The Massacre at Paris

The Massacre at Paris: With the Death of the Duke of Guise is thought to have been written around 1590. It is Christopher Marlowe’s first history and depicts the events surrounding St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre.

Synopsis

Like all of Marlowe’s plays, the first surviving print has neither a list of characters nor a division into acts. Due to the corrupted state of the text, The Massacre at Paris is only divided into scenes.

[Szene 1]
The Huguenot Henri de Navarre has just married the Catholic Marguerite de Valois, sister of the French King Charles IX, in Paris. Charles IX and the Queen Mother, Caterina de' Medici, expect the marriage to finally bring peace between Huguenots and Catholics. Admiral Coligny, the leader of the Huguenots, the Prince of Condé and Navarre are aware, however, that the powerful Duke of Guise will do everything in his power to disturb this peace.

[Szene 2]
The Duke of Guise curses the wedding. After demanding a pair of poisoned gloves from an apothecary, he orders a soldier to shoot Admiral de Coligny. In a long monologue, the Duke explains how he will destroy the Huguenots and seize power in France with the support of Spain and the Pope.

[Szene 3]
The apothecary hands the poisoned gloves to Jeanne d’Albret, Henri de Navarre’s mother. She smells it and dies. When Coligny tries to take the body away, he is wounded in the arm by a bullet.

[Szene 4]
At the insistence of his mother, the Duke of Anjou, his brother, and the Duke de Guise, Charles XI agrees to the murder of all Huguenots. During the planning phase of the massacre, news of the assassination attempt on Coligny arrives. To keep him and his followers safe, the king is to visit him.

[Szene 5]
Charles XI visits the wounded Coligny.

[Szene 6]
Guise makes his brother the Duke of Mayenne and several followers swear on the cross. The masked Anjou joins them. The first thing they do is murder Coligny and throw his body into the street. The massacre begins.

[Szene 7]
Guise stabs the preacher Loreine.

[Szene 8]
Montsoreaukills Seroun on behalf of Guise.

[Szene 9]
Shortly after Talaeus has asked his friend the philosopher Ramus to flee, Guise, du Maynne and Anjou enter his room. A philosophical debate ensues between Ramus and Guise. Then Anjou stabs Ramus. Navarre learns of the massacre and confronts Anjou. The latter denies having taken part in it. Navarre and Condé want to see the king.

[Szene 10]
Anjou declares to two Polish princes that he accepts the election as king of Poland but will resign the crown if his brother Charles XI dies without an heir to the throne.

[Szene 11]
Two soldiers argue about what to do with Coligny’s body. The Queen Mother arrives accompanied by Guise and his brother, the Cardinal. Caterina de' Medici is worried because Charles IX is increasingly tormented by remorse. When the Cardinal reports that he has heard how the king has allied himself with Navarre to take revenge for the Huguenots, the Queen Mother declares that she will kill Charles XI if necessary so that her favourite son Anjou can become King of France.

[Szene 12]
Guise kills a Huguenot.

[Szene 13]
Charles XI dies. Caterina de' Medici sends Épernon to Poland to bring back Anjou. Navarre and Plessis flee to Navarre.

[Szene 14]
At the coronation, the Queen Mother worries because Anjou, now Henri III, spends time only with his mignons, not caring about politics. The Cardinal reports that his brother Guise is planning to wipe out Henri de Navarre and the House of Bourbon. Caterina de' Medici promises that if Henri III does not support the plan, she will have him replaced by his younger brother.

[Szene 15]
The Duchess of Guise writes a letter to her lover Maugiron. Her husband discovers the affair.

[Szene 16]
Navarre and Bartas prepare for war against France.

[Szene 17]
Henri III makes Joyeuse, another of his favourites, general in the forthcoming battle against Navarre. Guise is not very happy about this, especially because the king makes fun of him by telling him about the affair between the Duchess of Guise and Maugiron. In the exit, the furious Guise meets Maugiron, who cannot explain the Duke’s anger. When Henri III enlightens him, Maugiron is immediately ready to end the affair and reconcile with the duke.

[Szene 18]
Joyeuse fell at the battle of Coutras, Navarre was victorious.

[Szene 19]
A soldier is outraged that his employer the Duke of Guise is being made a cuckold and shoots Maugiron. After Guise has paid the soldier, a heated argument ensues with Henri III. The king and Épernon accuse Guise of seeking the crown. The reconciliation that follows is deceptive. Henri III plans to kill the duke.

[Szene 20]
Navarre informs Bartas that Guise has raised an army against Henri III. He sends Plessis to the king with the message that he will support him in the fight against the duke.

[Szene 21]
A captain of the guard assures himself of the determination of the 3 assassins to kill the Duke of Guise. The king inquires whether everything is prepared for the task. Henri III gives Guise a friendly reception. No sooner has the king left than Guise is stabbed to death by the assassins. Henri III and Épernon are looking at the dead Guise when his son enters. The king has him arrested and orders the murder of the cardinal. Caterina de' Medici is horrified by the deed. She loses all her will to live.

[Szene 22]
The cardinal is strangled by the first assassin.

[Szene 23]
The Duke of Mayenne swears revenge for Guise. A monk reported to him that his other brother, the cardinal, was also killed. The monk promises to kill Henri III.

[Szene 24]
Henri III stands with his army before Paris. He thanks Navarre for his support when a messenger in the shape of a Dominican monk is reported. While the king reads the message, the monk stabs him. A soldier kills the Dominican. The wounded king asks for the English agent to inform Elizabeth I of the assassination. Dying, Henri III curses the pope and appoints Navarre as his successor to avenge his death. The dead king is carried out with all present paying tribute.

Text

The drama consists of 802 sentences with a total of 10,663 words and a vocabulary of 1,952 words.¹; (The Massacre leaf is included in these statistics). 6 words were used by Marlowe for the first time in a new meaning, 3 words were used by him for the first time, 3 words were used in a previously unknown grammatical construction and 2 words occur in this meaning only in Marlowe.

Origin

The depiction of contemporary events should actually simplify the dating of the drama. In fact, one can only safely assume that the play in its present form was written after the assassination of Henri III on 1 August 1589 in Saint-Cloud. A more precise dating after this date is up to the interpretation of the text. The dying Henri III not only recognises Navarre as his successor, but also commissions him to avenge his death. Henri holds Pope Sixtus V responsible for his murder and demands bloody revenge from Navarre. However, Sixtus V died of natural causes in Rome on 27 August 1590. A fact that suggests that Marlowe had finished his drama before this time. Since the desire for revenge would have made little sense if the pope had already been dead.²

Title page of the earliest extant print. s. a. CC0

Another reading favours a much later date for precisely this reason, as well as consideration of Henslowe’s notes on The Massacre at Paris.³ According to this reading, Marlowe viewed the actual events in France with unprecedented irony. The first verifiable performance took place on 9 February 1593. It is true that Henslowe marked the play as "ne", only it is completely unclear whether he thereby really described it as "new".⁴ But even if The Massacre at Paris had only been written in 1593, the ironic effect that Marlowe would have wanted to unfold would not really have come to fruition. After Alençon’s death, Henri III had sent negotiators to Navarre to negotiate Henri’s formal recognition as heir to the French throne if he had converted, but Navarre had refused. The conversion continued to be discussed, but never took concrete shape – at least not during Marlowe’s lifetime. Navarre laid siege to Paris in 1590, but had to break off the siege at the end of August after the Spanish intervened in the civil war on the side of the Catholics. It was not until July 1593 that Navarre converted to Catholicism and his coronation as Henri IV took place on 27 February 1594, the entry into Paris the following month and on 30 March the parliament also recognised the new king. Could Marlowe have foreseen all this if he had written his drama in 1593? Even if he had had this foresight, the average English theatre audience would have found it quite difficult to comprehend Marlowe’s ironic intentions. These would only have become apparent in late 1593 early 1594, after Navarre had openly demonstrated that religion had not become a matter of inner conviction, but a means to an end. Probably recognising the irony that the drama now offered thanks to political events, Henslowe put the play back on the schedule.⁵

Hardly any of Marlowe’s works have so many parallels to Shakespeare. Critics are completely divided as to whether the authors of the text version borrowed from Shakespeare, or the latter from Marlowe. Since numerous similarities come from plays written after Marlowe’s death, these analogies are equally of little help in determining when The Massacre at Paris was written.

The play was never entered in the Stationers' Register. The earliest surviving print is by Edward Allde in octavo format and is undated. Because of the poor condition of the text, the publication was associated with the so-called "Bad Quatros" of Pembroke’s Men in the early 1590s. H. J. Oliver suggested a date around 1602 because of two parallels to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599).⁶ Robert A. H. Smith also favours the years between 1599 and 1602.⁷

It is clear that the present text is corrupted. The play is only half the length of an average drama of the Elizabethan period. It contains numerous repetitions, metrical irregularities and almost word-for-word adoptions from other plays. It is therefore assumed that the Octavo is a textual reconstruction by one or more actors.⁸ Despite the title, more than half of the play deals with the reign of Henri III and the Duke of Guise is the largest part.⁹ It is likely that the drama was very extensive. Already in the existing form, one can identify twenty different speaking parts in the first five hundred lines. Only seven surviving plays from the period require more.¹⁰ An allusion to a dialogue that is no longer extant can be found in Thomas Fuller, who in 1650 in A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine wrote: "I reasonably remember how one being asked in the Massacre of Paris, whether he was a Catholick or an Hugonite, answered he was a Physican."¹¹ Another indication of a longer version emerged with the so-called Massacre leaf and has been a source of controversy ever since.

Sources

The French Wars of Religion were fought not only with sword and cannon, but also with the pen. Huguenots and Catholics alike produced numerous writings. Although the source material for The Massacre at Paris is very well researched, it remains to be considered that due to the abundance of material, it will never be fully clarified what Marlowe actually knew and used.¹² Furthermore, the use of documents that no one knows about today because they have been lost in the course of time must be taken into account. Finally, hearsay cannot be excluded as a source when processing contemporary events.¹³

For the first six scenes as well as parts of [Szene 8] De Furoribus Gallicis, published in 1573 by Ernestus Varamandus, is considered the main source. The Huguenot François Hotman is thought to be behind the pseudonym.¹⁴ He belonged to the monarchomachs. This group held the view that the monarchy had developed into tyranny and demanded that in future sovereignty should come from the people.¹⁵ In the year of publication, the translation A True an Plain Report of the Furious Outrages of France was already published, the reprint appeared in 1574 without reference to the original author as Book X of The Three Parts of Commentaries, the English version of Jean de Serres Commentariorum de statu religionis et reipublicae in regno Galliae.¹⁶ For the other scenes, too, sources can be found in a wide variety of pamphlets of the time,¹⁷ which would have been available to Marlowe in the collection Mémoires de l’état de France sous Charles neuvieme (1576), edited by Simon Goulart.¹⁸ Mainly due to Paul Kocher’s detailed studies, the play was long regarded as an agitational work of Protestantism. In fact, Marlowe also drew on Catholic writings and even the works of the French Huguenots were much more sophisticated than they appear at first glance. Due to the ongoing wars in Italy, Italian culture became modern in France towards the end of the 15th century. There were also marriages between the French and Italian nobility, culminating in the marriage between the later Henri II and Caterina de' Medici. She brought many Italians with her to the court, where they remained faithful to their native way of life.¹⁹ Together with growing dissatisfaction with the regency, anti-Italianism arose in France from the 1570s onwards, transcending denominational boundaries.

"Konspirative Machenschaften von Ausländern zielten auf eine Aushebelung der traditionellen rechtstaatlichen Prinzipien, eine Unterwanderung der moralischen Ordnung sowie auf die politische Entmachtung des alten Adels ab. Antiitalianismus ist immer auch Ausdruck einer generellen Hofkritik, die sich hier unter anderem gegen die Privilegierung von favoris und gegen die Italianisierung der französischen Sprache und der Hofkultur richtet."²⁰

Against this background, two works were written that could also be considered as sources for Marlowe’s drama. Le Reveille-Matin des François, et leurs voisins, the first part of which appeared in 1573, made the views of the monarchomachs accessible to an international audience. The attacks are directed against Charles IX, his mother and his brother Anjou. Written by a Huguenot collective of authors, the House of Valois is condemned to such an extent that even the Duke of Guise would be preferable as ruler of France! Although editions were published with a dedication to Elizabeth I, there was no English version, but there was a Latin version.²¹ The writing was nevertheless well known in England, as was Discours merveillieux de la vie, actions et deportements de Catherine de Médicis, Royne merewhich was ranslated into English in the same year of publication.²² It was published in 1575 and Henri Estienne is believed to be the author. The work enjoyed enormous popularity and was the beginning of a centuries-long demonisation of Caterina de' Medici. Outside the English stage, Anne Dowriche depicted the events of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in her 1589 narrative poem The French History. She too is likely to have used Serres or Hotman as a source. Her portrayal of Caterina de' Medici in particular may have influenced Marlowe.²³

An interesting development, not only for The Massacre at Paris but also for Edward II, happened in the late 1580s. Jean Louis de Nogaret de La Valette, Duke d’Épernon, was the favourite of Henri III, who met the concentrated rejection of the Catholic pamphleteers. Meanwhile, there was open talk of homosexual relations between the king and his mignons, with parallels drawn in particular with Edward II and Piers Gaveston. Jean Boucher’sHistoire tragique et memorable de Pierre de Gaverston, Gentilhomme Gascon, jadis mignon d’Edoüard 2. Roy d’Angleterre; tirée des Chroniques de Thomas Valsingham, et tournée de Latin en François, a partial translation of Thomas Walsingham’s Historia Anglicana, appeared in July 1588.²⁴ Boucher did not compare Henri III directly to Edward II, but readers did.(Baumgartner 1975) In response, Épernon himself wrote the Repliqve à l’Antigauerston où responce faicte à l’histoire de Gauerston, which has since been lost.²⁵ The Catholic League countered this in turn with theResponce à l’Antigaverson de Nogaret.
Boas was the first to recognise a precursor to Edward II in The Massacre at Paris.²⁶ In both plays, the relationship of the king to his nobles is an underlying theme.²⁷ In the autumn of 1583, Francis Walsingham felt compelled to point out to James VI of Scotland, the prospective heir to the English crown, the disadvantages of lordly favouritism, citing Edward II as an example.²⁸ The Scottish king remained unimpressed by this throughout his life. As with Henri III at the French court, most of James I’s favourites did not come from the higher nobility. Whether Henri III and James VI actually had intimate relationships with their courtiers and whether these influenced policy is secondary. The fact is that towards the end of the 16th century, two rulers of countries in the immediate vicinity of England gave the impression of following the will of their favourites in their decisions. Marlowe pointed out the difficulties of royal favouritism in both plays, which gave them an explosive topicality.²⁹

Reception

From 9 February 1593 to 5 October 1594, the drama was performed a total of 11 times, earning Henslowe 17li 10s (about €5,964). The earnings of the first performance amounted to 3li 14s. This is the second highest amount for a performance ever recorded by Henslowe.

The Massacre at Paris seems to have been unique in its kind. England’s interest in the French events was very great. Not only did English soldiers constantly leave the island to actively intervene in French affairs, but there were also countless pamphlets, essays, ballads, etc. that kept the English up to date. In general, histories from other countries were popular in England.³⁰ Nevertheless, Marlowe’s play is the only English dramatisation of these contemporary events known to us, although Henri de Navarre also appears in the works of Spenser and Shakespeare.³¹ Whether the drama was successful is impossible to say today. The contemporary theme and the use of typical enemy images suggest that the audience’s taste was at least partially met. In any case, the play was known beyond the borders.

In 1602, Sir Ralph Winwood, the English ambassador in Paris, reported protesting against the performance of a play that was perceived as an insult to Elizabeth I:

"it was objected to me before the [French] Counsaile by some Standers by, that the Death of the Duke of Guise hath ben plaied at London, … and sence by some others that the Massacre of St. Bartholomews hath ben publickly acted, and this King represented upon the stage."³²

Nothing is known about performances after 1594. Unfortunately, Thomas Fuller does not indicate in A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine whether he has seen or read the play. Nevertheless, it is clear from his remark that the drama was still received in a version unknown to us, at least in the first two decades of the 17th century, for Fuller was not born until 1608.
Four plays are known to have also dealt with the Duke of Guise and were written after Marlowe’s death. John Webster mentions his play Guise in the dedication of The Devil’s Law Case (1617-1619) to Thomas Finch. This work has been lost. (The reference to it in the Henslowe Diary has been exposed as a forgery by Collier.)³³ Also not preserved is Henry Shirley’s The Duke of Guise, which was entered in the Stationers' Register in 1653. The Duke of Guise by John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee (1682) and Massacre of Paris by Nathaniel Lee, published in 1689 but probably begun in 1679, have no connection with Marlowe.³⁴

In 1818, two independent editions of The Massacre at Paris appeared almost simultaneously. One is by William Oxberry, the other by an anonymous editor identified by N. W. Bawcutt in 1971 as James Broughton.³⁵ As it was not possible to establish in which month Oxberry had been published, it is not proven whether he or Broughten was the first to publish the piece.³⁶

Apart from Henslowe, the amateur group Yale Dramatic Association produced the first known performances in October 1940.³⁷ On 30 January 1963, the Marlowe Society organised a performance at the Chanticleer Theatre in London.³⁸ Further productions followed, but the theme and the mutilated version of the text mean that The Massacre at Paris will never be a hit with the public again.

In research, the work was dismissed as Protestant propaganda and an epigone of the Huguenot pamphleteers until the 20th century.³⁹ Despite the poor state of the text, however, it can be read that Marlowe dealt with the sources in a far more differentiated way and that his view of the events corresponded to that of the contemporary, uninvolved but informed observer.⁴⁰ The concurrence of brutality and comedy, the fear of defilement by the mere presence of a different believer, and the close connection between religious ritual and violence were characteristic of the Wars of Religion.⁴¹ All of this is reflected in the play, making it a more valuable period piece than has long been assumed. The dramaturgical shortcomings make a theatrical performance difficult, but offer interesting possibilities for the new media.⁴²

Setting

On 18 May 2003, Wolfgang Mitterer’s opera Massacre received its world premiere at the Ronacher in Vienna. The libretto was written by the composer and Stephan Müller, with recourse to the English text. It is not, however, a literary opera.⁴³ Commissioned by the Wiener Festwochen, the work is conceived for five singers and four dancers as well as an ensemble of nine instrumentalists. The director of the first performance was Joachim Schlömer.

Audio

BBC Radio 3 broadcast The Massacre at Paris on 30 May 1993, directed by Alan Drury and featuring Michael Earley, Timothy Walker, Jeremy Blake, Sally Dexter, Ben Thomas, et al.