Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies –
Come, Helen, come give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for Heaven be in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE,
The Tragical History of Dr Faustus c. 1549
WITHIN DAYS OF ITS PREMIERE IN LONDON, in the last decade of the 16th century, Kit Marlowe’s perfect pentameter line, ‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?’ from Act V of his Tragical History of Dr Faustus was buzzing around the capital.1 In the cut-throat commercial world of Elizabethan theatre, the play was an immediate success. The audience loved it, the money-men were happy. Its producer, Philip Henslowe,2 kept meticulous production accounts in a journal. Henslowe’s Diary is a valuable historical source, which records numerous performances of Dr Faustus at the Rose and at the other new playhouses in the capital. The show was still being performed regularly well into the 17th century. Faustus was a hit.
The Tragical History of Dr Faustus was one of eight-hundred-odd plays produced in London over a period of forty years from 1574 to 1616 (the year of Shakespeare’s death).3 The productivity of the playwrights in the Elizabethan capital was unprecedented. As well as the editions that have survived, there were scores of other plays lost to time, the manuscripts destroyed by dissatisfied authors or burnt in the less discriminating Great Fire of London of 1666. And yet in that maelstrom of theatrical creativity, one desperate, appalling, erotic line immediately gained currency in the popular imagination. Was this the face that launched a thousand ships? The question is an expression both of utter bliss and of utter desolation.
At their inception, the words had simply been just part of another speech penned by Marlowe and then muttered over and over by a lone actor, as he paced up and down the South Bank, desperately trying to remember his lines. The dramas were in repertory, and there was a punishing turnover of scripts. Actors worked six days a week, forty-nine weeks of the year.4 That is a lot of dramatic verse (some brilliant, some dreadful doggerel) to commit to memory.
Much of what was written was instantly forgettable. But ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’ was soon carried across the River Thames to the City of London on the tongues of thousands. It has been estimated that from three to four thousand men and women every afternoon would travel from the north bank of the river to the south bank and back again. They were pleasure-seekers using the services of the wherry-men who plied to and fro across the river carrying passengers to take in the entertainments on ‘Bankside’ – London’s wild side, the suburbs of sin. Wherries wound their way across the Thames and along the London waterways that are now for ever clogged underground – lost rivers such as the River Fleet and the Oldbourne; Elizabeth I herself was rumoured to use these river taxis, in disguise, at night. In one of the largest cities in the West, a city that handled between two thirds and three quarters of the nation’s trade,5 in a newly burgeoning international axis, Helen’s name was back on the great water-ways and back on the streets.
One has to imagine the context in which Marlowe’s line took hold of the capital. When Faustus was first staged, Elizabethan London was at its most fervent and fetid. Pox and plague stalked the streets. There were human heads on London Bridge and bears being ripped to shreds by mastiffs within sight of the theatres. Prostitutes picked up custom in the playhouses them-selves, others sat a stone’s-throw away in infamous brothels such as the Holland Leaguer.
Much of the South Bank has been sanitised now, but around one of the few remaining derelict areas, where plastic bags and tin-cans are heaped up on the ghosts of the past, prostitutes still street-walk. In Marlowe’s day it was illegal to tout for custom. Calling out or throwing stones at passers-by was outlawed; so scores of ‘trulls and flurts’ stood waiting, some branded, some with their nipples painted, all desperate to earn a crust through the sale of their bodies. A punter could pick up a strumpette (a woman), an apple-squire (a rent-boy) or a young child whose maidenhead was restored every night. The impresarios of the theatre often had financial interests in the whore-houses.
Sexually transmitted diseases were endemic. A broadsheet of 1584, A Mirror for Magistrates, tells us ‘forty shillings or better’ would buy ‘a pottle or two of wine, the embracement of a painted strumpet and the French Welcome’. Thefts of personal possessions are much talked about during a session at the ‘stews’ (the local brothels) with ‘Winchester geese’ or ‘Flanders Mares’.6 For the Elizabethan audiences, sex meant danger.
In one edition of the play, when Helen makes her entrance she is flanked by two cupids – an immediate signal to the audience that the incarnation of the sex goddess Venus/Aphrodite has arrived.7 Marlowe also makes a clever, direct connection between his Helen of the 16th century and another sexually active Helen of the 1st century AD, Simon Magus’ companion, Helene. Just before Helen and Faustus leave to have sex, Helen is exalted in fine poetic terms, reminiscent of the Song of Solomon, one of the texts referred to by Simonians and the Gnostics.
O, thou art fairer than the evening air Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars. Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter, When he appeared to hapless Semele, More lovely than the monarch of the sky In wanton Arethusa’s azured arms, And none but thou shalt be my paramour.
Exeunt
(V.i.102–8)
His paramour. Marlowe’s Helen is daimonic, a diabolic spirit. The symbolism of the play goes so far as to suggest she is even the devil in female form, a succubus. If Faustus was leaving the stage to make love to this she-devil Helen, then many would have known that from this point on they were irrevocably condemned. Enjoying Helen was the ultimate delight that brought with it the ultimate, awful punishment: eternal damnation.8
To catch the natural light at the Rose, or the other theatres on the South Bank, theatrical performances such as Marlowe’s Faustus would normally be held around 2.00 p.m. There was no fixed roof over the new amphitheatres, which were an architectural hybrid of bear-pits and makeshift performance spaces in inn courtyards. Bankside was low-lying and marshy. Given that the Rose accommodated just over 1,600 people and that Dr Faustus was a commercial hit, in high summer, sitting or standing through the tragedy must have been a steamy and pungent experience. Added to the smell of immediate neighbours (for the unlucky, one of London’s ‘Stinkards’ who reeked of garlic and urine) and those outside ‘plucking the rose’ (having a pee) was the distinctive stink of the South Bank: dyers, tanners and starchers all using the river as a free resource.9
The audience who met Helen in this rank environment at the Rose Theatre would have been mixed. The basic entry rate to London’s new play-houses was one penny and although a few extra coins could buy a cushion or a better seat, theatre of this period was a democratic experience. Archaeological investigation has shown the area close to the stage to be hard-worn and beaten – witness to crowds of Tudor playgoers ‘moshing’ – jostling around, flicking and grabbing the actors.10 The highest percentage of the audience probably consisted of citizens and successful artisans, but along with these and well-to-do traders, there were also journeymen and students, dukes and duchesses, sitting across the way from pimps and prostitutes. It was for this catholic crowd that Helen danced with the devil.
To appreciate the physical setting in which the Elizabethan Helen made her mark, I visited the site of the Rose Theatre on London’s South Bank during its excavation, and found a suitably Stygian setting.11 The ghost of the stage is now 10 feet or so (3 m) beneath the current street level, submerged (for preservation) in 2 feet (0.6 m) of distilled water. Encased in a 1980s office building, the profile of the stage has been picked out by a scattering of grit and a snaking red light tube. The air is dank and musky – there are replicas of the earthenware pots at the entrance once used by the theatre’s entrepreneurs to re-coup their investment, collecting pennies from lords and ladies, bishops, traders and spies. But the pots rattle no more – this is a site that has been silenced by concrete and by time.
So it was here on the South Bank, a stirring, sensuous, sordid location, that the most enduring Elizabethan Helen was born. The capital’s trade-mark ‘jangling’ (gossip and chit-chat) gave the oxygen of publicity to its new resident. Tourists noticed that in the roughest inns and the finest dining houses, Londoners were always talking, talking, talking.12 Courtiers were essential to the patronage of the players and play companies, and many of these sponsors and pundits met daily in locations such as the central aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral (known as Paul’s Walk or Duke Humfrey’s Walk) to chat and exchange news. Two of the things they discussed were Marlowe’s new play, and one of its most striking images, ‘Sweet Helena’. Shakespeare and Jonson were among those who eagerly drew on and parodied Marlowe’s line.13 Word of mouth, like spoken poetry and oral history, covers its tracks. But what is certain is that, blasted by the bitter smell of gunpowder and the searing beauty of Marlowe’s lines, the Elizabethan Londoners made Helen an icon in the popular imagination once again.
Marlowe’s Helen arrived in the Elizabethan capital with a bang. Theatrical producers fed off the punters’ taste for spook and spectacle. We know that in 1595 Philip Henslowe paid seven pounds two shillings for the tricks and trappings that made theatre so exciting to an Elizabethan audience. An early production of Faustus boasted a ‘throne in the hevenes’ and ‘enterludes and music’. Later a dragon-machine was added. And in 1598, Henslowe appropriated from the Admiral’s Men’s properties store, a ‘Hell’s Mouth’ into which Faustus could collapse.14 In 1620, one audience member reported that ‘shagge-hayr’d Devills runne roaring over the Stage with Squibs in their mouthes, while Drummers make Thunder in the Tyring-house and the twelve-penny Hirelings make artificiall Lightening in their Heavens’.15 The special effects employed by the producers of the Tragical History of Dr Faustus were bumptious, brassy and wondrous to the Elizabethan audience. Their infernal nature was particularly appropriate for this play; because Faustuswas a diabolic piece of work.
Faustus had come into the consciousness of the Elizabethans via a volume published in Frankfurt and then translated into English, sometime around 1587, entitled, The Historie of the Damnable Life, and Deserved Death, of Doctor John Faustus. This was a ‘true’ story of dreadful temptation. Johann Faust did exist; he was a German scholar and conjuror who billed himself as a mid-16th-century disciple and double of Helen’s old friend Simon Magus. As with Simon Magus, much of our evidence for Faust’s life comes from hostile sources and so has to be read carefully. Lutheran reformers used Faust’s story as a case-study of how not to engage with the spiritual world.
The details of Dr Faust’s life are sketchy. But the Historie left its readers in no doubt that at some point the sorcerer’s soul had indeed been sold to the devil in return for earthly pleasures, including the carnal knowledge of Helen:
Now, in order that the miserable Faust could indulge in the desires of his flesh at midnight when he awoke, in the twenty-third year that had past, Helen of Greece entered into him …Now when Doctor Faust saw her, she so captured his heart that he began to make love to her and kept her as his mistress: he became so fond of her that he could hardly be a moment without her. In the last year he made her pregnant and she bore him a son …16
Helen as a captive mistress: it was a mortal delight that would lead Faust to eternal death. Temptation incarnate. We are told that students of the religious reformer Luther discovered evidence, at Faust’s home, of a gruesome end: ‘his brains cleaving to the wall: for the devil had beaten him from one wall against the other, on one corner lay his eyes, in another his teeth’, and then moving outside they found ‘lying on the horse dung, most monstrously torn and fearful to behold … his head and all his joints were dashed in pieces’.
Inspired by this ghastly story, Marlowe set to penning his work for the London stage.
In Marlowe’s play Faustus is a man who cannot not sin – he is predestined for damnation. And one of the most significant staging posts on his journey into hell is his sexual relationship with the lascivious, luciferous spirit of Helen. Marlowe’s Helen is not just an agent of destruction, she is an agent of the devil himself. Popular woodcuts of the time – the Ars Moriendi – show devils dragging a man’s soul out from his mouth as he dies.17 Just so, Helen’s ‘lips suck forth my soul; see where it flies –’ here Faustus is a necromancer and Helen a succubus, a spirit of the dead.
Helen has always been ambiguous, but there is something different going on here. Whereas classical authors imagined in her a brilliant source of light that permeated into the heavens itself, the light in her that balanced the dark, here Helen’s glow is hemmed in with an oppressive gloom. Helen gleams in the pages of Faustus and on the stage of the Rose Theatre, but it is an aureole of light surrounded by impenetrable, stifling shadow.
The play met the tastes of the Tudor audience perfectly. Here on stage were the necromancers and occult illusions and witches that they knew to be real. In Europe, trafficking in spirits had recently been made a capital offence and the Lutherans were whipping up witch-hunt fever. In 1586 in Trier after a particularly late spring, ‘a hundred and eighteen women and two men’ had been burnt following their confession that ‘the prolongation of the winter was the work of their incantations’.18 In Britain on the other hand, an increasingly puritanical outlook went so far as to deny that such forces existed – but men and women wanted to believe in the supernatural. There were reports of great confusion and consternation among both the actors and the audience during one performance of Marlowe’s Faustus, when some panicked, believing that there was one too many devils on stage.19
Just forty years before, all official public performances in England had taken the form of miracle plays and morality plays. These were unofficially sanctioned productions that peddled only ideas which met the approval of the Church. Much of Marlowe was blasphemous, and the impact for a live audience must have been thrilling. Here, for instance, was a man who was being made immortal thanks to the kiss of a whore-queen – not an idea to be found in the tenets of orthodox Christianity. But here too was a play of morals that seemed to reach beyond lessons of good and evil, asking questions about what it meant to be a woman, what it meant to be a man; about what it meant to be human. Two thousand years earlier, on the sun-baked slopes of the Athenian acropolis, the same questions had been asked, and now as then it was the spirit of Helen that was at the heart of the enquiry.20
Helen posed a problem – she was the perfect classical beauty that the Elizabethan Renaissance, with its love of antiquity, craved,21 and yet her actions represented sin in its purest form as promulgated by the new, increasingly puritanical Church. The culture of the Renaissance keened for Beauty, but the prevailing Protestant mores upheld predestination and the unpardonable nature of sin.
And because playwrights such as Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dekker and Heywood had (although each to varying degrees) a broad knowledge of classical literature, their fertile minds were being exposed to the visceral, raw horrors of a classical world dominated by fickle and unforgiving gods. The result was a harrowing explosion of creativity. Elizabethan London was reeling under the impact of both a classical Renaissance and a Protestant clamp-down. This was an edgy world, when religious uncertainty kept the waters churning like a neap tide. And in the swell Helen slipped even further from the rank of heroic queen. Now losing yourself in Helen meant spinning into a vortex, where Aphrodite had no roses, only thorns.
Marlowe lived in stirring times. There are many parallels between 5th-century BC Athens and 16th-century AD London. The Elizabethan capital had the schizophrenic exuberance of an age in political, social and cultural transition. Londoners were beginning to experience foods, stimulants and stories from countries their grandfathers had never even dreamed existed. Live crocodiles were presented at court in 1605 and a camel was touted around the streets. Suddenly Londoners were tasting the unknown and the exotic and it was making the fin-de-siècle capital restless. In the fifty years since 1550, the London population had risen by nearly 70 per cent. The city was booming, it was humming with a cultural energy and Helen’s name was quickly carried along the lines of current.
But also – as in 5th-century BC Athens – one of the spurs to this vivacity was the spectre of mass and premature death courtesy of the plague.
Beauty is but a flower,
Which wrinkles will devour,
Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair;
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.
I am sick, I must die
Lord have mercy on us!22
The poet and playwright Nashe describes the dreadful inevitability of death in an infected London. The Elizabethan Helen is indeed besmirched with dust: this is a time when even the immortal queen may succumb to death.23 And although Marlowe’s lyrical line ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’ has gathered to itself a wonderfully bright timbre, his inspiration may in fact have been the very dark work of the Greek satirist Lucian.24 Lucian conjured up a vision of Helen’s skull in Hades in one of his Dialogues of the Dead, written around AD 170. A new arrival to Hades, Menippus, is being given a guided tour by Hermes, and stands in front of a pile of bones and skulls:
HERMES: This skull is Helen.
MENIPPUS: And for this a thousand ships carried warriors from every part of Greece; Greeks and barbarians were slain, and cities made desolate.
HERMES: Ah, Menippus, you never saw the living Helen; or you would have said with Homer
Well might they suffer grievous years of toil
Who strove for such a prize.
We look at withered flowers, whose dye is gone from them, and what can we call them but unlovely things? Yet in the hour of their bloom these unlovely things were things of beauty. Menippus: Strange, that the Greeks could not realise what it was for which they laboured; how short-lived, how soon to fade. Hermes: I have no time for moralising. Choose your spot, where you will, and lie down. I must go and fetch new dead.25
So, on the stage of the Rose, the face that launched a thousand ships was enjoying a true re-naissance, albeit in a shadow cast by classical antiquity. And whereas even the most hostile ancient sources allow Helen to escape death and ignominy as a star, a spirit in the oceans, or in Elysian fields making love to Achilles, for many Elizabethans Helen has become a symbol of endless death.26
Tottel asks of Helen in his Songs and Sonettes composed in 1557:
Did not the worms consume
Her carrion to the dust?
Did dreadful death forbear its fume
For beauty, pride or lust?
Thomas Proctor rewrites history by killing Helen off in Troy, in his poem ‘Helen’s Complaint’ from the volume The triumph of truth. 27 And yet, still one feels Marlowe’s Helen is attractive not repulsive; the playwright’s saturated lines drip with a personal yearning. Marlowe had risen from a family of poor shoe-makers thanks to an education that introduced him to the characters who created and inhabited the classical texts he avidly read. Men like Homer and women like Helen, these were his heroes and his heroines, his path to enlightenment.
Marlowe’s Helen was a Zeitgeist. She was dark, distinctive and transitory enough to become legendary once again. And the face that launched a thousand ships was particularly vivid for the very reason that she could get away without an actual appearance – Faust’s Helen is a wraith, an appearance in spirit only. Rather than some callow boy dressed up as a woman trying to play the most beautiful woman in the world, the Elizabethan image of Sweet Helena could blossom in the minds of London’s theatre-goers.
The stage directions of Dr Faustus distil, perfectly, one of the enduring and fundamental problems with Helen. Marlowe’s Helen ‘passeth over the stage’ but never speaks. Is she real or is she a ghost? Is she an eidolon or an icon, a creation of the act of sex or of the sexual imagination? Is she Simon Magus’ Ennoia, the sacred feminine, trapped in different bodies down the centuries, or one hapless woman with feet of clay, a real, tired matron who inspired many millennia of fantasies? How do you transmit the idea of Helen, how do you become her?
Theatre directors have dealt with the problem in a variety of ways. In 1950, Orson Welles put Eartha Kitt on stage as Helen, accompanied by the music of Duke Ellington. In 1966, as their offstage relationship crumbled, a plump Elizabeth Taylor was Helen to Burton’s Faustus at the Oxford Playhouse. The RSC production of 1968 had Helen naked, whereas in Manchester in 1981, Helen descended from the ceiling in a shower of gold-dust. In John Barton’s 1974–5 staging (with Ian McKellen as Faustus), Sweet Helena was simply a marionette with a blonde wig, a mask and a chiffon nightie.28 In the Young Vic’s sell-out show of 2003 directed by David Lan, Helen was not there at all, it was only the movie-star beauty of Jude Law as Faustus that was allowed on stage.
Remember Zeuxis and his frustrating quest to find the perfect way to represent the ultimate beauty. Any physical Helen can only disappoint; but a poetic Helen has always the chance to embody absolute perfection. Marlowe’s versification lifts Helen beyond the confines of a Faustian pact, out of the slavering, syphilitic fug of a theatre on Bankside. She is made immortal once again at the very moment she ‘immortalises’ Faustus with a kiss. For many she abides as ‘the face that launched a thousand ships’, a beautiful, formless poetic image, which first swirled around the heads of Elizabethan Londoners and which still hangs in the air.