A close reading of Marlowe’s referencing of immortality must explore within his works questions such as: What are the relationships of the human body and soul (if any) to stars, and to immortality? What is the eternal heaven, where, and by whose account are we to know about it? Where and what is hell, and how are these entities supposed consistently to work together in actual practice? This chapter will focus upon what might be called the logistics of Marlowe’s stellar spaces, in an attempt to shed light upon proposed mechanisms of translation between states of being, by interrogating his work for its bases in both mythic cosmogonies and proto-scientific cosmologies.
I shall first consider the notion of “stellification”, defined by the
Oxford English Dictionary Online as “the action of stellifying or
placing among the stars”, an idea which has a long history of connection to ideas of immortality. According to Fowler:
Virgil added his authority in one of the most influential passages in ancient literature, Georgics I, 32, where he imagines that
Augustus ‘may add himself as a new star or
constellation…where, between Virgo and the grasping Claws [of Scorpio], a space is opening’. In the Middle Ages…
stellification generally followed this Virgilian plan of
aggrandizing national champions with quasi-imperial claims. It was a destiny for the great, like Arthur. {Arcturus, the Bear}. The exception of Chaucer proves this rule, for he is terrified to
think he may have been seized upon for the stellification of celebrity. Such ascensions sat awkwardly with Christian
doctrine, and one may guess them to be vestiges, in part, of older star worship surviving as a popular under-cult (36).
Marlowe makes use of stellification in diverse ways in his works. My initial discussion will move from a more general survey towards a substantial focus upon the Tamburlaine plays, whose hero, while
acknowledging the significance of stellification, understates it in regard to his own godhood. He is unequivocal, however, about the power of stellar influence. Tamburlaine shares a strong interest in the stars, divinity, death, and the loci of immortality with his supporting characters/casts; they ruminate upon the problem his existence presents for their archaic cosmogony, occupying extensive passages of the text to do so, often in his absence. The views of his friends, his enemies and Tamburlaine himself at various stages of his career are given substantial authorial significance in both plays, as all puzzle their way through life and death.
The third section of this central chapter, dealing with Doctor Faustus, brings stellification up to an Elizabethan date. Doctor Faustus presents contemporary views available to Marlowe of the
physics of heaven and hell, and of their source-derivations in pagan and early Christian models. Differences between models have special significance for Marlowe’s presentation of ideas of immortality, in that Faustus, who asks pertinent questions of Mephistophilis, also journeys physically beyond the sublunary sphere, and interrogates Christian notions of a purely spiritual superlunary existence in an Aristotelian fashion. Faustus thereby attempts to gain knowledge of the mechanisms of the celestial spheres and what he takes to be the Intelligences governing them. This knowledge base, and these flights, have antecedents germane to Marlowe’s deeper consideration in the play of esoteric forms of immortality in conflict with ideas of the early
Christian church and of Calvinism. These are matters upon which my focus will be directed in the chapter which follows, rather than in this.
The Ovidian taste Marlowe shared with many of his contemporaries perhaps ensured his employment of topoi centred on
the stars, associating stellification with immortality. Many of Ovid’s metamorphoses “end in unambiguous stellification. Hercules, Castor and Pollux, the seven daughters of Atlas; all these and many more are translated to the stars” (Fowler 50). An aspiration to be stellified “went back to antiquity, when general belief linked the soul’s immortality with the heavens” (65). It might be expected that Marlowe’s poetry would evidence such stellification, but in fact the
topos appears in only three of his dramatic works. His translation of Ovid’s Elegies contains only a few glancing references to stars, of the
kind: “Sharp eyes she had; radiant like stars they be” (3.III.9), in which stars are employed for their metaphoric value rather than as an immortality topos. The dedicatory epistle to the Countess of Pembroke
notes the large number of stars to be found in Ariadne’s crown, doing so in order to allow for the immortalisation of Watson’s work, which Marlowe hopes will take place by inclusion as a star in her own crown. There is no stellar reference in The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, in Hero and Leander, or in the Manwood epitaph. Beyond his
poetry, Marlowe has little to say about the stars and immortality in most of his dramatic works, and that conventionally metaphoric. The
Tamburlaine plays and Doctor Faustus are exceptional in this respect.
Before turning to those plays, there is one stellar reference of interest in Marlowe’s other work which merits attention with respect to immortality. There is an interesting degree of intertextuality in Marlowe’s Lucan’s First Book when he translates Lucan’s
modification of Ovid’s celebration of Julius Caesar’s apotheosis by stellification. As earlier discussed, the epic genre proposes immortality
for its heroes, and a succession of Roman emperors were anxious not to be left off the divine list. Virgil’s Aeneid was directed at Augustus’s
divinity. Ovid took a twist upon the topos, querying the physics of
translation, and, unusually for him, not suggesting a metamorphosis: And from her Caesar’s body took his new expulsèd sprite, That which she not permitting to resolve to air quite, Did place it in the sky among the stars that glister bright, And as she bare it, she did feel it gather heavenly might, And for to waxen fiery. She no sooner let it fly,
But that a goodly shining star it up aloft did stye [mount] And drew a great way after it bright beams like burning hair.
(Metamorphoses XV.950-956)
Caesar’s bodily death having been so famously public, it is the soul’s ascent through an action of Venus, invisibly present in the Senate at the time, which provides the focus of attention in Ovid’s scrupulously observed details of transition.
Marlowe translates Lucan developing a flattery which in contrast does use a metamorphosing model when dealing with the
body of a later emperor. Lucan says, to a living Nero, “Thee (seeing thou, being old / Must shine as a star) shall heaven (whom thou lovest) / Receive with shouts” (LFB.172). Nero is to join Ovid’s Julius in the
stars. His apotheosis must necessarily be to a triumph (implies Lucan) but will involve nothing so unpleasant as a bodily death. On that account alone he shall exceed the stellification of his predecessor. Lucan’s sardonic development (he risked all on Nero’s egocentrism) is to have Nero’s massive body threaten the balance of “vast heaven”. Marlowe translates: “The burdened axis with thy force will bend. / The midst is best” (57-8). Lucan’s fate may not have been sealed by this veiled reference to Nero’s fat, but rather by the timid temerity of his presumption in advising his emperor.