Stage prayer in Marlowe and Jonson. (2024)

Prayer is a distinctive speech act that appears everywhere and inmany forms in early modern plays, including Shakespeare's. (1) Thisis not because playwrights were particularly pious but because theywrote in the speech of their time, in which prayer had long since becomea familiar habit--not only in church but also in the privacy of oneshome, in everyday speech, in theological controversy, and in thetheatre. (2) Prayer included everything from simple petitions forpersonal favors to formation of the self before God in richly poeticlanguage, as numerous English translations of the Hebrew psalms makeclear, to say nothing of the poetry of John Donne and George Herbert.(3) In writing prayers, playwrights for the early commercial stage inLondon followed long-standing precedent from the beginning ofplaywriting in English. In the fifteenth-century Towneley Plays from thenorth of England, a gifted anonymous playwright imagined the distinctivesacrifices by Cain and Abel, with each of the brothers praying as hemakes his offering. The same playwright had Herod pray anachronisticallyto "Mahowne" (Mohammed). In the earliest extant commercialplay in English, called simply Mankind, a talented anonymous author infifteenth-century East Anglia made prayer the focus of his generic storyof Christian formation. In the Digby Mary Magdalen, also from EastAnglia, near the turn of the sixteenth century, Mary the sister ofLazarus recognizes the divinity of Jesus and prays to him on behalf ofher brother. More than a century after the Towneley Herod first prayedto Mohammed, Marlowe's Tamburlaine followed his example--albeitwith unprecedented defiance and ambiguity.

Each playwright's way of imagining prayer is distinctive, andthis essay will consider Marlowe's and Jonson's, whichcontrast illuminatingly not only with each other but also with thediverse and inventive prayers written by Shakespeare. (4) Marlowe'scontribution was a mordant way of treating prayer that nearly alwaysundermined it. Caustic skepticism is fully formed in the blockbustercalled Tamburlaine that introduced Marlowe stunningly to the Londontheatre scene earlier than Shakespeare, though both playwrights wereborn in the same year and in the same social stratum. Many people prayin Tamburlaine, Part 1, but Tamburlaine himself is not one of them. Hespeaks and acts with an audacity that had been traditionally associatedwith overweening villains, implicitly denying the supplicatory gesturesof those who pray, yet he pays no price for his actions and attitude; onthe contrary, his boasts are unanswered, and his conquests areinexorable. His lover Zenocrate fears for him, voicing moral trepidationas she intercedes on his behalf with "mighty Jove and holyMahomet" 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 bepunished, and she asks that the inevitable not happen to Tamburlaine.Her petition is granted in that he conquers unharmed, but givenTamburlaine's defiant rhetoric and unhindered triumph, the point isthat her prayer exhibits effeminate weakness and a misunderstanding onher 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 whyTamburlaine does not pray.

Prayer in 2 Tamburlaine is more complex than in the first play. Onone hand, the ambiguities surrounding prayer continue. Sigismond, forexample, who is the treacherous defender of Constantinople against theTurks, dies after his Muslim opponent, Orcanes, prays to the ChristianGod 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 circ*mstances certainly are: aTurk prays to Christ, asking for vengeance on an untrustworthyChristian, who is destroyed in the ensuing battle. The sequence ofevents vindicates Christ as Orcanes describes him: perfect and worthy ofworship because he destroys a perfidious Christian on behalf of aMuslim. (6)

On the other hand, 2 Tamburlaine is innovative in that theoverweening hero himself prays three times, and his prayers connote avulnerability that he does not show in 1 Tamburlaine. His first prayeris a plea addressed to the spirit of Zenocrate, whose death he has beenunable to prevent. He speaks to her as if she were a god, not to deifyher but to grieve the unprecedented helplessness he feels in the face ofher loss, for her possession by the gods means that she does not belongto 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 cannotdefeat, namely death. His jealousy of the gods in this prayer isexpressly erotic, and the eroticism is closely tied to power--as"potent" and "impotent" suggest--but also implicitlyto death as defeat, before which even Tamburlaine is powerless.

He addresses his second prayer to Jove, whose power heacknowledges, blames, threatens, and challenges in the same breath. Thecirc*mstances in this case involve the death of his son, Calyphas, whomTamburlaine himself stabs to death after Calyphas's laziness andinsolence infuriate his peremptory father. Yet Calyphas has clearlylearned from Tamburlaine, who offers the example of insolence in aprayer 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 blamesJove 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 madeTamburlaine a more determined enemy of the gods than the Titans werewhen they made war on Olympus (4.1.126-28). This is not a prayer ofgratitude, petition, praise, or any other recognized category foraddressing the gods, but simply of open challenge, raising "highastounding 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 burnedthe Quran as a deliberate affront, Tamburlaine addresses Mahomet as ifhe were a god, defying him to "work a miracle" and claimingthat he is "not worthy to be worshipped / That suffers flames offire to burn the writ / Wherein the sum of thy religion rests"(5.1.187-89). Marlowe's intended parallel with Christianity isclear (Islam neither regards Mohammed as divine nor claims that the sumof Islamic teaching is in the Quran), and the parallel continues inTamburlaine'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 hisactions, as most late-sixteenth-century Christians would have assumed itshould be. The play offers little explicit support for thepossibility--feared by the morally sensitive Zenocrate--thatTamburlaine's ultimate failure is a result of Jove's sendingvengeance on the head of Tamburlaine for his audacity. He is undoubtedlymore vulnerable in the second play than in the first, but his attitudetoward the gods has little if anything to do with his vulnerability.Like brilliant fireworks in the night sky, he ascends rapidly, makes anawe-inspiring spectacle, and then disappears, undone not by anythingoutside himself but simply by the expenditure of his own titanic energy.

The sardonic context of prayer in Tamburlaine yields to sardonicprayer 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 victoryand at the same time managed to mock prayer itself by inviting laughterat its reenactment on stage. Faustus again prays to a devil when heappeals to Mephistopheles: "Come, Mephistopheles.... / Come,Mephistopheles! / Veni, veni, Mephistophile!" (2.1.26-29). Prayeryields to mere conversation, however, in the dialogue that ensuesbetween the magician and his demonic assistant. Shakespeare'sanalogues come much later, in conversations between Macbeth and thewitches' "masters" and again between Prospero and Ariel.(8)

Over the course of the play, Faustus's prayers to demonseventually 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 devilsappear: Lucifer, Beelzebub, and Mephistopheles (2.3.82 s.d.). Moreover,the Good Angel leaves the stage just before Faustus's appeal toChrist. The entry of three devils is unsettling for several reasons, notleast because it raises questions about the truth of what the Evil Angelhas 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 beconcerned about whether they possess Faustus's soul. The Good Angelis contrastingly reassuring: "Never too late, if Faustus canrepent" (78). Yet the assurance too is ambiguous: in immediatecontext it appears to have greater credibility than the EvilAngel's threatening description of Faustuss perilous condition, butonly devils appear in response to Faustus s prayers, and the Evil Angelis right in the long run, because Faustus does not in fact repent.

Fate in the play, having enjoyed oddly sophom*oric pleasures by thedevil's means, Faustus seems to have second thoughts about his boldapostasy. "Ay, pray for me, pray for me!" he urges his fellowWittenberg scholars, and then again in apparent despair, "And whatnoise 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). Thisseems to be another assurance that divine grace is adequate to answerFaustuss prayer, but the Evil Angel's earlier assertion thatFaustus cannot repent haunts the play's ending. "Ah, myChrist!" he pleads again (5.2.71), echoing his earlier prayer, buthe also calls in sequence on the horses of the night, the devils, themountains 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 histragic stature in the starkness of their appeal, but they also reinforcethe ambiguity of what prayer means in Dr. Faustus. His most directappeal 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 nothingexcept his desperation: "My God, my God, look not so fierce onme!" (5.2.112). (9)

In The Jew of Malta, Marlowe recalled a pattern he had invented foran episode in 2 Tamburlaine and made a variation of it work for anentire play. The pattern is set by Orcanes's non-Christian prayerto the Christian God for the defeat of Sigismond, a treacherousChristian; in The Jew of Malta, a non-Christian (Barabas) prays forsuccess to the God of the Bible in competing with a treacherousChristian (Ferneze), but the non-Christian loses. Unresolvable skepticalquestions underlie this device: in 2 Tamburlaine, does God favor theChristian who presumably believes in God but who loses, or thenon-Christian who presumably does not believe in the Christian God butwho wins? In The Jew of Malta, does God favor a non-Christian who losesin a competition with a faithless Christian, or does God favor theChristian who lies and cheats with impunity? Neither play states itsskepticism so openly, but both implicitly make the point.

In any case, no one in The few of Malta prays more than Barabashimself does, and he addresses many deities in the manner ofFaustus--not all of them spiritual entities. Once, he unmistakablyaddresses 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 toconvert to Christianity, she has taken the vows of a nun in order togain access to Barabas's former house, which Christian authoritieshave seized and turned into a convent. Her motive is to retrieve thegold and jewels that Barabas had hidden there and to return them to him,giving him necessary collateral in recovering his wealth after the cityhad seized his assets because he was a Jew. The success of thisenterprise might indicate that God favors it, but Barabas curses hisenemies by calling on "thou great Primus Motor" (1.2.165) whenhis wealth is first seized, and he addresses the "partialheavens" and "luckless stars" (1.2.260-61) when he asksfor supernatural assistance. In similarly vague terms, he conventionallyaddresses the rising sun as "Phoebus" (2.1.60) in gratitudefor the recovery of his wealth. His final prayer is a long curse onAbigail, directed to no one in particular (3.4.97-106), after she fallsin love with a Christian and converts because Barabas murdered herlover. (10) Whether petitions are addressed successfully to the God ofthe Bible on behalf of recovering ill-gotten wealth, or to anything butGod for any other reason, they are defined in The Jew of Malta bysardonic irony.

For the first time in Edward II, Marlowe uses prayer for a morecomplex purpose than satirical wit. This is something he may havelearned from Shakespeare in the Henry VI plays, where Marlowe also seemsto have discovered what a playwright could do with English history. (11)Marlowe's Earl of Kent initially quarrels with his brother, KingEdward, but he regrets his anger when Mortimer openly rebels against theKing, prompting Kent to pray for God's punishment on himself fordoubting 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 withEdward initially because of Edward's favoritism toward his friendGaveston, who is both a commoner and Edward's lover. When Kentrepents his disagreement before God, he implicitly sets aside thereasons for his dispute with the king, so he regrets his prejudicesbased on social class and gender preference (to use familiar modernterms).

Prayer becomes increasingly fraught in Edward II when the kinghimself appeals to God. His prayers again are not satirical, but theircontext challenges received notions of why people prayed. Brought to bayat last by his relentless enemy Mortimer, Edward ambivalently offers toacquiesce in Winchesters demand that he give up his power. He removeshis crown, puts it on again, rages at his persecutors, and removes thecrown 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 asingle request for resignation in the face of defeat. Circ*mstances arenot kind to Edward, however, and his response is not consistentlysubmissive. When Matrevis and Gurney forcibly shave his beard so he willbe harder for would-be rescuers to recognize, the King is less resignedthan 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 moresympathy for him than any other, but his request for divine assistancewould appear to be completely unavailing, given the cruel and torturousway he is murdered.

About five years after Marlowe's own untimely death, a newkind 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 InHis Humour, and whether Shakespeare was instrumental in selecting it forthe company's repertoire, as Nicholas Rowe reports, he must haveknown it well, judging from the Folio edition, which prints a list ofactors in the 1598 production, including Shakespeare. (12) Jonson'sprincipal innovations were his keen satirical observation of humanfoibles in imitation of ancient Latin writers and his following ofItalian neo-classical expectations for the well-made play. (13) UnlikeMarlowe, who aimed his satiric wit at prayer itself, Jonson delighted inexposing human weakness of every kind, including what he saw as thewrong use of prayer. He regarded its right use seriously enough toinclude a prayer addressed to God the Father among his publishedpoems--one of just two devotional poems in the entire collection. Hissatiric incisiveness is evident in an observation about prayer that herecorded in Discoveries: "Affliction teacheth a wicked person sometime to pray: prosperity never." There seems no reason to doubt thesincerity of Jonson's generous memorial tribute to Sir FrancisBacon in the same work: "In his adversity I ever prayed that Godwould give him strength; for greatness he could not want." (14)

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

Two examples will serve to illustrate how conscious Jonson was--andhow conscious he must have wanted his audience to be--of the differencebetween the solemn asseveration, with its strong kinship to prayer, andempty expletive. Railing against the latter, Asper asserts that not oneamong those who utter "perj'rous air," i.e., who misuseoaths, 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 inabilityto swear like Bobadil has "not the right grace" (EMI,3.5.105), but at the same time his foolish behavior makes clear that healso lacks divine favor and personal good will. When he exclaims"as I have somewhat to be saved" (112) and "as I am agentleman" (117) in the same conversation, he makes clear that heis not graceful, he is no gentleman, and he may not have a soul worthsaving.

Jonson makes the same point about the misuse of oaths earlier inEvery Man Out, when the jealous Kitely contemplates asking Cash to watchDame Kitely. The anxious husband worries about acknowledging that he isjealous of his wife and therefore tries to make Cash swear an oath notto reveal a secret before Kitely tells him what it is. He wonders aloudto 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 thatKitely identifies as typical of men about town who swear readily, unlikemen with strong religious commitments--Puritan or Roman Catholic. Heconflates "swear" (expletive) and "swear" (solemnoath), as if they were equivalent. The pun is deliberate on Jonsonspart, suggesting that people of religious scruple take the content ofoaths seriously, though they are empty ("perj'rous air")at the same time for men about town who swear without regard for themeaning of their words. The passage is important as an indication ofwhat Jonson thought his auditors would likely assume about oaths in thelate sixteenth century. The later ban against oaths on stage, issued byparliament in 1606, indicates that governing authorities saw the samedistinction: despite common swearing, they took oaths seriously, ashaving content, and therefore banned them from stage dialogue. (17)

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

Warned about new legislation against hoarding, Sordido neverconsiders 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 blessedangel!" (1.3.45-46). Using the rhetoric of prayer, he recites acharm in praise of the almanac that has made him think he will beprosperous 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. Heenters later in the play with a rope around his neck, determined to hanghimself because harvests are plentiful after all, despite the almanacspredictions. He condemns prognosticators and hangs himself. He is indeedfortunate, however, in that five countrymen rescue him before hesuffocates. Full of gratitude for his reprieve, Sordido repents andpromises to be generous to the poor thereafter. He concludes hisconversion with a couplet: "Now I prove, / 'No life is blestthat is not graced with love" (3.2.100-101). It is an unusualmoment 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 fatherinto 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 fromothers', but occasionally he departs from the norm with expletivesthat 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 fromFungoso asking for more money. The letter closes with a blatantlyself-interested prayer: "I humbly ask you blessing, and pray God tobless you" (3.2.32-33). Fungoso wants his father to give him moneyto buy more fashionable clothing, but his request for funds arrives atthe nadir of Sordido's despair, helping comically to send him overthe edge. Fungoso fares little better himself. Caught while trying tohide during a tavern raid, he is forced to pay the bill for others'extravagance. His brother-in-law Deliro covers Fungoso's debt in avain effort to recover the good will of Fallace, Deliro's wife, whois Fungoso's sister. The last we hear from Fungoso is hisdeclaration that he is out of humor with court imitation (5.5.2-4). Ashis father Sordido fails in the country, Fungoso in town reaches the endof good fortune and determines to amend his life--an undeserved outcomethat 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 honestoaths. The principal difference in the later plays is that the gracegranted to the likes of Sordido and Fungoso disappears, as theplaywright gives no quarter to those who sport with crimes. He isexplicit about this point in his interpretation of Sejanus, one of histwo tragedies, in light of the providential dispensation of justrewards: "This do we advance as a mark of terror to all traitorsand treasons, to show how just the heavens are in pouring and thunderingdown a weighty vengeance on their unnatural intents, even to the worstprinces; much more to those for guard of whose piety and virtue theangels are in continual watch, and God himself miraculouslyworking." (18) The rhetoric of this remark suggests the continuityin moral thinking between Jonson's tragedy, comical satire, andcourt masques. Bonario's line in Volpone would appear to expressthe author's sentiment precisely: "Heaven could not long letsuch 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 thatthe cynicism and self-obsession of the title characters surprisinglycoexists with their inclination to pray. Sejanus utters a brief prayerin Edemus's garden, where he awaits a meeting with Livia, wife ofDrusus: "Prosper it, Pallas, thou that better'st wit; / ForVenus hath the smallest share in it" (1.1.373-74). His point isthat he hopes to meet Livia in order to plan Drusus's murder withher, not to make a sexual liaison. The first prayer in Sejanus thussatirically illustrates still another misuse of prayer: asking heaven toprosper a deadly purpose. Volpone's most infamous prayer is lessmurderous than Sejanus's but no less perverse, when he begins theplay with twenty-four blasphemous lines in praise and worship of hisgold, "the world's soul and mine" (1.1.3). (19) Theprayer is a brilliant parody of religious language addressed not to adeity 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 theirmoral limitations evident by directing prayer to corrupt andself-serving ends.

Volpone prays several more times in the course of his gradualundoing, but none of his subsequent prayers has the sacrilegious panacheof his first one, and all indicate his gradually increasing frustrationand ineffectiveness. In the scene just after Moscas first hint oftreachery to his master, Volpone responds to a knock at his door, hopingin a prayer to the god of love that Mosca has returned withCorvino's wife, Celia, whom Volpone hopes to seduce: "Now,Cupid / Send it be Mosca, and with fair return!" (3.3.22-23). ButNano announces a most unwelcome visitor, Lady Politic Would-Be,prompting Volpone's ironic concern that his loathing of theannounced guest will "quite expel my appetite to the other"(29). The suggestion of impotence perfectly correlates Volpone'ssexual appetite with his avarice. In a hilarious scene with LadyPolitic, Volpone ironically becomes the victim, unable to escape herinane verbal assaults and compelled to pray for deliverance: "Mygood angel save me!" (3.4.115). As if sensing his frustration, shefondly 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 theentry of Mosca, whom Volpone greets with relief: "Welcome to myredemption!" (3.5.2). Both Moscas entry as "good angel"and Volpone's way of greeting him are deeply ironic, given Volponesmaterialistic obsession and Moscas treachery, which will undo Volpone inthe end. The plays two principal rascals again refer cynically to prayerafter a scene of comic confusion and repeated tricky reinterpretation ofevents by Mosca, who at last turns to Volpone, "Patron, go in andpray for our success" (3.9.62), to which Volpone respondscynically, "Need makes devotion. Heaven your labour bless!"(63). (20)

As for Sejanus, after he breathes his brief prayer to PallasAthena, he is less inclined than Volpone to call on anyone forassistance. Shaken by Tiberius's refusal to let him marry theemperors daughter and knowing apprehension for the first time afterMacro has hinted at serious trouble for him ahead, Sejanus abuses thegods in a fit of self-reproach for his concern. Though he addresses hiscomplaint to the gods, he does not actually pray so much as try toreassure himself, as he hyperbolically calls for apocalypticconsequences 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 ofTiberius and Macro, but not by a renewal of his own fear.

Most of the prayers in Sejanus are uttered by Arruntius, a choricconsul who escapes tyrannical oppression by lying low and being lucky:his interlocutors at the beginning of the play, Silius and Sabinus, arearrested for treason in act 3 because of their sympathy for the party ofGermanicus. Not surprisingly, Arruntius wonders to himself, "May Ipray to Jove / In secret, and be safe?" (4.300-301). His earlyprayer sets the tone for the others: "In the meantime, Jove, ... Ofall wild beasts, preserve me from a tyrant; / And of all tame, aflatterer!" (1.435-38). Commenting on the senators' flatteringprayers for Tiberius, Arruntius also comments pointedly on prayeritself. In response to their praise of Tiberius's modesty, wisdom,and innocence, Arruntius asks himself, "Where is't? / Theprayer's made before the subject" (3.144-45). (21) When thesenators pray to Jove to guard Tiberius's bounty, Arruntiusrejoins, "And his subtlety, I'll put in--/ Yet he'll keepthat himself, without the gods. / All prayers are vain for him"(147-49). Most striking is Arruntius's indignation with the godsfor their forbearance and inaction in the face of unchecked corruption.His outburst is a moral counterpart to Sejanus's laterexpostulation 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 thebeleaguered Hebrew prophet who lamented Israels suffering in captivityand wondered--though never as rudely as Arruntius does--when Yahwehwould do something about it.

Early modern prayer would seem to be so habitual as to beperfunctory, but in style the prayers invented by Marlowe and Jonson arequite distinct, reflecting each playwrights way of thinking and writing.Stage prayer per se was hardly new in the late sixteenth century, butthe London stage supplied an unprecedented opportunity for playwrightsto learn from each other as they competed in selling their scripts tocommercial acting companies. (22) Marlowe was the first playwright totreat prayer itself skeptically. Though his political and social contextprevented him from mocking Christian prayer directly, he pilloriedappeals made by adherents of the other Abrahamic faiths, no matter howsincere their speakers might be, and he left strong indications of hisown skepticism about prayer. Jonson, on the other hand, published atleast one prayer among his poems and made clear in various comments thathe practiced prayer himself as a faithful Catholic. But Jonson wasmerciless in imagining hypocritical prayers, and he was endlesslyinventive in writing comically self-deceived petitions addressed toheaven. Though spontaneous prayer was often associated with Puritans,who eschewed the set forms of The Book of Common Prayer, Marlowe andJonson consistently imagined all prayer as spontaneous, thereby markingthis 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]) butnonetheless remains merely a threat. All references toShakespeare's plays are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G.Blakemore Evans, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997) and are citedparenthetically by act, scene, and line number.

(2) The distinctiveness of prayer as a speech act is that itaddresses a non-human entity, usually a deity or deities, so itsgrammatical form distinguishes it from soliloquy, even if prayer sharessome features of soliloquy. The speech act that is closest to prayer isthe oath, especially when it invokes a deity, but oaths do not normallyaddress a deity directly without becoming attenuated prayers.Shakespeare also uses "pray" and "prayer" inaddressing human beings, giving rise to his most frequent use of"pray" in the reflexive "I pray you" or "I praythee" and thereby to the contraction "prithee," which wasin 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 (easilymisused, as he saw it) in Every Man Out of His Humour, as noted later inthis essay.

(4) Stage prayer has only recently begun to receive criticalattention, with Shakespeare being the starting point. Joseph Sterrett,in The Unheard Prayer (Leiden: Brill, 2012), argues that selected playsby 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 CommonPrayer, offering a thematic rather than a linguistic analysis becausereferences are so few. Shakespeare's echoes of the prayer book arelisted by Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare'sPlays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 827-30.

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

(6) It is worth noting that Marlowe invented Orcanes's prayer,and that Sigismond acknowledges the justice of his death in his dyingmoments (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, butthey are neither so anti-Catholic nor so slyly ambiguous asFaustus's prayer, though oddly enough, all are prayed by women.Joan la Pucelle prays to devils in 1 Henry VI; the witch, MargeryJordan, in 2 Henry VI; and Lady Macbeth in Macbeth. The stage directionin 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 thatProspero 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, MyGod, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34 and Matthew27:46, 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 thelate sixteenth century.

(11) Marlowe's influence on Shakespeare has often been noted,particularly where Edward II and Richard II are concerned. Lessfrequently observed is Shakespeare's influence on Marlowe, ingeneral and sometimes in detail. In Edward II, for example, Marlowe forthe first time describes a character as leaning "on the shoulder ofthe king" (1.2.23), which is a posture described twice of Edward IVand 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 Editionof the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler, and IanDonaldson, 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 ofthe 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 ArsPoetica, translated by Jonson into English heroic couplets and publishedafter his death as Horace His Art of Poetry, ed. Colin Burrow, inCambridge, 7:1-67. Jonson lived much longer than Marlowe and wrote agreat deal more than Marlowe did, so Jonson's prayers areinterpreted in this essay selectively but with accurate representationof them all.

(14) Discoveries, ed. Lorna Hutson, in Cambridge, 7:505, 532.Jonson also wrote a "grace" or blessing of King James, ofwhich 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 himselffor emphasis, even in formal writing. In the "Epistle" printedbefore Volpone, addressed to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge,he remarks, "I know that nothing can be so innocently writ orcarried but may be made obnoxious to construction. Marry, whilst I bearmine innocence about me, I fear it not" (47-49). Volpone, or TheFox, 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 prayerin an early play, The Case Is Altered (1597), where Jaques the miseraddresses his hoard while hiding it under a pile of horse dung, as if hewere a mother speaking to a young child and then as a subject deferringto a monarch (3.5.16-28, ed. Robert Miola, in Cambridge, 1:1-98). Of thetwo addresses to gold, Volpone's sustained blasphemy is the moreinventive and compelling.

(20) In contrast to the perverse prayers of Volpone, the petitionsthat Celia directs to heaven in her distress (3.7.67,133,183-84,265) aregranted in the comeuppance of her husband Corvino and of her would-beseducer, Volpone himself. As things come undone decisively for Volpone,Celia exclaims gratefully, "O heaven, how just thou art!" andVolpone admits "[Aside] I'm caught / I' mine ownnoose" (5.10.13-14). Jonson's emphasis on Celia'ssuffering, however, has the unfortunate effect of making her so passivethat she lacks appealing qualities to complement her virtue: she is notwitty, resourceful, clever, or even verbally evasive.

(21) Cain notes that Arruntius plays "on logical terms: thesubject 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 TheCambridge Guide to the Worlds of Shakespeare, ed. Bruce R. Smith(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 1:117-22.