Re-citing Marlowe: Approaches to the Drama (review)

Abstract

Reviews 199 Harraway, Clare, Re-citing Marlowe: Approaches to the Drama, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000; cloth; pp. 224; R.R.P. A U S $ 122.00; ISBN 1840142340. In its literary theory, this post-structuralist study is indebted particular Foucault of 'What is an Author?' and the Barthes of 'The Death of the Author'. In Marlowe criticism, Clare Harraway's favoured predecessors are Simon Shepherd, Emily Bartels and Sarah Munson Deats. A m o n g Early M o d e m writers, Harraway invokes the example of Montaigne. Harraway's premises are the fact of a 'non-essential, continually changing self and the problems of capturing this in writing' (p. 21). The book is studded with familiar topoi ofpost-structural criticism. 'The potential to resurrect a fixed and stable self for the dramatist remains impossible . . . as language cannot convey either character or intention in an unproblematic or easily recuperable way'; language does not 'offer uncomplicated access to a single, unitary meaning' (p. 6). There is of course a slide from what is problematic or complicated to what is impossible, and there is a parodic quality to the 'fixed and stable' dramatist or the 'single, unitary meaning' that are allegedly the object of other, misguided varieties ofcriticism. Defending deconstruction against Thomas Healy's criticism that in its procedures 'a text cannot speak about anything but itself, Harraway answers that 'Historical, political and psychoanalytic readings are . . . accessible to the deconstructionist . . . they are simply more overtly derived from the linguistic limitations of the text' (pp. 18-19). The exact character of this derivation might well have been explained more fully. Harraway's own excursions into historical contexts are cursory: a few pages on the history of printing (pp. 34-36), a few paragraphs on the will of Henry VIII as an exemplum of the limits of inscription and of royal 'will' (pp. 66-68), a single paragraph on the Elizabethan 'bond of association' (p. 70). In the last of these cases, she first draws a distinctly unitary and unequivocal meaning from the historical document: 'Ostensibly a gesture of obeisance to the monarch, the bond was actually an opportunity for Elizabethan noblemen to decide who should be handed the reins of government next' (p. 70). She then moves to a generalisation (based on a surprisingly unproblematised 'reality') about a document in Edward IT. 'The potency of Edward's title relies, in reality, upon the interpretation of its readership; if the community of readers agrees to invest the king's name with a special authority then his signature is meaningful' (p. 70). There is a bookish myopia about this claim: a well-armed 200 Reviews military and a compliant magistracy, like the one upholding Elizabeth's mle, would 'in reality' have been at least as effective in empowering a medieval or Early M o d e m monarchy. In similar vein, Harraway claims that Faustus's defiant misreadings ofhis texts at the play's opening 'promote the right of the reader to read according to his desires'. Possibly; but in Faustus's case the 'right' is decidedly circumscribed. W e ourselves likewise have the 'right' to read the highway code or the taxation laws according to our desires, but w e will not get away for long with doing so. This would seem to be the point of Marlowe's play. For Harraway, however, Faustus's contract is 'unable to prevent its own erasure' and it is finally enforced only because ofFaustus's scholarly faith in the efficacy and durability oftextuality. Despite Harraway's answer to Healy, most of her Marlovian texts tend to function as allegories ofthemselves. Nevertheless, even if they become rather repetitive, her interpretations are often refreshing and exhilarating. She discusses Doctor Faustus and Edward II under the rubric 'Reading and Writing', Tamburlaine and Dido, Queen of Carthage under the rubric 'Repetition', and The Massacre at Paris and The Jew of Malta in relation to issues of canonicify and genre. There is an interesting chapter on Tamburlaine, suggesting that 'the differences played out between Tamburlaine and his heirs realize the sequel's own challenge to its father play' (p. 94). There is a vigorous defence of Dido, Queen of Carthage, which moves...