Hammer or Anvil: Psychological Patterns in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays by Constance Brown Kuriyama (review)

materials out of which a cohesive picture of Medwall as dramatist can yet emerge. DAVID BEVINGTON University of Chicago 178 Comparative Drama Constance Brown Kuriyama. Hammer or Anvil: Psychological Patterns in Christopher Marlowe’s Plays. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1980. Pp. xvi + 240. $21.00. Professor Kuriyama summarizes and discusses fully and perceptively the current criticism of Marlowe’s plays and finds it confusing, contra­ dictory, and inconclusive. Her purpose seems to be to clear up this confusion and critical perplexity by presenting a psychoanalytical in­ terpretation of the chief characters of the dramas. For example, she believes that Tamburlaine’s “confused and vacillating relationship” to the gods “seems ultimately related to a basic preoccupation with sexual identity.” Uneasiness about one’s relationship with women is as much an uncertainty as one’s relationship with the gods. She concludes therefore that the author of Tamburlaine was “probably” suffering from “an intense conflict of a marked homosexual character.” She finds just such confusion and vacillation common to the chief characters in all the plays. Tamburlaine, for instance, under her examination turns out to be a son unconsciously in rebellion against his father, then as a father unnaturally destroying his son. She also finds Tamburlaine busy with such kind of concerns as “Intense rivalry with father figures, strained efforts to cope with women and sexual objects, pronounced castration anxiety.” Moreover, we shall see that Tamburlaine is central to these concerns, “that he embodies and activates them, and yet remains the play’s primary means of dealing with them.” She then proceeds to analyse such leading characters in the rest of the plays according to the criteria set forth by Irving Bieber and others in Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytical Study of Male Homosexuals. Now, Professor Kuriyama accounts for such characters as these by the character of their creator as she finds it within the plays and in certain evidence she deduces from his biography. Thus the unconscious mind of this vacillating, unstable, brilliant young dramatist driven by primitive sexual urges is responsible for the same states in his leading characters—Tamburlaine, Aeneas, Dido, the Queen Mother Catherine, the Duke of Guise, Barabas, Faustus, and Edward II. In her final chapter (it had been better placed had it been the first chapter) the author takes up the biographical evidence for homosexu­ ality in Marlowe’s character. She maintains that Marlowe’s mother was an aggressive, domineering woman and that Christopher was her favorite, with suppressed incestuous desires; that his father was a braggart, and an indolent failure, derided and despised by Christopher’s mother. Thus the father was resentful of the poet, hostile, and very jealous of him. As a result, the poet must have hated his father and feared him. Out Reviews 179 of this condition one may recognize the Oedipal complex rising, and Christopher was haunted and perplexed and driven by this condition unconsciously. It made him unstable, violent, given to extremes, and ambivalent. It accounts for these same conditions in the characters of his plays. Thus when one looks at Faustus or Tamburlaine or Edward, one will hear varied changes rung on the character of Christopher. Indeed the poet’s violent death provides a summary of the various complexes one finds in his characters and deduces from what we know of his life. Threatened, he responds “with a violent attempt to assert his dominance, manifesting itself as a sudden attack from behind involving provocative seizure and use of the prospective victim’s own weapon (castrating before one is castrated).” But this attack is followed by Marlowe’s inability to do more than inflict a few minor wounds on Frizer “(evidence of his ambivalence toward violence, augmented by guilt).” This gives way to weakness; so Frizer turns the dagger into Marlowe’s brain “with lethal force.” This last indicates “suicidal sub­ mission, talion punishment.” Marlowe’s character, then, according to Professor Kuriyama, follows the very same frustrating and ambivalent scheme in his works “with various permutations” from “Tamburlaine at one extreme (identification with the aggressor) to Edward at the other (identification with the victim.)” His life is the very paradigm of his works. This is ingenious but just too pat. The evidence...