The School Of Night
Posted: Thu Oct 17, 2024 10:26 pm
Douglas Mercer
October 17 2024
Naturally with someone who has vaulted and been vaunted so high in the sacred lore it is difficult to obtain factual information about the very real life one Georg Faustus (1480-1561). But that’s no matter by now we are strict adherents of the theory of imaginary solutions; history after all is only a fable that has gathered consensus around it and biographies are novels just as novels are history books. So if the final state is for the literal to become figural even as the figural is to become literal we might as well start gliding into the gloaming straightaway.
They say that Faustus was an alchemist, astrologer, and magician but those could mean anything; no doubt charlatans and cranks have always abounded but one must be on watch as one knows that the sacred fount of knowledge is always tarred from the beginning as the demonic. They also say that others called him a conman and a heretic the latter of which he no doubt he was, to his eternal credit; and no one likes to be conned, but who’s kidding who here is the eternal question.
Naturally some even doubt that he even existed but if not we will invent him. Whenever great doubts arise around a subject (anyone but Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, Paul Is Dead) you know you are in the presence of greatness, as people need to domesticate and assimilate the enigmatic with some quasi-naturalistic speculation, a way of saying it is not so.
They say also that maybe he had a twin or doppelganger and this too is straight out of the valance of folklore. In addition to his other sobriquets he was also called a physician and a doctor of philosophy, and here we get closer to the core of things. Naturally the Church accused him of fraud and consorting with devils for nothing can seem more satanic than the truth and they knew they must stamp it out at all costs; and neither love nor money can stop them from weaving infernal legends around man who is an existential threat to their very way of being. He was also accused of making vain boasts that he was a demi-god; he once, they say, attempted to fly; when he died he of course was exploded in an experiment gone awry; this of course being right along in the paint by numbers history, the ascribed fate of all who deal (they say) in necromancy. As always the legend grows apace, when the eerie and the uncanny make their presence felt; some to inflate and some to deflate; but most to push reality into the realm of folklore, or drama, or stories, and into the realm of imagination and fiction rather than where it belongs in the heart of that goddess with butterfly wings who went by the name of psyche.
At the inevitable crossroad of life Faust (dissatisfied with the world) makes a pact with demonic forces to achieve total knowledge (which is total madness). This tableaux has been misconstrued as sacrificing spiritual values for power and knowledge or, worse, worldly gain or pleasure. What it is of course is the interstitial space of man’s most primal desire, the primal scene where the guardians of the world will always cry guilty (hubris, overweening, inflation, grandiosity, megalomania, self-aggrandizement) when man seeks to become a god like a fanatic, and in that drama Satan will always be a two-bit player. A beautiful young woman will always get tossed in and seduced but the legend is about divine love and its frenzy—nothing else. He will have obtained a doctor of divinity which in itself is the only study there is—but in the end he will get carried away to hell. It’s one of those famous scenes a faire which the audience always expects in order to get their money’s worth, and go home suitably awed and chastened by the supposedly hallowed mystery.
When Dr. Faustus hit the London Stage Christopher (Kit) Marlowe was on top of the world; the majesty of his verse astonished all who heard it; his hyperbolic heroes strode the board like histrionic giants with emotions as big as the sea; it was always the challenging hero that the playwright was drawn to, for whom his human skin was much too small; in Faust he found the perfect paradigm for all that he wanted to say: a striving magician who wanted to plumb the depth of knowledge in order to make himself a god.
Nor can they raise the wind, or rend the clouds;
But his dominion that exceeds in this,
Stretches as far as doth the mind of man;
A sound magician is a mighty god:
Here, Faustus, tire thy brains to gain a deity.
Marlow picks up the thread and tells a fairly straight rendition of it but by the likes of the full sail of his verse you can tell whose party he is of. He crafts his hero in a way that would have resonated with the time, when men were outgrowing the prejudices and shibboleths of old and were encountering thrilling new vista upon vista each one acting as a signal to carry them further and further on. Marlowe’s contemporary Bacon said knowledge is power and that is the primal equivalence; knowledge is the wresting of the secrets of nature and life and using them for the purposes of men. As a Christian Eliot famously said that after such knowledge what forgiveness? But after such knowledge no forgiveness is required—only victory and the inevitable magnanimity of the gallant.
Settle thy studies, Faustus, and begin
To sound the depth of that thou wilt profess:
Having commenced, be a divine in show,
Yet level at the end of every art
Sweet analytics thou has ravished me
Literally this knowledge is a divine frenzy which devours; it was this mad pursuit of light when threatened the authorities. Marlowe was said to hold “monstrous” views; they he held unorthodox views and jibes about his “atheism” had appeared in print and damaged his reputation. These were enlarged upon in reports prepared by government informers. There was a reason after all they stabbed him in the eye; the point being felt the point was made.
When Marlowe was at the very apogee of his fame Shakespeare had written some plays which paled by comparison; and it was Shakespeare who in a roundabout way gave the name to the group of intrepid Elizabethans who were at the forefront of reviving learning from its ancient home in Greece and Rome: The School Of Night. In Love Labor’s Lost Shakespeare takes a swipe at this coterie by saying, in another context: black is the badge of hell, it is the hue of dungeons and the school of night. This arcane reference was set straight only in 1903 when a scholar recognized that he was referring to a group of men which included Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, Matthew Roydon, Thomas Harriot, and the famous Wizard Earl: Henry Percy, the Ninth Earl of Northumberland; and since then the appellation has stuck, satisfying as it does the need to demonize the heroes. These men were searching for the lost knowledge along with Dee and Bruno and as such were deemed enemies of the state and certainly the church. The knowledge that they were seeking would soon liberate mankind, but sunk in a quagmire of a regressive religion they were anathematized, jailed and killed.
Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain in-hearse,
Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew?
Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write
Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead?
So said Shakespeare of the Rival Poet, ie, Christopher Marlowe. Here he is beginning to abjure any jealousy of his forerunner and as a poet per se no doubt he is correct. But as a thinker and a man he falls short. In his last public utterance he tells us to leave off dispute that is above our station, which is mad heresy. Kit Marlow and the men of the School Of Night never left off any disputation because they knew that nothing was above their station. But you see the dark ice-cold heroes of Shakespeare are always painted in the hues of dungeon black: Iago, Edmund; and so he stacks the deck. And Macbeth who vaunts himself up in supernatural soliciting becomes passive and is awed by the so-called hallowed life of the building. That is Shakespeare eschews the wild and ends always in the reconciliation of lovers’ meeting. His one true magus buries his staff full fathom five in the ground. And it is that “struck me dead” which is the clue he left us that he was talking about none other than Kit Marlowe. Surreptitiously speaking of him again some five years later in As You Like It he uses the phrase “strikes me dead.”; so the laggards in the back of the class will be in no doubt abou the matter at hand.
No, neither he, nor his compeers by night,
Giving him aid, my verse astonished.
He, nor that affable familiar ghost
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,
This is the crux of it. The compeers or peers are Marlowe’s fellow searchers after the truth in the School of Night. It is they or, perhaps it is Satan himself, who is that affable ghost; and note the word gull as if the ones who seeks a god like status are gullible and are being misled by an intelligence which is leading one astray. Like anyone I worship the man from Stratford; but on this side of idolatry—and when the central issue of this or any other time is at stake all one can say is the less Shakespeare he.
***
The affable familiar ghost is apparent in the movie The German Doctor when Josef Mengele explains about the memory of blood; that when blood becomes diluted or mixed memory is forsaken; what we have to remember who we are: sonnenmenschen. The archetype of Wotan had been forgotten for a thousand years but when it again came to the fore that furor Germanicus roiled in its always divine frenzy; the river bed might run dry for a time but once it swells it overflows the banks; they say that in Hitler’s dream he saw the coming man: intrepid, pitiless and cruel. They also say that he was afraid of this man; but they say a lot of things.
When Dr. Faustus first hit the boards in 1592 peculiar legends ran wild around London; they say that toward the end some nights actual devils made their appearance on the stage at the Globe.
The powerful effect of the early productions is indicated by the legends that quickly accrued around them. In Histriomastix, his 1632 polemic against the drama, William Prynne records the tale that actual devils once appeared on the stage during a performance of Faustus to the great amazement of both the actors and spectators. Some people were allegedly driven mad at that fearful sight.
The divines were up in arms calling such plays demonic and wild vanities or idle recreations; the authorities did not know what to make of it, only that it augured them no good; Shakespeare was not a company keeper so perhaps he met the tales with a thin smile in is little room; because when man plays with fire and plays with it under the capacity of Divine Love it is not he who will be burned; though it is possible that all the devils will be loose, but we know the face that is alabaster when the a man refuses to be a servant but will only become a master when reigning above a mortal pitch. After all when a man can summon spirits from the vasty deep and they do come you should pay attention. As for the homebody John Aubrey decades later he recounted that Edward Alleyn, lead actor of The Admiral’s Men who performed the play, dedicated his life to charity as a way to atone for that frightful sight, which is the time-honored pursuit of those who cannot look into the sights of the sun; and are frightened to death of their own shadow.
October 17 2024
Naturally with someone who has vaulted and been vaunted so high in the sacred lore it is difficult to obtain factual information about the very real life one Georg Faustus (1480-1561). But that’s no matter by now we are strict adherents of the theory of imaginary solutions; history after all is only a fable that has gathered consensus around it and biographies are novels just as novels are history books. So if the final state is for the literal to become figural even as the figural is to become literal we might as well start gliding into the gloaming straightaway.
They say that Faustus was an alchemist, astrologer, and magician but those could mean anything; no doubt charlatans and cranks have always abounded but one must be on watch as one knows that the sacred fount of knowledge is always tarred from the beginning as the demonic. They also say that others called him a conman and a heretic the latter of which he no doubt he was, to his eternal credit; and no one likes to be conned, but who’s kidding who here is the eternal question.
Naturally some even doubt that he even existed but if not we will invent him. Whenever great doubts arise around a subject (anyone but Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, Paul Is Dead) you know you are in the presence of greatness, as people need to domesticate and assimilate the enigmatic with some quasi-naturalistic speculation, a way of saying it is not so.
They say also that maybe he had a twin or doppelganger and this too is straight out of the valance of folklore. In addition to his other sobriquets he was also called a physician and a doctor of philosophy, and here we get closer to the core of things. Naturally the Church accused him of fraud and consorting with devils for nothing can seem more satanic than the truth and they knew they must stamp it out at all costs; and neither love nor money can stop them from weaving infernal legends around man who is an existential threat to their very way of being. He was also accused of making vain boasts that he was a demi-god; he once, they say, attempted to fly; when he died he of course was exploded in an experiment gone awry; this of course being right along in the paint by numbers history, the ascribed fate of all who deal (they say) in necromancy. As always the legend grows apace, when the eerie and the uncanny make their presence felt; some to inflate and some to deflate; but most to push reality into the realm of folklore, or drama, or stories, and into the realm of imagination and fiction rather than where it belongs in the heart of that goddess with butterfly wings who went by the name of psyche.
At the inevitable crossroad of life Faust (dissatisfied with the world) makes a pact with demonic forces to achieve total knowledge (which is total madness). This tableaux has been misconstrued as sacrificing spiritual values for power and knowledge or, worse, worldly gain or pleasure. What it is of course is the interstitial space of man’s most primal desire, the primal scene where the guardians of the world will always cry guilty (hubris, overweening, inflation, grandiosity, megalomania, self-aggrandizement) when man seeks to become a god like a fanatic, and in that drama Satan will always be a two-bit player. A beautiful young woman will always get tossed in and seduced but the legend is about divine love and its frenzy—nothing else. He will have obtained a doctor of divinity which in itself is the only study there is—but in the end he will get carried away to hell. It’s one of those famous scenes a faire which the audience always expects in order to get their money’s worth, and go home suitably awed and chastened by the supposedly hallowed mystery.
When Dr. Faustus hit the London Stage Christopher (Kit) Marlowe was on top of the world; the majesty of his verse astonished all who heard it; his hyperbolic heroes strode the board like histrionic giants with emotions as big as the sea; it was always the challenging hero that the playwright was drawn to, for whom his human skin was much too small; in Faust he found the perfect paradigm for all that he wanted to say: a striving magician who wanted to plumb the depth of knowledge in order to make himself a god.
Nor can they raise the wind, or rend the clouds;
But his dominion that exceeds in this,
Stretches as far as doth the mind of man;
A sound magician is a mighty god:
Here, Faustus, tire thy brains to gain a deity.
Marlow picks up the thread and tells a fairly straight rendition of it but by the likes of the full sail of his verse you can tell whose party he is of. He crafts his hero in a way that would have resonated with the time, when men were outgrowing the prejudices and shibboleths of old and were encountering thrilling new vista upon vista each one acting as a signal to carry them further and further on. Marlowe’s contemporary Bacon said knowledge is power and that is the primal equivalence; knowledge is the wresting of the secrets of nature and life and using them for the purposes of men. As a Christian Eliot famously said that after such knowledge what forgiveness? But after such knowledge no forgiveness is required—only victory and the inevitable magnanimity of the gallant.
Settle thy studies, Faustus, and begin
To sound the depth of that thou wilt profess:
Having commenced, be a divine in show,
Yet level at the end of every art
Sweet analytics thou has ravished me
Literally this knowledge is a divine frenzy which devours; it was this mad pursuit of light when threatened the authorities. Marlowe was said to hold “monstrous” views; they he held unorthodox views and jibes about his “atheism” had appeared in print and damaged his reputation. These were enlarged upon in reports prepared by government informers. There was a reason after all they stabbed him in the eye; the point being felt the point was made.
When Marlowe was at the very apogee of his fame Shakespeare had written some plays which paled by comparison; and it was Shakespeare who in a roundabout way gave the name to the group of intrepid Elizabethans who were at the forefront of reviving learning from its ancient home in Greece and Rome: The School Of Night. In Love Labor’s Lost Shakespeare takes a swipe at this coterie by saying, in another context: black is the badge of hell, it is the hue of dungeons and the school of night. This arcane reference was set straight only in 1903 when a scholar recognized that he was referring to a group of men which included Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, Matthew Roydon, Thomas Harriot, and the famous Wizard Earl: Henry Percy, the Ninth Earl of Northumberland; and since then the appellation has stuck, satisfying as it does the need to demonize the heroes. These men were searching for the lost knowledge along with Dee and Bruno and as such were deemed enemies of the state and certainly the church. The knowledge that they were seeking would soon liberate mankind, but sunk in a quagmire of a regressive religion they were anathematized, jailed and killed.
Was it the proud full sail of his great verse,
That did my ripe thoughts in my brain in-hearse,
Making their tomb the womb wherein they grew?
Was it his spirit, by spirits taught to write
Above a mortal pitch, that struck me dead?
So said Shakespeare of the Rival Poet, ie, Christopher Marlowe. Here he is beginning to abjure any jealousy of his forerunner and as a poet per se no doubt he is correct. But as a thinker and a man he falls short. In his last public utterance he tells us to leave off dispute that is above our station, which is mad heresy. Kit Marlow and the men of the School Of Night never left off any disputation because they knew that nothing was above their station. But you see the dark ice-cold heroes of Shakespeare are always painted in the hues of dungeon black: Iago, Edmund; and so he stacks the deck. And Macbeth who vaunts himself up in supernatural soliciting becomes passive and is awed by the so-called hallowed life of the building. That is Shakespeare eschews the wild and ends always in the reconciliation of lovers’ meeting. His one true magus buries his staff full fathom five in the ground. And it is that “struck me dead” which is the clue he left us that he was talking about none other than Kit Marlowe. Surreptitiously speaking of him again some five years later in As You Like It he uses the phrase “strikes me dead.”; so the laggards in the back of the class will be in no doubt abou the matter at hand.
No, neither he, nor his compeers by night,
Giving him aid, my verse astonished.
He, nor that affable familiar ghost
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,
This is the crux of it. The compeers or peers are Marlowe’s fellow searchers after the truth in the School of Night. It is they or, perhaps it is Satan himself, who is that affable ghost; and note the word gull as if the ones who seeks a god like status are gullible and are being misled by an intelligence which is leading one astray. Like anyone I worship the man from Stratford; but on this side of idolatry—and when the central issue of this or any other time is at stake all one can say is the less Shakespeare he.
***
The affable familiar ghost is apparent in the movie The German Doctor when Josef Mengele explains about the memory of blood; that when blood becomes diluted or mixed memory is forsaken; what we have to remember who we are: sonnenmenschen. The archetype of Wotan had been forgotten for a thousand years but when it again came to the fore that furor Germanicus roiled in its always divine frenzy; the river bed might run dry for a time but once it swells it overflows the banks; they say that in Hitler’s dream he saw the coming man: intrepid, pitiless and cruel. They also say that he was afraid of this man; but they say a lot of things.
When Dr. Faustus first hit the boards in 1592 peculiar legends ran wild around London; they say that toward the end some nights actual devils made their appearance on the stage at the Globe.
The powerful effect of the early productions is indicated by the legends that quickly accrued around them. In Histriomastix, his 1632 polemic against the drama, William Prynne records the tale that actual devils once appeared on the stage during a performance of Faustus to the great amazement of both the actors and spectators. Some people were allegedly driven mad at that fearful sight.
The divines were up in arms calling such plays demonic and wild vanities or idle recreations; the authorities did not know what to make of it, only that it augured them no good; Shakespeare was not a company keeper so perhaps he met the tales with a thin smile in is little room; because when man plays with fire and plays with it under the capacity of Divine Love it is not he who will be burned; though it is possible that all the devils will be loose, but we know the face that is alabaster when the a man refuses to be a servant but will only become a master when reigning above a mortal pitch. After all when a man can summon spirits from the vasty deep and they do come you should pay attention. As for the homebody John Aubrey decades later he recounted that Edward Alleyn, lead actor of The Admiral’s Men who performed the play, dedicated his life to charity as a way to atone for that frightful sight, which is the time-honored pursuit of those who cannot look into the sights of the sun; and are frightened to death of their own shadow.
