1

Dr. Faustus - Selling His Soul to Make a Point

In Dr. Faustus, Christopher Marlowe has vividly drawn up the character of an

intelligent, learned man tragically seduced by the lure of power greater than he was
mortally meant to have. The character of Dr. Faustus is, in conception, an ideal of
humanism, but Marlowe has taken him and shown him to be damned nonetheless,
thus satirizing the ideals of Renaissance Humanism.

M. H. Abram's A Glossary of Literary Terms defines Renaissance Humanism, stating

that some of the key concepts of the philosophy centered around "the dignity and
central position of human beings in the universe" as reasoning creatures, as well as
downplaying the "‘animal' passions" of the individual. The mode of the thought also
"stressed the need for a rounded development of and individual's diverse powers... as
opposed to merely technical or specialized training." Finally, all of this was
synthesized into and perhaps defined by their tendency to minimize the prevalent
Christian ideal of innate corruption and withdrawal from the present, flawed world in
anticipation of heaven. (p. 83)

The character of Faustus is reasoning and very aware of the moral (or immoral) status
of what he is undertaking. His opening speech is devoted to working out logically
why he is willing to sacrifice both the road to honest knowledge and his soul in favor
of more power. (I, 1-63) He exhibits, in his search for power, anything but animal
passion; he indeed exhibits a chilling logic as he talks himself out of the possible
delights of heaven. Not only is he intelligent, he also demonstrates a broad base of
learning, another quality admired and upheld by humanists.

In several sections of the play, Faustus goes into beautifully vivid descriptions of the
wonders he will accomplish with his power. (I, 78-97; III, 104-111) This seems an
ironic parody of what Philip Sydney (a well-known humanist) described in his
Defense of Poesy as the poet's prerogative of describing a reality better than that
which may actually be attained. Faustus is rarely more humanist than when he
describes what he will do with his hell-bought power.

Marlowe's attack on humanism is subtle. He demonstrates an admirable complexity of

narration as he weaves these grand-seeming gestures of the power of the individual in
with the essential damnation that walks hand-in-hand with man. There is little or
nothing which Faustus does which is not unto itself humanistic. His downfall is
woven into the fact that he is and will always be human– thus, flawed. Marlowe
creates a character who is intelligent, broad-based in his education, logical, and
poetic... and still damned. Despite his humanism, he is unequivocally corrupt, a
quality which Renaissance Humanism as a philosophy tended to gloss over.

When Faustus achieves his power, he time and again fails to take advantage of it for
any but the silliest operations. From the viewing of the Seven Deadly Sins (V, 277-
322) to enchanting an offensive knight with horns (X, 52-80), the man's professed
intentions of greatness are shown for the hopeless dreams they really are– they
contain neither truth nor purpose, in the end, despite what Sydney stated.

Marlowe points out again and again in conversation with the wise (if evil) demons
and devils the nature of hell. He states it quite simply that "All places be hell that is
 2

not heaven." (V, 125) Of earth, Mephastophilis asserts that "this is hell, nor am I out
of it." (III, 76) Both these spite the humanistic love of the world, or as Abram's
Glossary puts it:
...[Renaissance humanists] tended to emphasize the values achievable by human
beings in this world, and to minimize the earlier Christian emphasis on innate
corruption and on the ideals of asceticism and of withdrawal from this world in a
preoccupation with the world hereafter. (p. 83)

Christopher Marlowe was not a Humanist, as evidenced by how clearly the tragedy
that was Dr. Faustus exemplified the downfall of a humanist and reinforced themes
which conflicted with the basic tenets presented by Renaissance Humanism. If this
reading is to be believed, the man was in fact violently and intelligently opposed to it.
It is difficult to imagine a more effective and thorough attack on the mentality and
methodology of the humanist than Dr. Faustus.

Casting Doubt in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

by William M. Hamlin

He that casts all doubts shall never be resolved.

English Renaissance proverb

It will come as news to no one that Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus can be and
has been deemed a skeptical play. [1] More than a century ago, the Victorian scholar
J. R. Green characterized Marlowe's outlook as a "daring scepticism" and claimed that
Faustus was "the first dramatic attempt to touch the great problem of the relations of
man to the unseen world, to paint the power of doubt in a temper leavened with
superstition." [2] Fifty years later, Una Ellis-Fermor called Doctor Faustus "perhaps
the most notable Satanic play in literature." [3] And the varied testimony of Marlowe's
contemporaries--Robert Greene, Richard Baines, Thomas Kyd, and Richard
Cholmeley among them--strongly suggests that both the man and his writings could
be considered iconoclastic and profoundly irreverent: both susceptible to charges of
"monstruous opinions," "vile hereticall conceipts," even "diabolical atheism." [4]
True, the circumstances in which these allegations were sometimes made force us to
question their accuracy; y et, there still exists an extraordinary congruence of
contemporary attitude about Marlowe--about what we might call his skepticism. But
what in fact are we saying when we say an early modern writer is skeptical? In what
senses does this word carry meaning with respect to the dramatic compositions of
Marlowe or his contemporaries? How can we allege, without being utterly vapid, that
Doctor Faustus exhibits a pervasive skepticism? How, if at all, may we infer skeptical
tenets from dramatic texts? What, if any, are the skeptical paradigms inherent in
Marlowe's great tragedy?

These are the questions I wish to consider. And, as a means of approaching them, I
would like first of all briefly to examine the enabling premises and methodological
strategies of the best-known current commentator on skepticism and English
Renaissance tragedy: Stanley Cavell. Cavell has not written on Marlowe--indeed his
 3

dramatic criticism has focused almost exclusively on Shakespeare--but it is

nonetheless worth our while to attend to his programmatic statements regarding what
he calls the "skeptical problematic." [5] He claims, for instance, that Shakespeare
"engage[s] the depth of the philosophical preoccupations of his culture," and he adds
that his guiding "intuition" about Shakespeare is that "the advent of skepticism as
manifested in [Rene] Descartes's Meditations is already in full existence" in "the great
tragedies" of the early seventeenth century. [6] But these two statements would appear
to be incompatible, for while it may be true that Shakespeare anticipates the
hyperbolic doubt of Descartes, it is clearly anachronistic to characterize that doubt as
a "philosophical preoccupation" of the first decade of Britain's seventeenth century.
Not that doubt did not exist, or that epistemological questions were not asked--far
from it. But the forms of philosophical skepticism to which Shakespeare and Marlowe
could have been exposed were principally those derived from the Pyrrhonian and
Academic paradigms of antiquity. [7] Indeed, Marlowe quotes, in the 1604 quarto of
Doctor Faustus, a phrase lifted directly from Sextus Empiricus's Adversus
Mathematicos (Against the Mathematicians), a work readily available at Cambridge
during Marlowe's student days, and undoubtedly also circulating in London at that
time. [8] And Sextus's principal champion in the late sixteenth century, Michel de
Montaigne, was indisputably read by Shakespeare. [9] Hence Cavell's implicit
diminution of the influence of Montaigne--not to mention his complete neglect of
many other contemporary writers through whose works classical skepticis m was
channeled into early modern intellectual life--is fundamentally ahistorical. [10]

Cavell writes that "the skeptical problematic I have in mind is given its philosophical
refinement in Descartes's way of raising the questions of God's existence and of the
immortality of the soul," and he goes on to assert that the "issue" posed in
Shakespeare's tragedies is not, "as with earlier skepticism, how to conduct oneself
best in an uncertain world; the issue suggested is how to live at all in a groundless
world. Our skepticism is a function of our now illimitable desire." [11] Several
responses are in order here. First, while Cavell's characterizations of Pyrrhonian and
modern skepticism are essentially accurate, it remains true that Descartes is ultimately
less remarkable for his doubt than for the edifice of certainty his doubt enables him to
build. That is, Descartes embraces "a groundless world" only to reject it; his
skepticism, however radical, is always already an instrument in the discovery of truth,
and, when coupled with an appropriate method of investigation, allows for the
perpetuation of dogmatic philosophy. [12] Second, Pyrrhonian skepticism has the
potential to be as radical a form of doubt as that employed by Descartes: witness, for
instance, Sextus's trenchant interrogation of the existence of gods in book 3 of his
Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes (Outlines of Pyrrhonism). [13] While no one in pre-
Cartesian Europe fully exploits Pyrrhonism's inherent potential for doubt, this in itself
does not invalidate the possibility. Montaigne, for instance, implicitly questions the
existence of the external world in a passage late in his Apologie de Raimond Sebond
(1580, 1588)--and this despite Cavell's claim that such questioning in philosophical
tracts begins only with Descartes. [14] Moreover, the comments on philosophical
skepticism in Philippe du Plessis-Mornay's De la Verite de la Religion Chrestienne
(1581) indicate the extent to which Pyrrhonism's potential for rendering uncertain the
existence of the Judeo-Christian God could trouble late-sixteenth-century
intellectuals. Mornay writes, in the 158 7 English translation prepared by Sir Philip
Sidney and Arthur Golding, that in antiquity.
 4

There were in deede a kinde of Philosophers called Scepticks (that is to say Dowters)
which did rather suspend their Judgement concerning the Godhead, then call it in
question. But yet it ought to suffize us, that they be the selfsame which deny al
Sciences, yea even those which consist in Demonstration; and which professe
themselves to doubt of the things which they see and feele; in so much that they doubt
whether they themselves have any beeing or no. But yet for all that, let us see after
what maner these kind of people do reason, Against the thing which the world
preacheth, which Nations worship, and which wise men wonder at; these folke say at
a worde for all, how shall wee beleeve that there is a God, sith we see him not? [15]
Mornay attempts to render skepticism innocuous by suggesting that its interrogation
of God's existence amounts merely to what we might call the doubting Thomas topos:
that we forgo belief until we see, that we demand "ocular proof." But he does this
only by deliberately occluding Pyrrhonism's potent considerations of the criteria by
which judgments are leveled, considerations widely dispersed through Sextus's
Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes and sharply noted, for example, by Montaigne. [16] And
Mornay's frequent reliance, elsewhere in the book, on standard tactics of skeptical
argumentation suggests the extent to which his customary habits of thought are
inflected by familiarity with Pyrrhonism's fundamental attitudes. [17] Indeed, Mornay
explicitly acknowledges the value of open-minded inquiry when he writes, in his
"Preface to the Reader," that "foredeemings and foresetled opinions doo bring in
bondage the reason of them that have best wits; wheras notwithstanding, it belongeth
not to the will to overrule the wit, but to the wit to guide the will." [18]

Mornay's position vis-a-vis skepticism is thus complex: like most devout sixteenth-
century Christians, Protestant or Catholic, he sees radical Pyrrhonian attitudes as
misguided, even laughable, but he is simultaneously aware of the inherent potency of
skeptical objections. Indeed, the considerable time he devotes to rejecting and
ridiculing them (and even, occasionally, to deploying them) indicates their formative
power in his outlook as a religious polemicist. And Mornay was widely read in
England: the Sidney-Golding translation was reprinted in 1592, 1604, and 1617, and
many contemporary writers appear to have studied it carefully, among them John
Florio Fulke Greville Sir John Davies, Lucius Cary, William Chillingworth, John
Earle, and Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon--each of whom played a role in the
complex history of ancient skepticism's reception in Tudor and Stuart Britain.

In short, allegations such as that of Cavell about Pyrrhonism's intrinsic weakness as a

means of investigating metaphysical questions have tended toward exaggeration; they
have had more to do with explicit early modern deployments of skeptical thought than
with the implicit unease about skepticism we may infer from the incessant stream of
early modern refutations. From 1562 forward, after all, European intellectuals had
ready access--thanks to Henri Estienne's lucid and scholarly Latin translation of the
Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes--to Sextus's concise presentation of Pyrrhonian thought,
where, among other things, skepticism is defined as "an ability to set out oppositions
among things which appear and are thought of in any way at all, an ability by which,
because of the equipollence (isostheneia) in the opposed objects and accounts, we
come first to suspension of judgement (epoche) and afterwards to tranquillity
(ataraxta)." [19] They had access, in other words, to a closely argued treatise offering
the position that all mental apprehensions--perceptions, ratiocinations, memories,
judgments, beliefs--are subject to doubt, and specifically to the sort of doubt
generated by the technique of opposition, which, according to Sextus, leads to the
 5

impasse of equal persuasiveness. Thus, despite Pyrrhonism's advocacy of judgmental

suspension and subsequent nescience, the rupture between ancient and modern
skepticism is not as severe as it is sometimes made out to be--a fact which indirectly
strengthens Cavell's case, though it diminishes his sense of Shakespeare's prescience.
[20] But when Cavell adds that "skepticism is a function of our now illimitable
desire," he severs himself inecoverably from classical skepticism. Desire is
presupposed here--it serves as a given in this essentially Freudian formulation--and a
"groundless world," a world deprived of the "assurance" of God's existence and
providential supervision, allows desire to be "illimitable." Skepticism, then, becomes
a "function or expression" of desire, a consequ ence of a prior discovery: and it
manifests itself as a "banishment of the world." [21] Moreover, skepticism for Cavell
is not merely doubt, but doubt coupled with denial and disappointment--a supposition
of the worst. [22]

Yet, if there is anything we can say with accuracy about epistemological discussion in
Marlowe and Shakespeare's day, it is that doubt is sharply distinguished from both
assent and dissent. As John Donne writes in the early 1590s, "the Sceptique which
doubts all is more contentious then eyther the Dogmatique which affirmes, or
Academique which denyes all." [23] In the anonymous treatise The Scepticlc,
composed around 1590 and sometimes attributed to Sir Walter Ralegh, we read that
"The Sceptick doth neither affirm nor deny any position, but doubteth of it, and
opposeth his reasons against that which is affirmed or denied to justify his not
consenting." [24] And, in the 1593 "Note" on Marlowe's "damnable judgment of
religion," Richard Baines claims that Marlowe quoted "contrarieties out of the
Scripture"--an allegation which, even if false, shows that Baines knew the subversive
potential of the Pyrrhonian tactic of establishing a clash of authoritative opinion. [25]
Clearly, the skepticism which Marlowe and S hakespeare can reasonably be supposed
to have encountered- skepticism derived from Pyrrhonism and its Academic
incarnations, thoroughly laid out by Sextus and Cicero, and channeled through
Diogenes Laertius, Galen, Augustine, Erasmus, Vives, Gianfrancesco Pico della
Mirandola, Montaigne, Francisco Sanches, and others--was committed not only to
suspension of judgment in the face of diverse opinion and belief, but to careful
discrimination between various states of cognition. It was an antidote rather than a
substitute for dogmatism, and it promoted the avoidance of rash judgment and a
heightened sensitivity to epistemological questions, distinctions, and anxieties. "The
profession of the Phyrrhonians," writes Montaigne in Florio's 1603 translation of the
Apologie de Raimond Sebond, "is ever to waver, to doubt and to enquire: never to be
assured of any thing, nor to take any warrant of himself." [26]

Still, in spite of all this, it would seem that Cavell's understanding of skepticism might
be remarkably fruitful for a reading of Doctor Faustus--more fruitful, perhaps, than
for most of Shakespeare's tragedies. For what character in English Renaissance drama
better exemplifies desire and appetitiveness than Faustus? What character more
thoroughly banishes the world in order to replace it with the solipsistic trappings of
his fantasy-a fantasy that "will receive no object," but "ruminates on necromantic
skill" (I.i. 106-7)? Nonetheless, I argue that despite this apparent consonance of
Marlowe's play and Cavell's skepticism, in fact Doctor Faustus reveals a more
complex interaction of doubt and desire, a paradoxical reciprocity between the two
that hints, in my view, at genuine "philosophical preoccupations" of the culture in
which Marlowe and Shakespeare lived. For common to the quartos of 1604 (the A-
 6

text) and 1616 (the B-text)--and despite their significant differences-is a series of
cyclical trajectories wherein Faustus's habit of casting doubt is preempted by an
experience of euphoric ravishment--ravishment that yields in turn to new casting of
doubt. [27] Faustus's desire to be resolved "of all ambiguities" is frequently expressed
and frequently satisfied during the play, its representation often marked by sexual
metaphor (I.i.82); but, appropriately enough, the resolution figured as sexual
consummation only engenders new ambiguities. [28] Like the planets about which
Faustus inquires, doubt and desire exhibit a "double motion" (II.iii.51); their forward
and backward movements serve as a means of depicting Faustus's psychomachia.
Indeed, to draw upon another of the play's astronomical metaphors, desire and doubt
are "mutually folded in each others' orb," locked in a symbiotic but incestuous
embrace (II.iii.39). And Marlowe thereby explores both the genesis of doubt and the
relation of doubt to belief, two cynosures of epistemological investigation in early
modern Europe, and authentic preoccupations of int ellectual life in Marlowe and
Shakespeare's Britain.

Consider, for example, the ways in which familiar and distinctly Faustian attitudes
habitually succeed one another. The cavalier dismissal of conventional truth so
prominent early in the play, and embedded in such claims as "This word 'damnation'
terrifies not [me]," gives way first to involuntary casting of doubt, as in "Was not that
Lucifer an angel once?" and then to ravished contemplation (I.iii.60, I.iii.66): [29]

Now that I have obtained what I desire,

I'll live in speculation of this art
Till Mephistopheles return again.
(I.iii.114-6) [30]

Later in the play, when doubts merge more fully with what the English Faust Book
calls "godly motions," and when resolution of ambiguity becomes almost
indistinguishable from presumption of damnation, Faustus undergoes still more rapid
shifts of mind. [31] "What art thou," he asks himself when the Horse-Courser leaves,
"but a man condemned to die?" (IV.i. 139). Yet within four lines he adds, "Tush!
Christ did call the thief upon the cross; / Then rest thee, Faustus, quiet in conceit"
(IV.i.143-4). In this latter and astonishingly suggestive line, the "conceit" to which
Faustus proposes to yield is the converse of the "speculation" to which he earlier
inclined--yet still a mental state tinged with sexual innuendo. Indeed, the "unjust
presumption" of which Faustus later accuses himself is presumption only from the
demonic perspective (V.i.71). We thus witness a series of Satanic inversions as the
play progresses--inversions that steer our attention toward the sharp distinctions
among Faustus's mental dispositio ns. [32]

If Faustus's cavalier rejection of dogma is concentrated in the play's first two acts, and
his presumptuous (though sympathetic) self-condemnation in the last three, his
wavering is distributed throughout. Often expressed interrogatively, it serves as the
basis of some of the play's most memorable passages: "What might the staying of my
blood portend?" (II.i.64); "Why streams it not, that I may write afresh?" (II.i.66); "Be
I a devil, yet God may pity me" (II.iii.15); "See, see where Christ's blood streams in
the firmament! / One drop would save my soul, haifa drop" (V.ii.78-9). Indeed, the
very presence of the Good and Evil Angels can be read not only as an externalization
of Faustus's cerebral discord, but as a manifestation of the skeptic's experience of
 7

opposition -- of mutually exclusive testimony -- so heavily stressed in Sextus

Empiricus, Montaigne, and other sources. [33] And, if Faustus's customary response
to such opposition is not to suspend judgment in Pyrrhonian fashion, but to
"extinguish clean / These thoughts" and "glut the longing of [his] heart's desire," he is
scarcely alone in early modem Europe (V.i.83-6). [34] From the strict Pyrrhonian
perspective, in fact, his choice appears no more aberrant than Montaigne's fideistic
embrace of the Roman church. [35] Fictional character and historical personage both
participate in a key vector of the standard Pyrrhonian trajectory, only to abandon it in
what serves, during the sixteenth century, as a principal paradigm of the reception and
appropriation of ancient skepticism: a rush to judgment reconfigured as the inevitable
outcome of an experience of conflicting opinion. [36]

But perhaps the best example of the succession and inter-penetration of characteristic
Faustian attitudes may be found in the soliloquy that begins act II:

Now, Faustus, must thou needs be damned,

And canst thou not be saved.
What boots it then to think of God or heaven?
Away with such vain fancies and despair!
Despair in God and trust in Beelzebub.
Now go not backward. No, Faustus, be resolute.
Why waverest thou? O, something soundeth in mine ears:
"Abjure this magic, turn to God again!"
Ay, and Faustus will turn to God again.
To God? He loves thee not.
The God thou servest is thine own appetite,
Wherein is fixed the love of Beelzebub.
To him I'll build an altar and a church,
And offer lukewarm blood of new-born babes.
(II.i.1-14)

The first six and a half lines of this speech employ the rhetorical technique of second-
person self-address -- a technique upon which Marlowe frequently relies in the play,
particularly in those speeches where heavy emphasis is placed upon Faustus's inner
turmoil. And, while I agree with W.W. Greg, Michael Keefer, David Bevington, Eric
Rasmussen, and other editors that the question mark at the end of line 2 in the A-text
is probably intended not as an interrogative but as an exclamation point--thereby
contributing to the emphatic statement of Faustus's present condition--even if the
mark indicates interrogation, the resulting rhetorical question only adds to the
development of the speaker's persona. [37] It is a persona characterized by
confidence, keen observation, frequent resort to the imperative mood and, above all,
presumption. He presumes to know Faustus's state of imminent and irrevocable
damnation, and thereby constructs a superficially logical critique of Faustus's
tendency to cast doubts, to turn h is thoughts toward God: "What boots it then to think
of God or heaven?" This is followed by the peremptory "Away with such vain fancies
and despair! / Despair in God and trust in Beelzebub"--a command making it clear
that within the implied mental world of this persona, thoughts of God are mere
"fantasies" when conceived by an abandoned soul, and should be replaced with acts of
"trust" [38]: specifically, trust in demonic beings such as Beelzebub, who, like
Mephistopheles and Lucifer--but unlike God and Christ--do in fact appear during the
 8

play. Unstated but implicit is the understanding that it does "boot"--it does avail--to
think of and trust in demons. Moreover, such thoughts and trust are metaphorically
associated with forward movement, unlike the wavering and potential backsliding
associated with the mind that turns toward God. [39]

Midway through line 7, and responding to the question, a first-person voice

emerges--"O, something soundeth in mine ears"--and in line 8 this "something" is
represented in still another voice, a terse, disembodied voice cast in the imperative:
"Abjure this magic, turn to God again!" In line 9, the first-person voice returns, this
time speaking in the future tense: "Ay, and Faustus will turn to God again" [my
emphasis]. As the first indication of resolve and fixed purpose in the soliloquy, this
line stands out dramatically, demanding comparison with the second such moment of
resolve, that found in lines 13-4. But the line is also tainted. Despite its mood of
compliance and humility, despite its presentation of a "godly motion," it also
substitutes the protagonist's name for the expected first-person pronoun. The line, in
short, has been infiltrated by the second-person voice's habit of self-address, and the
stated resolve is thereby subtly undermined. We have a foreshadowing of disaster.

Faustus, then, cannot help but engender "godly motions." And when he assures
himself, a moment later, "Thou art safe; / Cast no more doubts," he merely stipulates a
condition of psychic stasis that has already been and will continue to be contradicted
by his behavior (II.i.25-6). [41] He engages, that is, in magical thinking, assuming a
causal relation between speech and reality, hoping thereby to stave off his implicit
recognition that from the Satanic point of view, casting doubt is dangerous--it
amounts to "unjust presumption." But inseparable from this recognition is the idea
that doubting--wavering--is valuable, valuable precisely because it functions as
temporary detachment from dogmatic positions, thus enabling the possibility of
change, and of growth. One of the best expressions of this idea in early modern
English drama may be found in Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam, composed
perhaps a decade and a half after Marlowe's death. There, in the Chorus concluding
act II, we encounter a sustained criti que of partiality in judgment:

In line 10, the second-person voice reassumes control, and with characteristic
presumption informs the voice of line 9 that God "loves thee not." Lines 11-2 follow
up this assertion by transforming, through mere allegation, a partial truth into an
unqualified truth: "The God thou servest is thine own appetite, / Wherein is fixed the
love of Beelzebub." The former admonition to "trust in Beelzebub" has now
metamorphosed into the affirmation that the first-person Faustus has a fixed "love" of
this devil. And the affirmation is tacitly assented to in lines 13-4, even though the
lines can be read with equal legitimacy as emanating from the first- or the second-
person Faustus. The use of the first-person pronoun in line 13 suggests the former
possibility, and certainly this reading is attractive for the additional reason that, as in
line 9, here again we encounter the future tense, this time in a defiant and grotesque
resolution to "build an altar and a church, / And offer lukewarm blood of new-born
babes." But i t may be that this is rather the second-person Faustus, appropriating the
first-person pronoun in an attempt to achieve a rhetorical integration of the self that is
so evidently divided throughout the speech. If this is the case, then the pronoun
appropriation we witness here mirrors the infiltration of self-address we witnessed in
line 9. Either way, a clear parallel is drawn to line 9, and, in retrospect, we can see
that both resolves might be characterized as "vain fancies"--fantasies of future action
 9

that cannot possibly ensue as long as Faustus endures the inner conflict here depicted.
On the one hand, Faustus desires an intimacy with God that can never be achieved in
conjunction with the second-person voice's presumption. On the other hand, he seeks
a defiant and definitive rejection of God that can never occur as long as the first-
person voice is able to conceive the words of line 8: "Abjure this magic, turn to God
again!" Indeed, line 14's grotesque resolve to sacrifice infants may serve, additionally
, as a metaphorical attempt to bleed out the vitality of such cunning cerebral births as
those of lines 8-9. But the attempt is futile, for as the Prologue has informed us,
Faustus is "swoll'n with cunning of a self-conceit" (line 20): pregnant, that is, with
such cunning, and able--as the play abundantly demonstrates--to conceive this
cunning, and deliver it, time and again. [40]

Our ears and hearts are apt to hold for good

That we ourselves do most desire to be:
And then we drown objections in the flood
Of partiality, 'tis that we see
That makes false rumours long with credit pass'd,
Though they like rumours must conclude at last.
The greatest part of us, prejudicate,
With wishing Herod's death do hold it true:
The being once deluded doth not bate
The credit to a better likelihood due.
Those few that wish it not, the multitude
Do carry headlong, so they doubts conclude. [42]

Desire, in short, curtails doubt; the wavering that can lead to truth, hence to growth, is
usually displaced by the precipitous rush to judgment practiced by what Cary's
daughter and biographer calls "too speedy resolvers." [43] And Faustus, of course, is
one of these. But Marlowe makes it clear that the ravishment of resolution is always
only temporary. Casting doubt is as fundamental to Faustus as resolving ambiguity; it
seems a natural outgrowth or consequence of resolution, and perhaps points to the
ultimately unsatisfactory stasis of dogmatic conclusion." [44]

Marlowe's tragedy thus offers a skeptical commentary on the human propensity for
the static, the human preference for being over becoming. Faustus wants to perform
miracles, to do the wondrous, to transcend human frailty, fallibility, uncertainty; he
wants to "gain a deity" (I.i.65). And all this is associated with resolving ambiguity.
But what he learns is that this intransitive desire of his--desire that takes as its object
knowledge or sex, music or travel, but never finds true satisfaction--this desire not
only fails to "extinguish clean" his doubts, but breeds them: cannot exist without
them. Hence, despite the anatomy of skepticism offered by Cavell, we cannot
confidently say that desire precedes doubt in Doctor Faustus. The transgressive
dismissal of conventional truth so evident in the play cannot be read simply as a
consequence of Faustus's preexistent desire to engage in the occult. Nor, conversely,
can the wish to be a powerful magician, a "demigod," be read simply as an outcome
of doubt--a solipsi stic refurnishing of a now-vacant space (B.I.i.61). Rather, the two
impulses are reciprocal. In much the same way that fantasies become truths for
Faustus even as conventional truths metamorphose into fantasies, Faustian doubt and
desire coexist and presuppose one another. And, while Marlowe is probably not
suggesting that skeptical detachment is the solution to the potentially tragic dilemma
 10

of "forward wits" like Faustus, he clearly presents a dramatic scenario wherein his
protagonist follows a quasi-Pyrrhonian trajectory in cleansing his mind of dogma only
to reinscribe it--compulsively--with the fast-fading signature of his desire
(Epiogue.7). The trajectory itself represents one of the principal paradigms of early
modern Europe's reception of ancient skepticism: an appropriation--manifest also in
Montaigne--in which the vacuum created through doubt invites its own elimination,
thereby initiating an endless cycle of evacuation and substitution. There is no question
that this skeptical paradigm constitutes a distortion of Pyrrhonian thought as
represented by Sextus Empiricus; but equally, there is no question that the
Renaissance understands it as a form of skepticism, a basic skeptical paradigm. To
contextualize Doctor Faustus within early modem skepticism is thus to discover that
its central figure experiences a mental life that corresponds with remarkable fidelity to
what is perhaps the major sixteenth-century misconstruction and subsequent
deployment of Pyrrhonism.

Doctor Faustus is a skeptical play not in advocacy but in depiction: not in proposing
an attitude of detachment but in portraying passionate attachment and the attendant,
enormously sympathetic self-destruction it can bring on. And the brilliant irony here
is that Faustus's fundamental alternative--the choice he rejects--also constitutes a form
of attachment: contentment with a particular shape of resolution, and thus, tacitly,
with an abandonment of inquiry. But Faustus recognizes that what modernity might
call "normative behavior" in the world always demands a closing down of doubt and
desire, a consistent tracking of resolution, an acquiescence that in diminishing one
diminishes all. Faustus rejects this capitulation, aware both that it amounts to a falling
short of human potential and that in so doing he renders his life incompatible with
conventional earthly existence. We might say that for Faustus, despite his recurrent
emphasis upon the tangible, the logical, and the here-and-now, believing is seeing
precisely as often as seeing is believing.

William M. Hamlin, associate professor of English at Idaho State University and

author of The Image of America in Montaigne. Spenser. and Shakespeare (1995). is
finishing a book entitled "Fools of Nature: Skepticism and English Renaissance
Tragedy."

NOTES

This essay is an expanded version of a paper delivered at Cambridge University in

June 1998 at the Fourth International Conference on Christopher Marlowe. I wish to
express my gratitude to David Bevington, Patrick Cheney. David Fuller, R. J.
Hankinson, Theresa Jordan, John Kijinski, and Elisabeth Leedham-Green.

(1.) The epigraph is taken from Morris P. Tilley. A Dictionary of Proverbs in England
in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press,
1950) D571: see also N268, N276.

(2.) J R. Green. A Short History of the English People, 4 vols. (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1895), 2:863-4. Quotations from Christopher Marlowe's play are drawn
from the new Revels edition: Doctor Faustus, A- and B-texts (1604, 1616), ed. David
Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester UK: Manchester Univ. Press, 1993).
 11

Unless otherwise noted, I quote from the text of 1604. Hereafter, citations will be
made parenthetically within the text.

(3.) Una Ellis-Fermor, The Frontiers of Drama, 2d edn. (London: Methuen, 1964), p.
142. In addition to the work of Ellis-Fermor, I have found the following studies of
Faustus particularly valuable: Richard Waswo, "Damnation, Protestant Style:
Macbeth. Faustus, and Christian Tragedy." JMRS 4, 1 (Winter 1974): 63-99;
Constance B. Kuriyama, "Dr. Greg and Doctor Faustus: The Supposed Originality of
the 1616 Text." ELR 5 (1975): 171-97; Sara M. Deats, "Doctor Faustus: From
Chapbook to Tragedy," EL WIU3 (1976): 3-16: Edward Snow, "Marlowe's Doctor
Faustus and the Ends of Desire," in Two Renaissance Mythmakers, ed. Alvin Kernan
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 70-110: Joel B. Altman, The Tudor
Play of Mind (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978): Michael Warren, "Doctor
Faustus: The Old Man and the Text," ELR 11, 2 (Spring 1981): 111-47; Michael
Keefer, "Verbal Magic and the Problem of the A and B Texts of Doctor Faustus,"
JEGP 82, 3 (July 1983): 324-46: Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy (Chi cago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 109-19: Keefer, "History and the Canon: The Case
of Doctor Faustus," UTQ 56, 4 (Summer 1987): 498-522; C. L. Barber, Creating
Elizabethan Tragedy, ed. Richard P. Wheeler (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988).
pp. 87-130: Leah S. Marcus, "Textual Indeterminacy and Ideological Difference: The
Case of Doctor Faustus," RenD 20 (1989): 1-29: G. M. Pinciss, "Marlowe's
Cambridge Years and the Writing of Doctor Faustus," SEL 33, 2 (Spring 1993): 249-
64: and Patrick Cheney, Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto
Press, 1997), pp. 190-220.

(4.) For Thomas Kyd's two letters and the Richard Baines note, see Douglas Cole,
Christopher Marlowe and the Renaissance of Tragedy (Westport CT: Praeger, 1995),
pp. 155-8. For Greene's Groatsworth of Wit and the two informers' reports on Richard
Cholmeley, see the excerpts provided in Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1992), pp. 42-7 and 277-9. See also John Bakeless, The Tragicall
History of Christopher Marlowe, 2 vols. (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press,
1942), vol. 1, chap. 5; Bakeless (albeit rather vaguely) associates Marlowe with
skepticism (p. 128). And see Nicholas Davidson, "Christopher Marlowe and
Atheism," in Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture, ed. Darryll
Grantley and Peter Roberts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), pp. 129-47.

(5.) Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge:

Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 1, 3.

(6.) Cavell, pp. 2, 3.

(7.) My discussion here is based on the belief that the revival of Greek skepticism in
sixteenth-century Europe impinged upon English intellectual life rather more than
historians of philosophy have acknowledged, though somewhat less than literary
critics often assume--and in highly defined and restricted ways. See Richard H.
Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press. 1979); Charles B. Schmitt, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola
(1469-1533) and His Critique of Aristotle (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1967); Schmitt,
Cicero Scepticus: A Study of the Influence of the Academica in the Renaissance (The
Hague: Nijhoff, 1972); Schmitt, "The Rediscovery of Ancient Skepticism in Modem
 12

Times," in The Skeptical Tradition, ed. Myles Burnyeat (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1983), pp. 225-51; Popkin and Schmitt, eds., Scepticism from the Reformation
to the Enlightenment (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1987); Luciano Floridi, "The
Diffusion of Sextus Empiricus's Works in the Ren aissance," Journal of the History of
Ideas 56, 1 (1995): 63-85; Lisa Jardine, "Lorenzo Valla: Academic Skepticism and the
New Humanist Dialectic," in Skeptical Tradition, pp. 253-86; Floridi, Sextus
Empiricius (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, forthcoming); and Charles Larmore,
'Scepticism," in Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Daniel
Garber and Michael Ayers, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998),
2:1145-92.

(8.) Faustus A.I.i. 12. The phrase, On kai me on (attributed by Sextus to Gorgias of
Leontini), derives from Adversus Logicos 1.66, which corresponds to Adversus
Mathematicos 7.66. Adversus Mat hematicos was translated into Latin by Gentian
Hervet and published in 1569. Various copies of this folio are known to

have existed in England during the late sixteenth century: the main library at
Cambridge held a copy no later than 1583, and Andrew Perne, Master of Peterhouse,
also owned a copy at the time of his death in 1589--a copy probably acquired during
the 1570s. See Elisabeth LeedhamGreen and David McKitterick, "A Catalogue of
Cambridge University Library, 1583," in Books and Collectors 1200-1700, ed. James
P. Carley and Cohn G. C. Tite (London: British Library, 1997), pp. 153-235. Dr. John
Dee held a copy of the 1569 Sextus folio in his London library by the time he
completed his inventory of September 1583; see John Dee's Library Catalogue, ed.
Julian Roberts and Andrew G. Watson (London: Bibliographical S ociety, 1990], item
1790. I have recently discovered that London's Middle Temple possesses a copy of the
1569 Sextus--a copy inscribed by John Delaberlel, who entered the Temple in 1575/76
and resided there until his death in 1607. The phrase On kal me on was also available
in a Greek manuscript of Adversus Logicos that the Oxford scholar John Wolley
translated into Latin sometime between 1553 and 1563; see Schmitt, "John Woliey
(ca. 1530-96) and the first Latin translation of Sextus Empiricus, adversus logicos I,"
in The Sceptical Mode in Modern Philosophy, ed. Richard A. Watson and James E.
Force (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1988). pp. 61-70.

(9.) For Shakespeare's knowledge of Michel de Montaigne -- besides the famous

borrowing from "Des cannibales" in The Tempest -- see, for example the Arden
editions of Hamlet (1982) and King Lear (1997).

(10.) Other writers include Erasmus (Praise of Folly [1509] and the 1515 letter to
Martin Dorp]; Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (whose Examen Vanitatis [1520]
was read in England by John Rainolds and John Dee, among others); Henry Cornelius
Agrippa (De Incertitudine et Vanitate [1530]); Juan Luls Vives (De Disciplinis
[1531]); Omer Talon (Academia [1547]); Peter Ramus (Animadversionum
Aristotelicorum [1548]); Guy de Brues (Dialogues contre les Nouveaux Academiciens
[1557]); Henri Estienne (preface to Sextus's Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes [1562]);
Gentian Hervet (preface to Sextus's Adversus Mathematicos [15691); Pedro de
Valencia (Academica [1596]); and Pierre Charron (De la Sagesse [1601]). Cavell's
suggestion that Pyrrhonism never considers how to live "in a groundless world"
assumes that Pyrrhonism in early modern Europe may be fully equated with
 13

Montaigne's typical deployment of Pyrrhonism -- essentially a Christian appropriation

of skepticism as presented by Sextus.

(11.) Cavell, p. 3.

(12.) Compare to Larmore, pp. 1164-5.

(13.) See Sextus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 3.2-12. esp. 3.6 ("Even granting that god is
indeed conceivable, It is necessary to suspend judgement about whether gods exist or
not, so far as the Dogmatists are concerned. For it is not clear that gods exist") and
3.11 ("it is inapprehensible whether there are gods").

{14.) Cavell, pp. 3-4; Larmore, p. 1148; Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. Pierre Villey, rev.
V.-L. Saulnier, 3 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), 2:601 (for an
English rendering see An Apology for Raymond Sebond, trans. M. A. Screech
[Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987] pp. 185-6]. Montaigne in fact shows several
indications of envisioning a more Cartesian form of doubt than that with which he is
usually credited. He claims in the Apology, for instance, that "We do not doubt much,
because commonly received notions are assayed by nobody. We never try to find out
whether the roots are sound. We argue about the branches" (Screech. p. 114; Villey, p.
539). He adds later that "We wake asleep; we sleep awake ... Our rational souls accept
notions [fantasies] and opinions produced during sleep, conferring on activities in our
dreams the same approbation and authority as on our waking dreams; why should we
therefore not doubt whether our thinking and acting are but another dream; our
waking some other specie s of sleep?" (Screech, p. 180; Villey, p. 596). This doubt is
not as radical as that offered by the Cartesian hypothesis of the malin genie, but one
wonders nevertheless whether Descartes may not have been prodded by these
passages. It is also worth noting that Joseph Mede, at Cambridge in 1602/3,
underwent a skeptical crisis after reading Sextus, and his doubts extended to the
existence of the external world. As his contemporary John Worthington later wrote,
"not long after his entrance into Philosophical studies he was for some time disquieted
with Scepticisme, that troublesome disease of the Pyrrhonian School. For lighting
upon a Book in a neighbor-Scholar's Chamber, (whether it were Sextus Empiricus, or
some other upon the same Subject, is not now remembered) he began upon the
perusal of it to move strange Questions to himself, and even to doubt whether the
whole Frame of things, as it appears to us, were any more then a mere Phantasm"
("The Life of the Reverend and most Learned Joseph Mede, B.D." in The Works of
Joseph Mede (London, 1664), P. iii; quotation truncated: cf. Popkin, History, pp. 66,
265). Mede soon recovered from his malady, but years later still quizzed his pupils at
Christ's College by asking them, "What Doubts have you met in your studies to day?"
(Worthington, p. vii).

(15.) Philippe du Plessis-Mornay. A Woorke Concerning the Trewnesse of the

Christian Religion (London, 1587: Delmar NY: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1976), p. 12.

(16.) For example, Sextus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.21-4, 1.114-7, and 2.14-79; and
Montaigne, Apology, e.g., pp. 185-6 (Screech trans.).

(17.) For example, A Woorke, pp. 243, 247-8, 256-7, 357, 475.
 14

(18.) A Woorke. sig. iir.

(19.) Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 1.8:I rely here on the recent English translation by Julia
Annas and Jonathan Barnes (Outlines of Scepticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1994]), p. 4. Martha Nussbaum, in a valuable discussion of Pyrrhonism, claims
that "the Modes and Tropes, as reported by Sextus, contain no restriction of subject
matter, but range very widely over many areas in which pupils can be expected to
have beliefs" (The Therapy of Desire [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994], p.
288). And R. J. Hankinson, author of The Sceptics (London: Routledge, 1995), writes
that "anything can be a subject for Pyrrhonian scepticism, provided it has a certain
theoretical density" (personal communication, 1998). See also Jonathan Barnes, "The
Beliefs of a Pyrrhonist," Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 29
(1982), pp. 2, 12. Thomas Nashe, in Christs Teares Over Jerusalem (1593), asserts
that the "soule-benummed" unbelievers of his day "followe the Pironicks, whose
position and opinion it is tha t there is no Hel or misery but opinion. Impudently they
persist in it, that the late discovered Indians are able to shew antiquities thousands
before Adam" (The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 5 vols. [London:
A. H. Bullen, 1904-10], 2:115-6; also, 1:172). Nashe, one of the Elizabethan readers
of the English translation of Sextus, clearly associates Pyrrhonism both with atheism
and the pre-Adamite theory; see my essay, "On Continuities between Skepticism and
Early Ethnography; Or, Montaigne's Providential Diversity," SCJ 31, 2 (July 2000):
361-79.

(20.) Popkin and Schmitt have both discussed continuities between ancient and
modern skepticism. Schmitt, for instance, writes that "it is my belief that the recovery
and the reassimilation of the ancient writings were the primary factor in the evolution
of the modern skeptical attitude" ("Rediscovery," p. 228).

(21.) Cavell, p. 5. In "Macbeth Appalled" (1993), Cavell writes that over the years he
has "addressed the issue of philosophical skepticism as an expression of the human
wish to escape the bounds or bonds of the human, if not from above then from below"
(The Cavell Reader, ed. Stephen Mulhall (Cambridge MA: Blackwell, 1996), p. 203).

(22.) Writing on Othello, for instance, Cavell speaks of the "progress from the
completeness of Othello's love to the perfection of his doubt" (Disowning Knowledge,
p. 128): later he alludes to Othello's "professions of skepticism over [Desdemona's]
faithfulness" when he evidently means something like "Othello's denial of her
constancy" (p. 138). In the introduction to the same book, Cavell writes that "tragedy
is an interpretation of what skepticism is itself an interpretation of: that, for example,
Lear's 'avoidance' of Cordelia is an instance of the annihilation inherent in the
skeptical problematic, that skepticism's 'doubt' is motivated not by (not even where it
is expressed as) a (misguided) intellectual scrupulousness but by a (displaced) denial,
by a self-consuming disappointment that seeks world-consuming revenge" (p. 6).

(23.) John Donne, "Paradox #3," in Paradoxes and Problems. ed. Helen Peters
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 5-6. Peters believes the Paradoxes were written
early in the 1590s when Donne studied at Thavies and Lincoln's Inns (p. xv).

(24.) The Sceptick ed. William M. Hamlin, in "A Lost Translation Found? An Edition
of The Sceptick (c. 1590) Based on Extant Manuscripts," ELR 31, 1 (forthcoming);
 15

see also Sir Walter Raleigh's Sceptick, or Speculations (London, 1651), p. 1. As S. E.

Sprott has argued, this work may rely upon a lost English translation of Sextus
Empiricus to which Thomas Nashe alludes in 1591. And since the evidence seems
strong that one manuscript of The Scepticlc existed in Ralegh's library, the date of
composition must fall between the appearance of the lost translation (c. 1590) and
Ralegh's death (1618). See Sprott, "Raleigh's 'Sceptic' and the Elizabethan Translation
of Sextus Empiricus." PQ 42, 2 (1963): 166-75. As for the attribution to Ralegh, I
agree with Peter Beal that it is almost certainly spurious (Index of English Literary
Manuscripts [London: Mansell, 1980-93], vol. 1, pt. 2. p. 368).

(25.) "Appendix B: Richard Baines' Note," in Cole, p. 158. The implication of

Baines's allegation seems to be that Marlowe has compiled a treatise illustrating
internal contradictions in the Bible: "He saith likewise that he hath quoted a number
of contrarieties out of the Scripture which he hath given to some great men who in
convenient time shall be named."

(26.) The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio [London, 1603:
New York: Modern Library, 1933), p. 449: see also Viley ed., 2:502-3. See also the
account of early modern skepticism in Stephen Toulmin's Cosmopolis (Chicago: Univ.
of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 22-56: Toulmin inaccurately conscripts Erasmus and
Montaigne to stand in for all Renaissance humanists, but his discussion of skeptical
values is perceptive,

(27.) For example, I.i.6, I.i.112. Faustus's experience with Aristotle's Analytics--
ravishment quickly followed by disillusionment-perhaps should have taught him how
to regard his subsequent ravishment by magic. The English Faust Book stresses
Faustus's ravishment by music: see The Historie of the Damnable Life, and Deserved
Death of Doctor John Faustus (1588, 1592), in The English Faust Book: A Critical
Edition Based on the Text of 1592, ed. John Henry Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 100, 119; see also Doctor Faustus A.II.iii.29.

(28.) For examples, see II.iii.62, II.iii.66, III.Chorus.2-7, and IV.Chorus.9-10.

(29.) For reasons of syntactic grace, I have substituted the B-text reading ("terrifies
not me": B.I.iii.57) for that of the A-text ("terrifies not him": A.I.iii.60). Other
examples of such dismissal: "Come, I think hell's a fable" (II.i. 130); "Think'st thou
that Faustus is so fond / To imagine that after this life there is any pain? / Tush, these
are trifles and mere old wives' tales" (II.i. 136-8).

(30.) The English Faust Book informs us that Faustus was called "the Speculator" and
signed himself "Doctor Faustus the insatiable speculator" (pp. 92, 129): see also pp.
93, 98, and 114.

(31.) The English Faust Book, p. 112.

(32.) Another example: "thy drift" (V.i.75).

(33.) See Annas and Barnes's Outlines of Scepticism, pp. 4-5. 11-2, 51-2; and
Montaigne, An Apology for Raymond Sebond "They [The Pyrrhonians] put forth their
propositions, but to contend with those they imagine wee hold in our conceipt. If you
 16

take theirs, then will they undertake to maintaine the contrary: all is one to them, nor
will they give a penny to chuse" (Florio, Essayes of Montaigne, p. 449; for the
French, see the Villey ed. p. 503; see also Florio, pp. 412-3, 460-1, 483-93, 499-503,
522). Francisco Sanches, who does not seem to have read either Sextus or Montaigne
before publishing his Quod Nihil Scitur (Lyon, 1581), nonetheless places strong
emphasis upon diversity of opinion as a prologue to doubt; see That Nothing is
Known, trans. and ed. Elaine Limbrick and Douglas F. S. Thomson (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 213, 222-3.

(34.) See also Pro.23-5 ("falling to / glutted / surfeits"), I.i.80 ("glutted with conceit"),
and V.ii.10-1 ("surfeit") for further images of overconsumption; and see the B-text's
"let me be cloyed / With all things that delight the heart of man" (B.III.i.58-9).

(35.) Montaigne might not agree with this claim, since he chooses to do that which is
customary in his society, while Faustus does not. But Montaigne's embrace is not
merely a passive following but an active endorsing of custom, and therefore an
abandonment of Pyrrhonism.

(36.) This may be contrasted with the Cartesian movement to judgment which is
designed precisely to preclude such a rush.

(37.) W. W. Greg, ed., Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, 1604, 1616 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1950). pp. 320-1; Keefer, ed., Doctor Faustus: a 1604-version edition
(Peterborough: Broadview, 1991), p. 29; Bevington and Rasmussen, p. 138n. Roma
Gill keeps the question mark in her edition (Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe,
vol. 2 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990]).

(38.) An idea powerfully reinforced by Mephistopheles's speech at B.V.ii.13-5, a

speech not found in the A-text: "his labouring brain / Begets a world of idle fantasies /
To overreach the devil." "Fancy" and "fantasy" mean essentially the same thing in the
late sixteenth century, "fancy" being a contraction of "fantasy" (first used in the
fifteenth century), and each employed in verse according to metrical demands. The B-
text includes a comma after "fancies," and Bevington and Rasmussen's suggestion that
this punctuation makes "despair" anticipate the phrase "Despair in God" (line 5)
seems entirely plausible. But their related comment--that the A-text's reading of line 4
suggests "brush aside idle fancies and desperate thoughts" (line 217)--strikes me as
unpersuasive; I think that Faustus's despair is being encouraged throughout this
speech, and that it is granted attractiveness by being associated with "forward"
movement and resolve.

(39.) The play offers a clear association among forward motion, magic, and
resolution, and between backward motion and conventional religious belief. Being
resolute, resolving ambiguities, living in all voluptuousness, etc., is connected to
moving forward (I.i.76), being a "forward wit" (Epilogue. 7), and engaging in magic
(B.II.i.14): wavering (II.i.7) and acknowledging uncertainty, fear, and doubt (I.iii.14;
II.i.26) are connected to moving backward (II.i.6).

(40.) For detailed discussion of this line, see William M. Hamlin. "'Swolne with
cunning of a selfe conceit': Marlowe's Faustus and Self-Conception," ELN 34, 2
(December 1996): 7-12.
 17

(41.) See also "Then fear not, Faustus, but be resolute" (I.iii.14).

(42.) Elizabeth Cary. The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry, ed. Barry
Weller and Margaret Ferguson (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994). II. Chorus.
413-24.

(43.) Cary, p. 233. See also the positive valence attached to the state of being
"disengaged on either side" (p. 238).

(44.) Sir John Davies, in Nosce Teipsum (1599), comments on the soul's tendency to
seek static resolution: "For why should we the busie Soule beleeve, / When boldly she
concludes of that, and this?" (lines 85-6). See Robert Krueger, ed., The Poems of Sir
John Davies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).

Fissured families: a motif in Marlowe's plays

Lisa Hopkins

Christopher Marlowe's plays are littered with family groups shattered and destroyed,
either through their own actions or those of others.(1) Sometimes the disharmony is
limited to family disagreements or ideological disunity within the family group; at
other points it becomes more extreme, leading to internecine betrayal and even
murder. As Frank Ardolino suggests, "the composite roles family members play as
both fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, brothers and
sisters provide Marlowe with rich sources of complex interactions and the opportunity
to portray the tensions created by the shifting roles, to limn, in short, the dynamics of
power as established within the microcosm of the family" (83).(2) I want to argue,
though, that Marlowe does more than simply "limn" these: I am going to suggest that
he provides a sharply focused and detailed critique of the problematics of familial
interaction, and that, contrary to modern, psychoanalytically driven theorizing of the
family, he sees these as arising fundamentally not from inherent inter-gene rational
struggle, nor from the kinds of mythic model proposed by Ardolino--who sees the
plays as radically informed by the Uranus-Jupiter-Saturn model--but as an aberration
caused by particular aspects of social injustice and malaise.

In what seems likely to have been Marlowe's earliest play, Dido, Queen of Carthage,
the issue of family features very strongly. The play opens with what looks like a
traditional scene of family life: a man with a boy on his lap. But we rapidly discover
that this is not a scene of a father and a son, but instead of what the British
government has termed "a pretended family," two homosexual lovers (homosexuality
is something to which I will return in due course). Moreover, Jupiter promises to
subordinate the interests of his real family to those of his lover Ganymede: he gives
the boy the jewels which his wife Juno wore on her wedding day, and plucks a feather
 18

from the wing of his son Hermes.(3) The family conflict presaged here is actualized
when Jupiter's daughter, Venus, enters--not in her traditional role as goddess of love,
but, very pointedly, in her capacity as a mother, and, by implication, in the even less
likely role, for a sex symbol, as grandmother. (This point is also stressed again later in
the characters' repeated references to the kinship ties between herself, Aeneas,
Ascanius, and her other son Cupid.) Jupiter's infatuation with Ganymede, she claims,
has had repercussions throughout the family in that it has prevented him from paying
proper attention to the welfare of her son Aeneas. Thus an initial lack of proper
conjugal relations between husband and wife has apparently escalated into a situation
which also affects both Jupiter's daughter and his grandson, and which will have
serious implications too for his great-grandson Aeneas. We may, after all, remember,
as David Farley-Hills reminds us in relation to Tamburlaine, that Jupiter usurped and
killed his own father (45).

The speech which Jupiter then makes to Venus assures her that she is wrong, and that
he still has Aeneas's interests at heart:

Content thee, Cytherea, in thy care,

Since thy Aeneas' wandering fate is firm,
Whose weary limbs shall shortly make repose
In those fair walls I promis'd him of yore. (I.i.82-5)

In fact, however, the play itself proves Venus to be very accurate in her diagnosis of
strains within the family. She has less insight into the cause, though, for she is herself
complicit in it. When she visits the son for whom she has professed so much affection,
she appears in disguise to him; only after she has left does he detect her identity, and
he then proceeds to lament the lack of a closer relationship between them. Here we
seem to be invited to discern that Jupiter's own poor parenting skills have, in one of
the classic patterns of child abuse, been transmitted in turn to his daughter, who fails
to mother her son as he would wish. This is made very clear in Aeneas's moving
comments as he realizes the identity of the disguised figure with whom he has been
talking:

Achates, 'tis my mother that is fled;

I know her by the movings of her feet.
Stay, gentle Venus, fly not from thy son!
Too cruel, why wilt thou forsake me thus,
Or in these shades deceiv'st mine eye so oft?
Why talk we not together hand in hand,
And tell our griefs in more familiar terms?
But thou art gone, and leav'st me here alone
To dull the air with my discoursive moan. (I.ii.240-8)

Here the familiar relationship between Aeneas and his mother, indicated in the fact
that he can recognize her from so minor a detail as "the movings of her feet," forms a
sad counterbalance to her unexplained unwillingness voluntarily to reveal her identity
to him--apparently, from his use of the term "so oft," a familiar feature of her behavior
to him.
 19

Despite--or perhaps because of--Aeneas's sensitivity to his mother's lack of trust in

him, he too is revealed as a poor parent. Ascanius early demonstrates a strong sense of
kinship: when Aeneas imagines that a rock he sees is Priam, Ascanius assures him that
it cannot be, "For were it Priam, he would smile on me" (II.i.36). Perhaps it is this
sense of a lost family--Aeneas has, after all, literally mislaid his wife, Creusa--which
makes the child at once accost Dido with "Madam, you shall be my mother" (II.i.98).
(Richard Proudfoot points out that "Marlowe's Dido, unlike Chaucer's, doesn't count
pregnancy among her claims on Aeneas" (7); instead she is presented throughout the
play as poignantly childless, anxious to mother.) But like Jupiter and Venus before
him, Aeneas in turn proves so indifferent to the fate of his offspring that he actually
proposes at one point to leave Ascanius behind with Dido--his protestation that he
couldn't have been about to depart because he would have had to leave his son behind
is savagely undercut by the audience's awareness that that was in fact precisely what
he was planning. Even Aeneas's denial is couched in worrying terms: "Hath not the
Carthage queen mine only son?" (IV.iv.29) suggests that Ascanius's importance to his
father may be at least as much dynastic as personal--as the only son of a widower, he
forms a unique and temporarily irreplaceable link in the chain of succession; the
implication, however, is that had he brothers, he might prove expendable, as
Tamburlaine's son Calyphas is later to be. The inclusion of four generations in Dido
allows us to see very clearly how the cycle of flawed parent-child relationships
renews and perpetuates itself.

Even when fewer generations are considered, however, the pattern is still discernible.
Tamburlaine Part One both opens and closes with families: the sharp differences
between Cosroe and Mycetes open up questions of heredity, family resemblances and
the nature / nurture debate, which is of course raised again in even more radical form
by the victories won over kings by the mere son of a Scythian shepherd; and the end
of the play sees both a marriage-providing an unusually comic form of closure to so
violent a story-and also the reunion between Zenocrate and her father. Family is thus
signaled as an issue of some importance, and it becomes even more so in Part Two
where we observe closely Tamburlaine's three boys. We see the rivalry between them,
brought about primarily by the very fact that they, unlike Ascanus, are members of a
family instead of isolated heirs; we witness the effect on them of their mother's early
death--indeed Calyphas's effeminacy, although clearly present from the beginning,
could be interpreted as perhaps becoming exacerbated by a subconscious attempt to
take over the role within the family of a lost mother;(4) and, as with Cosroe and
Mycetes in Part One, we see also the radical differences amongst brothers which
result eventually in the ultimate example of family fragmentation, Tamburlaine's
infanticide.

Tamburlaine's killing of Calyphas is difficult to decode. It has often been seen as in

some sense exemplary, in the light of Renaissance educational theory.(5) T. A Pearce
argues that it is indeed precisely a response to such theory:

Here is portrayed a father who is at once a man of arms and a lover of poetry and
worshipper of beauty, now faced with the problem of bringing up boys, his sons. The
entire passage might have been written by Marlowe after reading Sir Thomas Elyot's
Boke Named the Governour (1531), which appeared some fifty years earlier. (20)
 20

Pearce sees in Marlowe's portrayal of Tamburlaine's immovability a response to twin

stimuli: the attack by Gosson (like Marlowe, a former pupil of the King's School,
Canterbury) on lack of proper moral fiber in the theater, and the attack by Sir
Humphrey Gilbert on modern educational methods and their failure to prepare for
military service. Tamburlaine, Pearce suggests, embodies the very virtues which both
Gosson and Gilbert were, in their different ways, advocating, and in nothing is this
more apparent than his stoic sacrifice of his own son. Paul Kocher similarly sees in
Tamburlaine's stabbing "an act of military discipline . . . from the Elizabethan point of
view Tamburlaine is merely heroic in this" (225), and suggests, moreover, that
Tamburlaine's action is also rendered glorious by its association with the story of the
Roman consul Manlius Torquatius, who similarly slew his son for disobeying orders.
But such readings are, as Carolyn Williams recognizes, counterintuitive; and, more
importantly, they are notably not shared by the on-stage audience of dignitaries.

Infanticide also occurs elsewhere in the play, in Olympia's very differently motivated
decision to kill her son, and crops up again in two more of the plays, The Massacre at
Paris--where it is threatened rather than actual, since Catherine never needs to carry
out her resolve to kill one or both of her sons--and The Jew of Malta. Here Barabas's
initial affection for the daughter whose name means, ironically, "the father's joy"
(Tambling 95) is violently transmuted by her conversion to Christianity--her adoption,
it could perhaps be argued, of a different father-figure--into a murderous hate whose
momentum not only wipes out Abigail and her entire convent of nuns but is also
echoed in the kind of mock infanticide in which Barabas kills Ithamore, who, he so
often stresses, has assumed the position of his heir. Family fragmentation is, of
course, further emphasized in the play by the recurring presence of the two bereaved
parents, Ferneze and Katherine, both of whom are apparently partnerless as well as
childless. Moreover, Jeremy Tambling points to further elements in the play of fury
directed at literal and symbolic members of its families when he comments on
Barabas's stress on the nuns' frequent pregnancies, his identification of Abigail with
the original exemplar of sibling rivalry, Cain, and the ways in which his celebrated
image of "infinite riches in a little room" (I.i.37), "parodying the idea of Christ in the
womb, suggest[s] a pre-Oedipal desire for identification with the mother" (99, 103-4).

In others of the plays matters never reach the pitch of family self-destruction seen in
The Jew of Malta and Tamburlaine; but very often this is because, in them, families
are never formed in the first place. It is notable that one of the few things
Mephostophilis denies Faustus is a wife:(6) thus the scholar, whom we assume to
have long since drifted apart from the "base stock" from which he was sprung, is
afforded no opportunity to recreate a family unit, something for which he perhaps
compensates in his marked affection for his friends and for Wagner, and, arguably,
even in his desire to please the pregnant Duchess of Vanholt. Marlowe, however,
pointedly withholds from his hero personal participation in such a family unit, even
though, as Emily Bartels points out, "in the sources... he and Helen get married and
have a son" (135). In a brilliant analysis of the play, Kay Stockholder demonstrates
Faustus's unease with his own sexuality and the ways in which his approaches to
heterosexuality are thwarted by powerful patriarchal figures which, together with the
presence of the strongly developed cuckoldry theme she shows to be present in the
play, indicates a deeply unresolved Oedipus complex. Ironically, the woman he is
offered instead of a wife is Helen--the legendary marriage-breaker of mythology, the
 21

woman who abandoned her husband Menelaus and her daughter Hermione for the
seducer Paris.

Family even becomes an issue in the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins. Pride
"disdain[s] to have any parents" (II.i.116), Wrath "had neither father nor mother"
(II.i.141), Gluttony's "parents are all dead" (II.i. 148), while all the rest cite ill-
matched couplings as their source of origin. Once again it is possible to discern a
suggestion that fractured or non-existent family structures lie behind the darkest
events of the play. Similarly in Dido, Queen of Carthage there is a strong sense of the
fact that in coming together these two, widow and widower respectively, would be
able to restore the family structure that each has lost--something that seems strongly
signaled in Dido's desire effectively to reconstitute her former marriage by
rechristening Aeneas Sichaeus, and by her enthusiastic response to Ascanius's request
that she should function as a replacement mother for him.(7) It is one of the most
savage ironies of the play that it is family strife amongst the gods, specifically
between Juno and Venus, which prevents this dream of a new family from reaching
fulfillment, just as it has previously devastated the family of Priam and Hecuba.

Family breakdown is, then, repeatedly stressed as a recurring motif in Marlowe's

plays, and its impact is heightened by the use of vignettes of happy families which
provide both contrast and pathos. Obvious examples are Zabina and Bajazeth in
Tamburlaine Part One, whose mutual affection, undiminished by the brutal
circumstances of their captivity, could be seen as strongly reminiscent of the marriage
of affection and mutual support proposed by Protestant ideology, and Olympia and her
family in Part Two, where again conjugal and filial devotion triumphantly survives
external disasters. It is also noteworthy that Marlowe has rearranged chronology in
The Massacre at Paris by deferring the death of Jeanne of Navarre until after her son's
wedding, which allows us a tragically brief glimpse of the happy life she could
apparently have led with her son and her new daughter-in-law (who is presented as
markedly affectionate and deferential to her mother-in-law). But there are also, and
more strikingly, instances of the same phenomenon in the only play that I have not yet
mentioned, Edward II.

In Dido, Queen of Carthage it might be possible to argue that it is Jupiter's

homosexual attachment to Ganymede which is seen as the initial spark for family
disunity(8) (though in fact this idea is largely exploded by Jupiter's account of strife
between him and Juno reaching much farther back, as when she harmed Heracles, and
by the unpleasant insight into her character we are offered during her meeting with
Venus). In Edward II, however, the question of whether or not homosexuality gives
rise to family disruption is addressed head on, and answered with a resounding
negative. The issue is highlighted from the very first lines of the play: "My father is
deceased. Come, Gaveston, / And share the kingdom with thy dearest friend." Here
we could, perhaps, see a suggestion that individual happiness can be enabled only by
a breakdown of family structure, at least for Edward and for Gaveston; and
undoubtedly Edward's preference for Gaveston has soured relations between himself
and Isabella. Homosexuality seems, however, to have been seen in the Renaissance
period not as an exclusive alternative to heterosexuality, but rather as a sort of
additional extra to it, so that the breakdown of the marriage need not necessarily have
been attributable solely to Edward's sexual preferences,(9) and as Claude J. Summers
points out, "while the word `unnatural' occurs frequently in the play to describe
 22

rebellion and anarchy and dissembling, it is never applied as a sufficient definition of

homosexuality" (223). Certainly Gaveston's undoubted homosexuality very markedly
fails to have any deleterious effect on his marriage to Edward's niece;(10) and family
ties other than the marriage bond are shown in the play to be totally unaffected by
homosexuality. There is strong affection between Spenser and his father, between
Edward and his brother, and, most notably of all, between Edward and his son. There
is no trace, in the conduct of the homosexual king, of the poor parenting which
characterized that supreme example of heterosexuality, the Queen of Love, let alone
of the infanticidal rage of a Tamburlaine or a Barabas. If we judge by the devotion to
him evinced by his son, Edward II is the best parent in the plays.

If it is not the attempt to set up a "pretended family" that undermines the stability of
the real family, then, what does? Perhaps part of the answer may lie in Marlowe's
depiction of power relationships within the affected families. The children who suffer
most badly in these plays are all royal children, or, what I take to be effectively
analogous, the children of gods:(11) Venus, Hermes, Aeneas, and Ascanius, in Dido,
Queen of Carthage, are all divine or of divine ancestry; the son of the Guise in The
Massacre at Paris, forced to view his father's murdered body, is the child of perhaps
the foremost political figure in the country. Tamburlaine's troubled brood have as
father "the scourge of God," conqueror of half the world, and Jill Levenson points to
the way in which the concept of Tamburlaine's kingship is insistently reinforced by
the play's language (102). Finally, the young Edward III is son and nephew not only
of a king, but also, and perhaps even more importantly, of a queen, a power-broker
both between nations and in the internal political affairs of England, who shares in the
responsibility for the brutal murder of his father. Even Abigail comes to grief only
when her father has acquired so much wealth and power that he will soon be able to
put himself forward as a serious candidate for the governorship of Malta: before his
development of such ambitions, their relationship seems solid enough.(12)

As Simon Shepherd points out, the parenting of royal offspring was felt to be an
especially difficult issue.(13) In cases like these the usual disadvantages of
patriarchy--the discrepancy between the prospects of the eldest son and those of the
other children--are significantly increased: for the eldest boy a crown, for the others
the unenviable position of needing to be kept alive as possible successors, but equally
of representing an everpresent threat, as is illustrated in the situations of Henry III and
Henry IV in The Massacre at Pans, and in the strife between Cosroe and Mycetes in
Tamburlaine Part One. (This question of the situation of potential heirs to thrones
could, of course, have been an issue particularly highlighted for Marlowe himself and
for his audiences by Elizabeth I's refusal to name her successor and by the consequent
intrigues surrounding the various possible claimants such as the Grey sisters, Arabella
Stuart, and James VI of Scotland). For the daughters, moreover, there was the
unappetizing propsect of being used to seal a diplomatic marriage: this was the fate
that awaited Zenocrate before her capture by Tamburlaine, and we are reminded of the
fact when, towards the end of Part One, we briefly meet her first fiance.

The usual fate of princesses is also figured in The Massacre at Pan's in the person of
Marguerite of Valois, who is treated with surprising sympathy--the racier aspects of
her rather scandalous history, which included taking several lovers who reputedly
included the Duke of Guise, are suppressed, and she is turned into the model
daughter-in-law(14)--and perhaps also in that of the Duchess of Guise, trapped in a
 23

loveless marriage which she owed to her high birth and her relationship to the royal
family of France, who is seen as inextricably enmeshed in the structures of the family
which simultaneously enable her and cripple her. She is saved from death at the hands
of her jealous husband through the fact of her pregnancy, thus keeping the family unit
(however unhappily) together, but she is also, like Venus in Dido, Queen of Carthage,
complicit in the replication of her own unhappy situation by producing children born
into an atmosphere of violence, suspicion and bloodshed, as we see only too clearly
when her young son is forced to look at his murdered father's body.(15) In her case,
mothering, which would be seen by contemporary audiences as fulfillment of the
most natural of all possible instincts is also, from another perspective, blameworthy
and inevitably disastrous. (The potential consequences of family bonds are made
further apparent within the Guise clan when, having murdered the Duke himself, they
also make sure of his brother the Cardinal, whose only apparent crime lies in the fact
of the relationship).

It seems, then, that it is primarily the question of power, and perhaps more specifically
of patriarchal power, which is involved in the production of unhappy marriages and
fractured families. The more unequal the distribution of power within the family
grouping, and the greater the concentration of it within the hands of the patriarch, the
greater the risks of family break-up and disharmony. In this context it is perhaps
significant that although Edward II is a king, and thus in theory a wielder of near-
absolute power, it is in fact made very clear to us from an early stage in the play that
his power is so seriously qualified by the disaffection of his barons that it amounts to
virtually nothing (Mahood 119). Whereas his brother-in-law of France, more secure
on his throne, turns his back on the request for help which he receives from his sister
and nephew, Edward never forgets his affection for his son, and ultimately resigns his
crown--and with it, inevitably, his life--in order to ensure the boy's succession to a
throne which might otherwise have been bid for by Mortimer. It is equally noteworthy
that the Earl of Kent forsakes his brother when he sees a chance for his own political
star to gain the ascendant, but returns to a blind and indeed ultimately stupid loyalty to
him when he loses his influence with Mortimer and Isabella. Isabella herself may also
be an example of this phenomenon; historically, her father Philip IV stood apart as the
one strong French king in a period of generally weak rule, and it may well be that we
should see her career of decimating her family--she is directly or indirectly
responsible for the deaths of her husband, his brother, and her niece's husband--as a
product of his upbringing as much as of her husband's neglect. In these plays, it
seems, the principal threat to the institution of the family is, paradoxically, the
patriarchal power structure itself, and what Marlowe is showing us, in his analysis of
the politics of family, is the inherent self-annihilation which fissures patriarchal
ideology.

(1) For comment on this aspect of Marlowe's plays, see Stephen Greenblatt. "Marlowe
and the Will to Absolute Play," from Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from More to
Shakespeare (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980) 193-221, reprinted in New Historicism
and Renaissance Drama, edited by Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton (Harlow,
Essex: Longman. 1992) 57-82. J. B. Steane, in the introduction to his edition of
Marlowe's complete plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), notes that Marlowe was
himself a member of a troubled family, but also pays due regard to the problematic
nature of adducing biographical information in criticism 11; all quotations from
Marlowe's plays will be taken from this edition.
 24

(2) I did not discover Professor Ardolino's paper until late in the preparation of my
own: although interested in very similar concerns, we have in fact used different
instances and approaches.

(3) For an acute analysis of the giving of jewels as effecting a reification of

relationships, and thus highlighting the power structures inherent in them, see
Shepherd. Michael Hattaway comments on how Tamburlaine similarly fetishises his
armor.

(4) M. M. Mahood has an interesting suggestion to make about Calyphas's difference

from the other sons, commenting that "Calyphas has the most character of the three
sons; but, by the sharpest irony, Marlowe causes Tamburlaine to kill the only being he
has endowed with some measure of his own vitality, and to leave his kingdom to his
other two sons, pale and sketchy replicas of their father and quite incapable of
maintaining his conquests" (102).

(5) For a forcible argument that Tamburlaine might in fact be seen as a good father in
terms of Renaissance values, see Carolyn D. Williams, "`The Jealousy of Wars':
Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Renaissance Parenthood," paper read at a conference on
Literature, Politics and History, University of Reading, 1995. I am very grateful to
Carolyn Williams for sending me a copy of this paper.

(6) Interestingly, Robert H. Watson ("Tragedy," in The Cambridge Companion to

English Renaissance Drama, 301-351) comments that "Faustus's first demand of
Mephostopholis is a beautiful spouse." Certainly this is what one might expect
Faustus to ask, but the fact that he does not actually do so, and stipulates merely a
wife in general, seems to me to suggest that he is motivated not so much by lust as by
the desire for family ties. Mahood points to the ironic contrast between Faustus's
situation when he cries Lente currite, noctis equi," and that of the original speaker in
Ovid, a fulfilled lover (110).

(7) That this aspect of Dido's and Aeneas's situations would have been readily
perceived in the Renaissance is suggested by the banter between Antonio and
Sebastian in The Tempest about "widow Dido" and "widower Aeneas" (The Tempest,
edited by Anne Righter [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968], II.i.79-82). Dido's
widowhood is also repeatedly referred to in Chapman's comedy The Widow's Tears.

(8) Wilbur Sanders, for instance, sees Marlowe's treatment of his homosexual
characters as informed by "a neurotic desire for symbolic punishment and expiation"
(140). As will become clear, I disagree.

(9) See Alan Bray, Hamosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's
Press, 1982) 16; Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to
Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1990) 63-148; Jean E. Howard, "Sex and
social conflict: the erotics of The Roaring Girl," in Erotic Politics: Desire an the
Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (London: Routledge, 1992) 170-190; and
Valerie Traub, "Desire and the Differences it Makes," in The Matter of Difference, ed.
Valerie Wayne (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991) 81-114. Lisa Jardine
interesting comments that "Marlowe is also able to exploit the stage irony that
 25

Edward's `natural' love--his queen Isabella--is also, in the event, a boy" (23), while
Bruce R. Smith remarks that "the misogyny of Edward II does not equate
homosexuality and effeminacy: it insists on their separation" (Homosexual Desire in
Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991], 215).

(10) Shepherd (119) regards the niece as being essentially a dupe of Gaveston, but I
see no evidence for this.

(11) James I argues that "in the Scriptures Kings are called GODS" (qtd. in Leonard
Tennenhouse, "Strategies of State and political plays: A Midsummer Night's Dream,
Henry IV, Henry V, Henry WI, "in Political Shakespeare, edited by Jonathan
Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1985) 109-128, 117.

(12) Mahood views Barabas as ambitious to rule (113).

(13). See Shepherd, 75 and 156-7, and also David M. Bergeron, Shakespeare's
Romances and the Royal Family (Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1985) 110. There is also
an interesting discussion on the allocation of children's inheritances as an increasing
source of tension during the Elizabethan period in Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters
(68-102).

(14) For an account of the career of Marguerite of Navarre, see my Wtomen Who
Would Be Kings: Female Rulers of the Sixteenth Century (London and New York:
Vision Press and St. Martin's Press, 1991).

(15) It is interesting that the Duchess of Guise, like the Niece in Edward II, has taken
one of the king's minions for her lovers. This could be seen as adding force to the
view that male homosexuality is not necessarily incompatible with more conventional
family structures. Indeed Margot Heinemann ("Political drama," in The Cambridge
Companion to English Renaissance Drama, 183) has suggested that even in Edward II
"the decisive issue is not his homosexuality (though that antagonizes the barons, and
probably the audience, they admit that 'the greatest kings have had their minions'), but
that it leads him to favor social upstarts and squander wealth on them."