Elizabethan Drama Essays - Guggenheim Fellows, Tamburlaine

Elizabethan 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