The Complete Plays (96 page)

12   
mark
: Target.

17        
air of life
: Breath.

22        
closet
: Chamber.

26        
excrements
: (Here) faeces.

27        
channel water
: Sewer-water.

28        
Sit… your grace
: Matrevis plays upon the alternative sense of ‘excrements' (26), which could also mean ‘hairs'.

36.1–2  
SD
They wash… away
: The incident is taken from John Stow's
Chronicles of England
(1580).

52    
Thrust in
: I.e. into Killingworth Castle. Marlowe is thinking of the doors at the back of the stage; cf.
Jew of Malta
2.3.365.

Scene
24

8   ,11  
Edwardum… est
: The two interpretations of the Latin are given in the succeeding lines.

13        
Unpointed
: Unpunctuated.

14        
being dead
: I.e. when Edward is dead.

16        
quit
: Exonerated.

21        
Lightborne
: An anglicization of ‘Lucifer' (= light-bearer), this is also the name of a devil in the late fifteenth-century Chester cycle of mystery plays.

26        
use much
: Am much accustomed.

31        
lawn
: Strip of linen, here stuffed down a victim's throat to cause suffocation.

41        
At every… horse
: Fresh horses have been stationed for him at intervals of ten miles.

42        
Take this
: I.e. the secret token used at 25.19.

50        
seal
: Authorize with the royal seal.

51        
Feared… feared
: Reminiscent of Machiavelli,
The Prince
, ch. 17: ‘because hardly can [love and fear] subsist both together, it is much safer to be feared, than to be loved' (trans. Edward Dacres (1640), p. 130).

53–4  
Aristarchus' eyes… boy
: I.e. the prince fears Mortimer as much as his pupils feared the Greek scholar Aristarchus (N), whose very looks were like a whipping (‘breeching').

59        
imbecility
: (Here) incapacity, weakness.

60        
onus quam gravissimum
: A very heavy burden. Like the tag in line 62, part of the legal formula for the installation of a Roman governor.

62        
Suscepi… provinciam
: I have undertaken that office.

68        
Maior… nocere
: I am greater than one Fortune can harm (i.e. too great for Fortune to harm me), from Ovid,
Metamorphoses
VI, 195.

71.2  
SD
CHAMPION
: One who, in a formal coronation ceremony, offers to fight any who challenge the claim of the new king to his crown.

79        
here's to thee
: The king customarily drank the champion's health from a silver-gilt cup, which was then presented to him as his fee.

81        
blades and bills
: Swords and halberds.

106      
none of both them
: I.e. neither of them (Q2‘s reading; Q has
none of both, then
).

Scene
25

9          
savour
: Stench.

16        
for the nonce
: Purposely.

24        
Pereat iste
: Let this man perish. The instruction may be included in the unpunctuated letter or inscribed on the token. It is in Latin so that Lightborne cannot understand it.

25        
lake
: (Here) dungeon, cell.

33        
featherbed
: Feather mattress.

41        
Foh
: An expression of disgust at a bad smell.

with all my heart
: ‘I must say' (Bevington and Rasmussen 1995).

41.1  
SD
Enter
KING EDWARD
: Because Q provides no stage directions, Edward's entrance is unclear. He may enter from beneath the stage via a trap door, or he could be ‘discovered' (i.e. revealed) from behind a curtain drawn by Lightborne.

48        
used
: I.e. being treated.

54        
Caucasus
: See (N). The mountains were a byword for hardness.

69        
ran at tilt
: Jousted.

77        
That, even
: Q's
That, and even
is just possible but strained and hypermetrical.

92        
You're overwatched
: You are exhausted (from having little sleep), perhaps punning on the sense, ‘under my eye'.

113.1   
SD
EDWARD
dies
: Q is unspecific about the murder, but the details were notorious. In Holinshed's words:

they came suddenly one night into the chamber where he lay in bed fast asleep, and with heavy featherbeds or a table (as some write) being cast upon him, they kept him down and withall put into his fundament an horn, and through the same they thrust up into his body an hot spit, or (as other have) through the pipe of a trumpet a plumber's instrument of iron made very hot, the which passing up into his entrails, and being rolled to and fro, burnt the same, but so as no appearance of any wound or hurt outwardly might be once perceived. His cry did move many within the castle and town of Berkeley to compassion…

(
Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland
(1587), vol. 3, p. 341)

Scene
26

4          
ghostly father
: Priest (administering the last rites to one about to die), i.e. here a murderer.

9      
Fly… savages
: Take flight beyond civilization.

11        
Jove's huge tree
: The oak.

24        
SP
FIRST LORD
: Though Q attributes speeches in this scene to a collectivity of
LORDS
, it is likely that they were apportioned to individuals in performance (as at 93).

52        
hurdle
: The frame or sledge used to drag criminals through the streets on the way to the place of execution.

53        
Hang him… quarters up
: Mortimer Junior is to be hanged, drawn and quartered – the traditional punishment for treason.

80        
trial
: Investigation.

101      
distilling
: Falling.

THE MASSACRE AT PARIS

The Massacre at Paris
probably dates from 1592. It must post-date the assassination of Henri III (2 August 1589), and is generally supposed to have been the play whose first performance, under the title ‘The Tragedy of the Guise', by Lord Strange's Men at the Rose in January 1593, is recorded in Philip Henslowe's Diary. That play was a great success, and continued in the repertoire. But the only early publication of
The Massacre
was in an undated octavo usually assigned on bibliographical evidence to 1602, and from the difficulties presented by this text (the basis of this edition) spring most of the problems which beset the understanding of the play. It seems to have been assembled from the memories of actors, and perhaps as much as half the play Marlowe wrote is missing. A single manuscript leaf, now in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, preserves a significantly fuller version of the opening of scene 19, and hints tantalizingly at the original verbal texture of the play (see Appendix).

The action of the first half of the play, dealing with the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre (1572), derives from François Hotman's
De Furoribus Gallicis
, published under the pseudonym ‘Ernest Vara-mund', translated in 1573 as A
True and Plain Report of the Furious Outrages in France
and reprinted in 1574 without acknowledgement as Book 10 of Jean de Serres,
The Three Parts of the Commentaries… of the Civil Wars in France.
Some details of the planning of the massacre may be taken from Simon Goulart's collection of
Mémoires de l'état de France
(1576–7). The killing of Ramus comes from the anonymous
Tocsin contre les massacreurs
(1579). This clearly touched a chord for Marlowe: Guise, impugning Ramus's scholarship for ‘never sound[ing] anything to the depth' (9.25), recalls (or anticipates) Faustus' resolution
to ‘sound the depth' of his ‘profess[ion]' (1.2). Sources for the latter half of the play, which treats events of seventeen years with distorting compression, cannot be so clearly determined. There are innumerable hostile accounts of the reign of Henri III (his interests in magic and
mignons
were especially execrated in Guisard polemics); and Marlowe need not have been confined to written sources of information: events were within living memory, English soldiers were fighting in France in the early 1590s, and Marlowe may have been there twice in person.

One of the play's nineteenth-century editors thought it beneath criticism:

the language seldom rises above mediocrity, the characters are drawn with the indistinct faintness of shadows, and the plot is contemptible: events in themselves full of horror and such as should strike the soul with awe, become ludicrous in the extreme by injudicious management; The whole is in fact not so much a tragedy as a burlesque upon tragedy…

(William Oxberry, quoted in Oliver 1968:1)

Its stock has risen since then (Judith Weil argues that its concerns are central to the understanding of all Marlowe's work), but the key issues remain the play's historical accuracy and the interpretation of its black humour. Earlier scholars thought its historical vision corrupted by the Protestant propaganda of its sources. More recently, its bloodthirsty comedy has been seen to reflect the vicious sacrilegious humour which characterized the atrocities of the French wars of religion, ‘the rites of violence'. However, the anthropologically minded historian who coined the term (Natalie Zemon Davis, in
Society and Culture in Early Modern France
, 1975) was explicitly concerned with
popular
violence. Marlowe's is a sixteenth-century ‘Machiavellian' interpretation of the massacre as a conspiracy engineered by the Catholic nobility. He gives far greater prominence than his sources to his villainous duke of Guise, and, as Guise's big soliloquy (2.34ff.) makes clear, his motivation is not religion but the distinctly Marlovian ambition for a crown, ‘the diadem of France' (44). ‘For this,' the speech insists, are all his actions shaped, including a hypocritical show of religion:

For this, have I a largess from the Pope,

A pension and a dispensation too;

And by that privilege to work upon,

My policy hath framed religion.

Religion: O
Diabole!

Fie, I am ashamed, how ever that I seem,

To think a word of such a simple sound,

Of so great matter should be made the ground. (2.62–69)

As in Shakespeare's early histories,
Henry VI, Parts Two and Three
(1591–2), with which the play shares a number of lines, popular violence is the tool of aristocratic ambition.

In the fast-moving second half, as in the Shakespeare histories, civil war is treated as a revenge-drama played out by the nobility (the conspirators speak of the Massacre itself as a bloody piece of theatre). The Guise is caught up in a lethal court intrigue, and the massacre he engineers in the first half is ironically recalled in the slaughter of the second. The text is full of ironic symmetries, though we cannot be quite sure of their import: are Queen Catherine's casually murderous speeches about her two royal sons in scenes 11 and 14 so similar because they depict the terrible repetitive mechanism of civil war (as in
Henry VI
), or because the reporter mixed up the original speeches? Similarly, is Anjou apparently so different once he becomes Henry III because ideological confusion in Marlowe's treatment of him makes the character ‘wellnigh unintelligible' (Kocher 1941), or because Marlowe intended to disconcert his audiences, or, as Potter suggests, because the historical king really was so enigmatic? The problem is acute in the final scene, when the dying king has an unexpected attack of pro-Elizabethan sentiment and violent anti-Catholicism (especially since his anti-papal speech seems to have got tangled up with Edward II's equally uncharacteristic outburst on the same theme). Can the lines in which Henry gives the Protestant Navarre his blessing be Marlowe's? If so, was Marlowe being serious? And what would the lines have meant to audiences who saw the play after the new king, Henri IV, converted to Catholicism in 1593?

Scene
1

1          
brother
: Brother-in-law (he has just married Charles's sister Margaret).

3        
religious league
: Between the Catholics and Protestants.

8        
fuelled
: Perpetuated, continuing the imagery of lines 6–7.

12        
queen-mother
: Catherine de' Medici, who retained many of the powers of a regent.

49        
house of Bourbon
: The Bourbon family, rulers of Navarre, now allied to the royal family of Valois.

52        
beats his brains
: Racks his brains.