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Abstract
I argue that Part 2 of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (1587; published 1590) upends the narrative operations of ekphrasis at work in Part 1 to expose Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘brazen world’ progressively. I track Part 2’s descent into this world through rhetorical insufficiencies that generate flawed ekphrases, which lack the requisite enargeia (vivid description) to be seen in the mind’s eye. Particular attention is paid to Zenocrate’s death scene as well as Tamburlaine’s preservation of her body in a gold-lined coffin. I argue that the coffin is a symbol of Tamburlaine’s rhetorical inadequacy and an aesthetic time capsule in which Marlowe suspends ekphrasis. This suspension complicates the ways in which audiences ‘see’, and is the site of a contest between ‘poetic’ (ekphrastic) and ‘dramatic’ (spectacular) ways of seeing. Through the ekphrastic interaction between the Tamburlaine plays, Marlowe challenges dramatists to revive the operations of ekphrasis in new ways. I examine William Shakespeare’s response to this challenge in The Winter’s Tale (1611; published 1623), arguing that he reconciles the poetic and dramatic ways of seeing to create a stage-picture of the revival of ekphrasis in the coming to life of Hermione’s statue.
Notes
1 Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, ed. J. S. Cunningham. The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), Pt 1, 1.2.35, 5.1.452. All subsequent references to both Parts 1 and 2 are from this edition, cited parenthetically in the text.
2 David McInnis, ‘Introduction’, in Tamburlaine: A Critical Reader, ed. David McInnis (London: Bloomsbury, 2020): 1–18, at 2.
3 Charles Whitney, Early Responses to Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 17; see also McInnis, ‘Introduction’, 3.
4 Kimberly Benston, ‘Beauty’s Just Applause: Dramatic Form and the Tamburlanian Sublime’, in Christopher Marlowe, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1986): 207–27, at 208.
5 Thomas Cartelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 64.
6 Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 182.
7 McInnis, ‘Introduction’, 8.
8 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1965), 100. All subsequent references to Sidney’s Apology are from this edition, cited parenthetically in the text. Lucy Potter, ‘Christopher Marlowe’s “Golden World”: Ekphrasis and Sidney’s Apology in Part 1 of Tamburlaine the Great’, Notes and Queries 65, no. 1 (2018): 37–42.
9 Efterpi Mitsi, ‘“What is this but stone?” Priam’s Statue in Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage’, Word & Image 27, no. 4 (2011): 443–49; Lucy Potter, ‘Ekphrastic Catharsis: Christopher Marlowe’s Mural of Troy’s Fall in The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage’, Word & Image 34, no. 4 (2018): 310–21.
10 Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 7, 14.
11 Ruth Webb, ‘Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a Genre’, Word & Image 15, no. 1 (1999): 7–18, at 14.
12 Robert Watson, ‘Tragedy’, in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 292–343, at 303.
13 McInnis, ‘Introduction’, 2.
14 J. S. Cunningham, ‘Introduction’, in Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, 1–106, at 24; Ernest L. Rhodes, Henslowe’s Rose (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1976), 41.
15 Meg F. Pearson, ‘“Raving, Impatient, Desperate and Mad”: Tamburlaine’s Spectacular Collapse’, Marlowe Studies: An Annual 2 (2012): 87–102, at 89.
16 A memorable example in Part 1 is when Tamburlaine rhetorically moves Death from the point of his sword to those of his horsemen’s spears, upon which Death’s ‘fleshless body’ comes to rest and ‘feed’ in preparation for the slaughter of the Damascene Virgins (5.1.110–15).
17 David Thurn, ‘Sights of Power in Tamburlaine’, English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989): 3–21, at 18.
18 James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 5.
19 For example, Robert Logan, ‘Violence, Terrorism, and War in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Plays’, in War and Words: Horror and Heroism in the Literature of Warfare, ed. Sara Munson Deats, Lagretta Tallent, and Mary G. Perry (Lanham: Lexington, 2004): 65–82, at 77; and Sara Munson Deats, Sex, Gender and Desire in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997), 150.
20 Mark Thornton Burnett, ‘Tamburlaine the Great, Parts 1 & 2’, in The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 127–43, at 127.
21 Mark Thornton Burnett, ‘Tamburlaine and the Body’, Criticism 30, no. 1 (1991): 31–47, at 38, 34.
22 Joel Altman, The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 328.
23 The argument about different ways of seeing builds on Ruth Lunney’s study of Marlowe’s dialogue with tradition and the ways in which his plays transform the familiar by ‘mak[ing] use of—rather than discard[ing]—old ways and values’. Lunney’s focus is the ways in which these plays ‘exploit the conventional expectations of early audiences’ and thereby change their understanding of the materials of the traditional drama, especially the visual sign and cautionary tale; Ruth Lunney, Marlowe and the Popular Tradition: Innovation in the English Drama before 1595 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 2, 53, 182.
24 The power of the dramatic effects of the same boy playing Zenocrate in both parts would have been heightened by consecutive performances of the plays. The first known consecutive performance was in December 1594, after which the two plays ‘were frequently paired in consecutive performances’; McInnis, ‘Introduction’, 9–10.
25 Benjamin Miele, ‘Zenocrate’s Power, the “Remorse of Conscience”, and Tamburlaine’s Ovidian Impotence in 1 and 2 Tamburlaine’, Marlowe Studies: An Annual 5 (2015): 131–50, at 131. On Zenocrate’s name, also see Mary Mellen Wehling, ‘Marlowe’s Mnemonic Nominology with Especial Reference to Tamburlaine’, Modern Language Notes 73, no. 4 (1958): 243–47, esp. 246.
26 Pearson, ‘“Raving”’, 90.
27 Christopher Braider, ‘The Paradoxical Sisterhood: Ut Picture Poesis’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, 9 vols, Vol. 3, ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 168–75, at 172.
28 Joel E. A. Spingarn, A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance (New York: Macmillan 1920), 42.
29 See also Braider, ‘Paradoxical Sisterhood’, 168; and Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 61–62.
30 Geoffrey Shepherd draws attention to Sidney’s ‘direct knowledge of advanced contemporary theorising on art’ in the conceptualizing process behind his ‘belief that the poet can deliver a second and a golden world’; Sidney, Apology, 64–66.
31 Pearson, ‘“Raving”’, 87.
32 Marlowe, Tamburlaine, 23–24.
33 Pearson, ‘“Raving”’, 87, 89.
34 Timothy Turner offers a comprehensive survey of extant criticism on Calyphas in Timothy A. Turner, ‘Executing Calyphas: Gender, Discipline, and Sovereignty in 2 Tamburlaine’, Explorations in Renaissance Culture 44 (2018): 141–56; see also Carolyn Williams, ‘“This Effeminate Brat”: Tamburlaine’s Unmanly Son’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 9 (1997): 56–80; and Pearson, ‘“Raving”’, 90–96.
35 Turner, ‘Executing Calyphas’, 144.
36 For a thorough examination of Sidney’s theory of divine creation and the poet’s role within it, see Michael Mack, Sidney’s Poetics: Imitating Creation (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004), esp. 81–108.
37 Litotes is a singular noun. The online Oxford English Dictionary (2000–) does not record any plural form in either the definition or examples of its use; https://www.oed.com/search?searchType=dictionary&q=litotes&_searchBtn=Search (accessed on 19 August 2022).
38 Neil Rhodes, The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 98.
39 Tamburlaine’s battle with Jove is eloquently articulated in his ‘aspiring minds’ speech in Part 1 (2.7.12–29).
40 Rick Bowers, ‘Marlowe’s Knifework: Threat, Caution, and Reaction in the Theatre’, Shakespeare Bulletin 27, no. 1 (2009): 19–26, at 23.
41 Patricia Cahill, ‘Marlowe, Death-Worlds, and Warfare’, in Christopher Marlowe in Context, ed. Emily C. Bartels and Emma Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013): 169–80, at 170.
42 John Gillies, ‘Marlowe, the Timur Myth, and the Motives of Geography’, in Playing the Globe: Genre and Geography in English Renaissance Drama, ed. John Gillies and Virginia Mason Vaughan (Madison: Associated University Presses, 1998): 203–29, at 224.
43 Johnstone Parr has examined the imbalance of Tamburlaine’s humours in the context of ‘sixteenth-century psycho-physiology’ and argues that Tamburlaine’s downfall is driven by his uncontrolled ‘excess heat’, which manifests itself after Zenocrate’s death; Johnstone Parr, ‘Tamburlaine’s Malady’, PMLA 59, no. 3 (1944): 696–714, at 703, 700–01.
44 The completion of Part 1’s theoretical project in Part 2 speaks to the prevailing view of Part 2 as a ‘hasty’ and ‘spontaneous’ sequel. I suggest, rather, that Marlowe’s sustained exploration of ekphrasis across both plays may be profitably understood in terms of Sidney’s concept of ‘that Idea or fore-conceit’, in which the ‘the skill of the artificer standeth’ (101; emphasis in original); that is, Sidney’s argument that the best poetry shows itself to have been in the poet’s mind before it is written.
45 Lunney, Marlowe and the Popular Theatre, 2, also 312.
46 Wesley Trimpi, ‘Sir Philip Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. Glyn P. Norton, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 3: 187–98, at 187.
47 Part 2 may itself have ignited the provocation to a more ‘spectacular’ theatre through its own success on the stage. According to Thomas Cartelli, Part 2 was more successful than Part 1. His assessment is based on ‘recorded receipts for performances of 2 Tamburlaine [that] are greater than those for performances of 1 Tamburlaine in four of five instances when the plays were performed consecutively’; Cartelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare, 69, 212n.
48 M. L. Stapleton, ‘The Critical Backstory: Tamburlaine, 1587–2000—A Reception History’, in Tamburlaine: A Critical Reader, ed. David McInnis (London: Bloomsbury, 2020): 19–41, at 20. McInnis notes that performances of the plays up until 1599 can be ‘inferred’ from inventories of costumes and stage properties; McInnis, ‘Introduction’, 8. The plays’ title page records that both were performed ‘sundrie times’ before they were first published in 1590.
49 As Lukas Erne notes, ‘Jones’s 1590 edition of Tamburlaine was a ground-breaking venture that seems to have been understood as such in its own time’; Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 76. More recently, Tara Lyons has drawn attention to the ‘unprecedented textual experience with professional plays’ that all three editions offered Jones’s customers: ‘an opportunity to read a whole series from start to finish, in one sitting and setting’; Tara L. Lyons, ‘Richard Jones, Tamburlaine the Great, and the Making (and remaking) of a Serial Play Collection in the 1590s’, in Christopher Marlowe, Theatrical Commerce, and the Book Trade, ed. Kirk Melnikoff and Roslyn Knutson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018): 149–64, at 150. Claire Bourne reports that all three editions sold out between 1590 and 1605, and that the Tamburlaine plays persisted well into the 1600s in ‘memories of the early modern theatre’; Claire M. L. Bourne, ‘New Directions: Mending Tamburlaine’, in Tamburlaine: A Critical Reader, ed. David McInnis (London: Bloomsbury, 2020): 85–106, at 87, 89. The amount of contemporary commentary that the Tamburlaine plays generated is well documented; Whitney, Early Responses, 17–69; Richard Levin, ‘The Contemporary Perception of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 1 (1984): 51–70.
50 Erne argues that Shakespeare was anything but indifferent to publication as he ‘could not help knowing that his plays were read and reread, printed and reprinted, excerpted and anthologized as he was writing more plays’; Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, 25. Erne’s landmark study inspired a new phase of Shakespeare criticism spearheaded by Patrick Cheney: Shakespeare, National Poet–Playwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Earlier, Cheney had formed a similar thesis about Marlowe as England’s national playwright based on the recourse to Ovid rather than Virgil in his professional rivalry with Edmund Spenser, in Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997).
51 Ruth Webb, Word & Image, 14.
52 Richard Meek, Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 26.
53 Ibid., 147.
54 Ibid., 155.
55 Ibid., 165; parentheses in original. William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen. The Royal Shakespeare Company (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2009), 5.2.10–20. All subsequent references to The Winter’s Tale are from this edition, cited parenthetically in the text.
56 Meek, Narrating the Visual, 178.
57 Ibid., 173–76.
58 Ibid., 175.
59 Meek points out that ‘Critics and theorists who have written about ekphrasis—and mimesis more generally—have stressed the ways in which all modes of representation are reliant upon conventions, and that seeing is analogous to the act of ‘reading’: an act of interpretation that takes place in time’; ibid., 24.
60 Ibid., 169.
61 Grant Scott, The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994), 1.
62 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn, Intro. Denis Feeney (London: Penguin, 2004).
63 Leonard Barkan, ‘Making Pictures Speak: Renaissance Art, Elizabethan Literature, Modern Scholarship’, Renaissance Quarterly 48, no. 2 (1995): 326–51, at 343 (emphasis in original).
64 Catherine Belsey, ‘Invocation of the Visual Image: Ekphrasis in Lucrece and Beyond’, Shakespeare Quarterly 63, no. 2 (2012): 175–98, at 196.
65 Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon, 1960), 80.