Marlowe's staging of meaning.

Publication: Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England

Publication Date: 01-JAN-06

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IN his preface to the collection "A Poet and a filthy Play-maker" Kenneth Friedenreich remarks that for a long time criticism of Marlowe's plays focused on his abilities as a poet rather than as a playwright, and that not until the late twentieth century had "the community of Marlowe's interpreters accepted the truth that all his plays possess--albeit in varying degrees--a theatrical dimension possessed of its own powerful structure and logic." (1) Particularly effective in illustrating how Marlowe combines the visual and verbal to create meaning onstage are studies calling attention to the influence of emblem books and of pageants and morality plays on his work. One of the first critics to take this approach was Jocelyn Powell, developing the premise that,



In constructing his plays, [Marlowe] pays very careful attention to the visual effect made by each scene in action, and contrives that the movements of the actors, their properties, their costumes, and the background against which they appear, should combine to form a picture, as representative as the words, of the psychological and moral tensions about which he is writing. (2)

Powell adds that "on the whole Marlowe's most powerful effects do not rely on tradition; he creates his own images, giving them significance through context and language, underlining the action with significant visual detail, or extending the verbal action into the stage-picture" (199). Picking up on Powell's use of "spectacle," J. W. Harper notes that "the word preferred by Marlowe and his contemporaries was 'show', and this word in the Renaissance carried a connotation which it has since lost: a show was a visible means of communicating an intellectual concept." (3) Harper adds that Marlowe's "basic dramatic method is the presentation of a series of emblematic images which, in their suggestion of formal arrangement, communicate their meaning as forcefully to the eye as to the ear" (xv). In this study I want to demonstrate that only when we perceive this aspect of Marlowe's plays and its thematic purposes is it possible to achieve an accurate appreciation of his theatrical craftsmanship.

Indeed, the "play-maker" epithet should be a reminder that Christopher Marlowe was a playwright, a craftsman who constructed plays by using the tools of his craft. He spoke the language of the early modern stage--what Alan Dessen has described as the "theatre vocabulary" shared by those responsible for putting plays onstage: playwrights, players, and bookkeepers. (4) Essential to that language are the stage directions and dialogue signals that determine what the characters do and where onstage they do it. Because a playgoer's experience of drama is linear, these visual elements are necessarily fundamental to a play's structure and meaning. Marlowe seems to have understood not only that actions and their stage location are important but that they can be a means of both highlighting and linking key events in the plot. This device of visual emphasis is evident in all Marlowe's plays, from, at one extreme, Edward II and I Tamburlaine, which have the most minimal stage directions and staging requirements, to The Jew of Malta, which makes the most extensive use of the performance space. In each play a direct relationship between the staging and a governing idea is apparent. In using this method, Marlowe is no different from his contemporaries, all of whom to some degree employed a nonrealistic "theatrical logic--call it symbolic or imagistic or presentational." (5) But Marlowe was especially adept at creating and deploying successive stage images to chart a sequential process.

In early modern plays the stage directions indicate a playwright's familiarity with the language of the theater; in addition, they can provide evidence of his approach to playmaking. Marlowe's directions demonstrate his strong interest in the visual and the importance of that dimension to the structure of his plays. (6) His directions are for the most part conventional, demonstrating his familiarity with, in particular, the world of the Rose playhouse inhabited by the Admiral's Men. Not surprisingly, the confused and confusing extant text of The Massacre at Paris (7) is something of an exception, although it too includes staging practices similar in important ways to those of Marlowe's other plays. In general, then, his stage directions are minimal, but sufficient to produce the required action when combined with dialogue cues. This is typical of playtexts through the period: even in the extant manuscripts and quartos annotated for performance, the bookkeepers rarely supplement dialogue signals with additional stage directions. (8) Although probably no early modern playtext by any author has a signal for every character entrance, in Marlowe's most of these directions are present. He seldom specified exactly how many "others" or "attendants" should appear, but he frequently called for such figures to swell an entrance. While exit or exeunt is always less common than enter in playtexts of the period, Marlowe's are notably unusual in that he seldom marked character exits or scene endings with couplets; even his dialogue signals for departure are often extremely subtle--not the typical "go," "come with me," or "follow." Almost always, however, he included dialogue to effect the removal of a body. Also atypical, but characteristic of Marlowe, are abrupt mid-scene changes in location. His plays make considerable use of properties and costumes, and feature distinctive items or memorable business at thematically central moments--a chafer of coals, cage, chariot; banquets, hangings, bed scenes. Like his fellow playwrights, Marlowe included many more small, hand-held props than large items that had to be carried on; probably the most common property is a simple letter or other piece of paper. (9) Interestingly for a playwright whose plays rely so heavily on emblematic moments, he never used the term "dumb show." And while none of the stage directions we can safely attribute to Marlowe requires the stage trap, he often made repeated use of the tiring-house wall and its openings. Indeed, Marlowe seems to have been well aware of the power of repetition (that essential playwright's tool), something nowhere more apparent than in his play with the fewest and most minimal stage directions.

Edward II is often discussed in terms of the language of Fortune's wheel--of high and low, rising and falling--but what a playgoer actually sees is horizontal movement, namely entrances and exits. And since Marlowe typically signals virtually every action with a dialogue cue, what the playgoer hears are repetitions and variations of leave, depart, part, away, exile, banish, gone, farewell, come, stay, arrive, and return. It might be objected that any play consists of a series of entrances and exits, but Edward II consists of very little else--or at least no other actions are given nearly the same almost continuous verbal and visual emphasis. On its own, this repetition is not significant, but when it is considered in relation to King Edward's love for Piers Gaveston, the coming and going can be seen as integral to the staging of this story. That relationship and its consequences are manifested from start to finish in the play's basic structure of arrival and departure, union and separation. This is interspersed with moments of pause or stasis that not only highlight the arrivals and departures but are emphasized by contrast with the dominant mode of movement on and off stage. To show how this works, it is necessary to describe in some detail how Marlowe uses dialogue and action to create the process; doing so, however, will establish a technique fundamental to Marlowe's playmaking.

Edward II begins with Gaveston reading a letter from Edward, an action that effectively joins the two characters into one as Edward "speaks" first, but in Gaveston's voice. In addition, the issue is their current separation: the letter commands Gaveston to "come" to Edward. When the king enters, Gaveston eavesdrops on the argument between Edward and Mortimer about his "return" to England (83, 95, 105). This matter is therefore central from the start. Once they are alone, Gaveston signals his movement towards Edward: "I can no longer keep me from my lord" (138) and they embrace, creating the first of a series of similar images of union. Almost immediately, however, they begin to discuss Gaveston's possible "exile" to...

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