Christopher Marlowe’s Contribution to English Tragedy

Christopher Marlowe’s Contribution to English Tragedy:

We may begin by quoting Swinburne’s just and relevant remarks regarding Marlowe: “Before him there was neither genuine blank verse nor a genuine tragedy in our language. After his arrival the way was prepared, the paths were made straight for Shakespeare.” After the Reformation Movement, Mysteries and Moralities lost all their influences on the audience. They were disliked by people because of their association with old church. In this time, the Revival of Learning and translation of the great Italian tragedies of Seneca left a deep impact on the development of the English drama. Following Senecan model grew the tradition of Revenge Tragedy that often involved long sententious speeches, lack of action, talkative ghost and horrible scene of gruesome murders. It required the mighty effort of a genius to free the Elizabethan drama from the dark and vulgar aspects of the Senecan Tragedy. In this situation,  Marlowe appeared to give Elizabethan drama a distinct shape.                      
The first thing done by Marlowe was to break away from the medieval conception of tragedy that deals with rise and fall of royal personalities. Almost all the heroes of Marlowe – Tamburlaine, Faustus and Jew of Malta – are of humble parentage, but they are endowed with great heroic qualities. His heroes are fired with indomitable passions and inordinate ambition . His Tamburlaine is in full-flooded pursuit of military and political power, his Faustus sells his soul to devil, Jew of Malta absolutely discards all sense of human values with his blind and inordinate aspiration towards wealth as an ultimate end. Thus individuality and worldliness, two basic principles of Renaissance, coupled with intense passion and pitiless struggle with superhuman energy find expression in his heroes.
Another great achievement of Marlowe was to introduce element of conflict in two of his great tragedies Dr. Faustus and Edward II. Conflict may be physical as well as internal and spiritual.  The spiritual conflict that takes place in the heart of hero is much greater, significant and poignant than the former. In this respect, Dr. Faustus is the first tragedy that dramatizes the agony of a conflict ridden soul in the history of English drama. Unlike the heroes of ancient tragedies, Marlowe’s heroes are not helpless puppets in the hands of blind fate. They are conscious of what they are doing and ready to embrace the consequences. That’s why Faustus says: “ ...Faustus hath incurr’d eternal death/ By despearte thoughts against Jove’s deity.”
Other remarkable achievement of Marlowe was to introduce a new type of blank verse in his tragedies. A new spirit of poetry was breathed into the artificial and monotonous verse of old plays. in the place of the verse of Gorboduc with its end-stopped run-on-lines, sometimes with regular feminine or weak endings, varied the accent here and there and shifted the caesura. He also created a wonderful rhythm of extreme flexibility and power by introducing feet other than iambic ones. Faustus' magnificently apostrophe on Helen with its poetic excellence, romantic rapture and musical cadence is probably the most celebrated verse paragraph in Elizabethan drama.
Marlowe discarded the conception of tragedy as it was distinctly moral one. In those dramas, aim was always to preach some moral lesson to the audience. But there was no such instructive morality in Marlowe's plays. The main interest in Marlovian drama centres on the towering personality of the heroes with their tremendous rise and fall.
Among other notable characteristics of Marlowe's tragedies is its high seriousness and lack of humour. According to many critics, these farcical scenes in Dr. Faustus are nothing but interpolations. The women characters are also conspicuous by their absence. Zenocrate in Tamburlaine, Helen in Dr. Faustus, Abigail in Jew of Malta are either figureheads or spirits or shadows. As regards plot construction, Marlowe  followed the old chronicle tradition of separate episodes just loosely knit together in his Tamburlaine and  Dr. Faustus. Only in Jew of Malta and Edward II, he first attempted a regular plot and succeeded to some extent in the former and to a great extent in the latter. Most of the above features may be regarded as the drawbacks of Marlowe as a dramatist and probably due to this limitation Marlowe could not succeed in reaching the loftiest summits of  the tragic art. But he was the pioneer or the "morning star" of Elizabethan drama. We may conclude by illuminating remarks of Schelling: " Marlowe gave the drama passion and poetry; poetry was his most precious gift. Shakespeare would not have been Shakespeare, had Marlowe never written or lived."

Lady Macbeth and the Sleep-Walking Scene

Q. Comment on the sleep-walking Scene in Macbeth and discuss how it focuses on the character of Lady Macbeth.
Ans. Though the plot of Macbeth is dominated by Macbeth, the importance of Lady Macbeth in the gradual transformation in plot construction cannot be put aside. Except, Macbeth she is the most acclaimed character in this play. She shares her husband’s lust for power. Her fierce goading leads Macbeth to commit regicide and seize the throne.
                                                

           Realising the horrible consequence of his misdeeds, Macbeth divulges his anguish in his soliloquy in Act-v, Sc-v, and makes a tragic appeal to the audience. But Lady Macbeth finds a concentrated expression for her agony and claims sympathy from the audience in only one scene, that is Act-v, Sc-I.  This is the so called sleep walking scene where we find a Lady Macbeth faint with the trembling flame of a candle, completely different from the graceful queen who with her firmness and strength at once controls the guest and her frightened husband in a royal banquet in Act-III, Sc-IV. In this scene her total mental break down suggests her inability to handle the evil which she deliberately invoked to choose.
        Before sleep-walking scene we lastly see Lady Macbeth in the Banquet scene where her boldness does not give any hint of her impending breakdown. She loves her husband deeply and wants to assist him and appease his mental unease. But since the murder of Duncan Lady Macbeth becomes increasingly unimportant to her husband as begins to go emotional collapse that constitutes the main plot. Due to the increasing detachment from him and all the ghastliness and unnaturalness of her crime, she loses her balance of her mind.  Her progressive weakness of mind is expressed in her utterance: “Nought’s had all spent/ Where our desire is not without content” (Act-III, Sc-II). Her desolation sinks inward and from this state of nervous exhaustion and lonely brooding, sleep-walking is a possible and natural happening.
            The sickness of Lady Macbeth is vividly suggested by her perpetual longing for light as she is afraid of darkness which is associated with hell: “Out damned spot...Hell is murky”. But it was she invoked the dark night: “Come thick night/ And pall thee with the dunnest smoke of hell” (I, IV). But now “she has light by her continually”. At the moment of murder she encouraged Macbeth saying, “A little water clears us of this deed”. But now the smell of blood haunts her mind. She says, “All perfumes of Arabia will sweeten this little hand”. She said defiantly, “What’s done is done.” But now she regrets, “What’s done cannot be undone”. The sharp contrast between her previous and later speeches brings to the fore the dramatic irony of the play.
          The incoherent language in which Lady Macbeth speaks is also suggestive of her “great perturbation in nature”. Though her speeches are incoherent, there is a rational connection in the sequence of her thought and ides. But the grandiose iambic pentameter of her courtyard speeches has been contracted into a spasmodic series stark interjection, most of them being monosyllabic: “Yet who have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him”. Her allusion to Lady Macduff seems reduced to the miniature scale of a nursery rhyme (The thane of Fife /Had a wife), but it culminates in the universal lamentation of “ubi est”: “Where is she now?” Verse is the language of emotion under control, but her emotion is jumble and memory is chaotic. So she appropriately speaks in prose. A. C. Bradley has rightly remarked that Lady Macbeth is “the only one of the Shakespeare’s tragic characters who on last appearance is denied the dignity of verse.”
  The traditional explanation of Lady Macbeth’s bold beginning and a remorseful pathetic end is that she has an originally, naturally, gentle and womanly nature and therefore collapses from the strain violating that nature. But psychoanalytical study has rejected this explanation and tends to diagnose her malady as a manifestation of hysteria which compels her to re-enact the pattern of her behaviour that she deliberately tried to repress. Sigmund Freud regarded this sleep-walker and her sleepless mate as the two parts of a single split personality. “Together they exhaust the possibilities of reaction to the crime, like two disunited parts of single psychical individuality, and it may be that they are both copied from a single prototype.”

Significance of the Porter Scene in Macbeth

Significance of the Porter Scene in Macbeth:

Porter talking to Lennox and Macduff

Macbeth is a tragedy which unfolds before us a world where “Good things of Day begin to droop and drowse, / Whiles Night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.” It portrays a dark and gloomy world which teems with blood and murder. But the presence of the drunken porter with his comical and apparently meaningless words seems to be irrelevant. Pope and Coleridge agreed that the Porter scene was interpolated by the players. Whether Shakespeare wrote it or not is debatable issue. But its relevance and significance in the whole play can be logically established.
                                                                                                                   Firstly, the scene is theatrically necessary as it gives time for the actor and the actress who play the role of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth to wash their hands and change their clothes. Capell suggested that it was necessary “to give a rational space for the discharge of their action.”
                                                                                                                     Secondly, it provides comic relief to the audience. The audience has just witnessed the killing of Duncan and the horror surrounding it and this comic scene gives the audience a chance to catch their breaths and enlivens the gloomy atmosphere of horror. The Porter is, as White comments, “one of Shakespeare’s true humours grotesques, although not of the best sort of them.” He can be compared with the grave-digger in Hamlet and the Fool in King Lear.
                                                                                                                                     But the Porter Scene entirely destroys this atmosphere of horror. At the very beginning the Porter imagines himself to be the “Porter of Hell Gate”. Kenneth Muir reminds us that “it is there to increase our feelings of horror. We are never allowed to forget through the scene that a murder has been committed, and it is about to be discovered. If we laugh, we never forget.”
                                                                                                                                     According to Prof. Hales, the Porter is intended to be contrasted to his master and to come out as the better man, morally superior to Macbeth. He is no doubt vulgar, lo-bred, drunken and obscene. Yet he has committed no murder. His presence may bear an implicit moral import that a man of foul tongue is better than a man of foul deed.
                                                                                                                                  What the Porter says may seem irrelevant. But close analysis reveals that they are very much associated with the main theme of the play. The Porter invites three sinners to enter the castle which he imagines as hell. Their sins strongly echoes the Macbeth’s crime. Like Macbeth, all of them took the short and easy way to gain pleasure or power. The Jesuit equivocator who is accused of equivocation is reminder of contemporary political theme of treason and equivocation derived of famous Gunpowder Plot. Like him, Macbeth also equivocates after the murder of Duncan: “All is but toys: renown, and grace is dead; / The wine of life is drawn, the mere less/Is left this vault to brag of.”
                                                                                                                                     Lastly the knocking in the Porter Scene makes a strong impact on the audience. Thomas De Quincey has remarkably commented on it. With this is brought back the pulsating note of life. Thomas De Quincey has summed up this point wonderfully, “...the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that has suspended them.”

Character of Macbeth

Character of Macbeth:It is difficult to assess the character of  Macbeth as a hero or as a villain. From the beginning to the end of the play, his personality undergoes a sea change. From a brave and loyal follower of king he is transformed into a ruthless murderer. At the beginning of the play all other characters including Banquo are eclipsed by Macbeth’s valour and heroism. He is called as “valour’s minion”, “Bellona’s bridegroom lapped in proof”, “brave” and “noble” Macbeth, the king’s “valiant cousin” etc. But in the last scene of the fourth act, it is he who is regarded as the “Fiend of Scotland”, a “hell-kite”, the “tyrant” “whose sole name blisters our tongues”, “devilish Macbeth”. Though Macbeth falls in the eye of the other characters, the reader can easily separate Macbeth from a hardened criminal. Actually what save Macbeth from being a villain character are some of his redeeming qualities.
                                                         Macbeth has an extraordinary sensitive and imaginative mind which expresses it fear, remorse and agony through beautiful poetry. His wavering before the murder of Duncun, his hallucination of the blood dripping dagger, his mental torment and anguish all testify to his sensitive and imaginative mind. After he commits the murder his immediate concern is not with being discovered, but with his conscience. He says “To know my deed, ‘twere best not know myself”[ActII,ScII]. At the end of the play he is tormented by the awareness that he is now living amidst “Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath”[ActV,ScIII].
                                              Another virtue that he has retained is his courage. But it has inhuman quality: “bear-like, I must fight the course” [ActV,ScVII]. But when he understands the deceptive prophecies of the witches, he succumbs to a genuine human emotion. He feels sheer terror: “it hath cow’d my better part of man” [ActV,ScVIII]. But soon he recovers courage enough to die. Thus in his death he is not totally lost.
                                         Other strong point of Macbeth’s character is his capacity to face and withstand the ugly truth about himself. Though the influence of the witches and of Lady Macbeth is very prominent, Macbeth is not totally controlled by them. He consciously embraces the evil and also aware of its consequence. He is conscious of the goodness he abandons. He recognises the “deep damnation” to be expected and his hallucination of dagger confirms the force of his knowledge.
                                        He is also introspective and can analyse his mind appropriately. He knows what prompts him to commit the murder. It is his “vaulting ambition”. Though he diagnoses his malady, he acts humanly without trying to resist it.
                       In the world of evil his weak and nervous beginning and bold end is contrasted with his wife’s bold beginning and a remorseful pathetic end. Sigmund Freud made a comparative study of their character and concluded that they are the two parts of a single split personality. “Together they exhaust the possibilities of reaction to the crime, like two disunited parts of single psychical individuality, and it may be that they are both copied from a single prototype.”   (Sigmund Freud) 

Significance of the comic plots in Dr.Faustus

Significance of the comic plots in Dr.Faustus: Besides introducing the audience to the main tragic theme, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus offers them a couple of comic scenes. Introduction of comic scenes in a tragedy became a well-fashioned convention in the Elizabethan period. Most of the famous dramatists tended to use them only to please the groundlings. They inherited it from the interlude tradition of the Medieval Miracle and Morality plays. Most of them failed to present them as the integral part of the play until Shakespeare came to harmonise the grotesque tragic-comic contrast of early Elizabethan plays. Though at first glance the comic scenes in Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus appear to be irrelevant and disconcerting to the main theme of the play, a close reading of the text testify to their relevance in the play. In short the comic scenes are important because firstly, they provide comic relief. Secondly, they throw additional light on the meaning of the tragic action. Lastly, they present a contrasting point of view when compared to main theme of the play. To demonstrate this, we have to analyse the comic scenes one by one.
                                                                                                                             In Act-I,sc-II, When Wagner perplexes the two scholars with his logic, he seems to imitate his master’s way of displaying knowledge through verbal jugglery. Here we see that the hero and his servant do not differ in their quality but in the extent their misdeeds.
                                                                                                    In Act-I,Sc-IV, Wagner is engaged in a debate with a clown and tries to befool him. He remarks on the poor condition of the clown saying, “he (clown) would give his soul to the devil for a shoulder of mutton”. Next Wagner invokes Devil to punish the clown. Here Wagner’s desire to get the clown as his servant echoes Faustus’ intention to get Mephistophilis as his servant. This scene thematically parallels and in a way mocks the main tragic action.
                                                                                                                              Next comic scene (Act-II,Sc-II) is the appearance of the seven deadly sins employed by Lucifer to entertain Faustus. Harry Levin describes these deadly sins a “quaint procession” and interprets Faustus’ unalloyed amusement as a sin of moral decay. Next comic scene (Act-III,Sc-I) is the assault of Pope in his privy chamber by Faustus. It reveals the antichristian spirit of the play which was fostered by Renaissance humanism. The prank of snatching the Pope’s cup from his lips is echoed at the end when Faustus sees Christ’s blood streaming in the firmament and longs in vain “for one drop to save his soul”.
                                                                                                                              Next comic scenes are Act-IV, Sc-II and Sc-III where Ralph and Robin steals goblet from the vintner and strive to practice necromancy with help of a book. Their activities parody all the mischief Faustus has done in his life.
                                                                                                                          According to Harry Levin, the comic under plots reduce the main plot into absurdity and the over-plot is luminously adumbrated, sketched as it were lightning against a black sky. Besides, the play may be a pertinent example of Victor Hugo’s formulation for western art – the intermixture of grotesque and sublime. The most important point that these comic plots run parallel with the main tragic theme and often parody it lead to Bakhtinian theory of Carnivalesque where the rational discourse of the authority is mocked and subverted by the marginal ones.

Dr.Faustus as a Renaissance Hero

Faustus as a Renaissance Hero: When Christopher Marlowe composed tragedy Doctor Faustus, England observed the fullest development of Renaissance, “the complex many sided movement”, in the words of Walter Pater, “in which, in various way, the human mind wins for itself a new kingdom of feeling and sensation and thought.” Doctor Faustus in various ways shows its origin deeply rooted in Renaissance aspiration. Faustus himself is a Renaissance man who sacrifices himself to liberate human aspiration from physical instrumentalities and constricting superstition. In this sense, “Faustus may seem...Icarian” (Robert N. Watson, Theory of Renaissance Tragedy: Dr Faustus). In the beginning of the play, chorus also describes the tragedy of Faustus with Icarian myth.
                                                                              As a Renaissance man Faustus rejects all the famous Medieval studies like – Aristotle’s logic, study of medicine, Justinian’s law, theology. These studies were not only unable to reveal the absolute truth, but also to place him in “...a world of profit and delight, / of power, of honour, of omnipotence”. He ultimately chooses sorcery which is “an extension of the emergent Renaissance Sciences” (Robert N. Watson). It involves ancient history, foreign languages, optics, navigation and astronomy, and, “...for exotic delicacies that may be exchanged for money and court favour”. So Faustus never chooses black magic on the basis of mere superstition. Instead he chooses it only to gain power and intellectual satisfaction. C. L. Barber in his creating Elizabethan Tragedy remarked “the heroic quality of magic depends on fusing this divine suggestion with tangible values and resources of secular world.”
                                                                    Renaissance spirit involves immense emphasis on man’s intellectual power and man can attain truth through the critical use of it. The same spirit we find in Faustus’ intense quest for knowledge and truth throughout the play. He questions Mephistophilis relentlessly on various subjects like astronomy, theory of creation etc. But his most important question (“Now tell me who made the world?”) asked to Mephistophilis remains unanswered.
                                                                    It was an age of exploration and discovery of new lands. Renaissance spirit consists in the spirit adventure and heroism. Renaissance hero Faustus too cherishes within himself an impetuous adventurous spirit. He not only plans to send his familiar spirit to “search the corners of the entire new found world”, but himself travels throughout the Europe visiting all the glorious creation of Man.
                                                                As a Renaissance man he is a worshipper of beauties. Actually what is beautiful is appreciated by Faustus. It may be the temple of St. Marks or it may be Helen of Troy. The beauty of Helen elicits from him the beautiful poetic speech: “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,”
                                                                Instead of group sacrementalism, Renaissance religion tends towards personal or individual salvation. Reformation rejects all the meaningless rituals of Catholic Church. As its immediate effect we find in Doctor Faustus, poignant criticism of church in the speeches of Mephistophilis who denounced the “troop of bald-pate friars/ whose summum bonum is in belly-cheer”. Again marriage, a ritual ceremony of church, is severely criticised by Mephistophilis when he says,
“Marriage is but a ceremonial joy”.
                                                           Faustus, a Renaissance man, endeavours to gain limitless power and ultimately achieves it. But he does not know how to use it. That is why, his great ambition to glorify advance human civilization quickly fades. He uses his power to entertain the emperor with groceries and holography. Instead of turning man into God, he uses his magic  to turn his hecklers into beast. Thus Faustus’ tragedy represents the misdirected spirit of Renaissance which gave birth to some cheaters and tyrant who exploited science and navigation to pillage the foreign land. Learning became an instrument to please the monarch in the hope of honour and money and the production of beauty was exploited in the ostentation of power. Reflecting all these social corruption, “Dr. Faustus is a parable about spiritual loss in the modern world, a warning...about the fatal corruption awaiting all Renaissance aspiration.”   (Robert N. Watson, Theory of Renaissance Tragedy: Dr Faustus)