Stage prayer in Marlowe and Jonson.

Cox, John D.

Prayer is a distinctive speech act that appears everywhere and in many forms in early modern plays, including Shakespeare's. (1) This is not because playwrights were particularly pious but because they wrote in the speech of their time, in which prayer had long since become a familiar habit--not only in church but also in the privacy of ones home, in everyday speech, in theological controversy, and in the theatre. (2) Prayer included everything from simple petitions for personal favors to formation of the self before God in richly poetic language, as numerous English translations of the Hebrew psalms make clear, to say nothing of the poetry of John Donne and George Herbert. (3) In writing prayers, playwrights for the early commercial stage in London followed long-standing precedent from the beginning of playwriting in English. In the fifteenth-century Towneley Plays from the north of England, a gifted anonymous playwright imagined the distinctive sacrifices by Cain and Abel, with each of the brothers praying as he makes his offering. The same playwright had Herod pray anachronistically to "Mahowne" (Mohammed). In the earliest extant commercial play in English, called simply Mankind, a talented anonymous author in fifteenth-century East Anglia made prayer the focus of his generic story of Christian formation. In the Digby Mary Magdalen, also from East Anglia, near the turn of the sixteenth century, Mary the sister of Lazarus recognizes the divinity of Jesus and prays to him on behalf of her brother. More than a century after the Towneley Herod first prayed to Mohammed, Marlowe's Tamburlaine followed his example--albeit with unprecedented defiance and ambiguity.

Each playwright's way of imagining prayer is distinctive, and this essay will consider Marlowe's and Jonson's, which contrast illuminatingly not only with each other but also with the diverse and inventive prayers written by Shakespeare. (4) Marlowe's contribution was a mordant way of treating prayer that nearly always undermined it. Caustic skepticism is fully formed in the blockbuster called Tamburlaine that introduced Marlowe stunningly to the London theatre scene earlier than Shakespeare, though both playwrights were born in the same year and in the same social stratum. Many people pray in Tamburlaine, Part 1, but Tamburlaine himself is not one of them. He speaks and acts with an audacity that had been traditionally associated with overweening villains, implicitly denying the supplicatory gestures of those who pray, yet he pays no price for his actions and attitude; on the contrary, his boasts are unanswered, and his conquests are inexorable. His lover Zenocrate fears for him, voicing moral trepidation as she intercedes on his behalf with "mighty Jove and holy Mahomet" because Tamburlaine is so violent and merciless:

   Pardon my love, O, pardon his contempt
   Of earthly fortune and respect of pity,
   And let not conquest ruthlessly pursued
   Be equally against his life incensed
   In this great Turk and hapless emperess! (5)

Her prayer assumes that overweening ambition will inevitably be punished, and she asks that the inevitable not happen to Tamburlaine. Her petition is granted in that he conquers unharmed, but given Tamburlaine's defiant rhetoric and unhindered triumph, the point is that her prayer exhibits effeminate weakness and a misunderstanding on her part of where the true power of the world (and of the play) lies--not with Jove or Mahomet but with Tamburlaine himself. That is why Tamburlaine does not pray.

Prayer in 2 Tamburlaine is more complex than in the first play. On one hand, the ambiguities surrounding prayer continue. Sigismond, for example, who is the treacherous defender of Constantinople against the Turks, dies after his Muslim opponent, Orcanes, prays to the Christian God for his Christian enemy's destruction:

   Thou Christ, that art esteemed omnipotent,
   If thou wilt prove thyself a perfect God
   Worthy the worship of all faithful hearts,
   Be now revenged upon this traitors soul,
   And make the power I have left behind
   (Too little to defend our guiltless lives)
   Sufficient to discomfort and confound
   The trustless force of those false Christians. (2.2.55-62)

This prayer is not sardonic, but its circumstances certainly are: a Turk prays to Christ, asking for vengeance on an untrustworthy Christian, who is destroyed in the ensuing battle. The sequence of events vindicates Christ as Orcanes describes him: perfect and worthy of worship because he destroys a perfidious Christian on behalf of a Muslim. (6)

On the other hand, 2 Tamburlaine is innovative in that the overweening hero himself prays three times, and his prayers connote a vulnerability that he does not show in 1 Tamburlaine. His first prayer is a plea addressed to the spirit of Zenocrate, whose death he has been unable to prevent. He speaks to her as if she were a god, not to deify her but to grieve the unprecedented helplessness he feels in the face of her loss, for her possession by the gods means that she does not belong to him:

   What god soever holds thee in his arms,
   Giving thee nectar and ambrosia,
   Behold me here, divine Zenocrate,
   Raving, impatient, desperate, and mad,
   Breaking my steeled lance with which I burst
   The rusty beams of Janus' temple doors,
   Letting out death and tyrannizing war
   To march with me under this bloody flag;
   And if thou pitiest Tamburlaine the Great,
   Come down from heaven and live with me again! (2.4.109-18)

For the first time, Tamburlaine has discovered a rival he cannot defeat, namely death. His jealousy of the gods in this prayer is expressly erotic, and the eroticism is closely tied to power--as "potent" and "impotent" suggest--but also implicitly to death as defeat, before which even Tamburlaine is powerless.

He addresses his second prayer to Jove, whose power he acknowledges, blames, threatens, and challenges in the same breath. The circumstances in this case involve the death of his son, Calyphas, whom Tamburlaine himself stabs to death after Calyphas's laziness and insolence infuriate his peremptory father. Yet Calyphas has clearly learned from Tamburlaine, who offers the example of insolence in a prayer to Jove, asserting his own divine substance:

   Made of the mould whereof thyself consists,
   Which makes me valiant, proud, ambitious,
   Ready to levy power against thy throne,
   That I might move the turning spheres of heaven. (4.1.114-17)

Acknowledging the god's superior power, Tamburlaine blames Jove at the same time for making Calyphas out of poorer material--

   Created of the massy dregs of earth,
   The scum and tartar of the elements,
   Wherein was neither courage, strength, or wit,
   But folly, sloth, and damned idleness. (4.1.122-25)

By creating such an inferior being, he concludes, Jove has made Tamburlaine a more determined enemy of the gods than the Titans were when they made war on Olympus (4.1.126-28). This is not a prayer of gratitude, petition, praise, or any other recognized category for addressing the gods, but simply of open challenge, raising "high astounding terms" to audacious defiance (1 Tamburlaine, Prologue, 5).

Despite the many setbacks he endures in the second play, culminating in his own death, Tamburlaine continually flouts the gods, especially in his third and final prayer. Having blasphemously burned the Quran as a deliberate affront, Tamburlaine addresses Mahomet as if he were a god, defying him to "work a miracle" and claiming that he is "not worthy to be worshipped / That suffers flames of fire to burn the writ / Wherein the sum of thy religion rests" (5.1.187-89). Marlowe's intended parallel with Christianity is clear (Islam neither regards Mohammed as divine nor claims that the sum of Islamic teaching is in the Quran), and the parallel continues in Tamburlaine's daring prayer:

   Why send'st thou not a furious whirlwind down
   To blow thy Alcoran up to thy throne
   Where men report thou sitt'st by God himself,
   Or vengeance on the head of Tamburlaine,
   That shakes his sword against thy majesty
   And spurns the abstracts of thy foolish laws? (5.1.190-95)

Tamburlaine's death is not an obvious consequence of his actions, as most late-sixteenth-century Christians would have assumed it should be. The play offers little explicit support for the possibility--feared by the morally sensitive Zenocrate--that Tamburlaine's ultimate failure is a result of Jove's sending vengeance on the head of Tamburlaine for his audacity. He is undoubtedly more vulnerable in the second play than in the first, but his attitude toward the gods has little if anything to do with his vulnerability. Like brilliant fireworks in the night sky, he ascends rapidly, makes an awe-inspiring spectacle, and then disappears, undone not by anything outside himself but simply by the expenditure of his own titanic energy.

The sardonic context of prayer in Tamburlaine yields to sardonic prayer itself in Dr. Faustus, when Faustus prays to the devil:

   Be propitious to me, gods of Acheron! Let the threefold spirit of
   Jehovah be strong! Hail to thee, spirits of fire, air, water, and
   earth! Lucifer, thou prince of the East, Beelzebub, thou monarch of
   fiery hell, and Demogorgon, we beseech you that Mephistopheles may
   appear and rise. Why do you delay? By Jehovah, Gehenna, and the
   holy water I now sprinkle, and by the sign of the cross I now make,
   and by our prayers, may Mephistopheles himself arise at our
   command! (1.13.16-22n) (7)

By having Faustus appeal to demons in a spoof of Catholic ritual, Marlowe appealed to English prejudice in the wake of the Armada victory and at the same time managed to mock prayer itself by inviting laughter at its reenactment on stage. Faustus again prays to a devil when he appeals to Mephistopheles: "Come, Mephistopheles.... / Come, Mephistopheles! / Veni, veni, Mephistophile!" (2.1.26-29). Prayer yields to mere conversation, however, in the dialogue that ensues between the magician and his demonic assistant. Shakespeare's analogues come much later, in conversations between Macbeth and the witches' "masters" and again between Prospero and Ariel. (8)

Over the course of the play, Faustus's prayers to demons eventually yield to desperate but unavailing pleas to Christ. "Ah, Christ, my Saviour, / Seek to save distressed Faustus' soul!" (2.3.81-82). The only response to this prayer is that three devils appear: Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Mephistopheles (2.3.82 s.d.). Moreover, the Good Angel leaves the stage just before Faustus's appeal to Christ. The entry of three devils is unsettling for several reasons, not least because it raises questions about the truth of what the Evil Angel has just claimed--that it is "too late" for Faustus to repent (2.3.77). If it is indeed too late, the devils should not need to be concerned about whether they possess Faustus's soul. The Good Angel is contrastingly reassuring: "Never too late, if Faustus can repent" (78). Yet the assurance too is ambiguous: in immediate context it appears to have greater credibility than the Evil Angel's threatening description of Faustuss perilous condition, but only devils appear in response to Faustus s prayers, and the Evil Angel is right in the long run, because Faustus does not in fact repent.

Fate in the play, having enjoyed oddly sophomoric pleasures by the devil's means, Faustus seems to have second thoughts about his bold apostasy. "Ay, pray for me, pray for me!" he urges his fellow Wittenberg scholars, and then again in apparent despair, "And what noise soever ye hear, come not unto me, for nothing can rescue me" (5.2.50-51). The Second Scholar tries to reassure him: "Pray thou, and we will pray that God may have mercy upon thee" (53). This seems to be another assurance that divine grace is adequate to answer Faustuss prayer, but the Evil Angel's earlier assertion that Faustus cannot repent haunts the play's ending. "Ah, my Christ!" he pleads again (5.2.71), echoing his earlier prayer, but he also calls in sequence on the horses of the night, the devils, the mountains to come and fall on him, the earth that he might run into it, and the stars that reigned at his nativity. These prayers heighten his tragic stature in the starkness of their appeal, but they also reinforce the ambiguity of what prayer means in Dr. Faustus. His most direct appeal for God's mercy apparently goes unanswered:

   If thou wilt not have mercy on my soul,
   Yet for Christ's sake, whose blood hath ransomed me,
   Impose some end to my incessant pain.
   Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,
   A hundred thousand, and at last be saved. (5.2.91-95)

His final prayer, echoing Christ on the cross, clarifies nothing except his desperation: "My God, my God, look not so fierce on me!" (5.2.112). (9)

In The Jew of Malta, Marlowe recalled a pattern he had invented for an episode in 2 Tamburlaine and made a variation of it work for an entire play. The pattern is set by Orcanes's non-Christian prayer to the Christian God for the defeat of Sigismond, a treacherous Christian; in The Jew of Malta, a non-Christian (Barabas) prays for success to the God of the Bible in competing with a treacherous Christian (Ferneze), but the non-Christian loses. Unresolvable skeptical questions underlie this device: in 2 Tamburlaine, does God favor the Christian who presumably believes in God but who loses, or the non-Christian who presumably does not believe in the Christian God but who wins? In The Jew of Malta, does God favor a non-Christian who loses in a competition with a faithless Christian, or does God favor the Christian who lies and cheats with impunity? Neither play states its skepticism so openly, but both implicitly make the point.

In any case, no one in The few of Malta prays more than Barabas himself does, and he addresses many deities in the manner of Faustus--not all of them spiritual entities. Once, he unmistakably addresses the God of Israel on behalf of his daughter, Abigail:

   O Thou, that with a fiery pillar led'st
   The sons of Israel through the dismal shades,
   Light Abraham's offspring, and direct the hand
   Of Abigail this night! (2.1.12-15)

He prays for Abigail because she is assisting him: pretending to convert to Christianity, she has taken the vows of a nun in order to gain access to Barabas's former house, which Christian authorities have seized and turned into a convent. Her motive is to retrieve the gold and jewels that Barabas had hidden there and to return them to him, giving him necessary collateral in recovering his wealth after the city had seized his assets because he was a Jew. The success of this enterprise might indicate that God favors it, but Barabas curses his enemies by calling on "thou great Primus Motor" (1.2.165) when his wealth is first seized, and he addresses the "partial heavens" and "luckless stars" (1.2.260-61) when he asks for supernatural assistance. In similarly vague terms, he conventionally addresses the rising sun as "Phoebus" (2.1.60) in gratitude for the recovery of his wealth. His final prayer is a long curse on Abigail, directed to no one in particular (3.4.97-106), after she falls in love with a Christian and converts because Barabas murdered her lover. (10) Whether petitions are addressed successfully to the God of the Bible on behalf of recovering ill-gotten wealth, or to anything but God for any other reason, they are defined in The Jew of Malta by sardonic irony.

For the first time in Edward II, Marlowe uses prayer for a more complex purpose than satirical wit. This is something he may have learned from Shakespeare in the Henry VI plays, where Marlowe also seems to have discovered what a playwright could do with English history. (11) Marlowe's Earl of Kent initially quarrels with his brother, King Edward, but he regrets his anger when Mortimer openly rebels against the King, prompting Kent to pray for God's punishment on himself for doubting his brother:

   Proud traitor, Mortimer, why dost thou chase
   Thy lawful king, thy sovereign, with thy sword?
   Vile wretch, and why hast thou, of all unkind,
   Borne arms against thy brother and thy king?
   Rain showers of vengeance on my cursed head,
   Thou God, to whom in justice it belongs
   To punish this unnatural revolt! (4.6.3-9)

The prayer is complicated by its context. Kent disagreed with Edward initially because of Edward's favoritism toward his friend Gaveston, who is both a commoner and Edward's lover. When Kent repents his disagreement before God, he implicitly sets aside the reasons for his dispute with the king, so he regrets his prejudices based on social class and gender preference (to use familiar modern terms).

Prayer becomes increasingly fraught in Edward II when the king himself appeals to God. His prayers again are not satirical, but their context challenges received notions of why people prayed. Brought to bay at last by his relentless enemy Mortimer, Edward ambivalently offers to acquiesce in Winchesters demand that he give up his power. He removes his crown, puts it on again, rages at his persecutors, and removes the crown once more, resigning it finally with a prayer:

      Now, sweet God of heaven,
   Make me despise this transitory pomp
   And sit for aye enthronized in heaven!
   Come, Death, and with thy fingers close my eyes,
   Or if I live, let me forget myself. (5.1.107-11)

Despite the double address to both God and Death, the prayer is a single request for resignation in the face of defeat. Circumstances are not kind to Edward, however, and his response is not consistently submissive. When Matrevis and Gurney forcibly shave his beard so he will be harder for would-be rescuers to recognize, the King is less resigned than vindictive, making his prayer almost a curse:

   Immortal powers, that knows the painful cares
   That waits upon my poor distressed soul,
   O, level all your looks upon these daring men
   That wrongs their liege and sovereign, England's king. (5.3.37-40)

He utters his final prayer just before he dies: "Assist me, sweet God, and receive my soul!" (5.5.109). This prayer evokes more sympathy for him than any other, but his request for divine assistance would appear to be completely unavailing, given the cruel and torturous way he is murdered.

About five years after Marlowe's own untimely death, a new kind of comedy was staged in London by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the acting company to which Shakespeare belonged as financial investor, actor, and playwright. The new play was Ben Jonson's Every Man In His Humour, and whether Shakespeare was instrumental in selecting it for the company's repertoire, as Nicholas Rowe reports, he must have known it well, judging from the Folio edition, which prints a list of actors in the 1598 production, including Shakespeare. (12) Jonson's principal innovations were his keen satirical observation of human foibles in imitation of ancient Latin writers and his following of Italian neo-classical expectations for the well-made play. (13) Unlike Marlowe, who aimed his satiric wit at prayer itself, Jonson delighted in exposing human weakness of every kind, including what he saw as the wrong use of prayer. He regarded its right use seriously enough to include a prayer addressed to God the Father among his published poems--one of just two devotional poems in the entire collection. His satiric incisiveness is evident in an observation about prayer that he recorded in Discoveries: "Affliction teacheth a wicked person some time to pray: prosperity never." There seems no reason to doubt the sincerity of Jonson's generous memorial tribute to Sir Francis Bacon in the same work: "In his adversity I ever prayed that God would give him strength; for greatness he could not want." (14)

Every Man In His Humour was not Jonson's first play, but it was his first success on stage, and it encouraged him to write a counterpart, Every Man Out of His Humour, which includes a satire of hypocrisy in prayer. Following contemporary usage by all playwrights, Jonson consistently registers vestiges of pre-Reformation prayers in the oaths used by his characters ("By'r Lady," "Marry," etc.), indicating how customary and unthinking such expressions had become. Jonson, however, is more attentive than Shakespeare to their casual use in fashionable swearing. Knowell describes Stephen in Every Man In His Humour as one of those who "hulf it, with a kind of carriage" (1.2.29), and Stephen proves him right, demonstrating his pretension to gentlemanly status by using three imprecations ("by gad's lid," "i'faith," "'slid") in a comment on the way he thinks gallants ought to speak (1.1.40-44). Buffone urges Sogliardo to do the same in Every Man Out: "Learn to play at primero and passage; and, ever when you lose, ha' two or three peculiar oaths to swear by, that no man else swears" (1.2.39-41). (15) Jonson places oaths in the mouth of every character in the Induction to Every Man Out except Asper, who is, in some sense, a humorless version of Jonson. (16)

Two examples will serve to illustrate how conscious Jonson was--and how conscious he must have wanted his audience to be--of the difference between the solemn asseveration, with its strong kinship to prayer, and empty expletive. Railing against the latter, Asper asserts that not one among those who utter "perj'rous air," i.e., who misuse oaths, but knows evil well:

   Knows what damnation is, the devil, and hell;
   Yet hourly they persist, grow rank in sin,
   Puffing their souls away in perj'rous air
   To cherish their extortion, pride, or lusts. (EMO, Ind. 31-34)

In contrast, he asserts,

   Good men and virtuous spirits that loathe their vices
   Will cherish my free labours, love my lines,
   And with the fervour of their shining grace
   Make my brain fruitful to bring forth more objects
   Worthy their serious and intentive eyes. (EMO, Ind. 133-37)

Jonson frequently puns, as Shakespeare does, on "grace" (135) as divine favor, personal good will, and social refinement. Stephen ironically means the latter when he laments that his inability to swear like Bobadil has "not the right grace" (EMI, 3.5.105), but at the same time his foolish behavior makes clear that he also lacks divine favor and personal good will. When he exclaims "as I have somewhat to be saved" (112) and "as I am a gentleman" (117) in the same conversation, he makes clear that he is not graceful, he is no gentleman, and he may not have a soul worth saving.

Jonson makes the same point about the misuse of oaths earlier in Every Man Out, when the jealous Kitely contemplates asking Cash to watch Dame Kitely. The anxious husband worries about acknowledging that he is jealous of his wife and therefore tries to make Cash swear an oath not to reveal a secret before Kitely tells him what it is. He wonders aloud to himself whether Cash takes oaths seriously:

   [Aside] He will not swear. He has some reservation,
   Some concealed purpose and close meaning, sure;
   Else, being urged so much, how should he choose
   But lend an oath to all this protestation?
   He's no precisian, that I am certain of,
   Nor rigid Roman Catholic. He'll play
   At fayles and tick-tack; I have heard him swear. (EMI, 3.3.84-90)

"Fayles and tick-tack" are variations on backgammon that Kitely identifies as typical of men about town who swear readily, unlike men with strong religious commitments--Puritan or Roman Catholic. He conflates "swear" (expletive) and "swear" (solemn oath), as if they were equivalent. The pun is deliberate on Jonsons part, suggesting that people of religious scruple take the content of oaths seriously, though they are empty ("perj'rous air") at the same time for men about town who swear without regard for the meaning of their words. The passage is important as an indication of what Jonson thought his auditors would likely assume about oaths in the late sixteenth century. The later ban against oaths on stage, issued by parliament in 1606, indicates that governing authorities saw the same distinction: despite common swearing, they took oaths seriously, as having content, and therefore banned them from stage dialogue. (17)

Paralleling the distinction between serious oaths and mere expletives in Every Man Out, Jonson also implicitly distinguishes genuine from perfunctory prayers. In making both distinctions, however, he imagines only the "false" version of these two kinds of speech act on stage. The farmer Sordido is consistently associated with self-interested prayer. When he first enters, he exclaims that the almanac he is reading favors him: "I thank my Christ, I thank my Christ for it" (EMO, 1.3.1-2). This is an exclamation of delight in the form of a profane prayer, uttered complacently because Sordido has had a good harvest and is hoarding it for greater profit, so he is pleased to read that the prediction is for rain during the next harvest. He thus expresses extreme self-interest on the principle that only well-stocked farmers flourish in a poor season. Jonsons description of Sordido makes the point clear: "one that never prayed but for a lean dearth, and ever wept in a fat harvest" (Cambridge, 1:257).

Warned about new legislation against hoarding, Sordido never considers compliance but thinks only of how he might conceal his store, congratulating himself self-interestedly in the form of a prayer, because the legislation will make his stockpile all the more valuable: "O, good again, past expectation good! / I thank my blessed angel!" (1.3.45-46). Using the rhetoric of prayer, he recites a charm in praise of the almanac that has made him think he will be prosperous in the future:

   Blest be the hour wherein I bought this book,
   His studies happy that composed the book,
   And the man fortunate that sold the book.
   Sleep with this charm, and be as true to me
   As I am joyed and confident in thee. (1.3.52-56)

Predictably, Sordido's good fortune does not materialize. He enters later in the play with a rope around his neck, determined to hang himself because harvests are plentiful after all, despite the almanacs predictions. He condemns prognosticators and hangs himself. He is indeed fortunate, however, in that five countrymen rescue him before he suffocates. Full of gratitude for his reprieve, Sordido repents and promises to be generous to the poor thereafter. He concludes his conversion with a couplet: "Now I prove, / 'No life is blest that is not graced with love" (3.2.100-101). It is an unusual moment of "grace" for a Jonsonian fool.

Sordido's habit of profane prayer is also learned by his son, Fungoso, who aspires to be a man about town. Hoping to trick his father into paying for his urban escapades, Fungoso prays for success: "God send me good luck! Lord, ant be thy will, prosper it. O Jesu, now, now, if it take--O Christ--I am made forever!" (2.2.220-21). Fungoso's swearing is generally indistinguishable from others', but occasionally he departs from the norm with expletives that are nearly prayers: "for God's sake" (3.1.236), "Pray God it do not" (238), "for the love of Christ" (242). Just before he hangs himself, Sordido receives a note from Fungoso asking for more money. The letter closes with a blatantly self-interested prayer: "I humbly ask you blessing, and pray God to bless you" (3.2.32-33). Fungoso wants his father to give him money to buy more fashionable clothing, but his request for funds arrives at the nadir of Sordido's despair, helping comically to send him over the edge. Fungoso fares little better himself. Caught while trying to hide during a tavern raid, he is forced to pay the bill for others' extravagance. His brother-in-law Deliro covers Fungoso's debt in a vain effort to recover the good will of Fallace, Deliro's wife, who is Fungoso's sister. The last we hear from Fungoso is his declaration that he is out of humor with court imitation (5.5.2-4). As his father Sordido fails in the country, Fungoso in town reaches the end of good fortune and determines to amend his life--an undeserved outcome that neither father nor son prayed for.

Indeed, Jonson's early plays are marked by no good prayers, just as they are marked by "perj'rous air" but no honest oaths. The principal difference in the later plays is that the grace granted to the likes of Sordido and Fungoso disappears, as the playwright gives no quarter to those who sport with crimes. He is explicit about this point in his interpretation of Sejanus, one of his two tragedies, in light of the providential dispensation of just rewards: "This do we advance as a mark of terror to all traitors and treasons, to show how just the heavens are in pouring and thundering down a weighty vengeance on their unnatural intents, even to the worst princes; much more to those for guard of whose piety and virtue the angels are in continual watch, and God himself miraculously working." (18) The rhetoric of this remark suggests the continuity in moral thinking between Jonson's tragedy, comical satire, and court masques. Bonario's line in Volpone would appear to express the author's sentiment precisely: "Heaven could not long let such gross crimes be hid" (5.12.98).

Gross crimes presume gross criminals, in both comedy and tragedy, and one of the many points Volpone and Sejanus have in common is that the cynicism and self-obsession of the title characters surprisingly coexists with their inclination to pray. Sejanus utters a brief prayer in Edemus's garden, where he awaits a meeting with Livia, wife of Drusus: "Prosper it, Pallas, thou that better'st wit; / For Venus hath the smallest share in it" (1.1.373-74). His point is that he hopes to meet Livia in order to plan Drusus's murder with her, not to make a sexual liaison. The first prayer in Sejanus thus satirically illustrates still another misuse of prayer: asking heaven to prosper a deadly purpose. Volpone's most infamous prayer is less murderous than Sejanus's but no less perverse, when he begins the play with twenty-four blasphemous lines in praise and worship of his gold, "the world's soul and mine" (1.1.3). (19) The prayer is a brilliant parody of religious language addressed not to a deity but to material gain: "let me kiss, / With adoration, thee, and every relic / Of sacred treasure in this blessed room" (11-13). In both Sejanus and Volpone, consummately clever villains make their moral limitations evident by directing prayer to corrupt and self-serving ends.

Volpone prays several more times in the course of his gradual undoing, but none of his subsequent prayers has the sacrilegious panache of his first one, and all indicate his gradually increasing frustration and ineffectiveness. In the scene just after Moscas first hint of treachery to his master, Volpone responds to a knock at his door, hoping in a prayer to the god of love that Mosca has returned with Corvino's wife, Celia, whom Volpone hopes to seduce: "Now, Cupid / Send it be Mosca, and with fair return!" (3.3.22-23). But Nano announces a most unwelcome visitor, Lady Politic Would-Be, prompting Volpone's ironic concern that his loathing of the announced guest will "quite expel my appetite to the other" (29). The suggestion of impotence perfectly correlates Volpone's sexual appetite with his avarice. In a hilarious scene with Lady Politic, Volpone ironically becomes the victim, unable to escape her inane verbal assaults and compelled to pray for deliverance: "My good angel save me!" (3.4.115). As if sensing his frustration, she fondly recalls a man who used to listen to her for hours on end, prompting still another prayer by Volpone: "Some power, some fate, some fortune rescue me!" (126). His petition is granted with the entry of Mosca, whom Volpone greets with relief: "Welcome to my redemption!" (3.5.2). Both Moscas entry as "good angel" and Volpone's way of greeting him are deeply ironic, given Volpones materialistic obsession and Moscas treachery, which will undo Volpone in the end. The plays two principal rascals again refer cynically to prayer after a scene of comic confusion and repeated tricky reinterpretation of events by Mosca, who at last turns to Volpone, "Patron, go in and pray for our success" (3.9.62), to which Volpone responds cynically, "Need makes devotion. Heaven your labour bless!" (63). (20)

As for Sejanus, after he breathes his brief prayer to Pallas Athena, he is less inclined than Volpone to call on anyone for assistance. Shaken by Tiberius's refusal to let him marry the emperors daughter and knowing apprehension for the first time after Macro has hinted at serious trouble for him ahead, Sejanus abuses the gods in a fit of self-reproach for his concern. Though he addresses his complaint to the gods, he does not actually pray so much as try to reassure himself, as he hyperbolically calls for apocalyptic consequences if he again feels any trepidation:

      By you, that fools call gods,
   Hang all the sky with your prodigious signs,
   Fill earth with monsters, drop the Scorpion down
   Out of the zodiac, or the fiercer Lion,
   Shake off the loosened globe from her long hinge,
   Roll all the world in darkness, and let loose
   Thenraged winds to turn up groves and towns!
   When I do fear again, let me be struck
   With forked fire, and unpitied die. (5.390-98)

He indeed dies unpitied, brought down by the machinations of Tiberius and Macro, but not by a renewal of his own fear.

Most of the prayers in Sejanus are uttered by Arruntius, a choric consul who escapes tyrannical oppression by lying low and being lucky: his interlocutors at the beginning of the play, Silius and Sabinus, are arrested for treason in act 3 because of their sympathy for the party of Germanicus. Not surprisingly, Arruntius wonders to himself, "May I pray to Jove / In secret, and be safe?" (4.300-301). His early prayer sets the tone for the others: "In the meantime, Jove, ... Of all wild beasts, preserve me from a tyrant; / And of all tame, a flatterer!" (1.435-38). Commenting on the senators' flattering prayers for Tiberius, Arruntius also comments pointedly on prayer itself. In response to their praise of Tiberius's modesty, wisdom, and innocence, Arruntius asks himself, "Where is't? / The prayer's made before the subject" (3.144-45). (21) When the senators pray to Jove to guard Tiberius's bounty, Arruntius rejoins, "And his subtlety, I'll put in--/ Yet he'll keep that himself, without the gods. / All prayers are vain for him" (147-49). Most striking is Arruntius's indignation with the gods for their forbearance and inaction in the face of unchecked corruption. His outburst is a moral counterpart to Sejanus's later expostulation on his own fear:

   Still dost thou suffer, heav'n? Will no flame,
   No heat of sin make thy just wrath to boil
   In thy distempered bosom, and o'erflow
   The pitchy blazes of impiety
   Kindled beneath thy throne? Still canst thou sleep,
   Patient, while vice doth make an antic face
   At thy dread power, and blow dust and smoke

   Into thy nostrils? Jove, will nothing wake thee?
   Must vile Sejanus pull thee by the beard
   Ere thou wilt open thy black-lidded eye,
   And look him dead? Well, snore on, dreaming gods,
   And let this last of that proud giant race
   Heave mountain upon mountain gainst your state.
   Be good unto me, Fortune, and you powers
   Whom I, expostulating, have profaned. (4.259-73)

The addressee is Jove, but the genre is the jeremiad, named for the beleaguered Hebrew prophet who lamented Israels suffering in captivity and wondered--though never as rudely as Arruntius does--when Yahweh would do something about it.

Early modern prayer would seem to be so habitual as to be perfunctory, but in style the prayers invented by Marlowe and Jonson are quite distinct, reflecting each playwrights way of thinking and writing. Stage prayer per se was hardly new in the late sixteenth century, but the London stage supplied an unprecedented opportunity for playwrights to learn from each other as they competed in selling their scripts to commercial acting companies. (22) Marlowe was the first playwright to treat prayer itself skeptically. Though his political and social context prevented him from mocking Christian prayer directly, he pilloried appeals made by adherents of the other Abrahamic faiths, no matter how sincere their speakers might be, and he left strong indications of his own skepticism about prayer. Jonson, on the other hand, published at least one prayer among his poems and made clear in various comments that he practiced prayer himself as a faithful Catholic. But Jonson was merciless in imagining hypocritical prayers, and he was endlessly inventive in writing comically self-deceived petitions addressed to heaven. Though spontaneous prayer was often associated with Puritans, who eschewed the set forms of The Book of Common Prayer, Marlowe and Jonson consistently imagined all prayer as spontaneous, thereby marking this particular speech act with their characteristic voices.

Hope College

NOTES

(1) The only play by Shakespeare that omits prayer is King John, where John's threat against Angiers takes the form of a prayer ("Then God forgive the sin of all those souls" [2.1.283]) but nonetheless remains merely a threat. All references to Shakespeare's plays are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997) and are cited parenthetically by act, scene, and line number.

(2) The distinctiveness of prayer as a speech act is that it addresses a non-human entity, usually a deity or deities, so its grammatical form distinguishes it from soliloquy, even if prayer shares some features of soliloquy. The speech act that is closest to prayer is the oath, especially when it invokes a deity, but oaths do not normally address a deity directly without becoming attenuated prayers. Shakespeare also uses "pray" and "prayer" in addressing human beings, giving rise to his most frequent use of "pray" in the reflexive "I pray you" or "I pray thee" and thereby to the contraction "prithee," which was in fact a late-sixteenth-century innovation. OED Online, s.v., "prithee," accessed May 24, 2016, http://www.oed.com.

(3) Jonson memorably satirizes prayer for personal favors (easily misused, as he saw it) in Every Man Out of His Humour, as noted later in this essay.

(4) Stage prayer has only recently begun to receive critical attention, with Shakespeare being the starting point. Joseph Sterrett, in The Unheard Prayer (Leiden: Brill, 2012), argues that selected plays by Shakespeare reinforce the thesis implied by his title. Daniel Swift, in Shakespeare's Common Prayers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), considers Shakespeare's debt to the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, offering a thematic rather than a linguistic analysis because references are so few. Shakespeare's echoes of the prayer book are listed by Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare's Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 827-30.

(5) Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1, in Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 5.1.363-67. All references to Christopher Marlowe's plays are to this edition. References are to act, scene, and line number and are hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

(6) It is worth noting that Marlowe invented Orcanes's prayer, and that Sigismond acknowledges the justice of his death in his dying moments (2 Tamburlaine, 2.3.4-9).

(7) Translated from Marlowe's original Latin by the editors. Shakespeare also wrote prayers for characters to pray to demons, but they are neither so anti-Catholic nor so slyly ambiguous as Faustus's prayer, though oddly enough, all are prayed by women. Joan la Pucelle prays to devils in 1 Henry VI; the witch, Margery Jordan, in 2 Henry VI; and Lady Macbeth in Macbeth. The stage direction in 2 Henry VI invites performers to invent appropriate action: "Here do the ceremonies belonging" (1.4.23.01).

(8) The Tempest is particularly reminiscent of Dr. Faustus, in that Prospero summons Ariel by urging him to "come" three times (1.2.187-88).

(9) "And at the ninth houre Iesus cryed with a loude voyce, saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama-sabachthani? which is by interpretation, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34 and Matthew 27:46, repeating Psalm 22:1). The Geneva Bible, intro. Lloyd Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).

(10) Curses and blessings were invariably framed as prayers in the late sixteenth century.

(11) Marlowe's influence on Shakespeare has often been noted, particularly where Edward II and Richard II are concerned. Less frequently observed is Shakespeare's influence on Marlowe, in general and sometimes in detail. In Edward II, for example, Marlowe for the first time describes a character as leaning "on the shoulder of the king" (1.2.23), which is a posture described twice of Edward IV and the Earl of Warwick in 3 Henry VI (2.1.189, 2.6.100).

(12) Ben Jonson, Every Man In His Humour, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 4:728. Quotations from all of Jonson's works are from this edition, hereafter cited as Cambridge. As Bevington points out in his edition of the Quarto, despite copious speculation based on the list of actors, "we simply do not know" what role Shakespeare played (Cambridge, 1:114).

(13) Jonson's most important model was Horace's Ars Poetica, translated by Jonson into English heroic couplets and published after his death as Horace His Art of Poetry, ed. Colin Burrow, in Cambridge, 7:1-67. Jonson lived much longer than Marlowe and wrote a great deal more than Marlowe did, so Jonson's prayers are interpreted in this essay selectively but with accurate representation of them all.

(14) Discoveries, ed. Lorna Hutson, in Cambridge, 7:505, 532. Jonson also wrote a "grace" or blessing of King James, of which three versions survive (Cambridge, 5:246-47).

(15) Every Man Out of His Humour, ed. Randall Martin, in Cambridge, 1:233-428.

(16) This is not to say that Jonson was above a mild oath himself for emphasis, even in formal writing. In the "Epistle" printed before Volpone, addressed to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, he remarks, "I know that nothing can be so innocently writ or carried but may be made obnoxious to construction. Marry, whilst I bear mine innocence about me, I fear it not" (47-49). Volpone, or The Fox, ed. Richard Dutton, in Cambridge, 3:1-199.

(17) For relevant comments on the 1606 act, see Alison Shell, Shakespeare and Religion (London: Methuen for the Arden Shakespeare, 2010), 30-78.

(18) Sejanus His Fall, ed. Tom Cain, in Cambridge, 2:230.

(19) Jonson had written an earlier version of Volpone's prayer in an early play, The Case Is Altered (1597), where Jaques the miser addresses his hoard while hiding it under a pile of horse dung, as if he were a mother speaking to a young child and then as a subject deferring to a monarch (3.5.16-28, ed. Robert Miola, in Cambridge, 1:1-98). Of the two addresses to gold, Volpone's sustained blasphemy is the more inventive and compelling.

(20) In contrast to the perverse prayers of Volpone, the petitions that Celia directs to heaven in her distress (3.7.67,133,183-84,265) are granted in the comeuppance of her husband Corvino and of her would-be seducer, Volpone himself. As things come undone decisively for Volpone, Celia exclaims gratefully, "O heaven, how just thou art!" and Volpone admits "[Aside] I'm caught / I' mine own noose" (5.10.13-14). Jonson's emphasis on Celia's suffering, however, has the unfortunate effect of making her so passive that she lacks appealing qualities to complement her virtue: she is not witty, resourceful, clever, or even verbally evasive.

(21) Cain notes that Arruntius plays "on logical terms: the subject of a proposition should come before the predicate. Tiberius's innocence in particular does not exist" (3.145n).

(22) For details, see John D. Cox, "Playwriting," in The Cambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, ed. Bruce R. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 1:117-22.