Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama

SEVEN Magic as Emasculation in George Chapman and Ben Jonson

275 SEVEN Magic as Emasculation in George Chapman and Ben Jonson In his brief treatment of Bussy D’Ambois in Radical Tragedy, Jonathan Dollimore asserts that George Chapman’s tragedy, like earlier plays of the period, “interrogates providence and decenters the tragic subject but now the emphasis has shifted; before, the emphasis had tended to fall on the first of these projects, now and henceforth the reverse tends to be the case.”1 That is, the later plays show less interest in providence, or perhaps any religious or theological underpinning of human subjectivity, and more interest on the radical instability of that subjectivity in a more purely secular context. To an extent this is true, and reflects the progression evident in the preceding chapter. In general, the implicit processes of effeminization I have been tracing so far in this study become explicit in Chapman and Ben Jonson, where the characters ’ failure of masculine self-construction seems less a function of religious uncertainty, inviting perhaps a more objective analysis in psychosexual and social terms. In fact, the plays of Chapman and Jonson further develop the more secular aspects of the witchcraft plays through their inclusion of a more realistic portrayal of male sexual psychology, so that the trappings of magic occur in increasingly parodic forms. Yet questions of religious context still inform ironies of subjectivity that arise in the plays of the early seventeenth century. 276 Magic and Masculinity in Early Modern English Drama I suggest that Bussy D’Ambois (ca. 1604) indirectly—by, in fact, ironizingitshero—reflectstheradicalindividualismofCalvinism, while nevertheless rejecting its emphasis on helpless depravity and the dependency on (spiritual) predetermination. It thus constitutes an extremely ambiguous exploration of masculine selffashioning undermined by a narcissistic self-consumption very closely related to Calvinist self-justification—since the subjectivity in question remains untempered by real virtue, self-control , and (importantly for Chapman) scholarly discipline. Of all the observations made on this very controversial text, Richard Ide perhaps come closest to the true identification of its psychological dilemma when he remarks that throughout the play Bussy “continues to assume, as he has from the start, that he is in possession of the virtue which in reality can be obtained only after a long experiential quest.”2 That is, the play reveals that personal salvation , or self-redemption as it occurs, for example, in Shakespeare’s second tetralogy, can never be gratuitous or unmerited. For Dollimore, Bussy D’Ambois “does not merely show noblesse defeated by policy. Were this...the case it might be legitimately defined as humanistic tragedy....Rather, the play shows the putative noblesse to be the effect of policy and thus, by noblesse’s own essentialist criteria, to suffer erasure.”3 While Dollimore legitimately stresses social contexts that have been perhaps more carefully historicized recently by John Huntington, his assertion that noblesse can only be the effect of policy collapses the play’s psychological and social problematic in ways that show how neatly preconceived ideological agendas can narrow the meaning of early modern texts, and how cultural materialists can ignore cultural—and literary—contexts as effectively as critics of other persuasions.4 It is difficult to imagine that a poet who, as Millar MacLure argues, consistently and insistently emphasized a life “divided between an ‘outward’ world or riches, ‘opinion’ and ‘policy,’ and an ‘inward’ world of spiritual and poetic vision,” would dismiss noblesse as simply an effect of policy , and if MacLure now sounds too old-fashionedly humanist to Magic as Emasculation in Chapman and Jonson 277 us we might consider the argument of Huntington that a “strong criticism of aristocratic privilege is at the center of Chapman’s repeated defenses of learning and virtue,” and that “‘learning,’ and especially the neoplatonic learning which creates ‘soul,’ has a social value; for Chapman it identifies an intellectual hierarchy that poses an alternative to, and therefore may be seen as a criticism of, the actual social structure.”5 I contend that we need to return Bussy to the orbit of “humanist tragedy” since its hero, while inviting great sympathy for his challenge to social privilege, fails to establish the requisite virtue through his false assumption of its gratuitous nature. We might consider, first, the best poetic evidence of Chapman’s religious beliefs, to be found in the poem “A Hymne to Our Saviour on the Crosse,” appearing within Petrarchs Seven Penitentiall Psalms.6 Maclure...