Programme note for the Marlowe Sessions, Canterbury - June 2022
On Tamburlaine and Faustus
‘I can’t get no satisfaction’
Richards / Jagger
This is an extraordinary time to encounter Tamburlaine and Faustus again.
From Scythia and the banks of the Dnipro, on the Eastern wall of our own sweet Babylon, comes a threat of annihilation that feels perhaps more plausible and real than it has ever felt. The threat invades our nightmares through images of ostentatious displays of savage barbarism. Its sole purpose: to utterly terrify. A man who came from nowhere and has fashioned himself from nothing, with a team of henchmen, has used his enemies’ greed, vacillation and cowardice against them. Language is mastered and employed like a weapon too.
He won’t actually annex Crimea, he won’t actually flatten Grozny a second time, he won’t actually sanction the use of chemical weapons in Syria, he won’t actually murder the four virgins, he wouldn’t dare invade Ukraine, he wouldn’t dare challenge the Emperor Bajazeth, it’s simply not in his economic interests to turn off the gas, he wouldn’t… you know… press the… would he? As in Tamburlaine, we fearfully look to the walls of our city to see what colour the tents are that are pitched there. We pray that they will be white. We see that they are red. But in our darkest nightmares we wake to see black tents. And we can do very little about it.
Marlowe reminds us in his play that the thin veneer of ‘civilised’ government and bourgeois structures of power are just that, a very thin veneer. A hollow crown. A meaningless ring of metal tossed from hand to hand by a man who sees that there are two groups of people in the world: the conquerors and the conquered. And everything else is decoration. Every constitution a fairytale to prettify the genocide of the people who wrote it. Every national anthem a nursery rhyme to block our ears to the screams of the naysayers. Every Jubilee a plate of sugar to sweeten the taste of the rivers of blood mixed with ground bones to build the structures of Empire. There’s no speechifying your way out of the path of a bullet. Pomp and entitlement are risible barriers against a nuclear blast.
From time to time we are faced with the black implications of Mao Zedong’s maxim that ‘power grows out of the barrel of a gun’. Sat underneath official political channels, underneath fine words and ideas are the hard facts of political reality. If you have the might you can do what you like. We can convince ourselves against that idea for years on end (perhaps it's our own historical brutality that gives us the privilege of being able to think this way now) but ultimately, it comes back to power. And whether you are going to be queasy about the trivial matter of a few million deaths, in the process of building your new Jerusalem. The only game in town is whether you dare or not. Power, posits Dostoevsky, ‘is for those that have the temerity to bend down in to the dirt and pick it up’.
Is it worth the deaths of 70 million Chinese in the years following the cultural revolution, to achieve Chinese hegemony in the twenty first century for the grandchildren of long marchers? Are the deaths of millions in colonial wars justifiable to give Britain and America their hegemony of the last few hundred years? Have I benefitted from it directly? These are massive and complex historical questions that I don’t know the answer to. But it sure as hell feels more frightening being on the inside of a besieged city for the first time than it does conducting the siege and exacting the ransom, and pretending I haven't been complicit in it.
Yes. This is an extraordinary time to encounter Tamburlaine and Faustus.
In re-reading Doctor Faustus, I was struck by something. The pact with Lucifer: 24 years of living ‘in all voluptuousness’ in exchange for his eternal soul, is entirely John Faustus’ idea. It’s not Mephistopheles’ or Lucifer’s. It’s not presented to him by the devil. It’s his own offer. Tragically, what we see him desire, is the most his human imagination can comprehend. Much like the Clown, Robin who plans on using Faustus’ magic books to get to the body of Nell Spit the serving maid. (He doesn’t even seem too bothered by being turned in to an ape, at least he’ll get ‘sport…nuts and apples enow’). I was struck by the paltry makeweight the humans, Robin and John Faustus, use against their eternity.
I thought about a conversation with a child in forty years time:
Child: It must have been awful in the early part of the twenty first century.
Phillip: Why?
Child: You can’t have known about the conflict diamonds in your iPhone, or the damage planes did to the environment, you can’t have known that a lot of your clothes were made by child slaves in Bangladesh…
Phillip: Ah… I did know about all of that, to be fair to me.
Child: Then WHY DID YOU DO IT? Have you seen the planet?
Phillip: Um…
Flights to long forgotten holidays, ill fitting clothes thrown in to landfill, and roughly a third of my life staring at a screen to anaesthetise myself against the sheer awfulness of being alive and participating in it all, seem like a terrible bargain when faced with ecological catastrophe and the like. This pursuit of ‘voluptuousness’ that I’m engaged in hasn’t come close to satisfying me. I know how to make things better, yet I choose not to. Strange that.
When writing Faustus, Marlowe may have thought about God, giving the perfect earth to the Adam and Eve. ‘Just don’t try and know too much guys, because you can’t. You’re human’. ‘Here is heaven…’ And God can’t work out why they chose hell. God’s had three drafts at the whole damn project before we get ten pages in to the bible… This mystery. Our ability to know what heaven looks like, but to choose hell. What does it mean to have so much and to know so much? Can it ever satisfy us? As Mephistopheles says to John Faustus who is seeking to know, ‘’why, this is hell, nor am I out of it…’. Hell is real. We make it. We live in it. We choose it. But we could choose heaven…
And then the other thing that struck me… Faustus can repent at any time. Right up until the last minute. But, scared by a physical threat from Mephistopheles, the momentary pain of scourged skin, he chooses, of his own free will, to cut open his arm (again) and recommit his soul to Lucifer. It’s almost as if he wants to be damned. Almost like he knows he’s done something wrong. Strange that.
Marlowe, was an insider / outsider. One of the first generation of English renaissance men to taste the possibility of reinventing themselves. A lowly shoemaker’s son from Canterbury, who saw first hand how power actually worked in the Tudor State from his position as a scholar at the King’s School, and latterly at Cambridge University. A man who despite the promises of the age was imprisoned within his class, his sexuality and by his religion. He saw the possibilities and pitfalls of new poetic form in the English language. A man who was perhaps uniquely placed to see what hypocrisies the gilded artifice of the age covered up. A man who strained to look over the fence to glimpse human freedom outside of the bounds of God, sexuality and class. For Marlowe and his audience, it’s implications were both terrifying and thrilling.
I often wonder whether we like Shakespeare so much because he offers us a vision of humanity that just about edifies us. That makes it a bit easier to crack on despite the pitiful employment conditions of the Deliveroo guys. Macbeth creates hell on earth, right out of his imagination, yet in his death we get some redemption through the arc of his downfall. Revenged by the father of some kids that he had killed. No such comfort in Tamburlaine. There’s no reckoning. The scourge of the Gods, the immolator of holy books, the genocidal soldier, the public butcher of his own son, the torturer, the man who struck out beyond moral bounds, who had the courage to try to actually realise some of his desires, dies of an unnamed disease, surrounded by his friends and his sons. The first part of Tamburlaine ends in a wedding. Um… Isn’t that how comedies end?
Faustus’ final utterance is strangely ambivalent: ‘Ah Mephistopheles’. It’s this ambivalence in Marlowe that I find shocking, the surfeit, the numbness, to yet another fortune given by an Emperor, the disappointment in what happens every time our desires become manifest. ‘Is this the face that launched a thousand ships?’. Even Helen of Troy, the most you could sexually desire (in this instance as a straight man), in reality is a bit of a let down when she actually arrives. The mysteries of the universe are imparted to Faustus’ little human brain by Mephistopheles, it makes him none the wiser. Like trying to explain tennis to a cat. There’s a shock I still feel today when reading these plays, in the numbness and the indifference of the universe (as Marlowe sees it) to our fate. That’s not how plays work, I think to myself. But it’s often how I feel reality works. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, may very well die of old age in the arms of his daughter and his ballerino son-in-law in a big, camp palace. Doesn’t feel right somehow.
For Marlowe, often the most soaring poetry comes before some brutal intervention from a world that is utterly deaf to it. His observation seems to be that we have such a dysfunctional relationship with our own desires, that some men would sooner invade Ukraine than seek therapy. They’d sooner be in hell. How strange that we are slaves to our desires despite the fact that we know how banal they are and ultimately how they can’t be… well… the thing is…
I can’t get no satisfaction
’cause I try and I try and I try and I try
I can’t get no – hey hey hey
Even that verse is maddeningly circular and the words taper out in to inarticulacy as Mick tries to grasp what it is.
Is this bleak? Not if it’s true. It might help us see ourselves truly as we stand on a precipice. It’s not lovely as an idea but might just be a terribly urgent one. Perhaps Shakespeare sees what Marlowe sees, but he always gives us enough to get through the day. Perhaps we’ve run out of time for that, in the face of the colossal evidence of our own barbarity, selfishness and indifference to the future that is stacking up in front of us. Marlowe is inviting us to look in to the abyss, but in doing so might just be able to steer us away from falling in. As I say, it’s not exactly nice. The reflection may not be pretty. But the truth rarely is. Maybe it’s why Shakespeare died old and rich, and why Kit Marlowe got stabbed in the eye in Deptford when he was twenty nine, by a state that was sick of his bloody plays.
Hoping for our own goodness might not get us out of this one. Looking at who we are beyond the artifice and the lullabies, might.
This is an extraordinary time to encounter Tamburlaine and Faustus.
© Phillip Breen