Christian Cabalists in defence of Gloriana: The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age.
From Saturday, 22 September 2012 to Thursday, 8 November 2012, I read Frances Yates' The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (NY: Routledge Classics [Routledge & Kegan Paul, London & NY], 1979, 2001; ISBN: 0-415-25409-4; 263 pps.).
The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age is a primer of the work-to-date of Dame Frances Yates (she was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1972 and elevated to Dame Commander in 1977), who, in her work at the University of London's Warburg Institute, revolutionalized the study of esoteric Western philosophy by emphasizing the influence of Hermeticism and the Kabbalah, particularly the Christian Kabbalah, on Renaissance thought. As such, Yates is at pains here to summarize her previous, relevant work -- principally Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964; incidentally, Philip Pullman, author of the young adult trilogy His Dark Materials, which has taken both kudos and brickbats for being something of an atheist's response to C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia series, has cited this book as being a profound influence on his intellectual development), The Art of Memory (1966), Theatre of the World (1969), The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972), and Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (1975) -- as well as to exhaustively repeat disclaimers along the lines of "[I]t is impossible to do justice to this subject in a brief sketch" (p. 210, Chapter 17: "The Occult Philosophy and Puritanism: John Milton") and declare the need for further study of the several topics she raises ("The problem of Pico della Mirandola and Cabala still awaits expert treatment by Hebrew specialists" [p. 224, note #2 to Chapter 2: "The Occult Philosophy in the Italian Renaissance: Pico della Mirandola"] and "Elizabethan Aristotelianism as a whole, awaits careful study" [p. 235, note #25 to Chapter 9: "Spenser's Neoplatonism and the Occult Philosophy: John Dee and The Faerie Queene"] are but two of a plethora of examples).
While Yates is far from a brilliant stylist, her prose, admittedly kludgy and repetitive, is far from being the worst I've read, and the repetition of names and points previously made is actually helpful to a newcomer to the material; with that said, how well a reader likes -- or is able to finish -- The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age will depend largely on how interested he is in the subjects that Yates covers. While I do have a certain level of interest in the topics that Yates surveys here -- an interest largely piqued by Anthony Burgess' brilliant last prose novel, A Dead Man in Deptford (1993), Richard Zimler's historical novel The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon (1996), Ross King's literary mystery Ex Libris (1998), E.R. Dodds' Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (1965), and the second book in Jeffrey Burton Russell's five-volume history of the concept of the devil and evil in Western, then Christian, thought, Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (1981), as well as some of the comic books written by Alan Moore (chiefly Promethea and, to a lesser extent, certain volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) -- and I was energized enough on the day that I began reading The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age to plow through 50-odd pages (while referring to the endnotes, fleshing out the index, and highlighting and annotating away), the density of the subject matter and the slowness of my reading speed, due only partly to my aforementioned highlighting, scribbling of marginalia and supplementing the index, eventually caused my enthusiasm to flag enough that I was more than ready to be shut of this book.
Broadly speaking, then, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, gives a précis of the influence of Neoplatonism, Hermeticism (a school of thought credited to the supposed Egyptian mystic, Hermes Trismegistus, who probably never existed) "as revived by Marsilio Ficino" (p. 1, Introduction), and Christian Cabalists ("Cabala" is Yates' preferred spelling of a term more often rendered in English as "Kabbalah" or "Kabala") on Renaissance philosophy, art, literature, and science. Yates opens her summary with a chapter on the 13th century Catalan polymath (it is his role as a philosopher-cum-mystic that Yates is interested in here) Ramon Lull (again, I'm using Yates' spelling), treating him in effect as the first Christian Cabalist, although "It was Pico [della Mirandola] who introduced Cabala into the Renaissance synthesis" and "believed that Cabala could confirm the truth of Christianity" (p. 20, Chapter 2: "The Occult Philosophy in the Italian Renaissance: Pico della Mirandola").
It would be well to quote Yates at length on Christian Cabala:
"What is Cabala? The word means 'tradition.' It was believed that when God gave the Law to Moses he gave also a second revelation as to the secret meaning of the Law. This esoteric tradition was said to have been passed down the ages orally by initiates. It was a mysticism and a cult but rooted in the text of the Scriptures, in the Hebrew language, the holy language in which God had spoken to man. Out of Cabalist studies of the Hebrew text there developed a theosophical mystique, nourished on elaborate search for hidden meaning in the Scriptures, and on elaborate manipulation of the Hebrew alphabet. Cabala was basically a method of religious contemplation which could, rather easily, pass into a kind of religious magic, though such a use of it was actually a degradation of its higher purposes."
-- pps. 2-3, Introduction
As one might suspect, the definition of "Cabala" or "Kabbalah" isn't quite as simplistic as Yates has it here. For example, Raphael Patai, in the Third Enlarged Edition of his The Hebrew Goddess (Detroit: Wayne State University Press; 1990 [1st and 2nd editions originally published in 1967, by KTAV Publishing House, Inc., and in 1978, by Avon Books]; ISBN: 0-8143-2271-9; Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 89-70488; 369 pps.), writes:
"While the Kabbala as a whole is deeply mystical, it is speculative rather than ecstatic. It emphasizes the intuitive grasp of ultimate truths, but at the same time demands the most exacting observance of all the laws and rules of traditional Judaism. It stresses the personal religious experience, yet, paradoxically, it considers itself as a body of old, transmitted wisdom, as indicated by the meaning of its very name, Kabbala, literally 'Reception,' that is, something 'received' from ancient masters. In fact, the chain of Kabbalistic tradition is believed to lead back to Adam himself, whose knowledge of all the ultimate secrets was derived directly from divine communication."
-- p. 113 (Chapter V: "The Kabbalistic Tetrad")
For that matter, Max I. Dimont, in a footnote to the 2nd Edition of his Jews, God and History (NY: Signet Classics [New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.], 1994; previously copyrighted 1962, 1990; ISBN: 978-0-451-52940-4; 580 pps.), writes: "The word 'Kabala' comes from the Hebrew word kabeil, meaning 'to receive' -- hence 'tradition' or 'revelation'" (p. 276, Chapter Twenty-Two: "Kabala and Kinnanhorra").
Yates traces the influence of Christian Cabala on and its manifestations in the work of such notables as Johannes Reuchlin, Francesco Giorgi ("the Cabalist Friar of Venice"), Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Albrecht Dürer, John Dee, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman (in particular The Shadow of Night), William Shakespeare, Robert Fludd, Francis Bacon (especially his New Atlantis), and John Milton.
Yates makes clear in her preface her indebtedness to the work of Gershom Scholem, specifically his collection of lectures titled Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, which was first translated into English in 1941; she also notes, in her introduction, that, at least at the time she was writing The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, "Scholem's work has hardly yet been integrated into general history" (p. 2). She writes in her second chapter:
"...Pico [della Mirandola] associates the Hermetic magic with Cabala, for he states that no magical operation is of any value without Cabala.
....
"...Christian Cabala lies at the heart of the Italian Renaissance on its occult side. For, as Scholem puts it when discussing Cabalistic principles and Platonic ideas, this current of Hebrew mysticism undoubtedly suited the spiritual temperament of the circle of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola.
"The kind of Cabala which influenced Pico and which, in a Christianised form, he introduced into the Italian Renaissance, was Cabala as it had developed in Spain before and up to the time of the Expulsion. As Scholem has shown, after the Expulsion, a new type of Cabala developed, deeply intent on Messianic hopes and using the spiritual techniques more specifically in this direction than the Spanish Cabalists had done. The new type of Cabala is known as the Lurianic Cabala, through the name of its founder, Isaac Luria. Lurianic Cabala developed with ever-growing intensity throughout the sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries, culminating in the messianic figure of Sabbatai Sevi, after whose failure in 1665 it took other forms."
-- p. 25
If there was some pushback by Christian historians about the pervasive influence of Jewish mystical thought on the spiritual and intellectual thinkers of the Renaissance, in both northern and southern Europe, there was also at least a certain amount of dismissal of the idea by Jewish scholars; as, for example, by Rabbi Joshua Trachtenberg, who wrote, in his seminal The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America; 2nd trade paperback edition, 1983 [original publication date 1943]; ISBN: 0-8276-0227-8):
"[The sixteenth century] was the century that uncovered the mysteries of the Kabbalah to Christian eyes. Until that time Europe had been aware that Jews possessed a mystic doctrine, and Christians had pretended to draw much magical inspiration from it, though few were familiar enough with Hebrew to gain more than the most casual acquaintance with it. The growing interest in Hebrew studies that was a feature of the Renaissance gradually opened the pages of this theosophical system to the curious. Pico della Mirandola and Johann Reuchlin were the first to popularize their Kabbalistic gleanings in Christian circles; in their opinion they had discovered not only the supreme 'science of nature,' but, among Jews, final proof of the divinity of Christ! These were the dual interests that led them to introduce the Kabbalah in full dress to a new and eager audience. But the Kabbalah as Christian Europe finally embraced it was not the Kabbalah of the Jews.
"On the fringe of Jewish theosophy was the magical lore that non-Jews had heretofore but dimly perceived. This had little enough to do with Kabbalah proper, and was, in fact, denominated in Jewish circles the 'practical Kabbalah' as distinct from the authentic 'theoretical Kabbalah.' It was the practical Kabbalah in a theosophical dress that Christians found the easier and the more desirable to assimilate. It became a prized adjunct of astrology and alchemy, a marvelous magic apparatus, in the general view. Jewish elements were soon absorbed and so transposed as to remain Jewish in name only. Since the sixteenth century there has grown up a vast library of Kabbalistic texts, so-called -- a new, Christian Kabbalah, that speedily parted company with its ostensible parent and ventured off in other directions wholly on its own. The term Kabbalah became synonymous with magic, under this new dispensation."
-- Trachtenberg, p. 77, 79
The pushback by Jewish historians against the Kabbalah is older than Trachtenberg, of course; as Paul Reitter notes in his book review essay of the diaries of the young Gershom Scholem (Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom Scholem, 1913 - 1919, edited and translated by Anthony David Skinner; Harvard University Press) in the May 2008 issue of Harper's Magazine:
"From the start, Scholem's particular investment in the Kabbalah developed within the context of a Zionist critique of German-Jewish history writing. The most authoritative interpretation of Jewish history at the time was a nineteenth-century creation; its authors were German Jews who cultivated an approach known as the 'science of Judaism,' which applied to the study of Judaism the methods of modern scholarship. As a youth, Scholem applauded their massive erudition, which clearly helped shape his own standards of learning, but he soon grew suspicious of the story these historians told. Assimilationism, Scholem felt, had deformed it.
"By the end of the First World War, Scholem was connecting the tendency of these historians to emphasize the rationalist character of Judaism with what he would later term the problem of German-Jewish 'apologetics.' He surmised that the 'science historians' wanted to make Judaism seem safe and familiar to the non-Jewish world. Why else would these nonsectarian scholars dismiss the Kabbalah as unimportant and largely un-Jewish quackery even though they hadn't studied it thoroughly? For them, Judaism was a religion of reason whose progress toward ever-greater rationalism was culminating in its dissolution. [This might explain the attitude of those science fiction writers who posit a falling away of religion as humans or other sentient races advance technologically.] They believed, as one of them wrote, that their task consisted in giving Judaism a 'decent burial.' Scholem found such thinking dubiously deracinating, insufficiently dialectical, and ultimately suicidal."
-- Reitter, "Irrational Man," Harper's Magazine, May 2008, pps. 88-9
Yates notes that "[t]he De arte cabalistica [by Johannes Reuchlin, published in 1517] is the first full treatise on Cabala by a non-Jew" and would "become the bible of the Christian Cabalists" (p. 29; Chapter 3: "The Occult Philosophy in the Reformation: Johannes Reuchlin"); she also writes:
"Some years before the publication of De arte cabalistica a fierce movement of antisemitism, instigated by a converted Jew called Johann Pfefferkorn, had broken out around Reuchlin. It was the usual kind of virulent attack on Jewish religion and character, directed particularly against the books of the Jews which it proposed to confiscate and burn. The attack was not, ostensibly, primarily against Cabalist books, but against Hebrew prayer-books and Talmudic treatises.
...
"It is reasonable to suppose that Reuchlin's Christian Cabala and the importance which he attached to Cabalist literature of the Jews had no small share in arousing the wave of antisemitism led by Pfefferkorn.
...
"Here at the very beginning of the spread of Christian Cabala one can already detect the ominous sound of a nascent witch-hunt against it."
-- pps. 30-1; Chapter 3
One of the more interesting points that Yates raises is that another exponent of Christian Cabala, Francesco Giorgi or Zorzi (a Venetian patrician family well connected with government circles; p. 35), who, like Pico della Mirandola, "believed that Cabala could prove, or rather had already proved, the truth of Christianity" (p. 34), was consulted on the Talmudic justification for England's Henry VIII's plea for divorce from his first wife, his brother's widow, Catherine of Aragon, the aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V:
"Towards the end of 1529, an Englishman, Richard Croke, came to Venice [which had a "renowned Jewish community"; p. 33] on a secret mission, which seems to have been the idea of Thomas Cranmer, future Archbishop of Canterbury. Cranmer proposed to the King that he should consult canonist lawyers and leading Jewish rabbis as to the legality of the proposed divorce. The advice of the rabbis was required because different views as to the legality of marriage with a brother's widow can be found in different books of the Old Testament. (It will be remembered that Henry questioned the legality of his marriage to Catherine on the ground that she was his brother's widow.) In Leviticus marriage between a man and his brother's widow is prohibited. In Deuteronomy, on the contrary, it is prescribed if the former union has been without issue. Which was the right view according to expert canonist opinion and in Jewish law? Richard Croke came to Venice to gather views about this, and he consulted the leading theologian of Venice, expert in Hebrew studies and in touch with Jewish scholars -- Francesco Giorgi.
"Giorgi enthusiastically assisted Croke, taking trouble to procure books and documents bearing on the case. The fact of this mission, and of the important part played by Giorgi in it, is well known. There are letters from Henry VIII himself thanking Giorgi for his valuable assistance. It is not quite obvious why 'the King's cause' attracted the Friar of Venice. Was it his zeal for religious unity which made him anxious to avoid a schism? Or was it the Venetian spirit of independence, cultivating a rapprochement with England as antidote to Hapsburg domination? Nor is it at all clear (to me at any rate) why Henry VIII's English advisers thought it important to send a mission to Venice to consult Venetian Jews, and Giorgi, the Cabalist theologian, about the divorce. This is all the more strange when one remembers that Jews were not allowed in England at that time.
"The very great influence of Giorgi's De harmonia mundi in Elizabethan England...may have some distant historical root in Giorgi's support of Henry VIII's divorce. Queen Elizabeth I might have been favourably disposed towards the philosophy of Francesco Giorgi if she knew that the Friar of Venice had supported her father's divorce, to which she owed her own existence. Giorgi's work was in the library of John Dee, the philosopher of the Elizabethan age, and was...a powerful influence underlying the Elizabethan Renaissance."
-- pps. 36-7
Yates, in her treatment of Dee in later chapters, puts the lie to the old formulation that Renaissance England elevated its philosopher-mystic to the status of privy councilor to the Queen, while Renaissance Italy took its philosopher mystic, Giordano Bruno (who is only glancingly referenced here), and burned him at the stake; she divides Dee's career into three phases, the third of which ended in calumny, ostracization, and penury. Yates sketches Dee's influence (and, through Dee, Giorgi's) on Edmund Spenser's unfinished epic poem The Faerie Queene, which was intended as a panegyric to Elizabeth and a formulation of what would later be called imperialism, and observes, "I believe that much in the chilly reception of The Faerie Queene can be explained if it is realised that the poem expressed Dee's vision for Elizabethan England, an expansionist vision which had become too dangerously provocative by the time it was published [1590 and 1596]" ( p. 126; Chapter 9: "Spenser's Neoplatonism and the Occult Philosophy: John Dee and The Faerie Queene"). While Yates' overviews of these various esoteric influences on Shakespeare's later plays, Puritanism and John Milton are interesting and thought-provoking, I am less sympathetic for her out of hand dismissal of Christopher Marlowe as a reactionary agent against the occult philosophers and the Jews.
Yates argues, for instance, that Doctor Faustus is "less [of a portrait] of an heroic individual soul, struggling with problems of science or magic versus religion, [than] a piece of propaganda constructed in view of a current situation" (p. 140; Chapter 11: "The Reaction: Christopher Marlowe on Conjurors, Imperialists and Jews"). She continues:
"The medieval formula of fear of sorcery is applied to a situation which is not medieval. Faustus is not a medieval sorcerer; he is a Renaissance scholar who has taken all learning for his province with a particular bent towards the natural sciences. The medieval anti-sorcery formula, ignorantly applied to the Renaissance scholar, produces Faustus, the genius with an artificially-induced neurosis.
....
"John Dee, returned from his continental mission in 1589, was faced with growing outcries against him as a conjuror, and felt surrounded by enemies who refused to believe that his Christian Cabala was 'white.' Marlowe and his Doctor Faustus must surely have been an important factor in the opposition to Dee, fomented from the public performances of this sensational play. Audiences would inevitably have recognised Faustus as an unfavourable reference to Dee....The turning of the Dee of his first period, mathematician and scientific expert, leader of the Elizabethan Renaissance, into the Dee of the third period, the banished conjuror whom the queen and the court are afraid to encourage, was a process in which Marlowe's propaganda in the theatre may have played a considerable part.
"Marlowe associates the bad occultism of Faustus with the Puritans; he makes references to gold-making to be used against the King of Spain which sound uncannily like phrases in the later Rosicrucian manifestos which were inspired by Dee's mission on the continent. Could Marlowe, in his capacity of political agent [i.e., spy], have known something about Dee's second period abroad? At any rate, he certainly knows something about Christian Cabala as propagated by Henry Cornelius Agrippa and by 'Franciscan Friars' [it should be remembered that Mephistopheles, the demon conjured by Faustus, assumes, at Faustus' command, the guise of a Franciscan friar, "That holy shape becomes a devil best"; Doctor Faustus, Scene 3, Line 27; quite possibly this is a gibe at Francesco Giorgi, as Yates points out on p. 139] and he is violently against it as diabolical.
"Puritan Christian Cabalists might therefore have felt threatened by Doctor Faustus. We must tread cautiously among these hidden aspects of the Elizabethan situation, though they probably contain the real truth about what was going on. There was a philosophy and an outlook which we associate with the Elizabethan age, the philosophy of Spenser, which looked to Queen Elizabeth I as the Protestant saviour of Europe. And there were opposite currents, entirely opposed to that philosophy and that outlook. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, with its obvious allusion to Dee as conjuror, tended to undermine the Elizabethan Renaissance, and can hardly have been welcome to the survivors of the [Sir Philip] Sidney circle, or to Edmund Spenser, or to Walter Raleigh, his patron, or indeed to the queen and her government."
-- pps. 141-42
I suspect that Marlowe scholars are, at minimum, on the fence as regards Yates' interpretation of Doctor Faustus. The play is, notoriously, available in two slightly different versions -- the "A-text" and "B-text" (the B-text, published in 1616 by John Wright, and "advertised in 1619 as 'With new Additions,'" "apparently derives from a composite manuscript with various layers of addition, revision, playhouse annotation, and censorship"; David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, eds., in the World's Classics [Oxford University Press] edition of Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, p. xxviii [1995; ISBN: 0-19-282737-5; 535 pps.]) -- although "there is general agreement that neither text represents exactly what was first performed," as "[b]oth show signs of theatrical adaptation" and "[m]any have suspected that someone else (Thomas Nashe?) wrote at least some of the clowning scenes" (Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey, eds., Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays, p. 632 [NY: Penguin Classics, 2003; ISBN: 0-140-43633-2; 742 pps.]). The editors of the Penguin Classics edition of Doctor Faustus which is "based on the A-text"; p. 632) further note:
"Nor is there agreement about the interpretation of the play, which seems unquestionably orthodox to some and questioningly heterodox to others. For some it is learned and theologically subtle, for others a populist, even subversive, barnstormer. No interpretation which positively excludes any of these possibilities can hope to be complete [emphasis added]."
-- Romany & Lindsey, p. 633
Bevington and Rasmussen, writing in the Oxford University Press World's Classics collection of Marlowe's plays, state:
"The language of Doctor Faustus establishes an adversarial relationship between humanity and the gods. Just as Icarus' story could be read two ways in the Renaissance, as an instance of foolish human aspiration and as proof that the gods will not tolerate Promethean challenge of their authority, Doctor Faustus can be seen as an object lesson of hubris and as a dark speculation on what is intolerable and tragic about divine limits placed on human will."
-- Bevington and Rasmussen, p. xii
They further note: "If Doctor Faustus reflects Marlowe's view of himself to any significant degree, it suggests a man whose heterodoxies have come home to haunt him" (Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, p. xvii).
It is curious that Yates, though noting that the fear of sorcery that Doctor Faustus implicitly exploits (a fear more explicitly exploited in its early productions, which are legendary for the supposed actual appearance of demons; Romany and Lindsey, p. xxii and p. 635), doesn't give enough weight to the fact that Marlowe heavily based his play, written around 1588-89 (Bevington and Rasmussen, p. xii), on the English translation of Johann Spies' 1587 Faustbuch, about the real, though somewhat obscure, German Renaissance figure of Dr. Johann Georg Faust (whose very existence was doubted by the mid-17th century, and who is sometimes thought to be a composite of two occultists named Faust: one named Johann, the other named Georg); given that the English title of the Faustbuch was rendered as The Historie of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, it should come as no surprise that "[t]he author [of the Faustbuch] is suspicious of learning in general, and he can explain Faustus' interest in magic only as the product of 'a naughty mind'" (Romany and Lindsey, p. 633 and p. 634).
Given this, one may well question how much of the reactionary, anti-intellectual bent of Doctor Faustus, if any, originated with Marlowe -- a rather mysterious, temperamental and contrarian free spirit who absented himself on the Continent during much of his graduate studies at Cambridge "'in matters touching the benefit of his country,'" rubbed elbows with such free-thinkers and "atheists" as Thomas Harriott, Giordano Bruno and Walter Raleigh, and was denounced by such shady characters as Richard Baines and Thomas Kyd and jealous fellow playwright and poet Robert Greene, for, among other things, saying that "Christ was a bastard and a homosexual who deserved crucifying" and of "'daring God out of heaven with that atheist Tamburlaine'" (Bevington and Rasmussen, pps. vii - ix; see also Charles Norman, Christopher Marlowe: The Muse's Darling [Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. {a subsidiary of Howard W. Sams & Co., Inc.}, 1971 {originally published in 1946 as The Muse's Darling; subsequent printings published in 1950 and 1960}; Library of Congress Card Catalog Number 70-142471; 285 pps.], Chapter XI: "Raleigh, Spenser and Marlowe"; Chapter XIII: "Marlowe's Table Talk", and Chapter XXII: "Marlowe's Table Talk (Continued)") -- and how much of it stemmed from his sources.
Likewise, Yates omits to emphasize that Marlowe's Faustus took the form of an updating of a morality play, "a dramatic genre that flourished until shortly before Marlowe arrived in London" (Bevington and Rasmussen, pps. xii-xiii). Furthermore:
"Even the comic scenes [in Doctor Faustus] are from the morality play; the alternation of serious action with scenes of buffoonish reveling in sin is a recognizable feature of morality plays from Mankind (c. 1471) on down to The Longer Thou Livest The More Fool Thou Art (c. 1567) and other early Elizabethan dramas. Most of all, Faustus himself as the protagonist is the 'mankind' figure of his own morality play, and accordingly we are told his who life's history from birth in Germany to death and damnation."
-- Bevington and Rasmussen, p. xiii
Given the daring, not say exceedingly unwise, statements that Marlowe often repeated in London, apparently to impress and amuse the learned men of Raleigh's circle (as well as Raleigh himself) -- heterodox statements that eventually came back to haunt him in the form of testimonies from Thomas Kyd, Richard Baines and Gabriel Harvey -- it's far more likely that Marlowe used his play Faustus as a beard to air his own intellectual development, as well as the doubts and misgivings that attended it, than as a reactionary attack on Dee, the Renaissance intellectuals, the Puritans, and the Christian Cabalists. (Indeed, Norman points out in an endnote to Chapter XXII ["Marlowe's Table Talk (Continued)"], that Samuel Aaron Tannenbaum, in his 1928 book The Assassination of Christopher Marlowe: A New View, "implicates Raleigh" in Marlowe's murder [p. 264].) Baines, in particular, is the author of the so-called "Baines Note," which sought to condemn Marlowe's then criminal, not to say treasonous (if the monarch of England was the head of the Church of England, then to disagree with the Church of England was to disagree with the monarch, and the state itself), irreligious statements, and supposed prowess at converting formerly good Christians to apostasy and atheism (chiefly one Richard Cholmley); this note was submitted to the Privy Council, who delayed sending it to Elizabeth I for her perusal until after they received the intelligence that Marlowe had been killed in a Deptford tavern (Norman, p. 198). Norman asks, "[I]f his declaration concerning Marlowe, that 'all men in Christianity ought to indevor that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped,' was an incitement to murder, as some writers believe, to whom would it have appealed?" (Norman, p. 199).
Finally, if some performances of Doctor Faustus did contain truly reactionary elements, instead of low-brow comedy whose humor and appeal largely elude the modern reader, it should be remembered that not all of the play was actually written by Marlowe.
As regards The Jew of Malta, Barabas' "boast-off" with his Muslim slave Ithamore (Act 2, Scene 3; lines 175-218) reads far more like a bit of darkly comic braggadocio, most recently exemplified in freestyle or battle raps, than an actual, serious confession of their crimes. Indeed, Barabas, for all that his rage leads him to commit mass murder and collude with Malta's enemies, the Turks, is in his way a more sympathetic and even ethical figure than Malta's Christian rulers; The Jew of Malta is thus more of a biting commentary on Christian hypocrisy and double-dealing than it is a pogrom-inciting anti-Semitic screed against the "perfidious Jews." (Although, again, it should be noted that most scholars don't believe that Marlowe is the sole author of The Jew of Malta; Norman, calling attention to "a fumbling, sensational hand present in the text of Marlowe's play," goes so far as to credit this "boast-off" to said hand, given that the "long catalogue of crimes" recited by Barabas and Ithamore is"in the somber rhythms of [Thomas Kyd's] The Spanish Tragedie"; Norman continues, "The conjecture is irresistible that Marlowe was dismissed by Lord Strange after his opinions became known; and as the play he was working on was the property of Strange's company, he left it behind, unfinished, when his employment ceased" (Norman, pps. 132-33). If anything, The Jew of Malta twits and satirizes the more conventional -- and certainly more acceptable -- anti-Semitism of the times than condones or promulgates them; if the majority of the audience saw the play as a straightforward condemnation of the Jews, there were doubtless any number of subtler minds attending performances of it that would've seen through the crowd-pleasing dramedy -- doubtless to Marlowe's peril.
Yates points to "the Portuguese marrano Doctor Roderigo Lopez, formerly physician to the Earl of Leicester and high in the queen's favour" (Yates, p. 146), as a possible target of Marlowe's "propaganda," but allows, "It would be difficult to prove that Marlowe had Lopez in mind when he wrote The Jew of Malta, yet it is a fact that the sensational execution of Lopez [in 1594, a year after Marlowe's murder, for his supposed role in the so-called "Lopez Plot," a supposed attempt to poison Elizabeth I] revived interest in the play which became again exceedingly popular, with many performances to large houses from 1594 onwards" (Yates, pps. 146-47). However, as the editors of the Penguin Classics edition of Marlowe's Complete Plays point out,
"There were historical Jews whose lives may have provided prototypes for the career of Barabas. The favourite candidate is Joseph Mendez Nassi (also known in his native Portugal as Joao Miques), who led an exodus from Christian persecution to Constantinople in 1547. A fabulously wealthy merchant and 'diplomat,' he rose to become an adviser to Süleyman the Magnificent's son Selim [II]. Created duke of Naxos on Selim's succession in 1566, he was reputed to have persuaded the Sultan to attack Venetian-held Cyprus in 1570, and was treated as a notorious enemy by European chroniclers and diplomatic agents.
"But Barabas is not copied from a specific historical person. He is, rather, derived from the collective fantasy of 'the Jew' -- the focus not only of continuing medieval anti-Semitism, but also, by the sixteenth century, the object of a more specific fear: the few, converted, Jews living in western Europe were commonly suspected of being covert allies of 'the Turk,' a fifth column whose conversion to Christianity and commitment to the security of Christendom were merely nominal, not to be trusted. (It is hard to say whether this was fear or paranoia: disquietingly, the converted Jews living in London were, apparently, much involved in conspiracies against the Elizabethan regime. See David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England 1485 - 1850 (Oxford, 1994), ch. 2, 'The Jewish Conspirators of Elizabethan England'.) It would, however, be dull-witted to complain about our uncertainty over the play's links with reality, since such uncertainties are exactly what The Jew of Malta is about."
-- Romany & Lindsey, pps. 612-13
For their part, the editors of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Doctor Faustus and Other Plays write:
"Perhaps what is most subversive about Marlowe's play is its readiness to punish Barabas for the same sort of 'kingly treachery' and deceit that enable Ferneze [the Christian governor of Malta] to triumph. Marlowe conjures up a jarring sympathy for both the misunderstood stranger and the amoral prince."
-- Bevington & Rasmussen, p. xx
As regards two specific anti-Semitic myths given prominence in The Jew of Malta, Trachtenberg devotes an entire chapter of The Devil and the Jews to Christian accusations of Jews being poisoners par excellence (owing largely to the Jews' high reputation as physicians), and four pages to recounting the Christian calumny of Jews acting as fifth columnists, dating back to the siege of "the Arian Visigothic city of Arles in 508" by "the Catholic Frankish ruler Clovis" (Trachtenberg, pps. 183-86).
Finally, for all that Yates devotes a chapter to the witch craze ("Chapter 7: Reactions Against the Occult Philosophy: The Witch Craze"), and another chapter to the literary reaction against Christian Cabala, occult philosophy and the "New Learning" (Chapter 11: "The Reaction: Christopher Marlowe on Conjurors, Imperialists and Jews"), she doesn't address heresy as such, which was really the big idea that powered the Inquisition in the first place: witchcraft was defined as a heresy by the Catholic Church beginning from "the letter of Pope Benedict XII in 1336 to the Bishop of Carcassonne ordering him to step up the hunt for witches" and culminating in the papal bull of Pope Innocent VIII in 1484 ("Summis desiderantes affectibus", "Desiring with the most profound anxiety"), shortly after his election to the papacy, which adjured Christendom to support the Inquisitors that he had appointed to Germany, Henrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, future authors of the witchfinders' manual, the Malleus maleficarum (1486), upon pain of "'the wrath of God Almighty,'" as interpreted and executed by the Mother Church and her duly appointed agents (Rossell Hope Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology [NY: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1959; Library of Congress Card Catalog Number 59-9155; 571 pps.], p. 245 and p. 263, respectively). Oddly enough, though the Church took pains to exclude Jews from being classified as heretics -- as Trachtenberg notes, "Innocent [III] refused to countenance the preaching of the cross against the Jews of [Provence during the Albigensian Crusade of the early 13th century]" (The Devil and the Jews, p. 174) -- popular opinion among both the laity and the clergy held that Jews were heretics, "indeed, the heretic[s]": "little difference in treatment was meted out to Jews and heretics per se" (ibid, p. 174 and p. 175). Trachtenberg writes:
"Despite all the evidence to the contrary some of the most influential leaders of the Church in its earliest period were of the opinion that Judaism was not an independent faith but merely a perverse deviation from the one true faith. (We have already noted that the emergence of Christianity was antedated to the beginning of revealed history.) The tendency to treat Jews as heretics, who knew the truth and rejected it, is very pronounced in the apocryphal gospels which began to appear about the middle of the second century. While the catalogues of heresies compiled by Christian writers included only divagations from orthodox Judaism in the pre-Christian period, for [medieval] times they included all Jews."
-- Trachtenberg, p. 174
While Robbins, in his The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, asserts that "There was no such thing as Jewish witchcraft" and that Jews weren't usually "persecuted for witchcraft,"
"They were, of course, attacked as adherents of Satan and, with pagans (i.e., Mohammedans) and witches, bracketed as the main targets of the Faith. Allegations against Jews paralleled the typical accusations against witches (and other heretics), especially the use of poisonous herbs and of human bodies ritually murdered for magical potions and ointments. Conversely, witches were accused of attending a sabbat, often (especially in the earliest accounts) called a synagogue. These words representative of the Jewish religion were considered opprobrious enough to use against witches."
-- Robbins, p. 281
Robbins goes on at some length to distinguish the Jewish predilection -- or reputed predilection, at any rate -- for magic, as opposed to witchcraft, the latter of which was technically defined, from the mid-14th century onwards, as a heretical compact with the Christian lord of evil, Satan (Robbins, pps. 281-82; 546-51.
While Yates does provide different angles for the subjects assayed in The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age and, consequently, much food for thought, one would be advised to take some of her interpretations and conclusions with a grain of salt, given the apparent wrong-headedness -- or, at minimum, over-simplification -- of her verdict on Marlowe and his major works, and her too-glancing treatment of the witch craze.
The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age is a primer of the work-to-date of Dame Frances Yates (she was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1972 and elevated to Dame Commander in 1977), who, in her work at the University of London's Warburg Institute, revolutionalized the study of esoteric Western philosophy by emphasizing the influence of Hermeticism and the Kabbalah, particularly the Christian Kabbalah, on Renaissance thought. As such, Yates is at pains here to summarize her previous, relevant work -- principally Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964; incidentally, Philip Pullman, author of the young adult trilogy His Dark Materials, which has taken both kudos and brickbats for being something of an atheist's response to C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia series, has cited this book as being a profound influence on his intellectual development), The Art of Memory (1966), Theatre of the World (1969), The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972), and Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (1975) -- as well as to exhaustively repeat disclaimers along the lines of "[I]t is impossible to do justice to this subject in a brief sketch" (p. 210, Chapter 17: "The Occult Philosophy and Puritanism: John Milton") and declare the need for further study of the several topics she raises ("The problem of Pico della Mirandola and Cabala still awaits expert treatment by Hebrew specialists" [p. 224, note #2 to Chapter 2: "The Occult Philosophy in the Italian Renaissance: Pico della Mirandola"] and "Elizabethan Aristotelianism as a whole, awaits careful study" [p. 235, note #25 to Chapter 9: "Spenser's Neoplatonism and the Occult Philosophy: John Dee and The Faerie Queene"] are but two of a plethora of examples).
While Yates is far from a brilliant stylist, her prose, admittedly kludgy and repetitive, is far from being the worst I've read, and the repetition of names and points previously made is actually helpful to a newcomer to the material; with that said, how well a reader likes -- or is able to finish -- The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age will depend largely on how interested he is in the subjects that Yates covers. While I do have a certain level of interest in the topics that Yates surveys here -- an interest largely piqued by Anthony Burgess' brilliant last prose novel, A Dead Man in Deptford (1993), Richard Zimler's historical novel The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon (1996), Ross King's literary mystery Ex Libris (1998), E.R. Dodds' Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety (1965), and the second book in Jeffrey Burton Russell's five-volume history of the concept of the devil and evil in Western, then Christian, thought, Satan: The Early Christian Tradition (1981), as well as some of the comic books written by Alan Moore (chiefly Promethea and, to a lesser extent, certain volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) -- and I was energized enough on the day that I began reading The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age to plow through 50-odd pages (while referring to the endnotes, fleshing out the index, and highlighting and annotating away), the density of the subject matter and the slowness of my reading speed, due only partly to my aforementioned highlighting, scribbling of marginalia and supplementing the index, eventually caused my enthusiasm to flag enough that I was more than ready to be shut of this book.
Broadly speaking, then, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, gives a précis of the influence of Neoplatonism, Hermeticism (a school of thought credited to the supposed Egyptian mystic, Hermes Trismegistus, who probably never existed) "as revived by Marsilio Ficino" (p. 1, Introduction), and Christian Cabalists ("Cabala" is Yates' preferred spelling of a term more often rendered in English as "Kabbalah" or "Kabala") on Renaissance philosophy, art, literature, and science. Yates opens her summary with a chapter on the 13th century Catalan polymath (it is his role as a philosopher-cum-mystic that Yates is interested in here) Ramon Lull (again, I'm using Yates' spelling), treating him in effect as the first Christian Cabalist, although "It was Pico [della Mirandola] who introduced Cabala into the Renaissance synthesis" and "believed that Cabala could confirm the truth of Christianity" (p. 20, Chapter 2: "The Occult Philosophy in the Italian Renaissance: Pico della Mirandola").
It would be well to quote Yates at length on Christian Cabala:
"What is Cabala? The word means 'tradition.' It was believed that when God gave the Law to Moses he gave also a second revelation as to the secret meaning of the Law. This esoteric tradition was said to have been passed down the ages orally by initiates. It was a mysticism and a cult but rooted in the text of the Scriptures, in the Hebrew language, the holy language in which God had spoken to man. Out of Cabalist studies of the Hebrew text there developed a theosophical mystique, nourished on elaborate search for hidden meaning in the Scriptures, and on elaborate manipulation of the Hebrew alphabet. Cabala was basically a method of religious contemplation which could, rather easily, pass into a kind of religious magic, though such a use of it was actually a degradation of its higher purposes."
-- pps. 2-3, Introduction
As one might suspect, the definition of "Cabala" or "Kabbalah" isn't quite as simplistic as Yates has it here. For example, Raphael Patai, in the Third Enlarged Edition of his The Hebrew Goddess (Detroit: Wayne State University Press; 1990 [1st and 2nd editions originally published in 1967, by KTAV Publishing House, Inc., and in 1978, by Avon Books]; ISBN: 0-8143-2271-9; Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 89-70488; 369 pps.), writes:
"While the Kabbala as a whole is deeply mystical, it is speculative rather than ecstatic. It emphasizes the intuitive grasp of ultimate truths, but at the same time demands the most exacting observance of all the laws and rules of traditional Judaism. It stresses the personal religious experience, yet, paradoxically, it considers itself as a body of old, transmitted wisdom, as indicated by the meaning of its very name, Kabbala, literally 'Reception,' that is, something 'received' from ancient masters. In fact, the chain of Kabbalistic tradition is believed to lead back to Adam himself, whose knowledge of all the ultimate secrets was derived directly from divine communication."
-- p. 113 (Chapter V: "The Kabbalistic Tetrad")
For that matter, Max I. Dimont, in a footnote to the 2nd Edition of his Jews, God and History (NY: Signet Classics [New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.], 1994; previously copyrighted 1962, 1990; ISBN: 978-0-451-52940-4; 580 pps.), writes: "The word 'Kabala' comes from the Hebrew word kabeil, meaning 'to receive' -- hence 'tradition' or 'revelation'" (p. 276, Chapter Twenty-Two: "Kabala and Kinnanhorra").
Yates traces the influence of Christian Cabala on and its manifestations in the work of such notables as Johannes Reuchlin, Francesco Giorgi ("the Cabalist Friar of Venice"), Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Albrecht Dürer, John Dee, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman (in particular The Shadow of Night), William Shakespeare, Robert Fludd, Francis Bacon (especially his New Atlantis), and John Milton.
Yates makes clear in her preface her indebtedness to the work of Gershom Scholem, specifically his collection of lectures titled Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, which was first translated into English in 1941; she also notes, in her introduction, that, at least at the time she was writing The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, "Scholem's work has hardly yet been integrated into general history" (p. 2). She writes in her second chapter:
"...Pico [della Mirandola] associates the Hermetic magic with Cabala, for he states that no magical operation is of any value without Cabala.
....
"...Christian Cabala lies at the heart of the Italian Renaissance on its occult side. For, as Scholem puts it when discussing Cabalistic principles and Platonic ideas, this current of Hebrew mysticism undoubtedly suited the spiritual temperament of the circle of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola.
"The kind of Cabala which influenced Pico and which, in a Christianised form, he introduced into the Italian Renaissance, was Cabala as it had developed in Spain before and up to the time of the Expulsion. As Scholem has shown, after the Expulsion, a new type of Cabala developed, deeply intent on Messianic hopes and using the spiritual techniques more specifically in this direction than the Spanish Cabalists had done. The new type of Cabala is known as the Lurianic Cabala, through the name of its founder, Isaac Luria. Lurianic Cabala developed with ever-growing intensity throughout the sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries, culminating in the messianic figure of Sabbatai Sevi, after whose failure in 1665 it took other forms."
-- p. 25
If there was some pushback by Christian historians about the pervasive influence of Jewish mystical thought on the spiritual and intellectual thinkers of the Renaissance, in both northern and southern Europe, there was also at least a certain amount of dismissal of the idea by Jewish scholars; as, for example, by Rabbi Joshua Trachtenberg, who wrote, in his seminal The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America; 2nd trade paperback edition, 1983 [original publication date 1943]; ISBN: 0-8276-0227-8):
"[The sixteenth century] was the century that uncovered the mysteries of the Kabbalah to Christian eyes. Until that time Europe had been aware that Jews possessed a mystic doctrine, and Christians had pretended to draw much magical inspiration from it, though few were familiar enough with Hebrew to gain more than the most casual acquaintance with it. The growing interest in Hebrew studies that was a feature of the Renaissance gradually opened the pages of this theosophical system to the curious. Pico della Mirandola and Johann Reuchlin were the first to popularize their Kabbalistic gleanings in Christian circles; in their opinion they had discovered not only the supreme 'science of nature,' but, among Jews, final proof of the divinity of Christ! These were the dual interests that led them to introduce the Kabbalah in full dress to a new and eager audience. But the Kabbalah as Christian Europe finally embraced it was not the Kabbalah of the Jews.
"On the fringe of Jewish theosophy was the magical lore that non-Jews had heretofore but dimly perceived. This had little enough to do with Kabbalah proper, and was, in fact, denominated in Jewish circles the 'practical Kabbalah' as distinct from the authentic 'theoretical Kabbalah.' It was the practical Kabbalah in a theosophical dress that Christians found the easier and the more desirable to assimilate. It became a prized adjunct of astrology and alchemy, a marvelous magic apparatus, in the general view. Jewish elements were soon absorbed and so transposed as to remain Jewish in name only. Since the sixteenth century there has grown up a vast library of Kabbalistic texts, so-called -- a new, Christian Kabbalah, that speedily parted company with its ostensible parent and ventured off in other directions wholly on its own. The term Kabbalah became synonymous with magic, under this new dispensation."
-- Trachtenberg, p. 77, 79
The pushback by Jewish historians against the Kabbalah is older than Trachtenberg, of course; as Paul Reitter notes in his book review essay of the diaries of the young Gershom Scholem (Lamentations of Youth: The Diaries of Gershom Scholem, 1913 - 1919, edited and translated by Anthony David Skinner; Harvard University Press) in the May 2008 issue of Harper's Magazine:
"From the start, Scholem's particular investment in the Kabbalah developed within the context of a Zionist critique of German-Jewish history writing. The most authoritative interpretation of Jewish history at the time was a nineteenth-century creation; its authors were German Jews who cultivated an approach known as the 'science of Judaism,' which applied to the study of Judaism the methods of modern scholarship. As a youth, Scholem applauded their massive erudition, which clearly helped shape his own standards of learning, but he soon grew suspicious of the story these historians told. Assimilationism, Scholem felt, had deformed it.
"By the end of the First World War, Scholem was connecting the tendency of these historians to emphasize the rationalist character of Judaism with what he would later term the problem of German-Jewish 'apologetics.' He surmised that the 'science historians' wanted to make Judaism seem safe and familiar to the non-Jewish world. Why else would these nonsectarian scholars dismiss the Kabbalah as unimportant and largely un-Jewish quackery even though they hadn't studied it thoroughly? For them, Judaism was a religion of reason whose progress toward ever-greater rationalism was culminating in its dissolution. [This might explain the attitude of those science fiction writers who posit a falling away of religion as humans or other sentient races advance technologically.] They believed, as one of them wrote, that their task consisted in giving Judaism a 'decent burial.' Scholem found such thinking dubiously deracinating, insufficiently dialectical, and ultimately suicidal."
-- Reitter, "Irrational Man," Harper's Magazine, May 2008, pps. 88-9
Yates notes that "[t]he De arte cabalistica [by Johannes Reuchlin, published in 1517] is the first full treatise on Cabala by a non-Jew" and would "become the bible of the Christian Cabalists" (p. 29; Chapter 3: "The Occult Philosophy in the Reformation: Johannes Reuchlin"); she also writes:
"Some years before the publication of De arte cabalistica a fierce movement of antisemitism, instigated by a converted Jew called Johann Pfefferkorn, had broken out around Reuchlin. It was the usual kind of virulent attack on Jewish religion and character, directed particularly against the books of the Jews which it proposed to confiscate and burn. The attack was not, ostensibly, primarily against Cabalist books, but against Hebrew prayer-books and Talmudic treatises.
...
"It is reasonable to suppose that Reuchlin's Christian Cabala and the importance which he attached to Cabalist literature of the Jews had no small share in arousing the wave of antisemitism led by Pfefferkorn.
...
"Here at the very beginning of the spread of Christian Cabala one can already detect the ominous sound of a nascent witch-hunt against it."
-- pps. 30-1; Chapter 3
One of the more interesting points that Yates raises is that another exponent of Christian Cabala, Francesco Giorgi or Zorzi (a Venetian patrician family well connected with government circles; p. 35), who, like Pico della Mirandola, "believed that Cabala could prove, or rather had already proved, the truth of Christianity" (p. 34), was consulted on the Talmudic justification for England's Henry VIII's plea for divorce from his first wife, his brother's widow, Catherine of Aragon, the aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V:
"Towards the end of 1529, an Englishman, Richard Croke, came to Venice [which had a "renowned Jewish community"; p. 33] on a secret mission, which seems to have been the idea of Thomas Cranmer, future Archbishop of Canterbury. Cranmer proposed to the King that he should consult canonist lawyers and leading Jewish rabbis as to the legality of the proposed divorce. The advice of the rabbis was required because different views as to the legality of marriage with a brother's widow can be found in different books of the Old Testament. (It will be remembered that Henry questioned the legality of his marriage to Catherine on the ground that she was his brother's widow.) In Leviticus marriage between a man and his brother's widow is prohibited. In Deuteronomy, on the contrary, it is prescribed if the former union has been without issue. Which was the right view according to expert canonist opinion and in Jewish law? Richard Croke came to Venice to gather views about this, and he consulted the leading theologian of Venice, expert in Hebrew studies and in touch with Jewish scholars -- Francesco Giorgi.
"Giorgi enthusiastically assisted Croke, taking trouble to procure books and documents bearing on the case. The fact of this mission, and of the important part played by Giorgi in it, is well known. There are letters from Henry VIII himself thanking Giorgi for his valuable assistance. It is not quite obvious why 'the King's cause' attracted the Friar of Venice. Was it his zeal for religious unity which made him anxious to avoid a schism? Or was it the Venetian spirit of independence, cultivating a rapprochement with England as antidote to Hapsburg domination? Nor is it at all clear (to me at any rate) why Henry VIII's English advisers thought it important to send a mission to Venice to consult Venetian Jews, and Giorgi, the Cabalist theologian, about the divorce. This is all the more strange when one remembers that Jews were not allowed in England at that time.
"The very great influence of Giorgi's De harmonia mundi in Elizabethan England...may have some distant historical root in Giorgi's support of Henry VIII's divorce. Queen Elizabeth I might have been favourably disposed towards the philosophy of Francesco Giorgi if she knew that the Friar of Venice had supported her father's divorce, to which she owed her own existence. Giorgi's work was in the library of John Dee, the philosopher of the Elizabethan age, and was...a powerful influence underlying the Elizabethan Renaissance."
-- pps. 36-7
Yates, in her treatment of Dee in later chapters, puts the lie to the old formulation that Renaissance England elevated its philosopher-mystic to the status of privy councilor to the Queen, while Renaissance Italy took its philosopher mystic, Giordano Bruno (who is only glancingly referenced here), and burned him at the stake; she divides Dee's career into three phases, the third of which ended in calumny, ostracization, and penury. Yates sketches Dee's influence (and, through Dee, Giorgi's) on Edmund Spenser's unfinished epic poem The Faerie Queene, which was intended as a panegyric to Elizabeth and a formulation of what would later be called imperialism, and observes, "I believe that much in the chilly reception of The Faerie Queene can be explained if it is realised that the poem expressed Dee's vision for Elizabethan England, an expansionist vision which had become too dangerously provocative by the time it was published [1590 and 1596]" ( p. 126; Chapter 9: "Spenser's Neoplatonism and the Occult Philosophy: John Dee and The Faerie Queene"). While Yates' overviews of these various esoteric influences on Shakespeare's later plays, Puritanism and John Milton are interesting and thought-provoking, I am less sympathetic for her out of hand dismissal of Christopher Marlowe as a reactionary agent against the occult philosophers and the Jews.
Yates argues, for instance, that Doctor Faustus is "less [of a portrait] of an heroic individual soul, struggling with problems of science or magic versus religion, [than] a piece of propaganda constructed in view of a current situation" (p. 140; Chapter 11: "The Reaction: Christopher Marlowe on Conjurors, Imperialists and Jews"). She continues:
"The medieval formula of fear of sorcery is applied to a situation which is not medieval. Faustus is not a medieval sorcerer; he is a Renaissance scholar who has taken all learning for his province with a particular bent towards the natural sciences. The medieval anti-sorcery formula, ignorantly applied to the Renaissance scholar, produces Faustus, the genius with an artificially-induced neurosis.
....
"John Dee, returned from his continental mission in 1589, was faced with growing outcries against him as a conjuror, and felt surrounded by enemies who refused to believe that his Christian Cabala was 'white.' Marlowe and his Doctor Faustus must surely have been an important factor in the opposition to Dee, fomented from the public performances of this sensational play. Audiences would inevitably have recognised Faustus as an unfavourable reference to Dee....The turning of the Dee of his first period, mathematician and scientific expert, leader of the Elizabethan Renaissance, into the Dee of the third period, the banished conjuror whom the queen and the court are afraid to encourage, was a process in which Marlowe's propaganda in the theatre may have played a considerable part.
"Marlowe associates the bad occultism of Faustus with the Puritans; he makes references to gold-making to be used against the King of Spain which sound uncannily like phrases in the later Rosicrucian manifestos which were inspired by Dee's mission on the continent. Could Marlowe, in his capacity of political agent [i.e., spy], have known something about Dee's second period abroad? At any rate, he certainly knows something about Christian Cabala as propagated by Henry Cornelius Agrippa and by 'Franciscan Friars' [it should be remembered that Mephistopheles, the demon conjured by Faustus, assumes, at Faustus' command, the guise of a Franciscan friar, "That holy shape becomes a devil best"; Doctor Faustus, Scene 3, Line 27; quite possibly this is a gibe at Francesco Giorgi, as Yates points out on p. 139] and he is violently against it as diabolical.
"Puritan Christian Cabalists might therefore have felt threatened by Doctor Faustus. We must tread cautiously among these hidden aspects of the Elizabethan situation, though they probably contain the real truth about what was going on. There was a philosophy and an outlook which we associate with the Elizabethan age, the philosophy of Spenser, which looked to Queen Elizabeth I as the Protestant saviour of Europe. And there were opposite currents, entirely opposed to that philosophy and that outlook. Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, with its obvious allusion to Dee as conjuror, tended to undermine the Elizabethan Renaissance, and can hardly have been welcome to the survivors of the [Sir Philip] Sidney circle, or to Edmund Spenser, or to Walter Raleigh, his patron, or indeed to the queen and her government."
-- pps. 141-42
I suspect that Marlowe scholars are, at minimum, on the fence as regards Yates' interpretation of Doctor Faustus. The play is, notoriously, available in two slightly different versions -- the "A-text" and "B-text" (the B-text, published in 1616 by John Wright, and "advertised in 1619 as 'With new Additions,'" "apparently derives from a composite manuscript with various layers of addition, revision, playhouse annotation, and censorship"; David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, eds., in the World's Classics [Oxford University Press] edition of Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, p. xxviii [1995; ISBN: 0-19-282737-5; 535 pps.]) -- although "there is general agreement that neither text represents exactly what was first performed," as "[b]oth show signs of theatrical adaptation" and "[m]any have suspected that someone else (Thomas Nashe?) wrote at least some of the clowning scenes" (Frank Romany and Robert Lindsey, eds., Christopher Marlowe, The Complete Plays, p. 632 [NY: Penguin Classics, 2003; ISBN: 0-140-43633-2; 742 pps.]). The editors of the Penguin Classics edition of Doctor Faustus which is "based on the A-text"; p. 632) further note:
"Nor is there agreement about the interpretation of the play, which seems unquestionably orthodox to some and questioningly heterodox to others. For some it is learned and theologically subtle, for others a populist, even subversive, barnstormer. No interpretation which positively excludes any of these possibilities can hope to be complete [emphasis added]."
-- Romany & Lindsey, p. 633
Bevington and Rasmussen, writing in the Oxford University Press World's Classics collection of Marlowe's plays, state:
"The language of Doctor Faustus establishes an adversarial relationship between humanity and the gods. Just as Icarus' story could be read two ways in the Renaissance, as an instance of foolish human aspiration and as proof that the gods will not tolerate Promethean challenge of their authority, Doctor Faustus can be seen as an object lesson of hubris and as a dark speculation on what is intolerable and tragic about divine limits placed on human will."
-- Bevington and Rasmussen, p. xii
They further note: "If Doctor Faustus reflects Marlowe's view of himself to any significant degree, it suggests a man whose heterodoxies have come home to haunt him" (Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, p. xvii).
It is curious that Yates, though noting that the fear of sorcery that Doctor Faustus implicitly exploits (a fear more explicitly exploited in its early productions, which are legendary for the supposed actual appearance of demons; Romany and Lindsey, p. xxii and p. 635), doesn't give enough weight to the fact that Marlowe heavily based his play, written around 1588-89 (Bevington and Rasmussen, p. xii), on the English translation of Johann Spies' 1587 Faustbuch, about the real, though somewhat obscure, German Renaissance figure of Dr. Johann Georg Faust (whose very existence was doubted by the mid-17th century, and who is sometimes thought to be a composite of two occultists named Faust: one named Johann, the other named Georg); given that the English title of the Faustbuch was rendered as The Historie of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, it should come as no surprise that "[t]he author [of the Faustbuch] is suspicious of learning in general, and he can explain Faustus' interest in magic only as the product of 'a naughty mind'" (Romany and Lindsey, p. 633 and p. 634).
Given this, one may well question how much of the reactionary, anti-intellectual bent of Doctor Faustus, if any, originated with Marlowe -- a rather mysterious, temperamental and contrarian free spirit who absented himself on the Continent during much of his graduate studies at Cambridge "'in matters touching the benefit of his country,'" rubbed elbows with such free-thinkers and "atheists" as Thomas Harriott, Giordano Bruno and Walter Raleigh, and was denounced by such shady characters as Richard Baines and Thomas Kyd and jealous fellow playwright and poet Robert Greene, for, among other things, saying that "Christ was a bastard and a homosexual who deserved crucifying" and of "'daring God out of heaven with that atheist Tamburlaine'" (Bevington and Rasmussen, pps. vii - ix; see also Charles Norman, Christopher Marlowe: The Muse's Darling [Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. {a subsidiary of Howard W. Sams & Co., Inc.}, 1971 {originally published in 1946 as The Muse's Darling; subsequent printings published in 1950 and 1960}; Library of Congress Card Catalog Number 70-142471; 285 pps.], Chapter XI: "Raleigh, Spenser and Marlowe"; Chapter XIII: "Marlowe's Table Talk", and Chapter XXII: "Marlowe's Table Talk (Continued)") -- and how much of it stemmed from his sources.
Likewise, Yates omits to emphasize that Marlowe's Faustus took the form of an updating of a morality play, "a dramatic genre that flourished until shortly before Marlowe arrived in London" (Bevington and Rasmussen, pps. xii-xiii). Furthermore:
"Even the comic scenes [in Doctor Faustus] are from the morality play; the alternation of serious action with scenes of buffoonish reveling in sin is a recognizable feature of morality plays from Mankind (c. 1471) on down to The Longer Thou Livest The More Fool Thou Art (c. 1567) and other early Elizabethan dramas. Most of all, Faustus himself as the protagonist is the 'mankind' figure of his own morality play, and accordingly we are told his who life's history from birth in Germany to death and damnation."
-- Bevington and Rasmussen, p. xiii
Given the daring, not say exceedingly unwise, statements that Marlowe often repeated in London, apparently to impress and amuse the learned men of Raleigh's circle (as well as Raleigh himself) -- heterodox statements that eventually came back to haunt him in the form of testimonies from Thomas Kyd, Richard Baines and Gabriel Harvey -- it's far more likely that Marlowe used his play Faustus as a beard to air his own intellectual development, as well as the doubts and misgivings that attended it, than as a reactionary attack on Dee, the Renaissance intellectuals, the Puritans, and the Christian Cabalists. (Indeed, Norman points out in an endnote to Chapter XXII ["Marlowe's Table Talk (Continued)"], that Samuel Aaron Tannenbaum, in his 1928 book The Assassination of Christopher Marlowe: A New View, "implicates Raleigh" in Marlowe's murder [p. 264].) Baines, in particular, is the author of the so-called "Baines Note," which sought to condemn Marlowe's then criminal, not to say treasonous (if the monarch of England was the head of the Church of England, then to disagree with the Church of England was to disagree with the monarch, and the state itself), irreligious statements, and supposed prowess at converting formerly good Christians to apostasy and atheism (chiefly one Richard Cholmley); this note was submitted to the Privy Council, who delayed sending it to Elizabeth I for her perusal until after they received the intelligence that Marlowe had been killed in a Deptford tavern (Norman, p. 198). Norman asks, "[I]f his declaration concerning Marlowe, that 'all men in Christianity ought to indevor that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped,' was an incitement to murder, as some writers believe, to whom would it have appealed?" (Norman, p. 199).
Finally, if some performances of Doctor Faustus did contain truly reactionary elements, instead of low-brow comedy whose humor and appeal largely elude the modern reader, it should be remembered that not all of the play was actually written by Marlowe.
As regards The Jew of Malta, Barabas' "boast-off" with his Muslim slave Ithamore (Act 2, Scene 3; lines 175-218) reads far more like a bit of darkly comic braggadocio, most recently exemplified in freestyle or battle raps, than an actual, serious confession of their crimes. Indeed, Barabas, for all that his rage leads him to commit mass murder and collude with Malta's enemies, the Turks, is in his way a more sympathetic and even ethical figure than Malta's Christian rulers; The Jew of Malta is thus more of a biting commentary on Christian hypocrisy and double-dealing than it is a pogrom-inciting anti-Semitic screed against the "perfidious Jews." (Although, again, it should be noted that most scholars don't believe that Marlowe is the sole author of The Jew of Malta; Norman, calling attention to "a fumbling, sensational hand present in the text of Marlowe's play," goes so far as to credit this "boast-off" to said hand, given that the "long catalogue of crimes" recited by Barabas and Ithamore is"in the somber rhythms of [Thomas Kyd's] The Spanish Tragedie"; Norman continues, "The conjecture is irresistible that Marlowe was dismissed by Lord Strange after his opinions became known; and as the play he was working on was the property of Strange's company, he left it behind, unfinished, when his employment ceased" (Norman, pps. 132-33). If anything, The Jew of Malta twits and satirizes the more conventional -- and certainly more acceptable -- anti-Semitism of the times than condones or promulgates them; if the majority of the audience saw the play as a straightforward condemnation of the Jews, there were doubtless any number of subtler minds attending performances of it that would've seen through the crowd-pleasing dramedy -- doubtless to Marlowe's peril.
Yates points to "the Portuguese marrano Doctor Roderigo Lopez, formerly physician to the Earl of Leicester and high in the queen's favour" (Yates, p. 146), as a possible target of Marlowe's "propaganda," but allows, "It would be difficult to prove that Marlowe had Lopez in mind when he wrote The Jew of Malta, yet it is a fact that the sensational execution of Lopez [in 1594, a year after Marlowe's murder, for his supposed role in the so-called "Lopez Plot," a supposed attempt to poison Elizabeth I] revived interest in the play which became again exceedingly popular, with many performances to large houses from 1594 onwards" (Yates, pps. 146-47). However, as the editors of the Penguin Classics edition of Marlowe's Complete Plays point out,
"There were historical Jews whose lives may have provided prototypes for the career of Barabas. The favourite candidate is Joseph Mendez Nassi (also known in his native Portugal as Joao Miques), who led an exodus from Christian persecution to Constantinople in 1547. A fabulously wealthy merchant and 'diplomat,' he rose to become an adviser to Süleyman the Magnificent's son Selim [II]. Created duke of Naxos on Selim's succession in 1566, he was reputed to have persuaded the Sultan to attack Venetian-held Cyprus in 1570, and was treated as a notorious enemy by European chroniclers and diplomatic agents.
"But Barabas is not copied from a specific historical person. He is, rather, derived from the collective fantasy of 'the Jew' -- the focus not only of continuing medieval anti-Semitism, but also, by the sixteenth century, the object of a more specific fear: the few, converted, Jews living in western Europe were commonly suspected of being covert allies of 'the Turk,' a fifth column whose conversion to Christianity and commitment to the security of Christendom were merely nominal, not to be trusted. (It is hard to say whether this was fear or paranoia: disquietingly, the converted Jews living in London were, apparently, much involved in conspiracies against the Elizabethan regime. See David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England 1485 - 1850 (Oxford, 1994), ch. 2, 'The Jewish Conspirators of Elizabethan England'.) It would, however, be dull-witted to complain about our uncertainty over the play's links with reality, since such uncertainties are exactly what The Jew of Malta is about."
-- Romany & Lindsey, pps. 612-13
For their part, the editors of the Oxford World's Classics edition of Doctor Faustus and Other Plays write:
"Perhaps what is most subversive about Marlowe's play is its readiness to punish Barabas for the same sort of 'kingly treachery' and deceit that enable Ferneze [the Christian governor of Malta] to triumph. Marlowe conjures up a jarring sympathy for both the misunderstood stranger and the amoral prince."
-- Bevington & Rasmussen, p. xx
As regards two specific anti-Semitic myths given prominence in The Jew of Malta, Trachtenberg devotes an entire chapter of The Devil and the Jews to Christian accusations of Jews being poisoners par excellence (owing largely to the Jews' high reputation as physicians), and four pages to recounting the Christian calumny of Jews acting as fifth columnists, dating back to the siege of "the Arian Visigothic city of Arles in 508" by "the Catholic Frankish ruler Clovis" (Trachtenberg, pps. 183-86).
Finally, for all that Yates devotes a chapter to the witch craze ("Chapter 7: Reactions Against the Occult Philosophy: The Witch Craze"), and another chapter to the literary reaction against Christian Cabala, occult philosophy and the "New Learning" (Chapter 11: "The Reaction: Christopher Marlowe on Conjurors, Imperialists and Jews"), she doesn't address heresy as such, which was really the big idea that powered the Inquisition in the first place: witchcraft was defined as a heresy by the Catholic Church beginning from "the letter of Pope Benedict XII in 1336 to the Bishop of Carcassonne ordering him to step up the hunt for witches" and culminating in the papal bull of Pope Innocent VIII in 1484 ("Summis desiderantes affectibus", "Desiring with the most profound anxiety"), shortly after his election to the papacy, which adjured Christendom to support the Inquisitors that he had appointed to Germany, Henrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, future authors of the witchfinders' manual, the Malleus maleficarum (1486), upon pain of "'the wrath of God Almighty,'" as interpreted and executed by the Mother Church and her duly appointed agents (Rossell Hope Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology [NY: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1959; Library of Congress Card Catalog Number 59-9155; 571 pps.], p. 245 and p. 263, respectively). Oddly enough, though the Church took pains to exclude Jews from being classified as heretics -- as Trachtenberg notes, "Innocent [III] refused to countenance the preaching of the cross against the Jews of [Provence during the Albigensian Crusade of the early 13th century]" (The Devil and the Jews, p. 174) -- popular opinion among both the laity and the clergy held that Jews were heretics, "indeed, the heretic[s]": "little difference in treatment was meted out to Jews and heretics per se" (ibid, p. 174 and p. 175). Trachtenberg writes:
"Despite all the evidence to the contrary some of the most influential leaders of the Church in its earliest period were of the opinion that Judaism was not an independent faith but merely a perverse deviation from the one true faith. (We have already noted that the emergence of Christianity was antedated to the beginning of revealed history.) The tendency to treat Jews as heretics, who knew the truth and rejected it, is very pronounced in the apocryphal gospels which began to appear about the middle of the second century. While the catalogues of heresies compiled by Christian writers included only divagations from orthodox Judaism in the pre-Christian period, for [medieval] times they included all Jews."
-- Trachtenberg, p. 174
While Robbins, in his The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, asserts that "There was no such thing as Jewish witchcraft" and that Jews weren't usually "persecuted for witchcraft,"
"They were, of course, attacked as adherents of Satan and, with pagans (i.e., Mohammedans) and witches, bracketed as the main targets of the Faith. Allegations against Jews paralleled the typical accusations against witches (and other heretics), especially the use of poisonous herbs and of human bodies ritually murdered for magical potions and ointments. Conversely, witches were accused of attending a sabbat, often (especially in the earliest accounts) called a synagogue. These words representative of the Jewish religion were considered opprobrious enough to use against witches."
-- Robbins, p. 281
Robbins goes on at some length to distinguish the Jewish predilection -- or reputed predilection, at any rate -- for magic, as opposed to witchcraft, the latter of which was technically defined, from the mid-14th century onwards, as a heretical compact with the Christian lord of evil, Satan (Robbins, pps. 281-82; 546-51.
While Yates does provide different angles for the subjects assayed in The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age and, consequently, much food for thought, one would be advised to take some of her interpretations and conclusions with a grain of salt, given the apparent wrong-headedness -- or, at minimum, over-simplification -- of her verdict on Marlowe and his major works, and her too-glancing treatment of the witch craze.