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chapter 4 The Curious Sovereignty of Art Marlowe’s Sacred Counterfeits He affirmeth...That if there be any god or any good Religion, then it is in the papistes because the service of god is performed with more ceremonies, as Elevation of the mass, organs, singing men, Shaven Crownes, &cta. That all protestantes are Hypocriticall asses. —Richard Baines on the opinions of Christopher Marlowe, 1593 Marlowe the Antichrist Two future adversaries and scholars of Antichrist overlapped at Cambridge, probably unknown to each other, in the 1580s. One attended Jesus College, the other Corpus Christi. As one was getting his bachelor’s, the other received a master’s. Afterwards they might both have taken the orders toward which their training inclined them, but only one did. The other was accused of nefarious activities and blasphemous opinions, of espionage , sodomy, and atheism. The accusations were eventually strengthened by his former schoolmate, now a minister and pedagogue, whose maiden publication included an account of his fellow graduate’s sacrilege, then murder, a few years previously. Two men, one training. One of the them a clear-cut Christian, the other his demonic opposite. The other, in all senses, is Christopher Marlowe.1 1. For Marlowe’s life (and death) I have depended primarily on CM; David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (London: Faber and Faber, 2004); Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning : The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992); and John Bakeless, The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942). 184 The Curious Sovereignty of Art His doppelgänger is Thomas Beard, a puritanical preacher, Oliver Cromwell ’s schoolmaster, and the best-selling author of Antichrist the Pope of Rome.2 He wrote in addition the compendious catalogue of God-sent af- flictions meant to illustrate virtue by way of its opposite, fittingly called The Theatre of Gods Iudgements, where Marlowe, as already mentioned, briefly figures. Beard’s titles alone help formulate our central inquiry: How different, finally, is the antichristian theater of Marlowe from the writings of his pious contemporaries? The question is so difficult to answer because it touches on issues with no graspable edges: the history of real opposition to Christianity and the extent of its symbolic internalization , for one thing; for another, the relation of such opposition to the doctrinal conflicts of the Reformation; for yet another, how the reformers ’ iconoclasm impinged on the much vexed issue of English drama’s secularization. Beard makes for a pretty good microcosm of the initial complexities. The cycle plays and moralities may have been happily on the wane from his perspective,3 but he nonetheless carried the old traditions forward into a new world, as would Marlowe, by writing a passion play. Beard intended his religious drama, so far as we know, for a strictly “humanist” student performance, and he modeled it, as medieval English dramatists never had, on the five-act canon of the classics.4 The gospel of Mark thus returns at long last to its formal roots in pagan antiquity. Elsewhere Beard follows the convention, not unrelated to scripture’s pagan heritage, of attacking “Plaies & Comedies, and such like toies...which haue no other vse in the world but to depraue and corrupt good manners.”5 To prove it he needed only quote such familiar authorities as Tertullian, Augustine, Chrysostom, and, lastly, the pagan Plutarch, who was made to speak once 2. For an account of Beard’s life, see the entry on him by Alexandra Walsham, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 4:537–38. 3. Harold C. Gardiner, Mysteries’ End: An Investigation of the Last Days of the Medieval Religious Stage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), gives the once standard interpretation of the cycles’ demise. For a powerful restatement of his view in a much broader context, see James Simpson, Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1350–1547, vol. 2 of The Oxford English Literary History, ed. Jonathan Bate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 536–39. I have been greatly influenced on this question by Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 4. See Walsham, “Beard, Thomas” (n. 2), p. 537. 5. Thomas Beard, The Theatre of Gods Iudgements (London, 1597 [STC 1659]), p. 374. The book is, by the way, an augmented translation of Jean de Chassanion, Histoires memorables des grans...

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