The Complete Plays Read Online Free

with him, burning towns as perverse monuments to her memory. There are more victories, but they are circumscribed by the increasingly persistent references to Heaven, Hell and death.
    A nuclear scientist, watching the first atomic bomb explode, grimly applied to himself the words of a great Hindu god: ‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ 13 Tamburlaine too identifies with death, and his terrible chariot drawn by captive kings belongs in the traditional Triumph of Death. The idea of earthly conquest is still strong towards the end of the play – in Babylon, where earlier conquerors ‘Have rode in triumph, triumphs Tamburlaine’ (5.1.70) – but his march to Samarkand is cut short by his own death. Yet even here, Marlowe avoids conventional Christian moralizing. His final illness begins just after he has burned the Koran, an act which could be interpreted as a fatal defiance of divine power, except that he burns it in thename of God (‘For he is God alone, and none but he’, 5.1.201). And in the last scene, the crown with which he invests his son is the sign of a purely secular power. The play remains studiedly ambiguous about the religious meaning, if any, of ‘Tamburlaine, the scourge of God’ (5.3.248).
    Of Marlowe’s own religious views, nothing certain can be known. The closest we come is the dubious record of ‘his damnable judgement of religion, and scorn of God’s word’ preserved in the ‘note’ Richard Baines delivered to the Privy Council close to the time of Marlowe’s death. Baines was a hostile and unreliable witness (he had been apprehended with Marlowe for counterfeiting in Holland; each accused the other of intending to desert to the Catholic enemy), and his note is an informer’s delation. But it is the nearest thing we have to evidence and is reprinted at the end of this Introduction. The opinions it contains are clever and provocative. The religion of Moses was magical trickery, designed, like all religion, ‘only to keep men in awe’. The New Testament is ‘filthily written’, its mysteries sexual scandals. The most entertaining blasphemy – ‘That St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom, and that he used him [note the ambiguity of the pronouns] as the sinners of Sodoma’ – sounds like an accusation until you read the disarming sequel: ‘That all they that love not tobacco and boys were fools.’
    More important, perhaps, to an understanding of the place of religion in Marlowe’s plays is the context of Counter-Reformation Europe. ‘Atheism’ in the sixteenth century did not preclude belief in God. It was what you accused someone else of. The unity of Christendom, at once political and religious, was split by a confessional division which turned each side’s deepest spiritual convictions to derision. For Protestants, Catholicism was a murderous conspiracy to uphold the hegemony of Spain and the papacy; in Catholic eyes, Protestants were merely seditious heretics. Much of continental Europe was involved in religious wars. Marlowe knew this world – he had been in France as well as in Holland 14 – and it colours the mockeries and solemnities of the plays.
    It is literally the setting of
The Massacre at Paris
, whichdramatizes the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572) and its aftermath. The play opens with an ecumenical marriage, but within moments the cast is divided by the key ritual that separated Catholics from Protestants: the Catholics go to mass ‘to honour this solemnity’ (which Catherine de Medici promises – aside – to ‘dissolve with blood and cruelty’, 1.24–5), leaving the Protestants to express their satisfaction at the discomfiture of the Catholic leader the duke of Guise, and their hope of making the ‘Gospel flourish in this land’ (56). Guise is a monster of politic