The Gift of Fire: Aggression and the Plays of Christopher Marlowe.

In The Gift of Fire, Matthew N. Proser "speak[s] in a post-Freudian manner" (2) in order to explore "aggression" as a failed "creative" catalyst in a selection of troubled and fragmentary plays by Christopher Marlowe. View but his picture in this tragic glass, and applaud his fortunes as you please.

Proser's manner is post-Freudian "by specifying the nature of the wish that the fantasy fulfills and by understanding that the fantasy can be a specific scenario meant to overcome a sexual trauma rather than simply a wish fulfillment": "Marlowe's works contain an 'acting out' of his inner trauma in order to triumph over it" (196-97). Thus Proser complements Kuriyama's (and to a lesser extent Barber's) Freudian study of the Oedipal complex producing Marlowe's "homosexuality" (186) by "refocusing the shape of the Oedipal story" - "Oedipus' most primitive unconscious motive [being] retaliatory aggression against authority figures perceived as destructive, an impulse characteristic in Marlowe's plays" (3).

Specifically, Proser contends that Marlowe's "inability to achieve complete authoritative integration in his plays is due to a failure or insufficiency of 'executive ego'" - that "arbiter of artistic destiny" that "controls and shapes the imagination to larger ends" (6). Proser believes that "this failure or insufficiency relates to the way in which [Marlowe] deployed aggression in his dramas"; he discovers that this "problem has psychological roots in his life experience"; and he attempts to "demonstrate Marlowe's deployment of aggression in relationship to the evolution of form in his plays" (6).

To pursue this project, Proser divides his study into two parts. In part one, he looks at the well-known record of Marlowe's biography - especially of Marlowe's turbulent family life unearthed by William Urry - through a relatively new lens for Marlowe studies: recent theory about both aggression and the creative process. He argues that the "Promethean gift of fire" in Marlowe's psychic inheritance was the fire of "Rage," and that the dramatist's "genius" lay in (and was inhibited by) his (in)ability to shape "anger into art" (48). In part two, Proser plots a "developmental" order for five of Marlowe's plays that "best illustrates" a "process of maturation and growing control" (68-69), with chapters on Tamburlaine I, Tamburlaine II, The Jew of Malta, and Doctor Faustus, and with two final chapters on Edward II.

Through both this focus on selected plays and its "post-Freudian" methodology, The Gift of Fire needlessly dampens its otherwise warm import. Proser offers no justification for absenting himself from nearly half of Marlowe's canon (Dido, Queen of Carthage, The Massacre at Paris, and Marlowe's poetry, especially Hero and Leander but also translations of Ovid and Lucan). Absent, too, is any self-consciousness about the limitations of psychoanalytic criticism, as marshaled, say, by Greenblatt to advance the new historicism, but ably defended by Elizabeth Bellamy in service of Lacan (who is also absent here). Missing, finally, is a map to psychoanalytic criticism on Marlowe; such a map would have highlighted Proser's originality and allowed him to respond to arguments challenging his own - Peter Donaldson's, for instance ("Marlowe's innovation in tragic form" is "his tragedy of fragmentation").

I wonder, too, when Marlowe's psychoanalytic critics will begin probing what is palpably in the text - not John or Katherine Marlowe or Kit's dead brothers or his surviving sisters but such specters as the dead Ovid or the living Spenser. The dynamic of relation in Marlowe's works is not just biologically Oedipal but professionally Oedipal as well. Why, for example, does Proser's methodology not permit him to consider the reasons behind Tamburlaine, in his "Oedipal" grief over Zenocrate's death (96-97), talking about Ovid, of all people?

Despite limitations, The Gift of Fire remains an important contribution to Marlowe studies. Written by a former President of the Marlowe Society, it fascinates and informs in its disciplined attempt to understand both the psychic origins of Marlowe's drama and the actual shape that the drama took. Proser's psychological profile is persuasive: "the powers marshaled against the Marlovian hero derive . . . from the human insufficiencies of John and Katherine Marlowe . . . from Marlowe's vicissitudes as a boy brought up with girls . . . from the inner fears . . . connected with his siblings' deaths [and] . . . from the magnification of these insufficiencies and vicissitudes effected by the primal emotions with which Marlowe must have reacted to experience in his childish fantasy" (200). The Marlowe who emerges is thus a heroically tragic one: "Marlowe's most profound sense of himself . . . seems to be that of someone straining for an identity . . . against the most tremendous . . . odds . . . . Herein lies the special tragic dimension of his work": Marlowe's "ritual" contest against "feelings of doom" (198-201).

This is a tragic glass indeed, and I'm pleased to applaud his fortunes.

PATRICK CHENEY Pennsylvania State University