The Aesthetics of Antichrist: From Christian Drama to Christopher Marlowe

Preface

Preface With the advent of a commercial theater in London, traditional drama was dying, or already dead. Almost completely destroyed were the plays that had staged the miraculous lives of saints or explained the Catholic sacraments as a certain avenue to posthumous benefits. For centuries before, daylong cycles honoring the Feast of Corpus Christi had brought to northern England the history of the world from creation to judgment. Now judgment came to them. In 1576, the same year James Burbage founded his Theater, the inhabitants and local authorities of Wakefield received instructions from the ecclesiastical commissioners at York to cease staging anything “wherein the Majesty of God the Father, God the Son, or God the Holy Ghost...be counterfeited or represented.”1 Notwithstanding a brief vogue later in London for plays drawn from Old Testament narratives, throughout the country it was increasingly unfashionable , if not also illegal, to put explicitly religious scenes on stage. Over the next quarter century the dramatic representation of godhead would all but disappear. In its place there flourished, for a while, an openly forpro fit theater without obvious precedent. 1. Glynne Wickham et al., ed., English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 69. On the demise of religious drama over the last quarter of the sixteenth century, see Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 20–27; on the brief, ineffectual fashion for Old Testament drama that I mention in the following sentence, see pp. 91, 107–14. No one who wrote for the new venue has a more debated relation to sacred drama than Christopher Marlowe. In general the scholarship on him has been tempted either to stress his novelty or to deny it. Either he produced a radically new sort of theater, at odds with the old superstitions and no longer blinkered by faith; or he recapitulated with only minor deviations solidly Christian conventions. Either his plays gave voice to Protestant orthodoxies just as medieval dramatists had underwritten, in their own complex fashion, the prerogatives of the church; or else he broke with religion by twisting Christian idioms into the radically ironic formulations of modern atheism. Either Marlowe the Christian or Marlowe the Antichrist. It will be the task of this book to argue that Marlowe separates sacred and secular drama—the Middle Ages, as it were, from High Renaissance— the way a common wall divides adjacent rooms. We debate whether the rooms are entirely separate or perfectly conjoined, but really this amounts to the same thing. Medieval and Renaissance drama are divided by what they share. Their Antichrists are exclusive and mutual. My account of Marlowe could be said for that reason to emerge dialectically from the truth of both approaches to his work—as the short-circuit between them, so to speak. If Marlowe preserves certain elements of medieval drama, should this not, for example, be allowed to imply that his medieval predecessors achieved by means of the Bible a drama almost as dodgy as his? My first three chapters pursue that implication at length. A medieval Marlowe, I want to say, should allow us to see all the better how Marlovian the Middle Ages already were. By the same token, those who argue that Marlowe’s work is fundamentally at odds with “real” Christianity—either as an early expression of secular atheism (e.g., Dollimore) or as the recovery of atheism’s classical analogues (e.g., Riggs)2 —should begin to seem, in light of these chapters, of all things unconsciously pious. I suspect the radical Marlowe looks so modern because his champions cannot easily stomach the “ambivalences” of medieval drama,3 much less of the old-time religion this drama reflects, and in the reflection, partly constitutes. “The vanity of scholarship,” writes Harold Bloom, “has few more curious monuments than this Christianized Marlowe. What the common reader finds in Marlowe is precisely what his contemporaries found: impiety, audacity, worship of power, ambiguous sexuality, occult aspirations, defiance viii Preface 2. Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, 3rd ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (London: Faber, 2004). 3. A term I borrow from Rainer Warning, The Ambivalences of Medieval Religious Drama, trans. Steven Rendall (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). of...