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Article Excerpt
This chapter examines the interplay between Elizabethan discussions of tyranny and obedience and Elizabethan anxieties about damnation in Cambises (1560/1) and Horestes (1567). Both tragedies are important to the development of English Renaissance drama because they offer evidence of the impact of the discussions on tyranny and obedience and the impact of the fear that supernatural forces can infiltrate human actions. In determining what leads a king to behave like a tyrant, as in the example of Cambises, Elizabethans questioned whether the 'role of the sinister', or, more broadly, the supernatural, was crucial to understanding acts of tyranny. That questioning, which comes through in the tragedies' concern with forms of obedience and resistance, is intimately bound up with the uncertainty in the period with regard to damnation and Hell. The primary aim of this article is to reconsider the plays in light of the contemporary attitudes to tyranny and resistance, the concern with damnation and Hell the plays engage with, and how this affects the development of Elizabethan tragedy.
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Thomas Preston's tragedy Cambises and John Pickering's Horestes address questions of obedience and resistance from opposite doctrinal perspectives. The distinction between Horestes' active duty to resist the tyranny of Clytemnestra and Egistus and the passive resistance to Cambises' tyranny in Pickering's play wholly encapsulates the complexities of Elizabethan polemical tracts on resistance and obedience.
The vigorous thematic interest in rebellion and obedience in tragedies performed during the first decade of Elizabeth's reign links directly with contemporary debates concerning the possibility that God or the Devil could influence earthly events equally. From the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, when Luther famously nailed his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of a church in Wittenberg in 1517, until the 1550s, when English reformers were writing theological treatises, the Protestant argument concerning tyranny altered dramatically. Greg Walker's recent examination of how people reacted to what he labels 'the slide into an English tyranny' in the 1530s and 1540s during the Henrician Reformation pays particular attention to the mutable political climate that Elizabeth inherited when she came to the throne in 1558. (1) Throughout the sixteenth century the debates surrounding political resistance had been passionate, but the argumentation often lacked consistency. The Calvinists contributed significantly to these discussions by underlining a distinction between the office and the person of a magistrate, and with this distinction in place, the reformers attempted to distinguish between a lawful magistrate and an ungodly one.
The next hurdle for the Protestant polemicists presented itself in the form of another question: was a magistrate who did not fulfil his duties nonetheless the recipient of a power ordained by God? On the one hand, it was agreed that magistrates were decreed by divine providence, yet, at the same time, it might be affirmed that tyrannous magistrates were not legitimate conduits at all for the expression of divine authority. Calvin's theory of constitutional resistance stated that it was for God, not private citizens, to rectify 'unbridled government', and only magistrates, on behalf of the people, should legitimately resist a ruler: 'any magistrates [...] I doe so not forbid them according to their office to withstand the outraging licentiousness of kinges'. (2) Furthermore, Calvin stated that if a magistrate did not resist a wicked ruler, then he was not fulfilling his duty to the people as an officer of God:
if [the magistrates] winke at kinges wilfully raging over and treading downe the poor cummunalities, their dissembling is not without wicked breache of faith, because they deceitfully betray the libertie of the people, whereof they know themselves to bee appointed protectors by the ordinace of God. (ibid.)
Calvin went on to argue that it was legitimate to resist a tyrant only under certain circumstances, such as when the magistrate behaved tyrannically and abused his people. (3) By the 1550s both Calvinists and Lutherans agreed that when a magistrate behaved tyrannically he could legitimately be resisted. The complex discussions of the period concerning the degrees of resistance point to the key problem in Protestant resistance theory: if God appoints tyrants to reign, then to resist their rule is to defy God's will. Philipp Melanchthon, for example, affirmed that when a magistrate behaved immorally and exceeded the limits of his office, then he eliminated himself from an ordained position. The unlawful magistrate thus reduced himself to a private citizen and became subject to the laws of that society. This uncomfortable conclusion clearly related intimately to the anxieties presented in the tragedies performed in the early part of Elizabeth Tudor's reign.
In the prose writings of the period on this same subject, polemicists often introduced the threat of divine wrath to emphasize their point. Imitating William Tyndale's The Obedience of a Christen man (1528), the author of the 1547 homily 'An Exhortacion concerning Good Ordre and Obedience to Rulers and Magistrates' (reissued in 1559) cites Romans 13.2 in his argument for absolute obedience: 'whosoever resisteth shall get to themselfes dampnacioun'. (4) How keenly Elizabethans responded to this threat is made especially clear in the tragic dramas and poetry from the early decades of Elizabeth's reign. Nonetheless, the widely promulgated Tudor document 'An Homily Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion' (1547, reprinted in 1570) defended passive resistance to tyrannous regimes. This document stressed that the only legitimate response for the political subject of a tyrant was prayer:
let us either deserve to have a good Prince, or let us patiently suffer and obey such as wee deserue. And whether the Prince be good or evil, let us according to the counsell of the holy Scriptures, pray for the Prince, for his continuance and increase in goodnesse, if he be good, and for his amendment if he be euill. (5)
When Preston and Pickering depart from the narratives of their sources, it is often in order to allude to contemporary discussions on tyranny and obedience that involve questions of divine providence. This point is made evident in the opening sequence of Horestes, where the Vice appears onstage and exclaims, 'Well, fowarde I wyll, for to prepare | Some weapons and armour the catives to quell; | Ille teache the hurchetes agayne to rebel'. (6) In Cambises, King of Persia (1560/2) and Horestes: A New Interlude of Vice (1567) both authors include a Vice character who is an abstraction of an inherently wicked quality. Interestingly, these figures can serve to distance the tyrannous actions of the rulers from concerns with divine providence. If he was not born a tyrant, Cambises is clearly shown to be predisposed to behave like a tyrant, and the Vice Ambidexter brings Cambises' wicked qualities to the fore. (7) Moreover, without any physical interaction, Ambidexter draws the audience's attention to the debate over political resistance throughout the play. Thus the role of the Vice is not central to the audience's interpretation of what causes the protagonists' tyranny, but it points up strategically how the protagonist is partial to villainy and what the consequences of tyrannous government might be.
In the classical sources Cambises' madness is linked to an inborn insanity. Herodotus, whom Sidney praised for his poetic eloquence in writing history, mentions the accession of Cambises, his campaigns against Egypt and Ethiopia, and his eventual fall into madness, in a discussion of the Persian kings in the Histories; all this is also coupled with an account of Cambises' drinking habits. The section on Cambises' eight-year reign (530-522 bce) discusses his decision to invade Egypt as a result of his rage against Amasis's treachery. Herodotus tells us that when Cambises requested Amasis's daughter for marriage, the Egyptian king sent the Persian monarch the daughter of the late King Apries instead. When Cambises learned of this deception, all his rage was directed at the Egyptians and he proceeded to attack: '[this] brought down upon Egypt the wrath of Cambises, son of Cyrus'. (8) Herodotus later recounts instances of Cambises' madness, his outrage at the Apis-calf (a calf that is unable to reproduce and is understood to bear the god Apis), and his orders for the murder of his wife and his brother Smirdis. The narrative closes...
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