Richard Hillman

Turning and Turning Again: Shakespeare’s First Tetralogy

In taking up Edward II before the First Tetralogy, and so departing from the widely accepted order of composition, I have sought not only to examine Marlowe’s English history play in close relation to The Massacre at Paris, but also – paradoxically – to establish it more firmly as a pivotal text between the First Tetralogy and the Second.1 Such a function matches the text’s presumed date and obvious affinity with Richard II. Within a broadly delineated “discursive space,” however, fine points of chronology, like questions of filiation and authorship, are ultimately immaterial, even where they may be decided with reasonable confidence – as is far from the case with all aspects of the First Tetralogy.2 Regardless of such circumstances, Edward II remains pivotal for me because, in developing its portrait of an ineffectual monarch, as modelled in Henry VI, it attaches a virtual cliche of contemporary French political discourse – the analogy between Edward and Henri III – to qualities shared by the League’s Henri and Shakespeare’s Richard II: irresponsibility, tyrannical highhandedness, and personal self-indulgence. It has always seemed symptomatic of English anxieties that the historical drama of the 1590s makes so much of sovereigns who fostered civil war in their times (and, in Richard’s case, long after) by an inability to govern justly, wisely, and authoritatively.

Faustus Face to Face with Damnation: Another Morality Model

This article employs close textual analysis to propose as a source for the final despairing soliloquy of the protagonist of Christopher Marlowes tragedy _Doctor Faustus_ (1592) the analogous despair of the protagonist of the neo-Latin tragedy _Mercator seu Judicium_ (1540) by the German Protestant polemecist Thomas Kirchmeyer (alias Naogeorgus). In addition, the French translation of this work by Jean Crespin, as _Le Marchant converti_ (1558), appears to have influenced the anonymous revisers of Marlowes original tragedy (the so-called A-text), who supplied the scene (in the B-text) with a more spectacular theatrical dimension, including a gaping hell-mouth. Finally, comparison is also made with the soliloquy of the penitent Usurer in the fantastic biblical morality play, _A Looking Glass for London and England_, by Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene (1589-90), which also owes a debt to Kirchmeyer. The fact that the Usurer is finally saved by the gift of divine mercy, as also is Kirchmeyers Mercator, intertextually throws into relief the damnation of Faustus and highlights Marlowes problematic evocation of the question of pre-destination.

Shakespeare’s Arthurian Misfortunes

“Odd man out” among Shakespeare’s pre-1600 English history plays, the long-marginalized King John now commonly attracts approval as a repository of historiographical self-consciousness, contrary to the strenuous myth-making of the two Tetralogies.1 Behind this reversal in critical attitude may lie the innovative claim of Sigurd Burckhardt that the play manifests a sceptical “modernity” (134), whereas the subsequent histories, “resolute and stirring” in a way that serves “the national cause,” conduct “a kind of holding operation” (153). As commentators have increasingly insisted, however, it is possible to see even the notorious Tudor myth, insofar as it informs the Tetralogies, as dialogized within a nexus of history-writing – hence, history-making – processes. Conversely, I propose, the historiographical explorations of King John stand out in stark outline because they are set against fraught and contentious mythical backgrounds.

Marlovian Monarchs and Various Guises

Studies of source and influence have a habit of relieving their general rigidity in matters of textual evidence by sporadic indulgence of the speculative impulse. In 1942, John Bakeless deduced Marlowe’s thinking from a subjective association of his own: “the frequency with which Marlowe uses the word ‘minion’ in Edward II suggests that the French court was more or less in his mind” (2: 88).1 This was to endorse the late nineteenth-century impression of J. A. Nicklin that “Gaveston, as he lived for Marlowe, is the pet and darling of another Henri Trois” (cited Bakeless 2: 88). True, particular texts lay behind these intuitions, notably a 1588 French pamphlet attributed to the League activist Jean Boucher, a Parisian cure and Doctor of Theology connected with both the book-trade and the university.2 That work had targeted Henri III’s controversial “mignon,” the duc d’Epernon, by way of an English analogy spelled out in its title: the Histoire tragique et memorable de Pierre de Gaverston [sic] Gentil-homme Gascon jadis le mignon d’Edouard 2. Roi d’Angleterre, tiree des Chroniques de Thomas Walsinghan [sic] & tournee de Latin en Francois. Dediee a Monseigneur le duc d’Espernon. There was also the latter work’s “original” – a roughly accurate description of the pertinent section of Thomas Walsingham’s Historia Brevis (68–76) – which Marlowe “may also have read” (Bakeless 2: 88).

Introduction: the Vasty (Discursive) Fields of France

It is an inescapable paradox that while intertexual study, by definition, operates in the spaces between texts, it must define those spaces by proliferating textual references. More paradoxically still, the narrower the spaces become, the more room they offer for exploration – exploration, however, that increasingly distances itself from the very concept of “discovery.” Replete with textual analysis as this book may be, my chief concern is with intertextual spaces, taken as delimiting and conditioning an inclusive discursive one: the presence of readings enables the process of reading absence. At the same time, the impulse to discover never diminishes – on the contrary. Intertextual activity remains bound by the desire – unfulfillable, like all desire – to demonstrate what lies beyond the reach of evidence, to textualize the intertextual. Perpetual frustration is the price to be paid for not being bound to silence.

Of tendyr hertys been Englysche men

All the plays of the Second Tetralogy have entered into this discussion from time to time, usually at the heels of Henry V. To provide a more coherent context for those scattered references, it is necessary, in the first instance, to shift backward to Richard II – that is, to political and dramatic “origins.” A new dynamic of signification may be set in motion by reconsidering two familiar points from a “French” perspective: first, Marlowe was probably acquainted with the three parts of Henry VI, as well as with Richard III, when he wrote Edward II;1 secondly, the latter play obviously comprises a precursor text for Richard II. It will now, I hope, seem reasonable to postulate Marlowe’s alertness to associations between English historical models and contemporary French politics in the First Tetralogy. In this light (and even apart from Massacre), it appears almost a matter of course that he should then have chosen for his sole English historical drama a subject charged with similar significance. To identify such common ground, however heuristically, is to open a new way of looking at Richard II. For if the dramatic treatments of Henry VI and Edward II both evoke the disastrous reign of Henri III, and caution the English accordingly, the very modifications that Marlowe made to his precursor’s approach help to make visible the French colouring, too, of Edward’s theatrical successor.

The Unfortunate Traveller in (and out of) France

Let me begin by setting up the (dis)appearing act that paradigmatically defines the Lacanian subject as a lens for viewing the evolution of Jack Wilton’s role – a much-discussed phenomenon in The Unfortunate Traveller. Jack begins as an active and amoral practical joker, flaunting his membership in the Vice- and Trickster-club at the expense of common humanity. He ends as a largely passive observer and recorder, whose wide range of tonal positions – including those of the scorner, the idealist, the moral philosopher, and even the humanitarian – marks him as a variable product of changing circumstances. The narrator’s increasingly “discrepant attitudes,” in G. R. Hibbard’s phrase (179), notoriously fail to confer a unified perspective, but they do converge, from their various angles, to locate him at a distance from the increasingly raw material of his recit and, paradoxically, to incorporate him into humanity at large. Initially defined in terms of his superhuman agency and power to expose – “Gods scourge from above” (226), as he styles himself while still in France – Nashe’s narrator-protagonist by stages becomes the helpless overseer of events beyond his control: the halfpitying spectator of the nonetheless justified slaughter of the Munster Anabaptists; the sorrow-stricken onlooker, locked in his upper chamber, at the rape and suicide of Heraclide (that epitome of feminine virtue who fails to deter Esdras with the threat of “a power aboue thy power” [289] ); and, finally, the “[m]ortifiedly abjected and daunted” speaker of unspeakable executioners’ torments.