While Henry of Navarre's combination of militancy and Protestant faith is depicted from the providential vision, causes of the Duke of Guise's rebellions are ascribed to his personal nature in Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris. Guise abandons the providential conception of history and acts like the Machiavellian tyrant. Much like Guise, the Duke of Anjou (afterwards Henry III) has also earned the status of tyrant since the Saint Bartholomew murders. As seen in the massacre and the battle of Coutras, important political events are subordinated to their personal lives. In particular, the dramatist's treatment of Guise differs from the accounts of Francois Hotman's A True and Plain Report of the Furious Outrages of France and Simon Goulart's Memoires de letat de France sous Charles neuvieme, primary sources for the play. In Hotman's and Goulart's accounts, the Duke of Guise appears to be a tool manipulated by the French queen, Catherine de Medici. The duke is transformed into a villain in the play. He is shown committing murders of which history does not accuse him. What is the nature of the element that made Marlowe embody Guise's Machiavellian manouevers in a contrast with Navarre's acceptance of the divine order? To examine this problem, I would like to focus on Tacitus's historical approach, which became popular in the last years of the Elizabethan reign. In the time when providential vision was dominant, Tacitus's penetrating analysis of causes and motives offered a new approach to looking at the past. In his Annals, he tries to explain history by representing human nature hidden behind historical events. Strongly aware of the new type of historiography, Marlowe seems to have illustrated the conflict between the two orders of the divine and the human in The Massacre at Paris. In the play Navarre emerges victorious in the decisive struggle-the battle of Coutras-with Guise. The play culminates in regicide. Through the mutual destruction of Guise and Henry III, the retributive forces bring events full circle, and establish a new order in harmony with the divine will with the ascendance of Navarre as Henry IV. But there is an odd moment in the play where Navarre does not positively solve the massacre and leaves his two schoolmasters to be stabbed by the Guise. And the Protestant hero has thirsted for the French crown. To survive and get the kingship, he has struggled with Guise. In this struggle, his rhetoric is infused with the words of an ambitious man of action, which convey the image of a Machiavellian leader. The effect is too unheroic and too detached to praise his actions, as Clifford Leech pointed out. French disorder demarcates France as a historical topos distanced historiographically from the providential conception of history, a topos that allowed the exploration of human actions as causes of stability and instability. Marlowe wrote his play based upon the new historical approach, which moved from providential to Tacitean explanations of historical causation. Influenced by the historical view of Tacitus, Ben Jonson wrote Sejanus his Fall in 1603. He designed his play to teach statesmen what men do, and not what they ought to do. The Stuart English playwrights wrote their plays under the influence of Jonson's historical view. In this sense, Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris seems to have contributed to the viability of the new type of historiography.
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