Categorical Transgression in Marlovian Death and Damnation

Abstract

Appropriately for the products of a notoriously ambivalent cultural institution, the stage plays of Christopher Marlowe exploit the anxiety endemic in Elizabethan culture concerning the vulnerability of categorical boundaries. Often studied from the perspectives of gender, this categorical anxiety is more insistently provoked in relation to species, with human suffering and death regularly encompassing degradation to animal or vegetable status, and even beyond, to cooking, consumption and digestion. Edward II is broached on a spit; Barrabas boiled in a cauldron; Faustus consumed by a gaping hell mouth. Such respecification is symptomatic of ambivalence on other axes, and in the plays with more simplex protagonists, The Massacre at Paris and Tamburlaine, is reserved for their victims. An earlier study found predominantly carnivalesque connotations in the categorically transgressive sufferings of Edward II. Here, with the scope extended to the other plays but narrowed to species boundaries, infernalesque connotations loom larger. The Elizabethans inherited a late medieval vision of hell as a site of categorical transgression: a smithy, abattoir or kitchen in which devils wielded tools and utensils rather than weapons. And in Marlowe’s secular doomsday plays the world is separated from hell by only a thin, transparent crust, or itself effectively becomes a hell on earth.