Marlowe's Texts and Oral Transmission: Towards the Zielform

Abstract

Elizabethan popular theater was the product of a uniquely intense and creative encounter between literary art and traditional culture, and the plays of Christopher Marlowe offer as powerful an instance of this interaction as could be wished. (1) It is not so much that Marlowe's plays sometimes reflect or encompass folklore, as that in significant and intriguing ways, they are analogous to folklore. There is nothing romantic, arcane, or subversive in this, and no appeal will be made in what follows to distant origins, deep structures, or carnivalesque inversions. Rather, the plays meet many of the criteria by which folklore is defined, and in consequence they can legitimately and rewardingly be appreciated deploying methodologies and insights developed in the study of traditional culture. No longer taken to be the remnants (survivals) of primitive rites and superstitions, or (at least with regard to the premodern period) as the culture of the poor, (2) folklore is characterized, and as a matter of degree rather than kind, by constituting performances to be seen and heard, rather than artifacts to be read. inevitable result of performance from, and transmission between performances in, the memory of the performer(s) is the production, and where recording has occurred, the availability, of multiple versions of any one work, representing different lines of transmission or different phases in a single line of transmission. This is a result both of inexact recall and of the natural tendency of performers to alter material whose verbal integrity is protected neither by the authority of a written text nor respect for the original utterance of a known author. (3) Some of this of course applies to all forms of drama, which is a performance art whose texts are reconstructed from memory in performance, however brief the interval since the actor last glanced at the script. (4) But the Elizabethan popular stage, perhaps to a greater degree than any phase of theater history before or since, was peculiarly close to the mode of folklore in this matter of the transmission of texts and their consequent instability and variability. There were few of the restraints on textual change operative, directly or indirectly, in the medieval theater (due to the doctrinal sensitivity of religious drama), or in the modern theater (due to the prestige accorded to authors). Players would have had little compunction in making alterations, before or in performance, in any book of the play that they had purchased outright from that lowly creature, the poet. Complain he might, but not intervene, and an audience would not notice: individual plays were not classics to which spectators brought any knowledge or expectations beyond familiarity with generic conventions. Conversely, the factors producing textual instability were many and powerful. Plays were subjected to change before first performance to meet not merely the demands of the authorities but the constraints imposed by resources (personnel, costumes, machinery) and the players' sense of what would be acceptable to an audience and consequently profitable. Deliberate changes between performances and in performance would again reflect the need to succeed in front of audiences who had paid to get what they thought they wanted. Changes would also reflect, perhaps above all, the sheer pressure on the memories of the players, most of whom doubled parts in a constantly evolving repertoire of a dozen or more different plays. (5) It is the intensity of these pressures that balances the short career-in-tradition of popular Elizabethan plays when measured by the yardstick of folk traditions. In a run of fifteen or so performances at the Rose, Doctor Faustus might have been subjected to the amount of textual stress suffered by The Frog Prince or Little Musgrove over fifteen or more decades of sporadic performances in alehouses and chimney corners. (6) I Faced with multiple variants of a single folktale or ballad, folklorists will generally not seek to reconstruct the original text from which the variants may be presumed to derive. …