Playing with Desire: Christopher Marlowe and the Art of Tantalization by Fred B. Tromly

Abstract

REVIEWS ness and heroic glory recede further and further into mem­ ory, until finally they have disappeared entirely from the foreground narrative, leaving only a memorial of themselves. ( 212) Gold-Hall and Earth-Dragon impresses one throughout with its consistent and powerful reading of Beowulf, and with the vivid translations that, whenever possible, retain the concrete­ ness of the original by employing literal, even etymological, meaning for a word. Lee’s abilities as a translator beg for a com­ plete translation of the poem — a future project, we can hope. LARRY MCKILL / University of Alberta Fred B. Tromly. Playing with Desire: Christopher Marlowe and the Art of Tantalization. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. xi, 238. This book takes its readers back — not so far back, perhaps, as the late sixteenth century when the poems and plays it treats were first written, but back several decades from the present to a time when mythic criticism was in its ascendancy. The purpose of the book is to supplant the Icarus myth, which in 1952 Harry Levin argued at book length is central to Marlowe’s work, with the Tantalus myth: “Throughout Marlowe’s work we meet a recurrent metamorphosis in which Icarian aspiration falls heavily downward to become Tantalian frustration. [... ] Marlowe intended his plays to entice and to frustrate playgoers” (18, 26). In advancing this thesis, Fred B. Tromly lays heavy emphasis on his access to Marlowe’s authorial intentions and thus stages himself as the opponent of such critics as Jonathan Goldberg and Stephen Orgel. I wonder why Tromly does not also mention, in addition to Goldberg and Orgel, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley (New Critics writing at the time Northrop Frye was propounding a mythic criticism), who wrote “The Intentional Fallacy.” And I also wonder that he does not discuss how mythic criticism is rooted in a psychology of the unconscious, and reflect upon the relation of this psychology to the intentionalism that he espouses. 223 ESC 26, 2000 Because Marlowe mentions Tantalus (outside of his trans­ lations) only once, it requires strenuous argument (and some sacrifice of discrimination) to establish that “Tantalus and tantalization figure much more prominently in Marlowe than in any other writer of his time” (8). Tromly finds The Jew of Malta's Barabas “Tantalian [... ] in a kettle of boiling water” and “the [... ] king in Edward II [... ] more literally Tantalus-like, as he stands in a cesspool” (23), although neither character, unlike Tantalus, yearns to drink these means of his torture. By far the greatest part of the book is devoted to close readings of the plays, bracketed by Chapter 2, an examination of passages from Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Amoves, and by Chapter 8 on Hero and Leander, the text containing Marlowe’s sole reference to Tantalus. In Dido Queen of Carthage, the title character is read as the Tantalus figure, frustrated in her desire for Aeneas. Bajazeth occupies the role of Tantalus in the first part of Tamburlaine , but in the second part Tamburlaine himself and the play’s audience are the tantalized. In reading the second part of Tamburlaine, Tromly develops a strategy to which he will return: the construction upon discrepancies between a play’s prologue and the play itself a Marlovian intention to mislead and tease an audience. In The Jew of Malta, too, according to Tromly, the prologue is crucial to our understanding of Mar­ lowe’s manipulation and frustration of audience expectations, for the prologue offers the stereotype of the covetous Jew, while the play transfers the stereotype’s covetousness from Barabas to the Christians, and so, by implication, to the play’s audience. With Edward II, Marlowe’s arousal and frustration of audience expectations acquires “a wounding violence” (122) as “the play actively works to subject its spectators to the [horrible] condi­ tions affecting its characters” (123-24). And, finally, with Doc­ tor Faustus, discussion returns from tantalization closer to the figure of Tantalus, recalled by the play’s “repeated snatchingaway of sustenance,” including, at its climax, the spiritual sus­ tenance of “Christ’s blood streaming] in the firmament” denied to Faustus (139, 150-51). Tromly offers such “patterns of repeated motifs” as...