Marlowe’s Knifework: Threat, Caution, and Reaction in the Theatre

Abstract

This paper investigates a particular kinesthetic experience with special emphasis on physicality of knives. On stage, cutting and stabbing instruments assert meanings beyond mere stage property to elicit neuro-sensory muscular reactions audience; actions of fear and distress that occur prior to intellectual perception and that produce radical tensions beyond moral pedagogy, analogues of Artaud or Seneca, or even post-reformation humanist debate. For heroic villains, a knife--in hand, imagined, or action--represents a desperate, even deadly, adjunct to making character happen onstage and thereby heightening psychological effects of violence and fear. Hereby Marlowe persistently, literally and figuratively, inserts knife (or sword, or other stabbing instrument) as special prop, agent, and symbol for emergence of terror as a new and devastating instrument of culture theatre--the sort of effect created by Guise Massacre at Paris when he stabs to death a pair of unarmed academics, guilty only of being Protestants, with chilling line I'll whip you to death with my poniard's point (9.79). Onstage, it's true but it's not real. Such horror produces complex reactive effects. In his still-authoritative study titled Weapons Theatre (1968), Arthur Wise counsels, the purpose of an authentic weapon is to kill, purpose of a theatrical weapon is to appear to do so (sic 19). More recently, Eli Rozik describes semiotics of objects onstage--for purposes especially a knife--dropping their practical function and assuming a communicative function. Thus, a knife plays a knife onstage. becomes a knife in quotation marks for other purposes. Or rather, as I will argue, it becomes a knife italics--for emphasis. As will be seen, Edward II, a red-hot poker emphatically plays role of a murder weapon, a horrific stabbing instrument of torture, and an unusual, but historically reported, means of assassinating a king. Such use onstage does not produce an alienation effect but an intensification effect that is especially Marlovian its moment of performance. Years ago, Dynamics of Drama (1970), Bernard Beckerman put it clearly, stating that theatre, our bodies are already reacting to texture and structure of action before we recognize that they are doing so (151). More recently, Janet Clare opened an article titled Marlowe's 'Theatre of Cruelty' as follows: It is a commonplace of understanding of Marlowe that he produced a theatre of consistently violent techniques and effects. Confronted with a combination of Renaissance eloquence and extreme acts of aggression, it can be difficult (unless undue emphasis is placed on fascinating details of life) to find an appropriate critical vocabulary for dramaturgy (74). Consequently, Clare appropriates Artaud's manifestos of violence theatre as guide to her inquiry into destabilizing rhetorical effects of verbal and visual onstage violence. But I would argue that critical vocabulary and governing aesthetics of violence inheres physicality of theatre itself. violence, especially knife violence, asserts something new, sensational and immediate, something more visceral, dangerous, and specific than can be handled by usual critical vocabularies. In an essay titled Three Uses of Knife, contemporary playwright David Mamet asserts excruciating theatricality of knife violence as follows: The appearance of knife is attempt of orderly, affronted mind to confront awesome; to discover hidden structure of word. In this endeavor rational mind will not be of help. This is province of theater and (67). In Massacre at Paris, Marlowe effectively combines theatre and religion within Duke of Guise who, as pan-European terrorist and homicidal maniac, cannot do anything without physically drawing a knife or sword or imagining himself or someone else as doing so. …