FREE ESSAY ON ELIZABETHEAN DRAMA

ELIZABETHEAN DRAMA

Beyond New Historicism: Marlowe's unnatural histories and the melancholy properties of the
stage
Drew Milne
The tradition of the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the minds of the living.
[1] 
There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
And just as such a document is not free from barbarism, barbarism also taints the process
of transmission ... [2] 
Recent critical discussions of Elizabethan drama, above all of Shakespeare, have centred
around `new historicism', a trend consolidated in critical anthologies.[3] New
historicism is characterised by an interest in the historicity of texts and the
textuality of history, and by affinities with theoretical projects concerned with power,
identity and the construction of subject positions. Despite important political
differences, new historicism has been linked with what has become known as `cultural
materialism'.[4] Many of the political differences stem from the uneasy relation of new
historicism, and of cultural materialism, to the Marxist conception of history or
historical materialism, differences which this essay seeks to accentuate. 
Raymond Williams is often claimed as a major precursor of cultural materialism, but
interest in institutions, discursive practices and subject positions suggests the
different legacy of Althusser's attack on humanism and the influence of Foucault. New
historicism, by contrast, shows scant regard for Marxism while being especially indebted
to Foucault's version of Nietzsche's will to power and perspectival historicism, despite
important critiques of Foucault's work.[5] The Althusserian approach is more overtly
committed to the possibility of political change but tends towards a similarly
theoreticist, even formalist reduction of history. The possibility of resisting power and
the power of ideology marks the decisive conflict in these different assimilations of
history to culture. New historicism, lost in proliferating examples of contingent but
seemingly inescapable discourses of power, seems at best to expand the archive of wry
smiles at the ruses of history and power. As an academic guise in which to rework the
glories of the past without pausing too long over the enormity of the history surveyed,
the reproduction of literary history now lies in the hands of those who can offer few
reasons for continuing to produce the object of critique. Sinfield suggests that, `New
historicists, therefore, like their colleagues, are sustaining many of the old routines
while knowing, really, that their validity has evaporated.'[6] As such, new historicists
could be described as reformists who do not believe in progress. 
If we are to awake from the nightmare of history, perhaps such historicism should be left
alone to dull the air with discoursive moans, as Aeneas puts it in Marlowe's Dido, Queen
of Carthage. The persistent naturalisation of suffering in history should be resisted if
the process of transmitting historical documents is not to further the process. Herein
lies the need to offer estranging perspectives on Elizabethan drama and the intervening
historical gulf. One aspect of the difficulty is the continuing investment in
naturalising both the language and dramaturgy of Elizabethan drama within a literary
tradition dominated by Shakespeare and the Shakespeare industry. This essay seeks to
provide an estranging perspective through a reading of new historicist accounts of
Marlowe. Focussing on Tamburlaine, I hope to suggest some different approaches with
regard to the melancholy dramatisation of history as a scene of unnatural events, by
drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin and Franco Moretti.[7] 
A distinctive and estranging approach to dramatising the enormity of history is evident
in the prevalence of violence, murder and arbitrary death in Elizabethan drama itself.
This prevalence has long been seen as excessive, a mark of something unnatural in its
historical imaginary, without being understood. History in Elizabethan drama is, as
title-pages characteristically predict, lamentable. The structure of effects suggested by
drama as an occasion for melancholic lamentation helps to contextualise the roles of
Tamburlaine, Barabas and Guise in Marlowe's plays, where it seems particularly
in-appropriate to reduce their dramatic ambivalence to the need to identify with a
central protagonist or autonomous `character'. As David Bevington suggests: `The
well-known type of Lamentable Tragedy, Mixed Full of Pleasant Mirth ... traces its
origins to the view that vicious behavior is at once funny and terrifying as a spectacle,
admirable and yet grotesque, amusing but also edifying as a perverse distortion of moral
behavior.'[8] Elizabethan drama, par-ticularly Marlowe's, dramatises the contradictions
of seeing history as a record of divine providence in which the world is the theatre of
divine judgment. The prologue to the first part of Tamburlaine invites audience and
reader to `View but his picture in this tragicke glasse, / And then applaud his fortunes
if you please.'[9] Indeed the play seems to relish the ambivalent moral possibilities of
melancholy pleasure in lamenting a world without divine providence. In this theatre
history is both unnatural and inhuman. Violent suffering without end or grace goes
against the notion of a fall from a greater nature or the prospect of a redeemed nature
to come. History is then seen as the non-identity of nature with itself, unnatural forces
struggling with natural ones. Unnatural forces, however, must also be seen as emerging
from nature, while the dramatisation of history in terms of human agency suggests that
unnatural acts are an aspect of human nature for which no secular concept of wordly evil
is adequate. In Elizabethan drama the stage is not so much beyond good and evil as caught
in an attempt to develop a secular concept of evil. The resources for such a concept are
figurative rather than conceptual, resorting to melancholy in face of the unthinkably
arbitrary and violent prevalence of suffering. 
Benjamin's account is helpful here. The contemplation of lamentable stories of death by
unnatural causes finds its aesthetic purpose in allegories of unholy dying, allegories in
which history is a fallen nature, a world of evil without the consolations of natural
justice. On such an unnaturally cruel and violent stage dominated by seemingly arbitrary
and unreliable powers, the possibility that evil might be recognisable without theology
is consoling. Indeed it is the reduction of history to worldly evil which makes it
possible to stage history as a state of unnatural nature that can be lamented. The mirror
of magistrates becomes a wheel which needs to be reinvented because it never quite comes
full circle, notably in the lurching rhythms of the failure of poetic justice at the end
of King Lear. Hence, although a fashion for stage violence can be traced from Cambises
and Gorboduc to The Spanish Tragedy, its historical significance is complicated. Thus it
is difficult to understand why Tamburlaine was so popular, even to the extent of
imitation in The First part of the Tragical raigne of Selimus. Tamburlaine's simple
linear plot seems to offer little more than a violent pageant of power and destruction
enlivened by occasional striking tableaux. This taste for horror in aesthetic form has
remained unexplained in its more specific historical manifestations, and in general,
perhaps because it reflects but fails to explain the nightmare of history. 
In rethinking this nightmare, much of the critical verve of new historicism is derived
from the historicisation, if not critique, of humanist or idealist conceptions of
subjectivity in the reception and critical transmission of Elizabethan drama. There is a
danger in assimilating the different approaches associated with new historicism to one
paradigm, but the centrality of conceptions of subjectivity is evident. Catherine Belsey,
while developing an attack on liberal humanism, seeks `to chart in the drama of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the eventual construction of an order of subjectivity
which is recognizably modern.'[10] This finds its strategic justification in the need to
displace the largely romantic and post-romantic conceptions of the subject dominant in
the modern reception of Shakespeare and so-called Renaissance drama more generally.
Jonathan Dollimore describes the task as `a critique of the way literary critics have
reproduced Renaissance drama in terms of a modern depoliticized subjectivity, and an
attempt to recover a more adequate history of subjectivity'.[11] Dollimore argues that
Elizabethan tragedy itself challenged Christian essentialism and in the process decentred
`Man'; but he also highlights the danger of anachronism: 
the incorrect procedure is that which insists on reading the early seventeenth century
through the grid of an essentialist humanism which in historical fact post-dates it and
in effect only really emerges with the Enlightenment; in other words, what makes a
materialist analysis of subjectivity in that period seem inappropriate is itself a
thoroughly anachronistic perspective.[12] 
Nevertheless there are striking similarities between Dollimore's account of Tamburlaine
and the persistent Nietzschean romanticism which marks previous critical accounts of
Marlowe. Hazlitt says of Marlowe that: `There is a lust of power in his writings, a
hunger and thirst after unrighteousness, a glow of the imagination, unhallowed by
anything but its own energies.'[13]; while Helen Gardner argues less effusively that:
`The first part of Tamburlaine glorifies the human will: the second displays its
inevitable limits.'[14]; and Harry Levin offers the following stirring formulation of
Marlowe's Barabas: `His will to power is gratified less by possession than by control. In
this he does not resemble the conqueror so much as he adumbrates the capitalist; and
Marlowe has grasped what is truly imaginative, what in his time was almost heroic, about
business enterprise.'[15] This Nietzschean aesthetic of the will to power and primitive
accumulation, in which naked ambition and the arbitrary amassing of power and wealth is
celebrated as the legitimate aspiration of human energy, finds surprising echoes in
Dollimore's account of Tamburlaine: 
With his indomitable will to power and warrior prowess, Tamburlaine really does
approximate to the self-determining hero bent on transcendent autonomy . . . exclusion
may be the basis not just of Tamburlaine as fantasy projection but Tamburlaine as
transgressive text: it liberates from its Christian and ethical framework the humanist
conception of man as essentially free, dynamic and aspiring. [16] 
In Dollimore's argument these terms are ambivalent rather than celebratory, but seem to
preclude the more Brechtian possibility that Marlowe does not in the end intend sympathy
with Tamburlaine. Perhaps, like Mother Courage, Marlowe intended a sense that the passage
of war and destruction might be understood as the responsibility of a badly motivated
human agent, such that Tamburlaine's exploits are an occasion for reflective lamentation,
rather than Nietzschean identification with a superman. The central hermeneutic
difficulty, however, is that the attempt to historicise anachronistically imputed
conceptions of subjectivity relies on claiming that more recent conceptions of decentred
subjectivity are not similarly anachronistic, an objection which could also be extended
to Brecht's plays. Much depends on whether we applaud the fortunes seen in the `tragicke
glasse' of Tamburlaine as a stage on which the will to power is enacted, or whether we
prefer to steel ourselves against the figurative idealism which lurks in such mirrors of
nature. If we applaud the fortunes of Tamburlaine then we identify with that difference
of nature from itself which produces the spectacle of history, thus naturalising
Tamburlaine's will to power. If we do not identify with Tamburlaine's struggle for power
as something natural then we have to lament the spectacle of unnatural history or find a
perspective from which to understand it differently. 
Thus the focus on subjective agency, individual will or dramatic identity tends to
abstract from history to highlight the ideological forms which transcend the historical
gulf between modern and pre-modern fictions of society. A materialist account of
subjectivity may restore individuals to history, but the political relevance of
theoretical hindsight is mortgaged to the reception history it seeks to displace. In
other words, by making subjectivity such a central analytical tool new historicism
succeeds in decentring subjects, showing how such subjects were never centred, but
obscures the historical and cognitive significance of the different terms in which
Elizabethan drama dramatised history. As Moretti argues, taking up Benjamin's account of
allegory: `allegory is not a subjective deception to which someone might be imagined to
hold the semantic key, but the objectively deceptive condition of the nature of history
by which everyone is ultimately betrayed.'[17] Moreover, subjectivity in Elizabethan
drama is invariably a chimera given the persistent ambivalence of theatricality. Kastan
and Stallybrass, for example, suggest that `Acting itself threatens to reveal the
artificial and arbitrary nature of social being.'[18] The nature of social being,
however, is not arbitrary save in constructions which make being the ground of
historicity. Human history cannot be understood in terms of a history of human
subjectivity without reference to the nature against which it struggles, and that nature
is itself historical.[19] The history of subjectivity is never the same as the history of
subjects as objects in human attempts to dominate nature. The thought that the
antagonistic domination of human nature and the struggle to dominate nature itself might
be superseded and shown to be neither natural nor contingently historical, is perhaps
what Marx meant by the pre-history of human society. If there is an affinity between
modern conceptions of decentred subjectivity and pre-modern Elizabethan drama, it may be
that both Elizabethan dramatisations of history and contemporary historicism collapse
history, indeed naturalize it in terms of a drama of subjective wills. 
Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), an important text in the
emergence of new historicism, provides exemplary instances of these difficulties. In his
introduction Greenblatt concedes the risk of anachronism, and comments on his small group
of chosen texts that: `It is we who enlist them in a kind of historical drama'.[20]
Greenblatt provocatively suggests a dramatised analogy with Nietzsche's conception of the
will to power in the very title of the chapter `Marlowe and the Will to Absolute Play'.
Such anachronism is significant insofar as the naturalization of history as power
suggested by Nietzsche, and also in Foucault's work, is a historically determinate
attempt to understand social process in terms of illusory subject positions. As
Greenblatt explains in his epilogue: 
Whenever I focused sharply upon a moment of apparently autonomous self-fashioning, I
found not an epiphany of identity freely chosen, but a cultural artifact. If there
remained traces of free choice, the choice was among possibilities whose range was
strictly delineated by the social and ideological system in force. (p. 256) 
Hence Greenblatt describes Marlowe's plays by explicitly evoking Marx's The Eighteenth
Brumaire: `Marlowe's protagonists rebel against orthodoxy, but they do not do so just as
they please; their acts of negation not only conjure up the order they would destroy, but
seem at times to be themselves conjured up by that very order.' (p. 210) The subtle
difference, however, is the shift to a more structuring account of `order', and, more
fundamentally, the stress on the dramatic protagonist as the interpretative key, despite
arguing that it is the social order which fashions such protagonists. Consequently,
Greenblatt's approach needs to be understood as both a sketch of the development of human
autonomy in the Renaissance, what might be called a romanticist reading of the early
modern period, and the historicisation of such autonomy as being illusory: `Marlowe's
heroes must live their lives as projects, but they do so in the midst of intimations that
the projects are illusions.' (p. 213) 
Accordingly, in a move which has become characteristic of new historicism, Greenblatt
prefaces his account of self-fashioning in Marlowe's plays with an anecdotal historical
analogue for the contemporary `system' of power. This analogue juxtaposes Marlowe's plays
with the `casual, unexplained violence' in an English merchant's tale of a voyage in 1586
to Sierre Leone, suggesting an historical 'matrix' of the relentless power-hunger of
Tudor absolutism, and in particular the acquisitive energies of English merchants,
entre-preneurs, and adventurers.(p. 194) In some respects this echoes what might be
called the old historicist account of L.C.Knights in Drama and Society in the Age of
Jonson (1937), which examines the social and economic bases of Elizabethan-Jacobean
culture in rather more detail. But Greenblatt does not relate nascent English capitalism
and colonialism to the specific religious and political conflicts dramatised in
Tamburlaine. Rather, he deploys history as `matrix' in a more metaphorical analogy
between the dynamic political geography of merchant capital and the theatrical
representation of space. Just as merchant capitalism seeks to reduce geographical
differences to an expression of its power, so, for Greenblatt, Marlowe uses theatrical
power to represent different spaces: 
In Tamburlaine Marlowe contrives to efface all such differences, as if to insist upon the
essential meaninglessness of theatrical space, the vacancy that is the dark side of its
power to imitate any place. This vacancy - quite literally, this absence of scenery - is
the equivalent in the medium of the theater to the secularization of space ... (p. 195) 
On this basis Marlowe's dramatisation of the history of Tamburlaine is seen by Greenblatt
as Tamburlaine's will to power in the occupation of theatrical space. Just as Elizabethan
dramatists breezily rewrite historical source materials, so Greenblatt breezily rewrites
Tamburlaine in terms which implicitly argue the perspicuity of Deleuze and Guattari:
`Tamburlaine is a machine, a desiring machine that produces violence and death.' (p. 195)
Hence the terms of Tamburlaine's dynamic occupation of stage space are further abstracted
from Marlowe's theatrical allegory of history, and dramatised in Greenblatt's
anachronistic allegory: `Space is transformed into an abstraction, then fed to the
appetitive machine. This is the voice of conquest, but it is also the voice of wants
never finished and of transcendental homelessness.' (p. 196) While Greenblatt's analogue
indicates the dialectical relation between culture and barbarity suggested by Walter
Benjamin, he does not use it to examine specific power struggles in history, but rather
as an anecdotal allegory to suggest the historicity of power. 
Greenblatt's conception of theatricality is nevertheless a sophisticated one. This is
salutary amid the prevalent reluctance to recognize the centrality of theatre and
theatricality for Elizabethan drama, a reluctance which reflects the dominance of
print-culture perspectives on drama and more recent attempts to conceive history as a
form of textuality. However, his account of theatricality risks remaining immanent within
the metaphors generated by theatricality in Marlowe's plays. Comparing `the violence of
Tamburlaine and of the English merchant' (p.197) this leads Greenblatt into an alarming
aestheticisation of their respective representations and experiences of stage space and
geography: 
experiencing this limitlessness, this transformation of space and time into abstractions,
men do violence as a means of marking boundaries, effecting transformation, signaling
closure. To burn a town or to kill all of its inhabitants is to make an end, and in so
doing, to give life a shape and a certainty that it would otherwise lack. (p.197) 
There is something chilling in these lines, not least in the trans-formation of violence
into formal patterns and the assimilation of human suffering - `to burn a town' - to the
perspective of the violent protagonist. For Greenblatt the structure of limits give shape
but no escape: `in Marlowe's ironic world, these desperate attempts at boundary and
closure produce the opposite effect, reinforcing the condition they are meant to efface.'
(p. 198) The key anachronism is the suggestion of ironic and implicitly inescapable
reversals of power. Marlowe's plays fails to give such intelligible shape or indeed
another moral scheme by which to understand the spectacle of violence because the
dramatic presentation is not restricted to the self-fashioning of the protagonist: we
also see the victims. 
In the fifth act of Tamburlaine 1, for example, Tamburlaine sacks the town of Damascus
and kills all of its inhabitants, save the father of Zenocrate, Tamburlaine's wife-to-be.
The play offers the Brechtian possibility that the audience need not identify with
Tamburlaine by offering perspectives on Tamburlaine's victims through Bajazeth, Zabina
and, most importantly, Zenocrate. Amid the death of Damascus, so to speak, and reports of
the speared and slaughtered carcasses of the virgins unsuccessfully sent by Damascus to
intercede with Tamburlaine, the audience also sees the laments and then suicides of
Bajazeth, Emperor of the Turks, and Zabina his wife, having had enough of being paraded
as Tamburlaine's symbolic slaves. As Zabina puts it, `Then is there left no Mahomet, no
God, / No Feend, no Fortune, nor no hope of end / To our infamous monstrous slaveries?'
(Pt.1: V.i.239-241) An audience might more easily identify with such a lament than with a
man who has killed a town. The laments of Bajazeth and Zabina are highly charged and,
juxtaposed with the slaughtered virgins, their self-fashioned deaths suggest the extremes
of the social scale to suffer at the hands of Tamburlaine.[21] Their deaths are
immediately followed by the entrance of Zenocrate who laments the sack of her home town
by her supposed lover: 
Zenocrate. Wretched Zenocrate, that livest to see, 
Damascus walles di'd with Egyptian blood: 
Thy Fathers subjects and thy countrimen. 
Thy streetes strowed with dissevered jointes of men, 
And wounded bodies gasping yet for life.... 
Ah, Tamburlaine, wert thou the cause of this 
That tearm'st Zenocrate thy dearest love? 
Whose lives were dearer to Zenocrate 
Than her own life, or ought save thine owne love. 
(Pt. 1, V.i.319-323, 334-5) 
Coming after Bajazeth and Zabina, Zenocrate reminds the audience of the slaughter of
Damascus, and highlights the depth of Tamburlaine's rejection of the natural pity which
might be associated with love. But if this isn't enough to suggest that we might identify
with the victims of Tamburlaine, Zenocrate then turns to see the `bloody spectacle' of
Bajazeth and Zabina: `Behold the Turke and his great Emperesse./ Ah Tamburlaine, my love,
sweet Tamburlaine, / That fights for Scepters and for slippery crownes' (Pt.1,
V.i.354-6). This suggests the way in which the play might be read as the tragedy of
Bajazeth and Zabina, their history as moral exemplum in the mirror of magistrates
tradition. However, despite the efforts of Zenocrate and Anippe, her maid, to summon the
wheel of fortune scheme this serves instead to highlight the dramatic ambivalence of
Tamburlaine's unstopped rise to power. Roy Battenhouse offers the most sustained attempt
to reinscribe Tamburlaine in a moral scheme, focussing in particular on the end of part
2, and reading the play in terms offered by Tamburlaine's final words, as the story of a
`Scourge of God' (Pt.2: V.iii.258), but this reading has to work against the grain of
Marlowe's more ambivalent moral and theological implications. History itself, as
Battenhouse concedes, makes his case hard to sustain: 
The tradition of Tamburlaine's peaceful and natural death being thus firmly established,
we must recognize that Marlowe's opportunities to make of the history an example of God's
punishing of sin were definitely limited. The histories were attributing to this Scythian
scourge a long life of unobscured glory - a career which looked like a blasphemous
challenge to the Puritan dogma of Providence. [22] 
The approach suggested by Greenblatt is more convincing in this respect: `Tamburlaine
repeatedly teases its audience with the form of the cautionary tale, only to violate the
convention. All of the signals of the tragic are produced, but the play stubbornly,
radically, refuses to become a tragedy.' (p. 202) Part 1, in particular, ends with
Tamburlaine triumphant, crowning Zenocrate queen of Persia and talking of marriage rites
to come, presenting the melancholy spectacle of inhuman, ruthless violence and tyranny
unpunished. 
Indeed the audience are encouraged to view this spectacle with horror and amazement. For
most of act five of part 1 Tamburlaine is identified with death, entering as the stage
direction puts it: `all in blacke, and verie melancholy' (Pt.1: V.i.inter 63-4). In one
of Marlowe's finest theatrical touches he shows the horror of Tamburlaine's power through
the rhetoric of allegorical reference to his sword as he claims that death is his servant
and dismisses the virgins sent by Damascus to intercede with him: 
Tamburlaine: Virgins, in vaine ye labour to prevent 
That which mine honor sweares shal be perform'd: 
Behold my sword, what see you at the point. 
1. Virgin: Nothing but feare and fatall steele my Lord. 
Tamburlaine: Your fearfull minds are thicke and mistie then, 
For there sits Death, there sits imperious Death, 
Keeping his circuit by the slicing edge. 
But I am pleasde you shall not see him there: 
He now is seated on my horsmens speares, 
And on their points his fleshlesse bodie feeds. 
Techelles, straight goe charge a few of them 
To charge these Dames, and shew my servant death, 
Sitting in scarlet on their armed speares. 
(Pt. 1: V.i.106-118) 
Tamburlaine's sword is more than an object of fear and potentially fatal steel, becoming
an allegory in which the stage property is an object of melancholic perception, a figure
of death. Benjamin comments that `once human life has sunk into the merely creaturely,
even the life of apparently dead objects secures power over it.'[23] And while the fatal
power of swords as objects is evident, the importance of the stage property here is the
significance of this sword as an object of contemplation into which history has been
metonymically distilled. 
The illumination of the fateful qualities of the most trivial stage property, such as a
handkerchief or a glove, reveal such props to be objects, often poisonous ones, which
signify the fateful arbitrariness of objective history. Indeed the relation between
protagonists and the fateful objects with which they identify is a central dramaturgical
part of the opening of many of Marlowe's plays: a letter for Gaveston; Faustus and books;
Barabas and heaps of gold. The significance of this is highlighted by the insignificance
of such stage props in classical drama. As Benjamin argues: `In moral examples and in
catastrophes history served only as an aspect of the subject matter of emblematics. The
transfixed face of signifying nature is victorious, and history must, once and for all,
remain contained in the subordinate role of stage-property.'[24] Similarly, sovereignty
is given allegorical representation in the metonymical form of sceptres and what
Zenocrate calls `slippery crownes'. All through Tamburlaine crowns are the sad
allegorical tokens of earthly power, but they become melancholic properties rather than
moral exempla precisely when providential schemes of history as morality fail.
Melancholic because the allegory of the objective world such stage props signify is one
in which the dramatisation of history as evil recoils from the realisation that there is
no evil in nature, only a subjective understanding with no correlative in reality. 
A striking passage from Plotinus's third century Enneads suggests the possibility of
seeing the enormity of history as the pleasurably lamentable work of a dramatic artist,
while suggesting also the risks of failing to recognise the possible barbarity of
neo-Platonist attempts to figure life as play, and so reduce the historical world to a
phenomenon secondary to subjective understanding: 
Murders, death in all its guises, the reduction and sacking of cities, all must be to us
just such a spectacle as the changing scenes of a play; all is but the varied incident of
a plot, costume on and off, acted grief and lament. For on earth, in all the succession
of life, it is not the Soul within but the Shadow outside of the authentic man that
grieves and complains and acts out the plot on this world stage which men have dotted
with stages of their own constructing. All this is the doing of man knowing no more than
to live the lower and outer life, and never perceiving that, in his weeping and in his
graver doings alike, he is but at play; to handle matters austerely is reserved for the
thoughtful: the other kind of man is himself a futility. Those incapable of thinking
gravely read gravity into frivolities which correspond to their own frivolous Nature.[25]

Murder, death in all its guises, and the reduction and sacking of cities are the
spectacles and changing scenes of Marlowe's unnatural histories, especially in
Tamburlaine and The Massacre at Paris. The resort to theatrical melancholy need not
collapse the world of suffering into a frivolous nature which corresponds to that
melancholy, as though the sacking of cities were frivolous. Nevertheless, the
dramatisation of such history as a pageant of power invariably threatens to be caught in
a figure which naturalises history as play. Plotinus reminds us that some of the relevant
figures are not as historically specific as they at first seem. The important difference
is that Elizabethan drama, and in particular tragedy, registers an essential inhumanism,
notably in the melancholic, metonymical significance of crowns, swords and other often
poisonous stage properties whose seemingly modest objectivity overcomes the best efforts
of human subjects. Moreover the drama suggests an unfathomably lamentable quality in the
struggle between natural and unnatural forces, precisely because without eschatology or a
modern idea of natural history, history is reduced to an allegory of natural forces. 
Thus the understanding of Elizabethan drama would be furthered by examining the relation
between nature, history and theatricality, so as to reveal its truth as a cognitive
framework which has become historically alienated from the barbarity it sought to
understand. Elizabethan drama attempts to stage history as nature; not nature in the
modern sense, but rather an unnaturally horrific and lamentable allegory of nature as
history. Decoding the history in this nature involves recognizing the way this
allegorical staging of history helps us understand the necessity for historical
distanciation, particularly from any attempt to displace the horror in its allegory of
natural history with new allegories of the historicity of power and subjectivity. In
short, the effort to rethink Elizabethan drama might restore a sense of the unnatural
histories which divide and rule our historical differences. Rather than rethinking such
history in `our' own natural interests, such documents might be blasted out of their
continuity and given a sense of unrelenting strangeness rather than strained relevance.
The hermeneutic shibboleths of power, subjectivity and identity may also have to give way
to the rejection or at least melancholic recognition of the essential inhumanism of a
world without grace whose historical nature is a nightmare from which we are yet to
awake. 
NOTES - Please note that to return to the text, click on the footnote number on the left
hand side of the page. 
[1] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trans. B. Fowkes, Surveys from
Exile: Political Writings, vol. 2, ed. D. Fernbach (Harmondsworth, 1973). 
[2] W. Benjamin, 'Uber den Begriff der Geschichte', Illuminationen, ed. S.Unseld
(Frankfurt am Main, 1977), p. 254; translation amended from 'Theses on the Philosophy of
History', Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London, 1973), p. 258. 
[3] See New Historicism and Renaissance Drama, eds. Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton
(London and New York, 1992); and Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of
Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (New York and London, 1991), eds. David Scott Kastan and
Peter Stallybrass. 
[4] See Jonathan Dollimore, 'Introduction: Shakespeare, cultural materialism and the new
historicism', Political Shakespeare: New essays in cultural materialism, eds. Jonathan
Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester, 1985); Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy
(London, 1989), especially the preface to the second edition; and Alan Sinfield,
Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford, 1992). 
[5] See Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-structuralist Thought and the Claims
of Critical Theory (London, 1987); and Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass. and Cambridge, 1987). 
[6] Sinfield, Faultlines, p. 287. 
[7] Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London,
1977); and Franco Moretti, 'The Great Eclipse: Tragic Form as the Deconsecration of
Sovereignty', Signs Taken For Wonders, trans. David Miller (London, 1983). Benjamin's
work has had surprisingly little resonance in studies of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.
Helpful discussions of Benjamin's work on 'Trauerspiel' and drama are provided by Charles
Rosen, 'The Ruins of Walter Benjamin', On Walter Benjamin, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge,
Mass. and London, 1988), pp. 129-5; and Rainer Nagele, Theater, Theory, Speculation:
Walter Benjamin and the Scenes of Modernity (Baltimore and London, 1991). 
[8] David M. Bevington, From 'Mankind' to Marlowe (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), p. 161. 
[9] Tamburlaine, Part 1, The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, 2 vols., ed Fredson
Bowers (Cambridge, 1973), vol. 1, p. 79. References to this edition hereafter in main
text. 
[10] Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy (London, 1985), p. 4. 
[11] Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, preface to second edition, p. xxviii. 
[12] Radical Tragedy, p. 155. 
[13] William Hazlitt, from Lectures on the Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth,
quoted from Critics on Marlowe, ed. Judith O'Neill (London, 1969), p.17. 
[14] Helen Gardner, 'The Second Part of Tamburlaine the Great', Critics on Marlowe, p.
42. 
[15] Harry Levin, `The Jew of Malta: Poor Old Rich Man', Critics on Marlowe, p. 51. 
[16] Radical Tragedy, p. 112. 
[17] Franco Moretti, Signs Taken For Wonders, p. 78. 
[18] Staging the Renaissance, p. 9. 
[19] See T.W.Adorno, 'The Idea of Natural History.' trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor, Telos, 60
(Summer, 1984), 111-124. 
[20] Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago &
London, 1980), p. 6. References hereafter included in the main text. 
[21] On these laments and lament generally see Wolfgang Clemen's neglected English
Tragedy Before Shakespeare, trans. T.S.Dorsch (London, 1961), esp. ch. 14, `The Dramatic
Lament and Its Forms', pp. 211-252; and ch. 15, `The Pre-Shakespearian Dramatic Lament',
pp. 253-286. 
[22] Roy W. Battenhouse, Marlowe's Tamburlaine: A Study in Renaissance Moral Philosophy
(Vanderbilt, Nashville, 1941; revised edition 1964), p. 144. 
[23] Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 132. 
[24] Benjamin, pp. 170-1. 
[25] Plotinus, The Six Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna & B.S.Page (Chicago, 1952),
III.ii.15, p. 90