares at the end of scene 8 that "I'll wing myself, and forthwith fly amain / Unto my Faustus, at the Great Turk's court."
5. Christopher Marlowe, Dr Faustus, ed. Roma Gill (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 5.156-57. Hereafter abbreviated DF and cited parenthetically by scene and line number in the text.
6. Henslowe, 66 n.
7. It might be felt that my willingness to take this interpretation seriously (or to ascribe it to Daborne in the first place) means that I am relying on a now outmoded view of Henslowe, one that has been refuted in recent years by R. A. Foakes, Carol Chillington Rutter, and others. I shall discuss the critical rehabilitation of Henslowe in a subsequent, longer version of this essay.
8. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus 1604-1616. Parallel Texts, ed. W. W. Greg (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1950), 61-62.
9. For the payment, see Henslowe's Diary, Second Edition, ed. Foakes (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 206. Whether the additions appear in the B-text is, of course, still a matter of dispute. Greg insisted that they do not. His position on this and other matters is challenged by Eric Rasmussen in A Textual Companion to Doctor Faustus (New York: Manchester Univ. Press, 1993). My analysis will focus on the A-text, which is probably more Marlovian and to my mind a better play.
10. Foakes, 319-20, 325. A list of playing apparel in the hand of Edward Alleyn includes "Faustus Jerkin his clok" (Foakes, 293).
11. "Hell mouth" is mentioned explicitly only in the B-text, where Mephastophilis also tells Faustus: "First wear this girdle, then appear / Invisible to all are here" (Marlowe, 77). In the A-text, Faustus's invisibility at the Pope's court is not attributed to a "girdle" or gown. Perhaps the additions of the B-text were written partly with a view to employing props that had subsequently come into the company's possession. Or perhaps the B-text formally recognizes staging conventions that were already in effect when the A-text was performed at the Rose in 1594.
12. Exactly where this "dragon" appears in Doctor Faustus is a matter of some dispute. Robert K. Root argued in "Two Notes on Doctor Faustus" (Englische Studien 43 [1910-1911]: 144-49), that the dragon is not used to pull Faustus through the sky. Rather, it is the costume that Mephastophilis wears when he first appears to Faustus. If this is true, then my contention that all of the listed properties are provided by Mephastophilis to Faustus must be modified, though Mephastophilis himself will become in this case a special effect. Henslowe states he "bought" only the "robe for to goo invisibell." The other items appear on the lists of costumes and stage properties belonging to the Lord Admiral's Men. And the mere fact that the papers were in Henslowe's possession does not mean that he purchased the listed items for the company. He may have had the lists drawn up in order to record the capital stock of his theatrical tenants, or he may, as landlord, simply have found it prudent to keep a list of expensive properties stored in his theater. A recent essay does, however, suggest that Henslowe may have used his pawnbroking business to provide costumes and properties for plays at the Rose Theatre. See Natasha Korda, "Household Property/Stage Property: Henslowe as Pawnbroker," Theatre Journal 48 (1996): 181-95.
13. A further note on the "robe": it is included in a list of costumes that Henslowe bought after 3 April 1598. Greg regards it as "probable" (Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, 11-12)
14. and Carol Chillington Rutter simply states as fact (Documents of the Rose Theatre [Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2002], 124)
15. that Doctor Faustus was withdrawn from the stage after Edward Alleyn's retirement in 1597. If this is the case, then the robe cannot have been purchased for, or even initially employed in, productions of Faustus. However, the retirement of the play in 1597 is purely conjectural, since Henslowe stops recording daily receipts, and with it the records of individual play performances, by that time. Of course, whoever furnished costumes and stage properties for Doctor Faustus would have to provide far more than the items I have listed, and not only to the actor (Alleyn) playing Faustus. My point is that the expenses large enough to be recorded-those properties involving what we might call "special effects" designed specifically for the play-correspond to those which, in the text of the play itself, Mephastophilis provides to, or manifests for, Faustus. Lena Cowen Orlin argues in a recent essay that Henslowe's inventory of stage properties "amounts to being a list of theatrical fittings and that there were other, now lost, accountings for moveables." See Orlin, "Things with Little Social Life (Henslowe's Theatrical Properties and Elizabethan Household Fittings)," in Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama, ed. Jonathan Gil Harris and Korda (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 114.
16. To be more precise: for a playwright such as Marlowe, who was not himself a member of an acting company, it made little difference whether he sold his plays directly to the players or contracted with an intermediary such as Henslowe.
17. See T. McAlindon, Doctor Faustus: Divine in Show (New York: Twayne, 1994), 13.
18. In his book Christopher Marlowe (London: Macmillan, 1991), Roger Sales offers a reading of the play in which Faustus is a playwright and Lucifer is a Renaissance Prince (133-60).
19. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962).
20. Thomas Dekker, quoted from Harris and Korda, "Introduction: Towards a Materialist Account of Stage Properties," in Staged Properties, 6.
21. See Joseph Loewenstein, Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 177-78.
22. Jonson's "Expostulation with Inigo Jones" develops the mind-body opposition in a way that compares Jones's spectacles to magical conjuration (lines 49-50, 88-90).
23. See Loewenstein, Ben Jonson, 59-61.
24. I by no means intend, of course, to suggest any correlation between the level of a playwright's psychic investment in his or her work and the quality of work produced, or to insinuate that playwrights who wrote at a faster pace than Marlowe produced inferior work.
25. See Lowenstein, Ben Jonson.
26. For an illuminating, materialist account of the prehistory of copyright, see Loewenstein, The Author's Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002).
27. A partial acknowledgment and amelioration of this fact was the institution of the so-called benefit performance, in which the playwright received a certain portion of the receipts from one of the first days' performances. But there is no evidence that this practice yet existed when Doctor Faustus was written. I should add that the fact of economic alienation does not necessarily imply that playwrights were indigent, or that they were unhappy with the prices they received for their plays, which could rise to £20 in the early seventeenth century-a tidy sum.
28. Harry Levin, The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1952), 120-21.
29. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, 33, 39.
30. The B-text, which probably incorporates the Bird-Rowley additions of 1602, employs spectacle more generously. Either the authors failed to grasp Marlowe's original intention, or the economic exigencies of theatrical revival demanded new and improved special effects to lure audiences back to an old play.
31. R. W. Dent, "Ramist Faustus or Ramist Marlowe?," Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 73 (1972): 63-74.
32. Levin, 113.
33. I suspect that this equivocation over whether Faustus's magic can summon up the real presence of Alexander also offers a refracted parody of the magic of the Eucharist.
34. Justinian's Institutes, Latin text by Paul Kruger, trans. Peter Birks and Grant McLeod (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987), 80, 81.
35. Both issues from Justinian-divided inheritance and disinheritance-come into play in the B-text's contest between Pope Adrian and Pope Bruno. Both popes claim to be "St. Peter's heir" (Gill, 73), an inheritance which, in this case, cannot simply be divided between them. Pope Adrian resolves the conflict by excommunicating the Emperor, in effect disinheriting him and thereby establishing his own status as the true "father" of the church. I cite this episode to demonstrate that Faustus's scraps of Latin and Greek are not mere textual throwaways, but are carefully reworked either by Marlowe or by subsequent contributors to the play.
36. Bibliography on the question of whether Faustus is saved can be found in Max Bluestone, "Libido Speculandi: Doctrine and Dramaturgy in Doctor Faustus," in Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama, ed. Norman Rabkin (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1969), 74.
37. An extreme though stimulating version of this argument is offered by William Empson in Faustus and the Censor: The English Faust-Book and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987).
38. See E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1923), 3:423-24.
39. Conversely, one might read this episode as presaging Faustus's ultimate salvation, if one takes the horse-courser-cheated out of what he thought was a good deal-as a counterpart to Mephastophilis. Faustus's final wish ("O soul, be changed into little water drops, /And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found" [13.110-11]), recalls the dissolving of the horse-courser's horse, as Roy T. Eriksen points out ("The Forme of Faustus Fortunes": A Study of The Tragedie of Doctor Faustus [Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1987], 89-90). The episode may therefore foreshadow Mephastophilis's disappointment and the restoration to Faustus of what he thought he had lost. In either case, though, someone loses in order that someone else may win, and no magical supplement intervenes.
40. Anthony Munday, A Second and Third Blast of Retrait from Plaies and Theaters (1580)
41. in The English Drama and Stage, ed. W. C. Hazlitt (1869; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, n.d.), 139.
42. The phrase "theater of night" will inevitably recall the so-called school of night with which Marlowe was associated. See M. C. Bradbrook, The School of Night: A Study of the Literary Relationships of Sir Walter Ralegh (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), esp. 101-24.
43. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt and others (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 5.2.9-17, 5.1.41-42.
44. Neither Marlowe nor Daborne ought to be understood as economically indigent, of course. Some combination of playwriting and intelligence work seems to have kept Marlowe well afloat. And Daborne, despite the temporary embarrassment caused by his lawsuit, was a patentee in the Queen's Revels. None of this alters what I am taking as the essential fact, however: the radical dependence of both men upon theatrical capital.
45. For his most direct formulation of the matter, see St. Augustine, Enchiridion
46. translated as Faith, Hope, and Charity, trans. Louis A. Arand (New York: Newman Press, 1978), section 11, 18-19.
47. See Thomas Aquinas, The De Malo of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Richard Regan (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), 63-65.
48. St. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, 4. Books 12-14, trans. Philip Levine (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), 12:23. Hereafter cited by book and page number.
49. St. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, 3. Books 7-11, trans. Davis S. Wiesen, 11:463.
50. St. Augustine, City of God, 4, 12:39.
51. Augustine's Aristotelianism will not allow him to imagine an absolute void, however. What precedes creation is "not complete and utter nothingess: there was this formless matter entirely without feature ... an intermediate stage between form and non-existence, some formless thing that was next to being nothing at all." St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1931), 12:282, 283.
52. On the resistance to imagining nothingness in early Western thought, see Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Penguin, 2000), 25-61.
53. See Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2001).
54. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie of Artes and Sciences (London, 1575), iii-iv.
55. Agrippa, Vanitie, sig. H1r.
56. Agrippa, G2r-v.
57. Francis Bacon, The New Organon, book 1, section 86, in Bacon, Selected Philosophical Works, ed. Rose-Mary Sargent (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), 122.
58. Bacon, 121.
59. Bacon, 120.
60. This is, of course, something of an overstatement. There is a kind of ethic, indeed an askesis, implicit in the scientific method as Bacon unfolds it. But for the most part Bacon describes this method as a self-running mechanism whose virtue is that it bypasses human foibles instead of trying to correct them.
61. Norman Austin, Helen of Troy and her Shameless Phantom (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994), 4, 34.
62. Homer, The Iliad, trans. Richard Lattimore (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962), 104. The Greek text is 3.158.
63. I am quoting Austin, 10. The relevant passage in the Odyssey is 4.561-69.
64. See Graham Hammill, Sexuality and Form: Caravaggio, Marlowe, and Bacon (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000), 119-21. The fact that a boy actor plays the part of Helen naturally comes into play here as well.
65. See Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 1-5, 7.
66. On Helen as succubus, see Hammill, 119-20.
67. Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 1194.
68. Both works are translated in Early Greek Political Thought from Homer to the Sophists, ed. Michael Gagarin and Paul Woodruff (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 190-95 and 206-9.
69. Isocrates, quoted from Austin, 24 n. 1.
70. Austin, 144.
71. Euripides, Helen, trans. Richard Lattimore, in Euripides II, ed. David Grene and Lattimore (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1956), 35-36, 43.
72. Greek text from Euripides, Helen, Phoenician Women, Orestes, ed. and trans. David Kovacs (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002).
73. Indeed, the phrase itself originates in Gorgias's oration "On Not Being" and is then quoted by Sextus Empiricus, by which path it might have made its way to Marlowe-although the Ramist route is the more likely.
74. For an extended discussion, see Charles Segal, "Gorgias and the Psychology of the Logos," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 66 (1962): 99-155. Somewhat surprisingly, Gorgias's encomium posits Helen as the victim of poetic and rhetorical force rather than its origin.
75. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1997), 78.
76. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 81.
77. Austin, 24-25.
78. For the opposing view of Helen as mere goods, see Matthew Gumpert, Grafting Helen: The Abduction of the Classical Past (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2001), 58-68. Both Gumpert's and Austin's books were quite helpful for my discussion of Helen.
79. On Erschutterung, see also Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno's Aesthetics (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1997), 23-24.
80. The connection was made by Hans Meyer in his book Thomas Mann: Werk und Entwicklung (Berlin: Volk und Welt, 1950), where he argues that the "middle devil" in the novel's famous twenty-fifth chapter may be based on Adorno (370).
81. Meyer's claim has recently been challenged by Michael Maar, who argues that Mann had the composer Gustav Mahler, not Adorno, in mind. See Maar, "Teddy and Tommy: The Masks of Doctor Faustus," New Left Review 20 (March/April 2003): 113-30.
82. What is beyond dispute is that Mann borrowed extensively from Adorno's Philosophy of Music for his Doctor Faustus.