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The School of Night
| Article
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11325 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1986 |
11,035 Words |
| Author
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Frederick Turner
Frederick Turner is Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities
at the University of Texas at Dallas. This article is taken,
with permission of Paragon House, from a collection of essays
entitled Natural Classicism, to be published soon. |
Fifteen-ninety-three was a plague year in England. A plague makes nothing matter: the black noise of apparently random and horrible death amid blooming health and plenty drowns out the subtler vibrations of moral and political significance.
They come, they goe, they trot, they daunce: But no
speech of death. All that is good sport. But if she [that is, Death] be
once come and, on a sudden and openly, surprise either
them, their wives, their children, or their friends,
what torments, what out-cries, what rage, and what
despaire doth then overwhelm them?. . . At the stumbling
of a horse, at the fall of a stone, at the least prick with a pinne, let us presently ruminate, and say with our selves, What if it were death it self?
England itself was sick: the euphoria of 1588 at the defeat of the Spanish Armada had soured by 1593; Philip Sidney, the stellar fire of English civilization, had died at the battle of Zutpnen; Raleigh was in disgrace; Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, with its odor of brimstone and despair, was touring the provinces. At a performance of the play in Exeter the actors noticed there was one devil too many in the damnation scene. They closed the show and left the place in terror, and the actor Alleyn wore a cross thereafter when he played Faust.
In London, if we can trust Jonson's portrait in The Alchemist, the plague year had a mood of manic charivari, of picaresque atrocity, unbridled lust, and ingenious crime. Law was ridiculed or in abeyance. The hero was the conny-catcher, the spy, the conman, the Felix Krull. That year the trial of Christopher Marlowe for atheism took place, marked by the treachery of the playwright Thomas Kyd to his erstwhile roommate and the lurid half-truths of the informer Richard Baines. Marlowe was not convicted because he was murdered first, in one of those tavern brawls he got into, not unlike Shakespeare's Mercutio:
Benvoli:. . .For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring. Mercutio: Thou art like one of these fellows that, when he enters the confines of a tavern, claps me his sword upon the table, and says "God send me no need of thee!" and by the operation of the second cup draws him on the drawer, when indeed there is no
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