The spirit and the letter: Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Elizabethan religious radicalism

Studies in Philology

Volumn 99, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 123-151

  Moore, Roger E ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 63149198317     PISSN: 00393738     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (65)

1. Consult Leo Damrosch's work, The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), for a detailed study of Quaker theology and its antinomian excesses.
2. See John L. Nickalls, ed., The Journal of George Fox (Philadelphia: Religious Society of Friends, 1997), 27, for a discussion of the Quaker belief in regeneration.
3. A Testimony Against John Pennyman's Lyes, Slanders, and False Accusation of Blasphemy, Etc. (London, 1671). Wing T805.
4. From two letters from Henry More to Lady Conway, Aug. and Sept. 1670, quoted in "On Bible-burning," Journal of the Friends' Historical Society (1932): 21.
5. All references to Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great are to volume 5 of The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. David Fuller and Edward J. Esche (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) and cited according to part, act, scene, and line.
6. In her article, "'Here's Nothing Writ': Scribe, Script and Circumscription in Marlowe's Plays," Theatre Journal 36 (1984): 301-20, Marjorie Garber acknowledges the uncertainty of the critics as to what purpose Tamburlaine's burning of the Koran serves. She believes that the burning of the holy book is one of many instances within Marlowe's plays where characters "undo" authoritative texts; here Tamburlaine replaces Mahomet's narrative of world ownership and power with his own. I agree with Garber that Tamburlaine is attempting to establish his own (divine) authority here rather than a limited one set down by Mahomet in the Koran, although I view his attempt as a typically Gnostic move.
7. James R. Howe, Marlowe, Tamburlaine, and Magic (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1976);
8. Beatrice D. Brown, "Marlowe, Faustus, and Simon Magus," PMLA 54 (1939): 82-121.
9. A. D. Nuttall, The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton and Blake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
10. See Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage, 1979), xiii-xxxvi, for a succinct relation of the discovery of the manuscripts and the ensuing drama that attended their publication.
11. Irenaeus, Adversus haereses (c. 180 C.E.), Hippolytus of Rome, Refutatio omnium haeresium, Epiphanius of Salamis' Panarion (c. 300 C.E.). For Tertullian's attacks on the Gnostics, see his Adversus marcionem, De praescriptione haereticorum, and Adversus valentinianos. Origen's criticism of the Gnostics in the Stromata includes much first-hand testimony of Gnostic beliefs. See Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle's discussion of these translations and the anti-Gnostic purposes to which Erasmus put them in Rhetoric and Reform: Erasmus' Civil Dispute With Luther (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 143-52.
12. All references to Nag Hammadi texts are from James M. Robinson, gen. ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 3d ed. (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1988), and are by codex, tractate and chapter number.
13. Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, trans. Dominic J. Unger, Ancient Christian Writers (New York: Paulist Press, 1992).
14. The Excerpta ex Theodoto of Clement of Alexandria (London: Christophers, 1934), 78.2.
15. Basilides, quoted in The Panarion of St. Epiphanius, Bishop of Salamis: Selected Passages, trans. Philip R. Amidon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
16. Bentley Layton, trans., The Gnostic Scriptures (New York: Doubleday, 1987), 294.
17. For a psychoanalytic reading of the motivations underlying Tamburlaine's "penetration" of others, see Constance B. Kuriyama, Hammer or Anvil: Psychological Patterns in Christopher Marlowe's Plays (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 26-28, 42-43. Although Kuriyama's approach has many flaws (e.g., she considers homosexuality to be a sickness arising out of numerous insuperable developmental conflicts), her basic contention, that Tamburlaine is afraid of femininity, weakness and passivity, seems right. My own interpretation of the play goes one step further than Kuriyama in that it places the conqueror's sentiments within the context of an overall fear of matter. Tamburlaine's anxiety is not merely personal, as Kuriyama would have us think; it is also deeply metaphysical.
18. See Christopher Fanta, Marlowe's Agonists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970) for an examination of the role the minor characters of Marlowe's plays (Zenocrate, Calyphas, and Abigail, among others) play in troubling the grandiose desires of the protagonists.
19. Allen Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 6.
20. See Frances Yates's discussion of the Hermetic works in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 22. Yates builds upon Festugiere's original disctinction between the two types of gnosis.
21. Although some today believe Marcion was not a Gnostic, no one has convincingly superseded the claim for Marcion's Gnosticism set forth in Adolf Harnack's landmark 1924 work, Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, trans. John E. Steely and Lyle D. Bierma (Durham, NC: Labyrinth, 1990). Harnack is also the first to point out systematically the similarities between Marcion's program and Luther's: "It was Luther who once again gave a central position to the Pauline-Marcionite recognition of the distinction between the law and gospel; this recognition became the lever of the Reformation as a spiritual movement" (134-35).
22. Elaine Pagels points out that the works of Paul were central texts for the early Gnostic exegetes. She says that the Gnostics favored Romans, 1-2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 Thessalonians and Hebrews, which they felt to be the only Pauline writings. The Pastoral Epistles were largely ignored by Gnostic thinkers. See The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters (Philadelphia: Fortess Press, 1975), 5.
23. Simone Petrement, A Separate God: The Origins and Teachings of Gnosticism, trans. Carol Harrison (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1984), 16. "What explains the persistence and resurgence of heresies of a Gnostic type is much more the early Christian texts of the New Testament than texts or traditions deriving from ancient heresies.... The debates of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on the subject of free will often reveal in those who denied the power of free will a view of the world and of humanity's natural state that is redolent of Gnostic pessimism. This is not only because they refer to Saint Augustine, who perhaps remained under the influence of his Manichean past; it is still more that, like Saint Augustine himself, they refer to Paul and John" (15-16).
24. Besides Irenaeus, Erasmus edited Origen's Contra Celsum, and read Tertullian's Adversus Marcionem, Adversus Valentinianos, and De praescriptione haereticorum in the 1521 edition of his friend, Beatus Rhenanus. See Boyle, Rhetoric and Reform, 143-44.
25. Simon Magus is best known as the contemporary of the apostles who attempted to buy their healing powers and was cast away from them as a devilish figure. He later became the center of a Gnostic cult, the Simonians, who regarded him as a Gnostic "savior." He was said to have traveled about with a former prostitute whom he had redeemed and whom he claimed bore the soul of Helen of Troy. Giovanni Filoramo, A History of Gnosticism, trans. Anthony Alcock (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), claims Simon and Helen are "the model of every ideal Gnostic couple" (147).
26. Simon's story was known in the Renaissance from many sources, chiefly Irenaeus and the late-antique novel, the Pseudo-Clementine Recognitions. The earliest attempt to link Marlowe with Simon and the Recognitions was Beatrice D. Brown's. Nuttall explores the Gnostic Simon myth and its value for Faustus, and he says the Recognitions was available in at least two editions from Basel in 1526 and 1536. See Nuttall, Alternative Trinity, 42-43.
27. See Alastair Hamilton, The Family of Love (Cambridge: James Clarke and Co., 1981), chapter 1, for a thorough examination of the traditions influencing Niclaes's thought.
28. Also see William Johnson, "The Mystical Tradition of the Homo deificatus in the Theology of the Family of Love and the Theologia Germanica," Journal of Religious Studies 14 (1988): 1-24, for useful background material.
29. See Hamilton, Family of Love, chapters 4-5, for an account of the humanist followers of HN.
30. The most succinct account of Christopher Vitell's life and mission is J. W. Martin, "Christopher Vitel: an Elizabethan Mechanick Preacher," Sixteenth-Century Journal 10 (1979): 15-22.
31. The full proclamation is reprinted in Jean Dietz Moss, "Godded with God": Hendrik Niclaes and His Family of Love (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1981), 74-75.
32. After the publication of Basilicon Doron by James I, a pamphlet defending the Familist sect emerged in 1606. Details about just how large the Familist community was at this time are scarce. See Hamilton, Family, 131-32.
33. See Christopher W. Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550-1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), chapters 4 and 5.
34. Hamilton lists William Fulke, master of Pembroke Hall, and Roger Goad, provost of King's College (Family of Love, 126). Another Cambridge man interested in the Familists was Stephen Batman, mentioned below, who helped Archbishop Parker build the Corpus Christi College Library and who wrote harsh attacks on the Familist evil.
35. See Julia G. Ebel, "The Family of Love: Sources of Its History in England," Huntington Library Quarterly 30 (1967): 342, where she quotes from Nashe's two works. In "The Returne of the Renouwned Caualiero Pasquill of England" (1592), Pasquill says, "I haue there set downe... all the vpstart Religions in this Lande. The Anabaptists; the Familie of Loue; the seaven capitall haeresies for which some haue been executed of late yeers in Suffolke" (74). In "Pierce Penilesse his Supplication to the diuell" (1589), Nashe says, "we diuide Christs garments amongst vs in so many peeces, and of the vesture of saluation make some of us Babies and apes coates... some gally-gascoines or a shipmans hose, like the Anabaptists and adulterous Familists" (171-72).
36. Although the idea of a formal "school of night" has been questioned in recent years, M. C. Bradbrook's The School of Night: A Study in the Literary Relationships of Sir Walter Raleigh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936) is still helpful in establishing the connections between major thinkers in this period.
37. A great fan of alchemy, Cabala, and other esoteric philosophies, Dee probably knew Marlowe and may have been a model for Marlowe's portrait of Doctor Faustus. See Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979), 120.
38. John Bakeless, The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), 1:60.
39. See Jan van Dorsten, The Radical Arts: First Decade of an Elizabethan Renaissance (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1970), 34, for information on John Dee's association with the Birckman bookshop.
40. See Bakeless's discussion of the Arian document found in Kyd's and Marlowe's rooms (Tragical History, 114-16).
41. For a more generalized discussion of the place of Arianism within the context of Marlowe's "atheism," see Nicholas Davidson, "Christopher Marlowe and Atheism," in Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture, ed. Daryll Grantley and Peter Roberts (Scolar Press, 1996), 129-47.
42. See "Francis Kett" in Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1917), 11:74-75.
43. William Strype, Annals of the Reformation (1824; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1966), 73.
44. Despite the skepticism of certain late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars like Nicholas Storojenko, who maintain there is no credible evidence that Marlowe knew Kett, John Bakeless convincingly argues that Kett lived and ate in Corpus hall for almost a year after Marlowe's matriculation. Bakeless bases his contention on the Buttery Book records for Corpus Christi. See Bakeless, Tragical History, 107-8.
45. For Nicholas Storojenko's 1878 "Life of Greene," in which he dismisses Kett's association with Marlowe and Greene, see Alexander B. Grosart, etc., The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Robert Greene (London, 1881-86; reprinted New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), vol. 1. Included in the appendix of this volume are two original documents recording the heresies of Kett.
46. C. L. Barber also makes the connection between Tamburlaine and the Elizabethan prophesyings. See Richard Wheeler, ed., Creating Elizabethan Tragedy: The Theater of Marlowe and Kyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 82-83. Barber says there is much in Tamburlaine that suggests the issues of Elizabethan radicalism, and he even remarks that "It is not such a long way from the Scythian Shepherd to [Anabaptist leader] John of Leyden" (83).
47. Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640-1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 161.
48. John Knewstub, A Confutation of monstrous and horrible heresies, taught by HN and embraced of a number, who call themselues the Familie of Loue (London, 1579). STC 15040.
49. John Rogers, The Displaying of an horrible secte of grosse and wicked Heretiques, naming themselues the Familie of Loue, with the lines of their Authours, and what doctrine they teach in corners (London, 1578). STC 21181.
50. See Elizabeth Eisenstein's fascinating analysis of the Family of Love's relationship with the printing world, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 443-50: "businessmen, particularly printers, with antidogmatic views [like those of the Family], were most fit to survive and even to prosper amid the shifting fortunes of religious warfare. If they adopted a tolerant creed that could be covertly sustained they could avoid persecution by zealots even while attracting foreign financial support" (445). By coming into contact with many diverse people throughout Europe and Asia through their business ventures, the printers began to have an appreciation for the "family" of mankind, says Eisenstein (448). The printers found the suprahistorical nature of the Familist doctrine especially helpful in articulating their expanded understanding of the nature of human unity.
51. See Una Ellis-Fermor, Christopher Marlowe (London: Methuen, 1927)
52. and Harry Levin, The Overreacher: A Study of Christopher Marlowe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952).
53. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 403,
54. and Emily Bartels, Spectacles of Strangeness: Imperialism, Alienation, and Marlowe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 12.
55. Howe, Tamburlaine and Music, 94.
56. See Thomas Fortescue, The Foreste (London, 1571),
57. and George Whetstone's English Myrrour (London, 1586).
58. Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem, ed. Ernest Evans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 69.
59. His drama of a soul struggling to find assurance of salvation was rewritten many times in the literature of Puritan autobiography in the mid-seventeenth century. The story of the famous "case of conscience" Francis Spira that partially underlies Marlowe's Faustus also underlies much Puritan - and even Quaker - autobiography. See Bunyan's Grace Abounding, 45,
60. and The Short History of the Life of John Crook, 163.
61. Both works are found in John Stachniewski and Anna Pacheco, eds., "Grace Abounding" with Other Spiritual Autobiographies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Marlowe's grasp of the contemporary English religious situation seems quite full, in this matter as well as with the threat posed by the Familist doctrine of the inner light.
62. In the seventeenth century, many people believed that the Familists were the spiritual ancestors of the Ranters and Quakers. Richard Baxter says in his Autobiography that the Ranters "taught as the Familists, that God regardeth not the actions of the outward man, but of the heart, and that to the pure all things are pure (even things forbeidden)." He goes on to see the Quakers as the inheritors of the Familist and Ranter legacy: he refers to "the Quakers, who were but the Ranters turned from horrid profaneness and blaspheny to a life of extreme austerity on the other side" (N. H. Keeble, ed., The Autobiography of Richard Baxter [London: Dent, 1974], 73).
63. John L. Nickalls, "George Fox's Library," Journal of the Friends'Historical Society 28 (1932): 3-21, lists a Dutch copy of HN's Glasse of Righteousness among Fox's books. Nickalls finds this "of especial interest" since, on the issues of "outward sacraments and silent waiting, Fox and Nicholas had much in common" (8).
64. Louella M. Wright, The Literary Life of the Early Friends: 1650-1725 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), reiterates Nickall's view. Nigel Smith, in his chapter on "Familist Writing in the Interregnum" in Perfection Proclaimed, says that although the Familist works retranslated in the 1640s were not as important for the English sects as the writings of the German mystics, George Fox certainly knew of them and HN seems to have been known and revered in James Nayler's circle.
65. See also Henry Hallywell's 1673 work, Account of Familism As it is Revived and Propagated by Quakers.