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‘I’ll Play Diana’: Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and the ‘Actaeon Complex’

As both playwright and spy, Christopher Marlowe was not only an overreacher, as Harry Levin has argued, but also an ‘overpeerer’. This unusual term, which the dramatist appropriated from the Actaeon myth in Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, initially described one who stands above and looks over or down upon. However, ‘overpeering’ in Marlowe broadens to include spying for political power and sexual pleasure, as well as the emotionally charged aspects of both watching and crafting theatrical displays – often producing imagined orgies of voyeurism, exhibitionism, and violence. He evokes a charged realm of visual observation and display, and the fascination with forbidden vision is central to his work. To understand the illicit sight in Marlowe, especially in relation to his career in Elizabethan espionage, it is necessary to appreciate the dynamics of prurient gazing and the myth of Diana and Actaeon that he uses as a paradigm of ‘overpeering’. Taboo yet numinous visions pervade the self-conscious, vivid spectacles in his drama. Doctor Faustus includes many of the central concerns also evident in The Massacre at Paris, Dido Queen of Carthage, ‘Hero and Leander’, and particularly Edward II. Espionage and voyeuristic sexual spying loom large; and there too classical myths often operate as vehicles for the exploration of such issues. In fact, the figures of Diana and Actaeon, used suggestively in Dido and Hero, recur resoundingly throughout Doctor Faustus. However, this play not only goes further in the nature of its engagement with myth in general and Actaeon in particular; it also takes the tale in different directions, with deeper ramifications. Following the cues of Marlowe himself, the ‘overpeering’ of secret surveillance and voyeurism in Faustus can be profitably examined by focusing upon the Diana and Actaeon myth. Playing with this multivalent text, Marlowe connects Diana’s divine power (and Actaeon’s transgression) to necromantic and theatrical prowess, interrogating and ultimately problematizing divinity, magic, and theater. At one point Faustus declares that he will ‘play Diana’ (IV.ii.53); this essay explores what it means to be a ‘play Diana’. And, in a drama in which the eye is titillated and finally trapped by ubiquitous metatheatrical displays, I echo the protagonist’s query, ‘What means this show?’ (I.v.82). To consider such questions, first it is necessary to look not only at Marlowe’s abundant and highly-