Book Reviews 203 more scholarly work. This book is sure to inspire and spark further comparative and transnational research on many fronts. In his conclusion Calin himself proposes lines of inquiry to be pursued, such as the study of the judgment poem in two or more languages (518). The influence of Calin's research extends to specialists of Ben Jonson and other English Renaissance writers: having a solid understanding of medieval English texts as Calin presents them can only lead to more comprehensive interpretations of early modern ones. Margaret Harp University of Nevada, Las Vegas Douglas Cole, Christopher Marlowe and the Renaissance of Tragedy. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995.176 pages. Douglas Cole's latest book on Christopher Marlowe is part of a series designed to provide scholarly introductions to important periods and movements in the history of world theater. It is intended for use in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses that focus on Renaissance drama in general, and Christopher Marlowe in particular. In eight chapters Cole examines Marlowe's life, Elizabethan theater, and each of Marlowe's plays (Massacre at Paris and Jew of Malta share a chapter) in order to "access the consequences of Marlowe's life in the theater, to see how his plays transformed the varied dramatic and literary traditions of his time, and, above all, to suggest how they helped to recast and redefine the themes and modes of tragedy." In his analysis, Cole focuses on Marlowe's use and transformation of classical, tyrant, Machiavellian, de casibus, and allegorical tragedy. As would be expected of a book written primarily for students, the first two chapters, "Matters of Life and Death" and "The World of the Theater in the Reign of Elizabeth," contain general summaries of Marlowe's life and the commercial theater of the period. Drawing from a number of sources, primarily Bakeless and Boas, Cole covers the usual ground one finds in Marlowe biography, including Marlowe's university training, his possible role as a spy for Elizabeth, his premature death, and the infamous comments by Thomas Kyd and Richard Baines that characterized Marlowe as an atheist and a homosexual. What is most refreshing here is that Cole does not get bogged down in the argument of whether Marlowe was indeed an
2C>4 BEN JONSON JOURNAL atheist/homosexual or not. Nor does Cole focus on the more sensational aspects, invented or otherwise, of Marlowe's death. Instead, he prefers to let the surviving documents speak for themselves, rejecting alike critics too much influenced by "hypersensitivity to institutional cover-ups and to the victimization of the individual by oppressive elites" and those more "sentimental sorts who prefer their poets noble and pure." Cole includes two appendixes that set forth Kyd and Baines's accusations as well as scholarly sources to which curious students can refer in order to make up their own minds about the "myth of Marlowe." Cole's analysis of Marlowe's plays begins in the third chapter, "Dido Queen of Carthage: Tragedy in the Classical Tradition," with a discussion of a play that "stands as a revealing instance of how Marlowe's dramatic imagination worked in relation to a powerful classical model and to the larger Renaissance conventions of tragedy based on such models." Cole argues that unlike previous literary treatments of Virgil's Dido, Marlowe's focuses primarily on Dido the individual, developing a "theatrical mode of communication... that accents action and emblem as its chief signals." In Dido, Marlowe is primarily concerned with developing a conception of tragedy in which the connections between an individual's desire, delusion, and destruction are fully explored. This reading clears up one of the more perplexing features of the play the failed love affair and suicides of Anna and Iarbas. Unlike most commentators who view their deaths as gratuitous spectacle, Cole points out that the love/suicides "reinforce and amplify" the theme of how the frustration of personal desire can lead to self-destruction, a theme to which Marlowe would return in Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus. In both parts of Tamburlaine the focus of Cole's fourth chapter, "Tamburlaine the Great: Tragical Discourse and Spectacle" Marlowe was "setting a tone... establishing a claim for the elevation of his style above the puerile rhyming verse or low comedy of other plays." Marlowe's contribution to tragedy here lies in his departure from established, more Senecan, forms of tragedy in which the story of tyrannical vice and retribution is developed, much as in Gorboduc and The Misfortunes of Arthur, for example, which stress "the disastrous results of tyranny, rebellion, ambition, and revenge on political stability." Marlowe's Tamburlaine, however, is not a tyrant-protagonist in borrowed Senecan robes, but a conqueror with a "heroic aura" that sets him apart from "ordinary men and tempts them to see
Book Reviews 205 themselves as laws unto themselves." Marlowe achieves this result primarily through the development of a form of heroic discourse that defines more particularly the "motivation and passion that drives [Tamburlaine] and mesmerizes his allies." Just how successful Marlowe's contribution to this particular form of tragedy was is borne out through Cole's discovery of Marlowe-like heroic discourse in such plays as Chapman's The Blind Beggar of Alexandria, Bussy D'Ambois, and The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron. Cole turns to an analysis of two of Marlowe's lesser known works, The Massacre at Paris and The Jew of Malta, in the fifth chapter, and the result is mostly uneven. Cole argues, not always convincingly, that in these plays Marlowe drew on stereotypes of Machiavellian stage character as well as on conventions of the morality play to create two characters (Guise and Barabas) who function as central figures to comment on the moral depravity of the world while "engaged in actions that contribute to that depravity." While this is certainly true in the case of Barabas, who exposes the hypocrisy of Christians, it is unclear why a staunchly Protestant audience would have found the same to be true for the duke of Guise. Far more effective in this chapter is Cole's analysis of how Marlowe matches "aspiring rhetoric with degrading practice" to develop the villains in the two plays. In chapter 6, "Edward II: Tragedy in the De Casibus Tradition," Cole argues that Marlowe took the influential Latin model of nondramatic tales depicting the fall of great men (the de casibus tradition, attributed to Boccaccio) and fused it with the traditions of the English history play. In so doing, Marlowe created "a history play with a tighter structure (in the traditional sense of providing a unifying line of action held together by cause-and-effect linkages and strongly etched character conflicts)" while managing to "define that structure along lines that were shaped by tragic paradigms derived from de casibus writing but worked into ironic implications peculiarly his own." Marlowe combines the political concerns of the history play and the moral "flaw" normally associated with the protagonist in the de casibus tradition through his focus on how closely related are the political problems of the state to Edward's emotional obsession with Gaveston. Edward is a tragic figure not only because he, like Shakespeare's Richard II, "refuses to acknowledge fully his own measure of responsibility for his downfall" but also because the good of the state is so "vulnerable to the power of personal animosities and obsessions."
206 BEN JONSON JOURNAL Cole returns to a focus on the personal in chapter 7, "Doctor Faustus: Tragedy in the Allegorical Tradition." After a brief examination of the problems associated with the two versions of Faustus, Cole focuses on how Marlowe's transformation of the Faust legend reveals "a consistent deepening of psychological insight into the habits of mind, imagination, will, and desire that forge [Faustus's] tragic destiny." When Marlowe introduces the allegorical devices in the episode of the Seven Deadly Sins, for example, he does so not simply to reflect the typical conventions of the Tudor morality play but also to "reinforce... the issues at stake in Faustus' self-destructive career." Likewise, the Good and Evil angels "do not initiate options for Faustus, as strictly external forces in a conventional morality drama might do," but reflect an internal psychological struggle. It is this focus on the internal, personal struggle, far more than on the external pattern of " 'the fall of the over-reacher,' [that] is responsible for the core of tragic feeling in the play." Marlowe shows us the horror of the "inner workings of the mental processes that produce the inward fall," conventions that would later be adopted by Shakespeare in Macbeth and Middleton in The Changeling. Cole's study is not without flaws. A major problem is that Cole tends to promote a single, unified reading of Marlowe's plays through his focus on the personal, especially in Dido, Tamburlaine, and Faustus. While Cole's humanist readings are certainly well argued, one would expect a book written specifically for students of Marlowe to contain at least a cursory overview of alternative readings. Missing from his analysis is any mention of other critical schools, including feminist, new historicist, or psychoanalytic studies. Another problem with Cole's study is most evident in his too brief final chapter, "Marlowe's Legacy to Tragedy," where he hints at connections between Marlowe's vision of tragedy and the dramatists who followed. While reading this book I found myself wanting more connections between the tragedy of the playwrights who followed and Marlowe's tragic conventions, in which, as Cole points out, plot, subplot, poetic imagery, and rhetoric function to develop and comment upon character. Although Cole does concede that Marlowe had a profound influence on Shakespeare, Jonson, Chapman, Middleton, and Webster, he does not spend nearly enough time illustrating where and how this occurs. Perhaps he wished to avoid repeating the arguments laid down by James Shapiro in his Rival Playzvrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare, but certainly a student of
Book Reviews 207 Renaissance drama could (one would assume) benefit from a more fully developed chapter devoted to this topic. Though the book is not without some flaws, Cole does provide students and teachers with an important, inexpensive, and somewhat thorough (though critically limited) introduction to the works of Christopher Marlowe and his contribution to Renaissance tragedy. David E. Phillips Charleston Southern University Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, The Wit of Seventeenth- Century Poetry. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995. viii + 222 pages. This is a wide-ranging collection, as you might expect it would be, given such a protean topic. The essays included, while not of consistently high quality, are seldom oppressively theoretical and are occasionally stimulating. The subject they address was very important to the seventeenth century. Indeed, as the editors point out, the century was "obsessed with wit." The best essay in the volume is probably the very first one, " 'No More Wit Than a Christian?' The Case of Devotional Poetry," by Helen Wilcox. Challenging a variety of poets of the age who spoke to dangers posed by the hubris of ingenuity, Wilcox shows that, paradoxically, wit could be understood as king to devotion for both transform the ordinary. In discussing the witty yet reverent poem "Prayer (1)" by Herbert and a comparable poem by Elred Revett, Wilcox shows how devotion could be conceived as a creative act that can unearth a "seam of wit even in the plainest of words or concepts," a seed that has been planted by a highly creative God. A more pedestrian essay on Herbert, but still an illuminating one, is M.C. Allen's article on The Temple. Unlike many readers, who see this poetry as equivocal and private, Allen argues convincingly that motives such as comfort of the afflicted, encouragement, and conversion, which resonate throughout The Temple, impose "formal order on ragged personal emotions," resulting in verse that is centrally pastoral in nature. Yet another essay with Herbert's poetry as a subject is "The Struc-