"Man is the measure of all things: of things that are, that they are; of things that are not, that they are not"
—Protagoras, On Truth
As a proverbial statement of subjectivism dating back to Socratic Greece, the notion of the homo-mensura found exceptional force as an ideological thrust of the English Renaissance. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, the rise of Renaissance humanism inaugurated the paradigm shift from a theocentric to an androcentric cosmology, in which "the submission of the human spirit to penitential discipline gave way to unleashed curiosity, individual self-assertion, and a powerful conviction that man was the measure of all things" (Logan, Greenblatt 488). This marked the advent of an intellectual culture that experimented with the destabilization of traditional absolutes—transcendental signifieds such as God and monarchy—around which the world had hitherto been ordered.
The arcane foundations of the English monarchy were shaken with the beheading of King Charles I at the height of the English Civil War in 1649, severely undermining the confidence in the divine mandate that politically legitimized kingship. Once thought to be the embodiment of divine will, the God-sanctioned king had now ceased to be infallible. This vein of anti-establishmentarianism, while featuring prominently in the often bloody upheaval within the politics of early modern England, also gained momentum in the subversive rhetoric of Renaissance literature, notably in the works of Christopher Marlowe and John Milton, who were both steeped in the ideological revolt of their time. A close analysis of language inTamburlaine and Paradise Lost reveals a sublimation of this destabilizing force within the realm of the symbolic.
This paper explores the processes of rhetorical usurpation that occur at the level of the signifier in Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Milton's Paradise Lost. I begin by briefly introducing the two modes of differing latent in Jacques Derrida's notion of différance. Then, borrowing from this notion of iterability, I suggest that the appropriation and repetition of signifiers in discursive spaces outside their native system is tantamount to an act of usurpation. I then proceed to examine the ways in which Renaissance authors such as Marlowe and Milton enact a kind of symbolic violence in their rhetoric, through the usurpation of key signifiers thought to be inviolably entrenched in various traditional systems. From my assessment I conclude that the ideological revolt of these authors against the Law of their time features prominently in the discourses of Tamburlaine and Paradise Lost, though not without an awareness of potential comeuppance.
Iterability: A Symbolic Usurpation
We begin with a brief survey of Derridean différance, which lies at the heart of post structuralist discourse. Derrida identifies the two nuances of differing that the term différance embodies. The first—to differ in the Saussurean sense—"is the most common and most identifiable, the sense of not being identical, of being other"; it is an "alterity of dissimilarity" that is spatially situated (Derrida 390). Signification or meaning attached to a particular signifier therefore derives from the difference between signifiers in a local system. [1] The second mode—to defer—is to resort to a "temporalizing mediation of a detour that suspends the accomplishment or fulfillment of 'desire' or 'will'" (391). Meaning (or rather, its shadow) consists in a temporal projection of the Lacanian signifying chain, where the attainment of meaning in its full presence is always a futile endeavor of reaching after. This involves a repetition of the signifier through time, thereby perpetually deferring its complete signification.
These two ways of differing (alterity and repeatability) engender the property of iterability or repetition with a difference—"the logic that ties repetition to alterity" (Derrida 7). [2] Given the same signifier, altering the surrounding semiotic landscape— transplanting or relocating the signifier—thereby results in the emergence of a new meaning or signification. This implies the ability of a selfsame signifier to differ from other signifiers and itself in virtue of being repeatedly situated in varying contexts across time.
At this point, the possibility of semiotic usurpation is evident. One may enact this usurpation through reiteration, in which the signifier is dislodged from its native system and repeated in a profusion of foreign discursive spaces. What follows from this indiscrete reproduction is disempowerment. For example, in classical psychoanalysis, Freud observes that "a multiplication of penis symbols [ironically] signifies castration" (Freud 85), or the symbolic loss of phallic power. With this in mind, the iterability of the signifier in deferring and differing undercuts the stability of the allegedly Platonic and inextricable relation between transcendental signifieds and their corresponding signifiers. The direct authority of these abstract signifieds over the signifier is therefore diminished, if not effaced, in what is tantamount to an implicit act of usurpation against stable systems such as theology or monarchy. This is not unlike "a system of overcoding" postulated by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, in which "a new form of inscription is overlaid upon the forms of primitive inscription" (Patton 91-92). Authors, as the masters of the written mark, are thereby invested with the uncanny power to perform this act of reductive appropriation. The iterability of the mark allows primitive (and often culturally quintessential) signifiers to be decoded—stripped of its native signification—and subsequently recoded and repeated indefinitely as disposable instruments of rhetoric. In what may be construed as symbolic blasphemy, sacred signifiers that refer unequivocally to their metaphysical edifices are, as it were, stolen from their temples and consumed in manufactured reproduction.
Having established the notion of an iterability that symbolically usurps, we may now proceed to assess how both Marlowe and Milton enact this discursive transgression in Tamburlaine and Paradise Lost.
The Slaughter of the Gods: Symbolic Iconoclasm in Tamburlaine
Scholarship identifies Marlowe as "a notorious atheist and free-thinker, a rebel against morals and religion" (Dawson vii-x)—an exemplar of the NietzscheanÜbermensch who rejects any framework of moral discourse and rises above constructed binaries of 'good'and 'evil.' The scathing Baines Note submitted to the Privy Council shortly before Marlowe's death accuses him of believing that "the beginning of religion was only to keep men in awe", suggesting therefore that religion for Marlowe was merely a theatrical spectacle orchestrated to inspire subservience. His spirit of atheistic philosophy inheres in the prologue toTamburlaine, where he proclaims that the reader "shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine / Threat'ning the world with high astounding terms" (Part 1, Prologue 4-5, my emphasis). The reader is here primed to observe the power of language toastound the masses. More significant is the nature of rhetoric used—it is largely theological. In the next few sections, I demonstrate how Marlowe, in the fitting voice of the usurper Tamburlaine, possesses the holy signifiers of various theological systems and brandishes them in calculated hyperboles to perform the spectacle of rhetoric.
Tamburlaine the Hermeneutic Transgressor
Early in the play, the reader is already alerted to Tamburlaine's insatiable desire to possess, whether princess Zenocrate, sovereign territories, or the physical crown(s). His transgressive Oedipal impulse is revealed in his dialogue with Cosroe, in which he attributes his compulsion to usurp Cosroe's kingship to "the thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown, / That caused the eldest son of heavenly Ops / To thrust his doting father from his chair" (1.II.VII.12-14). Mycetes too brands him "Tamburlaine the thief" (1.II.IV.41)—an epithet that is also of significant symbolic import. As Theridamas stands in awe at Tamburlaine's claims to absolute imperium, in which the latter boasts of how "I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains…" (1.I.II.174), he is compelled to remark, "not Hermes, prolocutor of the gods, / Could use persuasions more pathetical" (210-211). This is intriguing considering the place of Hermes in Greek mythos as the god of transactions, "the interpreter (ermeneus), or messenger, or thief, or liar, or bargainer" and the "contriver of tales or speeches" (Plato, Cratylus). By drawing a relation (of similarity and supersession) from Tamburlaine to Hermes, Theridimas foregrounds the reach of his possessive violence, which extends even to the metaphysical realm of rhetoric and speech, wherein—in a sort of twisted transaction—he appropriates signifiers at will and resignifies them as vacuous embellishments to his speeches.
Central to the play's transgressive (and possessive) rhetoric is perhaps Tamburlaine's illicit claim to the title of "scourge and wrath of God, / The only fear and terror of the world" (3.III.44-45). It is clear, however, that Tamburlaine's conquest is anything but holy and righteous or divinely sanctioned. As "a robber who shamelessly claims the title… as a justification for his merciless cruelties" (Battenhouse 131), he strips it of its religious nuance, and recasts it simply as a license of sorts that lends his bloodlust an air of legitimacy. Considering Marlowe's atheistic disposition, this is unsurprising as a satire of the divine right of kings. Far from being the retributive scourge that inflicts God's judgment upon transgressors, Tamburlaine is the prime transgressor who delights in the very villainy his title professes to punish. Therefore, in superimposing the religious signifier (the title) with a signification opposite to the original, a deconstructive usurpation has occurred through a violent resignification of the holy epithet in an unholy context (that is Tamburlaine's bloody scheme).
Religious Satire in Tamburlaine: Pluralism and Nihilism
Putting a satirical spin on the ostentatious power of religion over the masses, Marlowe stages a rhetorical performance through his unbridled proliferation of theological signifiers in Tamburlaine, to the effect of scathing irony. Of course, as 'godless' anti establishmentarian, Marlowe in no way explicitly privileges any one theistic religion. The religious landscape of Tamburlaine in fact appears strangely pluralistic—and with good reason. It is through this very intermixing and multiplicity of Greek, Christian, and Islamic theological signifiers—forced into the same space in all their mutual exclusivity—that theology is reduced to mere rhetorical pyrotechnics within the play. This is acutely evident when Orcanes discovers Sigismund's betrayal, and in the breath of a single remonstration, invokes three different gods of varying faiths—Christ, Mahomet, and Cynthia (2.II.III.36-64)—the first two belonging to monotheistic traditions, the last to a polytheistic one. There is here an overt dislodging of these signifiers from their respective theological systems, and a violent yoking together within the performative context of the play. Because of their logical incompatibility, what appears to be a religious pluralism almost immediately regresses into its diametric opposite, that is, religious nihilism and a reduction of godhood to rhetoric. Marlowe therefore annexes religious discourse as rhetorical accessories that he deploys at will to satirize religion itself. The usurpation of the symbol is exacted through the resignification of these mutually incompatible theistic signifiers in a system of performative rhetoric.
The sacrilegious invocation of the gods—the use of their names in vain—is no less prevalent in Tamburlaine's effusive speeches. The name of 'Jove' is repeatedly (ab)used by Tamburlaine, for no other reason than to imbue his rhetoric with a fearful majesty, and often to establish a congruence (and even a superiority) with the monarch of the Greek tradition. At one point in the play, Tamburlaine asserts that "Jove himself will stretch his hand from heaven / To ward the blow and shield me safe from harm" (I.II.180-181), and in another he compares military projectiles to "bullets like Jove's dreadful thunderbolts" (I.II.19-20). In some scenes, Tamburlaine overtly displaces Jove in his pompous rhetoric; his assertions of power in Zenocrate's presence see him proclaiming that he would "with my sword make Jove to stoop" (1.IV.IV.73). Later, while striking rapport with the Soldan, he claims that "Jove viewing me in arms looks pale and wane, / Fearing my power should pull him from his throne" (V.II.390-391). Even more provocative is Tamburlaine's reduction of Hades to an alternate Jove—a "black Jove"(2.V.I.98). In this case the name 'Jove' has been relegated to a generic signifier whose very (supposedly transcendental) referent is susceptible to other modalities simply by attaching a predicate. As such, in all these iterations of 'Jove', its signification—of Jove's unique godhood—is effaced owing to the reproducibility of the signifier in an array of contexts, therefore culminating in a sheer disempowerment of the transcendental signified 'Jove'.
This usurpation of the signifier is made even more pronounced if we consider Tamburlaine's alleged religious affiliations—he is Muslim. He swears "by sacred Mahomet" (2.I.V.109) before meeting the Turks at the beginning of the play's second part. Yet even this deference to Mahomet is but an empty performance of piety. As the play closes, he unflinchingly apostatizes by uttering the horrific blasphemy that "Mahomet remains in hell" (2.V.I.196), reflecting in his rhetoric a waxing defiance as he grapples with his impending death. This profound duplicity reinforces the notion that Tamburlaine "borrows omnipotence from the gods and displays his power in a series of shows designed to provoke wonder" (Dawson xiv). Religious signifiers in Tamburlaine have been forcefully appropriated, deposed of their eidetic signification, and reproduced as costumes and props of a grand rhetorical performance, constituting a symbolic iconoclasm—a slaughtering of the gods—on Marlowe's part as an ideologically transgressive playright.
Paradise Possessed: The Miltonic Revolution in Paradise Lost
In a spirit of overreaching very much like that of his contemporary Marlowe, John Milton embodies, in both his ideological convictions and exploitation of the signifier, an intellectual force that threatens to destabilize the absolute presence of monolithic establishments of monarchy and English literary tradition. He is described unflatteringly as "a political controversialist, a disestablishmentarian, an enemy of bishops", a "proponent of divorce," and as a "defender of regicide" (Teskey xxvii). As heir to the literary canon, he professes to liberate the "heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming" (PL, The Verse) with his masterful use of blank verse. Therefore, as with Marlowe, we are presented with a biographical profile of Milton not only as the unabashedly radical political scientist, but also a fearless literary innovator. Paradise Lost stands as Milton's endeavor to refashion literary inheritance through the usurpation of the symbol—"an example set, the first in English" (PL, The Verse).
Heaven, Hell, and Paradise: The Dislocation of the Topographical Signifier
A noteworthy instance of symbolic usurpation that Milton performs in the poem is his dislocation of topographical signifiers and their re-location within the imagination. As it were, space as signifier is transplanted from its topographical signified and internalized as a state of mind within the psyche. It comes as no surprise that Milton channels this act of possession in the rhetoric of Satan, the prime overreacher. Fiercely indignant and reeling from his fall from Heaven, Satan boldly proclaims that "the mind is its own place and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven" (1.254-255). This conviction later mocks him in his humanized soliloquy in Book 4, wherein he mourns that "within him Hell / He brings and round abut him, nor from Hell / One step no more than from himself can fly / By change of place" (4.20-23); an exasperated Satan laments, "which way I fly is Hell, myself am Hell" (75). As he contemplates his everlasting damnation, he remarks that "the Hell I suffer seems a Heav'n" (78). Milton's discursive deconstruction of Heaven and Hell is evident here; the topographical signifiers 'Heaven' and 'Hell' are deterritorialized (from topos) and reterritorialized (aspsyche)—they come to signify mental states.
We may also notice that Paradise too undergoes this internalization, in which it is dislodged from its referent, the physical Eden, and recast in rhetoric to carry nuances of edenic disposition, or of a psychological state resembling Eden. Satan waxes indignant upon espying Adam and Eve "imparadised in each other's arms, / The happier Eden" (506-507, emphasis mine). 'Paradise' the signifier as it is used here no longer refers to the utopian Eden, but to the marital bliss of the prelapsarian couple. Additionally, at the end of Book 12, Michael counsels the postlapsarian pair, advising that they should "not be loath / To leave this Paradise but shalt possess / A paradise within thee, happier far" (12.585-586). We observe in action here a discursive reconfiguration of 'Paradise' as it transits from denoting physical Eden to connoting inner peace and contentment—over the span of two lines. Milton in Michael's voice therefore performs this translocation of the signifier from space to psychology. Ostensibly, 'Paradise' in its usurped reiterations has been decapitalized (as with God in the rhetoric of Satan and Eve), reduced to a reproducible signifier in language and psychology. This dislocation—of Heaven, Hell, and Paradise—may perhaps be conceived as a kind of indignant (and no less desperate) reprisal of the lost topographical original in the mirrored psychological signifier, which offers the afflicted an illusive authority in symbolic possession.
Milton the Revisionary: Rewriting the Myth
Turning now from the discrete linguistic signifier to the myth fragment as signifier,Paradise Lost features narratively as a pastiche in which disjointed segments of Greek mythos are interpolated in the overarching Judeo-Christian biblical discourse. Inevitably, a decontextualization (and subsequent recontextualization) of these myth fragments takes place as they are transplanted from the Greek system onto the Judeo-Christian system of signification.
There is a wealth of discursive events that are cast by Milton as typological reiterations of corresponding Greek narratives. In line with his authorial philosophy, he seeks not merely to replicate preceding successes, but to supersede them. Hence, the myths he appropriates are rewritten, as it were, and on many occasions deliberately overturned. The recasting of the Narcissus myth as Eve's recognition of her image is one such memorable instance. In "the clear / Smooth lake", Eve sees that "just opposite / A shape within the wat'ry gleam appeared / Bending to look on me"—a spectre of herself that "returned as soon with answering looks / Of sympathy and love" (458-465). Eve, like Narcissus, would have "pined with vain desire" (466) and sooner drowned embracing her watery image, if not for the intervention of a corrective Voice that warns her, advising that "what there thou seest… is thyself" (467-468). Milton symbolically possesses the Greek myth of Narcissus, but not without theologically refashioning its discourse to underscore the redemptive benevolence of the Christian God, without whose divine intervention the pagan Narcissus had suffered his untimely fate.
Perhaps the most representative instance of Milton's appropriation of classical mythological signifiers—one indubitably bound to his authorship—is his very conscious subversion of the figure of the Orphic narrator, starkly evident in his invocations to Light and Urania in Books 3 and 7 respectively. In his famous invocation to Light, Milton explicitly maintains that while he sings "of Chaos and Eternal Night" (3.18) as did Orpheus in his 'Hymn to Night' (Teskey 56), he does so "with other notes than to th' Orphean lyre" (PL 3.17). While he further underscores an authorial identity similar to Orpheus by mentioning that he "venture[s] down / The dark descent [Hell] and up to reascend / though hard and rare" (20-21)—which Orpheus himself endeavours in an attempt to reclaim his beloved Eurydice—this resemblance he repudiates with a preceding disclaimer that his (narrative) descent had been "taught by the Heavenly Muse" (19). Once again, the intrusion of the divine voice lends Milton's rhetoric a strident Christian hue that at once borrows from and rejects the Orphic myth, as well as legitimizes his pagan appropriation as a tribute to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Similarly, in his invocation to Urania the Christian muse, Orpheus is again implicitly invoked as the mythical authorial archetype, this time together with his mother, the muse Calliope. Calliope is to Orpheus what Urania is to Milton; both are muses to their respective author figures.
Nonetheless, even before the reader is led to establish this congruence relation, Milton pre-empts our intuition, and interjects, "But drive off the barbarous dissonance / Of Bacchus and his revelers, the race / Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard" (7.32-34). He later beseeches Urania in the imperative—"So fail not thou" (39), citing that unlike Calliope, who is an "empty dream" because she could not save her son, Urania is "Heav'nly" (and will therefore forestall the gruesome fate he potentially shares with Orpheus). The redemptive voice is once again featured here in Milton's revision of the Orphic narrative, and its intervention abruptly cleaves a chasm between Milton and Orpheus just as their similarities begin to coalesce. This "rejection of the analogy provides a loophole by which the narrator escapes being finalized by history"(Falconer 131), and is perhaps, at one level, a reflection of his literary ambitions to endure and outlast where his classical predecessors have been forgotten. Psychologically, it may also qualify as an attempt on Milton's part to assuage his anxieties regarding the very real prospect of punishment for his political transgressions. In his almost desperate revisions of the Orphic myth, therefore, Milton usurps and refashions the staples of the classical tradition by divorcing them from their specific historical and cultural moment. In so doing, he symbolically thwarts the Orphic tragedy not only to secure his metaphysical survival as canonical author, but also to supplant the classical pantheon with the Christian God and his redemptive light.
Lastly, though it sounds strangely postmodernist, Teskey suggests that Paradise Lost itself is "based on a contiguous or 'metonymical' principle of authority by descent from an original" (Teskey 56) that encompasses the Greek classics of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid (as well as the Bible). This in fact implies that the poem is itself a reiterated signifier, which in its proliferation has disempowered the cardinal texts in virtue of reducing (or deferring) their stable, inviolable signified to yet another empty signifier ad infinitum. This therefore stands in agreement with Milton's authorial project, in which he intends to undermine and refashion the classical literary tradition in the guise of Paradise Lost, which (ironically) finds itself borrowed and reiterated by posterity. Any act of literary allusion, adaptation, or synthesis is itself an act of usurpation.
Conclusion: Transgression and Punishment
To conclude, this discussion has explored the ways in which the alternate, transgressive ideological convictions of Marlowe and Milton may have been sublimated into the strategic enterprise of symbolic usurpation in the rhetoric ofTamburlaine and Paradise Lost. Yet it is intriguing that even in the modalities of narrative space, and despite the intellectual and political upheaval that characterized early modern England, these authors appear to stand fast by what is believed to be the natural (or even plainly logical) dictum of lex talionis or retributive justice [3] :transgression against the powers that be must not go unpunished. Tamburlaine's eventual and almost necessary demise following the burning of the Koran, and Milton's fixation on the motif of (his) blindness and manifestations of the fall gesture towards an authorial awareness of potential reckoning even as they attempt to contravene and refashion the old world order in discourse. Therefore, their works—while rife with ideological upheaval—demonstrate a foresight that tempers these authors' revolutionary impulses with a self-effacing ambivalence.
Kenneth is a recent NUS graduate (2013) in English Literature, with a second major in Philosophy. As someone easily fascinated by patterns and systems seen and unseen, his academic interests lie largely in structuralist criticism that spans across language, psychology, and myth. He is especially drawn to depth psychology (Jung and Freud) and the psychology of space—discourses that struggle to chart the geography of inner worlds. Kenneth also has a soft spot for literatures of the English Renaissance and the classical Greek tradition. And World of Warcraft too.
[1] Saussure himself observes that "concepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but negatively by their relations with the other terms of the system" (Saussure 85). This principle of differentiality implies that meaning is not eidetically contained within the signifier (as in Platonic referentiality), but derives from differences between signifiers.
[2] While iterability constitutes the basis of deconstruction, I refrain from explicitly invoking the process here because my chief focus is not so much the collapse of binary concepts into each other, but the vacuity of the repeated signifier as a result of the property of iterability.
[3] Lex talionis or the law of retaliation, is legitimized in Old Testament of the Bible (see Exodus 21:23-24), although the punitive Mosaic Law is often perceived as superseded by the teachings of Christ (see the Gospels, Matthew 5:38-39 and Luke 6:27-29).
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