Deathly Experiments: A Study of Icons and Emblems of Mortality in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays (review)

Clayton MacKenzie’s attractively presented book explores connections between the popular emblems and related iconography of his time and Christopher Marlowe’s dramatic work, and in this he points up ways in which the playwright uses iconic imagery to manipulate meaning and structure. Marlowe, he argues, was superior to most of his contemporaries “in both the control and the development of his visual patterning and in his willingness to experiment” with such materials (xvii). His uniqueness resided, according to the argument presented here, in his experimental and complex use of these visual resources. In this MacKenzie believes he is to be regarded as well in advance of other playwrights, including the young William Shakespeare, in the years when these plays were written and first produced onstage.

Each play, beginning with Dido, Queen of Carthage, is taken up in turn. Dido, a play not to my knowledge encountered in any anthologies and credited on its title page to collaboration with Thomas Nashe, is based on the classical story, told most explicitly by Virgil in the Aeneid and well known in the early modern period, when it was, as MacKenzie indicates, regarded as an example of the perverse ability of Love to undermine Power—a lesson that he feels could well have been directed to Queen Elizabeth I herself, since Marlowe probably was writing shortly after the time when she had been dallying with the Duke of Alençon (d. 1584), whether or not she had in fact been serious about her intent to marry him. Attention is rightly called to Alciati’s emblem “Vis Amoris,” which is indicative of Love’s power even to subdue Jove, and to how such Love is in danger of causing tragedy, as other examples of emblem literature would illustrate. These of course are commonplaces of the time, made visible for the stage by Marlowe, whose less than complimentary portrait of Aeneas is suggestive of the complexity of character in his later plays.

In the sensational Tamburlaine plays, the iconographic theme that MacKenzie pursues is Death personified, visualized in both illustrations in books and funeral art, appearing, for example, on monuments in churches (e.g., the cadaverous image [fig. 10] standing as a memorial for Thomas Gooding at Norwich Cathedral). Indeed, these plays represent Death in many guises, with Tamburlaine as a terrifying bully and military death machine—a servant of Mars, the god of war—who lacks all respect for his victims. For victims confronted with such an overwhelming force, MacKenzie observes, there is another dimension to death, for dying may come as a welcome escape from torture and mistreatment, certainly hallmarks of Tamburlaine’s progress through these plays. In the end Death will of course come to Tamburlaine himself, the sea of his victims no longer being sufficient to sate the grim reaper, and he too must perish, ambiguously saying that he, as God’s “scourge,” “must die.” He thus necessarily will take his part in the Dance of Death, the popular iconography formerly painted in the Pardon Churchyard at St. Paul’s Cathedral and widely available in woodcuts such as those in the margins in the Booke of Christian Prayers issued by John Daye in 1578 and a number of subsequent editions.

For The Jew of Malta, attention is turned to the motif of Fortune—a motif that perhaps has been best analyzed by Samuel Chew in his Pilgrimage of Life (1962). Fortuna, to whom Barabas gives himself over in his mercantile adventures and in his person, is a dangerous goddess who eventually throws him down from her wheel symbolically—and literally at the end into a cauldron that echoes a common accoutrement in depictions of Hellmouth in Doomsday illustrations. Unfortunately, MacKenzie chooses to emphasize the wall painting at Chaldon, actually a good example but unlikely one that Marlowe could ever have known since most churches, by order of the Crown, had whitewashed...