Theodicy, Tragedy and the Psalmist: Tourneur’s Atheist’s Tragedy

Theodicy, Tragedy and the Psalmist: Tourneur’s Atheist’s Tragedy R. J. Kaufmann Evil and good stand thick around In the fields of charity and sin Where we shall lead our harvests in. Edwin Muir What can be said Except that suffering is exact, but where Desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic. Philip Larkin Despite the journalists’ banal breviary of daily violence, we know very little about the process and structure of evil. Routine information about daily transgressions, stale registers of corruption and titillating intimations of malevolence accumulate steadily but add up to less than nothing. They are a seawall blocking moral explorations as well as a protective barrier allowing us to harbor unproductive illusions about our relation to the larger, less charted state of things. If we have the courage to cherish the fragile occasions of smaller, domesti­ cated happinesses, we will not undervalue such a seawall. Human beings seem to require fairly calm waters to preserve ordinary equili­ brium; those deeps beyond the seawalls threaten, with strange analo­ gies, our own inner turbulence. It is as easy to undervalue reason as it is to overvalue it. The moral area between these two modes of misvaluation is tightly squeezed by their converging claims. There is little room for a poised life which is not at the same time an ignorant one. Tragic enquiry is easily discussed in terms of its centrifugal move­ ment. Standard critical rhetoric assumes the exclusive initiative of the hero. If all tragic literature were the “ matter of Ahab” which sees the tragic hero as a serindipitous being tracking his enemy beyond the edge of all ideological maps, this romantic variant would be as sufficient for tragic theory as it is relieving to our mundane frustra­ tions. The harsh persistence of Oedipus, the intellectual stamina of Hamlet, the uncheckable erotic drives of Phaedra, or the absolute imprudence of Medea would constitute the whole story. But they do not. It is important to take some trouble to discover just why they do not. 241 242 Comparative Drama Let Marlowe stand momentarily as an abbreviated instance. Nine­ teenth century romantic critics, when they rediscovered Marlowe, quickly enshrined him and his heroes (whom they saw as unambiguous projections of his thrusting ego) as the archetype of rebellious resist­ ance to all that compromised pure individualism. He became a symbol of daring intellectual defiance and of all those things which swelled their connotations for “ renaissance man.” This position has been can­ onized by repetition and reinforced by intelligent critics right down to the present moment. This belief in heroic initiative as the prime motor in Marlowe has not gone unchallenged. Since Roy Battenhouse’s book on Tamburlaine in 1941, there has been an ever more fully documented counter-case drawing Marlowe’s plays into the tradition of Medieval Christian Humanism or even more narrowly into an anti-humanistic Christian theological connection. This interpretive posture finds its orthodox fulfillment in Douglas Cole’s study of Suffering and Evil in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe in 1962, just as the earlier more romanticized reading reached its summit of sophis­ tication in Harry Levin’s The Overreacher a decade earlier in 1952. This polarization is familiar to students of Renaissance drama. Irving Ribner, in his careful appraisal of the state of Marlowe studies for the Tulane Drama Review’s special issue in honor of the 400th anniversary of Marlowe’s birth, described this radical division of opinion on Marlowe’s attitude towards his materials as a state of confusion, with some critics seeing Marlowe in terms so radically different from those in which others view him that it is difficult to believe that all are writing about the same man.1 Ribner’s point is well made, but it does not get deep enough into the problem, for the conservative, theologically affiliated critics are merely standing the romantic position on its head. Their work is polemic and revisionist; it challenges the adequacy of the romantic reading by exposing its historical naivete and by demonstrating the presence within Marlowe’s texts of elements invisible to romantic critics blinded by their ideological presuppositions. The conservative critics are, nevertheless, bound by the same axioms about...