Prayer is a distinctive speech act that appears everywhere and in many forms in early modern plays, including Shakespeare's. (1) This is not because playwrights were particularly pious but because they wrote in the speech of their time, in which prayer had long since become a familiar habit--not only in church but also in the privacy of ones home, in everyday speech, in theological controversy, and in the theatre. (2) Prayer included everything from simple petitions for personal favors to formation of the self before God in richly poetic language, as numerous English translations of the Hebrew psalms make clear, to say nothing of the poetry of John Donne and George Herbert. (3) In writing prayers, playwrights for the early commercial stage in London followed long-standing precedent from the beginning of playwriting in English. In the fifteenth-century Towneley Plays from the north of England, a gifted anonymous playwright imagined the distinctive sacrifices by Cain and Abel, with each of the brothers praying as he makes his offering. The same playwright had Herod pray anachronistically to Mahowne (Mohammed). In the earliest extant commercial play in English, called simply Mankind, a talented anonymous author in fifteenth-century East Anglia made prayer the focus of his generic story of Christian formation. In the Digby Mary Magdalen, also from East Anglia, near the turn of the sixteenth century, Mary the sister of Lazarus recognizes the divinity of Jesus and prays to him on behalf of her brother. More than a century after the Towneley Herod first prayed to Mohammed, Marlowe's Tamburlaine followed his example--albeit with unprecedented defiance and ambiguity. Each playwright's way of imagining prayer is distinctive, and this essay will consider Marlowe's and Jonson's, which contrast illuminatingly not only with each other but also with the diverse and inventive prayers written by Shakespeare. (4) Marlowe's contribution was a mordant way of treating prayer that nearly always undermined it. Caustic skepticism is fully formed in the blockbuster called Tamburlaine that introduced Marlowe stunningly to the London theatre scene earlier than Shakespeare, though both playwrights were born in the same year and in the same social stratum. Many people pray in Tamburlaine, Part 1, but Tamburlaine himself is not one of them. He speaks and acts with an audacity that had been traditionally associated with overweening villains, implicitly denying the supplicatory gestures of those who pray, yet he pays no price for his actions and attitude; on the contrary, his boasts are unanswered, and his conquests are inexorable. His lover Zenocrate fears for him, voicing moral trepidation as she intercedes on his behalf with mighty Jove and holy because Tamburlaine is so violent and merciless: Pardon my love, O, pardon his contempt Of earthly fortune and respect of pity, And let not conquest ruthlessly pursued Be equally against his life incensed In this great Turk and hapless emperess! (5) Her prayer assumes that overweening ambition will inevitably be punished, and she asks that the inevitable not happen to Tamburlaine. Her petition is granted in that he conquers unharmed, but given Tamburlaine's defiant rhetoric and unhindered triumph, the point is that her prayer exhibits effeminate weakness and a misunderstanding on her part of where the true power of the world (and of the play) lies--not with Jove or Mahomet but with Tamburlaine himself. That is why Tamburlaine does not pray. Prayer in 2 Tamburlaine is more complex than in the first play. On one hand, the ambiguities surrounding prayer continue. Sigismond, for example, who is the treacherous defender of Constantinople against the Turks, dies after his Muslim opponent, Orcanes, prays to the Christian God for his Christian enemy's destruction: Thou Christ, that art esteemed omnipotent, If thou wilt prove thyself a perfect God Worthy the worship of all faithful hearts, Be now revenged upon this traitors soul, And make the power I have left behind (Too little to defend our guiltless lives) Sufficient to discomfort and confound The trustless force of those false Christians. …
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Aug 2, 2023
Deokhyun Hwang + 2
Open Access