Tragedy and Trauma in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe by Mathew R. Martin (review)

Trauma studies has been slow to gain traction in early modern literary criticism. In the twenty-plus years since Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience galvanized contemporary interest in trauma across the humanities, studies of trauma in later periods have spread like wildfire. In contrast, only a handful of books on early modern trauma have appeared. In many ways, this makes sense. “Trauma” as a psychological term only dates to the late nineteenth century, and all the pioneering works of trauma theory are of modern and contemporary provenance. At the same time, scholars of early modern literature have struggled to determine the most appropriate terms of engagement with trauma, with most critics simply borrowing or lightly adapting contemporary trauma theories without subjecting them to serious scrutiny or delving very deeply into their sources. Only with the publication of Lisa Starkes-Estes’s Violence, Trauma, and Virtus in Shakespeare’s Roman Poems and Plays: Transforming Ovid has early modern trauma studies arguably become a fully self-conscious critical methodology. Selecting from trauma theory’s tangled skein those concepts, histories, and approaches most appropriate to her own critical concerns, rather than borrowing them from contemporary studies, Starkes-Estes produced a powerful reading of Shakespeare’s fascination with the Ovidian tradition’s representation of violence informed by psychoanalytic theories of masochism and sadomasochism. In Trauma and Tragedy in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe, Mathew Martin continues in this tradition, producing a powerful reading of Marlowe’s hostility to traditional tragic mimesis informed by psychoanalytic theories of primal trauma.

Martin’s dual focus on trauma and tragedy allows him to make productive interventions in the critical conversations on both subjects. Noting that most literary analyses of trauma tend to assume an already constituted subject whose psychic integrity is shattered by catastrophic experience—which he terms “external trauma”—Martin points out that there is another psychoanalytic tradition that instead discusses trauma as a “constitutive, structural split” in the subject’s being triggered by the infant’s loss of its “primal symbiotic relation with the mother” (12). As the infant matures, it develops a variety of strategies for disavowing this “internal trauma,” mostly through fantasy. The fort-da game described by Freud provides a paradigm of how a child may master his sense of abandonment by imaginatively replaying the mother’s departure with himself as the repudiating agent, concealing his vulnerability through aggression. Later on, during the Oedipal phase and under the threat of castration, the child may accept civilization’s offer of a mother-surrogate as imaginative compensation for the loss of the mother. Finally, when confronted with the mysterious and frightening world of adult sexuality, the subject may fashion a “primal scene”—an imaginary scenario, often seduction by an adult—as a symbolic expression of the threat it feels from the desires of the Other. In each of these cases, fantasy enables the subject to deny its internal trauma by projecting it onto the world. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” the subject seems to tell itself; “I am not split; it’s the world that’s against me.” But there is always the danger that these fantasy responses will fail and that the subject’s primal wounds will be reopened—and this is where Martin’s interests realign with those of other trauma critics. For it is in cases of catastrophic stress that primal splits in the subject’s being are exposed, throwing the subject back onto primal defenses.

Given tragedy’s emphasis on suffering, one might think that it would provide a natural context for exploring the relationship between these two types of trauma. However, this turns out not to be the case. Like trauma critics, critics of tragedy have also mostly neglected internal trauma. In this they have been encouraged by the history of the form: indeed, Martin argues that tragedy itself is an aesthetic fantasy response designed to cover over primal trauma. First, from Oedipus onward...