Dr Faustus

1

Dr. Faustus - Selling His Soul to Make a Point In Dr. Faustus, Christopher Marlowe has vividly drawn up the character of an intelligent, learned man tragically seduced by the lure of power greater than he was mortally meant to have. The character of Dr. Faustus is, in conception, an ideal of humanism, but Marlowe has taken him and shown him to be damned nonetheless, thus satirizing the ideals of Renaissance Humanism. M. H. Abram's A Glossary of Literary Terms defines Renaissance Humanism, stating that some of the key concepts of the philosophy centered around "the dignity and central position of human beings in the universe" as reasoning creatures, as well as downplaying the "‘animal' passions" of the individual. The mode of the thought also "stressed the need for a rounded development of and individual's diverse powers... as opposed to merely technical or specialized training." Finally, all of this was synthesized into and perhaps defined by their tendency to minimize the prevalent Christian ideal of innate corruption and withdrawal from the present, flawed world in anticipation of heaven. (p. 83) The character of Faustus is reasoning and very aware of the moral (or immoral) status of what he is undertaking. His opening speech is devoted to working out logically why he is willing to sacrifice both the road to honest knowledge and his soul in favor of more power. (I, 1-63) He exhibits, in his search for power, anything but animal passion; he indeed exhibits a chilling logic as he talks himself out of the possible delights of heaven. Not only is he intelligent, he also demonstrates a broad base of learning, another quality admired and upheld by humanists. In several sections of the play, Faustus goes into beautifully vivid descriptions of the wonders he will accomplish with his power. (I, 78-97; III, 104-111) This seems an ironic parody of what Philip Sydney (a well-known humanist) described in his Defense of Poesy as the poet's prerogative of describing a reality better than that which may actually be attained. Faustus is rarely more humanist than when he describes what he will do with his hell-bought power. Marlowe's attack on humanism is subtle. He demonstrates an admirable complexity of narration as he weaves these grand-seeming gestures of the power of the individual in with the essential damnation that walks hand-in-hand with man. There is little or nothing which Faustus does which is not unto itself humanistic. His downfall is woven into the fact that he is and will always be human– thus, flawed. Marlowe creates a character who is intelligent, broad-based in his education, logical, and poetic... and still damned. Despite his humanism, he is unequivocally corrupt, a quality which Renaissance Humanism as a philosophy tended to gloss over. When Faustus achieves his power, he time and again fails to take advantage of it for any but the silliest operations. From the viewing of the Seven Deadly Sins (V, 277322) to enchanting an offensive knight with horns (X, 52-80), the man's professed intentions of greatness are shown for the hopeless dreams they really are– they contain neither truth nor purpose, in the end, despite what Sydney stated. Marlowe points out again and again in conversation with the wise (if evil) demons and devils the nature of hell. He states it quite simply that "All places be hell that is

2 not heaven." (V, 125) Of earth, Mephastophilis asserts that "this is hell, nor am I out of it." (III, 76) Both these spite the humanistic love of the world, or as Abram's Glossary puts it: ...[Renaissance humanists] tended to emphasize the values achievable by human beings in this world, and to minimize the earlier Christian emphasis on innate corruption and on the ideals of asceticism and of withdrawal from this world in a preoccupation with the world hereafter. (p. 83) Christopher Marlowe was not a Humanist, as evidenced by how clearly the tragedy that was Dr. Faustus exemplified the downfall of a humanist and reinforced themes which conflicted with the basic tenets presented by Renaissance Humanism. If this reading is to be believed, the man was in fact violently and intelligently opposed to it. It is difficult to imagine a more effective and thorough attack on the mentality and methodology of the humanist than Dr. Faustus.

Casting Doubt in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus by William M. Hamlin He that casts all doubts shall never be resolved. English Renaissance proverb It will come as news to no one that Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus can be and has been deemed a skeptical play. [1] More than a century ago, the Victorian scholar J. R. Green characterized Marlowe's outlook as a "daring scepticism" and claimed that Faustus was "the first dramatic attempt to touch the great problem of the relations of man to the unseen world, to paint the power of doubt in a temper leavened with superstition." [2] Fifty years later, Una Ellis-Fermor called Doctor Faustus "perhaps the most notable Satanic play in literature." [3] And the varied testimony of Marlowe's contemporaries--Robert Greene, Richard Baines, Thomas Kyd, and Richard Cholmeley among them--strongly suggests that both the man and his writings could be considered iconoclastic and profoundly irreverent: both susceptible to charges of "monstruous opinions," "vile hereticall conceipts," even "diabolical atheism." [4] True, the circumstances in which these allegations were sometimes made force us to question their accuracy; y et, there still exists an extraordinary congruence of contemporary attitude about Marlowe--about what we might call his skepticism. But what in fact are we saying when we say an early modern writer is skeptical? In what senses does this word carry meaning with respect to the dramatic compositions of Marlowe or his contemporaries? How can we allege, without being utterly vapid, that Doctor Faustus exhibits a pervasive skepticism? How, if at all, may we infer skeptical tenets from dramatic texts? What, if any, are the skeptical paradigms inherent in Marlowe's great tragedy? These are the questions I wish to consider. And, as a means of approaching them, I would like first of all briefly to examine the enabling premises and methodological strategies of the best-known current commentator on skepticism and English Renaissance tragedy: Stanley Cavell. Cavell has not written on Marlowe--indeed his

3 dramatic criticism has focused almost exclusively on Shakespeare--but it is nonetheless worth our while to attend to his programmatic statements regarding what he calls the "skeptical problematic." [5] He claims, for instance, that Shakespeare "engage[s] the depth of the philosophical preoccupations of his culture," and he adds that his guiding "intuition" about Shakespeare is that "the advent of skepticism as manifested in [Rene] Descartes's Meditations is already in full existence" in "the great tragedies" of the early seventeenth century. [6] But these two statements would appear to be incompatible, for while it may be true that Shakespeare anticipates the hyperbolic doubt of Descartes, it is clearly anachronistic to characterize that doubt as a "philosophical preoccupation" of the first decade of Britain's seventeenth century. Not that doubt did not exist, or that epistemological questions were not asked--far from it. But the forms of philosophical skepticism to which Shakespeare and Marlowe could have been exposed were principally those derived from the Pyrrhonian and Academic paradigms of antiquity. [7] Indeed, Marlowe quotes, in the 1604 quarto of Doctor Faustus, a phrase lifted directly from Sextus Empiricus's Adversus Mathematicos (Against the Mathematicians), a work readily available at Cambridge during Marlowe's student days, and undoubtedly also circulating in London at that time. [8] And Sextus's principal champion in the late sixteenth century, Michel de Montaigne, was indisputably read by Shakespeare. [9] Hence Cavell's implicit diminution of the influence of Montaigne--not to mention his complete neglect of many other contemporary writers through whose works classical skepticis m was channeled into early modern intellectual life--is fundamentally ahistorical. [10] Cavell writes that "the skeptical problematic I have in mind is given its philosophical refinement in Descartes's way of raising the questions of God's existence and of the immortality of the soul," and he goes on to assert that the "issue" posed in Shakespeare's tragedies is not, "as with earlier skepticism, how to conduct oneself best in an uncertain world; the issue suggested is how to live at all in a groundless world. Our skepticism is a function of our now illimitable desire." [11] Several responses are in order here. First, while Cavell's characterizations of Pyrrhonian and modern skepticism are essentially accurate, it remains true that Descartes is ultimately less remarkable for his doubt than for the edifice of certainty his doubt enables him to build. That is, Descartes embraces "a groundless world" only to reject it; his skepticism, however radical, is always already an instrument in the discovery of truth, and, when coupled with an appropriate method of investigation, allows for the perpetuation of dogmatic philosophy. [12] Second, Pyrrhonian skepticism has the potential to be as radical a form of doubt as that employed by Descartes: witness, for instance, Sextus's trenchant interrogation of the existence of gods in book 3 of his Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes (Outlines of Pyrrhonism). [13] While no one in preCartesian Europe fully exploits Pyrrhonism's inherent potential for doubt, this in itself does not invalidate the possibility. Montaigne, for instance, implicitly questions the existence of the external world in a passage late in his Apologie de Raimond Sebond (1580, 1588)--and this despite Cavell's claim that such questioning in philosophical tracts begins only with Descartes. [14] Moreover, the comments on philosophical skepticism in Philippe du Plessis-Mornay's De la Verite de la Religion Chrestienne (1581) indicate the extent to which Pyrrhonism's potential for rendering uncertain the existence of the Judeo-Christian God could trouble late-sixteenth-century intellectuals. Mornay writes, in the 158 7 English translation prepared by Sir Philip Sidney and Arthur Golding, that in antiquity.

4 There were in deede a kinde of Philosophers called Scepticks (that is to say Dowters) which did rather suspend their Judgement concerning the Godhead, then call it in question. But yet it ought to suffize us, that they be the selfsame which deny al Sciences, yea even those which consist in Demonstration; and which professe themselves to doubt of the things which they see and feele; in so much that they doubt whether they themselves have any beeing or no. But yet for all that, let us see after what maner these kind of people do reason, Against the thing which the world preacheth, which Nations worship, and which wise men wonder at; these folke say at a worde for all, how shall wee beleeve that there is a God, sith we see him not? [15] Mornay attempts to render skepticism innocuous by suggesting that its interrogation of God's existence amounts merely to what we might call the doubting Thomas topos: that we forgo belief until we see, that we demand "ocular proof." But he does this only by deliberately occluding Pyrrhonism's potent considerations of the criteria by which judgments are leveled, considerations widely dispersed through Sextus's Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes and sharply noted, for example, by Montaigne. [16] And Mornay's frequent reliance, elsewhere in the book, on standard tactics of skeptical argumentation suggests the extent to which his customary habits of thought are inflected by familiarity with Pyrrhonism's fundamental attitudes. [17] Indeed, Mornay explicitly acknowledges the value of open-minded inquiry when he writes, in his "Preface to the Reader," that "foredeemings and foresetled opinions doo bring in bondage the reason of them that have best wits; wheras notwithstanding, it belongeth not to the will to overrule the wit, but to the wit to guide the will." [18] Mornay's position vis-a-vis skepticism is thus complex: like most devout sixteenthcentury Christians, Protestant or Catholic, he sees radical Pyrrhonian attitudes as misguided, even laughable, but he is simultaneously aware of the inherent potency of skeptical objections. Indeed, the considerable time he devotes to rejecting and ridiculing them (and even, occasionally, to deploying them) indicates their formative power in his outlook as a religious polemicist. And Mornay was widely read in England: the Sidney-Golding translation was reprinted in 1592, 1604, and 1617, and many contemporary writers appear to have studied it carefully, among them John Florio Fulke Greville Sir John Davies, Lucius Cary, William Chillingworth, John Earle, and Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon--each of whom played a role in the complex history of ancient skepticism's reception in Tudor and Stuart Britain. In short, allegations such as that of Cavell about Pyrrhonism's intrinsic weakness as a means of investigating metaphysical questions have tended toward exaggeration; they have had more to do with explicit early modern deployments of skeptical thought than with the implicit unease about skepticism we may infer from the incessant stream of early modern refutations. From 1562 forward, after all, European intellectuals had ready access--thanks to Henri Estienne's lucid and scholarly Latin translation of the Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes--to Sextus's concise presentation of Pyrrhonian thought, where, among other things, skepticism is defined as "an ability to set out oppositions among things which appear and are thought of in any way at all, an ability by which, because of the equipollence (isostheneia) in the opposed objects and accounts, we come first to suspension of judgement (epoche) and afterwards to tranquillity (ataraxta)." [19] They had access, in other words, to a closely argued treatise offering the position that all mental apprehensions--perceptions, ratiocinations, memories, judgments, beliefs--are subject to doubt, and specifically to the sort of doubt generated by the technique of opposition, which, according to Sextus, leads to the

5 impasse of equal persuasiveness. Thus, despite Pyrrhonism's advocacy of judgmental suspension and subsequent nescience, the rupture between ancient and modern skepticism is not as severe as it is sometimes made out to be--a fact which indirectly strengthens Cavell's case, though it diminishes his sense of Shakespeare's prescience. [20] But when Cavell adds that "skepticism is a function of our now illimitable desire," he severs himself inecoverably from classical skepticism. Desire is presupposed here--it serves as a given in this essentially Freudian formulation--and a "groundless world," a world deprived of the "assurance" of God's existence and providential supervision, allows desire to be "illimitable." Skepticism, then, becomes a "function or expression" of desire, a consequ ence of a prior discovery: and it manifests itself as a "banishment of the world." [21] Moreover, skepticism for Cavell is not merely doubt, but doubt coupled with denial and disappointment--a supposition of the worst. [22] Yet, if there is anything we can say with accuracy about epistemological discussion in Marlowe and Shakespeare's day, it is that doubt is sharply distinguished from both assent and dissent. As John Donne writes in the early 1590s, "the Sceptique which doubts all is more contentious then eyther the Dogmatique which affirmes, or Academique which denyes all." [23] In the anonymous treatise The Scepticlc, composed around 1590 and sometimes attributed to Sir Walter Ralegh, we read that "The Sceptick doth neither affirm nor deny any position, but doubteth of it, and opposeth his reasons against that which is affirmed or denied to justify his not consenting." [24] And, in the 1593 "Note" on Marlowe's "damnable judgment of religion," Richard Baines claims that Marlowe quoted "contrarieties out of the Scripture"--an allegation which, even if false, shows that Baines knew the subversive potential of the Pyrrhonian tactic of establishing a clash of authoritative opinion. [25] Clearly, the skepticism which Marlowe and S hakespeare can reasonably be supposed to have encountered- skepticism derived from Pyrrhonism and its Academic incarnations, thoroughly laid out by Sextus and Cicero, and channeled through Diogenes Laertius, Galen, Augustine, Erasmus, Vives, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, Montaigne, Francisco Sanches, and others--was committed not only to suspension of judgment in the face of diverse opinion and belief, but to careful discrimination between various states of cognition. It was an antidote rather than a substitute for dogmatism, and it promoted the avoidance of rash judgment and a heightened sensitivity to epistemological questions, distinctions, and anxieties. "The profession of the Phyrrhonians," writes Montaigne in Florio's 1603 translation of the Apologie de Raimond Sebond, "is ever to waver, to doubt and to enquire: never to be assured of any thing, nor to take any warrant of himself." [26] Still, in spite of all this, it would seem that Cavell's understanding of skepticism might be remarkably fruitful for a reading of Doctor Faustus--more fruitful, perhaps, than for most of Shakespeare's tragedies. For what character in English Renaissance drama better exemplifies desire and appetitiveness than Faustus? What character more thoroughly banishes the world in order to replace it with the solipsistic trappings of his fantasy-a fantasy that "will receive no object," but "ruminates on necromantic skill" (I.i. 106-7)? Nonetheless, I argue that despite this apparent consonance of Marlowe's play and Cavell's skepticism, in fact Doctor Faustus reveals a more complex interaction of doubt and desire, a paradoxical reciprocity between the two that hints, in my view, at genuine "philosophical preoccupations" of the culture in which Marlowe and Shakespeare lived. For common to the quartos of 1604 (the A-

6 text) and 1616 (the B-text)--and despite their significant differences-is a series of cyclical trajectories wherein Faustus's habit of casting doubt is preempted by an experience of euphoric ravishment--ravishment that yields in turn to new casting of doubt. [27] Faustus's desire to be resolved "of all ambiguities" is frequently expressed and frequently satisfied during the play, its representation often marked by sexual metaphor (I.i.82); but, appropriately enough, the resolution figured as sexual consummation only engenders new ambiguities. [28] Like the planets about which Faustus inquires, doubt and desire exhibit a "double motion" (II.iii.51); their forward and backward movements serve as a means of depicting Faustus's psychomachia. Indeed, to draw upon another of the play's astronomical metaphors, desire and doubt are "mutually folded in each others' orb," locked in a symbiotic but incestuous embrace (II.iii.39). And Marlowe thereby explores both the genesis of doubt and the relation of doubt to belief, two cynosures of epistemological investigation in early modern Europe, and authentic preoccupations of int ellectual life in Marlowe and Shakespeare's Britain. Consider, for example, the ways in which familiar and distinctly Faustian attitudes habitually succeed one another. The cavalier dismissal of conventional truth so prominent early in the play, and embedded in such claims as "This word 'damnation' terrifies not [me]," gives way first to involuntary casting of doubt, as in "Was not that Lucifer an angel once?" and then to ravished contemplation (I.iii.60, I.iii.66): [29] Now that I have obtained what I desire, I'll live in speculation of this art Till Mephistopheles return again. (I.iii.114-6) [30] Later in the play, when doubts merge more fully with what the English Faust Book calls "godly motions," and when resolution of ambiguity becomes almost indistinguishable from presumption of damnation, Faustus undergoes still more rapid shifts of mind. [31] "What art thou," he asks himself when the Horse-Courser leaves, "but a man condemned to die?" (IV.i. 139). Yet within four lines he adds, "Tush! Christ did call the thief upon the cross; / Then rest thee, Faustus, quiet in conceit" (IV.i.143-4). In this latter and astonishingly suggestive line, the "conceit" to which Faustus proposes to yield is the converse of the "speculation" to which he earlier inclined--yet still a mental state tinged with sexual innuendo. Indeed, the "unjust presumption" of which Faustus later accuses himself is presumption only from the demonic perspective (V.i.71). We thus witness a series of Satanic inversions as the play progresses--inversions that steer our attention toward the sharp distinctions among Faustus's mental dispositio ns. [32] If Faustus's cavalier rejection of dogma is concentrated in the play's first two acts, and his presumptuous (though sympathetic) self-condemnation in the last three, his wavering is distributed throughout. Often expressed interrogatively, it serves as the basis of some of the play's most memorable passages: "What might the staying of my blood portend?" (II.i.64); "Why streams it not, that I may write afresh?" (II.i.66); "Be I a devil, yet God may pity me" (II.iii.15); "See, see where Christ's blood streams in the firmament! / One drop would save my soul, haifa drop" (V.ii.78-9). Indeed, the very presence of the Good and Evil Angels can be read not only as an externalization of Faustus's cerebral discord, but as a manifestation of the skeptic's experience of

7 opposition -- of mutually exclusive testimony -- so heavily stressed in Sextus Empiricus, Montaigne, and other sources. [33] And, if Faustus's customary response to such opposition is not to suspend judgment in Pyrrhonian fashion, but to "extinguish clean / These thoughts" and "glut the longing of [his] heart's desire," he is scarcely alone in early modem Europe (V.i.83-6). [34] From the strict Pyrrhonian perspective, in fact, his choice appears no more aberrant than Montaigne's fideistic embrace of the Roman church. [35] Fictional character and historical personage both participate in a key vector of the standard Pyrrhonian trajectory, only to abandon it in what serves, during the sixteenth century, as a principal paradigm of the reception and appropriation of ancient skepticism: a rush to judgment reconfigured as the inevitable outcome of an experience of conflicting opinion. [36] But perhaps the best example of the succession and inter-penetration of characteristic Faustian attitudes may be found in the soliloquy that begins act II: Now, Faustus, must thou needs be damned, And canst thou not be saved. What boots it then to think of God or heaven? Away with such vain fancies and despair! Despair in God and trust in Beelzebub. Now go not backward. No, Faustus, be resolute. Why waverest thou? O, something soundeth in mine ears: "Abjure this magic, turn to God again!" Ay, and Faustus will turn to God again. To God? He loves thee not. The God thou servest is thine own appetite, Wherein is fixed the love of Beelzebub. To him I'll build an altar and a church, And offer lukewarm blood of new-born babes. (II.i.1-14) The first six and a half lines of this speech employ the rhetorical technique of secondperson self-address -- a technique upon which Marlowe frequently relies in the play, particularly in those speeches where heavy emphasis is placed upon Faustus's inner turmoil. And, while I agree with W.W. Greg, Michael Keefer, David Bevington, Eric Rasmussen, and other editors that the question mark at the end of line 2 in the A-text is probably intended not as an interrogative but as an exclamation point--thereby contributing to the emphatic statement of Faustus's present condition--even if the mark indicates interrogation, the resulting rhetorical question only adds to the development of the speaker's persona. [37] It is a persona characterized by confidence, keen observation, frequent resort to the imperative mood and, above all, presumption. He presumes to know Faustus's state of imminent and irrevocable damnation, and thereby constructs a superficially logical critique of Faustus's tendency to cast doubts, to turn h is thoughts toward God: "What boots it then to think of God or heaven?" This is followed by the peremptory "Away with such vain fancies and despair! / Despair in God and trust in Beelzebub"--a command making it clear that within the implied mental world of this persona, thoughts of God are mere "fantasies" when conceived by an abandoned soul, and should be replaced with acts of "trust" [38]: specifically, trust in demonic beings such as Beelzebub, who, like Mephistopheles and Lucifer--but unlike God and Christ--do in fact appear during the

8 play. Unstated but implicit is the understanding that it does "boot"--it does avail--to think of and trust in demons. Moreover, such thoughts and trust are metaphorically associated with forward movement, unlike the wavering and potential backsliding associated with the mind that turns toward God. [39] Midway through line 7, and responding to the question, a first-person voice emerges--"O, something soundeth in mine ears"--and in line 8 this "something" is represented in still another voice, a terse, disembodied voice cast in the imperative: "Abjure this magic, turn to God again!" In line 9, the first-person voice returns, this time speaking in the future tense: "Ay, and Faustus will turn to God again" [my emphasis]. As the first indication of resolve and fixed purpose in the soliloquy, this line stands out dramatically, demanding comparison with the second such moment of resolve, that found in lines 13-4. But the line is also tainted. Despite its mood of compliance and humility, despite its presentation of a "godly motion," it also substitutes the protagonist's name for the expected first-person pronoun. The line, in short, has been infiltrated by the second-person voice's habit of self-address, and the stated resolve is thereby subtly undermined. We have a foreshadowing of disaster. Faustus, then, cannot help but engender "godly motions." And when he assures himself, a moment later, "Thou art safe; / Cast no more doubts," he merely stipulates a condition of psychic stasis that has already been and will continue to be contradicted by his behavior (II.i.25-6). [41] He engages, that is, in magical thinking, assuming a causal relation between speech and reality, hoping thereby to stave off his implicit recognition that from the Satanic point of view, casting doubt is dangerous--it amounts to "unjust presumption." But inseparable from this recognition is the idea that doubting--wavering--is valuable, valuable precisely because it functions as temporary detachment from dogmatic positions, thus enabling the possibility of change, and of growth. One of the best expressions of this idea in early modern English drama may be found in Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam, composed perhaps a decade and a half after Marlowe's death. There, in the Chorus concluding act II, we encounter a sustained criti que of partiality in judgment: In line 10, the second-person voice reassumes control, and with characteristic presumption informs the voice of line 9 that God "loves thee not." Lines 11-2 follow up this assertion by transforming, through mere allegation, a partial truth into an unqualified truth: "The God thou servest is thine own appetite, / Wherein is fixed the love of Beelzebub." The former admonition to "trust in Beelzebub" has now metamorphosed into the affirmation that the first-person Faustus has a fixed "love" of this devil. And the affirmation is tacitly assented to in lines 13-4, even though the lines can be read with equal legitimacy as emanating from the first- or the secondperson Faustus. The use of the first-person pronoun in line 13 suggests the former possibility, and certainly this reading is attractive for the additional reason that, as in line 9, here again we encounter the future tense, this time in a defiant and grotesque resolution to "build an altar and a church, / And offer lukewarm blood of new-born babes." But i t may be that this is rather the second-person Faustus, appropriating the first-person pronoun in an attempt to achieve a rhetorical integration of the self that is so evidently divided throughout the speech. If this is the case, then the pronoun appropriation we witness here mirrors the infiltration of self-address we witnessed in line 9. Either way, a clear parallel is drawn to line 9, and, in retrospect, we can see that both resolves might be characterized as "vain fancies"--fantasies of future action

9 that cannot possibly ensue as long as Faustus endures the inner conflict here depicted. On the one hand, Faustus desires an intimacy with God that can never be achieved in conjunction with the second-person voice's presumption. On the other hand, he seeks a defiant and definitive rejection of God that can never occur as long as the firstperson voice is able to conceive the words of line 8: "Abjure this magic, turn to God again!" Indeed, line 14's grotesque resolve to sacrifice infants may serve, additionally , as a metaphorical attempt to bleed out the vitality of such cunning cerebral births as those of lines 8-9. But the attempt is futile, for as the Prologue has informed us, Faustus is "swoll'n with cunning of a self-conceit" (line 20): pregnant, that is, with such cunning, and able--as the play abundantly demonstrates--to conceive this cunning, and deliver it, time and again. [40] Our ears and hearts are apt to hold for good That we ourselves do most desire to be: And then we drown objections in the flood Of partiality, 'tis that we see That makes false rumours long with credit pass'd, Though they like rumours must conclude at last. The greatest part of us, prejudicate, With wishing Herod's death do hold it true: The being once deluded doth not bate The credit to a better likelihood due. Those few that wish it not, the multitude Do carry headlong, so they doubts conclude. [42] Desire, in short, curtails doubt; the wavering that can lead to truth, hence to growth, is usually displaced by the precipitous rush to judgment practiced by what Cary's daughter and biographer calls "too speedy resolvers." [43] And Faustus, of course, is one of these. But Marlowe makes it clear that the ravishment of resolution is always only temporary. Casting doubt is as fundamental to Faustus as resolving ambiguity; it seems a natural outgrowth or consequence of resolution, and perhaps points to the ultimately unsatisfactory stasis of dogmatic conclusion." [44] Marlowe's tragedy thus offers a skeptical commentary on the human propensity for the static, the human preference for being over becoming. Faustus wants to perform miracles, to do the wondrous, to transcend human frailty, fallibility, uncertainty; he wants to "gain a deity" (I.i.65). And all this is associated with resolving ambiguity. But what he learns is that this intransitive desire of his--desire that takes as its object knowledge or sex, music or travel, but never finds true satisfaction--this desire not only fails to "extinguish clean" his doubts, but breeds them: cannot exist without them. Hence, despite the anatomy of skepticism offered by Cavell, we cannot confidently say that desire precedes doubt in Doctor Faustus. The transgressive dismissal of conventional truth so evident in the play cannot be read simply as a consequence of Faustus's preexistent desire to engage in the occult. Nor, conversely, can the wish to be a powerful magician, a "demigod," be read simply as an outcome of doubt--a solipsi stic refurnishing of a now-vacant space (B.I.i.61). Rather, the two impulses are reciprocal. In much the same way that fantasies become truths for Faustus even as conventional truths metamorphose into fantasies, Faustian doubt and desire coexist and presuppose one another. And, while Marlowe is probably not suggesting that skeptical detachment is the solution to the potentially tragic dilemma

10 of "forward wits" like Faustus, he clearly presents a dramatic scenario wherein his protagonist follows a quasi-Pyrrhonian trajectory in cleansing his mind of dogma only to reinscribe it--compulsively--with the fast-fading signature of his desire (Epiogue.7). The trajectory itself represents one of the principal paradigms of early modern Europe's reception of ancient skepticism: an appropriation--manifest also in Montaigne--in which the vacuum created through doubt invites its own elimination, thereby initiating an endless cycle of evacuation and substitution. There is no question that this skeptical paradigm constitutes a distortion of Pyrrhonian thought as represented by Sextus Empiricus; but equally, there is no question that the Renaissance understands it as a form of skepticism, a basic skeptical paradigm. To contextualize Doctor Faustus within early modem skepticism is thus to discover that its central figure experiences a mental life that corresponds with remarkable fidelity to what is perhaps the major sixteenth-century misconstruction and subsequent deployment of Pyrrhonism. Doctor Faustus is a skeptical play not in advocacy but in depiction: not in proposing an attitude of detachment but in portraying passionate attachment and the attendant, enormously sympathetic self-destruction it can bring on. And the brilliant irony here is that Faustus's fundamental alternative--the choice he rejects--also constitutes a form of attachment: contentment with a particular shape of resolution, and thus, tacitly, with an abandonment of inquiry. But Faustus recognizes that what modernity might call "normative behavior" in the world always demands a closing down of doubt and desire, a consistent tracking of resolution, an acquiescence that in diminishing one diminishes all. Faustus rejects this capitulation, aware both that it amounts to a falling short of human potential and that in so doing he renders his life incompatible with conventional earthly existence. We might say that for Faustus, despite his recurrent emphasis upon the tangible, the logical, and the here-and-now, believing is seeing precisely as often as seeing is believing. William M. Hamlin, associate professor of English at Idaho State University and author of The Image of America in Montaigne. Spenser. and Shakespeare (1995). is finishing a book entitled "Fools of Nature: Skepticism and English Renaissance Tragedy." NOTES This essay is an expanded version of a paper delivered at Cambridge University in June 1998 at the Fourth International Conference on Christopher Marlowe. I wish to express my gratitude to David Bevington, Patrick Cheney. David Fuller, R. J. Hankinson, Theresa Jordan, John Kijinski, and Elisabeth Leedham-Green. (1.) The epigraph is taken from Morris P. Tilley. A Dictionary of Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1950) D571: see also N268, N276. (2.) J R. Green. A Short History of the English People, 4 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1895), 2:863-4. Quotations from Christopher Marlowe's play are drawn from the new Revels edition: Doctor Faustus, A- and B-texts (1604, 1616), ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester UK: Manchester Univ. Press, 1993).

11 Unless otherwise noted, I quote from the text of 1604. Hereafter, citations will be made parenthetically within the text. (3.) Una Ellis-Fermor, The Frontiers of Drama, 2d edn. (London: Methuen, 1964), p. 142. In addition to the work of Ellis-Fermor, I have found the following studies of Faustus particularly valuable: Richard Waswo, "Damnation, Protestant Style: Macbeth. Faustus, and Christian Tragedy." JMRS 4, 1 (Winter 1974): 63-99; Constance B. Kuriyama, "Dr. Greg and Doctor Faustus: The Supposed Originality of the 1616 Text." ELR 5 (1975): 171-97; Sara M. Deats, "Doctor Faustus: From Chapbook to Tragedy," EL WIU3 (1976): 3-16: Edward Snow, "Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and the Ends of Desire," in Two Renaissance Mythmakers, ed. Alvin Kernan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 70-110: Joel B. Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978): Michael Warren, "Doctor Faustus: The Old Man and the Text," ELR 11, 2 (Spring 1981): 111-47; Michael Keefer, "Verbal Magic and the Problem of the A and B Texts of Doctor Faustus," JEGP 82, 3 (July 1983): 324-46: Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy (Chi cago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 109-19: Keefer, "History and the Canon: The Case of Doctor Faustus," UTQ 56, 4 (Summer 1987): 498-522; C. L. Barber, Creating Elizabethan Tragedy, ed. Richard P. Wheeler (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988). pp. 87-130: Leah S. Marcus, "Textual Indeterminacy and Ideological Difference: The Case of Doctor Faustus," RenD 20 (1989): 1-29: G. M. Pinciss, "Marlowe's Cambridge Years and the Writing of Doctor Faustus," SEL 33, 2 (Spring 1993): 24964: and Patrick Cheney, Marlowe's Counterfeit Profession (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 190-220. (4.) For Thomas Kyd's two letters and the Richard Baines note, see Douglas Cole, Christopher Marlowe and the Renaissance of Tragedy (Westport CT: Praeger, 1995), pp. 155-8. For Greene's Groatsworth of Wit and the two informers' reports on Richard Cholmeley, see the excerpts provided in Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992), pp. 42-7 and 277-9. See also John Bakeless, The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe, 2 vols. (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1942), vol. 1, chap. 5; Bakeless (albeit rather vaguely) associates Marlowe with skepticism (p. 128). And see Nicholas Davidson, "Christopher Marlowe and Atheism," in Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture, ed. Darryll Grantley and Peter Roberts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), pp. 129-47. (5.) Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 1, 3. (6.) Cavell, pp. 2, 3. (7.) My discussion here is based on the belief that the revival of Greek skepticism in sixteenth-century Europe impinged upon English intellectual life rather more than historians of philosophy have acknowledged, though somewhat less than literary critics often assume--and in highly defined and restricted ways. See Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. 1979); Charles B. Schmitt, Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (1469-1533) and His Critique of Aristotle (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1967); Schmitt, Cicero Scepticus: A Study of the Influence of the Academica in the Renaissance (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1972); Schmitt, "The Rediscovery of Ancient Skepticism in Modem

12 Times," in The Skeptical Tradition, ed. Myles Burnyeat (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1983), pp. 225-51; Popkin and Schmitt, eds., Scepticism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1987); Luciano Floridi, "The Diffusion of Sextus Empiricus's Works in the Ren aissance," Journal of the History of Ideas 56, 1 (1995): 63-85; Lisa Jardine, "Lorenzo Valla: Academic Skepticism and the New Humanist Dialectic," in Skeptical Tradition, pp. 253-86; Floridi, Sextus Empiricius (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, forthcoming); and Charles Larmore, 'Scepticism," in Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), 2:1145-92. (8.) Faustus A.I.i. 12. The phrase, On kai me on (attributed by Sextus to Gorgias of Leontini), derives from Adversus Logicos 1.66, which corresponds to Adversus Mathematicos 7.66. Adversus Mat hematicos was translated into Latin by Gentian Hervet and published in 1569. Various copies of this folio are known to have existed in England during the late sixteenth century: the main library at Cambridge held a copy no later than 1583, and Andrew Perne, Master of Peterhouse, also owned a copy at the time of his death in 1589--a copy probably acquired during the 1570s. See Elisabeth LeedhamGreen and David McKitterick, "A Catalogue of Cambridge University Library, 1583," in Books and Collectors 1200-1700, ed. James P. Carley and Cohn G. C. Tite (London: British Library, 1997), pp. 153-235. Dr. John Dee held a copy of the 1569 Sextus folio in his London library by the time he completed his inventory of September 1583; see John Dee's Library Catalogue, ed. Julian Roberts and Andrew G. Watson (London: Bibliographical S ociety, 1990], item 1790. I have recently discovered that London's Middle Temple possesses a copy of the 1569 Sextus--a copy inscribed by John Delaberlel, who entered the Temple in 1575/76 and resided there until his death in 1607. The phrase On kal me on was also available in a Greek manuscript of Adversus Logicos that the Oxford scholar John Wolley translated into Latin sometime between 1553 and 1563; see Schmitt, "John Woliey (ca. 1530-96) and the first Latin translation of Sextus Empiricus, adversus logicos I," in The Sceptical Mode in Modern Philosophy, ed. Richard A. Watson and James E. Force (Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1988). pp. 61-70. (9.) For Shakespeare's knowledge of Michel de Montaigne -- besides the famous borrowing from "Des cannibales" in The Tempest -- see, for example the Arden editions of Hamlet (1982) and King Lear (1997). (10.) Other writers include Erasmus (Praise of Folly [1509] and the 1515 letter to Martin Dorp]; Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (whose Examen Vanitatis [1520] was read in England by John Rainolds and John Dee, among others); Henry Cornelius Agrippa (De Incertitudine et Vanitate [1530]); Juan Luls Vives (De Disciplinis [1531]); Omer Talon (Academia [1547]); Peter Ramus (Animadversionum Aristotelicorum [1548]); Guy de Brues (Dialogues contre les Nouveaux Academiciens [1557]); Henri Estienne (preface to Sextus's Pyrrhonian Hypotyposes [1562]); Gentian Hervet (preface to Sextus's Adversus Mathematicos [15691); Pedro de Valencia (Academica [1596]); and Pierre Charron (De la Sagesse [1601]). Cavell's suggestion that Pyrrhonism never considers how to live "in a groundless world" assumes that Pyrrhonism in early modern Europe may be fully equated with

13 Montaigne's typical deployment of Pyrrhonism -- essentially a Christian appropriation of skepticism as presented by Sextus. (11.) Cavell, p. 3. (12.) Compare to Larmore, pp. 1164-5. (13.) See Sextus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 3.2-12. esp. 3.6 ("Even granting that god is indeed conceivable, It is necessary to suspend judgement about whether gods exist or not, so far as the Dogmatists are concerned. For it is not clear that gods exist") and 3.11 ("it is inapprehensible whether there are gods"). {14.) Cavell, pp. 3-4; Larmore, p. 1148; Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. Pierre Villey, rev. V.-L. Saulnier, 3 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992), 2:601 (for an English rendering see An Apology for Raymond Sebond, trans. M. A. Screech [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987] pp. 185-6]. Montaigne in fact shows several indications of envisioning a more Cartesian form of doubt than that with which he is usually credited. He claims in the Apology, for instance, that "We do not doubt much, because commonly received notions are assayed by nobody. We never try to find out whether the roots are sound. We argue about the branches" (Screech. p. 114; Villey, p. 539). He adds later that "We wake asleep; we sleep awake ... Our rational souls accept notions [fantasies] and opinions produced during sleep, conferring on activities in our dreams the same approbation and authority as on our waking dreams; why should we therefore not doubt whether our thinking and acting are but another dream; our waking some other specie s of sleep?" (Screech, p. 180; Villey, p. 596). This doubt is not as radical as that offered by the Cartesian hypothesis of the malin genie, but one wonders nevertheless whether Descartes may not have been prodded by these passages. It is also worth noting that Joseph Mede, at Cambridge in 1602/3, underwent a skeptical crisis after reading Sextus, and his doubts extended to the existence of the external world. As his contemporary John Worthington later wrote, "not long after his entrance into Philosophical studies he was for some time disquieted with Scepticisme, that troublesome disease of the Pyrrhonian School. For lighting upon a Book in a neighbor-Scholar's Chamber, (whether it were Sextus Empiricus, or some other upon the same Subject, is not now remembered) he began upon the perusal of it to move strange Questions to himself, and even to doubt whether the whole Frame of things, as it appears to us, were any more then a mere Phantasm" ("The Life of the Reverend and most Learned Joseph Mede, B.D." in The Works of Joseph Mede (London, 1664), P. iii; quotation truncated: cf. Popkin, History, pp. 66, 265). Mede soon recovered from his malady, but years later still quizzed his pupils at Christ's College by asking them, "What Doubts have you met in your studies to day?" (Worthington, p. vii). (15.) Philippe du Plessis-Mornay. A Woorke Concerning the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion (London, 1587: Delmar NY: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1976), p. 12. (16.) For example, Sextus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.21-4, 1.114-7, and 2.14-79; and Montaigne, Apology, e.g., pp. 185-6 (Screech trans.). (17.) For example, A Woorke, pp. 243, 247-8, 256-7, 357, 475.

14 (18.) A Woorke. sig. iir. (19.) Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 1.8:I rely here on the recent English translation by Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (Outlines of Scepticism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994]), p. 4. Martha Nussbaum, in a valuable discussion of Pyrrhonism, claims that "the Modes and Tropes, as reported by Sextus, contain no restriction of subject matter, but range very widely over many areas in which pupils can be expected to have beliefs" (The Therapy of Desire [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994], p. 288). And R. J. Hankinson, author of The Sceptics (London: Routledge, 1995), writes that "anything can be a subject for Pyrrhonian scepticism, provided it has a certain theoretical density" (personal communication, 1998). See also Jonathan Barnes, "The Beliefs of a Pyrrhonist," Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 29 (1982), pp. 2, 12. Thomas Nashe, in Christs Teares Over Jerusalem (1593), asserts that the "soule-benummed" unbelievers of his day "followe the Pironicks, whose position and opinion it is tha t there is no Hel or misery but opinion. Impudently they persist in it, that the late discovered Indians are able to shew antiquities thousands before Adam" (The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 5 vols. [London: A. H. Bullen, 1904-10], 2:115-6; also, 1:172). Nashe, one of the Elizabethan readers of the English translation of Sextus, clearly associates Pyrrhonism both with atheism and the pre-Adamite theory; see my essay, "On Continuities between Skepticism and Early Ethnography; Or, Montaigne's Providential Diversity," SCJ 31, 2 (July 2000): 361-79. (20.) Popkin and Schmitt have both discussed continuities between ancient and modern skepticism. Schmitt, for instance, writes that "it is my belief that the recovery and the reassimilation of the ancient writings were the primary factor in the evolution of the modern skeptical attitude" ("Rediscovery," p. 228). (21.) Cavell, p. 5. In "Macbeth Appalled" (1993), Cavell writes that over the years he has "addressed the issue of philosophical skepticism as an expression of the human wish to escape the bounds or bonds of the human, if not from above then from below" (The Cavell Reader, ed. Stephen Mulhall (Cambridge MA: Blackwell, 1996), p. 203). (22.) Writing on Othello, for instance, Cavell speaks of the "progress from the completeness of Othello's love to the perfection of his doubt" (Disowning Knowledge, p. 128): later he alludes to Othello's "professions of skepticism over [Desdemona's] faithfulness" when he evidently means something like "Othello's denial of her constancy" (p. 138). In the introduction to the same book, Cavell writes that "tragedy is an interpretation of what skepticism is itself an interpretation of: that, for example, Lear's 'avoidance' of Cordelia is an instance of the annihilation inherent in the skeptical problematic, that skepticism's 'doubt' is motivated not by (not even where it is expressed as) a (misguided) intellectual scrupulousness but by a (displaced) denial, by a self-consuming disappointment that seeks world-consuming revenge" (p. 6). (23.) John Donne, "Paradox #3," in Paradoxes and Problems. ed. Helen Peters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 5-6. Peters believes the Paradoxes were written early in the 1590s when Donne studied at Thavies and Lincoln's Inns (p. xv). (24.) The Sceptick ed. William M. Hamlin, in "A Lost Translation Found? An Edition of The Sceptick (c. 1590) Based on Extant Manuscripts," ELR 31, 1 (forthcoming);

15 see also Sir Walter Raleigh's Sceptick, or Speculations (London, 1651), p. 1. As S. E. Sprott has argued, this work may rely upon a lost English translation of Sextus Empiricus to which Thomas Nashe alludes in 1591. And since the evidence seems strong that one manuscript of The Scepticlc existed in Ralegh's library, the date of composition must fall between the appearance of the lost translation (c. 1590) and Ralegh's death (1618). See Sprott, "Raleigh's 'Sceptic' and the Elizabethan Translation of Sextus Empiricus." PQ 42, 2 (1963): 166-75. As for the attribution to Ralegh, I agree with Peter Beal that it is almost certainly spurious (Index of English Literary Manuscripts [London: Mansell, 1980-93], vol. 1, pt. 2. p. 368). (25.) "Appendix B: Richard Baines' Note," in Cole, p. 158. The implication of Baines's allegation seems to be that Marlowe has compiled a treatise illustrating internal contradictions in the Bible: "He saith likewise that he hath quoted a number of contrarieties out of the Scripture which he hath given to some great men who in convenient time shall be named." (26.) The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio [London, 1603: New York: Modern Library, 1933), p. 449: see also Viley ed., 2:502-3. See also the account of early modern skepticism in Stephen Toulmin's Cosmopolis (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 22-56: Toulmin inaccurately conscripts Erasmus and Montaigne to stand in for all Renaissance humanists, but his discussion of skeptical values is perceptive, (27.) For example, I.i.6, I.i.112. Faustus's experience with Aristotle's Analytics-ravishment quickly followed by disillusionment-perhaps should have taught him how to regard his subsequent ravishment by magic. The English Faust Book stresses Faustus's ravishment by music: see The Historie of the Damnable Life, and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus (1588, 1592), in The English Faust Book: A Critical Edition Based on the Text of 1592, ed. John Henry Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 100, 119; see also Doctor Faustus A.II.iii.29. (28.) For examples, see II.iii.62, II.iii.66, III.Chorus.2-7, and IV.Chorus.9-10. (29.) For reasons of syntactic grace, I have substituted the B-text reading ("terrifies not me": B.I.iii.57) for that of the A-text ("terrifies not him": A.I.iii.60). Other examples of such dismissal: "Come, I think hell's a fable" (II.i. 130); "Think'st thou that Faustus is so fond / To imagine that after this life there is any pain? / Tush, these are trifles and mere old wives' tales" (II.i. 136-8). (30.) The English Faust Book informs us that Faustus was called "the Speculator" and signed himself "Doctor Faustus the insatiable speculator" (pp. 92, 129): see also pp. 93, 98, and 114. (31.) The English Faust Book, p. 112. (32.) Another example: "thy drift" (V.i.75). (33.) See Annas and Barnes's Outlines of Scepticism, pp. 4-5. 11-2, 51-2; and Montaigne, An Apology for Raymond Sebond "They [The Pyrrhonians] put forth their propositions, but to contend with those they imagine wee hold in our conceipt. If you

16 take theirs, then will they undertake to maintaine the contrary: all is one to them, nor will they give a penny to chuse" (Florio, Essayes of Montaigne, p. 449; for the French, see the Villey ed. p. 503; see also Florio, pp. 412-3, 460-1, 483-93, 499-503, 522). Francisco Sanches, who does not seem to have read either Sextus or Montaigne before publishing his Quod Nihil Scitur (Lyon, 1581), nonetheless places strong emphasis upon diversity of opinion as a prologue to doubt; see That Nothing is Known, trans. and ed. Elaine Limbrick and Douglas F. S. Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 213, 222-3. (34.) See also Pro.23-5 ("falling to / glutted / surfeits"), I.i.80 ("glutted with conceit"), and V.ii.10-1 ("surfeit") for further images of overconsumption; and see the B-text's "let me be cloyed / With all things that delight the heart of man" (B.III.i.58-9). (35.) Montaigne might not agree with this claim, since he chooses to do that which is customary in his society, while Faustus does not. But Montaigne's embrace is not merely a passive following but an active endorsing of custom, and therefore an abandonment of Pyrrhonism. (36.) This may be contrasted with the Cartesian movement to judgment which is designed precisely to preclude such a rush. (37.) W. W. Greg, ed., Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, 1604, 1616 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950). pp. 320-1; Keefer, ed., Doctor Faustus: a 1604-version edition (Peterborough: Broadview, 1991), p. 29; Bevington and Rasmussen, p. 138n. Roma Gill keeps the question mark in her edition (Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, vol. 2 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990]). (38.) An idea powerfully reinforced by Mephistopheles's speech at B.V.ii.13-5, a speech not found in the A-text: "his labouring brain / Begets a world of idle fantasies / To overreach the devil." "Fancy" and "fantasy" mean essentially the same thing in the late sixteenth century, "fancy" being a contraction of "fantasy" (first used in the fifteenth century), and each employed in verse according to metrical demands. The Btext includes a comma after "fancies," and Bevington and Rasmussen's suggestion that this punctuation makes "despair" anticipate the phrase "Despair in God" (line 5) seems entirely plausible. But their related comment--that the A-text's reading of line 4 suggests "brush aside idle fancies and desperate thoughts" (line 217)--strikes me as unpersuasive; I think that Faustus's despair is being encouraged throughout this speech, and that it is granted attractiveness by being associated with "forward" movement and resolve. (39.) The play offers a clear association among forward motion, magic, and resolution, and between backward motion and conventional religious belief. Being resolute, resolving ambiguities, living in all voluptuousness, etc., is connected to moving forward (I.i.76), being a "forward wit" (Epilogue. 7), and engaging in magic (B.II.i.14): wavering (II.i.7) and acknowledging uncertainty, fear, and doubt (I.iii.14; II.i.26) are connected to moving backward (II.i.6). (40.) For detailed discussion of this line, see William M. Hamlin. "'Swolne with cunning of a selfe conceit': Marlowe's Faustus and Self-Conception," ELN 34, 2 (December 1996): 7-12.

17

(41.) See also "Then fear not, Faustus, but be resolute" (I.iii.14). (42.) Elizabeth Cary. The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry, ed. Barry Weller and Margaret Ferguson (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994). II. Chorus. 413-24. (43.) Cary, p. 233. See also the positive valence attached to the state of being "disengaged on either side" (p. 238). (44.) Sir John Davies, in Nosce Teipsum (1599), comments on the soul's tendency to seek static resolution: "For why should we the busie Soule beleeve, / When boldly she concludes of that, and this?" (lines 85-6). See Robert Krueger, ed., The Poems of Sir John Davies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).

Fissured families: a motif in Marlowe's plays Lisa Hopkins Christopher Marlowe's plays are littered with family groups shattered and destroyed, either through their own actions or those of others.(1) Sometimes the disharmony is limited to family disagreements or ideological disunity within the family group; at other points it becomes more extreme, leading to internecine betrayal and even murder. As Frank Ardolino suggests, "the composite roles family members play as both fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters provide Marlowe with rich sources of complex interactions and the opportunity to portray the tensions created by the shifting roles, to limn, in short, the dynamics of power as established within the microcosm of the family" (83).(2) I want to argue, though, that Marlowe does more than simply "limn" these: I am going to suggest that he provides a sharply focused and detailed critique of the problematics of familial interaction, and that, contrary to modern, psychoanalytically driven theorizing of the family, he sees these as arising fundamentally not from inherent inter-gene rational struggle, nor from the kinds of mythic model proposed by Ardolino--who sees the plays as radically informed by the Uranus-Jupiter-Saturn model--but as an aberration caused by particular aspects of social injustice and malaise. In what seems likely to have been Marlowe's earliest play, Dido, Queen of Carthage, the issue of family features very strongly. The play opens with what looks like a traditional scene of family life: a man with a boy on his lap. But we rapidly discover that this is not a scene of a father and a son, but instead of what the British government has termed "a pretended family," two homosexual lovers (homosexuality is something to which I will return in due course). Moreover, Jupiter promises to subordinate the interests of his real family to those of his lover Ganymede: he gives the boy the jewels which his wife Juno wore on her wedding day, and plucks a feather

18 from the wing of his son Hermes.(3) The family conflict presaged here is actualized when Jupiter's daughter, Venus, enters--not in her traditional role as goddess of love, but, very pointedly, in her capacity as a mother, and, by implication, in the even less likely role, for a sex symbol, as grandmother. (This point is also stressed again later in the characters' repeated references to the kinship ties between herself, Aeneas, Ascanius, and her other son Cupid.) Jupiter's infatuation with Ganymede, she claims, has had repercussions throughout the family in that it has prevented him from paying proper attention to the welfare of her son Aeneas. Thus an initial lack of proper conjugal relations between husband and wife has apparently escalated into a situation which also affects both Jupiter's daughter and his grandson, and which will have serious implications too for his great-grandson Aeneas. We may, after all, remember, as David Farley-Hills reminds us in relation to Tamburlaine, that Jupiter usurped and killed his own father (45). The speech which Jupiter then makes to Venus assures her that she is wrong, and that he still has Aeneas's interests at heart: Content thee, Cytherea, in thy care, Since thy Aeneas' wandering fate is firm, Whose weary limbs shall shortly make repose In those fair walls I promis'd him of yore. (I.i.82-5) In fact, however, the play itself proves Venus to be very accurate in her diagnosis of strains within the family. She has less insight into the cause, though, for she is herself complicit in it. When she visits the son for whom she has professed so much affection, she appears in disguise to him; only after she has left does he detect her identity, and he then proceeds to lament the lack of a closer relationship between them. Here we seem to be invited to discern that Jupiter's own poor parenting skills have, in one of the classic patterns of child abuse, been transmitted in turn to his daughter, who fails to mother her son as he would wish. This is made very clear in Aeneas's moving comments as he realizes the identity of the disguised figure with whom he has been talking: Achates, 'tis my mother that is fled; I know her by the movings of her feet. Stay, gentle Venus, fly not from thy son! Too cruel, why wilt thou forsake me thus, Or in these shades deceiv'st mine eye so oft? Why talk we not together hand in hand, And tell our griefs in more familiar terms? But thou art gone, and leav'st me here alone To dull the air with my discoursive moan. (I.ii.240-8) Here the familiar relationship between Aeneas and his mother, indicated in the fact that he can recognize her from so minor a detail as "the movings of her feet," forms a sad counterbalance to her unexplained unwillingness voluntarily to reveal her identity to him--apparently, from his use of the term "so oft," a familiar feature of her behavior to him.

19 Despite--or perhaps because of--Aeneas's sensitivity to his mother's lack of trust in him, he too is revealed as a poor parent. Ascanius early demonstrates a strong sense of kinship: when Aeneas imagines that a rock he sees is Priam, Ascanius assures him that it cannot be, "For were it Priam, he would smile on me" (II.i.36). Perhaps it is this sense of a lost family--Aeneas has, after all, literally mislaid his wife, Creusa--which makes the child at once accost Dido with "Madam, you shall be my mother" (II.i.98). (Richard Proudfoot points out that "Marlowe's Dido, unlike Chaucer's, doesn't count pregnancy among her claims on Aeneas" (7); instead she is presented throughout the play as poignantly childless, anxious to mother.) But like Jupiter and Venus before him, Aeneas in turn proves so indifferent to the fate of his offspring that he actually proposes at one point to leave Ascanius behind with Dido--his protestation that he couldn't have been about to depart because he would have had to leave his son behind is savagely undercut by the audience's awareness that that was in fact precisely what he was planning. Even Aeneas's denial is couched in worrying terms: "Hath not the Carthage queen mine only son?" (IV.iv.29) suggests that Ascanius's importance to his father may be at least as much dynastic as personal--as the only son of a widower, he forms a unique and temporarily irreplaceable link in the chain of succession; the implication, however, is that had he brothers, he might prove expendable, as Tamburlaine's son Calyphas is later to be. The inclusion of four generations in Dido allows us to see very clearly how the cycle of flawed parent-child relationships renews and perpetuates itself. Even when fewer generations are considered, however, the pattern is still discernible. Tamburlaine Part One both opens and closes with families: the sharp differences between Cosroe and Mycetes open up questions of heredity, family resemblances and the nature / nurture debate, which is of course raised again in even more radical form by the victories won over kings by the mere son of a Scythian shepherd; and the end of the play sees both a marriage-providing an unusually comic form of closure to so violent a story-and also the reunion between Zenocrate and her father. Family is thus signaled as an issue of some importance, and it becomes even more so in Part Two where we observe closely Tamburlaine's three boys. We see the rivalry between them, brought about primarily by the very fact that they, unlike Ascanus, are members of a family instead of isolated heirs; we witness the effect on them of their mother's early death--indeed Calyphas's effeminacy, although clearly present from the beginning, could be interpreted as perhaps becoming exacerbated by a subconscious attempt to take over the role within the family of a lost mother;(4) and, as with Cosroe and Mycetes in Part One, we see also the radical differences amongst brothers which result eventually in the ultimate example of family fragmentation, Tamburlaine's infanticide. Tamburlaine's killing of Calyphas is difficult to decode. It has often been seen as in some sense exemplary, in the light of Renaissance educational theory.(5) T. A Pearce argues that it is indeed precisely a response to such theory: Here is portrayed a father who is at once a man of arms and a lover of poetry and worshipper of beauty, now faced with the problem of bringing up boys, his sons. The entire passage might have been written by Marlowe after reading Sir Thomas Elyot's Boke Named the Governour (1531), which appeared some fifty years earlier. (20)

20 Pearce sees in Marlowe's portrayal of Tamburlaine's immovability a response to twin stimuli: the attack by Gosson (like Marlowe, a former pupil of the King's School, Canterbury) on lack of proper moral fiber in the theater, and the attack by Sir Humphrey Gilbert on modern educational methods and their failure to prepare for military service. Tamburlaine, Pearce suggests, embodies the very virtues which both Gosson and Gilbert were, in their different ways, advocating, and in nothing is this more apparent than his stoic sacrifice of his own son. Paul Kocher similarly sees in Tamburlaine's stabbing "an act of military discipline . . . from the Elizabethan point of view Tamburlaine is merely heroic in this" (225), and suggests, moreover, that Tamburlaine's action is also rendered glorious by its association with the story of the Roman consul Manlius Torquatius, who similarly slew his son for disobeying orders. But such readings are, as Carolyn Williams recognizes, counterintuitive; and, more importantly, they are notably not shared by the on-stage audience of dignitaries. Infanticide also occurs elsewhere in the play, in Olympia's very differently motivated decision to kill her son, and crops up again in two more of the plays, The Massacre at Paris--where it is threatened rather than actual, since Catherine never needs to carry out her resolve to kill one or both of her sons--and The Jew of Malta. Here Barabas's initial affection for the daughter whose name means, ironically, "the father's joy" (Tambling 95) is violently transmuted by her conversion to Christianity--her adoption, it could perhaps be argued, of a different father-figure--into a murderous hate whose momentum not only wipes out Abigail and her entire convent of nuns but is also echoed in the kind of mock infanticide in which Barabas kills Ithamore, who, he so often stresses, has assumed the position of his heir. Family fragmentation is, of course, further emphasized in the play by the recurring presence of the two bereaved parents, Ferneze and Katherine, both of whom are apparently partnerless as well as childless. Moreover, Jeremy Tambling points to further elements in the play of fury directed at literal and symbolic members of its families when he comments on Barabas's stress on the nuns' frequent pregnancies, his identification of Abigail with the original exemplar of sibling rivalry, Cain, and the ways in which his celebrated image of "infinite riches in a little room" (I.i.37), "parodying the idea of Christ in the womb, suggest[s] a pre-Oedipal desire for identification with the mother" (99, 103-4). In others of the plays matters never reach the pitch of family self-destruction seen in The Jew of Malta and Tamburlaine; but very often this is because, in them, families are never formed in the first place. It is notable that one of the few things Mephostophilis denies Faustus is a wife:(6) thus the scholar, whom we assume to have long since drifted apart from the "base stock" from which he was sprung, is afforded no opportunity to recreate a family unit, something for which he perhaps compensates in his marked affection for his friends and for Wagner, and, arguably, even in his desire to please the pregnant Duchess of Vanholt. Marlowe, however, pointedly withholds from his hero personal participation in such a family unit, even though, as Emily Bartels points out, "in the sources... he and Helen get married and have a son" (135). In a brilliant analysis of the play, Kay Stockholder demonstrates Faustus's unease with his own sexuality and the ways in which his approaches to heterosexuality are thwarted by powerful patriarchal figures which, together with the presence of the strongly developed cuckoldry theme she shows to be present in the play, indicates a deeply unresolved Oedipus complex. Ironically, the woman he is offered instead of a wife is Helen--the legendary marriage-breaker of mythology, the

21 woman who abandoned her husband Menelaus and her daughter Hermione for the seducer Paris. Family even becomes an issue in the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins. Pride "disdain[s] to have any parents" (II.i.116), Wrath "had neither father nor mother" (II.i.141), Gluttony's "parents are all dead" (II.i. 148), while all the rest cite illmatched couplings as their source of origin. Once again it is possible to discern a suggestion that fractured or non-existent family structures lie behind the darkest events of the play. Similarly in Dido, Queen of Carthage there is a strong sense of the fact that in coming together these two, widow and widower respectively, would be able to restore the family structure that each has lost--something that seems strongly signaled in Dido's desire effectively to reconstitute her former marriage by rechristening Aeneas Sichaeus, and by her enthusiastic response to Ascanius's request that she should function as a replacement mother for him.(7) It is one of the most savage ironies of the play that it is family strife amongst the gods, specifically between Juno and Venus, which prevents this dream of a new family from reaching fulfillment, just as it has previously devastated the family of Priam and Hecuba. Family breakdown is, then, repeatedly stressed as a recurring motif in Marlowe's plays, and its impact is heightened by the use of vignettes of happy families which provide both contrast and pathos. Obvious examples are Zabina and Bajazeth in Tamburlaine Part One, whose mutual affection, undiminished by the brutal circumstances of their captivity, could be seen as strongly reminiscent of the marriage of affection and mutual support proposed by Protestant ideology, and Olympia and her family in Part Two, where again conjugal and filial devotion triumphantly survives external disasters. It is also noteworthy that Marlowe has rearranged chronology in The Massacre at Paris by deferring the death of Jeanne of Navarre until after her son's wedding, which allows us a tragically brief glimpse of the happy life she could apparently have led with her son and her new daughter-in-law (who is presented as markedly affectionate and deferential to her mother-in-law). But there are also, and more strikingly, instances of the same phenomenon in the only play that I have not yet mentioned, Edward II. In Dido, Queen of Carthage it might be possible to argue that it is Jupiter's homosexual attachment to Ganymede which is seen as the initial spark for family disunity(8) (though in fact this idea is largely exploded by Jupiter's account of strife between him and Juno reaching much farther back, as when she harmed Heracles, and by the unpleasant insight into her character we are offered during her meeting with Venus). In Edward II, however, the question of whether or not homosexuality gives rise to family disruption is addressed head on, and answered with a resounding negative. The issue is highlighted from the very first lines of the play: "My father is deceased. Come, Gaveston, / And share the kingdom with thy dearest friend." Here we could, perhaps, see a suggestion that individual happiness can be enabled only by a breakdown of family structure, at least for Edward and for Gaveston; and undoubtedly Edward's preference for Gaveston has soured relations between himself and Isabella. Homosexuality seems, however, to have been seen in the Renaissance period not as an exclusive alternative to heterosexuality, but rather as a sort of additional extra to it, so that the breakdown of the marriage need not necessarily have been attributable solely to Edward's sexual preferences,(9) and as Claude J. Summers points out, "while the word `unnatural' occurs frequently in the play to describe

22 rebellion and anarchy and dissembling, it is never applied as a sufficient definition of homosexuality" (223). Certainly Gaveston's undoubted homosexuality very markedly fails to have any deleterious effect on his marriage to Edward's niece;(10) and family ties other than the marriage bond are shown in the play to be totally unaffected by homosexuality. There is strong affection between Spenser and his father, between Edward and his brother, and, most notably of all, between Edward and his son. There is no trace, in the conduct of the homosexual king, of the poor parenting which characterized that supreme example of heterosexuality, the Queen of Love, let alone of the infanticidal rage of a Tamburlaine or a Barabas. If we judge by the devotion to him evinced by his son, Edward II is the best parent in the plays. If it is not the attempt to set up a "pretended family" that undermines the stability of the real family, then, what does? Perhaps part of the answer may lie in Marlowe's depiction of power relationships within the affected families. The children who suffer most badly in these plays are all royal children, or, what I take to be effectively analogous, the children of gods:(11) Venus, Hermes, Aeneas, and Ascanius, in Dido, Queen of Carthage, are all divine or of divine ancestry; the son of the Guise in The Massacre at Paris, forced to view his father's murdered body, is the child of perhaps the foremost political figure in the country. Tamburlaine's troubled brood have as father "the scourge of God," conqueror of half the world, and Jill Levenson points to the way in which the concept of Tamburlaine's kingship is insistently reinforced by the play's language (102). Finally, the young Edward III is son and nephew not only of a king, but also, and perhaps even more importantly, of a queen, a power-broker both between nations and in the internal political affairs of England, who shares in the responsibility for the brutal murder of his father. Even Abigail comes to grief only when her father has acquired so much wealth and power that he will soon be able to put himself forward as a serious candidate for the governorship of Malta: before his development of such ambitions, their relationship seems solid enough.(12) As Simon Shepherd points out, the parenting of royal offspring was felt to be an especially difficult issue.(13) In cases like these the usual disadvantages of patriarchy--the discrepancy between the prospects of the eldest son and those of the other children--are significantly increased: for the eldest boy a crown, for the others the unenviable position of needing to be kept alive as possible successors, but equally of representing an everpresent threat, as is illustrated in the situations of Henry III and Henry IV in The Massacre at Pans, and in the strife between Cosroe and Mycetes in Tamburlaine Part One. (This question of the situation of potential heirs to thrones could, of course, have been an issue particularly highlighted for Marlowe himself and for his audiences by Elizabeth I's refusal to name her successor and by the consequent intrigues surrounding the various possible claimants such as the Grey sisters, Arabella Stuart, and James VI of Scotland). For the daughters, moreover, there was the unappetizing propsect of being used to seal a diplomatic marriage: this was the fate that awaited Zenocrate before her capture by Tamburlaine, and we are reminded of the fact when, towards the end of Part One, we briefly meet her first fiance. The usual fate of princesses is also figured in The Massacre at Pan's in the person of Marguerite of Valois, who is treated with surprising sympathy--the racier aspects of her rather scandalous history, which included taking several lovers who reputedly included the Duke of Guise, are suppressed, and she is turned into the model daughter-in-law(14)--and perhaps also in that of the Duchess of Guise, trapped in a

23 loveless marriage which she owed to her high birth and her relationship to the royal family of France, who is seen as inextricably enmeshed in the structures of the family which simultaneously enable her and cripple her. She is saved from death at the hands of her jealous husband through the fact of her pregnancy, thus keeping the family unit (however unhappily) together, but she is also, like Venus in Dido, Queen of Carthage, complicit in the replication of her own unhappy situation by producing children born into an atmosphere of violence, suspicion and bloodshed, as we see only too clearly when her young son is forced to look at his murdered father's body.(15) In her case, mothering, which would be seen by contemporary audiences as fulfillment of the most natural of all possible instincts is also, from another perspective, blameworthy and inevitably disastrous. (The potential consequences of family bonds are made further apparent within the Guise clan when, having murdered the Duke himself, they also make sure of his brother the Cardinal, whose only apparent crime lies in the fact of the relationship). It seems, then, that it is primarily the question of power, and perhaps more specifically of patriarchal power, which is involved in the production of unhappy marriages and fractured families. The more unequal the distribution of power within the family grouping, and the greater the concentration of it within the hands of the patriarch, the greater the risks of family break-up and disharmony. In this context it is perhaps significant that although Edward II is a king, and thus in theory a wielder of nearabsolute power, it is in fact made very clear to us from an early stage in the play that his power is so seriously qualified by the disaffection of his barons that it amounts to virtually nothing (Mahood 119). Whereas his brother-in-law of France, more secure on his throne, turns his back on the request for help which he receives from his sister and nephew, Edward never forgets his affection for his son, and ultimately resigns his crown--and with it, inevitably, his life--in order to ensure the boy's succession to a throne which might otherwise have been bid for by Mortimer. It is equally noteworthy that the Earl of Kent forsakes his brother when he sees a chance for his own political star to gain the ascendant, but returns to a blind and indeed ultimately stupid loyalty to him when he loses his influence with Mortimer and Isabella. Isabella herself may also be an example of this phenomenon; historically, her father Philip IV stood apart as the one strong French king in a period of generally weak rule, and it may well be that we should see her career of decimating her family--she is directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of her husband, his brother, and her niece's husband--as a product of his upbringing as much as of her husband's neglect. In these plays, it seems, the principal threat to the institution of the family is, paradoxically, the patriarchal power structure itself, and what Marlowe is showing us, in his analysis of the politics of family, is the inherent self-annihilation which fissures patriarchal ideology. (1) For comment on this aspect of Marlowe's plays, see Stephen Greenblatt. "Marlowe and the Will to Absolute Play," from Renaissance Self-Fashioning: from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980) 193-221, reprinted in New Historicism and Renaissance Drama, edited by Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton (Harlow, Essex: Longman. 1992) 57-82. J. B. Steane, in the introduction to his edition of Marlowe's complete plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), notes that Marlowe was himself a member of a troubled family, but also pays due regard to the problematic nature of adducing biographical information in criticism 11; all quotations from Marlowe's plays will be taken from this edition.

24

(2) I did not discover Professor Ardolino's paper until late in the preparation of my own: although interested in very similar concerns, we have in fact used different instances and approaches. (3) For an acute analysis of the giving of jewels as effecting a reification of relationships, and thus highlighting the power structures inherent in them, see Shepherd. Michael Hattaway comments on how Tamburlaine similarly fetishises his armor. (4) M. M. Mahood has an interesting suggestion to make about Calyphas's difference from the other sons, commenting that "Calyphas has the most character of the three sons; but, by the sharpest irony, Marlowe causes Tamburlaine to kill the only being he has endowed with some measure of his own vitality, and to leave his kingdom to his other two sons, pale and sketchy replicas of their father and quite incapable of maintaining his conquests" (102). (5) For a forcible argument that Tamburlaine might in fact be seen as a good father in terms of Renaissance values, see Carolyn D. Williams, "`The Jealousy of Wars': Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Renaissance Parenthood," paper read at a conference on Literature, Politics and History, University of Reading, 1995. I am very grateful to Carolyn Williams for sending me a copy of this paper. (6) Interestingly, Robert H. Watson ("Tragedy," in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, 301-351) comments that "Faustus's first demand of Mephostopholis is a beautiful spouse." Certainly this is what one might expect Faustus to ask, but the fact that he does not actually do so, and stipulates merely a wife in general, seems to me to suggest that he is motivated not so much by lust as by the desire for family ties. Mahood points to the ironic contrast between Faustus's situation when he cries Lente currite, noctis equi," and that of the original speaker in Ovid, a fulfilled lover (110). (7) That this aspect of Dido's and Aeneas's situations would have been readily perceived in the Renaissance is suggested by the banter between Antonio and Sebastian in The Tempest about "widow Dido" and "widower Aeneas" (The Tempest, edited by Anne Righter [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968], II.i.79-82). Dido's widowhood is also repeatedly referred to in Chapman's comedy The Widow's Tears. (8) Wilbur Sanders, for instance, sees Marlowe's treatment of his homosexual characters as informed by "a neurotic desire for symbolic punishment and expiation" (140). As will become clear, I disagree. (9) See Alan Bray, Hamosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's Press, 1982) 16; Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1990) 63-148; Jean E. Howard, "Sex and social conflict: the erotics of The Roaring Girl," in Erotic Politics: Desire an the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (London: Routledge, 1992) 170-190; and Valerie Traub, "Desire and the Differences it Makes," in The Matter of Difference, ed. Valerie Wayne (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991) 81-114. Lisa Jardine interesting comments that "Marlowe is also able to exploit the stage irony that

25 Edward's `natural' love--his queen Isabella--is also, in the event, a boy" (23), while Bruce R. Smith remarks that "the misogyny of Edward II does not equate homosexuality and effeminacy: it insists on their separation" (Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics [Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991], 215). (10) Shepherd (119) regards the niece as being essentially a dupe of Gaveston, but I see no evidence for this. (11) James I argues that "in the Scriptures Kings are called GODS" (qtd. in Leonard Tennenhouse, "Strategies of State and political plays: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry IV, Henry V, Henry WI, "in Political Shakespeare, edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1985) 109-128, 117. (12) Mahood views Barabas as ambitious to rule (113). (13). See Shepherd, 75 and 156-7, and also David M. Bergeron, Shakespeare's Romances and the Royal Family (Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 1985) 110. There is also an interesting discussion on the allocation of children's inheritances as an increasing source of tension during the Elizabethan period in Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters (68-102). (14) For an account of the career of Marguerite of Navarre, see my Wtomen Who Would Be Kings: Female Rulers of the Sixteenth Century (London and New York: Vision Press and St. Martin's Press, 1991). (15) It is interesting that the Duchess of Guise, like the Niece in Edward II, has taken one of the king's minions for her lovers. This could be seen as adding force to the view that male homosexuality is not necessarily incompatible with more conventional family structures. Indeed Margot Heinemann ("Political drama," in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, 183) has suggested that even in Edward II "the decisive issue is not his homosexuality (though that antagonizes the barons, and probably the audience, they admit that 'the greatest kings have had their minions'), but that it leads him to favor social upstarts and squander wealth on them."