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Marlowe, Jonson, and the origins of evil

Ian Donaldson
p. 11-26

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I.

  • 1  Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem, 1.2.1-2 ; Neil Forsyth, The Old Enemy : Satan and the Combat Myth (...)
  • 2  Blake Morrison, As If (London, 1997). Fergal Keane’s reports from Rwanda were broadcast on BBC Rad (...)

1Where does evil come from ? Many years ago Tertullian complained that heretics spent far too much of their time worrying about this problem, yet Tertullian himself worried about it incessantly, as did most of the early Fathers of the Church 1. The question returns insistently in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Today, when explanations of the origins of evil are more likely to be framed in psychological and sociological terms than theologically, it still baffles and disturbs us. In a book published this past week, the English poet Blake Morrison puzzles over the killing in Liverpool in 1993 of a two-year old boy by two other boys aged only ten, and over similar recent killings by children in France, Norway, and America. How could seemingly innocent children behave like this ? Where does such evil come from ? Over the past week, too, the Irish journalist Fergal Keane has been exploring in a series of moving documentary programmes the origins of an even more profound evil — evil (in Keane’s own words) «beyond any scope of reference I might have had», «evil in a form that frequently rendered me inarticulate» — the recent mass killings in Rwanda. Interpreted by the major powers as a regrettable display of local tribalism, the evil in Rwanda, as Keane’s meticulous investigations reveal, has altogether more complex origins, ultimately but directly traceable to European colonial policies 2.

2«Comment le mal vient aux hommes» : there are two aspects of this general problem, as it has been phrased for the purposes of this conference, that deserve brief comment. The statement that evil comes to men might be thought to imply, first, that evil is not inherent, that it is primarily located elsewhere, that the puzzle consists in its unnatural displacement, in its coming to us. How did it get here ? who let it in ? where does it usually live ? who let it out ? This line of questioning has encouraged the creation of aetiological mythologies that purport to explain the origins of human evil in terms of some great escape. Once upon a time, these stories declare, evil was confined to a single jar or cabinet or bottle or to a subterranean region, until folly, curiosity, or rebellion somehow allowed it to break out.

  • 3  The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler, Longmans Annotated English Poets (Lo (...)

Thus saying, from her side the fatal key,
Sad instrument of all our woe, she took ;
And towards the gate rolling her bestial train,
Forthwith the huge portcullis high updrew,
Which but her self, not all the Stygian powers
Could once have moved ; then in the key-hole turns
The intricate wards…
She opened, but to shut
Excelled her power ; the gates wide open stood,
That with extended wings a bannered host
Under spread ensigns marching might pass through
With horse and chariots ranked in loose array ;
So wide they stood… (
Paradise Lost, II.871-7, 83-8) 3

3The problem about such stories, theologically speaking, is that they threaten to deprive human beings of moral agency, transferring the responsibility for evil back to some original errant figure, someone who carelessly opened the door or the box, or «in evil hour» pulled an apple from a tree. Such stories make us feel like victims of some deadly bacillus accidentally released from a secure laboratory : unlucky, indeed, but not, in moral terms, directly guilty.

  • 4  Dora and Erwin Panofsky, Pandora’s Box : The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol (Princeton, New (...)
  • 5  The word «box» meant «female private parts» in seventeenth-century English slang : see e.g. Jonson (...)

4«How evil comes to men» : the second aspect of this statement that deserves a passing comment is the way in which, by design or accident, it is so evidently gendered. What at first looks like a charming gallantry — evil would never come to women — changes its quality as one turns the phrase over : for perhaps if evil does not come to women it may come, more ominously, from them. Women are often at the centre of these allegories of evil, as Milton in Paradise Lost is sharply aware, as he describes Eve, in another seeming gallantry, as «More lovely than Pandora, whom the gods / Endowed with all their gifts» (IV.714-15). According to all known versions of the story, Pandora was indeed lovely, but whether she was an innocent victim of the gods, a mere recipient of the evils handed down, «endowed», from heaven in revenge for Prometheus’ theft of fire, or one who recklessly transmitted evils to humankind in a more active and culpable manner is a question that is variously answered in various versions of the legend, as Dora and Erwin Panofsky have shown in their wide-ranging study 4. In one important variant of the story which the Panofskys seem curiously to ignore, Pandora’s jar or box of evils is actually identified with her reproductive organs, female sexuality itself being seen as the primary source from which evil comes quite specifically to men 5. This ambiguity over the general question of moral agency and what one might call the geography of evil — whether it comes from within or without — is of central interest also, as I want to suggest, in the work of Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson.

II.

  • 6  See Jonson’s tribute to Alleyn in Epigrams, 89, in Ben Jonson, ed. Ian Donaldson, The Oxford Autho (...)
  • 7  Mark Eccles, «Jonson and the Spies», The Review of English Studies, xiii (1937), 385-97 ; Jonson, (...)
  • 8  On Jonson’s Catholic period see B. N. De Luna, Jonson’s Romish Plot (Oxford, 1967), and Ian Donald (...)
  • 9  Jonson, Poetaster, ed. Tom Cain, The Revels Plays (Manchester, 1995), annotation to I.1.1-3, and I (...)

5Jonson was a young man of twenty or twenty-one at the very threshhold of his literary career when Marlowe met his violent death at Deptford in 1593, but it is quite possible that through the intimate theatrical network of that time the two men had already met. They had many acquaintances in common, including the great actor Edward Alleyn, who had played the title roles in Marlowe’s major plays 6. Their social worlds overlapped in other ways. Both men were familiar with, and (to differing degrees) implicated in, the sinister world of government espionage and counter-espionage. When Jonson in his poem «Inviting a Friend to Supper» (Epigrams, 101) declares that at the table «we will have no Poley or Parrot by» he is assuring his guest that the company will not include the notorious double agent and informer Robert Poley who had been present at that other supper party at Deptford at which Marlowe had been fatally stabbed, nor Poley’s fellow-spy, the alleged extortioner, Parrot, now working for the Earl of Salisbury. Poley and Parrot may have been the «two damned villains» whom Jonson later told William Drummond had been placed in his cell to spy on him when he was imprisoned, probably in 1597, on criminal charges relating to the now-lost satirical play, The Isle of Dogs, that Jonson had written in collaboration with Marlowe’s former friend and close associate, Thomas Nashe 7. Jonson, like Marlowe, had extensive knowledge of the Catholic underworld, and, like Marlowe, was caught up on the fringes — at times, in the very epicentre — of Catholic political conspiracies 8. Both men were closely familiar with the operation of censorship. At the opening of his satirical comedy, Poetaster (1601), Jonson defiantly and admiringly quotes a passage from Marlowe’s translation of Ovid, which had been amongst the group of allegedly seditious, libellous, and immoral books ordered to be burnt by the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of London just two years earlier 9.

  • 10  John Bakeless, The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1942) ; Pa (...)
  • 11  Bakeless, The Tragicall History, vol. I, chs. 3, 5.
  • 12  Thus Roy Battenhouse, for example, believes that Marlowe’s views were broadly orthodox, and that i (...)

6Jonson’s general awareness of the nature of social and political evil — evil as it operates insidiously within the state — must therefore have been in many ways remarkably close to that of Marlowe. Yet the manner in which the two men chose to conceptualize and speak of evil is noticeably different. Marlowe’s notions of evil are inevitably affected by the theological debates to which — as John Bakeless, Paul Kocher, and Douglas Cole have fully and variously demonstrated — he was exposed during his years at Cambridge 10. Marlowe’s college, Corpus Christi, had recently acquired Archbishop Parker’s personal library of theological books and manuscripts, and it is possible that certain speeches from Tamburlaine and Edward II may have been directly inspired by books in this collection. Theology formed the liveliest area for intellectual disputation in Marlowe’s Cambridge, and Corpus had a special tradition for religious unorthodoxy ; one of the Fellows of the College, Francis Kett, was indeed to be burnt as a heretic some years after the period of Marlowe’s residency. When Marlowe addresses the question of evil he characteristically does so by reference to the work of theological writers familiar to him from his student days : to Aquinas, for example, and to Augustine, who was held in the highest esteem in Cambridge in the 1580s 11. With what spirit of mischief or orthodoxy Marlowe invokes such authorities has become (of course) a major area of critical dispute, but his general preoccupation with theological issues is clearly evident throughout his work 12. The testimony of Richard Baines to Marlowe’s «damnable judgement of religion, and scorn of God’s word» may or may not be a fabrication, but it plausibly reveals the kind of questions upon which Marlowe’s mind was exercised, and the unorthodox notions he might conceivably, daringly, have proposed.

That Christ deserved better to die than Barabas, and that the Jews made a good choice, though Barabas were both a thief and a murtherer.

That all the New Testament is filthily written.

That the woman of Samaria and her sister were whores, and that Christ knew them dishonestly.

  • 13  J. B. Steane, Marlowe : A Critical Study (Cambridge, 1964), Appendix 1, «The Baines Note» (here mo (...)

That St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ, and leant always in his bosom, that he used him as the sinners of Sodoma. 13

  • 14  Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925-52), I.221, 65-7.
  • 15  «Quid ergo est bonum ? Rerum scientia. Quid malum est ? Rerum imperitia» («What then is good ? The (...)

7Issues of theology were of absorbing interest also to Ben Jonson, who in 1606 was indeed required by the Consistory Court to engage in regular theological debates with the Dean of St Paul’s and the Chaplain of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Visiting Paris in 1612-13 after his conversion back to Anglicanism, Jonson listened with grave attention to further theological disputations between Catholic and Protestant champions 14. Jonson’s interest in theology, however, does not permeate his writing in the way that Marlowe’s does ; he makes no reference anywhere, so far as I am aware, to the work of Augustine, and his one possible allusion to Aquinas occurs only at the very end of his life, in a highly metaphysical poem written for his learned Catholic friend, Sir Kenelm Digby 15. When Jonson writes about evil he characteristically invokes neither the Fathers of the Church nor the reformers but the classical authors he had first encountered at Westminster School : Juvenal, Horace, Martial, Cicero, and above all, Seneca. It is partly from Seneca that the following meditation in Discoveries is derived :

  • 16  The relationship of soul and body implied in «Eupheme», The Underwood, 84.ix.51-5, resembles that (...)

I know no disease of the soul but ignorance : not of the arts and sciences, but of itself ; yet relating to those, it is a pernicious evil, the darkener of man’s life, the distorter of his reason, and common confounder of truth, with which a man goes groping in the dark no otherwise than if he were blind. Great understandings are most racked and troubled with it ; nay, sometimes they will rather chose to die than not to know the things they study for. Think then what an evil it is, and what good the contrary. (Discoveries, 814-22) 16

8The sentiment is entirely compatible with pre-Christian thinking. Ignorance — not of books, but of the soul and the self — is «a pernicious evil» that darkens life, distorts reason, confounds truth, and racks and troubles scholarship itself. It is characteristic of Jonson to see evil as a quality that disturbs rationality, and interferes with the proper functioning of the state. Virtue in Jonson’s opinion was an essential prerequisite for citizenship ; evil, a quality that made one properly a social outcast.

For it is virtue that gives glory ; that will endenizen a man everywhere. It is only that can naturalize him. A native, if he be vicious, deserves to be a stranger, and cast out of the commonwealth as an alien. (Discoveries, 1512-15)

  • 17  Jonson, Catiline, ed. W. F. Bolton and Jane F. Gardner, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (London, (...)

9In his two Roman tragedies, Sejanus and Catiline, Jonson explores variant forms of what might be called civic evil : conduct that is, in an extreme sense, disruptive or damaging to the state. The protagonists of both plays are presented as «evil seed», who deserve to be plucked «Out of our spirits», ostracized from the commonwealth. Julius Cæsar himself is remembered in Sejanus as one who «durst be evil», and was therefore justifiably murdered by «the constant Brutus» and «brave Cassius». Such civic misconduct is, in Jonson’s universe, the ultimate offence, a form of «blasphemy» against the polis. In the third act of Catiline, in a rare instance within the Jonsonian canon of a supernatural happening, the gods themselves express directly their anger with the «foulness» of the Catilinarian conspirators by means of a bravura son et lumière display of thunder and lightning, flashing and rumbling their rage at these bad citizens 17.

10Marlowe too knows (of course) about bad citizenship, but takes it more for granted. Barabas in The Jew of Malta is presented as a pupil of that master of devious statecraft whom Marlowe calls, in a pregnant play of words, Machevil — Machiavelli, maker of evil — but the Christians of Marlowe’s play seem, in terms of moral and social conduct, scarcely superior to the Jew. The state, it is implied, is bound to be corrupt whoever is in charge ; Marlowe’s world has no figures equivalent to constant Brutus, brave Cassius, and god-like Cato, and it soon becomes apparent that Barabas’s interest in statecraft is altogether secondary to his interest in himself : ego mihimet sum semper proximus (I.1.188).

  • 18  Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, ed. N. W. Bawcutt, The Revels Plays (Manchester, 1978).

If anything shall there concern our state,
Assure yourselves I’ll look — unto myself. (
The Jew of Malta, I.1.171-2) 18

  • 19  G. K. Hunter, «The Theology of The Jew of Malta», Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, (...)
  • 20  See James Shapiro’s critique of Hunter’s approach in Shakespeare and the Jews (New York, 1996), p. (...)

11The deeper resonances of The Jew of Malta, as G. K. Hunter suggested in a classic study more than thirty years ago, are not political but theological. The play, as Hunter argued, recalls the long patristic tradition of adversus Judaeos, which perceived Jewishness as a moral condition, and the climactic «Jewish choice» as the condemnation of Christ and the release of Barabas, the rejection of the treasure that is in heaven in favour of the treasure on earth. Marlowe’s Barabas in this analysis is to be seen as a type of anti-Christ ; his indication, by the sign of the cross, of the whereabouts of the treasure he has hidden in the convent that was once his house, as a thrilling act of blasphemy 19. Hunter’s account of The Jew of Malta has been severely criticised in recent years for its failure to concede that the play may also be, more plainly and obviously, an anti-Semitic work, but these two readings are not necessarily at variance, the theology of the play being used to validate and enforce its racial message in a manner that is explicitly recognized within the play by Barabas himself : «What ! Bring you scripture to confirm your wrongs ?» (I.2.111) 20.

  • 21  T. S. Eliot, «Ben Jonson» (1919), Selected Essays (London, 1932), p. 154. The link between Marlowe (...)

12Ben Jonson is the true heir of Christopher Marlowe, as T. S. Eliot accurately observed many years ago, and his work time and again remembers that of Marlowe, in small ways and in large 21. Volpone worshipping his gold at the opening of Jonson’s comedy recalls Barabas in his counting house at the opening of The Jew of Malta ; Volpone’s entrusting of the keys of his house to Mosca resembles Barabas’ entrusting his keys to Ithamore ; Mosca’s sardonic insults to his master who lies in bed shamming death — «Would you once close / Those filthy eyes of yours, that flow with slime / Like two frog-pits, and those same hanging cheeks, / Covered with hide instead of skin — Nay, help sir, — / That look like frozen dish-clouts set on end !» (I.5.56-60) — echo those of Ithamore to the disguised Barabas, desparately twanging a lute by his servant’s table : «Play, fiddler, or I’ll cut your cat’s guts into chitterlings» (IV.4.43). Jonson, like Marlowe, creates characters so deeply addicted to vice that (like gamblers) they do not know where to stop, pushing from one victory to another until their final come-uppance ; following

That restless ill, that still doth build
Upon success, and ends not in aspiring ;
But there begins, and ne’er is filled,
While aught remains that seems but worth desiring. (Catiline, Chorus after III.864-7)

  • 22  Stephen Greenblatt, «The False Ending in Volpone», Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 75 ( (...)
  • 23  «The Theology of The Jew of Malta», p. 233-5.
  • 24  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Everyman edition (London, 1914), Part 2, chs. xx, xxix. In his account o (...)

13The structures of Marlowe’s and Jonson’s plays thus often follow a roughly similar pattern, a chain of events leading (as in The Jew of Malta and Volpone) through a false ending to a final dazzling dénouement 22. While Volpone’s devotion to gold is presented initially, like Barabas’s, as a form of blasphemy, a religious evil, it is characteristic of the distinction I am seeking to describe that Volpone should be finally punished in a court of law for criminal offences, social mischiefs, committed against the state of Venice. The final punishment of Barabas, on the other hand, tumbling into the very cauldron he has prepared to entrap Calymath and his Bashaws, vividly recalls — as George Hunter has shown — a traditional figure of infernal punishment, the cauldron being, in late mediaeval iconography, a common image of Hell, surviving as a piece of symbolic theatrical furniture into late Tudor drama 23. If Marlowe’s dramatic representations of evil reach back into mediaeval theology, Jonson’s point forward to the philosophical meditations of his future friend and associate, Thomas Hobbes, who in Leviathan was to weigh the necessary «evils» of state power — the power of the legislature, for example, to punish a private citizen — against the greater evils of unchecked individual speech and action : such as the «very evil act» (as Hobbes called it) of speaking in contradiction to one’s conscience, to the inner knowledge of what is true. For Hobbes, as for Jonson, evil came from within the individual, and was to be punished by strong laws devised by the state. Jonson would have agreed with Hobbes’s assertion that «the measure of Good and Evill actions, is the Civill Law» 24.

  • 25  «To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author, Mr William Shakespeare, And What He Hath Left Us», Ungat (...)

14Though Jonson could speak admiringly in the 1620s of «Marlowe’s mighty line» 25, he was also keenly aware that in the latter years of King James’s reign Marlowe’s style of dramaturgy, like his view of the world, seemed distinctly dated. Writing in his commonplace book, Discoveries, around this same period, Jonson noted that

The true artificer will not run away from nature, as he were afraid of her ; or depart from life, and the likeness of truth ; but speak to the capacity of his hearers. And though his language differ from the vulgar somewhat, it shall not fly from all humanity, with the Tamerlanes and Tamerchams of the late age, which had nothing in them but scenical strutting and furious vociferation to warrant them to the ignorant gapers. (784-92)

  • 26  Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, ed. E. A. Horsman, The Revels Plays (London, 1960).

15«The late age» : Jonson measures his distance from Marlowe and his age, just as he had done some years earlier in Bartholomew Fair, where Marlowe’s poem of Hero and Leander is presented in travestied form as a puppet play to the crowds at Smithfield Fair. «I have only made it a little easy, and modern for the times, sir, that’s all», says the author, John Littlewit, modestly. «As, for the Hellespont, I imagine our Thames, here ; and then Leander I make a dyer’s son, about Puddle Wharf ; and Hero a wench o’ the Bankside, who going over one morning, to Old Fish Street, Leander spies her land at Trig Stairs, and falls in love with her» (V.3.113-19) 26. «A little easy, and modern for the times» : the joke is a complex one. Even as Jonson wryly chronicles this degradation of classical and Elizabethan literature as «modern» entertainment for the ignoramuses of Smithfield, he is also humorously aware that Marlowe’s fancifully Ovidian fable purporting to explain the origins of human unhappiness — why love is deaf and cruel, why lovers are always doomed, why scholars are always poor — actually explains nothing at all. Such a tale departs from life, and the likeness of truth ; it belongs to another age. Where unhappiness comes from is a question that must be approached through a different, and more realistic, narrative mode.

  • 27  See Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil (London, 1900) ; Jeffrey Burton Russ (...)
  • 28  See Peter Happé’s Introduction to his edition of The Devil is An Ass, The Revels Plays (Manchester (...)
  • 29  The popularity of Marlowe’s play in this period is attested by the publication of no fewer than ni (...)

16Two years later, in 1616, Jonson once again deliberately measured his distance from Marlowe and his age, this time through a comedy that engages more precisely with our present question : where evil comes from. Where evil comes from, in the central tradition of the mediaeval Church, is perfectly clear : it comes directly from the Devil and his infernal kingdom 27. That powerful belief was reinforced by the religious drama of the sixteenth-century England, and by the vogue of devil plays that continued well into the early years of the seventeenth century, such as The Merry Devil of Edmonton, and Thomas Dekker’s If This be Not a Good Play, the Devil is In’t, 1612 28. Ben Jonson’s comedy of 1616, The Devil is an Ass, responds to this general vogue, but also quite specifically (as I want now to suggest) to the most celebrated devil play of them all, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus 29.

17Jonson’s comedy is about a young devil named Pug, who yearns to spend some time on earth, and is finally granted a day’s leave from hell to go off to London and cause mischief. Pug is outwitted at every turn by the citizens of that city, whom he discovers to be far more proficient in evil that he is himself ; and returns finally to hell, mentally and physically shaken, but greatly relieved to be home.

18Evil, as Jonson sees it, does not come from hell, but from London. Or to put the matter another way, it is not a force external to humankind, for which other powers can be blamed ; it comes from within, and is subject to control by the human will. Devils for Jonson form part of a traditional eschatology no longer relevant in modern times. The structures of religious belief and patterns of social conduct have changed since Marlowe’s day, and so has the theatre itself, and the manner in which evil must now be dramatically represented. Pleading with his master, Satan, to allow him a little time on earth, Pug summons Iniquity, the traditional figure of the Vice from the Tudor Interludes, who in shambling fourteeners tells him of the sights he will show to Pug and pranks they will play together in London. Satan contemptuously dismisses this old-fashioned stuff.

Peace, dotard.
And thou more ignorant thing, that so admir’st,
Art thou the spirit thou seems’t ? So poor ? To choose
This for a Vice t’advance the cause of Hell
Now ? As vice stands this present year ? Remember
What number it is. Six hundred and sixteen.
Had it but been five hundred, though some sixty
Above — that’s fifty years agone, and six,
When every great man had his Vice stand by him,
In his long coat, shaking his wooden dagger —
I could consent that then this your grave choice
Might have done that, with his lord chief, the which
Most of his chamber can do now. But Pug,
As the times are, who is it will receive you ?
What company will you go to ? Or whom mix with ?
Where canst thou carry him ? Except to taverns ?
To mount up on a joint-stool with a Jew’s trump,
To put down Cokely, and that must be to citizens ? (The Devil is an Ass, I.1.76-93)

19Satan himself realizes that it is no good thinking of vice and evil in terms of the drama of the last age ; for times have changed, and devils — and dramatists — must change with them.

20The Devil is an Ass, like Doctor Faustus, begins with the negotiation of a contract about a period of time, and how it will be spent. Pug pleads to be allowed a month on earth, a fortnight, a week, and is finally granted by Satan a single day : Pug must return to hell when «the midnight’s cock do crow» (I.1.4, 36, 134, 156). Pug’s deal with Satan comically resembles that of Faustus with Mephistopheles to spend twenty-four years (not hours) freely exploring the secrets of the earth, and ironically recalls Faustus’ final despairing cry to have «A year, a month, a week, a natural day» in which to repent and so avoid eternal damnation (A-text, V.2.72). Arriving in London, Pug wishes excitedly for more time, for power to delay his return to hell : «O that I could stay time, now / Midnight will come too fast upon me, I fear» (II.2.20-1). The wish again recalls Faustus’ final speech :

Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease and midnight never come !…
O lente, lente currite noctis equi ! (A-text, V.2.68-9, 74)

  • 30  Joshua, 10 : 13 ; Ovid, Amores, I.13.40.

21Marlowe’s lines ironically remember the manner in which God allowed the sun and moon to stand still in the skies while Joshua slew the people of Gibeon ; and the wish expressed by Ovid’s lover, happy in his mistress’ arms, that dawn would never come 30. Jonson’s recall of Marlowe’s lines gives these traditional tropes a further ironic inflection : Pug wishes to «stay time» and linger where he is because London is a far more evil place than hell, and therefore much more exciting. By the end of the play, however, Pug — wholly unable to keep pace with events in London, black and blue from his beatings, shamed at his total lack of success — longs to return home to hell, in words that again humorously vary the words of Marlowe’s Faustus :

Well ! Would it were once midnight, that I knew
My utmost. I think Time be drunk, and sleeps ;
He is so still and moves not ! (V.6.9-11)

22Jonson’s London is populated by characters whose very names — Merecraft, Everill, Eitherside, Pitfall — eloquently convey the sinister qualities they possess. A name such as Everill suggests that the vices of this character are unchanging, that he cannot stop being ever-ill until he stops existing, being the product of predetermined universe. It is, oddly enough, the young devil, Pug, who seems more human, more flexible, more capable of embarrassment, education, and change than the hardened types who surround him. «You talk of a university ! Why, Hell is / A grammar school to this !» he exclaims in horror (IV.4.170-1). In his brief stay on earth, Pug changes not only his outlook but his clothes and body — assuming the physical appearance of a cutpurse recently hanged at Tyburn — and indeed his very name. The fiercesome Ladies Tailbush and Eitherside whose company Pug enters decide he would be more acceptable with a name that sounds slightly Parisian, and call this young devil De-vile — a name that nicely brings together evil, devilry, and vileness — qualities in which (as it turns out) he is in fact notably deficient. «There is no hell», he concludes, «To a lady of fashion» (V.2.14-15).

23In Discoveries, Jonson meditates on the problem of moral intractability. «Natures that are hardened to evil», he writes, «you shall sooner break than make straight ; they are like poles that are crooked and dry : there is no attempting them» (37-9). Yet such natures are what they are, Jonson insists, because of an act or failure of the will : it is within the power of the individual to accept, control, or deny the temptations of evil, which are not imposed from without.

It is strange there should be no vice without his patronage, that when we have no other excuse, we will say we love it, we cannot forsake it ; as if that made it not more a fault. We cannot, because we think we cannot, and we love it, because we will defend it. We will rather excuse it than be rid of it. That we cannot, is pretended ; but that we will not is the true reason. (Discoveries, 553-9)

24It is not just these wilfully hardened characters, however, whom Jonson displays in The Devil is an Ass. He also explores the more malleable character of Wittipol, who is drawn back from the very edge of an immoral act — the seduction of an unhappily married woman — by listening to his own conscience, and the counsel of his friend, Manly. In this remarkable reversal of the spirit of comic opportunism that dominated his earlier comedies, Jonson makes it again clear that evil is not a fixed condition, but the product of human choice.

  • 31  Nevill Coghill, programme note for his 1966 production of Doctor Faustus (with Richard Burton and (...)
  • 32  Doctor Faustus, ed. Bevington and Rasmussen, Introduction, p. 50.

25«Come, I think Hell’s a fable», says Marlowe’s Faustus. «Ay, think so still», responds Mephistopheles, «till experience change thy mind» (A-text, II.1.130-1). Evidently Marlowe himself, for all his reputed atheism, must finally have concluded that Hell was something more than a fable ; as Nevill Coghill once epigrammatically remarked, Marlowe’s play is about a Renaissance man who pays a mediaeval penalty 31. To most of Marlowe’s audiences and actors, one suspects, the theological framework of the play was, in the most literal and urgent sense, strictly true. There is a famous story of an early performance of Doctor Faustus at Exeter being abruptly abandoned when it was found that there was one devil too many on the stage 32. In Jonson’s comedy, however, the mediaeval penalties and infernal apparatus are presented — almost — as fabulous, matters in which a serious person might find it difficult to believe. The times have changed.

The Devil was wont to carry away the evil ;
But now the evil out-carries the Devil

  • 33  Conversations with Drummond, 350-5.

26says the figure of Iniquity, carrying away Pug on his shoulders to Hell in a final parody of the Tudor stage tradition of vetus comedia (V.6.76-7) 33.

27By the eighteenth century, as Pope’s Dunciad makes clear, the Faustus story had become a popular subject for theatrical farce, and the grand cosmology of Marlowe’s world had seemingly shrunk to a series of scenic events and devices :

  • 34  Pope, The Dunciad, ed. James Sutherland, The Twickenham Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope (Lo (...)

He look’d, and saw a sable Sorc’rer rise ;
Swift to whose hand a winged volume flies :
All sudden, Gorgons hiss, and Dragons glare,
And ten-horned fiends and Giants rush to war.
Hell rises, Heav’n descends, and dance on Earth,
Gods, imps, and monsters, music, rage, and mirth,
A fire, a jig, a battle, and a ball,
Till one wide Conflagration swallows all. (
The Dunciad (A), III.229-36) 34

28This is a theological and theatrical transformation such as Jonson’s own drama might be said to have predicted : Hell has become a mere stage property, and sorcery a matter of scenic tricks.

  • 35  G. L. Kittredge, «King James I and The Devil is an Ass», Modern Philology, ix (1911), 195-209 ; Le (...)

29Yet if Jonson’s moral universe differs from that of Marlowe, it differs also from that of Pope. Jonson lived in an age in which traditional beliefs about the origins of evil were rapidly changing, while the king himself conducted empirical enquiries into the reality of witchcraft, conjuring, and diabolical possession ; matters about which James, like many of his subjects, had genuine doubts. Fabian Fitzdottrel in Jonson’s comedy wishes to raise the devil much as he wishes to possess fine clothes and be seen wearing them at the playhouse : the deep diabolism of Marlowe’s play has become, in Jonson’s world, a mere fad, a social nuisance, that James’s recent proclamations had declared illegal. Fitzdottrel’s display of diabolical possession in the final act of the play is ultimately exposed as a sham, a mere manoeuvre to outwit the processes of the law, which finally entrap him. Jonson’s scene is now recognized to be a deliberate compliment to King James, who in the summer of 1616 had visited Lancashire in order personally to interrogate a young boy named John Smith who had recently testified against fifteen women accused of witchcraft. John Smith had vividly described to the court the nature of these women’s familiars — a horse, a dog, a polecat, a fish, a toad, a dog — whose noises, during apparent fits of diabolical possession, he imitated dramatically in the courtroom. In the course of his interrogations, James exposed the boy as a fraud, and four of the women accused of witchcraft were immediately released. For the others, the king’s discovery came too late. One had already died in prison, and nine others had been executed earlier in the summer. Evil in this case had not come from the Devil, nor from his seeming agents, the Lancashire witches ; it had come from a young boy 35. The issue was not academic ; it was, in every sense of the phrase, the burning question of the day.

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Notes

1  Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem, 1.2.1-2 ; Neil Forsyth, The Old Enemy : Satan and the Combat Myth (Princeton, New Jersey. 1987), p. 17. On this general topic, see Paul Ricœur, Le Mal : un défi à la philosophie et à la théologie (Genève, 1986).

2  Blake Morrison, As If (London, 1997). Fergal Keane’s reports from Rwanda were broadcast on BBC Radio 4 during early February 1997 ; the quotations here are taken from Keane’s earlier BBC dispatches, published as Season of Blood : A Rwanadan Journey (London, 1995), p. 4.

3  The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler, Longmans Annotated English Poets (London, 1968).

4  Dora and Erwin Panofsky, Pandora’s Box : The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol (Princeton, New Jersey, 1956, 1962).

5  The word «box» meant «female private parts» in seventeenth-century English slang : see e.g. Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, I.4.24-6, and «An Execration upon Vulcan», The Underwood, 43.213-16. The equation is clear in Abraham van Diepenbeek’s and Cornelis Bloemaert’s depictions of the Creation of Pandora, and the more recent works of Paul Klee and Max Beckmann (reproduced by the Panofskys as plates 35, 36, 59, 60).

6  See Jonson’s tribute to Alleyn in Epigrams, 89, in Ben Jonson, ed. Ian Donaldson, The Oxford Authors (Oxford, 1985). (All quotations from Jonson’s poetry, Discoveries, Conversations with Drummond, and Volpone are taken from this edition). In 1608 Alleyn acted in one of Jonson’s entertainments at Salisbury House : see Scott McMillin, «Jonson’s Early Entertainments : New Information from Hatfield House», Renaissance Drama, n.s. i (Evanston, 1968), p. 153-66, at p. 160.

7  Mark Eccles, «Jonson and the Spies», The Review of English Studies, xiii (1937), 385-97 ; Jonson, Conversations with Drummond, 212-13 ; F. S. Boas, Christopher Marlowe (Oxford, 1940), ch. 8 ; Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning : The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (London, 1992), passim.

8  On Jonson’s Catholic period see B. N. De Luna, Jonson’s Romish Plot (Oxford, 1967), and Ian Donaldson, Jonson’s Magic Houses (Oxford, 1997), ch. 4.

9  Jonson, Poetaster, ed. Tom Cain, The Revels Plays (Manchester, 1995), annotation to I.1.1-3, and Introduction, p. 19 and n. 40, 41.

10  John Bakeless, The Tragicall History of Christopher Marlowe, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1942) ; Paul Kocher, Christopher Marlowe (Chapel Hill, 1946) ; Douglas Cole, Suffering and Evil in the Plays of Christopher Marlowe (New York, 1972).

11  Bakeless, The Tragicall History, vol. I, chs. 3, 5.

12  Thus Roy Battenhouse, for example, believes that Marlowe’s views were broadly orthodox, and that in Tamburlaine Marlowe is sharply critical of the immoral conduct of his central character (Marlowe’s Tamburlaine : A Study in Renaissance Moral Philosophy (Nashville, Tenn., 1941)). Paul Kocher, on the other hand, believes in the subversive nature of Marlowe’s thought, arguing that in Doctor Faustus he knowingly exploits the opportunities for blasphemy afforded by the play’s theme : Christopher Marlowe, ch. 5.

13  J. B. Steane, Marlowe : A Critical Study (Cambridge, 1964), Appendix 1, «The Baines Note» (here modernized and selectively quoted).

14  Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and P. and E. Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925-52), I.221, 65-7.

15  «Quid ergo est bonum ? Rerum scientia. Quid malum est ? Rerum imperitia» («What then is good ? The knowledge of things. What is evil ? The lack of knowledge of things»), Seneca, Epist. xxxi. 6, Seneca Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, ed. with a translation by Richard M. Gummere, The Loeb Classics (Cambridge, Mass., 1967).

16  The relationship of soul and body implied in «Eupheme», The Underwood, 84.ix.51-5, resembles that described by Aquinas in Summa Theologiae, I.lxxv.

17  Jonson, Catiline, ed. W. F. Bolton and Jane F. Gardner, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (London, 1972), Chorus after Act IV.64-5 ; Sejanus, ed. Philip Ayres, The Revels Plays (Manchester, 1990), I.89-104 ; Catiline, III.5. 40-2.

18  Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, ed. N. W. Bawcutt, The Revels Plays (Manchester, 1978).

19  G. K. Hunter, «The Theology of The Jew of Malta», Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, xxvii (1964), 211-40.

20  See James Shapiro’s critique of Hunter’s approach in Shakespeare and the Jews (New York, 1996), p. 83-5.

21  T. S. Eliot, «Ben Jonson» (1919), Selected Essays (London, 1932), p. 154. The link between Marlowe and Jonson has been examined by Anne Barton, Ben Jonson : Dramatist (Cambridge, 1984), and James Shapiro, Rival Playwrights : Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare (New York, 1991), ch. 2.

22  Stephen Greenblatt, «The False Ending in Volpone», Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 75 (1976), 90-104 ; N. W. Bawcutt, Introduction to his edition of The Jew of Malta, p. 31.

23  «The Theology of The Jew of Malta», p. 233-5.

24  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Everyman edition (London, 1914), Part 2, chs. xx, xxix. In his account of Hobbes, John Aubrey remarks that «Mr Benjamin Johnson, Poet Laureat, was his loving and familiar Friend and Acquaintance» : Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (Harmondsworth, 1962), p. 236.

25  «To the Memory of My Beloved, The Author, Mr William Shakespeare, And What He Hath Left Us», Ungathered Verse, 26. 30.

26  Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, ed. E. A. Horsman, The Revels Plays (London, 1960).

27  See Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil (London, 1900) ; Jeffrey Burton Russell, The Devil : Perceptions of Evil From Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (Ithaca and London, 1977), and Lucifer : The Devil in the Middle Ages (Ithaca and London, 1984) ; D. P. Walker, The Decline of Hell : Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment (London, 1964).

28  See Peter Happé’s Introduction to his edition of The Devil is An Ass, The Revels Plays (Manchester, 1994), p. 29-31. The Merry Devil of Edmonton — whose date (1597-1603 ?) and authorship (Dekker ? Drayton ? Heywood ?) are both uncertain — was a popular play in this period, and had been presented at court in May 1613 : see W. A. Abrams’s edition (Durham, North Carolina, 1942), Introduction, p. 4-5. Jonson refers to the play in the prologue to The Devil is an Ass, and again in The Staple of News in 1626 (First Intermean after Act I). Leah S. Marcus sees Dekker’s If This Be Not a Good Play as the last and most explicit of a series of works in which Dekker criticizes James for his neglect of the English common law : The Politics of Mirth : Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Customs (Chicago, 1986), ch. 3.

29  The popularity of Marlowe’s play in this period is attested by the publication of no fewer than nine quartos between 1604 and 1631 : Doctor Faustus, A- and B-Texts (1604, 1616), ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, The Revels Plays (Manchester, 1993), Introduction, p. 50.

30  Joshua, 10 : 13 ; Ovid, Amores, I.13.40.

31  Nevill Coghill, programme note for his 1966 production of Doctor Faustus (with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor) at the Oxford Playhouse.

32  Doctor Faustus, ed. Bevington and Rasmussen, Introduction, p. 50.

33  Conversations with Drummond, 350-5.

34  Pope, The Dunciad, ed. James Sutherland, The Twickenham Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope (London, 1943).

35  G. L. Kittredge, «King James I and The Devil is an Ass», Modern Philology, ix (1911), 195-209 ; Leah S. Marcus, The Politics of Mirth, ch. 3.

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Ian Donaldson, « Marlowe, Jonson, and the origins of evil »Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare [En ligne], 15 | 1997, mis en ligne le 19 mars 2010, consulté le 23 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/1137 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/shakespeare.1137

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