The Game of Poetic Language
On Marlowe
Geoffrey Hamilton
December 1, 1996
Today older poetry, such as that which Marlowe's age produced with rhyme, is often
in the tow of apologists who justify these tested forms as mnemonic and now, the
argument goes, with the end of oral cultures such mnemonic devices have outlived
their usefulness. 'Primitives' and idiot rock stars use the older forms still,
and so, the conclusion is, it's too easy, or too retrograde.
These are mistaken understandings of the older forms which stem from
a misunderstanding of meaning, form, and purpose regarding poetics; a
misunderstanding that Marlowe, and poets like him, can at least be said
to have not adhered.
Marlowe's poetry, as with all poetry, is a form of human behavior
which, like all forms of behavior, plays games. This premise is both scientific
and literary. These games offer actual experience, which in turn offer value and,
therefore, meaning to human existence; an existence, nevertheless, that need not
have meaning, hence the term 'game' for these activities.
A scientist may not be satisfied with the following explanation as
to why all human activities are games but here is the logic of that statement:
A game is defined abstractly as an activity carried on for strictly relative
goals, involving standards and rules created to maintain motivation towards
continuing in that activity until the goal is recognized as achieved or
pointless. All games of the conventional kind should fit that definition
first, and they do, from Baseball, to Post Office, to solitaire, to 52 card pick up.
The next step is to decide what human activity does not fall into the
definition. Is education, or is commuting outside this definition? No, the
goals are relative (degrees or moneys), and they involve standards and rules
(contracts with schools or businesses) which motivate to play until you
achieve your goal, or give up.
Is murdering or is arguing outside the definition? No, the goals here
are competitive (relative) and involve ad hoc rules and standards based on
what is possible with the body or mind.
Goals, whatever they are, if failure or death is avoided, are
fleeting, and so another game must immediately begin again. The whole of
life is often referred to as a game as it is easy to recognize its mirroring
of the definition: there is no goal in life that is not relative - from heaven,
to surviving, to breathing - the rules and standards get us there and after
achieving the goal we know we will still need further goals. At least the
game of poetry is not as frustrating as breathing: we can always decide we
want to stop reading poetry.
Why does poetry exist? Marlowe lived in an age of classical rebirth,
of the muses, of aristocratic ideals, and of poetry as a symptom of personal
and societal cleverness. Poetry was valued highly for many reasons and its
value was not in doubt. Poetry's high value as a game, in particular, at the
time is demonstrated in Doctor Faustus by the prologue and
epilogue's explanations for the play's existence.
In the prologue there is a denial that Marlowe's (male) muse is to
be used for grand disputes like war, but that his "heavenly verse" he "must
now perform" for "patient judgments". The epilogue makes the point of the
performance clearer: "Faustus is gone: regard the hellish fall". The play/poetry
was for the edification of the audience, at least; and unlike prose edification
it was intended to be a game.
For some people today poetry is thought
of as unnecessary, 'No one talks like that!' or 'No one thinks that way in real
life!', as though real life is something that needs to be elaborated on. Today's
poetry appears to be so marginalized that a frequent response to it is a shrug
and a 'I didn't understand it', without any further interest in pursuing an
understanding. The point is that neither the classical, realistic, nor the
obtuse forms escape from being simply games and the mistake is in believing
that there is a hierarchy of values in forms -- all poetry is equal in it's
gamefulness/ultimate pointlessness. However, like other values, the more people who value something (art, money,
people, etc.) the more valuable it seems, and therefore the more meaningful
it seems. So we must put up with shoddy value judgements until ours becomes standard.
One way of deciding on a standard of meaningfulness is by the ballot,
or by the cash register. What I am suggesting in this line of reasoning is
that the game called poetry gains meaningfulness through adherence to the
popular forms; which is not to claim any moral superiority for these forms.
Why are poetry's popular forms popular? The Elizebethan Age's popular
forms, songs, plays, and verse, were comprehensible games to the age and so
enjoyable games. Doctor Faustus and Edward II could
be understood at two basic levels: one is at the level of the edification game,
the second through the allusions told to an educated classes, the cleverness game.
The most loved forms of poetry today are often found on radio and in
music videos, and these forms offer a continuance of the older forms which,
like Marlowe's maintain a more accurate idea of poetry: that it is about
understandable games. However, what people understand or believe is not
the actual goal of these games, nor are they of Marlowe's. The goal of
games is not actually what it is purported to be, the goal is always
enjoyment. This pleasure is as Marquis de Sade might have defined it, any
desired distraction from the void.
Almost anything works today as popular poetry, from Gregorian
chants, to Nigerian funk, to country ballads. What all popular forms
have in common is attention to specific conventional meanings within
a poetic diction, rhythm, and form. When Elton John sings the popular
ballad "sad songs mean so much" he is being gameful, with the alliteration,
rhythm, and conventional poetic diction, but within a sufficiently challenging
form. (He is also reflecting on the game as an engine of meaning, an idea
which will be unpacked below.)
What is 'sufficiently challenging' is relative to the audience.
A low challenge threshold is what often causes an educated or pretentious
audience to belittle other audiences, as these 'privileged' audiences desire
a greater challenge. However, this belittling, while a cry from the crib for
bigger and better games, is, in fact, a mistaken value judgment (though it is
still a game too).
Though Marlowe poetry is filled with cryptic references, he served
various audiences, as said above. He addresses in Faustus the
nobility in the prologue, the censors in the Epilogue, and he also serves
the less educated by using the Protestant morality of the time, "Read, read
the Scriptures"; though an atheist himself.
Today Marlowe is entirely for the educated mostly because his main
concerns and language are anachronisms today. But also because the adherents
of the less difficult types of poetry, pop songs for example, have
inoculated themselves from their belittling superiors by ignoring all
difficult poetry and saying 'it's just over my head'.
This may be a result of the deathly fear within today's highbrow
poets of serving a wide audience; something which has reduced the enjoyment,
therefore meaning, of today's poets to the level of a decrypting session with
Imperial Japanese code. Trying to be all things to all people is the best
method of actually attempting to be universal on a planet where people can
barely recognize a plugged toilet as a parochial problem.
The issue of popularity in poetry was illuminated by a recent
CBC Radio item. A New Yorker critic claimed that Shakespeare
is still read and is popular today because of the rhyme and rhythm of his
poetry. Why, if that's true, as I think it is, would it be true? Why do
many people frequently see productions of, and continually reread the
poetry of a Hamlet ? Because, like the Elton John song says
'sad songs say so much', Hamlet can still be fun over and over again.
The rhythm, rhyme, apostrophe, figuratives, puns, schemes, and diction makes the game of poetry
repeatable, as well as comprehensible straight away even without being
fully understood. 'I liked it, but I don't know why' is a statement which
typifies an enjoyed poem/game. For Gaveston in Edward II ,
words make him "surfeit with delight" .
Poetic tools have a unique power in the field of games which
are vital to human existence, as Marlowe/Gaveston comments "I must
have wanton poets, pleasant wits/ Musicians, that with touching of a
string/ May draw the pliant King which way I please./ Music and Poetry
is his delight". This kind power over kings, and the like, is probably
due to rhythm.
Like the last song you hear in the morning that gets stuck
in your head, something bio-mechanical happens to our bodies in the
presence of rhythm and we want to be with it. In addition, the
divergent sounds of words set to a rhythm will accent it. A third
layer is the associations from language that will attach themselves
to that rhythm. And fourth, the experience of fun, from that game,
will be attached by association to that accented rhythm - so for
those reasons we play with poems more than once though we know the
plot's ending.
King Edward II 's hesitant resignation in blank pentameter,
for example, becomes more amusing for a reader with each repeated
effort towards further understanding of what we know already will
happen. Reading the following quotation repeatedly makes the game
more valuable to an audience: "Heavens turn it (the crown) to a
blaze of quenchless fire;/ Or, like that snaky wreath of Tisiphon,/ Engirt
the temples of this hateful head; So shall not England's vines be perishd,/
But Edward's name survives, though Edward dies." .
The figuratives, the scheme, and meter, all contribute to
challenging an audience to understand what can be said much more
simply. But then it would not be as much fun; and so powerful a
distraction to someone like the pliant king.
The game of a manual or stock report, as opposed to poetry, is usually in furtherance of the other
games we want to play, like work, love, or Yatzee, so we only
participate in the information game when it doesn't interfere
with the games we have already come to value through the games
of childhood and growing up.
Then there are the games like poetry where the information
is the last thing we want to acquire, but we suppose that we do want
to acquire it. A 'good' poem is like the prefabricated six inch plastic
trophy that awaits the winner of an iron man contest, it may
have no value to most people, but the experience of winning it
will remake the four cent piece of plastic into the most valuable
item in your house, stared at as you go to sleep and shown-off to
your friends - friends who will also see it's value when you, and
they, play the game of retelling the tale. Poetry offers the same
opportunity to imbue the paltry complaints and ecstasies of anyone
with a greater-ness than could be otherwise.
Increased meaning always happens within an enjoyable game.
This is what makes poetry an engine of meaning. The more fun it is,
the more experience we have with it, the more valuable it is, and so
the more meaningful it becomes. But what makes it enjoyable? Yes
popularity would indicate it is enjoyable and conventional enough
to make it very meaningful, but what makes fun fun? What, irrespective
of its popularity, can make 'happy-joy-joy' out of eating shit? Is it
also the beauty or the truth of it?
Meaningfulness may be enhanced by mass popularity but if the game
is recontexualized into the goal of any selected audience
then relatively equal popularity can be found using any parochialism as a foundation.
As country, folk, and rock musics are sub-contexts of popular verse,
what is popular is relative to a selected audience, and any parochialism can
become a foundation. A foundation can be sadism, life affirming pregnancy,
or doctor assisted suicide. Within poetry, a foundation is anything from
picture poems, to a king's riddle as to which door has the princess and which
the tiger. Poetry's game must be in tune with what is considered fun by
the selected audience, this is irrespective of other conventions. It is
the taste of the audience which predetermines the usefulness of any
particular poem/game on offer. As I alluded to above, taste is conditioned
by what games people have played in the past.
Today's poetry is fun to those initiates who have learned the
secret handshakes of academia in their past, so it is essentially no
different than any other poem/game. The selected audience is preconditioned
in some way towards anticipating fun with desire and this desire haphazardly
predicts how certain games will suit their taste. A selected audience may
wallow in self-pity due to a past game, so fun for them is a Elton's sad
song or some poet with juvenile angst. If the selected audience is smug
about its own society it might want to have its faculties tested with
allusions, as with Marlowe's allusions to Agrippa, or perhaps they may
desire a polemic against another society. Either might be 'fun'.
Transcendent poetry, poetry which does not refer consciously
to itself and allows an audience to forget the media being employed,
can also be fun - so is being in the state of transcendence when 'within'
that kind of poetry. But it is by the actual experience motivated by this
fun where the game/poem offers pleasure, then value, and therefore
meaning, and further expands the boundaries of what will be considered
fun in the realm of game/poems in a selected audience's future. Humans
never transcend the poetry, they are where they are when they read, and
the game is the experience.
dramaturgy and uses prose and a verse with few hard
rules. In doing so it might happen that the conventional people will
put up their hands and not want to play. However the conventional selected
audiences, who make his popularity what it is (relative), of course are not
bound by principles of everlasting meaning and value. The selected
audience wants games and
when the game of the present convention no longer offers sufficiant
challenges, there must be a new game on offer. It is the game of
artists like Marlowe to be unconventional enough (but not too much)
to be able to create new conventions from the old
