Aspiring minds and lumps of clay: Christopher Marlowe and the gnostic body

This dissertation analyzes Christopher Marlowe's consistent engagement with the politics of embodiment in the sixteenth century. Marlowe sees in his own age a gnostic disregard and disdain for human bodies and desires, and even for the entire material stratum from which they arise. His characters repeatedly contrast their "aspiring minds" with the material "trash" which threatens to overwhelm them; they deny that their identity is in any way shaped by the bodies they inhabit. A deep fear of contamination by the base earth motivates in Marlowe's heroes violent apocalyptic actions designed to eliminate matter and the human "lumps of clay" who represent it. Marlowe's violent dramas present, while subverting, the largely gnostic outlook espoused by his heroes.;Chapter One examines the central ideas of gnosticism both in late antiquity and in Marlowe's own era. In particular it examines the 16th-century interest in Hermeticism and the important controversy over the Eucharist; both areas display gnostic anxiety over the body. Subsequent chapters discuss the conflicting attitudes to the body in each of Marlowe's dramas, with particular attention to the recurrent figure of Helen. In Tamburlaine and The Jew of Malta Marlowe presents characters who are convinced they are more than just bodies; they lash out at the world and its inhabitants in a ferocious attempt to end the tragedy of matter. In dramatizing the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, Marlowe exposes the outrages done to the body in the name of transcendental ideals. The early play Dido and the late Edward II focus on characters who actually contemplate accepting the body and its desires, but with significantly different results. In the earlier play Aeneas eventually abandons the individual (Dido) who would attach him to the earth, while in Edward II, the king, unlike any other Marlovian protagonist, in his love for Gaveston forswears transcendent status and cultivates a bodily identity. With Doctor Faustus, the author deepens his critique of spiritual escape from the body by taking on the Faust myth. Reworking the ancient tale of Simon Magus and the magical transcendence of the body he claims for himself, Marlowe's story of the condemned German scholar declares the futility of an escapist vision. Christopher Marlowe is a potent critic of Renaissance "ideals," one who realizes the violent, excessive consequences of separating human identity from earthly, material location.