ELH

Christopher Marlowe is a serious political thinker. He read widely in English and continental political thought and was well-versed in tracts on the French civil wars. This reading is reflected throughout his works, from the plots he chooses to the words he uses. How political thought works in his writings, though, is more of a problem. Unlike the court poet and bureaucratic administrator Edmund Spenser, Marlowe gives no pastoral world or fairyland within which he can "[create] well-governed and well-governing subjects," proto-republican citizens formulated through humanist ethics.¹ Instead of writing within the norms of civility and governance, Marlowe focuses on crises and states of emergency in order to conceptualize contemporary political thought by suspending or "estranging" its main premises, to use Emily Bartels's felicitous term.²

Marlowe's focus on moments of crisis is fueled by his own political experiences. Writing in London in the late 1580s and early 1590s, when "the government's responses to national security emergencies were by turns lackadaisical, earnest, and intermittently harsh, even despotic," led Marlowe to explore absolutism and its tendency towards militarism.³ Moreover, his employment as an operative for the Elizabethan state—continually exposed to the whimsical decisions of those in power—both nourished his radical intellectual tendencies and made him a perceived security threat to that state during one of these government crackdowns. As Conyers Read and Lawrence Stone showed many years ago, Elizabethan intelligencers were strongly dependent upon the seemingly capricious decisions of their employers. In part, the issue is economic. Members of the Elizabethan administration—often working against one another—recruited individuals from debtors prison and the universities to trade on their futures, promising great rewards for spying. Since none of these administrators had much money to pay intelligencers, however, the tendency was to string the spies along, promising future payment for more information.⁴ But also the issue has to do with the social form that intelligencing takes. To accumulate information, an intelligencer had to become a Catholic in the company of Catholics, a traitor in the company of traitors, and a [End Page 291] loyal servant in the company of the powerful. This evacuation of identity bound the intelligencer more perniciously to his employer, since the ever-present danger was that an administrator would simply cut off an intelligencer and let him languish in the criminal identity that he had tactically assumed.⁵ Marlowe's response to this situation is conceptual and aesthetic. He thinks through the contemporary political terms by which the inner workings of political crises can be grasped, and he displays those inner workings in literary form. Playing political concept off of theatrical form, Marlowe bypasses citizenship, the creation of well-governed and well-governing political subjects, and engages a more radical understanding of political life in which the political subject is defined by its exposure to the caprices of state authority.

We can see this in Marlowe's use of the word "massacre." A word that enters English in the 1570s, Marlowe uses it an impressive fifteen times, most famously in the title of his last play, The Massacre at Paris—the first use of the word to name an historical event, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.⁶ William Shakespeare, by contrast, uses the word eight times, and Spenser, six times—both over longer, more copious literary careers.⁷ In this essay I read Marlowe's use of the word "massacre" alongside emergent early modern absolutist political thought to show how Marlowe reworks contemporary political thought from the underside, as it were. In the late sixteenth century, absolutist political thinkers increasingly focus on the necessity of the sovereign to act outside of the law in order to preserve the stability of the state. Tacitly justifying the 1572 murder of the French Huguenots, these writers generally acknowledge that the sovereign and the sovereign alone has the right to use extralegal violence to resolve crises, actual or potential, that threaten the state. Rather than representing the phenomenon as an historical outrage, as do most Protestant political writers, Marlowe uses the word "massacre" throughout his works as a node of political thought that encapsulates...